In Reality: How Cultural Stories Hijack Biblical Interpretation

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) And I just love that last line against ourselves rather than for ourselves. And oftentimes, when we are captured by a cultural narrative, we're going to read the Bible for ourselves In order that we don't have to change that cultural narrative, because really it's the cultural narrative that we've given authority over our lives. It is the final authority for life and faith. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:54 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, I'm Dr James Spencer, and welcome to this episode of PREPPED. In today's episode, we're going to investigate and kind of dive in on a claim that I've made over the last couple of years, which is this the world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that distort or deny God, and so I think that the world's narratives are becoming much more easily communicated, much more communicated with a greater intensity, and that, as this happens, it's becoming more and more difficult for Christians to recognize the subtle ways that these narratives reshape our understanding of God and ultimately then reshape our understanding of reality. And so we have these cultural narratives that are actively reshaping us, and we need to understand how those things are working, we need to be able to identify them and we need to make sure that we're not being influenced by those without even realizing it. So today I just want to offer something that's pretty essential for our faith journey, and that's the ability to recognize and resist those cultural stories that are hijacking our understanding of God, and I hope by the end of our time together, you'll be able to identify the specific cultural narratives that may be influencing how you read scripture, understand how those narratives are subtly reshaping your understanding of God and, most importantly, discover how returning to more sound interpretive principles or that overarching story that God provides us in the scriptures, can restore clarity and truth to your understanding of God and of reality as a whole. So this isn't about politics or about taking sides in culture wars. 02:32 In my mind, it's about authority. It's where do the cultural stories that are told, that try to explain different aspects of the world, where do they sit in relation to God's word, and how is it that we continually put God's word as the final authority for life and faith? I am not suggesting that every cultural story is always wrong or always wrong in all aspects, but what I would suggest is that every cultural story is incomplete, and any story that begins without the triune God in mind, without acknowledging the triune God's presence, is going to be incomplete in a variety of different ways. And if God's truth, the Bible, if the Bible doesn't sit above it as the final authority for life and faith and provide this corrective to these other stories, if, instead, what we have is these stories taking prominence and having more authority than God's word, what we're going to end up with is an incomplete story that is pretending to be more complete than it is, and so I think this is really about ensuring that our understanding, as Christians, of the scriptures is shaped primarily by the text itself, that the Bible is the final authority for our life and faith, instead of, you know, being shaped by the dominant stories of the culture. The Bible should be correcting, should be reforming that cultural story. 04:01 There is a way, I think, that we need to, as Christians, interact with some of these cultural stories, and one thing I would say is that, you know, it is possible for anyone, any human being, to recognize something good about reality, something beautiful about reality, to recognize something true about reality. And, as Christians, we need to be careful, as we're interacting with different cultural stories, that we affirm what is good, true and beautiful, what is actually recognized as true, good and beautiful in these cultural stories. In other words, we don't have to throw the whole thing out simply because there isn't a doctrine of the Trinity attached, but what we do need to recognize is that, in affirming the true, the good and the beautiful in these cultural stories, we're not simply affirming or only affirming, we're also pushing beyond that affirmation and saying yes and so, in other words, yes, this is good and you realize it points toward the triune God. Yes, this is true and you realize that it points to the triune God. Yes, this is true and you realize that it points to the triune God. Yes, it is beautiful, and you realize that it points to the triune God. So if you've ever felt confused about why, you know, maybe, fellow believers, or even how it is that the world sort of shifts God away, you know, shifts itself away from God, shifts God away, you know, shifts itself away from God, I think this episode will hopefully provide some good confidence for you to have an understanding of the scripture that is really rooted in and reflects God's character and the intended meaning, rather than some of the cultural assumptions that we might bring with us to the text. And so what I'm about to share hopefully will transform how you approach God's Word and ultimately put you in touch with reality, particularly the reality of the Triune God. 05:55 So in a previous video, where we talked about faith becoming untethered from God's Word, we explored how faith can drift from its biblical foundations, and today we're going to examine one of the primary mechanisms through which that happens. I would say that that's the influence of cultural narratives on biblical interpretation. So let's just start with a simple but hopefully somewhat profound truth Everyone interprets the Bible through some kind of a lens. There's no such thing as just reading the Bible without any interpretive framework. The question isn't whether you're using a lens, it's what lens you're using, and it's really whether the lens that you're using and whether that lens helps you or hinders you from understanding the scripture. 06:44 Cultural narratives function as powerful lenses. They shape how we read and understand not only the Bible, but they shape and understand how we see the world, and those narratives are the stories our culture tells us about what's real. It helps us understand what's valuable. These stories can help us understand what constitutes success, how we should understand ourselves and what gives life meaning. Cultural narratives don't do necessarily bad things, as I mentioned before, and so cultural narratives can help us live lives with one another that are relatively peaceful, that are ordered, that are appropriate for a diverse group of people with a diverse set of beliefs to kind of stick together. 07:33 Unfortunately, by leaving God out, they're also reinforcing this idea that the we that we're talking about when I say the we live together is really just humans, and what I would say that a theological narrative does is it says no, it's not just humans. Our relationship is not just one to another, one human to another. It's also God in our midst, and so these cultural narratives can be very pervasive and persuasive, and we often absorb them unconsciously. It's sort of like breathing air. They become the water we swim in, and so it's impossible not to be wet when we're swimming in water. They're there or that they're influencing us, and yet they do shape how we approach and understand again, not only scripture but all these other aspects, our cultural values, what constitutes success? They have a way of shaping and driving our lives if we're not aware of them. So let me give you a concrete example. 08:37 In American culture, in United States culture, one dominant narrative is individualism the story that the individual is the primary unit of society, that personal freedom and self-determination are the highest values and that each person should determine their own path in life. And that narrative isn't necessarily wrong in every respect. There are elements of truth in it, including the biblical teaching about individual responsibility for God, for instance. But when that cultural narrative becomes our primary lens for reading scripture, it distorts our understanding in subtle but significant ways. So if we look at something like Paul's teaching about salvation through faith in Romans, our individualistic lens might lead us to focus exclusively on personal salvation while missing the communal dimensions of Paul's theology. It's not that it isn't also individual, but that there is a communal aspect that we need to be paying attention to His emphasis on the church as the body of Christ and on reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles are really central to God's redemptive plan. 09:41 Or maybe think about how our individualistic lens might affect our reading of Jesus's teaching about discipleship. When Jesus says, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, what if our individualistic lens leads us to interpret that primarily as a call to a personal devotion rather than as an invitation to join a counter cultural community with a distinctive way of life? And so that verse obviously has implications for the individual. It's an individual call Let him take up take you know, deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. That's an individual decision, but it's an individual decision that draws someone into a countercultural communal life. And so the point isn't that individual application is wrong. It's that when our interpretation is dominated by an individualistic lens, we miss important dimensions of the biblical text. And that challenge and that that really does challenge us. It pushes us to see that some of our cultural assumptions are just not quite right, I think as individuals, you know, an individualism is really just one of many cultural narratives that shape our biblical interpretation. 11:00 Others might be consumerism narratives that shape our biblical interpretation. Others might be consumerism. You know, do we really feel as comfortable talking about greed as we do about something like sexual promiscuity? Maybe we're sort of captured by nationalism. I've written an awful lot on Christian nationalism and we've had different episodes on Christian nationalism, and I think there are real problems with Christian nationalism. We see just, for example, in Romans 13, that there is a distinction between church and state and so we have to be careful, when we are talking about a Christian nationalism, that we really understand what we're saying there. But nationalism can tend to override or become an authority over the top of our faith. I address that a lot in Serpents and Doves if you wanted to pick that up or you could just listen to some of the other episodes or whatever. 11:53 But I think nationalism is one of those cultural stories that distorts the way we read scripture. We've got progressivism, you know, sort of the other side of conservatism, maybe even the other side of nationalism, but progressivism that talks about love in a way that the Bible doesn't necessarily talk about love, but it's compelling because our cultural stories want us to welcome all people, and so you can find things like I do a different take on inclusivism in Jesus's ministry and talk about how Jesus's message, the message of salvation, is totally inclusive. Everybody can hear it. No one is barred from the message of the gospel no one. But the community of faith is exclusive. There's only one way in, and that's through faith in Jesus and all that that entails. It entails that we are going to conform our lives to his image. It involves obeying all the commands that he has given, as we see in the Great Commission of Matthew 28. And so you could find some of my other work on that too. But there's also these various political ideologies, and so we have all of these. 13:11 Individualism is just one, but we have all these other things that can push us to see the world in inappropriate ways, in ways that are just a little off and that distance our understanding of what reality is from the presence and active work of the triune God among us. And so each of these narratives really does contain elements of truth, but each also distorts our understanding of reality. It distorts the way we approach the scriptures and I would say that's particularly so when they become our primary interpretive lens. So how do cultural narratives really hijack our understanding? I'll just outline four basic mechanisms that I see. 13:55 First, I think cultural narratives determine which parts of scripture we emphasize and which parts we neglect. So there's a selection bias, you might say, built into various cultural narratives. Every cultural narrative has certain biblical themes or passages that align with it and others that are going to challenge it or even contradict it. So naturally, we would tend to gravitate toward the parts of scripture that confirm our cultural assumptions, while avoiding or downplaying those that confront them. Cultural assumptions while avoiding or downplaying those that confront them. For example, if we're shaped by a prosperity-oriented cultural narrative that equates blessing with material success, we might emphasize passages about God's desire to bless his people while neglecting Jesus' warnings about wealth or his call to sacrificial living. We also have to figure out something to do with the cross. That Jesus suffers and dies in order to be vindicated and glorified is a real problem for a prosperity-oriented cultural narrative. 14:51 Second, cultural narratives influence how we fill in interpretive gaps. I think this is a really crucial one. The Bible doesn't directly address every contemporary issue. So we inevitably have to make interpretive leaps. We have to fill in interpretive gaps, we have to make decisions given gaps in information and often cultural narratives that we've absorbed, determine how we make those leaps. So, for instance, when considering modern bioethical questions not directly addressed in scripture, our approach will be shaped by whether we've absorbed a cultural narrative that prioritizes individual autonomy or one that emphasizes communal responsibility in the sanctity of life. 15:37 Third, cultural narratives can affect our emotional response to different biblical teachings. We tend to feel comfortable with passages that align with our cultural assumptions and uncomfortable with those that challenge them, and that emotional response often leads us to embrace certain teachings enthusiastically while holding others at arm's length, even if we theoretically affirm them as well. For example, if we've absorbed a therapeutic cultural narrative that prioritizes emotional comfort and self-fulfillment, we might resonate deeply with passages about God's love and comfort, while feeling really uncomfortable with teaching about judgment, holiness or self-denial. Fourth, I think cultural narratives shape our application of scripture. Even when we correctly understand a biblical teaching in its original context, the way we apply it to our lives is profoundly influenced by the cultural narratives we've internalized. So, for instance, we might correctly understand Jesus' teaching about loving our enemies. But if we've absorbed a political narrative that demonizes those who disagree with us, our application of that teaching will be severely limited by our cultural assumptions about who deserves love and who doesn't. 16:49 I think the result of these four mechanisms is what I would call cultural captivity, a state where our understanding of scripture is so thoroughly shaped by cultural narratives that we can no longer distinguish between biblical teaching and cultural assumptions. We think that we're just reading the Bible at face value, when in fact we're reading it through lenses provided by our culture, and that's shorting the Christian message. We're not getting all of it that we could, and we're doing something that Bonhoeffer references, which I love this quote he was speaking to an ecumenical conference in Gland and he looks out over the crowd and he says gentlemen, is it not clear from everything that we're saying today that we are more enamored with our own thoughts than with the thoughts of the scriptures? We need to be reading the Bible against ourselves rather than for ourselves, and I just love that last line against ourselves rather than for ourselves. And oftentimes, when we are captured by a cultural narrative, we're going to read the Bible for ourselves In order that we don't have to change that cultural narrative, because really it's the cultural narrative that we've given authority over our lives. It is the final authority for life and faith. And so to the extent that we can hold the Bible at arm's length and allow it to reinforce whatever cultural narrative we've decided is correct, then we don't have to read the Bible over against ourselves, and that over against is really where we find and where we operate God's word, or where we operationalize God's word as the final authority for life and faith. We give it the ability to change the stories that we've understood. We give it the ability to challenge us and to shape or reshape the way we understand the world and reality. So cultural captivity really does affect Christians across the theological and political spectrum. This is not about liberal versus conservative Christians. I think conservative Christians might be captive to narratives of nationalism or traditional family values, while progressive Christians might be captive to narratives of social justice or individual authenticity. The specific narrative isn't the point. It's the fact that in both cases, cultural stories, rather than the biblical texts it's you know, become the primary shaper of interpretation. So how do we recognize when our biblical interpretation has become captive to cultural narratives? I'm just going to suggest a couple of warning signs. 19:22 First, there are times when I find myself consistently drawn to the same types of passages while avoiding others. So, for example, maybe I gravitate toward passages about social justice while avoiding those about personal holiness, or vice versa. And I think that selective type of reading often indicates that I'm trying to not necessarily actively protect myself from anything, but that I'm selecting the passages that I really just want to read. I'm saying this is the area of life that I'm most interested in and I would like the Bible to support that interest, as opposed to saying the Bible has so much more to teach me than just about social justice and I need to hear in those other texts, I need to understand those other texts in order to have a full engagement of, even within social justice. I need to understand personal holiness, because these two concepts are interconnected. I can't just have more of an anemic theology of social justice while ignoring holiness, and so our selective reading often indicates that cultural narratives are shaping our engagement with scripture. 20:37 Second, if you're starting to feel defensive or uncomfortable when confronted with different biblical passages that may challenge your cultural or political commitments, that emotional resistance can be a sign that our cultural narratives have become more authoritative than the scripture itself. You know, our interpretation of scripture should consistently align with a particular political or cultural tribe. When that happens, it shouldn't Sorry, it shouldn't align with a particular political or cultural tribe, not in every case. And so, while the Bible does speak to political and cultural issues, when our interpretations align too neatly with any one human ideology, I get a little uncomfortable Again. I think, as I explained sort of earlier in this episode, these cultural narratives, they can recognize something good, something true and something beautiful, but because they're incomplete, they can't capture the fullness of that goodness, truth and beauty. And so if we're sitting back saying, oh, this human ideology aligns perfectly with what the Bible says, we're probably missing some of that incompleteness. And we need to rethink that, because we should always be doing both. We should be affirming what is good, true and beautiful in the world and in these cultural narratives, but remember it's affirm and hey, this is good. And remember it's a firm and hey, this is good. And also, there's far more here, there's far more depth to the triune God that this narrative just isn't addressing. And so it shouldn't just simply be strict alignment, it should also be a pointing beyond what is identified as really good, really really true and really beautiful to say. There's far more here than this narrative is capturing. 22:29 Fourth, you find it difficult to critique your own culture from a biblical perspective. I think that's a really good litmus test for when we've been sort of culturally captured. If scripture calls us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, rather than conform to the pattern of this world, we need to be able then to identify the ways in which biblical teaching challenges our cultural assumptions, and if we can't, that may indicate cultural captivity. I love what Jesus does in Matthew 6. I've done an episode on that as well. You could kind of go look at that. But in that section Jesus is critiquing the practices of fasting, prayer and giving that he sees around him, and he's telling his disciples not to pray, fast and give in the way that he's seeing, but to do it in a different way. And I think this is a good example of the sort of cultural critique I have in mind. 23:28 Notice that prayer, fasting and giving are generally good things. These are not, you know, this isn't murder, theft and coveting. This is prayer, fasting and giving. These are things that we would recognize as good. The trouble is that it's not just the act that's important, it's the way that we perform the act. And so we've got to be able to take a step back and say what is it about fasting, giving, praying? In our culture that is off. How is it that this doesn't work well? 24:01 And if we took that paradigm and we said, hey, participation in politics and government is good, for instance, but maybe the way we're doing it isn't quite God-honoring, maybe the way we're doing it is more like the world than it is aligned with what the Bible would tell us to do? And so we've got to be able to take some critical distance from these things and sit back and say what does it really look like for Christians to do X, y or Z, to participate in politics, to you know, get involved with our children's education, to you know, practice and participate in various civil events? What does that look like? We've got to be able to ask those questions, and if we can't, then we need to just think to ourselves how is it that? Maybe I'm not, maybe I'm being captured by a cultural narrative here. I would say the last thing is, you know, it's a question like this Do you primarily read scripture to confirm what you already believe rather than allowing it to challenge and transform you. 25:11 The way we approach the Bible, it turns out, actually is pretty important, and so we need to be approaching the Bible again. To go back to that Bonhoeffer story over against ourselves, we need to be approaching scripture expecting to be transformed and not necessarily thinking that in every case. You know the Bible is going to blow up everything that we believe. But the reality is that we don't read the Bible just to have everything we already believe reinforced. We read the Bible in order to come closer and closer and closer to conformity to Christ, and that involves change. 25:49 So I will just say this the goal here isn't to achieve some impossible culture-free reading of scripture. We are all shaped by our cultural context, and that's not inherently bad. The goal is to become aware of those cultural lenses so that they don't unconsciously dominate our interpretation. They don't take the place, they don't take that authoritative place of the scriptures. The scriptures are the final authority for life and faith, and so the scriptures have to be given the authority to reshape our cultural narratives and not the other way around. 26:21 And I would say that our cultural perspective can sometimes actually help us see aspects of scripture that others might miss. For example, readers from more collectivist cultures might notice communal dimensions of biblical teaching that individualistic Western readers tend to overlook. And we could say that vice versa as well. The problem isn't having a cultural perspective, it's being captive to it. So I'd say the first step toward becoming less culturally captive is simply awareness. We've got to recognize that cultural narratives do shape our interpretation, and once we become aware of those narratives, we can hold them more loosely, allowing scripture to challenge and reshape them rather than vice versa. And that brings us to the question of how we can read scripture in a way that allows the text itself, rather than cultural narratives, to be our primary authority. 27:11 And I'd say the solution to that cultural captivity isn't, again, trying to eliminate all cultural influences. That's impossible. No matter what we do, we're not going to escape all those cultural influences. Rather, the solution is to develop interpretive practices that allow Scripture to challenge and reshape our cultural assumptions. First, we need to approach Scripture with hermeneutical humility Hermeneutics is a fancy word for the art and science of biblical interpretation and so we need to recognize that our understanding of Scripture is always partial and influenced by factors that we may not be fully aware of, and that humility doesn't mean that we can't have confidence in that we understand core biblical teachings, but it does mean that we have to hold our interpretations with an appropriate tentativeness, especially on issues where faithful Christians disagree. 28:02 Second, I think we need to engage with Christians from different cultural and historical contexts. When we read scripture alongside believers from other cultures or study how Christians thought throughout history, you know, we become more aware of our own cultural biases and gain insights we might otherwise miss. It's always fascinating, I think, for me to study Augustine. Augustine lived in a different interpretive time and at a different interpretive context, and so he's talking about theology in ways that are both orthodox and that I can understand and I can agree with, but he's also talking about theology in relation to a context that I don't fully grasp and I don't fully understand. That really raises interesting insights that are often helpful in helping me to see the scriptures in a different way, and so I think that's one of the big reasons why the historic creeds and confessions of the church are so valuable. They represent the consensus of faithful believers across different cultural contexts and historical periods, and when our interpretation contradicts those consenses or core doctrines, it really should give us pause. 29:14 Third, we need to practice what I call cross-cultural reading, intentionally reading scripture through different cultural lenses to gain a more complete understanding. So, for instance, we might ask how a passage would be understood by believers in a collectivist Asian culture or by Christians living under persecution. One easy way to do this, I think, because it's hard to put yourself in the actual seat of someone from another culture. What I would say is I like to ask three different sort of application questions, two of which are you know, how does this apply in my life? In other words, that's an individual interpretation, the individual application what should I be doing? And then you ask what implications might this have for the church at large or my local congregation? This gets you into more of a collectivist or communal context for the application of these texts. It moves from just an individual what should I be doing? To a communal idea what should my local congregation be doing? And then the third application question is what is my responsibility? As I think, through that communal application, recognizing that we are part of the body of Christ and that, moving beyond sort of an individual devotional, I should do something to better my own life kind of application. We also have a responsibility, as members of the body of Christ, to help move our local congregation toward something that maybe it's not moving toward now. So I think that's a really helpful way to kind of get at what I'm calling cross-cultural reading, which is probably a bad name for that. 30:51 Fourth, we need to prioritize the clear teaching of scripture over our cultural preferences. So when biblical teaching clearly challenges our cultural assumptions, as it often will, we just need to be willing to submit our cultural narratives to biblical authority rather than trying to force scripture into our own cultural framework. And fifth, I think we need to read scripture as a coherent narrative centered on Christ rather than as a collection of isolated verses. When we understand how individual passages fit into the broader biblical story, we're far less likely to misinterpret them by imposing our cultural narratives. And I'd say, finally and most importantly, we need to approach scripture not just as an object of study, but as the living word of God that has authority over our lives. 31:35 The goal of biblical interpretation isn't just to understand a text. It's not to understand a text intellectually. It's to be transformed by the word of God, to have our minds renewed and our lives conformed in the image of Christ. And so in part. That's why we've developed, out of Verum Seminary, verumseminarycom. We developed a course called Reading the Bible as a Final Authority for Life and Faith. I'd encourage you to go to verumseminarycom, you can go to usefulthegodcom. You can find that course. It's a comprehensive course. It provides tools and frameworks you need to recognize and resist cultural narratives that hijack biblical interpretation, and you'll learn how to identify those cultural narratives. You'll see some practical strategies for reading the Bible on its own terms within a creedal framework. So the course really does help. It includes videos and lessons, practical exercises and discussion questions that'll help you develop not just knowledge about the Bible but the skills to interpret it faithfully yourself, and so you can find that again at vramseminarycom. 32:39 As we conclude today, I just want to emphasize that the issue of cultural captivity and biblical interpretation isn't just an academic concern. It's really a matter of spiritual growth, spiritual freedom, we might say. And Jesus said if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And I think that true freedom comes not from allowing our interpretations to be captive to cultural narratives, but from allowing God's word to challenge and transform our cultural assumptions, and so in the next video we're going to be talking a little bit about the teaching office, the biblical teaching office and how it might need to be restored, and we'll explore how God designed the teaching office to guide believers in faithful biblical interpretation, and how the historic creeds and confessions of the church provide an essential guide, some guardrails, for our faith, and so I'd encourage you to watch that video to gain a fuller understanding of how to keep your faith firmly grounded in biblical truth. 33:33 Until then, I just invite you to reflect on how the cultural narratives we've discussed today really affect your understanding of the scriptures. Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal any ways in which your interpretation of scripture has become captive to cultural stories rather than shaped by the text itself, and consider joining me in the Reading the Bible as the Final Authority for Life and Faith course to develop the skills you need to interpret scripture faithfully in those challenging times. Thanks for joining me today on PREPPED May God bless you as you seek to ground your understanding more firmly in his word rather than in cultural narratives. In a world where everyone seems to have their own version of Christianity, we really need to understand our book better than anything else. So I pray that you'll do that. I pray that this episode has been helpful and we'll see you on the next episode of PREPPED. Take care everybody. 34:25 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe, so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.