Evangelism In a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News About Jesus More Believable by Sam Chan

Author:Sam Chan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2008), 27. Copyright 2008. Used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

The grid should be self-explanatory. The cultures in Scandinavia, northern France, and Russia place a high value on equality. But Russia differs from the others in that it is a culture of control, while Scandinavia and northern France place a greater cultural emphasis on freedom. And the cultures of Great Britain, the USA, and Germany tend to have more hierarchy. But Germany is a culture that values control, while Great Britain and the USA tend to emphasize freedom to a greater extent.

When I taught this to my class in Sydney, I asked them where they would put Australia on the grid. We joked that Australia would be exactly in the center. We were neutral while the rest of the world was extreme in terms of equality, hierarchy, freedom, and control. But every culture thinks of itself as the neutral one. For example, China literally means “Middle Kingdom.” The British have Greenwich Mean Time, where Britain’s time is the reference point for the rest of the world. American maps of the world have America bang in the middle of the world map, even if this means Asia has to be divided into two on the edges of the map.

What Is Its Storyline?

The three methods I’ve outlined thus far give a synchronic reading of culture. But there is a fourth method that can give us a diachronic reading. Again, Timothy Keller helpfully shows us that each culture has its own storyline.15 Keller explains that stories typically have three parts:

The way things should be: a mission, a task, a journey

Something that stops this from happening: the bad guys

Something that achieves the mission: the good guys

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