Paul championed the mission to the gentiles. From the very beginning of his conversion, he received the revelation that the field of his calling would be in a gentile –multicultural– context (Acts 9).
One of the bigger battles that Paul had to fight was with the judaizing Christians who believed that gentiles, in addition to converting to Christ, should also keep the religious and cultural way of life of the Jews. The more radical judaizers would teach that to become part of the people of God they had to become Jews.
We must be careful that in our evangelistic or missionaries efforts we be not only “americanizing, hispanicizing, africanizing, etc.” people of other cultures. It is true that for practical reasons, it is important for people of other cultures to be assimilated within the dominant culture, but that is secondary to Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. In his mission to the gentiles, Paul did not require them to be assimilated into Jewish culture. No matter how reasonable and advantageous the process of integrating into another culture may be, for the effects of reaching people for Christ in multicultural contexts, they do not have to be as I am, culturally speaking, to be converted to Christ or to be good Christians.
As biblical Christians, we should get our identity from our relationship with Christ and not primarily from our ethnic identity. When Paul defines himself, he says that he has “no confidence in the flesh” that is, in his rich Jewish background as a Pharisee. He says about all his religious and ethnic labels that he “counts them as garbage.” Paul has a new pivotal point around which his life revolves. That new pivotal point is Christ and the gospel. Paul gets his identity from these (Phil. 3).
Humanly speaking, nobody can deny that cultural backgrounds close or open doors (Paul himself sometimes used his Roman citizenship as recourse). Nobody can deny the reality of “technologically developed or underdeveloped” regions. However, as Christians, we are called to surpass the human criteria that determine the way we perceive ourselves and the way we see and treat others.
We should see ourselves as part of a “new creation” in Christ and not use the standards of the old creation. Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:16 “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” In Colossians 3 Paul says that we should “put to death our members which are of the earth.” The reason to doing so is that now we are part of a new creation in Christ. This new creation in Christ is the new humanity that God is forming in us. This is the new community of the Spirit where: “There is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” All this teaches us that as Christians we no longer treat our brothers and sisters based on nationality or social class labels but based on our unity in Christ. National identities are important, but in a multicultural context, these identities should be integrated in the larger identity of God's international family.
- Guillermo Flores
woot - go new creation!!!
Exciting also, that this is not some dream of a "Christian Utopia" that we can somehow achieve here by "being really nice to each other"...but rather God's plan for his new creation...that He has begun here and now. As our lives are sourced in that restoring Spirit, who knows what things will be possible!
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