Father Nadim Nassar is the Church of England’s only Syrian priest, and an outspoken advocate for western Christians to recognise their Middle-Eastern heritage.
In The Culture of God, his first book, Father Nadim argues that there are three cultures Christians need to understand when they read the Bible: the culture of the Bible itself, their own culture, and finally ‘the culture of God’. Ultimately it was Jesus who had direct access to the culture of God; and so we need to begin by understanding Jesus in his own first-century Middle Eastern culture.
This fresh and provocative book, passionately argued, is an unfolding of what Father Nadim sees as the culture of God and how, when we understand it, it transforms our understanding of our faith.
Father Nadim was born and raised in Lattakia, Syria, to a Christian family, and studied in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war before moving to the UK, where he was ordained and became senior chaplain to the universities and colleges in London. He is director of the Awareness Foundation, which he founded with the Bishop of London; its mission is “to equip Christians everywhere to form an effective counter-force to the intolerance and mistrust that now prevail in so many communities, and to build understanding between the faiths”. The Culture of God is his first book.