Christians often use Paul’s famous words “there is neither Jew nor Gentile” (Gal. 3:28) as a rationale for colorblindness. They act as if differences don’t matter—as if being Christian means that culture doesn’t exist anymore. But this is an error in reading the larger passage and Paul’s life. Throughout Paul’s writings, he makes clear that his faith in Jesus transformed and redeemed (but did not replace) his cultural identity.
In Galatians 3:28, Paul is affirming that our external markers of difference don’t determine our standing before God. It’s about equality of spiritual status; it’s not about cultural obliteration. Throughout Paul’s writings, he makes clear that his faith in Jesus transformed and redeemed (but did not replace) his cultural identity. To understand this more, we need to explore a bit more of his story—and the ways his cultural identity serves as a beautiful display of Christ’s new work in him.
The Importance of Honoring Culture
Paul grew up as the child of a people who had been torn apart by civil war, foreign oppression, poverty, and exile for six hundred years (Babylon, Persia, Greece, and now Rome). He has a strikingly unusual heritage in that he was ethnically Jewish and yet was also a citizen of the Roman empire, the foreign rulers that oppressed Jewish lives, culture, and land.
Paul’s family was from Tarsus, an influential city north of Israel in Asia Minor. Yet he was trained in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, a leading member of the Sanhedrin. As a result, he was fluent in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as Greek philosophy and poetry. He was culturally fluent in his Jewish and Roman worlds. Thus, he could quote Greek writers effortlessly in Athens (Acts 17:16-32) and also skillfully cite and expound on the Torah.
Paul says the following of his ethnic and academic pedigree: “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Phil. 3:5-6). Paul goes on to say that he considers all these identity markers as rubbish (Phil. 3:8), but does he mean that they don’t matter? Let me convince you otherwise.
Paul insists that circumcision is not the basis for faith; Christ is what includes Jew and Gentile in the kingdom of God. And yet, though Paul refuses to circumcise Gentile believer and companion Titus (Gal. 2:3), Paul circumcises Timothy, whose mother is Jewish and whose father is Greek (Acts 16:3). Why does he do this? Paul wants to honor the culture of the Jewish believers they would meet along the way. To be an uncircumcised Jew was to say, “I reject and despise my people.” That would surely have broken trust. (In contrast, if Titus had been circumcised, he would be saying, “I did this to prove my conversion to faith.”) To use circumcision as proof of conversion was rubbish--but it was not rubbish to honor culture.
Here’s a modern-day example. Honoring your parents is high currency in Asian culture. When Asians or Asian Americans first become Christian, they may be told to follow Jesus by asserting their own individualism (“being their own person”) through faith-based life choices and decisions. Suddenly, through this Western lens, there is a higher authority than the parent for these Asian individuals. Without proper coaching on how to honor their parents while disagreeing with them, these believers may break trust with their parents and cause them to distrust Christianity. It is far easier to “obey” a parent and do what they say rather than having an honoring relationship that says, “I love and respect you, but I disagree with you. ” This kind of parent-child relationship requires navigating the much more demanding challenge of conflict and hard conversations while holding onto love.
When I, a Korean American, decided to go into ministry, I knew my father would be displeased. The hope that his children would have a better life had kept him persevering through economic hardship and family suffering. Before changing careers from city planning to ministry, I went on walks with him every month, during which I let him vent. “What will my friends and family say? What do you think kept your mother and me going through all those years?” he asked.
These were not easy walks. But I needed to have the integrity to say, “I hear you. And even if I don’t agree with you, I want you to know that I love and respect you.” My father’s very young faith and trust in God was at stake in how I honored him in my choices.
In Acts 21, we see Paul honoring culture after his many missionary journeys. The apostles in Jerusalem rejoice at the stories of Gentile believers and tell Paul of rumors that he had been teaching the Jews among the Gentiles to “turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs” (Acts 21:21). To counter the rumor, they suggest the following: “There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law” (Acts 21:23-24).
The apostles ask Paul to undergo ritual purification—not to prove that he is a Christian, but to honor his cultural community as a Christian. For Paul, being a powerful Christian witness meant being a Jew that honored his culture. His faith in Jesus should make him amplify how he honors others in his own context and people. When Jesus transforms Paul’s cultural identity, all the beautiful parts of his heritage are amplified, and the broken parts experience healing and restoration.
Paul complies. In fact, Paul never repudiates his story and identity. He recounts the story of his upbringing, conversion, and living as a Jewish Christian before the crowds in Athens; the mob, the Sadducees, and Pharisees in Jerusalem; and King Agrippa. He asserts his Roman citizenship. He uses his complex cultural background in service of the kingdom. He repents of his former self-protective ethnocentricism and understands his cultural identity as a beautiful space where Jesus breathes life and healing in him for others. When Jesus transforms Paul’s cultural identity, all the beautiful parts of his heritage are amplified, and the broken parts experience healing and restoration.
Paul was descended from people whose culture was mocked and threatened by Greek rulers—in a place where attempts at rebellion were met with mass crucifixions of hundreds of men at public roadsides. To then preach a crucified and resurrected Messiah to the Jews in every synagogue in the Roman empire and every Gentile who would listen was an unfathomable paradox that Paul chose to live each day as a Christian.
A Different Way of Being Our Cultural Selves
We live in turbulent times full of racial and political tensions. Colorblindness has been exposed as a mirage that does little to combat White supremacists who enact violence. Colorblindness offers no comfort or solution to the pain of Black and Brown mothers and fathers who weep over their children. And colorblindness says that our cultural and ethnic identities don’t matter. What an unbiblical lie.
Jesus was unafraid of the Samaritan woman’s pointed questions about Jew-Samaritan tensions in John 4. In his honoring kindness toward her, he showed her and the disciples a different way of being their ethnic and cultural selves. Paul’s life is filled with interacting with the other. The book of Revelation affirms that all tribes and languages will be present before the Lamb at the end of the ages. Should we not see our cultural and ethnic stories as vehicles for kingdom living?
We should not offer a Jesus and gospel that do not provide hope and deliverance for the suffering of Black and Brown people. We should not offer a gospel that does not confront places of ethnic and racial division and White supremacy. No idols should be left to serve as false gods in the gospel that offers freedom and new life. Jesus offers new life that doesn’t replace our cultural identities. He restores them for what they should and could be—for the flourishing of ourselves and the world.
I have been blessed by many leaders who stewarded their cultural identities to bless others. When I led a spring break urban service project for university students many years ago, the head pastor of a large Latino church welcomed us and allowed us to stay in the basement of his building as we volunteered for different organizations serving the neighborhood. Wisdom and quiet strength flowed from his fatherly welcome and familia-embrace of us–complete strangers.
My husband and I have been mentored by Black pastor-professors who have encouraged us to dream, speak, and persevere in faith through the highest highs and the lowest lows. We have learned so much from how they refused to let go of their blackness and instead use their power, voice, and humor to challenge systems, shepherd change, and multiply leaders.
I have watched a Filipino-American woman lead one of the best collaborative planning meetings I have ever seen. Everyone felt heard and seen. She was attuned to the needs of the community and also aware of and willing to use her spiritual authority as our leader. She was a pivotal voice who encouraged my own dreaming of more school.
I have watched White pastor friends engage in compassionate loving of the other and challenge their congregations to confront their own biases and speak up in word and deed about anti-blackness and racism in complex times.
Jesus looks good in all of these people—they are not trapped by what the world tells them they should be. Their cultural and ethnic stories serve as beautiful displays of Christ’s new life and work.
During a seminar many years ago, I heard the late theologian Lamin Sanneh say that every culture is like a bay of water awaiting the cargo of Christ. When Christ lands like a water plane in the bay, he looks at beauty and says, “I made that. It is beautiful and good!” He then looks at brokenness (idolatry, injustice, racism) and says, “I want to heal that and fill it with myself.” Sanneh articulated a definition of cultural redemption that doesn’t obliterate heritage but also confronts idolatry of all forms, including racism and injustice.
Should we not see our cultural and ethnic stories as vehicles for kingdom living? When Jesus redeems and recovers our stories, he affirms the beauty and good placed in us: the honoring of the elder and family; the story of righteous, embodied, injustice-defying faith. And he also shows us our scars from family; the idols that have been left standing; the golden calves unquestioned, and says, “I wanted to excavate those and fill them with myself.”
As we experience healing and embrace the beauty of our stories, we will instead be able to prophetically challenge the idolatries in our families and societies, and point to a different way of being who we are, in our skin and culture and context, for the healing of a broken and hurting world.