BibleProject - Honor-Shame Culture and the Gospel - Letters E4

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Paul wrote his letters in the shadow of Rome. His words stood in stark contrast to Roman rule and its honor-shame culture. Join Tim and Jon in exploring the cultural context of the New Testament letters and the questions we should consider when reading these texts. View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (0:00–6:15)Part two (6:15–23:30)Part three (23:30–33:30)Part four (33:30–40:10)Part five (40:10–end)Additional Resources Michael Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified LordShow Music Defender Instrumental by TentsCoastal Town by KuplaClocks by Smith the Misterdoing laundry by weird insideFrame by KVShow produced by Dan Gummel and Camden McAfee. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it in. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Welcome to the Bible Project Podcast. We're in the middle of a series discussing how to read the New Testament letters. These are letters written by the apostles of Jesus sent to the early church. Reading these letters is like listening to one side of a phone conversation. So to understand them, we kind of need to know who's on the other side of the phone. Who are these letters written to? And today we're going to try to figure out what kind of world did they live in. So by the time Jesus is resurrected and ascended, the Roman Empire has been ruling over Israel, Palestine for about 60ish years.

What was it like to live in the first century under Roman occupation? Well, in this episode, we're gonna look at two ways that Rome shaped culture during the times of these letters. The first is the socio-economic realities of the Roman Empire. But just try and imagine yourself into that packed Roman cities around the Mediterranean are mostly full of people who are just surviving. That's the vast majority.

And second, we'll talk about the honor and shame culture of the first century Roman world. The whole concept of a human defining their value, not by a relation to their group or family. This is one of the most radical realities of the gospel that broke into the human history in the Jesus Christ. So let's take a trip to the first century and get into the skin of the first people to read the New Testament letters. We are talking about how to read a section of the Bible, which are letters. Yes, the New Testament letters from the Apostles. The Apostles who have first-hand experience of Jesus and his teachings and who are shaped by the apostles. The apostles who have first-hand experience of Jesus and his teachings and who are shaped by him and then are commissioned to go and spread the good news

that Jesus is king of the universe. He's Lord. And to do that, take this messianic Jewish experience and bring it to people of all other cultures. Yes. And as they do that, we get a narrative of them doing that in the book of Acts, which is a kind of a second part of gospel of Luke. Yep. But then we have all these letters that they've written to all these churches that they've

helped start. And that's what we're talking about here. How do you read those letters? Yeah, that's right. And we've really spent a lot of time just talking about the fact that they are letters. Yep. And that's what we're talking about here. How do you read those letters? Yeah, that's right. And we've really spent a lot of time just talking about the fact they are letters. Yep. And how that's unique in the Bible. Yeah. There's a couple in the Hebrew Bible, a few letters. Yep, a letter from Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon, Jeremiah 29. There's some letters as Renei Maya, but not too many. And they're given a narrative context.

Directly. Here, in the New Testament, the narrative context is acts. What you're supposed to do then is kind of plug the letters into somewhere in the narrative framework of Acts. So we know the narrative context in the whole story of the Bible. This is post-resurrection Jesus, the fulfillment of the partnership that humans are supposed to have with God that we can now join and rediscover, and that it's going to all the nations, which was the idea about God's partnership in the first place. Yep, that's right. And this message and this story doesn't fit into the categories that we have in the modern west of religion.

There's religion, there's religious topics and issues, then there's political topics and issues like economic or social issues. It blends it all together. Yes, this religious message is that one, that a Jewish man is the embodiment of the creator God exalted as the king of the nations. And that all nations need to give their loyalty to him.

It's kind of an outrageous thing to... It's crazy. It's crazy. That's how this story sounded to people when they first heard it, especially if they weren't familiar with the Jewish tradition at all. So it's what we would call a religious message that has political, economic, and social consequences. The political, social, economic context of all of this was the Roman Empire in the first century. So, yeah. The first big context is where's it fit in the storyline of the Bible.

The second context that you can apply to any part of the Bible is what was the actual cultural, socio cultural socioeconomic context that this was written in to kind of help give a sense of context of place and time. And this is specifically helpful in the letters because the letters are you're listening to half of a correspondence. So you have to fill in a lot of gaps. Fill in. Yeah.

Why do they say what they say? What are the issues that they are addressing in the cultural context? It's just very similar to, if you read your great-grandpa's letter collection, but let's say these were all, let's say he was in World War II. So he's writing these letters from some place in Europe. You're obligated. If you want

to understand them and claim to understand them and tell other people about them, I feel you're obligated to understand what was happening right there on the ground. What trench warfare was like. Yep. At what moment in the war? So you can understand why he says what he says, and it's no different with the letters. So, we need to understand at least something of the culture dynamics of the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean in the first century. And this is a whole did. There's so much amazing stuff. And parts of the letters will shine with new brilliance in light and meaning when we see them in that context. So let's paint broad brushes here. The Roman Empire by the time Jesus sends out the apostles, right, in the early 30s, AD. And then the Book of Acts is tracking with about two decades' ish of the early Jesus movement. So by the time Jesus is resurrected and ascended,

the Roman Empire has been ruling over Israel, Palestine, for about 60-ish years. By the time that the Book of Acts ends, somewhere in the 50s, you know, they're now 20 years, so 80 years. So, relatively recent in terms of the history of ancient empires. Yeah. I don't know how that long how long that sounds to anybody listening. If you're Paul sitting in at the end of the book of Acts under house arrest in Rome, you're sitting in the capital of an empire who became rulers over Israel Palestine the same way that we would look back the same time as to World War Two. So what recent memory? Oh, World War II, right.

World War II, yeah. So, the Roman Empire had been around before. It wasn't an empire, it was a republic, and this is, I'm not a Roman history expert. So, the Roman culture, and people have a history, the predates this. Yeah. In some cases, referred to as like Greco-Roman culture. Correct. Okay. So, Greco meaning Greek. Yeah. Sometimes is referred to as like Greco Roman culture. Correct. Okay. So Greco meaning Greek. Yeah. Greek and Roman. So Alexander the Great in the early 300s, B.C.

storms from Greece all the way to India. Just taken charge. Taken charge. Dyes. Alexander the Great is Greek. Yep. And he was on what's called the a mission to bring the whole known world under this way of his culture and his power. And this was called the Hellenism based on the Greek word of Helleniste, Hellene, which is Greek. This is the Greek word for Greek, Hellene. So Greek gods, Greek culture, Greek gymnasiums, Greek way of life. And so, from the third, 300s on, Greece, the culture of Greece permeates that whole part of the world. The Romans inherit the scoop up after Alexander the Great,

power tractors across that whole span of territory. And it's just regional power games all over. Yeah. Alexander, great. Territory. Game thrones. Totally. Game of thrones.

Until in the like 40s and 30s, all of the great events surrounding the transition of the Roman Republic to an empire and Octavia and then all of it. It's just all the famous events. Go read Wikipedia. But by the 40s, BC, you've got a Roman emperor and he's asserting his authority, annexing all of this territory. Again, from Greece and Rome. But what's interesting, so there's a little...

Greco-Roman is trying to say, it was Rome, the Roman Empire is the power structure. Yes. The culture is Greek. Is Greek now with the functioning of... Yeah, in the same realm. It's very similar to how you could call, the way you could talk about England and America.

Because in a way, England... America is an offshoot. America is, you know, an offshoot of rebellious colonies. So we got their culture, but we have our own power structure. But, yeah, and have now developed our own institutions, but it's the same language, just a little different. So what America is to England is similar to what Rome was to Greece. So by the first century, the good news of Caesar Augustus

had spread around the world. And on coins, roads, festivals, gymnasiums being built in every city, there's a whole cult, not in our modern sense of the word, but an actual religion of the emperor, celebrating him as the incarnation of, you know, the ultimate divine power behind the realm. You can go off for sacrifices to the deified emperor

throughout, especially in the eastern part of the empire throughout the first century. So this is reality. You call the emperor savior and lord and master. Here you go. Roman culture was ubiquitous, inescapable, reality. This is from Michael Gorman's amazing introduction to Paul's letters.

It's called Apostle of Crucified Lord, a theological introduction to Paul's letters. The first hundred pages is just Roman culture. And Jewish diaspora culture in the setting of Paul's letters. And by that, just diaspora. Jewish community spread throughout the ancient world after the exile. Yeah. So Roman culture brought infrastructure. Wait, the exile. Oh, the big ones. The big ones. The big ones. Yeah. Spread them all over the ancient world. Yeah. And they just kind of

scattered communities out there. That's right. So on the surface, Roman Empire brought courts, the court system, infrastructure, road system, economic unity through roads and the Navy, and all of the economic fleets now, using the Mediterranean, it's like a highway for goods and grain. So there are lots of upsides to it, I guess, if you're into the empire kind of thing. But Gorman, this is his words, he says, but there's a dark side to Rome's peace that should

not be forgotten. The Romans established and maintained their empire through conquest, subjugation and intimidation. It was, in other words, peace through war and security via domination. The Romans invaded and enslaved. They moved the conquered in and out. They formed new colonies. They refounded old Greek cities as their own colonies. They imposed taxes and tributes to maintain the empire and its peace among the subjugated,

and they had a deterrent to make sure that anyone who threatened this peace understood the consequences, crucifixion. So a very small number of people, as we're going to see in a moment, actually got to enjoy the full benefits of the Roman Empire. Most people, what they knew of the Roman Empire, was the face of Roman Legionaries who will break your kneecaps if you don't pay your taxes. And then people you've never met who keep buying up your ancestral land or forcing you to move off of your land and go be relocated to some other place because somebody is appropriating your land and going to build a gymnasium.

That's kind of thing. So there are many analogies to empire throughout history. Yeah. But this is the setting. It's like a world empire runs the world. What percentage of people got to enjoy the benefits of the empire? Let's talk about this. So this is another quote from Gorman and a really helpful like diagram.

Charmed. So put the chart in the show notes. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. This is a chart found in Michael Gorman's book, but it's his adaptation of a social theorist who is trying to understand the dynamics of class in the Roman Empire. I got a scholar named Gerhard Linsky. So I'll just start reading this kind of a longish quote. If you look at the picture, it looks like, what do you say? Like a pyramid, kind of like a pyramid. It looks like an arrowhead. Okay, better. It's an arrowhead. So it has a very sharp long tip. And at the top of the tip is the emperor. And then coming down from the tip is the class of, it's the power and privilege scale.

So it's actually a very narrow group of people who get to participate in the top level elite class. Once you broaden out to the far distant edges of the arrowhead, you have the vast majority of population of the room. Yeah. So on the Y-axis is how many people are in that part of the class? That's right. And then the X-axis is how much power that class has.

That's right. Or to say it differently, the vertical axis up and down is power and privilege. Power and privilege. The horizontal, how wide it is, is about the numbers of people population. So you have this really thin slice of the governing class, which has all the power. There's a very few amount of people. I mean, it's just a thin line in the graph.

That's right. So, a Gorman's quote is helpful here. So he says, in the Roman hierarchical arrangement, power was concentrated at the top. At the pinnacle was the emperor. Beneath him were the senators, then the equestrians, a class of high-ranking military and political figures. After them are the Decurians, who are aristocrats with land and other kinds of wealth, but only local political power.

So that's what's called the governing class. Okay. The emperor, senators, equestrians, and decurians. Supporting this small governing class was a network of retainers. That is, political and religious officials like priests or government functionaries who kept the machinery of power running

and attended to the needs of the elite. This entire group composed about 3% of the population. So in our day, people talk about the 1% with the 5% or the... So in Rome, we're talking about 3%. 3%. Possessed the majority of the wealth and... And in this graph, that's all in that one line, the governing class.

Yeah, and then you begin... Are the retainers in there? You see the governing class going down, and then there's... Oh, there's the retainers. Yep. The retainers in priests. Yep, there you go. Further down the tower are people of some means, so they have wealth, but no political power,

like merchants or successful artisans. You know, you're a successful statue of Carver, whatever. You're making a killing, selling purple cloth, you know, at different ports, but no one, like, you have no connections and no power to in Rome, and you're never going to. So Gorman goes on, he says, these were not like what the Westerners called the middle class. So they did exist in the middle in terms of power and privilege. Yeah. There's nothing like representative political structures or institutions,

like republics or democratic republics have. So they just existed. But they called it a republic. And you say it was called a republic? It began as a republic, but by the first century. Oh, it's now it. It's now a empire. So this middle group constituted anywhere from five to 15% of the populace depended on the city and the region.

The bottom line is that the remaining 85% consisted of working lower class slaves or free persons, like artisans, craftsmen, merchants, below them are the working poor and day laborers. At the very bottom are the expendables, namely those without any status or wealth or skills to contribute value to those around them, widows, orphans, prisoners, beggars, anyone with physical disabilities. So you can see from this that for the vast majority of the population, the main priority was simply survival. So this is different than, you know, the culture I grew up in has a huge

middle class and the middle class varies. There's that per middle class and then there's, you know, what sociologists call the working poor, like an American culture, which is people who are able to provide a basic, sustainable living for a family, but there only one disaster medical emergency away from going under. So that's from the middle upper class down to the working poor. That's a big part of the American population.

And in Rome, that's a smaller middle. And the majority of people... You're saying that middle is like the 5-15%. Correct, that's right. The majority of the Roman Empire would be, what we might call the working poor, or just people living in poverty. Poority.

And just surviving, it's a vast majority. But just try and imagine yourself into that, packed Roman cities around the Mediterranean are mostly full of people who are just surviving. That's the vast majority. There's lots of countries and cultures on planet Earth right now, where that's the name of the game. There are many cities and towns even in America, or in Europe, where that's economic social reality. So it's not altogether different, you know, but it's imagine 3% control everything.

Yeah, and in a different way we talk about the 1% that became a meme in that if you look at where wealth is distributed. This is about wealth and power. In the modern world, we've done better at distributing power, even if in the last few decades wealth has really been consolidating. Yeah, consolidating. Power has as well, but not as you know not as much that's right Yeah, like we still still have a lot of ability to to shape. Yeah things even if we're not in the ruling class So that's maybe that where Westerners we have to use our imaginations is Same consolidation of wealth among a very small group, but also it's an empire Yeah, it's a dictatorship.

And so it's a very small, small group of people who actually can make any decisions that affect reality and how things are run. So just psychologically that people who have grown up in dictator ships, you know, that does something to you psychologically. Whereas Westerners tend to have a feeling of we can change it. Yeah. We can be the difference.

Right. That's kind of thing. So imagine, I'm in a culture where, what do you mean you're going to make a difference? How ridiculous. It's interesting. I think a lot of people would say, I don't feel empowered to actually make a difference. There is still a difference. When you grow up in a cultural setting, which people do have that thought and belief, even if you don't personally.

Yeah. But to grow up in a setting where just it's not even on the radar. It's not a possibility. Yeah. No one's sitting around going like, well, maybe we can... If they are, it's this crazy radicals living in the mountains sitting around going like, well, maybe we can, if they are, it's this crazy radical is living in the mountains and like. Yeah, yeah, right. Trying to create some sort of militia or something,

and they're probably gonna go down. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, right, I don't have the imaginative framework for this. That's right. Much less to imagine how the announcement of the apostles would then sound in this context, like in Thessalonica in Acts 17. These people are going around saying there is another king, Jesus, and they start these

communities where everybody calls each other brother and sister, and they're all sharing their stuff and taking care of the poor. I mean, just there wasn't anybody doing this kind of thing. Well, when you said it's a dictatorship, what I thought of immediately was, well, then so is the gospel. Hmm, hmm. You've got a king. Yes, yeah, that's right. But you look at this Roman emperor empire, and then the way that power is distributed is very skewed.

And so what's the difference with the kingdom of God is that the power is distributed differently. Yeah, or in Jesus' teachings, it's that diagram turned upside down. First will be last. Yeah, one of the titles for our king is the slave, the servant of the Lord, the suffering servant of Isaiah. It's the slave. I did not come to you, be served. Yeah, but to be the slave and to give my life as a ransom for many, the gift of being included in the family of the Messiah is given without regard to someone's placement on

this power and rank scale, which is why a slave owner and a slave and an orphan and a merchant and whatever city commissioner and a tent maker all sit at the same table and treat each other as of equal value on resurrection Sunday when they take the bread and the cup. It's a redefinition of power with very social implications for people. We'll flesh this out a little bit more, but we're just kind of painting the picture. The point we're here was to paint the way power and wealth was distributed and organized. Let's just touch down on a few cultural realities in this setting that are helpful categories. They've been hugely helpful for me in understanding the letters and why the apostles write the

way that they write. So one, what people call honor and shame dynamics, honor and shame cultures. I've heard this phrase a lot. Yep. I think I understand what it means. Yeah. But after you kind of plugged it in the last episode and said I won't be able to understand it.

Mm-hmm. I'm like, huh, I wonder if I really do. Someone who doesn't grow up in honor and shame culture can understand it, but it takes a work of sympathetic imagination. Yeah. Because I didn't grow up in a culture like this. Right.

Here, we're back to Michael Gorman. He has a whole chapter on it, and great bibliography if you want to follow the rabbit poll on this one. He says, simply to find honor and shame refer to the ongoing attribution or loss of esteem by one's peers, family, social class, city, and so on.

In Roman society, this respect or esteem was based primarily on such things as wealth, education, rhetorical skill, a good of a public speaker you are, family pedigree, and political connections. These were Roman cultures, status indicators. In this context, self-esteem would be conceived of as a ridiculous oxymoron. You're not esteemed by yourself. The only esteem that one has is bestowed not by the self but by the group. In this environment, pure pressure is not something negative to be avoided. It's appropriate and welcome.

So here's the thing that I've discovered over the years is that the Western cultures are a mix, almost like the strange contradictory mix of some honor, shame, elements, and then that exists. A whole lot of other things that are trying to upend honor, shame, dynamics. And self-esteem is a great example. Yes. So think through, and this is me as a kid, self-esteem, you have value no matter what anyone thinks about you. Do your own thing. Don't let other people define you. Discover yourself. You do you. You do you. And this is in the in of at least modern American culture in the 21st century.

Yeah. This is pervasive. This is what defines a good. That would have been unheard of in the Greco-Roman world. It would have been, it was also strange and ridiculous in America a hundred years ago. So this is a modern movement. People call it all kinds of things. You have value no matter what anyone says or thinks.

That's right. The only esteem that really matters is what you attribute to yourself. What you attribute to yourself. If other people don't understand who you are, forget them. It doesn't matter. Just think of every Disney movie. And you're like, oh yeah, it's the gospel of self esteem. And it would have sounded ridiculous. And you're like, oh yeah, it's the gospel of self-esteem. And it would have sounded ridiculous,

and does sound ridiculous. I mean, American culture on this angle looks offensive, ridiculous, and misguided. From the perspective of human history and culture. Yeah, and looks really dangerous to a lot of people and traditional cultures around the world. But we do have value. I agree.

Inherent. I totally agree. Regardless of any socio-economic or political system or it. I agree. So to that degree, it's not ridiculous. I'm not saying that it is. Yes. What I'm saying is it is viewed as ridiculous

by people who have grown up in more traditional honor shame cultures. Got it. And it can get distorted into a really unhelpful, but yeah, I think the whole concept of a human defining their value, not by a relation to their group or family, this is one of the most radical realities of the gospel that broke into human history in the Jesus movement.

What is? The idea that a human's value is not defined by the group or their family. Because we have a category for that. Yeah. But there's no category for that in the Roman world. Correct. Yeah, it would have sound crazy.

And Gorman brings up self-esteem where the gospel is going is that you have divine esteem as an image of God for whom Jesus died. That's what gives you your ultimate value. And your value is defined by your creator and what your creator has done for you in Jesus. So that's not self-esteem either.

Sure. But that is a gateway into a type of self-esteem. It's a type of self-esteem. So this is interesting. In honor-shame culture, like let's just go with the Greco-Roman world, vocabulary about esteem, reputation being recognized. This is very standard vocabulary. And it's what you're trained from your earliest memories to get up on that scale. Do whatever you can to get up on the power

privilege scale. Really there wasn't just a sense of where I am at that time stuck. Well if you're a slave, even if you've been freed, you're always still marked. You have a very clear ceiling on the ranks. That's another thing about the modern world is. That's right. There's more fluid, fluidity of that's right how you can go move up and down the social rank scale where I'm sure There's stories of people moving up and down in the ancient world. Yeah, it just would have been very very rare Yeah, less common more difficult and for some people it's like the cast system You have a clear ceiling. Yes, because of your family and if you've ever been a slave. Yeah.

Yeah, so related to that, this is interesting. One of the Greek words, honor, shame vocabulary, is this word of Greek word.co, which means to recognize or to recognize someone as a value. Through a steam. Yeah, a steam, yeah, to a steam someone, to recognize someone as a value. To a steam. Yeah, a steam. Yeah, to a steam someone. To recognize their honor.

This is the root word for the Greek word, doxa, which gets translated in our modern English translations as glory. But from doxa, to be recognized, to have doxa means to be recognized. What I've started to do is every time I see the word glory in the New Testament, to insert the word honor, and it will really make some familiar passages pop with a new significance. Because it's about your rank. This is a rank, a social rank term in the first century. That's different than how cavode and Hebrew.

Hmm. Well, it's related. Cavaud and Hebrew means heavy. Yeah. Heavyness. Your significance. Okay. There's overlap. Yeah. What's interesting is that the Greek word doxa comes from how you are perceived. Because the word means how you are recognized by others. Yeah. So to have doxa, glory means I am perceived as having social

rank in the eyes of people looking at me. And the sub-tuijit is a covert translated doxa? Correct. Often. Yeah. So Romans 8, verse 18, says Paul, saying, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the doxa that is going to be revealed in us. So this is the founder of a persecuted religious minority group writing to other members of the persecuted minority religious group saying that listen life is hard and your neighbors think you're stupid and crazy and you might lose your job. You might, you know, this kind of stuff and in the Empire of this world you still are you reviewed as having no status. Yeah, and you're suffering just Is this like your mind or it's your lot in mind of that fact that your status is low. That's right What Paul says, the biblical story

says actually divine doxa is going to be revealed in us. So cosmic divine status in honor is actually our future. And he goes into the story, talking, retelling the story of the Hebrew Bible that creation itself is in a state of longing anticipation for what he says, the

apocalypse, the revealing of the children of God. Creation right now is in a phase of futility for the true human rulers. Yeah, the true divine images that God's children. He says, what we're looking forward to verse 21 is for creation to be liberated Exodus language, from its slavery to corruption and mortality, and to obtain the freedom of the doxa of the children of God. So, Genesis 1, male and female, ruling as God's divine image, overall creation, is the ultimate state of Daksa. Glory. And creation is waiting for humans to become what God made them to be. Kings and Queens of all creation.

And he says, that's what's waiting for us. So what if you were to read the word honor there? So let's reread it. I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the honor that's going to be revealed in us. Verse 21, Creation itself would be really dangerous to spiritual tradition I grew up in. There is, and it's actually connected to this idea of a self-esteem movement, which is, if we have too much self-esteem, then that's our problem. We need to not think of ourselves as high.

Yeah. So, and it's all about God has honor. I'm just lucky he's putting up with me. And anything beyond that is dangerously getting into worship of like ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, someone even came up to us during the, I was talking to someone during the live podcast. She came from more of a new age movement.

And one of the things that she said was kind of dangerous was this sense of kind of self-glorification, which I think she meant was kind of this entitlement disconnected from God. And to that degree, that's dangerous. Anyways, that's not what this is talking about. Well, here we're back to the image of God. Humans are meant to be glorious, honored creatures of the highest rank, not because of something inherent within themselves, but because of the gift of existence and divine image bearing that God has given us.

And what an image does is bear witness to the honor of the one whom the image will represent. And the one whom we represent is the one whose honor was displayed when he was crucified as a criminal. Here, so this is from maybe the poem in Philippians 2 is another good example. There's some people who don't like each other and not getting along very well in the house churches of Philippi. It's a Paul right to them. At multiple points, he's trying to get them to be unified. What Paul's doing in almost all these lectures?

So he talks about, he opens chapter 2 saying, Listen, now there's any encouragement in the Messiah. If you've received any comfort from his love, if you are participating in what the Spirit is up to in the Messiah. If you've received any comfort from His love, if you are participating in what the Spirit is up to in your midst, if you have any affection for each other, if you have any sympathy, if you care about each other at all, make my joy complete by having a unified mindset and having the same love. Don't do anything out of selfish ambition and humility, treat people as more important than yourself.

Then in verse 5, he says, have this mindset, namely the mindset of Messiah Jesus, and then it's the statement, the poem. And he retells the story of Jesus. He was one with God, but he didn't exploit his status. Rather, he gave it up. Became a slave. Even more than a slave, he became obedient to the humiliating death of the cross.

Verse nine, therefore God has hyper-exalted him, given him the name, the name. He gives Jesus the name, Yahweh. The name. So that at the name of Jesus, every knee, bows, and heaven on earth, and under the earth that every tongue confess that Jesus Messiah is Yahweh to the doxa of God the Father. Wait, so that word there, well, it says Lloyd. It says Lloyd.

Yes. Which has a double nuance then to Jewish listeners that they would hear Jesus saying Jesus is Yahweh. To Greco-Roman listeners, they would hear Paul saying Jesus is Yahweh. To Greco-Roman listeners, they would hear Paul saying Jesus is the true emperor. And Jesus' rule, recognizing Jesus' rule as Yahweh and emperor, is the way that I give Doxa honor to God the Father. So God the Father has appointed a son as his second self, as the true emperor and incarnation of his divinity. And by worshiping and giving my believing loyalty to Jesus, I am esteeming and giving ultimate honor to God.

And the narrative about Jesus being exalted to a place of honor over heaven and earth, that's the ultimate type of language in Roman culture to talk about exaltation. So the point is the honor shame society, language of rank, of status, of honor, esteem. This is fundamental to the cultural world view. It's everywhere in the letters. I guess it kind of shows too like the power of adoption, how powerful that is, in the fact that like if you were, if you were adopted by someone with power in the Roman world, or just an ancient world, suddenly your life changes, not just that you have nice for things to play with and stuff now, but your honor. That's right.

Shifts. Family pedigree is one of the most important status. That's right. To be a sibling of the Emperor. When he talks about being brothers and sisters in the family of the Messiah, that's no different than saying you're a brother or sister of the Emperor. That's the point.

The real Emperor is Jesus Messiah. Wow. Yeah, all the sibling language in the New Testament. This was a scholar, Joe Joseph Hellerman, with this great study of sibling language in the letters called When the church was a family. And not in like American pie, type of family, you know, when the church was a family. In small town America, although that's often true. What he's talking about is the radical way that people create a, we've used this phrase, fictive, kinship, groups, calling each other brother and sister, and then understanding that the leader of their group,

Jesus Messiah, was their brother. Mm-hmm. That's just, so if no one ever thought to imagine such a thing, it's really remarkable. 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc

1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc 1 tbc sdmdc What the honor shame dynamic illuminates is the way that group value works in the New Testament. In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul at multiple points invokes this, like where those

the guy sleeping with his mother-in-law in 1 Corinthians 5. And he says, listen, all of your Roman neighbors even think this is terrible and wouldn't even dream of doing something like this. So he gets to notice how severe he is, he excommunicates the guy from the church. And we look at that and we're like, well, that's severe.

But in honor of shame culture, one person's misbehavior can endanger the whole group by association. It's the same thing as having like a proverbial black sheep among your kids in the family. In an honor shame society, the black sheep child can bring dishonor to the whole family by whatever, not pursuing the family trade or becoming a musician and joining the circus or something. You know, all these stories.

To me, this is so foreign to imagine group value being more important than individual value. That the dreams and aspirations, the honor and reputation of my family or my group is more important than my individual fulfillment, desire's dreams dreams reputation. So this is the historical context it's in. So that does two things for me right now. One is it helps understand a word like

glory and so maybe it brings more texture to some of these passages. But in that second example of Paul X communicating, the guy in Corinth who was doing something so shameful, even just regular, like Roman God worshipping neighbors would be disgusted, that the result of that was X communication. So I guess that my question would become, is honor shame, how is it connected to the gospel in terms of, we see two examples there. One is that we're all given honor because of what Jesus did.

But then there's also this, well then how do you do church? And how do you live together in unity and the culture you're in? And if you're in an honor shame culture, you might act differently. Yeah, yeah, what I'm saying is what the apostolic letters are is the gospel being applied in an honor-shame culture. Okay, right. So modern Westerners will have a more difficult time really understanding the letters because

we don't share that cultural context. I was just talking to a pastor, Asian Indian pastor recently, and we were just talking about this very dynamic. He was saying it's so much easier for him to read and talk about the letters of the New Testament in his church because it's an honor shame culture. It's an honor shame culture. And so just just they're dealing with the same things totally so if anything it's People who live in modern Western Individualist cultures to Christians. We're at the disadvantage should Jesus followers Then try to create culture to be honor shame. Okay, all right. So now we're to it

It's exactly the issue in other words the the cultural context shaped how the apostles talk, how they argue, how they value things, persuade people. Well, and their solutions to problems too. And the solutions to problems are solutions in honor, shame culture. Yeah. And so then the question will be, I don't live in honor, shame culture. So do I create new solutions? Yes. Or do I fight for recreating an honor-shame culture? In other words, what is it that is actually inspired by the spirit here?

Is it the cultural setting? Or is it the story? And I get to watch them apply it in a different cultural setting. But the way that the spirit is going to work out the Lordship of Jesus and the creation of families of siblings here in Portland where we live, is going to have to require different strategies. And to me that seems, this is called being a missionary. I only took one class on cross-cultural ministry in college, it's called mythology. And a lot of it was about like

comparative anthropology and sociology, just learning how to understand a culture and its story and values and how the story of Jesus challenges certain things and overlaps with other things will differ from culture culture. But this is a big challenge in the history of the church trying to understand the New Testament letters is just this. The way that gender or slavery is dealt with in the letters, and the way that different groups and denominations differ in how they read and understand those things today, is often due to this core difference of what the letters are and about and how we appropriate them today.

Yeah, because the closer that the culture you live in resembles the culture of first century Roman world, the easier it is to just copy and paste the letters into your setting. Oh, we have something similar going on. Let's just do, let's just copy what Paul said for this church to do. The further away you get culturally, the harder that becomes. And so there's this impetus to then say, well then let's just try to conserve the culture that they had so that we can then know, it's easier. Yeah, that's right. We can know what to do.

And then there's some confusion about, are we preserving the culture or are we preserving God's desire for human flourishing? And those two things become conflated. That's right. How do you parse them? We have our thumb on why interpretation of the letters is such a denominational divisive issue in the history of the Christian, at least in the Protestant Reformation. Why do we have a million different denominations?

A lot of it, seriously, much of it is based on our preloaded assumptions about how we appropriate the New Testament letters. Now, does it the kingdom of God create a culture that we should desire. Yeah. And part of quote unquote culture war is assuming that exists and then trying to realize that. By culture war, are you talking about in America? Yeah, that's an American kind of thing. Yeah. But yeah, so by culture war, it's Christian saying, this is how culture should exist to glorify God.

Yeah. So we're going to fight all these cultural battles where another way to think about it is I'm going to come into my culture as a missionary. How does this culture working? And now how can the gospel now? But it's a challenge. Yes. But then also a firm other thing. A firm and challenge and reshape the culture from it within. Reshape them with the story of the gospel. And maybe those two things shouldn't feel so different. Well, here's an example. I think in honor shame culture, Paul's gospel

was incredibly scandalous because it disrupted the social ladder of rank and value. And created what we, Westerners, look back on and see as, oh, he was about equality. And it's like, well, that's not how he would have imagined it. For him, it was just the gift of God's grace comes to every person, regardless of who they are, and puts them at the same place of value before the Creator. And that's different than what we think of as equality.

Oh, yeah. On this side of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, We've got equality as loaded with a different story in World View for anybody living after the French Revolution. What's the quick version? Oh, well, I mean, in the history of the French Revolution, it was equality, that is, for white males, right? Okay. And so, and that's, of course, the legacy that's getting shaken in new ways with each generation now.

And it's also very much bound up with a deist worldview and a story about God as a clockmaker who said the universe to work and then peace out. So it's just different, different setting. My point is just in honor shame, culture, the disruption of the social rank scale was what was most scandalous. Right. In my modern, western, individualist, self-esteem, self-therapyric culture, it's going to be actually the opposite, I think. It's going to be the gospel challenges the way that I have...

Exist within a community. Yeah, it's going to challenge the narrative that I'm an island under myself and that I can realize my full All my dreams and my potential by disassociating myself from value from other groups. It's gonna be about my value comes from That I am a brother of the emperor. I'm somebody's brother and sister Whether it's my actual family or some other group. So the same story will have two very different types of challenges based on the different cultures. The New Testament was written in honor of the same culture. And so we get lots of case studies of how that worked out, but that doesn't necessarily

mean that those exact strategies should be applied across the board. It depends on the culture. Now we're back to the letters as snapshots of the first generation working out the gospel in a Greco-Roman honor shame culture. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bible Project Podcast. If you'd like to submit a question for our upcoming

question response podcast on the series we'd love to hear from you. Record yourself asking the question and email that recording to info at BibleProject.com. Keep the question to about 20 or 30 seconds. Let us know your name where you're from. And if you can also in the email that you send it, transcribe your audio so it's easier for us to sift through them, that would be wonderful. Next week,

we're going to continue to talk about the context of the New Testament letters by looking at their situational context. What were the specific issues that the early church had that the apostles were addressing? Stop reading the letters as a grab bag of inspiring verses. I think that's not a helpful practice. However, if once you read through the whole letter and understand how it all works, there will be certain lines that pop. And so reading in context and the situational context doesn't prevent you from having inspiring Bible verses. What it will do is actually help you understand them even

more. Today's show is produced by Dan Gummel. Show notes are by Camden McAfee, where crowdfunding nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, we make free resources to experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. You can find everything that we've made on our website, Bibleproject.com. It's all for free because of the generosity

of thousands of people just like you who pitch in and make this project possible. Thanks for being a part of this with us. Hi this is Erin Kirk from Riverside, California. Okay I first heard about the Bible project from the you version app that I use for my Bible reading. Hi this is Cynthia Davis I'm from Virginia and one of the things I love about the Bible project is the simplicity and the fun that it brings to scripture. It just makes things so crystal clear. We believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a crowd-funded project by people like me. Find free videos, study notes, podcasts, and more at the Bible project. you