Edwin Zehner at The Cultural Mandate reflects on Christians, anthropology and cultural difference:

One of the primary things that anthropology offers to the Christian liberal arts student is ways of learning to listen to socially and culturally different others, even when disagreeing with some or all of what the others are saying. Not only are such skills useful in conventionally “cross-cultural” settings, but in our increasingly multicultural and globalized world they are foundational (even prior) to being able to formulate and voice a Christian perspective likely to influence cultural discourse and public policy over the long term.

I would argue that such perspectives (the practical outcomes of the anthropological perspective of “cultural relativism”) are fundamentally biblical. Consider the Lord’s widely quoted statement in Isaiah 1:18: “Come, let us reason together” (not “Come and let me preach at you,” although he does plenty of that in adjoining verses). Read out of context, which is how most evangelicals appropriate this passage, the appeal suggests a privileging of inter-cultural dialogue, as the “reasoning together” dialogue between God and man is the most profoundly “cross-cultural” one that can be imagined.

Read the full post here, and read the lengthy discussion about Christians, the concept of “world view,” and contemporary anthropological analysis that Zehner launched with his piece, including contributions from Robert Priest, Kevin Birth, Brian Howell, Robert Canfield, Steven Ybarrola and others.