Seeing the Whole Teapot

          

The Good News of Jesus Christ is bigger than we tend to see, due to our cultural and theological blinders and personal bent. Seeing the gospel through an honour-shame perspective opened up for me a richer understanding of all that was accomplished on the cross.[1] However, embracing insights into the gospel from an honour-shame perspective does not entail abandoning the important truths of justification by faith and substitutionary atonement through Jesus’ death on the cross. The guilt-innocence perspective is still valid and biblical, and of much value for all believers. Not only so, there are other ways of explaining the gospel that can be found in the Bible that may resonate better for those for whom the honour-shame and innocence-guilt explanations are not as effective.

Eugene Nida categorizes human cultures according to their primary way of responding to “transgressions of religiously sanctioned codes: fear, shame and guilt.”[2] While all cultures utilize all three emotional reactions to maintain social cohesion, different cultures emphasize them differently, normally with one response dominant over the others. The opposite of each of these is used as reward for those who adhere to social expectations: innocence[3], honour, and power.

 European and North American (Western) cultures tend to be primarily guilt-innocence cultures (though there seems to be a cultural shift in process); Asian and Middle Eastern cultures tend to be honour-shame cultures; and African, Polynesian and South American cultures tend to emphasize power-fear. This is a broad generalization that is tempered by effects of globalization, urbanization, and technological innovation.[4]

Another way of categorizing worldview lenses is presented in Andy Smith’s very practical book, Meaningful Evangelism: Choosing words that connect.[5] Smith looks at ways of presenting the gospel to people with different values and experiences that “have shaped each of their views of reality.”[6] The nine he looks at are Honour, Intellect, Justice, Legalism, Life, Pain, Power, Harmonious Relationships, and Spiritual Realities. He does not claim this as an exhaustive inventory of worldview lenses, but does find biblical language that can be used in presenting the gospel to people holding these different perspectives.

While Smith is examining the defining dynamics that shape the view of reality for individuals, Nida and anthropologists are more interested in cultural generalizations. Both sets of analysis find that the Bible proclaims the Good News with a variety of pictures and diversity of language that can speak to a wide range of life experience and worldview. Georges and Mischke compare the gospel to a diamond with many facets, and each of us tend to focus on a preferred facet. I prefer the metaphor of a teapot: Some will see the spout (and only the spout!) and declare that this amazing spout is the teapot. Others admire the handle, reveling in its beauty while hardly noticing the spout or the lid or the base. The reality is that the teapot is all of these together, and while we may have a preferred view that we default to, the teapot is more than just a handle or spout or lid.

Such is the gospel. We in the West (and many Christians in the rest of the world) have seen the Good News of Jesus Christ almost exclusively through a guilt-innocence lens. In the Pentecostal movement, a fear-power lens has been dominant. I am not advocating other lenses as a replacement, but believe we all will benefit from a broader view of “the whole teapot”, and will miss key elements of God’s Good News for us if we close our eyes to aspects of the gospel not as easily accessible through our preferred perspective. We may think of the proverbial elephant, with blind men feeling over different parts and defining the elephant by his own limited experience rather than exploring beyond that which is easily within reach. Yet we must ensure that each description is of the same elephant, and not tails of two very different animals.

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[1] See “How Could I Have Not Seen It” (post #2).

[2] Nida, E. (1954). Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian missions. New York: Harper and Row, p. 150. Found in Jayson Georges, The 3D Gospel.

[3] I suspect a more precise opposite for guilt might be justification, though it doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as “guilt-innocence” and is less of a mainstream term.

[4] This is a personal observation based on my experiences in Thailand and needs to be researched to be confirmed.

[5] Most easily obtainable through Amazon.com or its affiliates.

[6] Smith, p. 12.