Worldviews and Culture:
Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture

by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith

Charles Kraft

In 1980, Carl F. H. Henry offered a devastating review of Charles H. Kraft's Christianity in Culture. Henry does not deny that Kraft intends to be an evangelical, true to the historical faith of the Church, but he demonstrates clearly and irrefutably that if Kraft really wishes to maintain the faithfulness to the truth that he professes, he will have to offer major revisions of his views of Christianity and culture.

Henry's critique leaves little doubt about how deep and serious Charles Kraft's theological problems are. His article includes the following insights:

Along with the anthropologist Monica Wilson, he insists that our ideas must change as societies change (Religion and the Transformation of Society [Cambridge: University Press, 1971] 5)-an idea, presumably, that Wilson and Kraft consider impervious to change.

Kraft indicates that no universal criteria are applicable to all cultures and that each culture is valid only for its own participants (ibid. 49). None can be regarded as final, and no transcendently absolute criterion is allowed to judge any. Kraft declares this belief in the validity of other cultures to be the equivalent in anthropology of the Golden Rule in theology (ibid. 99). Yet cultural validity, Kraft says, does not oblige us to approve of customs like cannibalism, widow-burning, infanticide, polygamy and premarital sex (ibid. 50). On what basis can an emphasis on mere cultural validity identify any practices as universally wicked and sinful? Kraft writes of "the American assumption" that having sexual relations with someone other than one's first wife is adultery (ibid. 6). If vices and virtues are conceptually untransferable from one cultural context to another, why should any or all be considered universally normative or abhorrent?

But in any event he can provide no objective basis for approving monogamy, democracy, capitalism, self-determination, or military preparedness, above antithetical views, that is, polygamy, tyranny, communism, enslavement, or military weakness. While he writes of every culture being in some respects "stronger" than others, the term "stronger" cannot reflect objective gradations of truth or morality. Kraft's assumptions provide no basis for regarding any culture as either superior or inferior to any other.

God limits himself to the capacities of "imperfect and imperfectible, finite, limited" culture, and has done so even in the incarnation of Christ (ibid. 115). God uses "human language with all its finiteness, its relativity, and its assured misperception of infinity" (ibid. 114, emphasis mine). If Kraft means what he here says, we should distrust his own claims about God and his relations. But Kraft is much more vocal about the infallibility of others than about his own.

[A]ll human understandings of God's revelation and all behavior-responses are culture-conditioned and none is to be considered universally valid or true (ibid. 123).

While Kraft insists on evaluation of cultural behavior, he holds that the "meaning of that behavior is derived entirely from within the other's system, never from ours or from some 'cosmic pool' or universal meanings" (ibid. 124-125). The fact that God revealed some truths pertaining only to the Hebrews is invoked to justify the notion of the culture-relativity of all revelational information (ibid. 126).

Scriptural teachings are devalued as culturally conditioned while modern communication theories are assimilated to the revelation of the Spirit (ibid. 169fl.).

Kraft warns us that the New Testament is largely phrased in "Greek conceptual categories (rather than in supracultural categories)" (ibid. 130).

For Kraft, the "functions and meanings behind" the doctrinal forms hold priority. He leaves "largely negotiable" in terms of divergent cultural matrixes "the cultural forms in which these constant functions are expressed" (ibid. 118). "There is, I believe, no absoluteness to the human formulation of�cdoctrine," he says, but "the meaning conveyed by a particular doctrine�c is of primary concern to God" (ibid. 118). Here Kraft deflates and relativizes the doctrines of the Bible and the creeds of Christendom. Meanwhile he presumes not only to articulate the supracultural mind of God, but to entrench his own debatable doctrine as the rule to which he accommodates all else. He ranges Jesus against the Pharisees and against evangelical doctrinal orthodoxy and contends that Jesus considered beliefs and practices "simply the cultural vehicles" through which "the eternal message of God" is to be expressed and which must be continually updated to fulfill this function (ibid. 119).

"No cultural symbols have exactly the same meanings in any two cultures" (ibid. 138). Kraft apparently does not intend to say that his own use of cultural-symbols invalidates or precludes an understanding of his meaning; the meanings Kraft forges at Fuller Seminary presumably are reduction-resistant.[1]

The radical cultural relativism of Kraft's approach is apparent. Henry's trenchant evaluation of Kraft should have been more than enough of a warning to evangelical theologians and missionaries to beware the quicksand of cultural relativism.

There is, I believe, one point that might be added to Henry's shattering analysis. It is a methodological point that may help show how it is that Kraft departed so far from the Biblical standard. First, we need to consider Kraft's notion of a worldview. The issue primarily theological, but we may note in passing that Kraft went through something of a conversion experience, which he considers a change of worldview. Since the late 1980's Kraft has joined the charismatic Christians in affirming the continuing validity of sign miracles — while, ironically, maintaining his cultural relativism and the denial of the continuing validity of Biblical cultural norms. For some reason, he does not seem to regard his own conversion to a new theology as a cultural matter, even though theology and worldview are generally subsumed under culture in Kraft's theory.

This brings us to the key issue for understanding Kraft's methodological problem - his understanding of the idea of a worldview. For Kraft, a worldview is the "culturally structured assumptions, values, and commitments underlying a people's perception of REALITY."[2] In an explanation of cultural structuring, Kraft repeats the phrase "culture, including worldview" at least four times as he introduces his major points.[3] Worldview, in other words, is repeatedly seen as subordinate to culture and is regarded virtually as a product of one's culture.

For this reason, Kraft objects to Christians speaking of either a Biblical worldview or the Biblical worldview. Kraft believes that the notion of a particular worldview being Biblical "could easily be misconstrued to imply either that there is only one cultural worldview in the Bible (which there isn't) or that God endorses one or another of those worldviews as normative for everyone (which he doesn't)."[4] Kraft goes on to explain,

The use of the term worldview in this way easily misleads Western people into believing that God endorses Hebrew cultural perspectives on life. But there is nothing sacred about Hebrew perspectives, even though they are connected with the Bible. They simply make up a human culture that God was pleased to work through to reveal something much more important.[5]

Again, a few pages later, Kraft adds,

A position that sees it necessary for people to totally replace their cultural worldview with something called a Christian worldview does not really understand the Scriptures. God is not against culture in this way, though he has plenty to say in opposition to many sociocultural beliefs and practices.[6]

Though Kraft believes that Jesus had a worldview, he does not seem to want to say that all Christians should adopt Jesus' view and make it the basis of Christian civilization. Instead, we are told that Jesus' worldview "provides for us the clearest picture of how God's ideals are to be combined with the human perspectives of a typical worldview."[7] We are supposed to imitate this combination of God's ideals with a human worldview because God wants to work in and through our own socio-cultural matrix.

If the concept of a worldview begins to seem rather murky and if the relationship between culture and worldview seems to be so complex that we can hardly imagine how it is that we can distinguish God's ideals in the worldview of Jesus from those merely cultural worldview perspectives with which Jesus' worldview was united, we are apparently supposed to find comfort in the thought that the science of cultural anthropology can sort all of this out for us. We might have had more confidence in Kraft's ability to correctly distinguish the permanent from the transient if he had been able to give us an intellectually coherent explanation of culture and worldview. As it is, we have a formulation that is complex in part because of sloppy theology, though the subject itself is indeed not simple.

[1] All of the above quotations come from Carl F. H. Henry, "The Cultural Relativizing of Revelation" in the Trinity Journal, Fall, 1980, pp. 153-164.

[2] Charles H. Kraft, Christianity with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernatural (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1989), p. 20. Emphasis in the original.

[3] Ibid., pp. 54-55.

[4] Ibid., p. 103.

[5] Ibid., p. 103.

[6] Ibid., p. 106.

[7] Ibid., p. 106.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Charles Kraft
• Worldview and Culture
• Worldview and Worldviews
• Worldview and Theology
• Worldview and Covenant
• Conclusion