The Fear Of Syncretism Is Making The Church Assimilate

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by doctor Ashish Pharma, and we're going to be talking a little bit today about this idea of assimilation and how in the world the church tends to lose its shape, let's say, as the world sort of encroaches into it. There's an incorporation that sort of happens where the Church and the world start to look a lot more alike than we might want or hope, and so it becomes a problem of identity, it becomes a problem of thought process, it becomes a problem of values, and so that's what we're going to be talking.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: A little bit about today.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: We'll do a few episodes on the different problems we sort of see, our forces that we see pressuring in on the church and keeping the Church from developing that sort of mature, uncompromising faith that says, hey, I'm going to obey Christ even when the consequences are fairly negative.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: And figuring this out.

00:01:02
Speaker 1: So this first one is assimilation, but well we'll dive in in future episodes into what we call fragmentation and then transaction. So that's what's coming up. But today assimilation, So I'll leave it there. But ah wan, don't you start us off help us. Maybe you'd mentioned something before the podcast about syncretism, and I think people have probably heard that term and off a lot. I've used that term and off a lot. I'm interested to understand your thoughts on syncretism. So why don't we just jump in right there?

00:01:33
Speaker 2: Right?

00:01:34
Speaker 3: I love jumping right in, jump into the deep end, right, and then might as well the shock of the cold, you get over it quicker, that's right. So the two are often welded together for me, and that when I've gotten into conversations with assimilation, often in the classroom, I often hear students raise the concern of syncretism, and I think the connection for them is, generally, if assimilation is the problem of one group absorbing into itself another so that there's a loss of itself. The fear, on the other end is when that sort of assimilation is is compared to a religious setting or setting in which you have people concerned that we're going to lose the basics of our faith, We're going to lose the core of what it means to be in our case Christian, because we've allowed ourselves to get too close to something else, whether it be a culture, a way of thinking.

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Speaker 4: And often this is.

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Speaker 3: One directional right, it's a group of people that have, whether they recognize it or not. Usually it's they don't recognize it, a very culturally saturated understanding of their faith and often very traditioned. Right that it's been deep rooted for so long that these traditions just become the normativities of what it means to express their faith. And that's now engaging with another culture that's beginning to do similar sorts of things, right, starting to gain roots or begin to articulate the message of Jesus in light of its own place, and the fear then enters in of whoa that sounds too much like fill in the blank, whatever your culture is, right, right, So generally that conversation of syncretism that flows out of the assimilation conversation is a fear based conversation. I'm afraid of losing the essence of what makes Christianity what it is. Yeah, Now, I put it that way deliberately because I want to highlight my use of the word essence. There is already philosophically and culturally saturated sure, right, And what I want to get at within that is that there's a way discussing things that's irretrievably tied to locality. So we think about universals, we think about generalities, we think about common sense, these things that should be true here, there and everywhere, and it makes sense that we think in those terms. But my reaction, my initial reaction, is to say that we take for granted in that moment, how we don't know anything as generalities, We don't know anything as universals. Everything we know. And so my case in Boinde is one of the other things we were talking about, completely unrelated, was teaching in Europe, right.

00:04:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.

00:04:42
Speaker 3: At a place I used to teach, one of the perks was this opportunity regularly to go teach these these programs abroad. And I might have mentioned it on this podcast in some previous times, So forgive me if this was repetition, but I will never forget this moment we're teaching in. I'm teaching in Germany and the setting we're living in this youth hostel for me for weeks, for the students for months. Part of the deal is they have this very German breakfast right, yep, these mini loaves of bread that are fantastic, fresh fruit, cheese, cold cuts, put out some dutella, and students initially think that's breakfast.

00:05:30
Speaker 4: Maybe they're used to.

00:05:33
Speaker 3: Cereal and milk, or reanola and yogurt.

00:05:35
Speaker 2: Or make stup scrambled eggs.

00:05:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right, that's right.

00:05:39
Speaker 3: But by the time they get into this a couple months in, it's like this is normal to them, and they love it. I'll never forget the initial part though, And the initial thing was having these students walk up to the to the little food bar where all this stuff is laid out, and there's the basket of fruit, and they look at the apples and they know that it's an apple. It's not a confusion as to what it is, right, but there's still a level of huh. And the reason is and and I have an inverse example of this as well. So before I get to the punch one of this, let me give the inverse. I had a student in my philosophy class years ago who was from Germany, Okay, and I was telling this story, and her first reaction was to start laughing and say, that's how I feel about American apples. All right, So where's the juxtaposition. You go to a major American supermarket and you go look at the apples and they are big, and they are perfect spheres, and they have this mild layer of wax on them so they're shiny, and they work hard to make sure that you don't find one with the dent or the bruise in it. Right, And it's this idyllic image of the apple, and not just the students, all of us. We go to the store, we have this image in mind. And now when I say apple, the first image that pops into mind is that thing.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:04
Speaker 3: And that's just not what you're gonna find in Germany.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:08
Speaker 3: Right, So you go to Germany and you you have this thing that's not waxy, and it's not big, and it's often not a perfect sphere. Its color is kind of dull. It's a dull red, right, because it hasn't been polished.

00:07:25
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:07:26
Speaker 3: So my German student had that image in mind and she sees these American apples like, what in the world is going on with this? I've never seen apples like this, even if there's enough similarity that she knows, right, Yeah, And these American students in Germany are like, what in the world is going on with this? I could take two bites and be done with this thing, right right.

00:07:45
Speaker 4: My point in this is.

00:07:46
Speaker 3: That whatever image we have in our head, it came from somewhere. So even as we think in generalities, think in universals, think about the perfect form of the apple.

00:07:56
Speaker 4: If you want to think click a Titaness.

00:07:58
Speaker 3: Philosopher, we never get the image in our head from nowhere. I'd say the same thing what I do with my students now with regard to the category of what is a weed? Now, some of them are funny, and they think immediately of marijuana, and I think, okay, cool. But the ones who are thinking about a weed in terms of the garden, a dandelion, creeping Charlie. You know, I can't run all the weeds that we have out there, crabgrass, These sorts of images pop into their head.

00:08:29
Speaker 4: Flower, a.

00:08:33
Speaker 3: Zenia arose, a daffodil, right, a buttercup, something like this pops into their head. Now, how come the wild violet, the dandelion, these all have flowers on them. Why are they in one category versus the other? Again, the point here is that there is no universal This says more about us in the way that our language has been shaped by our place, by our expectations, by our desires, and we begin to put other things into these categories. And that's not inherently wrong, that's just how languages work. But the trouble creeps in, and this is where we get back to synchronism. The trouble comes in when we fail to recognize how deeply shaped our way of seeing things, hearing things, feeling things, imagining things is by our locality, by our cultures, by our traditions, our histories. And now we get to the Christian faith and we see a Christian faith and that I wanted to flag the word essence earlier because essence is a deeply philosophical term coming out of a particular Greek philosophical tradition that has saturated Western thought and its development in multiple cultures, and especially saturated the formation of Christian theology as we know it. You go to Scripture, the language of essence is just not there, right, not because it's wrong to use that as theological category, but because the form you break thinking.

00:10:05
Speaker 2: Right, right, they wouldn't have ever called it essence, right.

00:10:08
Speaker 4: That's right.

00:10:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're very quick and easy to use, these languages that are deeply shaped and cultured and local and traditioned, and so on and so forth. But in that process to miss that it is just that it's not some sort of pure version of the faith. And now when we see another culture that's newer to the faith trying to wrestle with the same sorts of things, we call it syncretism.

00:10:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's helpful.

00:10:42
Speaker 1: Actually, my framework for syncretism was a little different, but I am with you on what you're saying. In Old Testament theology, syncretism is a very clear thing, right. We can talk about scism in the Old Testament, for instance, where we have Israelite practices, usually idolatrous, but not always, there's a an intake of what is clearly stated to be inappropriate adoption of foreign cultural practices into Israelite society, which then creates these sort of mergers of incompatible notions under what's broadly called Yahwism. And so I think the difference so just as I'm hearing you talk, and we might tease this out a little bit, when the Bible, i mean the Bible is making it explicit, right, it's not saying that any cultural appropriation would be problematic. Right, it's saying that these particular ones are compromising Israelite faith and creating a skewed understanding of who God is and how God operates within Israelite society. That's often referred to as syncretism in Old Testament theology. But what you're talking about I agree with. I think we have to be very careful and recognized that we are culturally rooted and that not every difference would count as syncretism, which is going to have a negative and pejorative understanding of what that actually is. Right, So when we say something is syncretistic, we're essentially saying it's heretical. It's a soft form of heretical. Right, You've accommodated to the culture, You've compromised, You've allowed something in that shouldn't have ever come in. As opposed to recognizing, no, that's not exactly what this is. We can't equate this exactly to the sort of quote unquote syncretism that we identify in scripture, which that word is never used in scripture, by the way, either it's Old Testament theology, right, is naming a dynamic within the Old Testament syncretism. So that's not biblical terminology, it's Old Testament theology terminology.

00:13:09
Speaker 2: But when we.

00:13:09
Speaker 1: See that in the scripture, yeah, okay, we can name that. We can see it. It's clearly an abruption, like these are problematic things, but when we see it out in the world, we have to be I think, more careful with it.

00:13:21
Speaker 2: You can almost argue that the fact.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: That we are naming something syncretistic when we see it in another culture is a sign of our assimilation into our own culture. In other words, the depth of ingrainment that we have in our own culture keeps us from recognizing that this other expression by other Christians may actually be helpful and appropriate and a necessary understanding for us to recognize as part of what it means to have a good Christian witness. At the very least, we should recognize it as something that could be very good within a given culture of that culture's witness. And so I think that that what you're describing would point back to an assimilation to our own.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: Culture right where we've lost the script.

00:14:16
Speaker 1: Of I like to think I'll give a really cultural example to illustrate this. I've kind of gotten into this idea that it's like an operating system. There's firmware, right that defines the logic of a given system. So any computer we purchase, or an iPad or a phone or something like that has a basic logic to it, and every app that we put on that, every piece of software we put on that has to be formatted to fit that logic. So we could say that the firmware is the governing logic of this system, and everything we put onto it has to conform to that governing logic.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: And I think that part of.

00:14:57
Speaker 1: What we struggle with when we're dealing with this emmolation is recognizing that, yeah, well we may have to conform our behavior to within a given culture. As Christians. We see this all over the New Testament. We talked about in other episodes, where Paul is arguing that, hey, we can still fit within these structures, we just have to think about them differently.

00:15:18
Speaker 2: So there is that aspect.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: But I think when the governing firm where starts to skew the way we even think about things, that's where there's a baseline assimilation that starts to happen. I don't know if that makes sense, but throw it out there.

00:15:35
Speaker 3: It does. And so it leads to I have I should be clear and say my concern with the conversations that I often hear on syncretism doesn't mean that I don't that I think everything goes right, right. I want to tease out the Old Testament stuff.

00:15:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, go for it, because I think that.

00:15:58
Speaker 3: Actually helps us understand the sorts of dynamics we're working with here. You're the Old Testament scholar, correct me where I go wrong. But I want to put them in tension with Acts chapter two, right where in Acts chapter two, the disciples receive the power of the Spirit coming into them and they start to speak, and people marvel specifically that at this point it's Jews from diaspora who've come back to Jerusalem. Yes, and so they've come back. Now they're hearing the message of Jesus being proclayed to them in their own tongue.

00:16:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:38
Speaker 3: And I think that that's a significant claim, right, especially to the degree that languages contain the boundaries, the ways of thinking, the localities. Right, So some things are just lost in translation. But I hear people say chai tea, I get irritated because chai means tea. But I also get it because what an Indian person means by is not precisely what a British person would mean.

00:17:03
Speaker 4: By tea right in America.

00:17:05
Speaker 3: So that's such that I've been in a situation where someone offered me chai and I said yes, and I got a little thing with a green tea tea bag and hot water. Like, what the heck is this?

00:17:17
Speaker 4: This isn't what I signed up.

00:17:18
Speaker 2: For language for this, This isn't right. That's right.

00:17:22
Speaker 3: So I get the tension in that moment, right that to say chai tea is redundant. But I get also that when people say chai tea there, yeah, you know, there's layers going on. Yeah, they're saying they're referring to something different than the bag of green tea and hot water. But I also get that when people say chai t they're probably referring to something from Starbucks.

00:17:41
Speaker 4: That is not chai.

00:17:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, so there's there's at least three things going on. Yeah, languages do.

00:17:49
Speaker 4: That to it this That's what I'm trying to say.

00:17:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the fact that you have acted chapter two making that distinct point about language, I take it to mean that no one language gets to declare that central normativity, which means no set of categories gets declare one set of central normativity to accessing Jesus. And sure enough the rest of Acts is about not just to the Jew but to the gentile, and the gentile not a second class citizen. But what was far drawing near right? So Acts fifteen in some ways the climax there. So I say that to now put that intention with the Old Testament, that it seems to me that when we have this thing that Old Testament scholars will call syncretism. In the Old Testament, what's at stake there is Yahweh worship. Yes, always, so the syncretism of bringing Yeah, so the syncretism of capitulating to Canaanite ways is not capitulating to some other groups' ways of making chy or cooking rotti or bread or something like that.

00:18:52
Speaker 2: Right, correct.

00:18:54
Speaker 3: The issue here is the centering of life around the appeasing and worship of some.

00:19:02
Speaker 4: God who is not Yahweh.

00:19:03
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:19:07
Speaker 4: That absolutely is a concern.

00:19:09
Speaker 3: Right, And if the concern here is a detraction from as we understand Yahweh as the triune God revealed in the person of Jesus and administered to us by the breathing out of his very own breath, as we see at the end of John Yep, the Holy Spirit. Right, if that is undermined in speaking in a different tongue, then the issue here isn't that we've entered a different tongue with another set of categories. The issue here is we're no longer talking about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That's right, the God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

00:19:45
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I agree, and that's a problem. Yeah.

00:19:49
Speaker 3: But if the issue here is that you've begun to use categories that don't align with the long tried and true versions of speaking essentialism.

00:19:57
Speaker 2: Right, totally dif, then we got there. Yeah. Right.

00:20:02
Speaker 3: So one of the ways in which I've seen this is as an Indian who is a Christian, I have long felt that there's a challenge to be given, and that challenge is that because of the way that modern Christianity. So there's an older tradition of Christianity in India, there's a modern tradition of Christianity. The way the modern Christianity came to India was through British colonialism. Sure, merchant and soldier and missionary were working in tandem in a shared sort of project, such that those who embrace Jesus through the modern missionaries to India, I can affirm in this Philippians, one kind of way of the Gospel was preached, and I take joy in that, but I also am saddened by the fact that part of that project was we need to break being.

00:20:55
Speaker 4: Indian out of you.

00:20:57
Speaker 2: Yes, right.

00:20:58
Speaker 3: So unfortunately that that version of the Church that comes from the modern missionary movement in India rightfully so gets accused, I think by other Indians as rejecting being Indian. And it seems to me that the logic of Acts two and following is that no Indian is capable not only of bearing the presence of Christ, but ritually embracing, rather than being a secondary category. So with that in mind, it's been very important to me over the years, and I've written essays in the past on this, on how the Valley, which is in some ways, especially in northern India, but two larger Hindu India, kind of Christmas it is the chief There's tons of holidays, but it's kind of the chief holiday.

00:21:48
Speaker 4: And the basic premise of the Valley is that.

00:21:55
Speaker 3: The God ram entered into the kingdom of Rabin, who's a a demon god, to rescue his bride who'd been kidnapped, to liberate her, set her free. And the tagline of it is light overcomes darkness.

00:22:11
Speaker 4: Now, if we strip away and.

00:22:13
Speaker 3: We strip away it ob and these names, right, it sounds very very Christian, to be honest.

00:22:18
Speaker 2: You get a lot of resonances. Yeah, that's right.

00:22:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so my writing has been to the effect of, you know, can Indian Christians embrace the valley, which on the surface might sound like how dare they? That sounds like the same secretism you just said in the Old Testament is not allowed, right, the portrayal of yahweh worship for someone else worship. But my parallel here is to think about Christmas December twenty fifth. Yeah, how did we get there? We didn't get there from the Bible, there's no date. We didn't get there from the snow. I don't get the sense in the Middle East that there's very much snow. We got there because Christianity really seemed to take root in the Greco Roman world, and in that Greco Roman world, especially under the Latin influence of Rome, had this holiday called Saturnalia. On December twenty fifth, then among other things, Saturn, who's God, the father of the gods. Right, Jupiter is the high god, Saturn is the father of him. Yep, oh, that sounds like it has some resonance, right, the father and Saturn. Parents would give their children gifts on Saturnalia as a bestower of the parent, Saturn bestowing his gifts.

00:23:33
Speaker 4: Right.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: And Christians saw this and they said, hey, God, the Father gave us the ultimate gift in the person of Jesus. Right, I'm truncating this, right, but you can see within this how Christmas became December twenty fifth.

00:23:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:23:48
Speaker 3: And I, by the way, I think that's a beautiful move that Greco Roman Christians, especially Roman Christians, made to say, hey, we can celebrate on the same day and we can testify to.

00:24:00
Speaker 4: Jesus on it.

00:24:01
Speaker 3: And I've tried to use that as a parallel to say, can we do that same sort of thing with light overcoming darkness in the voley? Yeah, to me, that's not syncretism. That's an attempt to continue the mission of the Book of Acts.

00:24:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think so that would square with what's often referred to as syncretism in Old Testament theology, because what you end up having is not so we could easily just call it idolatry in the Old Testament. But the reason I think it gets the nuance of signatism often in the literature is that it's not a straight trading of Yahweh with another god. You don't just reject Yahweh and then pull another god in. What ends up happening is the sole allegiance that you're to have to the Lord to give him all you are and have right. This is Deuteronomy six four and five. Right, give the Lord all you are and have right. The short way of saying all that, and so happens in the Old Testament is you say, well, Yahweh is great for agriculture, right, but I need something for war, right, And so I'm going to pull in bail for war, or I'm going to pull.

00:25:15
Speaker 2: In you know, some other god for war. And you know, God is great for you know.

00:25:19
Speaker 1: The big stuff, but these household gods they really handle the tedium of the day, right, And so I'm going to pull those in. And what ends up happening is you have not a wholesale rejection of Yahweh, but a limiting of him, And what I usually argue is it's a distortion that ultimately results in a denial. So distorting Yahweh and making it seem as though he is either incapable of or irrelevant to certain aspects of society is ultimately a denial of who he is. That to me is the best way to shorthand explain what is usually meant by syncretism. It's a practice that sort of brackets Yahweh to the side. And so what we have then in your example, what you're saying is no de vali Christmas.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: These things are.

00:26:22
Speaker 1: The term I've been using lately, relocated, so you move them from one sacred social order into another. So now Devali really falls under the story of Christ and his church. Well, that's not syncretism, that's a wholesale move over, right, And so now it's sitting under something different, it's sitting under the authority of Christ. It's been reshaped. You can make the same sake case. I think your example of Christmas is right on, and so what we have is not an assimilation to right different culture. I'm going to be a Christian, but I'm going to continue to worship Devali over here and that's going to be fine, because it's really just part of my culture.

00:27:09
Speaker 2: Right.

00:27:10
Speaker 1: There's a difference in saying that, I think, than what you're saying, which is, no, I'm not going to celebrate d VALEI because it's part of my culture. I'm going to celebrate it with a renewed understanding of it because I've moved it over underneath the authority of Christ and I'm rethinking the whole thing. I'm going to assimilate it under my faith as opposed to allowing myself to be assimilated to it. I think there's a subtle move there that's really crucial. And that Old Testament, like I said, what gets assimilated at or we gets understood as syncretism.

00:27:43
Speaker 2: The Old Testament is.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: Largely that it's Yahweh is not in charge of everything. Yahweh is only in charge of certain things. And once you make that move functionally, you have denied who Yahweh actually is, and in a very important way, especially in ancient Israel.

00:28:03
Speaker 2: But I would argue for the Church as well.

00:28:06
Speaker 1: And so there isn't a there is a cultural condition that I think has to happen, But sometimes we get the impression I think that like we read the Book of Daniel and we say, well, if we eat the king's food, we're going to defile ourselves, and so we have to remain apart from whatever culture we're in. That isn't exactly it, right, Daniel is not refusing the king's food to.

00:28:34
Speaker 2: Avoid cultural appropriation.

00:28:36
Speaker 1: I mean, he becomes an expert in Babylonian culture and learning and understanding. It's difficult to believe that doesn't leave some sort of an imprint on him, right, But he's also preserving a deeply rooted we would probably call it identity of some sort and commitment to the Lord by refusing the king's food, right, by not becoming overly dependent on the king. I think the practice is largely intended to remind he and his friends that God is still caring for them, you know, And all the other episodes in Daniel, I think take on a similar flavor. They're going to learn these things about Babylon, They're going to become experts in the culture. They're going to become the wise people of Babylonian society, not because they've refused Babylonian understandings, but because they've retained their yahism while learning the Babylonian culture, the Babylonian whatever, and so this makes them very unique, powerful individuals in that culture because they can now be bridges into it. They can learn the new language, but they understand in a very different way. That's how I kind of read that aspect of it. Does that sort of give you a sense of does that align with what you're saying it?

00:29:58
Speaker 3: Does the the language that I like to use is transfigured.

00:30:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've used that before. I like that a lot.

00:30:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the idea I mean, if you think about the Hebrew scriptures, yep. The way in which Yahweh is depicted in the Hebrew Scriptures is certainly distinct from the way that say, bal would be by the Canaanites, right, or the gods of Egypt or the gods of Babylon. But there's something remarkably similar. And what I mean by that is that the mannerisms, the customs, the traditions, the sorts of things being addressed seem deliberate.

00:30:39
Speaker 2: Right.

00:30:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, It's set up in a and we could call it a cultural key, so that those who are among the Canaanites and those who are among the Babylonians and the Persians and the Egyptians. They're not seeing in yahweh something so utterly foreign and distinct that it's category problems. Right. This isn't like the person who grows up at the equator internet suddenly transported to the Arctic saying what is this right?

00:31:04
Speaker 2: Right? Right?

00:31:06
Speaker 3: Or vice versa someone who grows up there and whatever they encountered the equator. This is distinction through proximity. Is there's something oddly similar.

00:31:18
Speaker 4: And yet radically different.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:31:21
Speaker 3: And that's how honestly, that's how difference makes the most sense. If it's so radically different, it doesn't it's not threatening.

00:31:29
Speaker 4: Right.

00:31:32
Speaker 3: When the European colonizers came to what we thought we began to think of as the Americas, a lot of them were initially embraced by these First Nations peoples. And I would argue that it's partially because they were so different. A lot of the First Nations peoples would have greater senses of trepidation towards other groups of First Nations peoples. Right, you think about the dam and the Apache. Sure they actually had a different name for themselves. It's escaping me at the moment, But they were not friends in a way in which they were both in different sorts of ways, willing to make partnerships with the expanding Americans not coming west, And part of that was because of such radical difference, there was no sense of threat.

00:32:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's the.

00:32:16
Speaker 3: Similarity in which you see, oh yahweh is not one of these, right, that the distinction is made. And I think part of that is just simply for human reasons. What does it mean to eat the idea of an apple? Not only do I even know what the idea of an apple is apart from what I experience, right, either as that big, juicy, round, perfectly perfectly round, waxy thing, or as this small, not as juicy, not so symmetrical or waxy thing. Not only do I not know a apple apart from what I experience in day to day life. And we could go about that with everything. I don't even know within that environment what it would taste like. It's one of those apples more ideal than the other. I don't know, Like sure, I guess, yeah. Like My point here is that the categories that the Revelation to the Hebrews had to make sense, something so radically different that it didn't make cultural sense would have been so radically different, that there's no basis for understanding, which is all to say again that the Hebrew texts are working precisely within a cultural bubble, let's call it. And it's a challenge because it's in that cultural bubble, not in spite of it, so that when you now begin to think about the moving of the text and the Gospel into other spheres, it's got to make sense within that, and to call one purer than the other just on the basis of the culture, that's a part of I think misses the thrust of the Book of Acts, and I think it if forecloses on the richness of what the old US narratives are trying to do within those environments. Right, Why these rules that say you can't eat food that comes from animals with cleft feet like in and of itself? I think that the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament make it clear that doesn't really mean anything, right, but it certainly meant something to them because they lived in an environment where these were the sorts of rules around them, and Yahweh worship was now distinguishing itself within that.

00:34:27
Speaker 4: Does that make sense?

00:34:28
Speaker 2: It does?

00:34:29
Speaker 1: So let me try to rephrase a little bit, and I'll use the Old Testament studies arena to do this. But there's been this sort of myth for a really long time now that Old Testament law is let's say, more just than any other ancient Near Eastern law. That you see more mercy in the Old Testament law than you do in the ancient Near Eastern law. But as we've studied ancient Eary Eastern law codes outside of Israel, outside of what we find in the Old Testament, that really doesn't bear itself out. It's arguable that ancient Your Eastern law codes were in certain instances more merciful than what we find in the Old Testament. So even when we have analogs, let's say, of different laws like how long you could keep a slave, or what a basic punishment might be, or something like that, many times the ancient Near Eastern law codes are more favorable.

00:35:25
Speaker 2: Than the Old Testament is.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: So what's the difference, Well, what I would say is I go to Deuteronomy for I think we've we've leaned on, we've wanted, we've wanted somehow the Old Testament to be quote unquote better than the ancient Near Eastern law.

00:35:41
Speaker 2: Codes right.

00:35:42
Speaker 1: We want to we want to advance a narrative that says, look, these people were immoral, right, they only caught the law in partial ways, right, and so they're worse off than the Israelites were. That's not exactly the way I think that's appropriate to frame it.

00:36:00
Speaker 2: Before.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: What we see is the Israelites are practicing the law. They're obeying the law that God has given them. And the nations look in at the Israelites and they say, what other nation has a God so near they that he gave them this law? And the implicit answer is none. And so for Israel, the distinctive feature was not that their law was so different than everybody else's. The distinctive feature was God in their midst. And so you have this sort of to underscore your point, there's a deep similarity that they can see, and the core difference was God in their midst, that God had come near to give them this law, and that the dynamics of obedience and blessing that we see often in Deuteronomy, where you know the if Israel will obey, they're going to experience then the blessing of God that comes with living.

00:36:58
Speaker 2: Along the grain of reality. Right.

00:37:01
Speaker 1: It's not a quid pro quo, but it's a as you live into reality, you're always you're going to experience prosperity.

00:37:10
Speaker 2: And so that's all deeper topic. But just everybody trusts me.

00:37:16
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that if you obey you get stuff right, not prosperity gospel there, but so I deal with that in other places you could look and find it. But essentially what I'm saying is just to underscore your point that deep similarity doesn't is actually there.

00:37:33
Speaker 2: It's not.

00:37:35
Speaker 1: You could tell the difference because we're familiar with the literature. But somebody who wasn't familiar with the literature, if I laid out ancient Near Eastern laws with like Egyptian laws with Old Testament laws, it's not easy to tell the difference. If you lay out an ancient, you know, Near Eastern proverb against an Old Testament proverb, it's not necessarily that different. Like these common cons were, just that they were common conceptions. And the distinguishing feature was really that Israel had a god, a known God, a God who had revealed himself to them, that was in their presence, in their midst And this is why syncretism becomes such a problem in the Old Testament because once you start pulling in these other gods, right now.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: There really is no difference.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: There's no difference between Israel and the rest of the people. And so I think that that gives us an understanding not only of what was normally called syncretism, but almost what we're getting at with assimilation.

00:38:38
Speaker 2: It isn't that Greek speaking Jews and the.

00:38:41
Speaker 1: New Testament couldn't really understand God that they needed to speak Aramaic or Hebrew or whatever, right, otherwise they're just completely lost and without hope. That's sort of ridiculous, right. I mean, Stephen's speech in Acts seven speaks against this as well. Right, Whereas the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious leaders of the day, wanted to narrow God down into the temple and the law, Stephen narrates this whole history of Israel where God is acting outside of the land, apart from the Temple, and saying you're missing it. God is not confined to these areas. You're too narrow. And I think the point you're making is when we get to if we're not careful, we'll get so narrow, right that we miss all the different expressions that can be appropriate of watching God work in the world. And so that Greek speaking Jew isn't a lesser Jew because he's Greek speaking. That gentile is not a lesser Christian because they're gentile. They're expressing that faith in Christ within their culture, and arguably most of Paul's letters are helping people work out what it looks like to do that in their particular moment in situation. Maybe not culture one hundred percent, but definitely within their situation most of the time. And so I think, Yeah, this notion of assimilation really is to me more akin to what we find in the Old Testament, where they're drawing other things in and giving allegiance to something different than Yahweh. They're sort of saying, I'll give Yahweh ninety percent of my devotion and ten percent I'm going to spare for whatever other God I tend to that I want to worship.

00:40:37
Speaker 2: To me, that gets.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: Into assimilation because we've changed something fundamental about what God is asking us for. In denying him any aspect of his authority over our lives, we're functionally denying the whole thing. And that may seem like a harder line. But I think that's sort of where assimilation starts to come in. We start to say no, even though this doesn't align with Scripture, it seems okay to do. Or just because I'm now allowing something else to drive the course of my life, it doesn't mean I'm denying the Lord. I would argue that biblically it kind of does, right, and so that authority structure has to be in place. And I do think your illustration of Devali in Christmas it does describe that dynamic. It's not I'm going to do both of these. I'm going to be a Christian and I'm going to celebrate Davali as is it's I'm a Christian. But that doesn't mean I can't celebrate Davali. It just means that Devali has to conform to what I know of in christ That's more what I hear you.

00:41:49
Speaker 3: Saying, yeah, and more than conform. I would still go back to the language of transfigure, right, because it's it's not as if I'm forcing it into a to which, as I'm seeing within it echoes of something yeah that are deeper and rich, and so to me, this gets to the assimilation discussion, maybe from a different angle. See if it's saying similar something similar to you or not, let me know what you think that. I think in some ways if syncretism is often a fear discourse, right, we're afraid of losing what makes this thing what it is, what makes the faith what it is, what we say about Jesus unique assimilation is the result of that fear discourse. So it's still part of the fear discourse where it's because I'm afraid of assimilating. The best practice is this tried and true thing over here that we've forgotten, is itself an incarnate expression let's call it, or a transfigured expression?

00:42:53
Speaker 2: Yep, you must.

00:42:55
Speaker 3: Become more like this. So it's a stripping away of those things that we fear could be syncretistic elements in order to make you like this. In its worst forms, it really did carry the language killed the Indian to save the person, right, And in that case, people weren't talking about me Indian. They were talking about the Native Americans who were not Indian. And that fear based discourse means assimilate. I think it doesn't have to take that sort of strong version, but there is a certain implicit power structure involved. Right, It's that we want to make sure we maintain control. And I think what's lost in that process is possibility. So rather than the possibility of saying interesting, there's this deeply embedded mythic reality of light overcoming darkness in which God has to enter into the depths of darkness to rescue his bride. Yeah, and seeing a possibility within that we foreclose on that possibility out of a degree of fear. Right, it's a fear based discourse, and so control must be maintained, and what's lost is ultimately a richer expression. If we're really serious about the fact that God surpasses everything that we can imagine, he surpasses the finitude that is tied to our creational setting, not making creation bad, but God surpasses it can't be contained within it. Then we really should be looking increasingly for more ways to express the God that we say is true and good and beautiful. Right, And so to see something like the valley shouldn't be a reaction in fear. It should be the wonder of possibility. Now, that doesn't mean that we lose the sense of transfiguring. If we've lost the sense of transfiguring. Then we've lost the sense that this is ultimately about God.

00:44:56
Speaker 2: Right.

00:44:56
Speaker 3: But it seems to me like the Book of Acts is saying, worry less about that fear and more about the fear of the fear that leads you to assimilate.

00:45:07
Speaker 2: Right.

00:45:08
Speaker 3: So to that culmination in Acts fifteen, where you have this great Jerusalem Council, the Jews wanted to say to the Gentiles, you must become Jewish in order to embrace the Messiah, who is Jewish. And the point of dispute wasn't that Jesus was anything less than the Jewish Messiah. The point of dispute was that one had that one could only fully participate in the very life and flesh.

00:45:33
Speaker 4: Of the Jewish Messiah by becoming Jewish.

00:45:36
Speaker 2: Right.

00:45:37
Speaker 3: Where the reality that comes out of that council is a recognition that both existences can exist coequally, right, the Jewish and the Gentiles. So the gentile is asked to honor these certain things about becoming Jewish, about the Jewish Jesus, but a rejection of you must become Jewish, right, Yeah, honor these sorts of things and fellowship with us. You don't have to be circumcised. That's a pretty powerful declaration, right to say, put these things next to each other. Yeah, And I think the fear of syncretism brings about the active fear, which is assimilation, and the result is the loss of the kind of beautiful mosaic that the Book of Acts and Versus in chapters fifteen and following are offering to us.

00:46:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, what do you think?

00:46:32
Speaker 2: No, I like that a lot. I think so.

00:46:34
Speaker 1: I used to describe when I teach hermeneutics Bible study methods. I would try to help the students understand how the Bible work by describing my daughter's playing with glitter. They were really young at the time, and they always had glitter out, and so you clean this stuff us.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: Yes, it's exactly it right.

00:46:53
Speaker 1: You'd clean it up and you'd be like, okay, I got all the glitter, and then you knew, like ten days later, you're going to come back and you're always going to find more glitter, Like the stuff multiplies somehow.

00:47:02
Speaker 2: You just can't get clear.

00:47:04
Speaker 3: I was quoting Dimitri Martin, so in case that I stole his joke, I've cided him.

00:47:10
Speaker 2: I recognized it.

00:47:11
Speaker 1: But yes, but yeah, I mean that and so what I'd explained to him is, you know, every time you come back to God's words, you're just going to find more glitter. Right, that's the idea, And I think I would apply that same analogy to what you're suggesting. That God's realm is full of goodness, truth, and beauty, much of which we can't capture in our first run of the story. And so every time we come back to creation and look at what God has given us, we're going to find different aspects of that good, truth and beauty.

00:47:44
Speaker 2: It's just going to keep showing up like glitter.

00:47:47
Speaker 1: Right, you can't get rid of this stuff, and so and so we have to remain open to goodness, truth, and beauty. I think we have to remain open to people seeing aspects.

00:48:01
Speaker 2: Of the goodness, the good, true, and the beautiful.

00:48:04
Speaker 1: Right, even if they don't understand who God is, they're going to understand and see the goodness of creation, and they're going to recognize certain truths.

00:48:15
Speaker 2: They're going to see certain things as beautiful, and we need to.

00:48:18
Speaker 1: Be affirming that like, yes, you're right, you've correctly recognized an aspect of the goodness, truth and beauty.

00:48:26
Speaker 2: Right.

00:48:28
Speaker 1: Our role is then to sort of recognize that as something that we've been given by the Creator, something that we don't determine, but that has been given to us, and so as Christians, in my mind, it's almost in a way a resistance to a recognition of all the God has given us when we're refusing to see these other things, when we close ourselves off to the goodness, truth, and beauty that we finding all over creation, when we decide that we're never going to see another piece of glitter, even when it's a parent to us, Right, we're just going to leave it in the corner and ignore it, right, It doesn't mean it's not still there. And so there's this aspect of it that I think we've got to be not maximally open to anything, but consistently open to recognizing that what I thought was there wasn't all that was there. Right, There has to be an opening up to not to other viewpoints like it's it's not quite as like we often hear the boogeyman of postmodernism. It's like, oh, there is no truth, there is no whatever, and it's just all perspective.

00:49:38
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm saying.

00:49:39
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is that God's creation that is given to us has more than we're capable of seeing in any one moment, and that we have to be continually open to looking at it afresh, recognizing goodness, truth and beauty, and that often I think we'll recognize that goodness, truth, and beauty through other people we are seeing the world differently than we are, And that means that it doesn't mean that we have to agree with those people every time, but it means we have to give them their due that they're seeing something, they're recognizing something, some aspect of God's world that's really.

00:50:16
Speaker 2: Good, true and beautiful that we didn't see yep.

00:50:19
Speaker 1: And I think if we're unwilling to do that, what we end up with is we end up assimilating to our own culture, which is going to offer a very constrained understanding of God's creation, a limited story right in which certain parts, you know, we just like I said, we sweep the glitter to the corners and we leave it there, and then we.

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Just never look right right.

00:50:47
Speaker 1: And that is an aspect of this assimilation that we end up getting to.

00:50:51
Speaker 2: We end up buying into a narrower story than we need to.

00:50:55
Speaker 1: And then refusing the other stories out there, the other perspectives out there that could really widen our frame and help us see God's reality as it actually is.

00:51:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the loss is really our loss.

00:51:07
Speaker 2: It's very much our loss.

00:51:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, the loss of seeing beauty more fully realized, you know. And of course there remains a litmus test. And the litmus test I don't think is merely is Jesus the center. I think it's more specific than that, is is Jesus the Jewish Messiah center? I think that sure to really lean into Acts fifteen, I think that's an important part of the conversation. That the answer wasn't merely that gentiles don't have to become circumcised Jewish people to follow the Messiah, right. The answer was was that these gentiles could be gentiles without losing sight. It's very specific though, that without losing sight that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.

00:51:55
Speaker 4: Right.

00:51:56
Speaker 3: You don't have to become Jewish, and that doesn't mean you're less less Christian for it. This isn't a class issue in Christianity, right, But this is recognizing that Jesus was not a gentile. First, this was a covenant made in which Jewishness comes out of that to expand to everyone. Yeah, right, and so the way that some would you know, I'm a member of a theological group called the Society for Post Supercessionist Christian or Theology, excuse me, and that's kind of one of the things to say that The goal here is not to say all things have to pass through some sort of approval process. The issue here is to say we are second readers, and being second readers means that we are approaching an existing medium of theological revelation, and that revelation is culminating in the person of Jesus, who is a real person in a real place, opening up that real place so that you didn't have to be in or of that place.

00:53:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:53:00
Speaker 3: And so that kind of litmus test says not everything will go right if something supersedes not just Jesus, but the Jewish Messiah Jesus.

00:53:09
Speaker 4: So we've got a.

00:53:10
Speaker 3: Problem, right, But that doesn't that shouldn't foreclose out of fear seeing the glitter everywhere?

00:53:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think so we're getting toward the end here. What I would say is maybe where we're landing, which I think is a little different than when I would have what I would have said assimilation is at the beginning. But maybe what we what we mean by this is something closer to we're so captured by an ideological story, a story that is that claims to be more complete than it actually is, that we close ourselves off from God's broader creator creation, God's broader reality. We essentially put blinders on, and this is an effect of assimilation. There's a way of fusing God where we say I'm going to see in this way and only in this way, and it doesn't matter what else God puts before me. I'm only going to see in this way. And that creates an inappropriate closure that reflects our stronger commitment to a particular way of seeing a particular story than it does to our commitment to Jesus being the Jewish Messiah. That's right, Yeah, I think that's actually a helpful way of thinking about assimilation.

00:54:38
Speaker 2: I don't know, would you agree with most of that or yeah?

00:54:41
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And I think it's a helpful way to walk forward. Right, So instead of walking forward out of fear, it's walking forward with a sense of wonder and imagination.

00:54:51
Speaker 4: But it's not, it's not in.

00:54:54
Speaker 3: All things go, because that's often the fear. Well then anything will go no, no, no, are we are being very deliberate to say all things must be encircled because it's a life giving reality, the life giving reality of the very body of Jesus Christ too. Wasn't just anybody, right, It wasn't Warner Solomon's German Jesus. He was the Messiah who walked, that's right, from Nazareth to Jerusalem and back again.

00:55:22
Speaker 1: There's a constraint there that I think is really important to recognize. We used to when I used to be an administrator in higher ed if you remember, we used to do curriculum and stuff like that, right, And one of the things I always had in my mind, whether articulated it or not, was your best creativity happens within constraints. And so for us, there's no point in releasing all the constraints and saying we'll see the world better without any boundaries, because that's simply not true. What we need are the appropriate constraints so that we can actually be enabled to see the world that God has given us in an appropriate and theologically fitting manner.

00:56:05
Speaker 2: And I think that.

00:56:06
Speaker 1: That's an ever expanding sort of understanding. We don't just see it once and then close it off. It's not a snapshot. It's a continuing conversation that we're having with God and others as we interact within creation. And to resist that sort of movement and that sort of dialogue is really to close ourselves off, to narrow ourselves so much that we're unwilling to see any more of God's creation at all. So, yeah, the constraints have to be there there. To use Alicia Jauaro's language, they're enabling, They're not limiting. The constraints are actually enabling us to do something that we wouldn't be able to do without them. And so Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, is an enabling constraint. With that in place, we're able to do things with our minds. We're able to see things differently that we wouldn't be able to see without that constraint.

00:57:05
Speaker 4: So agreed.

00:57:07
Speaker 1: Very cool man, Well, there has been a great discussion on assimilation and looking forward to the one on fragmentation and transaction.

00:57:14
Speaker 2: We'll kind of dig into those as we go.

00:57:17
Speaker 1: We're kind of playing around with the diagnosis of this for Christianity, American Christianity particularly, but I think it would apply more broadly than that, and so we'll walk through these issues, these three forces, we're kind of calling them assimilation, fragmentation, transaction as we go further on the podcast, but hopefully you enjoyed this and.

00:57:39
Speaker 2: We'll see on the next episode. Take care of everybody,