I’m spending the week in Cyprus working with SAT-7 staff and board members and interacting at least here and there with Cypriots. The SAT-7 staff and board are an international group—Lebanese, Egyptian, Danish, English, Irish, American, Swedish, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, and more. They speak a list of languages, Arabic mostly and English always as a second language, so they’re a smart assembly of people.

All the staff and board members, like me, bring their cultural backgrounds to the table. We can’t help it. Our culture is part of who we are and part of what makes us individually intrinsically interesting.

My interest in culture, which simply means “way of life,” began in high school and went into orbit in college. Culture encompasses anthropology and social science, which typically includes language, religion, politics, and economics. (Though one scholar, Henry Van Til, argued religion comes first and defined culture as “religion externalized.”) Culture is about human beings, their ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, and most importantly, worldview.

Culture shows up in how we eat, what we wear, how we marry and bury, what music we like, and how we rear our children. It’s a filter and an amplifier through which we view the world and life and everything within it.

Culture is powerful, sometimes it seems near overwhelmingly so. Though I concede it's an incredibly powerful influence, I do not believe in “cultural determinism.” This is the idea that where we live or how we’re raised dictates all that we are thereafter. My theology doesn’t let me go there. For Christians, for example, God places us “In the World,” but commands us to be “Not of the World” even as we go “Into the World.”(John 17). The idea and reality of the Christian faith belies the idea of cultural determinism, or for that matter, economic or any other determinism.

True Christian faith, empowered by the Holy Spirit, enables anyone to change, to become something different than they were before. This doesn’t mean all cultural practices are bad or wrong or must change with Christian faith. It simply means that some things must change and can change with God’s intervention. Theologians call it conversion, being “born again,” along with the sanctification (Romans 12:2) process that should follow thereafter.

So culture is, and when you travel, culture is fun. I enjoy hearing accents, seeing different dress, eating food I don’t recognize, not being able to get ice in my drinks, trying to understand why my approach to resolving an issue is so perplexing to my friends, or vice versa, hearing-but-not-understanding—and that’s in English, watching how spouses relate to one another, seeing wedding rings on right hands, driving on the left side of the road, not being able to find Half-and-Half, or in fact, seeing wrinkled brows when I say “cream.” I enjoy finding shampoo affixed to the wall in little dispensers, showering using a hose apparatus, surfing through television channels in Arabic, Russian, Greek, English, and I-don’t-know-what-that-one-was.

Culture is one of God’s blessings. It makes human beings different. So it makes us as varied as flowers in the wilderness and, therefore, forever fascinating. What a boring place the world would be if we were all alike.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010

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