Honor and Shame

Rating:
Summary: Seeing Beyond Our Cultural Eye-Glasses
Review: I read this book after it came highly recommended by the president of the Evangelical Missions Society, and several college professors - and I do not regret it in the least. Rolland Mueller enables us to see beyond our cultural eye-glasses by laying out the anthropological concept of guilt based, fear based and shame based societies.

As Westerners shaped by logic, philosophy, rhetoric and a theological system developed by lawyer/theologians, our views are based on guilty vs. not guilty. Our presentation of the Gospel thus is laid out in legal system terms- guilt, redemption, paying the price for iniquity, etc. However, the rest of the world thinks much differently: Asian and Middle Eastern societies tend to focus on shame and honor, African and many tribal cultures focus on fear.

The author then proceeds to demonstrate that God is not only concerned with humanity's guilt, but that salvation was meant to resolve our problems of guilt AND shame AND fear. A portion is dedicated to viewing the effects of the fall through the three cultural mindsets (sin brought guilt, shame and fear into the world), which is Biblically rooted. The book shows how Christ's death on the cross was meant to redeem mankind from their guilt, shame and fear and bring them into a correct relationship with God in each of these areas. Finally, special notes are made concerning how these truths relate to evangelism and missions.

An excellent book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who knows a person from a different culture!

Rating:
Summary: NO FOOTNOTES!
Review: It is unfair to present material as important as this without footnotes. A reader should be able to verify information an author presents, especially when the author claims that lying is an important part of Arabic culture.

PS I did investigate this claim, and it is true that Muslims are allowed to lie in certain situations, but it would have been easier to verify if I had known from the start where Muller gets his quotes of Middle Age Muslim theologians such as Al-Ghazali (read Ghazali's "Reliance of the Traveller").