Wet Fish Epistemology

In our current group of editorials we are thinking about thinking, answering questions like: Why do we believe what we believe? What supports and shapes our presuppositions and our conscious convictions? What are we standing on? 

I’ve divided our survey of epistemology into seven spheres: tradition, culture, philosophy, experience, technological media, social media, and Scripture. Each sphere uniquely influences us, and it is helpful to be aware of each one’s particular effects. In this article we’ll think about the second sphere: culture.

The world we live in profoundly impacts us. We are regularly confronted with both truth claims and value claims, and these come not only from outside the church but also from within. Though we may think of ourselves as self-made, in reality we are largely the product of our culture. This is not to say that we are victims of our environment, but rather that the people we rub against during the natural course of our lives will inevitably shape who we are.

The ideas and values embedded into our current cultural moment are shaping us, even when we aren’t conscious of them. C. S. Lewis famously compared this effect to a fish’s experience in its natural environment. “A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet.”¹ And we are the same in our natural environment. You may notice the coldness or wetness of the air, but you will spend much of your life unconscious of the air itself—though you are touching and breathing it constantly.

Similarly, your unique culture has shaped your fundamental assumptions so thoroughly that you are probably unaware of just how deep those assumptions run. Your basic perception of truth, beauty, and goodness are formed by the things your culture holds up as true, beautiful, and good. Even when you don’t realize it.

We begin to see the uniqueness of our own cultures if we travel cross-culturally. For example, an innocent gesture such as a thumbs-up is an obscenity in the Middle East. Food, clothes, daily rhythms, and pace all vary between cultures. We feel like a fish-out-of-water in another culture because its essential elements are different from our own. Seeing these differences can help us realize just how much our own culture shapes us.

These differences run deeper than externals. For example, many Eastern cultures are built on an honor/shame system that is foreign to us Westerners. This shapes their families, relationships, work, education, and religion in incalculable ways. A culture is more than a set of practices; it is an entire way of thinking and living.

It’s not that the culture is inherently negative. Rather, it is inherently potent. The ideas and values embedded in our current cultural moment are shaping you, and you are most susceptible to it when you are least aware of it. Culture can be very good in the right circumstances and the right ways. In any case, we need to know how the ideas blowing around in the air we breathe are shaping the way we view God, man, sin, redemption, and so forth.

Without intentional effort, we will live unaware of how much our culture (Anabaptist or otherwise) affects what we think and what we love. We will swim in the water and not know what it means to be wet.

The next question is, how do we live in a culture without being carried along by it?

If you want to know what it means to be wet, you need to get out of the water—or at least to ask someone who has been. One way to do this is to read old books. Dead men may have been subject to the blind spots of their day, but they are unlikely to be taken by ours. Reading books from another time can help us identify and adjust to the particularities of our own culture.

For us Anabaptists, it’s helpful to focus particularly on books from our own history so we can be aware of how our culture has changed over time. The Anabaptists began as a fledgling movement of spiritual purists who tenaciously evangelized their neighbors and were willing to be killed rather than compromise Scripture. How did this develop over 500 years into a group of people content to live quiet, unassuming lives, many times choosing stability and respectability over gospel fidelity and spiritual fruitfulness? We need to know what we’ve lost and what has spilled into the gaps as a result.

And of course, the best thing to do to keep from being a mere captive of your culture is to know your Bible. God wrote it to teach us the truth so we could love it and live by it. It is not merely passive truth, but is living and active (Heb. 4:12), reproving and correcting (2 Tim. 3:17) so we don’t get tossed around by the culture but instead grow into Christian maturity (Eph. 4:14-16). If we are shaped primarily by the word of God, the culture will have minimal effect on us.

1.  C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 16. ↩︎