E. Randolph Richards > Quotes

“Our emphasis on saving makes sense when we consider that most of us think of our options as either saving or spending. But the biblical witness and Christian tradition suggest that there's another option: sharing.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“At some point in this generation, "Take up your cross and follow me" changed into, "Come to Jesus and he'll make your life better.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer "being fed," I'm out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become-permanently and spiritually-a part of the church. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word connotes in the non-Western world.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Some of these proverbs sound as if they come from Scripture (and many people believe they do), like this one: 'God helps those who help themselves'-which is likely anti-biblical. God helps those who rely on him.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“This misreading of Scripture arises from combining our individualism with a more subtle, deeply hidden and deeply rooted aspect of our Western worldview: we still think the universe centers around us.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible:”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen. When a passage of Scripture appears to leave out a piece of the puzzle because something went without being said, we instinctively fill in the gap with a piece from our own culture-usually a piece that goes
without being said.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a crosscultural experience.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Another reason Westerners are tempted to compromise is because we tend to view the world dualistically. Things are true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. We have little patience for ambiguity or for the unsettling reality that values change over time.”
― E. Randolph Richards

“In the West, it may help if the church started thinking more in terms of we than me.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Our tendency to emphasize rules over relationship and correctness over community means that we are often willing to sacrifice relationships on the altar of rules.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Sin is corporate; it permeates the whole body. We don’t like to think that way, but it’s true. It leavens the whole lump and the honor of us all is at stake.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“We like to say that generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“all questions of interpretation are, in the end, questions about application,”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“important public place in all of Israel. There couldn’t be any higher stakes in the honor game. The second point Matthew makes is at the end of the conflict story: “No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions” (Mt 22:46). Jesus won. The leaders then decide to kill Jesus. Honor is at stake here. They cannot just go down to the assassin’s booth at the market. Sticking a knife in Jesus in some Jerusalem alley would make him a martyr. They need to publicly disgrace Jesus in order to get their honor back. They need him executed as a criminal. This honor stuff is pretty serious. Some Middle Easterners still kill over honor.[19] It is within this context that we must understand the fact that Jesus encouraged his disciples to be humble: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor” (Lk 14:8). If you are not humble, you could suffer a terrible fate: “for”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Alas, here is the bigger problem: maybe the reason we North Americans struggle to find makarios in our personal lives is because we don’t have a word in our native language to denote it.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“bad behavior of its characters? In stories of right/wrong, we can identify the bad guys and the bad actions. Sometimes in Scripture it is harder. We sometimes see “sin” where the narrator did not intend it—or worse, we don’t see “sin” when the narrator was waving it in front of our faces. In the outrageous story in Judges 19 of the Levite and his concubine, we likely misread many parts. We see “sin” in several parts of the story: unfaithful concubine (v. 2), sexual assault (v. 22), rape (v. 25), cruelty (v. 28) and desecration of the dead (v. 29). We wouldn’t want to dispute any of these sins, but we likely missed some the narrator considered more important. The man repeatedly shamed the woman’s family by taking her from her parents but never giving her a full marriage (vv. 1-3) and later insulted her father’s hospitality (v. 10). Also, what the man had feared would happen in Jebus, a non-Israelite town (v. 12), actually happened in an Israelite town.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“It is possible to be so worried about the time (chronos) for something—such as the return of Christ—that we miss the time (kairos) for something—such as living like citizens of the kingdom of God.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“I suspect that the meaning of the Lord’s warning was clear to the Laodiceans. He wished his people were hot (like the salubrious waters of Hierapolis) or cold (like the refreshing waters of Colossae). Instead”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“So why go to church? Why worship with a group? Because, in some way we may not fully understand, the Spirit indwells the group in a way the Spirit does not indwell the individual. We are all built together to become one, whole building: a single dwelling for his Spirit. Like it or not, we need each other. As Rodney Reeves noted, “I cannot worship God by myself.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“when we project our own cultural mores onto the original audience of the Bible, we may fail to apply the Bible correctly in our own lives.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Being family gave you obligations. Jesus and Paul’s language about church as family was radical talk and not merely cultural convention.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“As bearers of the name of Christ”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Because we’re hesitant to make value distinctions—and rightfully so—we’re often slow to make any distinctions at all. Thus it goes without being said for many that to be truly equal”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Western societies are, by and large, individualistic societies. The most important entity in an individualistic culture is the individual person.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“He is an aggregate who must shoulder the burden of village, family, parents, ancestors. . . . When the first missionary to Japan, Francisco Xavier, began his labours in the southern provinces, this was the most formidable obstacle he encountered. The Japanese said, “I believe the Christian teachings are good. But I would be betraying my ancestors if I went to a Paradise where they cannot dwell.”[1]”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“This appears to give us a hard and fast rule you can take to the bank; there seems to be no room for exception. Yet in the verses immediately following the Jerusalem Council”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Our cultural mores tell us sexual modesty is necessary while economic modesty is considerate: preferable but not necessary. In other words, one of the ways Westerners routinely misread instructions about modesty in the Bible is by assuming sexual modesty is of greater concern than economic modesty.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

“Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There’s more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. So if you don’t have all the money you want, it’s because you lack the virtues required for success—industry, frugality and determination. A nineteenth-century biographer of George Washington put the matter this way: “In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands . . . why is any man hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?”[17] There appears to have been a trend from very early in American thought to invert Paul’s proverb “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thess 3:10 NIV 1984) to read, “If a man can’t eat, it is because he doesn’t work.” People know what they need to do to make money, we think, so if they’re poor, they must deserve it.
This understanding of wealth is the very opposite of how many non-Western cultures view it. Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves.”
― E. Randolph Richards, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible