No need for cultural awareness?

Gordo has a pet peeve:

A current pet peeve of mine is people who want to insist that we be culturally savvy in our understanding of our own culture and the culture of the Bible, and that this needs to happen before we can really get the message from the text. It seems to me a subtle attempt to deaden and dull the immediacy of God's living word. 

But I sense a false either/or thing going on here... or else he's being flat out naive about how meaning works.