Authors are always enmeshed in a culture, it cannot be otherwise, and I think we have observed that the idea of an author penning an inspired text does not mute, overcome, or diminish there cultural-ness. Abraham and child sacrifice, Moses and ordered genocide, Paul and slavery…
Jean Gebser, writing early in the 20th century, noted that civilizations go through stages of development that represent actual ways of seeing and viewing the world. His observation was that humanity’s stage of consciousness and development was reflected in their meaning making as a culture. A magic/tribal culture will make sense of their world, with sun and rain god’s and the corresponding dances to invoke those god’s activity differently than a postmodern pluralistic culture makes sense of it’s multicultural, rationalistic way of explaining a drought. Gebser’s contribution is in noting that over the course of thousands of years cultures have undergone slow but marked evolutionary development.
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What are the implications for the biblical text’s author being enmeshed within a particular culture vastly different than that of the readers?
For instance in Genesis 22 God in the inspired text says to Abraham go offer your son as a burnt offering on Mount Moriah. We could bypass the question of culture and time period, as most readers of the biblical text do, including most conservative scholars, seminarians and professors. If we do that we are left asking a couple honest questions.
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What happens when we claim the text and the author have a very specific cultural location that 
makes some of what is in the text “no longer correct?” Ouch, I know. For some of us we have been taught and trained to hear those as fighting words and to remind the offender this is the inspired word of God they are talking about.
What if each culture being written to and each author writing is at a particular stage of development or stage of cultural progress and we HAVE to take THAT into consideration as we think about the bible? That was the suggestion at the end of our last post.
This is of course one of what might be several possible solutions. I think some in more traditional church contexts as well as seminaries and more technical hermeneutics texts have tried to make it sound that because the text is inspired there is a muting of the culture boundedness of the text. If we continue to maintain that position we have learned nothing from the most glaring example where we tried using that line of defense. (a “defense” we don’t need)
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The move from the socialized mind to the self authoring mind might well be characterized by the move from being told what to see, believe and how to fit in, to how to see, come to your own conclusions and what what it means to be an interdependent individual. (have you gotten his book yet?)
The question I think facing the church as we head into the second decade of this millennium is whether or not we are comfortable with facilitating peoples journeys within the context of community or whether we are more concerned to create cookie cutter clones who believe the same thing, quote the same verses, have the same views on the Left Behind series, homosexuality, politics, woman’s role in marriage and church and genetic engineering.
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