Cultural Intelligence

Living for God in a Diverse, Pluralistic World

Darrell L. Bock

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781535981941
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Cultural intelligence requires that we understand the changing world around us, and engage these changes in ways that edify the church and winsomely seek after the lost. In Cultural Intelligence, Darrell L. Bock builds a theology of cultural engagement, and equips readers to relate well to their culture with an eye on the example set by Paul in the New Testament. This timely book will highlight the need to center our beliefs and practices around God's word while interacting well with a culture that is increasingly detached from biblical truth.

A Theology of Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence requires knowing our calling as well as the real nature of our battle. The spiritual nature of the conflict means we must utilize both a spiritual perspective and divinely appointed resources. It also means appreciating what is going on with the people around us who have made different choices. In the section that follows, we will consider six of the most significant texts on the cultural places and spaces we find ourselves occupying, as well as how the resources we have enable us to engage wisely.

Six Key Texts

Ephesians 6:10–18

The key text is verse 12:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens.

Christians fight a battle in a fallen world. Scripture often speaks of the world as being opposed to the things of God and, as a result, opposed to believers. John 15:19 reads, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you.”

In a battle, it is essential to understand the calling and the mission. For decades the church fought a culture war where we often made other people the enemy. But this core biblical text on engagement reminds us that our real battle is spiritual. It requires spiritual resources, and we are armed with those in response to the conflict.

Ephesians 6:10–18 is the most explicit battle text among the New Testament letters. In fact, the Greek word for battle (or as verse 12 calls it, our “struggle”) entails hand-to-hand combat, and the context involves arrows being shot during the struggle. It is a life-and-death fight.

Verse 12 of this text says we are in a wrestling match that needs armor. The metaphor is mixed, with arrows also coming from afar. In the passage, Paul is telling the Ephesians to stand strong as they resist the devil (vv. 11, 13). Ground has already been won. That ground is spiritual and is tied to things such as our theology and our character. That ground resides in the church and with the believing people of God. We need to hold our ground, not take over new territory.

This is what the text mentions as armor: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and God’s Word. Commentators debate whether this is about truth in the abstract or truth applied; whether it is about righteousness as justification or righteousness applied. Given what has been said in the letter of Ephesians to this point, it is probably all of this rather than either/or.

Both a guide to the battle and a description of the battle are present in this text. Strength is to come from the Lord (v. 10), and we are to equip ourselves with what he provides: his armor (v. 11).

If we were to state the key verse emphatically, it would read: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens” (v. 12). I emphasized “not” because on the other side of it is a fourfold description of the enemy that makes our opponent and the nature of the battle clear. Our mission is not to defeat or crush people. It is to stand with spiritual resources against an unseen enemy. These spiritual enemies are so invisible that people may not even realize they exist.

To repeat an essential point, the rest of the text names our resources: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God, and prayer (vv. 13–18). There is nothing about circumstances here. There is nothing about political ideologies here. The resources are our theology, our faith, and the quality and character of our lives as believers.

People are not the enemy. They are the goal. When Jesus sent forth his disciples with the Great Commission in Matt 28:18–20, he said to go into the world and make disciples. He did not say, “Go into the church and be disciples,” or “Withdraw from public space.” He sent the church into the public space, armed for battle with spiritual resources that only God and the gospel provide through Christ.

Now, let’s think through our battle metaphor. We are members of the GIA (God’s Intelligence Agency). Our assignment is to rescue people, as special forces do. We are to seek to rescue people from the clutches of unseen enemies. Those people walk “according to the ways of this world” (Eph 2:2)—a reality that should not surprise us. It is unrealistic to expect people who are not connected to God to live in ways he directs. This is why the gospel is so important in this struggle. The gospel equips people with ability and capability that they otherwise do not possess.

What does a member of the GIA do, and what is the mission? The mission is to so faithfully and relationally live out the truth of God that a way of rescue is made apparent. To so faithfully represent the truth of God that our lives and words demonstrate a flourishing, alternative way of life—his way of life.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to rescue people out of the clutches of destructive spiritual forces so sinister that people may not realize they are in any kind of danger. This is an enormous part of the challenge. People are in extreme danger, yet they don’t know it or see it. Understanding that our special-forces operation involves the rescue of people in harm due to sinister forces they often don’t recognize totally changes how I engage. If I see the person across from me not as an enemy but as one who needs to be recovered, as lost and needing to be found, I will engage differently.

This is not mission impossible, and this tape will not self-destruct in five seconds. This is the call of God, where we possess the resources to fight the battle he describes in the way he prescribes. Those resources are contained in and deployed through the truth we live out day by day individually among our neighbors, as the body of Christ before the world, and as believers engaging the world in ways that are distinct from how the world engages.

In the culture-war approach, we have all too often grown misguided in the mission, making people the enemy. In that faulty execution of our assignment, we’ve not only failed to accomplish the call of making disciples, but we have actually damaged the church by robbing it of its good news. Our challenges to culture, which were intended to attract, have sometimes been expressed so hard and so heartlessly that the recipients have been repelled instead. This is especially the case when we do battle in the same ways the world battles, or when we neglect to live in contrast to the world. As soon as we shed the relational distinctives that are the church—the call to love our enemies and to live authentically with integrity and grace—we look like any other special-interest group. Then people will choose cultural options with their own special interests in mind.

The damage to the church’s reputation and the cause of Christ is immense when the mission is as ill-defined as we’ve made it. Masses of our own young people look at how we older generations engage culturally, and they reply, “No, thank you!”

Our assignment is to engage in this spiritual battle using the spiritual resources we’ve been given so that, by the distinctive way we live and love, others will be drawn in. That distinctiveness is most evident when we love our enemies as Jesus called us to do. It is not an easy assignment, which is why it requires spiritual resources to accomplish.

Many biblical texts point to the rich resources we possess. Ephesians 1:3 says we have been given every spiritual resource we need from heaven, and we can praise God for that. First Peter 1:3–4a blesses the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ because, “according to his great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is unperishable.” And as 1 John 4:4 says, “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” This is true no matter what the world says, does, or thinks.

Ephesians 1:21–22 likewise teaches that Jesus has been exalted over all other powers and appointed head of the church. Nothing can remove him from his place, regardless of what happens in the world. And nothing can alter our position in Christ as a result.

There is nothing to fear in the battle, for the spiritual resources we have are great and the identity we have is unshakable. Our assignment is to draw on those resources rather than rely on those that make us more like the world. We do so by engaging intelligently with people who think differently than we do. Not by despising or disrespecting them, but by seeing them as hostages in need of rescue. When we act like the world and perceive them as enemies, our rescue mission goes off course and we lose our spiritual advantage.

1 Peter 3:13–18

The key text is verses 15–16a:

But in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do this with gentleness and respect.

First Peter is a great book. Much of it covers engagement. The apostle Peter, the author, sat at Jesus’s feet and took the engagement class the Savior held as he prepared the disciples to go into the world with the gospel.

One of my favorite engagement passages is 1 Pet 3:15, a verse often used in Scripture-memory programs. We are to be prepared to explain what we believe, our hope. Our faith is not ultimately about ideas, though it certainly has those, but is about hope.

Peter had one word he could choose to summarize everything that faith comprises, and he chose “hope.” That hope is about understanding and appreciating why we are on Earth and how we can connect to the Creator who made us. First Peter 1:13 ends with the exhortation to “set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” We see that hope in the way that God made the connection between us and him possible. It is why the believer’s message is called the good news. We get reconnected to the living God. We “get located” in the way we were designed to live, both now and for eternity.

First Peter 3:15 is an exciting call and a wonderful verse. But we often miss what is around it that helps answer our question about what intelligent engagement involves.

Starting in verse 13, we’re given a picture of the world as it ought to be: “Who . . . will harm you if you are devoted to what is good?” If we do good to others, things should go well. Simple enough.

Only we live in an upside-down world, so the next verse reads, “But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed” (1 Peter 3:14a). Now, look at that verse. It anticipates that we will suffer for doing right, just as Jesus taught his disciples (Matt 5:10–12). It sounds as if Peter actually understood what Jesus had been saying in effect throughout the entire second half of his ministry: “If you follow me, there will be pushback. The disciple bears a cross daily. That is the world we engage in and with. Yet we are blessed, because our acceptance does not come from the world but from God and being faithful to him.”

The next part of the verse is even more amazing. “But do not be terrified of them or be shaken” (1 Peter 3:14b NET). There is no cause for fear as we engage, even though we can anticipate rejection and injustice.

Now, I have to be honest. A lot of what I see in the church’s response to our culture looks like fear or our being shaken. We fear for the loss of the Judeo-Christian net I mentioned earlier. We tremble at the way the world lives and the choices it makes, disturbed by the influences it produces. These are disturbing events, but they should not surprise us.

Our fearful responses never help us engage well. The believer’s hope and identity rests in God. It is at this point that we connect to Christ as our hope and march into the world ready to engage, ready to give a defense, ready to stand firm, and armed with the spiritual resources that allow us to stand. And our dominant message is positive. It is about hope.

The tension of sharing the gospel and engaging with our culture is always a balance between the challenge the gospel presents to people about their sin and failure to live rightly and the gospel’s invitation to enter into hope and a new kind of life. As we engage, we have to simultaneously challenge and invite. How do we do that well?

The church often fails by focusing so hard on the challenge that the hope gets lost. We so wish to highlight what is wrong in the world that we mute the hope that God has made available, or we defer that hope to the future alone. Yet his hope starts now, in this life. Now, the only reason to come to a new hope is because we realize shortcomings in this life, many of them our own. So, challenge has to be there somewhere. Yet our landing place is hope. It cannot go missing. Biblical hope is not about prosperity or a trouble-free life. It exists in a life that is plugged into God’s purpose for creating us and aligned with his reasons for making us to begin with. So, in our engagement, it is important that we never lose the message of hope in the midst of a defense of the gospel and the challenge that comes with the gospel.

The only way for good news to be good news is for the good news to be in the message! And it needs to be communicated with an appreciation of why the news is good (because there is a rescue) and why grace is grace and not deserved or merited.

Often, we stop reading 1 Pet 3:15 right there at the mention of being prepared to give a defense for our hope. That is a major mistake. We don’t merely o...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Theology of Cultural Intelligence
• 2. Back to the Future: Lessons on Engagement from Paul
• 3. Difficult Conversations: How to Make Them Better
• 4. What Is the Purpose of Salvation and the Biblical Imperative of Love?
• 5. Intelligent Cultural Engagement and the Bible: A Second Effective Way to Teach Scripture
• Index