Redeeming Cultures

This is a scan of the actual Clan McAlpine crest that my parents gave my brother and I for Christmas last year. While I'm extremely interested in my Scottish heritage, there are some bits that obviously aren't all that positive. But there are also things that are inherent in the Scottish/Celtic culture that are godly and from God, and I want to celebrate those things.

If you haven't read "Peace Child" or "Eternity In Their Hearts" by Don Richardson, I highly recommend these books for their contribution to the understanding that every culture has "God's fingerprints" somewhere in it. Historically, many missionary endeavors crushed local culture and "Romanized" (or more recently "Christianized") the "uncivilized" cultures. It's always been interesting to me that the Celtic missionaries were more focussed on "redeeming" the cultural aspects of the people they took the Gospel to. They would use the (former) druid house of worship as their place of worship, for example. They would begin from the assumption that the culture was only "evil" if it wasn't submitted to Christ, but when the locals became followers of Jesus, the culture would be redeemed, bit by bit. Which, incidentally, is why we celebrate Christmas on December 25 -- the Celtic missionaries "redeemed" a pagan holiday and focussed it on Jesus instead.

So, instead of seeing Christ as opposed to culture or indifferent to culture, we should rightly see Christ as transforming the parts of culture that are opposed to Him, and redeeming those parts which were originally of His design. The Celtic missionaries depended a lot on the gift of discernment, rather than making a blanket policy that "all culture that isn't ours is evil". I'd like to suggest that we work harder at following their example, whether our setting is cross-cultural, inter-generational, or postmodern.