We should stop thinking like Westerners.
Posted Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I have become completely convinced that unless we have a firm grasp of our Hebrew heritage and a comprehensive understanding of Jewish and Near East culture we will never have good theology. Our understanding of scripture must build upon the foundation that God laid out in the Torah, not in spite of it. Our understanding must grow out of our Hebrew roots, not sepeate from them. If we are to be wholeistic followers of Jesus (our Jewish Rabbi) then we must learn to be more like Him in our thinking; meaning we should think less like Westerners and more like someone from the ancient Near East.
Thoughts?
May 18th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Only that from what I can see in scripture, Paul set up a church in a city in a matter of months … and he didn’t seem to be too concerned about fully educating them in a Jewish way of thinking.
And we also have Paul’s own teaching from 1 Corinthians that a Jewish mindset is just as problematic to the understanding of the cross as a Greek one (one seeks after wisdom and the other after signs … according to Paul).
Not to mention the complete rejection of the New Covenant idea by the Jews as a whole. If their mindset were “necessary”, then they wouldn’t have killed the true Messiah and rejected the Church that grew after it.
Also, Paul lists in Philipians his need to “count as rubbish” things of the flesh in order to “attain Christ”, and everything on that list had to do with his Jewish heritage.
And then to see that it was the Gentiles, pagan and polytheistic and hedonistic as they were, that grabbed the truth of Christ and took hold of the truth while the very people who had “confidence in the flesh” to understand the message rejected it.
All this isn’t to put down the Jewish way of thinking. It was designed by God to show that it will all be done by His Spirit, by the renewing of a mind to spiritual wisdom (also discussed in 1 Corinthians), which is different from worldly wisdom.
As a teacher and thinker, I love to see the context of the Jewish culture and the history — I appreciate it; it is very interesting and I know God can use it — but the Church that ended up infesting Rome was largely uneducated and ignorant of those things. They were schooled in the knowledge of God through the Holy Spirit and were willing to give up their Gentile-ness for something greater, just as Paul had to be willing to give up his identity as a Jew and Pharisee to truly attain Christ.
That’s not to say that your season of learning these things doesn’t have its place. I feel that God is leading you in it, but I guess I would see it as one piece of a puzzle, and definitely not “necessary” because Christ reveals all truth through His Spirit alone, per His teaching at the end of John.
Peace.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Good points. Maybe then the issue is that we not forsake the Jewishness of our faith as most Westerners have, but rather seek to really learn and discern some of the deeper things of our faith as they relate to the time and culture of the Hebrews.
I guess to verbalize it better, what really bothers me about American Christianity is that it tends to think that it has complete understanding of Scriptures when in fact a lot of the things that we often take for granting in scripture are based on a backward way of thinking that even the Gentiles in the Near East would likely not have had.
For example, Western Christianity sees our spiritual walk as an individual experience that occasionally involves others. A Hebrew (and a gentile from that time period) would likely see the opposite, our spiritual walk as a community experience with elements of individualism.
I think that the Gentile way of thinking during that time was different from that of the Jews, but I don’t think that their way of thinking was nearly as far removed as ours is now. I think at the very least that the Gentiles of that time could relate and understand how the Jews thought, and therefore better understand a lot of the context of the Bible, which in both Older and Newer Testaments was written primarily by Jews.
So, all that to say, when I read my Bible I see a people (Jew and Gentile believers) that have a very different way of thinking and relating to the world around them. And, I want to learn to look at the world with the kind of clarity and faith that they had.