Muller served many years as a missionary in Islamic countries, and so understands the honor culture of the Middle East very well indeed. Most importantly, he’s wrestled with how to present the gospel in a culture that doesn’t understand personal guilt.
In Romans, Paul famously presents the gospel in forensic (courtroom), guilt, and forgiveness terms. This has defined the gospel in the minds of the West ever since — because Roman culture was largely guilt-based.
But Jesus lived in an honor-based culture, and the Old Testament is written largely in honor-based terms to people with little sense of personal guilt. Of course, God himself fully understands personal guilt and sometimes speaks in those terms to his people, but most of the time, an honor-based reading of the text fits the best.
Of course, it’s all the same gospel, just presented in different terms from differing perspectives. Paul didn’t change the gospel, nor did Jesus. Both taught the same gospel, but expressed in language that was understandable to their very different audiences.
Hence, a missionary trained in the West will find an Islamic audience utterly incapable of understanding his lessons from Romans. They feel no guilt (personal guilt), only shame (community shame). They aren’t looking for forgiveness so much as honor. Promise them forgiveness, and they’ll wonder “what for?” Promise them honor, granted by God himself, and they’ll listen.
(Lev 26:13 NIV) I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.
Why did God redeem Israel? To provide them with honor rather than shame. God did not redeem them from sin but from shame, and yet much of the New Testament speaks of Christianity in terms of the Exodus.
And so, Christ came to rescue his people from shame —
(1Pe 2:6 NIV) For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”
In parallel, Muller explains how God moves us from defiled/unclean to clean, metaphors for shame and honor.
(Heb 9:13-14 ESV) 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
We don’t think of ourselves as “defiled” in the West. We think the old clean/unclean distinctions are entirely gone. But in the East, to be shamed is to be defiled. To be purified from the defilement of shame would be a dream come true!
Just so, the Old Testament passages dealing with the shame of nakedness speak to the heart of the honor culture. Nakedness symbolizes shame. Adam and Eve were shamed by their nudity before God — a concept that seems very odd to a Westerner. I mean, God made us naked, and likely sees us naked all the time — right?
But Leviticus 18 lists several sexual sins, always in terms of “nakedness” (lost in some translations).
(Lev 18:6-7 ESV) 6 “None of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncover nakedness. I am the LORD. 7 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. …
The New Testament, in contrast, speaks of Christians being clothed by God —
(2Co 5:2-4 ESV) 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked [shamed!]. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened — not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed [honored!], so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.
Just so, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the father places a robe on the returning son — to honor him.
Muller offers other similar parallels that speak to an honor culture —
* From expelled from God’s presence to visited by God
* From weakness to strength
* From sickness to being healed
All these themes speak to Westerners, to a degree, but they speak very loudly to the East. You won’t hear many evangelicals sermons on these themes, because there are other images that speak more clearly to us.
But for a missionary to an honor culture, these are themes that will speak to the heart of his audience. You see, it’s possible to be very biblical, very true to the gospel, and yet speak in terms that speak to an honor culture.
Rather than announcing that Jesus came to forgive your sins (which is true, of course), preach that Jesus came to take away your shame and give you the highest possible honor, honor that can only come from God.
It’s astonishing to me that so much of the Bible is written in terms that seem so utterly foreign to me. I’m still struggling with all this. But as I read from more and more missionaries who’ve lived in honor cultures and talked to the people there, the more I’m convinced that their observations are surely true.
It’s hard to imagine being raised to feel no guilt but only shame, that is, to have little concern for the innate rightness or wrongness of an act but only how that act might be perceived by others. I must say I feel no envy for those in an honor culture! I’d be miserable.
But even more miserable would be a Western missionary to an Islamic land, untrained in the ways of the East, trying to preach the gospel from his seminary class notes on Romans!
In short, it’s a great book — even an essential book for anyone speaking about the gospel to someone from an honor culture. It explains why we so often utterly fail to be effective — we speak in the wrong categories to people utterly unprepared to hear what we so urgently wish to say.
[Tomorrow: Re-interpreting Acts 2 in light of honor culture. Yep: the Acts 2 that contains Acts 2:38. That one.]
“Rather than announcing that Jesus came to forgive your sins (which is true, of course), preach that Jesus came to take away your shame and give you the highest possible honor, honor that can only come from God.”
Jay do you think this is the only thing that stands in the way of converting millions of Muslims to Christians ? Yes the Muslim religion believes that the old testament teachings still apply, there is no new covenant as far as they are concerned, and yes they live by the honor code, the Christian teachings dishonors every thing they stand for, You are going to have a much harder time trying to convince them that “Jesus is God” than the death of Jesus brought them honor. Maybe you should start by convincing them that Jesus was raised from death. If you can do that you might have a toe in the door. don’t get me started on Judaism. Or any other eastern religion .
This is strange, just last month I watched a youtube video made by anglo-islamists on this very
issue. They profess to honor Jesus Christ as a descendant of David but not as Allah/God.
But these proselytes were born in the US and seemed to be recruiting. A typical rootless young
idealist could fall for their line only to suffer later the shame of rejecting the eternal God’s only
Son.
Cultural pride/honor prolonged Vietnam, Korean and the Mid-eastern Wars so maybe we have
not learned not to poke our guilty noses into societal conflicts far from our shores. I suspect
Islamic clerics consider it doubly insulting to witness missionary efforts in their homeland.
Our paradigm of “out with the old and in with the new” does not serve us well in this circumstance. A more integrated view of God and man from Genesis forward might be helpful. While we tend to be Pauline in our approach to knowing God, perhaps Judges might provide a more thoughtful approach to the honor culture. Or even Job, who to a guilt culture, is largely an enigma. Interesting comparison, Jay. We tend to think the revelation we have is the same as it has always been and always will be, so we may miss the need to express the gospel in different terms. The closest analog I can think of is the idea of presenting the gospel as a rational conclusion, as C.S. Lewis or Francis Schaeffer might, as opposed to simply an embrace of unreasoning or experiential faith. For those of us who take the gospel from one of these angles, the other is a bit of a mystery.
Different people understand, comprehend, and learn in different ways. I am glad that these topics are being discussed. I think more westerners would understand eastern ways of thought if they were exposed to it. If you read the opinions of the rabbis of old, they thought about the texts and then wrote opinions and if you read a few opinions, you will see how various men interpreted the text in light of their learning or location.
Also, most cofC teaching (sermons) came from Paul, and unfortunately, has often been taken out of context. Perhaps a start would be to explain the context and stick to the text, not trying to make an argument with 5 completely unrelated verses. That might be a way to introduce people to what they text is really saying.
Laymond,
I make no pretense of knowing how to convert Muslims. However, the missionaries who’ve lived in Muslim lands for many years tell us that we’d better learn to understand the honor culture — not as a sufficient requirement to convert the Muslim but as a necessary prerequisite. Of course it takes much more than learning their culture, but it’s one of many steps we need to be willing to take — according to those who’ve been missionaries in that part of the world.
I’ve also heard lectures by Evertt Huffard on this topic — and he grew up in Palestine, the son of a missionary.
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