Americans are faced with questions and issues that never existed before. Stresses are building to levels which are destroying relationships, impacting communities and causing significant emotional reactions. How are Christians to deal with these questions and issues?
The Built on Truth Series offers powerful suggestions to Christians about how to deal with difficult questions and issues in a transparent and consistent way. Others may not like or agree with the outcomes, but they should be able to understand how they were attained.
Some foundational assumptions of Christianity are God exists and is active in the world, God created everything, and the Bible was provided by God so people can know what to believe, how to make choices and how to live according to God’s standards.
A good next step is to find direct and indirect Scriptures pertaining to the subject at hand.
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As a whole, America is a guilt/innocence society. Justice is defined as getting what you deserve – if you are innocent, you don’t get penalized; but, if you are guilty you do get penalized. Judges or juries decide whether you are guilty of innocent. With this worldview, individuals are very important, so individuality is stressed. Virtually all of American society is built on this worldview.
Many Eastern and Middle Eastern societies have an honor/shame worldview. What is most important in a matter is who gets honor and who doesn’t get shamed. It is a hierarchal system where community is very important. At the top of the heap is the country or country’s leader, then tribe or clan, then family. At the very bottom is the individual.
In the modern world, conflicts often arise when guilt/innocence societies come into conflict with honor/shame societies. For instance, Americans have a hard time understanding when honor/shame societies refuse to surrender instead of taking avoidable losses in a war. As an example, in World War 11, Japanese pilots chose to commit suicide by intentionally flying their planes into an enemy war ship. American pilots would not normally choose to do that.
