Cultural Bias and the 21st Century Ecclesia

Transcript

So, you know, it's a sense, it illustrates, even though it was done in, I hope, good humor, it illustrates how we all have a bias. You have your bias for the Bruins and we have our bias for whatever local team we might have. And it's just something that is a cultural thing where whatever part of the world you in, whatever part of the country, whatever city, if you have a national sports team, you likely, not always, but you likely have a leaning towards that. But what I want to talk about tonight is how our biases really, sometimes they're easy to see, like a sports team bias or something like that, but often they're very, very subtle. And I'd like to challenge you all tonight just to think about what I'm going to introduce to you and see if you can find any truth in it and how it might, you know, if these subtle biases, how they can influence, influence our faith, they can actually, they can influence our beliefs. We're not careful to try to identify them. So as a lead into this, I've got a few slides coming up that will try and illustrate the point. And they come from this book, Everyday Bias. And you'll notice a subtitle here, Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgment. So like I said, with the sports team, some biases are easy to see. They're kind of above the surface. But some of our biases, in fact, most of them, lie below our consciousness. They're subtle, but they influence us or have the potential to influence us greatly.

And we can be blinded and not really see it. So the author of this book states that people in supermarkets can be influenced from a study that showed when they played French music in a wine store, they would sell more French wine. When they played German music, then the sales of German would go up. So at the subconscious level, it kind of reminds me of a subliminal message. You've probably heard of that where in a movie theater, you know, you have the smell of and you want to buy popcorn. They've done studies where they've interspersed things in the film that happen so fast. You can't see it, but it influences your thinking. That's a type of thing that's going on here with the music, although it's obvious that there's music playing. It may not be so obvious that you're influenced to purchase wine. So I'd be remiss if I, you know, talking about sports, getting into this, this slide leads into the next one. But I thought I'd better throw it in with the great victory of the Boston Celtics and the NBA championship a couple of days ago. So congrats to your team there. But the author of that book on everyday bias had this to say about NBA referees. He said there's a bias that a study has shown that white referees have been shown to call more fouls on black players and black referees have been shown to call more fouls on white players. It's kind of interesting if it's true. I'm just taking the word of the author here.

Kind of interesting. Another study shows that when it comes to lab technicians, scientists will pay a woman lab tech and deem her as not worth the same as a male technician. So there's an example of a bias in a hiring practice within a lab technician's portfolio. And then when it comes to doctors, if a doctor has an obese patient, they found that he will treat them differently than someone who is not obese. And in the same way, patients, if their doctor is obese, will look at them differently than

they do for someone who, say, is very, very fit. So all of these examples from that book, Everyday Bias, illustrate the

point that there are things that go on at an unconscious or below conscious level that have an influence. They may affect our purchase of wine. They may affect how we call if we're a referee, a call, or if we are in a medical situation and our doctor is, you know, I'm a little past three score years and 10 now, so I've had a little bit of life behind me. But I guess at my conscious level, I wasn't really hadn't really dawned on me because inside, I don't really feel like I'm as old as I might be. But this slide here is an attempt to illustrate that in my 50 years roughly of being baptized thereabouts, I've witnessed a lot, a lot of change in our Western here in Canada. We have seen the emphasis on equality and the women's movement, both in the United States and Canada, in the civil rights movement, we've seen the expansion of and the acceptance of equal rights to gays and lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, LGBTQ people, and the public discourse has changed so much. If I went back in my lifetime and, you know, I recognize that I was older than a lot of people in that group and I have a little bit of history, I can go back and make a judgment over a passage of time. Fifty years ago, a lot of the things that are going on now in our culture, in North America, in the United States and in Canada, you just

wouldn't think it would happen a lot. There's been so much change and it affects us, brothers and sisters. It has an impact on us. If it doesn't on us directly, and I think it does, it definitely has an impact on our children and maybe, if we're old enough, our grandchildren. They're growing up in a world where the ideas have changed so much and there's subtle, subtle pressures and influences that can really challenge your belief. In 2 Corinthians 4, we read that if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. As an example, those who do not believe in God's face, in the face of God's message to us, his word, if you don't believe in that, if you accept worldly value, then you will have a heavy bias against anyone who holds a faith in God, as someone who can be counted on, whose word is true and unchanging and is a rock to them. So we preach Christ crucified to the Jews foolishness, but to us it is the power of God, the Savior. There's no other name under heaven whereby a man can be saved. But if you're a believer in the things of this world, you won't see it. The God of this world will have blinded your eyes. Now, going back to our reading in Corinth and thinking about the Apostle Paul's challenge, there's really nothing new under this. In the first century, Ecclesia in Corinth, things were just as bad there as they are today. The cultural environment was one that was full of sexual immorality. There was diverse religiosity, what we would call, at least what I would call in Canada, we live in a pluralistic society. It's multi-ethnic, it's not monolithic. It's not, it covers a wide range of multicultural aspects.

There's corruption, there's vulgar materialism in the first century of Ecclesia. And Paul faced these challenges in Corinth, just as we would. But the brothers and sisters at that time had the same challenges, these same influences pulling at them all the time. And it was a real challenge. And it did affect the faith of some and the belief of some, what they believed could be true, that a man could do this or a woman could do that. And we can too. So let's define culture a little bit as we dig down a little bit. Is it just about language, you know, French or English or Spanish or Italian or whatever it is? Yes, it is. That's part of our culture. The music that we enjoy, whether it's, you know, country or electric or modern, classical, whatever type it is, is part of our culture. The things that we enjoy, the art of our culture, the customs, the food that we enjoy. We might have a preference in our culture for a certain type of food, but it's much, much more than language and music and art and food. It goes deeper. It touches every aspect of our life as we live in this world. It has to do with how we see the world. If we believe that we, you know, everything happened by chance,

that through a big bang this planet was formed, then that is part of our worldview. It becomes part of what we value, what we hold true, how we look at human nature. That has a deep impact. It's much deeper and all-embracing than just language and music and art. Whatever part of the world you live in, whether it's Britain or France or Spain or Russia or Belgium, there are all within each nation certain cultural influences which rise to the floor and to the floor and affect you. How we view art. What we enjoy in art, whether impressionist or realist, down to our laws, our justice system, and that can be changing as well. You know, founded upon God's laws and our country and your country, but over time these things are changing and the values of society are changing and the laws change with it. The economy. The economy is part of the culture. And education, what we're taught in school as being important things to learn for our society. What about marriage and family? Should a husband and wife be one man and one woman for life? That can be part of our culture or like today or I guess a couple days ago in, I think it was Thailand, they have now accepted and become one more country to accept gay marriages. It doesn't have to be one man and one woman. And our society accepted that quite a while ago, especially here in Canada. We have accepted this diversity and embraced it as part of the values of Canadian society.

So these things, whether you… These things influence us and they influence us very subtly where it becomes difficult sometimes to espouse a different viewpoint to say to people in the society around us that our values, our beliefs, our attitudes, our behaviors and norms clash with some of the values of society. And if it's difficult for a person like me, you know who, and maybe you, I think I know because I've talked to some here. There's some here who are older than me. I'm not the only one in this group. I'm not at the top of the heap there. But if you are of my age or that age group, then certainly our children and our grandchildren are facing huge pressures,

huge pressures. And our belief systems can be challenged and changed as a result. So cultural bias is the interpretation of situations we find ourselves in,

actions or data based on the standards of the culture around us. They are grounded in the assumptions one might have due to the culture in which they are raised. And we just absorb it. If you're part of it, you absorb it. And over time, it's like water dripping on a rock. There will be some erosion. We want to be careful, very careful about society and how it affects us. So this chart here is an illustration, and I'm going to put on my laser pen here, of a passage of time, roughly from the time of Christ, leading up to what we'll call the post modern or art, which really began some people, all these things are, take this slide as a generalization. It's not actually terrifically accurate, but it's a broad generalization of a sliding period of time to illustrate some concepts. So leading up to our time, which would be off this chart, we have the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, and the modern period. And there were some seismic things and cultural changes that happened if we take a look at these three big categories. Here we can see a seismic change when Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Rome from Constantine and on closer to the 400s.

When belief in Jesus as the Son of God, not God the Son, that was a huge, huge shift, which affected many people and the persecutions that arose out of that. If you believed in just one God, as we do, people were subjected to huge persecution through the dark ages where the Roman church ruled and the educated people ruled until the time of the printing press, which as Christadelphians, we often emphasize as kind of an explosion, the beginning of an explosion of knowledge that would go out and challenge the existing culture at that time through the English Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment years, to the founding of the United States. If we kind of focus in on this modern period, we see in your area, your neck of the woods, as I would say here in Canada, the pilgrims landing in around the 1620s and the establishment of the United States in 1766. Huge changes were going on in the world at this time. And we can see an example of that. Well, just go back and talk about some of the changes that happened from the Middle Ages through to this modern period. In the Middle Ages, there was a feudal government. That was the way society was organized. Today, that's foreign to me. I have no idea or concept other than intellectually what that was about. Today, we have a vote. Not that long ago, women couldn't vote. There was a cultural shift and now they can. There was more equality. But back in the Middle Ages, it was feudal government. Everyone had a lord and was subject to that. There was a king over the lord and most people were simply serfs who worked the land. It was very, very poor subsistence living and they had a lord to respond to. It was a higher archipelago. Everybody had someone above them and it was highly structured. There was going to be a big change coming, a big change, because there was going to be a rejection of this authority after the printing press was invented and after knowledge got out and people could learn to read themselves.

There was a challenge to this way of life that had gone on for a thousand years. And there was a seismic change in the cultures of the Western world.

One of the things that we need to focus on in this period and that I would submit to you is that there was this age of reason and reason was elevated to the as the absolute filler that we should be reaching to. This is the Enlightenment era. This is the time when people had more knowledge, could lift themselves out of poverty, could challenge authority. And reason was elevated almost to the level of worship. It might be stunted by a lack of education. It might be darkened by superstition. And some would say it was very dark if religion was involved. The darkness and backwardness of the Middle Ages, according to a modern way of thinking, was due to the suppression of reason in ordinary people. Hence the term, and I'm sure you've heard it, the age of reason. An example of this would be the French Revolution. And all of these time periods, as I said, are just representative that there's a big crossover in a period of time. This French Revolution came at 1789, maybe 40 years after what I'm saying is the modern period here. But in the French Revolution, we've heard the term liberty, equality, fraternity. It was a time to overthrow the king and the church. And reason was at the pitacle of this culture, of their culture. It was a rejection of authority. And one of the things in the French Revolution that was done was they went to the Notre Dame Cathedral and took it over. They kicked out the priests. They kicked out the clergy. They kicked out all the authorities that were there. And they made one of the, they made this church the center of worship for reason. And they even put a paper mache figure there to represent that. And they said this, we are no longer going to worship God. We're no longer going to follow the church. We don't need revelation. And we don't need anything external from us, no traditional authority or anything outside of us to tell us what to do or how to behave or who to be. We have reason within and that's enough. And that we worship and celebrate. In this book, written by a fellow named Heath White, Postmodernism 101, speaking about the modern age, there was an incredible hope. And this is the age just preceding and leading up to. And I think I was part of this too, very early in my life, because postmodernism, they say, many say, didn't really start until about 1960. We'll touch on that. But there was this incredible hope that reason would lift us out of despair, out of all the dark ages and the oppression and being used by those who had authority over us in the past. There was hope that as science progressed and reason helped us understand things more and more, it would break down the barriers. So we would no longer fight ethnic wars. This was a real hope that these people had. We would no longer fight religious wars. We would no longer fight territorial war. We would sit down together using our reason to find the best path forward. And we would begin to agree. And you know, when I was young, when I read this, it made me think of John Lennon. And if you know that song, imagine, imagine there's no religion where we could all sit down. It was kind of expressed the same hope

that we could become like this. Well, from that period of time, from the founding of the United States, say, and through the modern period, free the founding of the United States and up until this century or last century, how did we do? How are we doing today? Are we sitting down together and using our reasoning to find the best path forward? Is that's what's happening right now in many of the democracies in the Western world? Are we sitting down? Are we reasoning well together? How well does the elevation of reason all this out? What about the First World War? A war like had never been seen in the world before.

You think the word First World War was bad, and it was horrendous. And then not too many years later, another war where millions of people willingly gas tortured and put to death. How'd reason make out there? And we go on at war after war after war. I don't think we've found a commonality that's really helped us get along together that espouses the real good, valuable principles that we as followers of Jesus Christ hold to. It becomes very difficult to understand how man can treat his fellow man in these. World War I began the shattering of the hope in universal reason, and we've all seen it. And it moves us up to our time, to the time when I was young, coming into my teens in the postmodern world. Not quite me. My hair wasn't that long, but we had this kind of rejection, another seismic shift beginning in our culture and something I've lived through, and I'm witnessing progress today. You know, there was this huge rejection of reason. I not only authority that the modern period rejected, but now people were seeing that this reason cannot be accepted. The ideas of the de-enlightenment of the dawn of the modern era were not working out. It's not going to bring a better day. So let's recap this, kind of encapsulate where we've been, and we'll move on soon to a conclusion. So changing cultures with differing worldviews. What we were saying is in the pre-modern times, going back to the Christian era, truth came from revelation. We believe the biggest sin would be saying you were independent from God. I have no need of God. We believe in moral authority. And then I postulated to you that in modern times, there was the pre-modern people generally trusted authority. Even if you were a serf, you put your trust in the lords above you and the king above them. Life may not have been good, but there was certainly trust in the authority. In modern time, reason became the truth, your own reason that you could figure things out on your own. You didn't need a religious authority or a human authority. The biggest sin was remaining ignorant, not exposing yourself and embracing reason and elevating it to a pillar of truth. And ethics were something that was an individual choice. Do what is good, what feels good. Do that. Modernism distrusted authority, but trusted reason. And today moving into our time, there's no truth. Truth doesn't exist. You have your truth. I have my truth. You should tolerate that because intolerance is the biggest sin going around and general acceptance of everything. You do your thing. I'll do mine. That's the ethic of the postmodern mind. Postmoderns distrust reason, distrust authority. And this is the culture we live in. This is the culture we breathe. This is the culture we interact with. And our children and our grandchildren are immersed in it.

It's in media and you can't get away from it. It's on your laptop. It's on your cell phone. And most of our kids and grandkids carry these things with them 24-7. And their exposure is,

it's just total and all-consuming. We're immersed in either a modernness or a postmodernist culture, if we've been born and raised here, I submit. The influence of society will affect our thinking in ways it's difficult to fully understand. It's almost subliminal. It's below the level of our conscious. Understand how we are being influenced. We are steep in something that's omnipresent in education, media, and other forms of social interaction. And I'm going to use, I'll finish this paragraph. One counterbalance is maintaining our trust in the authoritative words of God as revealed in the scripture. Now how does this affect us? A study by Barna Research, a Christian research group in 2022, shows that almost one-third, a little more than one-third of pastors, evangelical pastors, reject there is absolute moral truth and instead contend that each individual must determine their own truth. That's from a study, an empirical study that can be looked at. Only 37% of pastors in Christian churches in America today have a biblical worldview. How can that be? That's barely one out of every three who buy into God's word to such an extent that their life is driven by biblical truth. Now look at our statement of faith. Right at the beginning there's a section entitled The Foundation and it states that the scriptures composing the book currently known as the Bible are the only source, now extent, of knowledge concerning God and his purposes and they were given wholly by the unerring inspiration of God by the writers and that errors that have since crept in are due to transcription. This is our pillar of truth. This is our authority. Brothers and sisters and friends, be careful that we aren't undermined by the society's values around us and we find reasons to twist that truth to make it fit into something that's more comfortable. We're told to study, to show ourselves approved unto God, a memory verse, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. That rightly dividing is the interpretive process and this is where the danger lies. That we have the truth, we can claim its authority, but then we have to interpret what God is saying to us and sometimes I think I make it fit to what I want to believe to make it a little bit easier for those around me. So here's an illustration of cultural bias. I'm going to give you an example. I'm not going to stay with this slide for long because I'm going to scoot along here, but we all have this bias and this is an interesting book to read. The Western mind is so influenced that we have these colored glasses on that filter everything we read. We want to be careful when we're reading scriptures that we try and determine the Westernized thought that can creep in and influence our thinking and we don't even see it. We just don't see it and I've got an example of this. So before I get to the example and this is a closing few slides, here's a word for you that I don't even think I can pronounce. There's a lot of words I can't

polyvalence. It's a definition for literary critics and all it really means is that people understand stories best based on their experiences and we are all brought up in this Westernized world and our experiences, our life experiences, come out of the society we live in and so we just understand things naturally without really even thinking about it based upon how we are raised. So I read this book by Mark Alan Powell, a literary critic who has a specialization in biblical studies and he did an experiment. This kind of just happened by him by chance. He took a group of individuals and had them pair up and read a story, a short story, a biblical text silently and then he closed the books and there is a, people call it dyad, where two people get together in groups of two. They both read the story, they close the book, then one person tells the story to the best of their recollection to the other person. That's faithfulism. Then both open the text again and look at it to see what details were accurately remembered and what was omitted, added or changed. So the story of the prodigal, I'll ask you now, to think of the story of the prodigal. There's lessons you've learned and you've heard them in your dissertation, I'm sure. You've probably discovered for yourself as you've pondered over this certain lessons from the prodigal son that stood out to you. Well, here's what stood out

in the countries between a Western culture and an Eastern culture for this author using the text of Luke 15, 11 to 32. His students in the West recounted the story and every one of them missed one important detail when they went back to the text to see something they missed. The famine that Jesus mentions in verse 14 in his first study, not one person recounted this detail the famine didn't impact. It had no personal impact on the person reading the story and retelling. Here's what their retelling sort of sounded like. The main ideas, the younger son asked his father for a share of an inheritance. He left to a far country. He squandered the money. He got broke. He found a job feeding pigs. He was so hungry, he wished he could eat pig food and so on. The point being the text states that he squandered the money, a severe famine came on him and he began to be in need. And this is the part everyone in the Western society missed. No one picked it up. This omission was curious to the author so he expanded the idea to a more extensive study involving a hundred students and of a hundred students only six. It was a bigger sample group, Western world, only six out of a hundred recalled a famine being mentioned. Then this group was a diverse group of gender, race, age, economic status and religious affiliation. But they all had one thing in common. They were raised in the United States. So why do you think we miss the famine? Because we have never experienced a famine. If you have experienced a famine, you see it. If you don't, you're blind. Think about that. I did this experiment at a Bible school last year that I was in with adults. I never told them any of this leading up to it. I just had them read the story from Luke in twos, recount the stories back to each other. With one exception, nobody at that Bible school recalled in the story, the famine. Why? It's beyond their experience. One dear sister did. So guess what? She was in Africa. She was in Africa for a few years and experienced

the people around her who were starving and in great need. And it just stood out to her. But we in the Western world didn't get it. And I'm going to conclude this because I've gone on long enough by saying that this author went to Russia, the East,

in St. Petersburg, and he did the same study. Why I did it at the Bible school is because of what he found. The Russians saw it.

Americans mentioned squandering a hundred percent. That's the lesson. Only six percent mentioned a famine. The Russians noticed the squandering, but eighty-four percent mentioned the famine. Americans, Canadians, we see irresponsible behavior. The fault that Russians, those in the East see, is a desire to be self-sufficient. When Powell asked the Russian group, aren't we supposed to think the boy did something wrong? Of course they said. But his mistake was not how he spent his money or how he lost it. In their view, his primary mistake was leaving his father's house in the first place, placing a price tag on the value of his family and thinking it was only money he needed from. Their sin was the sin of wanting to be self-sufficient. And our culture in the West, it's what we elevate. We elevate the principle of independence and self-sufficiency. And we miss it in the scriptural text. So, brothers and sisters, I'm only bringing that up as an illustration of how our experiences influence us in how we read and how we understand things around us. And our culture that we are immersed in, that we absorb,

we can't help it. It just influences. And my warning to you in conclusion, the big idea behind all of this is that we will have a bias. And it's below the conscious level. It's very hard to understand and to figure out and to find. But it's important to recognize that we all have cultural bias. We bring our own stuff to our biblical studies that may, I submit, will have an impact on how we divide the word of truth. So if the cultural ideas around us now have rejected authority and have rejected reason and there is no truth, we must be very, very careful about how that might, at a very subtle level, influence us and change our understanding of

God's word. The culture we are part of greatly impacts each of us individually. And my hope is that at least in this class, I've given you something to think about and to challenge you into identifying your cultural bias and how they might impact.