Change across Cultures

Bruce Bradshaw

Description

C. S. Lewis compared the task of ethical inquiry to sailing a fleet of ships; the primary task is avoiding collisions. When introducing cultural change, such collisions are inevitable. Bruce Bradshaw provides expert instruction for navigating these cultural clashes.Bradshaw contends that lasting change comes only through altering the stories by which people live. The Bible is the metanarrative whose altering theme of redemption forms a transcultural ethical basis. Aspects of God's redemption story can change how local cultures think and behave toward the environment, religions, government, gender identities, economics, science, and technology. However, effective change takes place only in a context of reconciliation, Christian community, and mutual learning.A must read for anyone engaged in or preparing for cross-cultural ministry, relief, or development work. The book is also relevant to students of ethics, philosophy, and theology. Numerous real-life examples illustrate the inevitable tensions that occur when cultures and narratives collide.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441206978
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2002 by Bruce Bradshaw
Published by Baker Academic a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
eISBN 978-1-4412-0697-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Narrative: The Media of Ethical Inquiry
2. Scripture: From Narrative to Metanarrative
3. Culture: From Functionalism to Redemption
4. Environment: From Gnosticism to Biblical Holism
5. Religious Practices: From Power to Truth
6. The Powers: Transformation through Subordination
7. Gender Equality: From Participation to Leadership
8. Economics: From Exploitation to Empowerment
9. Science and Religion: Two Different Leading Functions
10. Reconciliation: A Commitment to a Better Future
11. Community: One Narrative with Many Cultural Dimensions
12. Toward Constructing the Narrative: From Teaching to Learning
Selected Bibliography
Index
Notes
About the Author
Foreword
T he great mission outreach of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries planted churches around the world. It was less successful, however, in transforming the societies in which people lived. Poverty, injustice, corruption, violence, and oppression continue unchecked in much of the world, despite the growth of the church. How should we as Christians respond to this apparent contradiction?
In this thought-provoking book, Bruce Bradshaw challenges us to reexamine our Christian mission to the world. He points out that too often we interpret Scripture through the lenses of our own cultures and worldviews. In the past, we have been deeply shaped by modernity. Its stress on individualism has led to a personalized gospel that largely ignores the importance of social and cultural systems. Its Greek dualism, which divides the world into supernatural and natural realms opposing spiritual to material, faith to fact, and miracle to natural order has given rise to a spiritualized gospel that is concerned with saving the lost but overlooks the fact that God is concerned with redeeming his whole creation, including the world. The modern use of a mechanistic metaphor in understanding and organizing the world and society has led to a managerial approach to mission that is based on control, hierarchy, and techniques and formulas, which belies the fact that salvation and mission have ultimately to do with relationships between God, humans, and creation.
Bradshaw challenges us to reenvision our understanding of the Christian mission for the twenty-first century. He calls us to bear witness to the whole gospel, which includes salvation from sin, the transformation of societies and cultures, and ecological stewardship. This calls for new kinds of leadership, different understandings of gender relationships, alternative uses of power, and new economic responsibilities. Bradshaw invites us to make the building of relationships central to our mission task and to be open to the work of God in human situations. This calls for moral as well as cognitive transformations. We need to develop methods for dealing with the issues arising out of cross-cultural ethics, just as we have done for dealing with cross-cultural understandings.
To develop his model, the author draws on narratives to help us understand the mission task. He begins with biblical narratives and links these to present-day cases drawn from his wide field-experience in Christian development and transformation around the world. These cases raise the cognitive and moral dilemmas that we face and present the gospel as a transformative power in the world.
Bradshaw reexamines many biblical texts to support his view of mission. Not everyone will agree with his exegetical conclusions, even though he finds the support of Bible scholars for many of them, but we cannot avoid the critical questions he raises and his challenge to look for a new biblical paradigm that sees mission not only as the salvation of individuals but also as the transformation of Christian communities and whole societies.
Paul G. Hiebert Professor of Mission and Anthropology Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
Acknowledgments
W hile admitting to be the sole author of this book, I am keenly aware that writing is not a solitary effort. The book has had many sources. It was conceived in 1993 when John Steward and I happened to meet in Manila. I shared my idea for this book, and he affirmed it by stating that “values are transmitted through stories; the values won’t change unless the stories change.” I am indebted to him for his wisdom and encouragement.
There are others who made valuable contributions. The World Vision staff who participated in my workshops provided the case studies from which the stories are garnered. My students at Fuller Theological Seminary helped shape many of my ideas. Tone Lindheim, an emerging theologian from Norway, was particularly helpful, and Laura Pinho read the entire manuscript. I am grateful to them.
The book also provided much of the substance for my Sunday evening reflections at Peace Fellowship, a house church of Anabaptists in Claremont, California. The folks at Peace listened well, giving me the impression that the material was worth publishing. Peter Riddell of London Bible College, Lance Shaina, Rebecca Russell, and Edna Valdez all gave me encouragement. Steve Hoke, Patrice White, Carl Raser, Sherwood Lingenfelter, Eric Ram, Ted Yamamori, Bruce Brander, and Don Brandt were among the people who read sections of the early manuscript, influencing me to believe that this book was worthwhile.
I must also thank my family for their support and tolerance. This book had a two-year gestation period, and Mary, my wife, tolerated the piles of books, journals, and papers that littered our house during that time. Our children, Ellen, Amy, and Phillip, also endured its birth.
Introduction
. . . fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured.
Leviticus 24:20
W hile Kosovo was being bombed during the spring of 1999, the Rrushis confined themselves to their family home in northern Albania. The bombing, however, was not their major concern; they were at war with their neighbors, the Bardhoshises. Both families live according to the moral code of the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini. Named after a fifteenth-century Albanian hero, it comprises the plot of the cultural narratives of northern Albania. The Kanun regulates justice, marriage, vengeance, and family feuds. It dictates retaliatory justice, or that blood be paid with blood, giving both the Rrushis and Bardhoshises moral justification to avenge a death they believe the other caused; thus they live in constant fear for their lives. The Kanun is responsible for the continuation of feuds in Albania over long periods of time, some being revived after lying dormant over a half century. There are, according to an independent blood-feud reconciliation agency, over 2,700 ongoing feuds in Albania. [1] The communist government that ruled Albania from 1944 to 1991 tried several times to curb the influence of the Kanun by legislative proposition. The feuds, however, were embedded in the cultural narratives, rendering governmental legislation powerless to end the blood feuds and allowing the Kanun to survive.
Sustainable cultural change requires the transformation of the values that permeate the cultural narratives, which are the stories of the social structures that comprise the communities in which people live. They also embody the values that govern their lives and inspire them to change their behavior. Christian missions and development agencies have engaged in numerous efforts to manage cultural change throughout the world. To a large extent, however, the projects have failed because the theology and ethics that influenced them were propositional, not narrative, in nature. They were, therefore, powerless to produce sustainable change.
Two primary concerns of this book are, first, the pervasive influence cultural narratives have on managing cultural change through development projects and, second, the way in which worldviews and moral assumptions inherent in cultural narratives govern biblical interpretations. Too often, biblical interpretations are culturally bound, influencing Christians who manage cultural change to believe they are implementing biblical solutions to cultural transformation. However, some of their solutions are less than redemptive.
Interpreting Scripture according to a specific worldview can produce interpretations opposed to each other. For example, the injunction “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” has frequently been interpreted as biblical justification for a personal ethic of revenge, influencing people to believe that they can rightly inflict on others the wounds that have been inflicted on them. Like the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, the Levitical teaching can be interpreted as a prescription for everyone to be toothless and blind. The narrative context of the Levitical injunction, however, can also be interpreted to imply that communities can realize justice when their laws respect all people equally. Instead of suggesting that people are justified in destroying each other’s limbs and lives, the ethical injunction can actually prevent such d