4 minute read
Every thoughtful American Christian I’ve ever known understands that our 21st century, Western culture differs significantly from the Ancient Near Eastern or Ancient Greco-Roman cultures in which the Bible was written and edited. But even then few grasp how different those worlds truly were. Cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich describes us as The WEIRDest People in the World.1 He’s right. We don’t realize how much our cultural experiences fundamentally shape our psychology and epistemology, which is why we have trouble seeing what the Bible truly says.2
Any cultural anthropologist worth their salt who read an eclectic batch of ANE texts would expect to see the normalized cultural practices of that time and place. Sure enough, the Old Testament bears witness to an evolving society with an intensive kinship system. There’s communal identity, intergenerational families in attached households, familial occupations, clans, tribes, patriarchs, patrilineal descent, primogeniture inheritance, polygyny, concubinage, endogamy with cousin marriage and Levirate marriage, arranged marriage, dowries, particular incest taboos, etc.3
Even those who have advanced degrees studying the Bible often miss the aforementioned ANE cultural practices. The trouble is we’re human. Reading ain’t just reading. Literacy enables us to comprehend the written language, but overshadowing that process is a lifetime of psychological enculturation that causes readers to consciously gravitate toward certain “clear” ideas in a text while subconsciously skipping over “confusing” ideas.4 Quite often this causes us to fixate on a misreading of a given text while completely missing the obvious, larger point that’s being made.
Time for a controversial example. Polygamy is the Old Testament cultural norm while 1 Timothy 3 is the closest Scripture gets to stopping the practice. That passage gets cited all the time, but it’s about the qualifications for elders.5 There’s a decent argument to be made about a redemptive trajectory back to God’s edenic ideal, but even the scrupulous Martin Luther recognized the Bible never condemns polygamy.6 I tend to agree with him. The Bible is far less prescriptive–and a lot less absolute–about strictly monogamous kinship than Western Christians tend to assert.7
The original beatniks often violated the social norms because they couldn’t unsee what they had seen. There was no going back to an age of innocence. That’s exactly how I feel. I launched into a deep-dive study of sex, marriage, and kinship in Scripture because I sincerely wanted to live by its transcendent principles. What I came away realizing is that, oh crap, the Bible sure is weird but it really isn’t WEIRD. It doesn’t work like that. As Jared Byas summarized, “How we think, feel, and reason isn’t universally human, but is impacted by all these [cultural-historical] factors.”8
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WEIRD being an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The implications are incredible. The acronym is intended as a consciousness raising device to help people be aware of their own cultural presuppositions. WEIRD is not the norm. WEIRD people are “one particular population at one slice of time,” as Henrich puts it. For example, most of the WEIRD people who’ve been studied by WEIRD psychologists, economists, sociologists, and academics in other fields are actually highly unusual from a global perspective. What we think of as normal human behavior is, in fact, a highly selective representative sample that further reinforces our biased perceptions.↩
Here’s Henrich again: “What I mean by awareness is… an inclination of many researchers, and probably people in general, to assume that the psychologies that they’re recording among their population is readily generalizable to humans as a species. And what a growing body of evidence shows is that our minds really adapt to the institutions and languages and technologies that we grow up with, so we should think of psychology as something that is changing over historical time–more like language or something like that–rather than something fixed.”↩
It’s got all the hallmarks. Western Christians keep seeing these as unfortunate exceptions to the “biblical ideal” of the monogamous, detached nuclear family model but that is an anachronistic projection of WEIRD values. That way of thinking keeps missing the reality that these texts really do reflect the Ancient Near Eastern world in which they were produced. Those weren’t the outliers in those cultural settings. Those were the norms.↩
Culture plays a huge role in determining what we find clear and what we find confusing.↩
It says nothing prescriptive to first century Christians in general.↩
According to Luther, “I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.” Personally, I tend to think of non-monogamous practices as the best bad idea in certain situations. Luther thought polygamy might be a preferrable option to divorce when a man’s spouse was unable or unwilling to be sexually intimate anymore. Ya know, I can see his reasoning there. Also, in an undergrad class on global missions I remember reading about 19th century American missionaries to Africa who observed the practice of tribal chiefs marrying the widows of fallen soldiers and providing for their children. The practice literally saved lives, so they had trouble condemning it.↩
In the interest of fairness, in N.T. Wright’s book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, he uses monogamy as his closing case study. Toward the end of his extended argument he writes, “[T]he New Testament assumes on every page that monogamy is now mandatory for the followers of Jesus…” Honestly, I think he made a weak sauce argument. Not one paragraph later Wright nuances, “It remains the case, despite the prevalence of polygamy in some cultures and at least the possibility of it in others, that most cultures in human history, up to the present day, have gravitated toward monogamy and stayed there.” That’s just plain factually inaccurate.
According to Joseph Henrich, “Starting in late antiquity, one branch of Christianity that eventually becomes the Roman Catholic Church began to impose a series of prohibitions surrounding marriage in the family that gradually over centuries began to break down European kinship structures into monogamous nuclear families… Most people probably think the monogamous nuclear family is the most common or universal, or the way families are supposed to be. It’s actually highly unusual from an anthropological perspective…and it was really the church that initiated that process.” Correct.
Like so many Christians, Wright is making this strong, universalizing theological claim that presumes centuries of WEIRD cultural presuppositions of Medieval Christianity. Yet these claims ultimately don’t hold up to anthropological scrutiny from a global perspective. I love N.T. Wright. He’s had a profound impact upon my faith, but in this case I really think he, like so many others, is trying to reverse-engineer a theological justification for a preexisting cultural value.↩
This quote is from an interview he and Pete Enns did with Joseph Henrich on their “Faith for Normal People” podcast.↩
