Chapter 8 BALANCED CONTEXTUALIZATION

John Stott’s book on preaching, Between Two Worlds, likens Christian communication to building a bridge from the Scriptures to the contemporary world.¹ Some sermons are like “a bridge to nowhere.” They are grounded in solid study of the biblical text but never come down to earth on the other side. That is, they fail to connect the biblical truth to people’s hearts and the issues of their lives. Other sermons are like bridges from nowhere. They reflect on contemporary issues, but the insights they bring to bear on modern problems and felt needs don’t actually arise out of the biblical text. Proper contextualization is the act of bringing sound biblical doctrine all the way over the bridge by reexpressing it in terms coherent to a particular culture.

How do we do this? Scholars point out that any reader of the Bible who wants to understand it must go back and forth between two different horizons, between the two banks of the river in Stott’s analogy - the biblical text and the reader’s cultural context. Scripture has supreme authority, and so it cannot be wrong and does not need to be corrected. But a Christian communicator’s understanding of the Bible may definitely be wrong—indeed, is always partly so- and therefore must always be open to being corrected. The same goes for the gospel communicator’s understanding of the hearer’s context, which can also benefit from more insight and correction.

Many Christians seeking to preach the gospel to a new culture are simply unwilling or unable to deal with this issue; they believe their task is simply to carry biblical doctrine over the bridge into the new culture. In other words, they see gospel communication as a one way bridge. They do not like the idea that information must come over the bridge in the other direction. They don’t see its importance, or they see this as a threat to the authority of Scripture. The problem with this idea of mission is that it assumes we who are on one side of the bridge already have an undistorted grasp of the gospel, and that our knowledge of the culture on the other side is not important. This view is blind to the truth that we are not only sinful but also finite, and therefore we cannot have clear and exhaustive knowledge of anything. We are largely oblivious to the power of culture to shape our understanding of things.2

So how can we guard the authority and integrity of Scripture and remain open to being corrected in our understanding of it? How can our message to the new culture be both faithful and fruitful? The answer is to allow some two-way traffic on the bridge.

When we approach the biblical text, we come with a “pre-understanding,” a set of already established beliefs about the subjects addressed in the Bible. These beliefs are strong and deep, and many are tacit — that is, they are difficult to verbalize, formulate, or even recognize in oneself.3 They come from a variety of voices we have listened to within our own culture. This does not mean we cannot or have not arrived at a sufficient and true understanding of biblical teaching. But it does mean the process is not a simple one, for our existing beliefs - many of them virtually unconscious - make it difficult for us to read Scripture rightly, to let it correct our thinking, and to carry it faithfully over the bridge to someone who needs it.

Because of our cultural blinders, we must not only speak to the people over the bridge; we must listen to them as well. We need to listen to what they are saying and take seriously their questions, their objections to what we are saying, and their hopes and aspirations. More often than not, this interaction with a new culture shows us many things taught in the Bible - things we either missed altogether or thought unimportant, possibly even ways in which we misread the Bible through the lens of our own cultural assumptions.

When I was a professor at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, many of my students had traveled from Korea to study in our school. I often led case study seminars that discussed real-life ministry situations with both Korean and Anglo-American students. Despite the fact that all the students shared the same conservative Reformed theology, they approached ministry in very different ways. One of the key differences had to do with how my Asian students wielded and regarded human authority. Koreans cede far more power to pastors and fathers, while American culture is much more egalitarian and democratic. The Korean students were able to point out to American students that there is quite a lot in the Bible about the authority of civil magistrates, parents, elders, and ministers, which Americans tend to ignore or screen out because our culture is deeply suspicious of institutions and authority. But while Korean students could point to texts such as Romans 13 and Hebrews 13:17, American students could point Asian colleagues to passages such as Matthew 20:24-28 and 1 Peter 5:1-4 (warning against leaders “lording it over” others) or Acts 4:19 and 5:29 (telling us we must not let human authority usurp God’s) or the book of Revelation (in which human authority overreaches and becomes demonic).4

What was happening? Information was going back and forth over the bridge. Our interaction with a different culture leads us to ask the text questions we may never have asked it before and to see many things we didn’t see clearly before. Entering into the text from a different perspective provides a point of triangulation that can help us to identify our own culturally bound presuppositions about the gospel. As a result we begin to see truths and insights in the Bible that were there all along, yet we had simply been blind to them. The questions of the new culture reveal to us as communicators that we have our own unique cultural blind spots.

To provide another example, secular people in Western culture are highly individualistic, which makes them sensitive to violations of human dignity on the basis of race. Their commitment to individual freedom leads to sensitivity to racial prejudice wherever it exists. Many Christians who have interacted with secularists have gone back to the Scriptures and found that the Bible speaks far more about the evil of racism than they had thought. Christians are not correcting the Bible, but they are correcting their understanding of the Bible through humble interaction with nonbiblical philosophies. We know that God in his mercy sometimes gives pagans morally informed consciences (Romans 2), which sense real evil and truth even if their overall worldview has no basis for their insights.

One of the main ways our understanding of the Bible remains distorted is through what has been called “the canon within the canon.” That is, we treat some parts of Scripture as more important and ignore or discard other parts of it. All Christians fall victim to some form of this, depending on our temperament, experience, and culture. D. A. Carson notes many instances of this. For example, the Bible tells us that God loves everyone in the world with his providential love, and yet it also teaches us that he loves the saved with his gracious love and is angry at the wicked.5 Different cultures will respond to these biblical aspects of God’s love differently. Members of Western cultures love the concept of God’s love for all and recoil from the doctrine of God’s wrath on evil. More traditional tribal cultures will have no problem with a God of judgment but will bristle at the idea that he loves all people groups equally. Each culture, then, will tend to highlight certain biblical teachings and downplay others, creating a mini-canon within the canon of Scripture. But if we stress the first biblical teaching (about God’s universal, providential love) and play down the second (about God’s judgment) — or vice versa - we have distorted the faith. Interactions with different cultures help us lose our blinders and slowly but surely move to a more rounded biblical Christianity.

Other examples abound. The Bible has much to say about wealth and poverty, and what it says is enormously varied and nuanced. In some places it is very positive about private property and riches- such as when God blesses Abraham, Job, and others with great wealth. Other Bible passages contain severe warnings about the dangers of money and make strong statements about the responsibility of God’s people to promote justice and care for the poor. People typically ignore much of the teaching on one side and latch on to other parts, largely dependent on whether they live in prosperous conditions or in poor ones. Carson summarizes, “The name of the game is reductionism,” that is, taming Scripture by not letting all of it speak to us. Our sociocultural location makes us prone to flatten the teachings of Scripture, ignoring some parts and exaggerating others. When we interact with people from other cultures and social settings, we find our particular distortions being challenged. So while gospel communicators should seek to correct their hearers’ cultural beliefs with the gospel, it is inevitable that contact with a new culture will also end up correcting the communicators’ understanding of the gospel.

The bridge, then, must run in both directions. While the Bible itself cannot be corrected by non-Christian cultures, individual Christians - and their culturally conditioned understanding of the Bible - can and should be. There should be heavy traffic back and forth across the bridge. We speak and listen, and speak and listen, and speak again, each time doing so more biblically and more compellingly to the culture.

THE BRIDGE AND THE SPIRAL

The two-way bridge image is important. In hindsight, we now recognize that the original call for “contextualization” in the 1970s was essentially a call for a two-way bridge rather than the older, one-way bridge of the “indigenous church” model. The older model did not encourage national Christian leaders to engage in deep theological reflection on how profoundly the gospel challenges culture. It assumed that Western Christianity was the true, undistorted, universal expression of the faith. Transporting it across the bridge required only a few minor adaptations, such as language translation and appropriating native music and dress. Harvie Conn argued that the indigenous model was based on a “functionalist” view of culture, which saw culture as a set of unrelated practices that helped a people group adapt to its environment. In this view of culture, you can slip out one piece of a culture (say, by replacing Hinduism with Christianity) and not expect the rest of the culture to change (such as the music, art, family structures, relationships between classes, and so on). This encouraged national Christians to engage in wholesale adoption of much of their indigenous culture, uncritically embracing it without examining it in light of the Scriptures. The indigenous church movement also failed by not challenging Western missionaries to recognize the culturally adapted nature of their own theology and practices.

CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY AND HARVIE CONN

Much of my thinking in this section is derived from Harvie Conn’s “Contextual Theology” course, available as a course syllabus and recordings of twenty lectures from the Westminster bookstore.7 Conn relates how cultural anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to see each culture as a complex set of practices, beliefs, and customs that helped a people group adapt to its environment.

This view was called “functionalism,” and it was a Darwinian approach. Culture enabled people to survive in a particular environment. A culture was studied to determine how it functionally met people’s psychological and social needs. The functionalist approach saw culture as a fairly mechanical entity, like a set of keys on a ring. You could remove a couple of pieces and put others in their place without changing the whole.

The functionalist approach to culture fit in well with the pietistic impulse of much of European Christianity. Pietism focuses on the inner individual experience and does not expect or ask how the experience of salvation will change the way we use our money, do our work, create our art, pursue our education, etc. In the indigenous church movement, personal salvation is offered without much thought as to how Christianity substantially changes a people’s attitude toward power and powerlessness, art and commerce, cultural ritual and symbolism. Conn states, “The Christian faith is consigned to the realm of mind and spirit rather than to the broad stream of the history of society and civilization.”

See Richard Lints’s excellent survey of the issues in The Fabric of Theology (pp. 101-116). Other important works that occupy various points of view across the middle of the contextualization spectrum include the following:

But for all its benefits, the two-way bridge has limitations as a metaphor for explaining contextualization. In the end, evangelicals believe that the two sides of the bridge do not have equal authority-the Bible is supreme. Yes, our interaction with culture helps us adjust and change our understanding of the Bible for the better, but in the final analysis, the Bible must be seen as the ultimate authority over both the culture and our consciousness.

If the Bible is instead seen as a fallible product of human culture, then we are locked in an endless interpretive circle that goes back and forth between our culture and the Bible. In this view, the Bible and culture are equally authoritative, which is to say equally relative. Thus we may use the Bible to correct a culture, but we can also use the culture to argue that parts of the Bible are now obsolete. This is why, for example, some mainline denominations use the Bible to denounce various forms of economic injustice in the United States, but at the same time they insist that what the Bible teaches about sex and gender is oppressive and dated. Following this pattern, in every generation and culture Christianity will be changing radically, often contradicting the teaching of the church in other centuries and lands. There is no way for us to increasingly come to grasp the truth.

But the deeper flaw in this “hermeneutical circle” approach is that it cannot exist in real life. Though we may say we make the Bible and culture equally authoritative, in the end we really are not doing so. If we state that what the Bible says here is true but what the Bible says over here is regressive and outdated, we have absolutized our culture and given it final authority over the Bible. Either the Bible has final authority and determines what in the culture is acceptable or unacceptable, or the culture has final authority over the Bible and determines what in the text is acceptable or unacceptable. So the image of the circle (or of a completely symmetrical two-way bridge) falls short. In the end the circle must be broken, and, fallen creatures that we are, we will always break it by privileging our own cultural biases.

For these reasons evangelicals have insisted that while contextualization must be a two-way process, the final authority of the Bible must be maintained.2 This is why many have come now to speak of contextualization as a hermeneutical spiral rather than a circle. 10 If Scripture and culture are equally authoritative, the movement back and forth between text and context is an endless circle of change. But if Scripture is the supreme authority and the interaction with culture is for the purpose of understanding the text more accurately (not to bring it into line with the culture), then the text-context movement is a spiral, moving us toward better and better understanding of the Word of God and how it can be brought to bear on and communicated to a particular culture.11

Using the hermeneutical spiral, evangelicals have been seeking to avoid either extreme on a spectrum described by Richard Lints in his book The Fabric of Theology. 12 At one end of his spectrum is a cultural fundamentalism that believes we can read the Bible and express its theology in culture-free, universal terms; at the other end is a cultural relativism that holds “that the Scripture can have no other meaning than that which is permitted by the conceptuality of the present-day situation.”13 Evangelicals seek to work in the middle of this spectrum, insisting that while there are no universal, culture-free expressions of biblical teachings, the Bible nonetheless expresses absolute and universal truths. I would call this approach “balanced contextualization” because it avoids these two extremes as it rests, ultimately and firmly, on the fulcrum of scriptural authority.

Lints writes that despite the effort to find this middle ground of balanced contextualization, there is still a lack of consensus about many particulars, and of course many evangelicals tend to lean toward one side of the spectrum or the other. Some are moving more toward giving the culture more say in how the gospel is communicated, and this is driving others toward the other end of the spectrum, refusing to acknowledge how culturally influenced our theological formulations are. Since this is a book for practitioners, I will not delve further into a discussion of the more theoretical issues related to contextualization other than to say how important it is to maintain the balance that Lints and many others speak of.

But it’s important not only to maintain this balance, but to do so in a way that is shaped by the patterns and examples of Scripture. I want to look at three biblical foundations for doing contextualization and then use Paul’s ministry to provide some examples and practical “ways and means” to go about it.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

  1. When you err in the way you contextualize the gospel, do you tend to create a “bridge to nowhere,” or a “bridge from nowhere?” What makes you suspect this is true? What factors or beliefs contribute to this tendency?
  2. Keller writes, “Our interaction with a different culture leads us to ask the text questions we may never have asked it before and to see many things we didn’t see clearly before… As a result we begin to see truths and insights in the Bible that were there all along, yet we had simply been blind to them.” Have you ever experienced the benefit of interacting with another culture in this way? What blind spots has this experience revealed to you in your own understanding of the Bible and the gospel?
  3. What is your “canon within the canon”? Take a few moments to jot down the themes of Scripture to which you typically give special prominence. Which parts do you notice other Christians emphasizing that you do not? Do you see a pattern? What does this tell you about your spiritual or cultural blind spots?
  4. Keller writes, “Evangelicals have been seeking to avoid either extreme on a spectrum… At one end… is a cultural fundamentalism that believes we can read the Bible and express its theology in culture-free, universal terms; at the other end is a cultural relativism that holds ‘that the Scripture can have no other meaning than that which is permitted by the conceptuality of the present-day situation.” “What dangers are associated with each of these two extremes? What examples have you seen of either extreme? On which side of the spectrum do you tend to err?