One of the most basic questions we can ask is, ‘Who am I?’ We can answer by talking about such things as our family, or our personal lives, or our faith; but sooner or later we have to talk about our nationality. This is no insignificant thing. The apostle Paul says of it: God made from one man every nation of humanity to live on all the face of the earth, having determined the times and the boundaries of their location, so that they should seek God, and hopefully that they might reach out for him and find him. (Acts 17:26-27). Our nationality is a gift of God whereby we belong to a people who have been given a place on earth and a place in time. Therefore the answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ involves a shared identity found in a common language, land and history. They are all powerful things in our experience of life and it is very striking that Paul traces them to God as His gifts. On one hand, this requires us to avoid the evangelical pietist rejection of ‘this world’ by placing instead a profound spiritual value on our national and cultural identity. On the other hand, it forbids making them equivalent to salvation in the way of liberation theology, which characteristically interprets salvation fundamentally in terms of political and economic justice. Paul teaches us that language, land and story are good but that they are not the ultimate purpose or meaning of life. They are, in fact, servants of the gospel, not the gospel itself. Their place in the plan of salvation is to point people beyond the gifts of God to God Himself.

Language, land and story are gifts of creation rather than of redemption. Nevertheless, they are glorious things. Adam was given the first and original language, the first and most unspoilt land in Eden; and the first and endless place in time before death entered the world.   An ideal world contained language, land and story. However, we do not live in an ideal world but a fallen one. All three cultural gifts were affected by the Fall. Language was diversified because in linguistic unity our forefathers spoke of the human race as equal with God, a blasphemy reflected in a cultural project – the Tower of Babel. Land was broken into pieces as well. Before the Fall there were no boundaries except between good and evil. Afterwards, the world became divided between families that became tribes that became nations. Even time was divided between life and death so that the story of humanity was divided into passing generations.

Sin brought about these divisions, and that makes Paul’s confidence even more striking that all national identities are gifts from God. If they are both gifts of God and also scarred by sin, the three gifts of language, land and story share a twofold and paradoxical message. They speak of the original greatness of human nature and existence, yet they speak also of its loss; of national consciousness as involving a tension between a lost ideal and actual experience. A longing exists within us all for that ideal because it answers the insecurity and insignificance of being one people among many, and especially when a nation is politically disempowered by the suppression of its language or the loss of its lands or the denial of its story. The reality of history is that such oppression is the majority experience of nations because there have always been and always will be what we nowadays call ‘superpowers’. The Middle East bears eloquent testimony to them as the cradle of so many ancient empires – some of them now as culturally oppressed as they were once cultural oppressors. 

Every oppressed people can know that God is on their side. That does not mean He hates their oppressor and will reverse the two positions, but it does mean that He hates evil, as when His gifts of language, land and story are despised in one people by another people in order to privilege their own gifts from God as a nation. When that happens, a nation loses its purpose. It no longer approves looking beyond itself to God because that challenges its cultural pride, and then it has confused God’s gifts in creation with God’s grace in salvation. Cultural pride may, of course, be as present in the oppressed as in the oppressor. Indeed, a particular danger for oppressed people is to identify God’s purpose for them as defending His cultural gifts to them as things absolute rather than things surrounded by God’s boundaries of time and place. A boundary, after all, can mark an end as well as a beginning.     

Indeed, Paul’s words contain an implicit warning that God’s ultimate test of a culture is its search for God in the Christ who is His Son and His final word, for it is Christ who will judge the nations in the last day. If God can raise a nation up, He can also cast it down. Therefore, there is no absolute right or wrong about the death of a culture. Even the tragedy of a lost civilisation eventually becomes a curiosity that later generations may view dispassionately, such as strolling through the ruins of Petra; or that they may intellectually explore with pleasure, such as studying the Aramaic once spoken there. The moral issues in the death of a culture lie not in the bare fact of it, but in the process by which it happens. 

There are countless examples, both past and present, of someone’s language, land and story dying a death. Some cultures have been murdered by virtual extermination, like the Armenians. Others may be all but suffocating under relentless pressure, like the Christian Arabs of the Middle East. Others in a more open society may accept eventual social equality while preserving a minority identity, like the Celts of Britain or the native Indians of the USA. In the hidden will of God, He may set His boundaries around us so that a language may become a minority interest, a land be lost or shared with others, and a cultural story become a tributary stream within a greater cultural river. Cultures sometimes survive a very long time in this condition.

There is much pain in suffering from cultural subjugation and it is tempting to become preoccupied with that pain. The apostle Paul has better advice, at once robustly defiant of wrongs done to us and at the same time calling us to the highest of idealism:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is worthy of a good report, if there is anything excellent or worthy of praise, dwell upon these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. (Phil.4:8,9).

Revd Phil Hill,
Head of Ministerial Formation,
Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary.