A friend of mine was talking with a devout Muslim about the claims of Jesus. The man expressed that he had no need for my friend's "Western God." Primarily for the sake of argument, my friend said, "Christianity is not Western, it's Eastern!" Later, he began to realize he was on to something.
Food for thought tonight: truth is, as a westerner, you're at a disadvantage to understand Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, and the rest. These men, like Moses and the prophets, came from cultures much more like what exists today in Iran, Turkey, Palestine, or Iraq than in the good ol' US of A.
Of course, understanding the Old Testament helps somewhat. My suspicion is, however, that most American or European Christians have understood the Hebrew culture revealed in the Old Testament with a severe western slant. Honestly, when I mentioned Moses, didn't you picture Charleton Heston?
Christianity is Eastern, and we need to take heed to that. I believe part of the necessary reformation of at least the American Church is the infusion of elements of eastern thought into the understanding and practice of the Bible. Please reserve judgment here. I am zealously opposed to goofiness. That is not what I mean.
I will give you one example, and I'd love to hear others. (shameless fishing for more comments!) The Jews did not study the scriptures in the analytical way we do. That is a western idea. The Jews memorized the scriptures, meditated on them, and did them. To them, that was study--to hide it in their hearts so that it would become reality in their lives.
Our methods of study are so analytical as to become critical. In other words, we tend to study to decide whether we believe what the scriptures say, or worse, to try and dismiss what they say. In our analytical approach, we also miss the precious intimacy of scripture, and the fact that primarily they reveal a person, rather than merely the answers to our questions.
What other western tendencies cloud our experience of Jesus? Hmmm...
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3 comments:
Eastern religion is a group of religions originating in India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia.
Christianity as a significant organized religion began in Europe, Rome in particular. All the Abrahamic religions are considered western by scholars and historians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/western_religion
Yes, frank, your point is well-taken. "Eastern Religion" is not a historically accurate label for Christianity in a broad sense. Perhaps I should find a better way to say this.
However, my point is that Christianity, which began, by the way, not in Rome, but in Jerusalem, and has its roots in the modern-day middle-east, cannot be properly understood or practiced from a purely western mindset, and in particular, not from a modern American expression of Westernism. What I'm attempting to do in this entry is to encourage western Christians to look outside their own default contexts of modern or post-modern thinking and see that our faith is not a system that fits neatly into these schools of thought.
Christianity as a significant organized religion, particularly the Roman variety, though widely accepted, is not necessarily consistent with Biblical teaching, and therefore not the standard I use to define genuine Christianity. The heart and foundation of Biblical Christianity is the blood covenant, a practice of ancient...ok...MIDDLE-eastern cultures, and a series of supernatural visitations by God to Abraham. My point is that these and other foundational ideas are foreign to the generally western way of thinking. Therefore, to properly understand Christianity, we must adjust our way of thinking rather than dismissing what does not fit into it.
Is there a better way I can express this? Pardon my relative historical amateurism, but I have always drawn the east/west line more near the Mediterranean. It seems that is where the vast cultural shifts lie in our current world.
wow, i know u wrote this years ago but i just stumbled upon this now. 2011. i think you are onto something here.
i also was thinking along the same lines you were. especially how "americanized" the faith has become.
let us discuss. :)
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