At the American Society of Missiology, Terry Muck made the argument that the story of the Good Samaritan can be read (faithfully) from the hermeneutic of interreligious dialog: Here we have a story of people from different faiths (albeit faiths of shared origin) showing compassion, regardless of - yes, regardless of ethnicity- but also regardless of religion. The powerpoint featured global images of the good Samaritan from this blog. Most moving to me was the image of a black person, perhaps in South Africa, healing a white man, as other privileged whites passed him on the road.
I suppose that the story can be accurately read from an interreligious perspective, since the question put to Jesus was "who is my neighbor?" And our neighbors come from all religious backgrounds. And we have faithfully loved our neighbor when we show compassion. But we have also faithfully loved him or her when we share the unique blessings found in Jesus Christ.

Richards and O'Brien's (2012) popular book on how Western culture causes us to misunderstand biblical passages only takes about four hours to read, but will enrich your sermons and stretch your understanding of God and the Christian praxis. While many of the stories are about Indonesia, it is not about an Indonesian hermeneutic- it is about how the Indonesian cultural logic made the biblical stories come to life for the authors.


The authors trace the them of 'what goes without saying' in a culture- that is, the implicit cultural logic that everyone knows, but which those from another culture may not know. This way of making implicit cultural information explicit is in the tradition of Bruce Malina, who did an anthropology of New Testament World. It is also, I might add, what Bible translators do as they translate every verse into vernaculars. Some interesting insights:

• Protestant Europe values marriage so much that we misread the cultural logic of the New Testament world, where chastity and singleness were indeed marks of piety. Paul assumed this in 1 Cor. 7.
• Our cultural logics tell us what foods are edible and which are not, and we tend to judge others who break those norms. When Peter saw the sheet of unclean foods coming down from heaven (with lobster and pork) it would have been like if we saw the sheet full of cockroaches and rats
• Western readers want all their truths about God to be transmitted in propositional format, so we prefer "God brings an end to all wars" (Ex 15:3, LXX) over  "God is a warrior." But God clearly chose to reveal truths about himself through poetry and parable, as well as propositions.
• For example, why does Luke have Jesus say "anyone who does not hate his father or mother" while Matthew has Jesus say "anyone who loves their family more than me"? Because Luke was translating directly from Jesus' Aramaic, whereas Matthew gave the MEANING.

• Issues about "modesty" in the New Testament we as much about financial modesty as sexual modesty: not wearing jewelry and covering the hair were ways to avoid marking oneself as a wealthy woman who could through expensive parties.
• In the cultures of the Old and New Testament, money and honor were limited resources- to build up money for honor for oneself was to steal this from others. So everyone was meant to be kept at a more or less similar level
• For example, the relationship between David and Bathsheba was very public - he sent for her, inquired about her, and she sent word about her pregnancy. So when Uriah came back, he was not unaware- his refusal to sleep with Bathsheba was public refusal to let David off the hook.
• The authors dare to remind us that a number of "virtues" in American culture are not in the New Testament world: EG: that your teeth must be white, you must be self-sufficient, and you should fight for freedom at all costs. 
• They also dare to suggest that not all the biblical promises apply to "me" or you- especially consider Jeremiah 1:5 and 29:11. And certainly-God wouldn't do such a dramatic event as the parousia without ME would he?!




• The weakness of Richards and O'Brian's book is that it relies almost solely on anecdote from Indonesia, and projects that information onto "most other people outside of Western Europe" and onto the world of the Ancient Near East. The authors recognize and apologize for this weakness at the beginning of the book- and of course, the anecdote from Indonesia is what makes the book such a good story. Besides, virtually all of their claims about parallels between Indonesian culture and the Ancient Near East are well-documented by biblical scholars (though, since Richards and O'Brian's book is written at a popular level, they spare us the extensive footnoting to document that scholarship).

I recently came across this back translation (1918) of Psalm 23 from the Khmu language, which is primarily spoken in Laos.*


“The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep
I don’t want to own anything.
The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field.
He wants me to go to the lake. He makes my good spirit come back.
Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death, I do not care.
You are with me. You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable.
You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch.
You pour car grease on my head.
My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows.
Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all my life.
And I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by the tribe."

True, translating 3000 year old Hebrew poetry into a tribal language is  always going to be difficult- which is the main reason this story has such valence- we grin as we watch the native speaker do his best to puzzle through the missionary's botched language skills.

But it doesn't always have to miss the mark this badly. Note that this translation was done before Bible translators understood the importance of village checks and back translations. Nowadays, once the vernacular translators have given the primary draft their best shot, native speakers who were not involved in the primary draft must translate the vernacular back into a lingua franca. That way the consultant can ask speakers, "Why would the Great Boss want you to lie down in the field" or "what other kinds of spirits could come back to you" or "What kind of grease was poured on his head? Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Why would he do that? What kind of furniture was he talking about, and why would he do that?"  Then the consultant can work with the speakers to come up with alternative renderings that more closely align with the original meaning.

...unless, of course, you think that meaning is found in the community, and not in the author's intent. I suppose deconstructionists and postmodern literary critics would say that this ethno-hermeneutic of Psalm 23 is equally valid?

*(originally provided by Darrell Whiteman in Wichita Eagle, January 7, 1960, but also in Grunlan and Mayers Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective and in Richards and O'Brian Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes)