Ethics and the Christian

Identifying Culture

A culture is1. Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience,

beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

2. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

3. Culture is communication, communication is culture.

4. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.

5. A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

6. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.

7. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.

8. Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.

9. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

God was building a Jewish Culture1. It’s foundation was the 10 commandments2. Israel was specifically prohibited from any

involvement with surrounding nations3. They were to be consumed with a culture that

reflected God and His nature: Deuteronomy 6.1-94. God totally dominated their religious practice,

their laws, their eating habits, their view of property rights, morality, and their music.

5. And He did that in a very small geographic space

God acknowledges the existence of other, non-covenant, cultures

1. Deuteronomy 7:1 (I understand the other nations to be completely different cultures)

2. Deuteronomy 12.2. Israel’s conquest of the land foreshadows the NT believers experience—a conflict over leadership of the same space—our hearts and minds.

3. Paul brought the Gospel to other cultures—Acts 17.16-21

We live in a non-covenant culture1. It was never a “Christian” country—our

constitution says so.2. It was founded with much sympathy to

Protestant Christianity.3. It’s laws and constitution reflected Biblical

precepts4. It did—in small degree—tolerate other

religions

Our culture has certainly moved away from that

1. Material prosperity is one of our biggest concerns

2. Earthly pleasure is one of our biggest concerns3. Man-made safety and security is one of our

biggest concerns4. Enjoying the fruits of material success without

going to the trouble of working for them is one of our biggest concerns

5. Unbelief is no longer only individual in nature, but now is institutionalized in nature

In the midst of cultures like ours, God is building a Kingdom culture

1. In Solomon’s day, you could find the Kingdom of God on a map

2. In the Church age, you can’t. Luke 17.213. God is not presently building a geographic

Kingdom4. But God is building a Kingdom, and just like

that of the Jews, He is the center of worship, ethics, morality, and music. See the Sermon the Mount

So our difficulty in living as believers in this world is amplified

as our earthly culture looks less and less like our Heavenly one