One of the most profound statements recorded in the Bible that directly impacts how one should do evangelism, church planting, and community development is stated in Romans 11:32. Weymouth renders this important verse as: "For God has locked up all in the prison of unbelief, that upon all alike He may have mercy."  The Phillips Translation renders it as: "God has all men penned together in the prison of disobedience, that he may have mercy upon them all."

 

Bible expositor  Charles J. Ellicott describes Paul's statement in verse 32 as "A weighty sentence embracing the whole course of human history and summing up the divine philosophy of the whole matter."  So how do we interpret the historical process and God's divine purposes?  If man and society reject providence, then history is all about mankind creating diverse "prisons of unbelief" which ascribe to individuals specific functions designed to satisfy particular social needs. It is from such functional forms from which they need to be freed. 

 

Human history is all about man and society creating cultural law-systems that deprive man of his freedom while simultaneously seeking to satisfy their needs through ascribed functions. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says,  “For without faith in God’s Providence the freedom of man becomes intolerable.”  

 

If God cannot provide, then the "family," as each society defines it, must provide.  Specifically, prison construction is all about reorganizing the nuclear family and the creation a new type of family structure, one designed to satisfy a particular need.  The general rule might be: The greater the need, the larger the "family."  

 

Human culture, or a  society's law-system, in this case, is all about each society organizing itself is a particular way to satisfy those needs apart from God. The thesis set forth in this site is that whatever kind of "family" man and society create, because it is built on a platform of ascribed functions shaped by the "elements of the world and not based on Christ" (Col. 2:8), will become a prison that wholly determines both what man thinks and how he behaves as a functioning person-thing.

 

The creation of these prisons of unbelief is a natural process.  In the words of Dillstone, "(they) gradually takes shape  within a particular physical environment.  Its forms are influenced by the character of the environment  --whether it is fertile or hard country, whether the climate is equable or extreme, whether the mineral and water power is abundant or scanty."   Dillstone would agree that the Chácobo sociocultural prison  or life-way was clearly shaped by the "elements" that made up the Amazon Rainforest.  

 

This process does not mean God compelled man and society to go their own way and create new kinds of life-ways to relieve their anxieties over existence.  Rather,  they individually choose to reject a Cultural Universal in which the husband-wife dyad operated as "one flesh" for a selected biological dyad that "fit" the particular environment in which they lived. 

 

It was the very life-ways they themselves created to relieve their anxieties over existence from which they would need to be redeemed.  For example, Rabi, as a young Chácobo Christian, had no idea that he was in "prison" his ancestors created until he was set free. Until then, the sociocultural life-way which had reduced him to a person-thing whose function was to serve his in-laws as the fifth member in the Chácobo household-of-five appeared to be normal. only after he was take his family and moved out, did he realize that the family-five was actually a prison. 

 

Conviction

These verses in Roman 11 imply that human culture must be viewed in a negative light rather than positive.  The kind of sociocultural operating system or "prisons" that man and society create once they depart from the PRINCIPLES "written on the heart" must be some kind of “defensive system against anxiety," one highly shaped by the particular "elements of the world/environment" (Col. 2:8) in which they live.  

 

The primary characteristics of such  "defensive systems against anxiety" is that they can only  be built on a foundation of ascribed functions camouflaged as moral duties, obligations, and rights which the members of society are expected to fulfill.  This move from culture to nature demands that society be “organized on mechanistic principles ...[in which] every part must be made to function smoothly within the totalitarian whole.”  If "faith in God’s Providence [makes] the freedom of man becomes intolerable,” mankind's only option is to mechanize society through the ascription of functions to its members.