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A special bonus to wrap up our Making More Room series.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Any theology that claims to speak for all people and all times is inherently racist and fundamentally heretical. Originally, this was part of a series we did called making more room. At the end that series, we put together an online interactive lecture talking about how we make more room for different cultures as part of our theological conversation. Thing is people were pretty into it. So I thought why not edit it together, throw it up on YouTube, and continue the conversation here.
Speaker 1:So give it a watch. Leave a comment down below. Okay. So in this series proper, we talked about making room for each other one on one and then within peer groups and then within larger groups. The point tonight of this sort of exercise is to talk about making room for cultures.
Speaker 1:And this is sort of an interesting question because there are a number of different ways that we can tackle this. We can talk about different cultural expressions. Do we make room for different musical styles or tastes or traditions, for example? We can talk about different cultural values. Do we prioritize the individual or the family, for example?
Speaker 1:Or we can talk about different cultural aesthetics and whether our concepts of beauty have been homogenized around the dominant images in our media and culture. All of these are really significant and actually important conversations. But particularly tonight, in about twelve or fifteen minutes here, I want to talk about how making room for cultures to speak shapes how we read something like the Bible, how we talk about someone like God, and ultimately how we form our theologies. And to talk about that, we have to understand that within the Western Protestant tradition that we are all part of, there has been a historic limiting of the room for culture in theological discourse. Now, today in culture, we're talking a lot about racism and white supremacy, and that's good.
Speaker 1:We absolutely should be. But one of the things that I think trips people up at times is that the language of white supremacy has shifted quite considerably in the last few years. When I was growing up, white supremacy meant the KKK. It meant outright violent acts of racism. Today, a lot of the time, what we're actually talking about is white hegemonic power, or at least that's how it would have been talked about in academic literature a decade ago.
Speaker 1:But this is the way that any dominant culture in the West, that means white culture, becomes the norm and stops being perceived as a culture at all. In other words, there is music and then there's black music. Or there is beauty and then there is exotic. There is theology and then there is liberation theology or womanist theology or Asian theologies. But the standard is the dominant culture.
Speaker 1:Therefore, the dominant culture is the supreme culture. Therefore, we live with white supremacy around us all the time precisely because we don't ever see white culture. In fact, only noticing it when it erupts into malignant violent racism in front of us is actually part of what keeps white culture so dominant around us. And so without intending to, what has happened in Western Protestantism is this misguided idea that there are cultural theologies and that there is such a thing as a pure, non biased extra, meaning outside of cultural theology. And sometimes we just call this systematic theology.
Speaker 1:The problem is that that's not a thing. It's just not really possible. You can't do extracultural theology. You can only do theology from within the dominant culture that has become hidden to your view. James Cohn, sometimes known as the father of black theology, argued that any theology that claims to speak for all people and all times is inherently racist and fundamentally heretical.
Speaker 1:Because all theology is contextual, all theology is bound to actual human conditions. Remember, theology is just words about God, so God may be outside of cultures, but we who speak of God are certainly not. And I'm paraphrasing Cohn here again, but he says, Christian theology is the rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of a community relating to the forces of liberation, the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ. And so with this as a framework, this understanding there's no such thing as a non cultured theology. What we often think of as a pure theology is really just white European theology that's been handed to us with a cultural bias that's been hidden from our view.
Speaker 1:And so I want to look at two, perhaps maybe three examples today of different cultural narratives that can help us see the Bible and God in new ways when we make room for different cultures to speak to us. So first, let's look at the hidden impact of the Ubermensch on our reading of the Bible. Now, Ubermensch is a German idea. It actually comes from Nietzsche, but it means the beyond man or maybe something more like the Superman. But this is the idea that the meaning of life is to leave your mark on the world.
Speaker 1:Fact, In this finds its blossoming in the great man theory, which is the idea that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. Those men who achieved their purpose and made their mark on the world, That history just lazily kind of drifts along, waiting until a great man appears to come and steer it in a new direction. Now, by the way, the language here is pretty heavy on the man. That's exactly part of the problem, but this is how it was constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Now we may not hold on to this as tightly as we once did, but even our celebrity culture that surrounds us today is very much an expression of this core idea.
Speaker 1:The idea that the greatest force in history is not the community or the family or the society working together, but the single individual that rises above and changes the world. Thing is, this is actually not a universal concept. Other cultures invert that narrative and speak in very different ways about what history is. Collectivist cultures like Japan and some South American and African cultures have precisely the opposite view of history. They tend to elevate the tribe or the community above the significance of just the individual.
Speaker 1:Now, we probably all heard that before. I'm not really saying anything new here, but think about how this shapes your reading of something like a biblical narrative. When you tend to think of the progression from creation to Noah to Abraham to Isaac to Israel to Jesus, do you tend to read that as a winnowing or an expanding narrative? I'm going to suggest that if you are part of the dominant culture that surrounds us, this is generally read as a winnowing story. We have all of creation, and that is narrowed down to Noah and his family.
Speaker 1:Then you move to Abraham and Lot is pushed to the side. You move to Isaac and Ishmael is pushed to the side. Then you move to Israel and the Northern Kingdom is pushed to the side until you move to Jesus, where we land on the ultimate exclusivity of the salvation that he offers to us. But when other theologians like the Japanese theologian Masao Takanaka says something like God is rice, What he's saying there is that there are lots of different words for rice in the Japanese culture. And once we begin to name God in all of those different ways for ourselves, we see God around us in all kinds of different ways.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, the same story that we just talked about, instead of starting to look like a winnowing, actually becomes an expanding role of God in creation, where creation is the gift to the universe, Where Noah is saved from the ruin of human sin. Where Abraham begins the steady move from an individual to whom God speaks, to a family that God blesses, to a tribe that God encourages, to a nation that welcomes the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, all the way to Jesus who invites even the Gentile now to the table of God. The complete disillusion of any exclusivity in history. And what's fascinating is that both of those can be true in some sense, but depending on your cultural narrative, one is going to feel like the center and one is almost automatically going to feel like a neat alternative way to think about the story. Neither of them, though, are culturally neutral.
Speaker 1:They are expressions of how our culture shapes, how we read the same story. So one more example here, the Tower Of Babel. In this story in Genesis 11, humans get together and they want to build a tower to the heavens, a tower as tall as God, a tower to display their ingenuity and power to the gods. Well, though god sees this, he's not impressed. So in the story, god comes down from the heavens and confuses their language.
Speaker 1:Everyone begins to speak in their own tongue now. They find it hard to work together, and so they abandon this project and they settle into their own cultural units never to challenge God again. Now, if you live in a culture that has been shaped by a colonial history, one of the things that is probably going to be embedded in your narrative of the world is this idea of cultural competition. It's the idea that some cultures are just better than others. And that while we can learn from every culture, the apex of history is some future melting pot where all of the cultures of the world are fused together into some ultimate metaculture.
Speaker 1:All of the lessons come together to form this giant ultimate metaculture at the end of time. If that's your frame, what you're probably going to read in the story of Babel is a story of punishment. God sees the arrogance of humanity and God punishes them by fracturing their shared cultures into all of these diverse cultures around the world. That's actually the story of Babel that I'm most familiar with. But that is not how theologians interpret Babel all the way around the world.
Speaker 1:Remember, if you go back to the start of Genesis, and by the way, the start of Genesis is just a funny sounding phrase to me. It sounds like saying the beginning of the beginning, but I digress. If you go back there, though, you'll find the original commission to humanity, which is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And theologians that are not as steeped in the colonial narratives of competition often read Babel not as a punishment, but as a blessing in line with this original commission. In other words, humanity has found itself off track.
Speaker 1:They are no longer multiplying not just in the number of humans, but in the types of humans, the diversity of humans, the beauty of human flourishing around the world. And so God, out of God's love, injects diversity back into the story to reorient humanity back toward the original purpose of filling and multiplying upon the earth. What one sees as an obvious punishment of God, another sees as an obvious blessing of that same God. And while both are certainly valid in their perspective to some degree, I actually might argue that once you see the blessing of Babel, that story begins to make a lot more sense once we go to the book of Acts and in Acts two where we read Peter get up and preach and all of the people begin to hear the gospel in their own tongues and language. In other words, the miracle of the spirit at Pentecost is not the emergence of a dominant metaculture that undoes all of our difference.
Speaker 1:The miracle actually comes in a spirit enabled conversation across our cultural difference that God thinks is beautiful. Unity within diversity is what God has always been trying to bless us with. And these two very brief examples are why we have to make room not just for individuals, but for diverse cultural expressions within our communities if we ever want to fully understand the beauty of what God is saying to us through the Bible and through the spirit who helps us to interpret and understand it. Demianthe Niles writes that the problem with power is that it privileges the central voice over all others. It decontext ualizes this central voice.
Speaker 1:That's what Cohen was talking about. We tend to think that the loudest voice around us is neutral, but it uses this to override all other voices, silencing those who do not have the power to overcome it. Those voices that are silenced are often those at the margins, cutting us all off from the liberative and therefore salvific insights they bring to us. She continues to say, to put it another way, the ability to hear the voices here unto ignored is not only a just and good thing to do, it is a necessary thing to do to be able to have a fuller understanding of the self, the other, and the divine for the flourishing of human life. Without this conscious effort to make room for others, as individuals, as peer groups, as large groups, and for the cultures that surround us and speak to us.
Speaker 1:We actually rob ourselves of everything the divine wants to show us about the world. And the irony is that the more perspectives we entertain and incorporate, the more objectively true our imagination of God becomes. Because none of us will ever see God completely. But when I allow myself to see God, not only from my own perspective, but from yours and cones and Niles and Takanaka's, slowly I begin to construct an image of God that corresponds to the divine in ways I never would have even begun to imagine on my own.