Once More with Eat the Meat, Spit Out the Bones

It’s easy to go all in or all out with things, to reject or accept things uncritically. But those easy roads do not listen well enough to the Spirit of wisdom.

Recently, I re-watched the video of the guy proposing to his local city council that boneless wings are not wings at all.

“Our children are raised being afraid of having bones attached to their meat,” he argues. But “that’s where meat comes from. It grows on bones.” So too with cultural information. The truth of common grace embedded in our world often grows on the bones of a cultural context. Godless cultures can have truthful content in their cultural messaging because of the grace of God’s general revelation. Thus I’ve said that Christians can “eat the meat and spit out the bones” when engaging information and material from cultural sources. Specifically, I have argued that we can do something like this when discussing something like Critical Race Theory.

I was reminded of this as I studied the first chapter of Daniel last week. When Daniel and his buddies are deported to Babylon (and very possibly castrated to serve as palace eunuchs), they are immersed in a campaign of cultural reeducation. The chief eunuch “was to teach them the Chaldean language and literature. The king assigned them daily provisions from the royal food and from the wine that he drank. They were to be trained for three years, and at the end of that time they were to attend the king” (Daniel 1:4-5). This scholarship and meal program was not from royal largesse. It was intended to erase these young men’s Jewishness. As John Calvin said, Nebuchadnezzar “does not act thus from any feeling of generosity, and his feeding those miserable exiles from his own table should not be considered a virtuous action; but he cleverly reconciles the minds of the boys to be reckoned Chaldeans rather than Jews, and thus to deny their own Jewish identity.” At the time, there was a famous and beautiful library in the city, and the learning of Babylon seemed to be the vanguard of sophistication. Yet scholars agree that this education would have included education in Babylonian mythology, divination, and astrology. The “wisdom” of Babylon was soaked with pagan idolatry and superstition. Daniel and his friends were put into a reeducation program that tried to erase their identities and make them Babylonians.

Babylon in this respect wasn’t really unique, because every culture has its “wisdom” that in retrospect is primitive and ultimately at odds with reality. Every culture has a pattern of assimilation and education that has its truth but also is filled with superstition that doesn’t align with reality. The wisdom of God requires us to sort through the messages of our culture and assess them.

First, like Daniel, we must recognize that we’re being taught and discipled by the cultural system around us. Technology and media are messaging a certain view of the world. We must realize that these things are indeed a form of education that end up working to assimilate us into the culture. Second, we must determine what of these messages are true, either by the common grace of God or by the remnants of Christian truth in our culture. We must analyze the teachings of our culture in light of Scripture. Third, we must eat the meat and spit out the bones: “Test all things. Hold on to what is good” (1 Thess 5:21).

Let me give you some examples of how this might work. In our culture, we’re told that LGBT+ is the new black, and that if you hate racism you should also hate heteronormativity. We’re told that race and sexual orientation or gender identity are two sides of the same coin. So there are two general responses. On the one hand, more progressive or liberal folks embrace it all. They fly rainbow flags. They embrace transgender ideology. They take all the so-called wisdom of our culture and say, “Yes!” to all of it. On the other hand, more conservative folks want to reject it all. They see the clear teaching of the Bible on sexuality and gender and they say that if race and gender go together, that they want no part of either. A biblical mindset, however, will understand that the Bible sees race and sexuality as two different things. Race or ethnicity is an aspect of humanity that has no intrinsic moral value. Every person has equal value as an image bearer of God, and racism must be acknowledged and wholeheartedly rejected. A biblical mindset will also see that the same doctrine of creation that requires us to reject racism also requires us to reject the ideology of the LGBT+ revolution. We refuse to assimilate the constant bombardment of cultural messaging that contradicts the Bible. So we say like Mr. Rogers, “Boys are boys from the beginning and girls are girls right from the start.”

Or think of the way our culture views parenting. On one side, some see kids as a burden to be avoided so that they can pursue their true self. On the other side, some basically worship their kids, parenting like a helicopter pilot over their lives, making their kids’ success the measure of their own. The biblical view says that children are a blessing from the Lord, and that they are ultimately God’s not ours. We raise them to walk with God, and we don’t avoid them or idolize them. Again, we could apply the same analysis to the cultural value of consumption. We live in a consumer economy, and our culture says purchase and buy and consume. The Bible does tells us that, yes, we must consume, but it also teaches us that we must conserve. We could apply the analysis to the question about environmentalism. One side says that the earth is sacred and basically worships the earth as a new form of paganism. The other sides says that the earth is a tool to be used recklessly. The Bible tells us to care for the earth but also to use its resources because God is our ultimate object of worship and our provider.

It’s easy to go all in or all out with things, to reject or accept things uncritically. But those easy roads do not listen well enough to the Spirit of wisdom. They’re like boneless wings, which aren’t really wings at all. Instead, we should acknowledge we’re in the midst of a campaign of cultural assimilation and reeducation that wants to erase our Christian identity and make us Babylonians instead. Then we should assess these messages and scan them for truth while rejecting the lies. I think that’s what Daniel did.