Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 21:4 (Dec 1978)
Article: Interpreting In Cultural Context
Author: Charles H. Kraft

Interpreting In Cultural Context

Charles H. Kraft*

*Charles Kraft is professor of missions at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Califomia.

At the start of this paper I would like to briefly introduce myself. First of all I am an evangelical Christian, committed to God through Jesus Christ as revealed in the written Word. I have been trained in an evangelical college and seminary and now, as a professor in an evangelical seminary, I endeavor to maintain in all that I do a commitment to the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted from an evangelical perspective. I am, furthermore, a missionary and trainer of missionaries. I am thus committed to the communication of the revealed message of God to the ends of the earth. Additionally I am an anthropologist, linguist and communicologist. From these disciplinary involvements I am committed to studying and analyzing the Word and the communication of God’s message from a Christ-centered, cross-cultural perspective.

An evangelical anthropologist should have something to say about culture and the Bible, and I feel that my evangelical commitment to the inspired Word of God and my attempts to integrate that commitment with my academic disciplines enable me to at least take a stab at certain of the cultural issues that affect our attempts to interpret the Bible. Many, however, consider the disciplines that I represent to be basically antagonistic to an evangelical commitment. I do not find them so. Indeed, I feel that my involvement in cultural, linguistic and communicational studies has deepened and strengthened my commitment to God’s inspired Word. I find that these perspectives continually illumine for me the Scriptural message for which I have given my life. For the Bible is a cross-cultural book, and to interpret it properly we need the sharpest tools available to enable us to deal reverently—and yet precisely—with the inspired message that comes to us in cultural forms that are not our own.

The matter of interpretation in culture is a weighty concem. For the Word has come to us via the forms of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek cultures. We are immersed in a culture far different from any of these. We cannot, therefore, always trust our culturally-conditioned reflexes to give us the proper interpretation of Scripture. We trust the Holy Spirit to keep us from going too far astray in our interpretations. Yet we are often puzzled that God’s Spirit does not lead us all to the same answer concerning every issue.

In this paper I have selected four areas where insight into the influences of culture can assist us in our understanding of how the Scriptures are to be interpreted. Underlying my discussion is an assumption that I have examined in another place.1 This assumption is that God comm...