The Apostle Paul and the Currents of Culture
by Michael Cranford

In Job 14:14 a question is posed, the significance of which cannot be overstated. In simple terms, the answer to this question is the answer to your destiny. Moreover, what response you offer expresses the meaning of your existence, the underlying framework for your dreams, accomplishments, and heartfelt passions, the basis for all the goals of your life. The question itself is deceptively simple: If a man should die, will he live again?

Don't try to answer this with words, at least not for a moment. Consider instead the actions and attitudes of a human life, and how they might pose a response to the question in terms other than a trite phrase or a theological reflection. As I stated, the answer to the question is the answer to your destiny. Your destiny is not only a goal you travel to, in life, but it implies the way you must travel to get there. How you perceive your destiny—how you answer this question—is reflected in how you live your life. Let us set this aside for a moment, and consider the actions and attitudes of one particular human life, and reflect on how that life expressed a response to this question.

Saul of Tarsus (known better by his Hellenized name, Paul) presents an imposing figure as we encounter him in the early pages of Acts. We can envision him standing under a blazing Palestinian sky outside the wind-swept gates of Jerusalem, commending Stephen's executioners while their garments lie disheveled at his feet, forgotten until their brutal work is completed. We later find Saul breathing out murderous threats, charging into the homes of Christians and mercilessly dragging men and women alike off to prison and despair. Saul, the enemy of the church, the zealous guardian of his ancestral traditions, bent on the destruction of the so-called Messiah and his followers.

This same Saul had the acclaim of Hebrew culture. He was a product of its finest pharisaic training, a member of the spiritual elite, a zealot for the Torah, a legal citizen of the most powerful empire on earth. These things mean little to us, from our modern vantage, but in Saul's time—in the eyes of Hebrew culture—he was significant. He had the respect of his peers, the acclaim of his people, the support of his religion—the pat on the back, the upward mobility. Paul, writing at a later stage in his life to the church at Philippi, mentions these cultural acclamations (Phil. 3:5-6).

And then we reach v. 7: "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ." In other words, all the things that were considered valuable in Paul's culture he now considers to be utterly worthless. Something has caused Paul to completely reorient his system of values. A man who, at an earlier point in his life, zealously and mercilessly persecuted the church, now considers it a privilege to share in the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, even to the point of following the example of his death (v. 10). What happened?

There is something essential here that we need to consider, a foundational point worth discussing, because whatever happened to Paul, whatever caused him to reject the prevailing value system of his culture and live a life of radical obedience to Christ, is something we almost entirely lack today.

What happened to Paul? He met a man. And meeting that man changed everything for Paul. The man appeared to Paul on a dusty road outside the city of Damascus, and spoke to him from within a blinding light. "SAUL, WHY DO YOU PERSECUTE ME?" The power of the man's words drove Paul down to the ground, to bow, for the very first time, before the One who would be his Lord and Savior.

Paul was too intelligent to be subverted by an emotional episode, a "feel good" religious experience, a convenient way of relating to God. On the road to Damascus he met a reality that contradicted the belief system of the world he lived in, the culture he had conformed to, the values he had adopted. Saul, the irresistible force, the impassioned persecutor of the church, met the immovable object of Jesus Christ, and in that encounter it was not Christ who yielded, but Paul, and all his strengths and passions were forever turned in a new direction—toward a new destiny. His very words, "Who are you, Lord?", reveal the beginning of a fundamental change in attitude.

Paul's values were not reoriented out of either coercion or convenience, but because they didn't line up with reality. The reality stood before him in the person of the resurrected Christ, and this reality suggested that the perspective of his culture—the worldview enjoined by the religious and social community of Israel—was invalid, and its values along with it. Understand that his culture's values were coherent; they made perfect sense, and corresponded with the actions and attitudes of his earlier life in perfect harmony. But they weren't based on truth. The reality Paul met on the road changed the course of his life because it suggested a different destiny—a destiny embodied in someone who had died, and now lived again. A person whose very presence answered Job 14:14 for Paul in tangible terms, and who validated not a life of acclaim and convenience, but a life of sacrifice—a life of sharing in both his sufferings and his resurrection-life (Phil. 3:10). In reflecting on sharing such a life Paul concludes, "And so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead" (v. 11). In other words, to share the same suffering as the man on the Damascus road implies that one will also share the same destiny. Remember, our destiny is not only the goal we travel to, but it implies the way in which we travel to reach it. Paul accepted this destiny on the terms Jesus offered, to follow in action and attitude the pattern of sacrifice and suffering lived out by Jesus himself.

Let us now consider a different answer to Job 14:14. Again, not an answer in so many words, but exemplified in the values and lifestyles of many individuals in contemporary American culture. Our culture lives like there is no tomorrow. The emphasis on immediate gratification, self-centeredness, meaningless sexual encounters, reckless consumerism, and unbridled sensuality is, in a very tangible way, an answer to Job 14:14. Paul himself frames it nicely: "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (1 Cor. 15:32).

The question that comes to mind is not why our culture "goes for the gusto"—why Miller Beer commercials seem to typify a fantastic version of the good life for so many people, why we are enticed by images of beautiful girls stranded on desert islands without Miller Beer. I understand why our culture validates this as a great good, even an ideal; it is consistent with a naturalistic answer to Job 14:14. What is difficult to understand is why we Christians sit there, staring at these commercials, and think, "That looks really good."

It seems clear why couples who are dating have sex before marriage, if they're not Christians. I mean, why wait? Life is short, so make yourself happy while you can. But it's more difficult to understand why Christians fall into this, knowing that, if we obey God in this thing and wait, we not only can have all the sex we want anyway, and a sense of being right before God, but also the knowledge that we're not animals. And that is worth something, at least in my mind.

When Paul met a man on the road to Damascus, his perspective on reality changed. With this altered perspective, his actions and attitudes conformed to Christ's, in contradiction to those of his culture. With his new perspective came an accompanying change in behavior. He not only counted all things to be a loss, conceptually; he actually suffered the loss of all things (Phil. 3:8). But we, today, are not always driven to this same conviction, as was Paul. Our portrayal of discipleship does not include a participation in Christ's sufferings. Why not? We have lost our grip on a coherent Christian perspective, and accommodated portions of a biblical worldview to the dominant view of our culture. Consequently, our values do not stand in contradiction to our culture's in any way that really matters. In the practical exigencies of life, we end up doing the same things as everyone else. The Christian life is no longer modeled on the life of radical obedience and sacrifice. And it is this life, particularly, which is the powerful life (cf. Phil. 3:10), since it is this pattern of living alone that brings us into essential agreement with the risen Lord. And the place of agreement is, let me suggest, the place of power. Paul models the way the Christian worldview should grip us, reorient us, and impassion us.

To better understand the dilemma of Christians in American culture and the task that lies before us if we would see our lives become powerful and significant for Christ in the time we are here, I would like to examine and expand on two terms I have been freely drawing on without explanation heretofore—namely, worldview and culture. As we understand these critical terms, we will also understand why it is inherently difficult to live out a bold, consistent Christian life in our culture.

 Worldview: A Blueprint of Reality

A worldview is a perspective on the world, a blueprint of reality, a coherent system of conceptions used to interpret the experiences of life. As Geertz states, a people's "world view is their picture of the way things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society. It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order."¹ Geertz distinguishes worldview from what he calls a culture's "ethos," or value system, but the relationship between them is so integral that we can safely use the one term to refer to both.² Kraft expresses the relationship between worldview and values by noting that a culture's worldview "is the central systematization of conceptions of reality to which the members of the culture assent (largely unconsciously) and from which stems their value system."³

You will note that I have been speaking of a "culture's" worldview, whereas it is more properly the individuals within a society that possess a given perspective, not the culture itself (which I anthropomorphize as a teaching device). And yet it is also correct to describe a worldview as a shared conception, since none of us operate entirely outside the bounds of our native culture. A worldview is not so much an individual perspective of reality as a societal ideology within which we are indoctrinated and which forms the basis for meaningful interaction and shared experience with others. In a sense there are many "worldviews" in American culture—as many as there are Americans. But there is equally a dominant ideology pervading Western culture, and American culture specifically, and we adopt this perspective as naturally and automatically as we achieve fluency in our native tongue.

A worldview touches on three essential aspects correlating human existence and the world of things and ideas. Each of these aspects can be formulated as a simple question, or as a technical term representing one of the three main branches of Western philosophy. The first is beliefs (metaphysics), which asks the question, "What is real?" or "What exists?" The second is ideas (epistemology) which asks, "What is true?" or "What can be known?" The third aspect isvalues (ethics), which asks, "What is good?" or "What is desirable?" If someone were to comprehensively give you answers to each of these questions from the perspective of their culture, the sum of their response would be their worldview. Each of these questions can be broken down into innumerably more narrow and specific questions, of course; a sampling of these is provided below. These questions will prove helpful to you as we evaluate the different worldviews and ideologies we will encounter in coming chapters. They may also be applied to cultural artifacts to yield their worldview influence, like movies or television programs. In such a case, answer the questions from the vantage point of any given character, or from the perspective of the film's producer. The coherent pattern which emerges as the questions are answered may provide you with more insight than you would have guessed.

 Beliefs (What is real?)

• What is the nature of the world around us? Is it material and/or spiritual, created or accidental, chaotic or orderly, fair or arbitrary?
• Is there a God behind it? Where is power found?
• How do things happen in the world? Do things happen purposefully, by accident, by the decisions of agents (either human or spirit)?
• Do people have free will, or are they at the mercy of something else?
• How are human beings viewed? Are they machines, do they have souls, are they animals, are they "victims" or "in control"? Do they have self-esteem, and if so, why?
• What is death (the end of physical life) all about?

Ideas (What is true?)

• What is the nature of truth (or truth-claims)?
• What is the value and role of history? Is it purposeful, mysterious and unknowable, trivialized, factual?
• What is the role of logic and reason? Is there value in these things?
• Do people actually know things, or are they for the most part ignorant and deceived?

Values (What is good?)

• Why do people act morally? (Or, what reason is there for acting morally?)
• Are there moral absolutes, or do people act morally because it works, or because it feels good?
• What happens when people act immorally? Do they feel bad? Are they punished? Do they feel good, and end up rewarded? What do people learn about "right" and "wrong"?
• What is considered good, or valuable? Why is it good?
• What do people live for? What do they spend their time on?
• What is the value of human life? How does this compare to the value of (for instance) animal life? Plant life? How does the value of human life measure up to other values?
• What meaning is there in life?

Culture: The Interplay between Worldview and Society

There is an essential connection between how we view the world and how we live. As we encounter life in all its varied aspects, we make sense of our experiences in light of our beliefs, ideas and values. Moreover, the sense I make of my world is communicated into a behavioral response consistent with my beliefs. For example, let's assume that my worldview includes a belief that supernatural entities exist, and that after death the spirits of the deceased have the ability to move freely about the earth and affect the physical realm in some malevolent way. Further, let's assume that one night I am walking in the woods near my home, and I am startled by a deep, soulful moan coming from behind me. As I turn, I see the white-hooded, glowing torso of some apparition reaching menacingly toward me. I immediately begin screaming and break into a run for my house, thoughts of Casper and other friendly spirits momentarily forgotten.

In this case, my worldview has provided a framework for interpreting my experience. What is important to note is that my behavioral response is completely predictable, in light of my worldview. To the degree that we share a common ideology, the behavioral responses of humans living in community will similarly follow predictable patterns, and as such patterns become transmitted over time and through shared experience they become identified as customs. Ultimately, the demands of living in community create patterns of behavior which emerge as broader, more coherent structures or institutions, such as family and marriage, education for our youth, and civil government. Such structures necessarily cohere as a society seeks perpetuity in a changing and hostile world. In plainer terms, our societal institutions support one another, and validate the worldview which gave rise to them, so that our society doesn't crumble and self-destruct.

There is consequently a progression from a society's ideology (i.e., how we see things) to its broader social patterns (i.e., how we live). This progression, from worldview to societal structures, is what I am referring to when I use the term culture. It is standard practice in contemporary social and anthropological theory to emphasize this dual nature of culture. Margaret Archer distinguishes between the cultural system, comprising the knowledge, beliefs, theories, and conceptual schemes (i.e., what I have been calling worldview) and the sociocultural level, which is focused on causal relations between groups and individuals in a social context.⁴ Similarly, Wendy Griswold distinguishes between culture as a bearer of meaning, which provides "orientation, wards off chaos, and directs behavior toward certain lines of action" (again, worldview), and the social world, comprised of social structures and patterns which the dominant ideology reflects.⁵ More important than the duality of worldview and social structures, however, is culture viewed as a cyclic process by which worldview gives rise to society, and even more critically, by which society validates and shapes worldview. Larkin recognizes the former process when he defines culture as an

...integrated pattern of socially acquired knowledge, particularly ideas, beliefs, and values (ideology) mediated through language, which a people uses to interpret experience and generate patterns of behavior—technological, economic, social, political, religious, and artistic—so that it can survive by adapting to relentlessly changing circumstances.⁶

Larkin's definition, while hardly succinct, encompasses the movement from worldview (or as he says, ideology) to interpretation of experience, and then on to patterns of behavior, which ultimately become expressed as concrete societal structures. A schematic of this progression is offered below.

It is important to emphasize that all structures of a society are affected by a culture's worldview; society does not exist in some objective, detached sense, free from cultural ideology. Rather, it mirrors the dominant worldview as surely as the worldview reflects society. A particularly interesting example of this is developed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he argues that a religious-based Protestant worldview gave rise to the capitalistic system that has dominated the world economy for three centuries. He vividly compares the role of worldview to that of a railroad switchman: "Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images' that have been created by ‘ideas' have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest."⁷ Weber's point is not that the Protestant worldview invoked a sense of material interest, but rather that it shaped how people pursued those interests. The doctrines of divine calling and predestination suggested both the idea of pursuing the vocation to which one is "called," as well as a certain sense of duty in the details of life. What begins as an approach to salvation suggests an approach to economics as well, rightly or wrongly applied. Worldview begets complex societal structures. In this example, a religious worldview set the tracks along which Western capitalists continue to run their economic lives.

The reverse process, already mentioned, is even more critical. Culture is not only a process by which worldview gives rise to societal structures, but also a process whereby society validates and shapes its worldview. This is not a chicken-or-the-egg paradox; it's not a question of "What came first, the worldview or the society?", but rather how a culture survives in the face of relentlessly changing circumstances. Culture operates in a cyclic fashion, supporting its own structures and resisting fragmentation. It is a system that either works, by strongly forcing its values and institutions on its members, or it falls apart. Cultures always endeavor to survive.

Wendy Griswold offers the example of television, which can be seen to both reflect and perpetuate an ideology of violence in contemporary American culture.⁸ It can be argued that mass media (as a cultural structure) reflects an ideology of violence and a general devaluation of human life which is endemic to American consciousness. It can also be shown that the violence television portrays perpetuates violent actions without an accompanying sense of guilt, or violent action accompanied by personal gain or emotional satisfaction (e.g., the bad guys get gunned down and it is portrayed in a way that makes us feel good). Mass media affects our sensibilities and perpetuates violence on an even broader scale.

Another example of this can be seen in our American work ethic. For many people, the structure of capitalist economics provides a context wherein one may realize the ideology of consumerism and acquisition of the good life. What is valuable is seen as the ability to enjoy the best things in life that money can provide. This causes us to evaluate our lives in a predictable way: I am unable to buy things and am therefore unhappy. If I work hard enough to get all the money I need, I can acquire and become satisfied. This evaluation of our lives leads to a variety of behaviors of which diligence in pursuing our careers is only a part. Succeeding at all costs, driving ambition, and excessive attention to working are common behaviors because they embody the dominant cultural values. This leads to structures in the business world which validate ambition and excessive work, and not (for example) devotion to one's children or commitment to God. These economic structures validate the beliefs by allowing a select group of driven people to achieve what they conceive to be the good life: "Yes, the best things in life are expensive, but they're worth the effort." In the meantime, our marriages crumble, our children have become alienated, and our faith in Christ has dipped to new levels of superficiality. But the system (viewed as a coherent, cyclical process) works.

 Little Creatures of Our Culture

Let's return to an example of how this works on the individual level, to better understand the process I have diagrammed. A worldview results in predictable patterns of behavior when an individual experiences some aspect of life. The individual's behavior, however, is contingent on their evaluation of the experience. For example, in Acts 28 we find Paul shipwrecked on the island of Malta. The islanders are polytheists; their worldview includes a belief in many gods, as well as a principle of reciprocity which governs the dictates of nature (i.e., nothing happens just by accident; people get what's coming to them). When Paul is bitten by a poisonous snake, the islanders assume (evaluating the experience in light of their worldview) that the goddess Justice has judged Paul, and that he must therefore have been a murderer (v. 4). When Paul doesn't get bloated and die, the people change their minds (reevaluating the experience in light of new evidence, but using the same worldview) and conclude that he is a god (v. 6).

We can also imagine how my experience in the woods would have turned out differently if I was a materialist. Rather than running in fright, I might instead have grumbled, "There's no such thing as ghosts!" and reached for the apparition, expecting to defrock a youngster holding a flashlight under a sheet. Note that the question as to whether or not the "ghost" was real is less important than the observation that my actions perfectly reflected my perception of reality.⁹ In fact, it is fair to say that I—that all of us—have been culturally conditioned to respond to life in a certain way. My actions are not determined, but within limits, they are utterly predictable. Ruth Benedict notes that

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.¹⁰

In the same vein, Kraft states:

Humans are understood to be totally, inextricably immersed in culture. Each human individual is born into a particular socio-cultural context. From that point on persons are conditioned by the members of their society in countless, largely unconscious, ways to accept as natural and to follow rather uncritically the cultural patterns of that society.¹¹

Culture's influence on us leaves us with a sense that certain things are appropriate and others inappropriate, or as Kraft says, we are conditioned to accept certain things as being "natural." For example, it's only natural to put on clothing before going outside, isn't it? And isn't it only natural to get upset or complain when someone treats you unfairly or inequitably? It's certainly natural to expect someone to return to you something that they have borrowed from you...isn't it?

Actually, it seems that way to us because it's part of our cultural ideology. Among the Gava people of Nigeria, one covers one's body only if one is hiding something. To walk about naked is therefore a sign of sincerity and integrity. Among the Hopi, who are Native Americans residing in northern Arizona, it is considered detrimental to one's own mental health, not to mention the well-being of society, to become upset or to complain for any reason. Mental equanimity and social harmony are significant values in Hopi culture, but individual rights (seen apart from the community) are not. Consequently, the Hopi will typically accept whatever treatment they are offered without complaint, to such a degree that a Hopi laborer is willing to be paid the same amount for a day's work as another is paid for an hour's.¹² Among the Yap people, who are Micronesians from the western Caroline Islands, ownership is primarily a function of need. Property is borrowed freely, and one is under no obligation to return a borrowed object until it is needed by the previous owner, and even then the item might have passed into another's hands.

All of these behaviors, which seem so odd in light of our Western sensibilities, are predictable patterns in light of the worldviews of their respective cultures, just as our behavior is predictable in light of contemporary American culture. What I want you to consider, at this late stage, is not whether our American cultural sensibilities are natural, but whether they are right. This is the critical question, since it lies at the very core of Christianity's dire situation in this country. What if the dominant ideology of our culture is, to some degree, evil? What if (and this won't come as a shock to you, hopefully) the American cultural worldview is in large measure antithetical to a Christian Theistic worldview? How can you, or any other Christian, expect to live out Christian beliefs and values on a consistent basis when you have been enculturated into a self-centered, live-for-the-moment, consumer-based ideology? When you are, as Ruth Benedict says, a "little creature" of the culture you were born into?

All the world's cultures, of which American culture is one, have been impacted by the Fall, their structures engineered by sinful humans, and to one degree or another shaped under the dominant influence of the evil one, who is termed by Paul "the god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4). Some cultures are more evil and oppressive than others, but none can even remotely be considered neutral, much less good.¹³ Sherwood Lingenfelter equates culture to a Las Vegas slot machine, a device which gives the appearance of fairness and equitable returns, but which in fact is programmed to make the players lose.¹⁴ Christians are players in a rigged game. The structures of culture perpetuate corrupt values and beliefs which do not correspond to reality. And behind culture stands the unseen, and often unappraised, influence of the adversary and accuser of God's people, who wages war on them through the vehicle of culture.

After that meeting, Paul wrote that he considered everything his culture valued a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord (Phil. 3:8). And as I read I am struck by the terrible thought that if we knew Jesus—if we really knew him—it would make a difference in our lives also. If we really knew him, we would adopt his values. We would gladly share his sufferings. Perhaps, then, we do not truly know him at all. At least, not the way Paul did.

It is a struggle, not to live for the moment. "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." But the dead are raised. Paul met a man who had risen from the dead, and that changed everything, because that same man laid hold of Paul's life (Phil. 3:12). And he has laid hold of yours. And mine. So I'm not living for this moment, but for a coming moment—when I will stand before the Lord Jesus Christ, and in that moment I will be like him. How happy will I be that I didn't go for all the gusto I could get in this life, as quickly as I could get it?

In that moment I will be like him, except that his hands will bear scars which will forever remind me that he also didn't live for the moment, but for that future moment when we could stand face to face, each of us knowing that if he hadn't denied himself some earthly pleasure to die for me, I would never even be there. And amazingly, that he felt it was worth it.

 Notes

1. Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Harper Collins, 1973), p. 127.

2. Geertz states that "the ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life implied by the actual state of affairs which the world view describes, and the world view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic expression" (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 127).

3. Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture (New York: Orbis, 1979), p. 53.

4. Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 134.

5. Wendy Griswold,Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1994), pp. 21-22.

6. William J. Larkin, Jr., Culture and Biblical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), pp. 192-93.

7. Max Weber,The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 280.

8. Griswold,Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, pp. 22-23. I have adapted her example from the "cultural diamond" model to my own schematic of culture.

9. If you are operating from a Theistic Christian worldview, then you can be reasonably sure that the ghost was not real, just as you can be absolutely positive that Paul was not a god on the island of Malta. Of course, the Christian worldview might allow that the apparition was a manifestation of Satan himself (2 Cor. 11:14), an even less appealing prospect for an encounter while taking an evening stroll in the woods.

10. Ruth Benedict,Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 3.

11. Kraft, Christianity in Culture, pp. 46-47.

12. See Laura Thompson, Culture in Crisis: A Study of the Hopi Indians (New York: Russell & Russell, 1973), p. 94. Richard Brandt similarly notes that Hopi do not begrudge one another equal pay even for unequal labor. Responding to the question as to whether a Hopi who works more hours should be paid more than one who works less, one of those interviewed stated, "Hopi don't go by the hour. If you work only half as long, you get the same pay. White men go by the hour" (Richard B. Brandt,Hopi Ethics: A Theoretical Analysis [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954], p. 231). It occurs to me that most traditional Hopi would find the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) to be confusing, to say the least.

13. Kraft notes that culture is essentially neutral; there is nothing inherently evil about humans dwelling in community under a common ideology: "I see cultural structuring . . . as basically a vehicle or milieu, neutral in essence, though warped by the pervasive influence of human sinfulness. Culture is not in and of itself either an enemy or a friend to God or humans" (Christianity in Culture, p. 113). Kraft's understanding still allows that the cultures of the world have suffered the pervasive effects of depravity, a point I am in complete agreement with. Some writers have misrepresented Kraft on this point, in my opinion (cf. Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Transforming Culture: A Challenge for ChristianMission [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992], p. 18; Larkin, Culture and Biblical Hermeneutics, pp. 220-21).

14. Lingenfelter,Transforming Culture, p. 18.