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GOSPEL AND CULTURE IN A NEW MISSIONARY SETTING

Any student of Christian theology is aware today that in order to understand the message of the Bible it has become indispensable to have a working knowledge of the cultural world of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin during the first century of our era. In theological texts we have now besides classic expressions such as “covenant” or “corporate personality” more recent ones such as “honor and shame” and “dyadic personality” (see for instance J.H. Neyrey, ed., The Social World of Luke-Acts [Hendrickson, 1991]). These are indicators of the high degree of cultural awareness that those who have a teaching ministry in the church must have, in order to move meaningfully from the questions of our postmodern culture to the answers that the gospel might have for them.

Emergence of the Third Church
The new awareness of cultural issues in theological circles is increased by the fact that media and the flow of information at a global scale, as well as colossal migration movements caused by economic change, allow Christians and churches in the West to see and experience the amazingly rich and diverse varieties of expression of the Christian faith in a thousand different cultures. Wandering prophets of independent African churches, native storytellers from Latin American pentecostal movements, tireless missionary entrepreneurs spreading through the world from their Korean homeland, Orthodox priests regaining political weight in the lands which used to be part of the Soviet Empire—they fill the pages of our missionary books and the screens of our VCR’ s. They are a living testimony to the remarkable variety of human cultures and the uniqueness of the gospel of Jesus Christ which is the one seed of a thousand different plants.

This fact of our times must be taken as the general frame for any kind of Christian theological reflection. As we look at the religious map of the world today we find a marked contrast between the situation at the beginning of this century and the present situation at the end of it. Scottish missiologist A. Walls has described it as a “massive southward shift of the center of gravity of the Christian world.” He understands the history of Christian mission, and of the church in fact as a sequence of phases each one of which represents the embodiment of Christianity in a major culture area, and the movement forward through transcultural mission in such a way that when that major culture declines, Christianity continues to flourish, now in a different setting. Thus in our time, then, .the recession of Christianity among the European peoples appears to be continuing. And yet we seem to stand at the threshold of a new age of Christianity, one in which its main base will be in the Southern continents, and where its dominant expressions will be filtered through the culture of those countries Once again, Christianity has been saved for the world by its diffusion across cultural lines” (“Culture and Coherence in Christian History,” Evangelical Review of Theology [3,1984] 215; see Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History [Orbis, 1996]). If the present patterns of church growth and church decline follow the trends of the last three or four decades the picture described by Walls will show ever more noted contrasts as we enter the next millennium.

A Swiss missiologist who was a missionary in Africa calls this “the coming of the Third Church.” He describes it by pointing to the fact that the first thousand years of church history were under the aegis of the Eastern Church in the Eastern part of the Roman empire, and that in the second millennium the leading church was the Western Church in the Western part of what used to be the Empire. Those familiar with the history of theology also perceive to what degree theological themes, language, and categories reflected this historical situation. Bühlman goes on to say, “Now the Third Millennium will evidently stand under the leadership of the Third Church, the Southern Church. I am convinced that the most important drives and inspirations for the whole church in the future will come from the Third Church” (W. Bühlman, The Church of the Future [Orbis, 1986] 6).

The great variety of cultures from this planet as well as the different forms that the Christian church has taken among them is now present in the U.S. and Canada. At the heart of the North American cities there are now growing pockets of “Third World” cultures as well as varied expressions of the “Third Church.” While at the beginning of this century many churches and denominations were committed to the task of “Americanizing” the immigrants, today churches face the challenges of multiculturalism. “Americanization” last century actually meant the imposition of the cultural patterns of the Anglo-Saxon middle class (taking as “American culture” the “dominant value pattern of middle-class Americans” in the USA, following E. Stewart and M.J. Bennett [American Cultural Patterns (Intercultural, 1991) ch. 1]), on the waves of newcomers, mostly from Europe. Today churches and denominations are grappling with the notion of multiculturalism. There are moments in which it seems clear that North America faces a dilemma of becoming either a vast multicultural experiment in coexistence or the chaotic battlefield of fundamentalist tribalisms.

Missiologists are also pointing to another fact of our time that has a bearing on issues of gospel and culture. While many nonWestern cultures are very receptive to the gospel of Jesus Christ, paradoxically it is within the Western culture that we find less receptivity to the gospel. Lesslie Newbigin, who was a missionary in India and then went back to minister among working class people in England, writes that “the most widespread, powerful and persuasive among contemporary cultures, . ..modern Western culture. ..more than almost any other is proving resistant to the Gospel” (Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture [WCC, 1986] 3). Patterns of church growth prove the validity of this observation in the case of North America today. Several of the old mainline denominations show patterns of decline and fatigue with significant numerical losses, while ethnic churches are growing vigorously. New partnerships are going to develop for mission in North America as well as for theological reflection about it (on Methodism in the U.S. see J.L. Gonzalez, Christian Thought Revisited [Abingdon, 1989] 142).

A New Way of Doing Theology
Theological reflection begins with doxology. The missionary facts that we have pointed out should cause us to pause in wonder. Jesus Christ, son incarnate of God, is the core of this one gospel that has flourished in a thousand different plants. We can name a place and a time on earth in which Jesus lived and taught. In other words we can place him in a particular culture at a particular moment in history. “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us” in Palestine during the first century of our era. After that the story of Jesus has moved from culture to culture, from nation to nation, from people to people. And something strange and paradoxical has taken place. Though this Jesus was a peasant from Palestine everywhere he has been received, loved, and adored, and people in hundreds of cultures and languages have come to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Moreover, they have come to feel that he is “theirs,” that Jesus is “one of ours.” We cannot but wonder and pause in amazement in face of the fact that the message of Jesus Christ is “translatable.” This means that the gospel dignifies every culture as a valid and acceptable vehicle for God’s revelation. Conversely this also relativizes every culture: There is no ‘sacred” culture or language that is the only vehicle that God might use. Not even Hebrew or Aramaic have this status, since the original documents of the Gospel that we possess are already a translation from those languages to that form of popular Greek that was the lingua franca of the first century, the koiné. (For a fascinating development of the theological consequences of these facts see the works of A. Walls [above], and L. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture [Orbis, 1989]).

Academic theology does not always register the impact of these missionary facts. But the kind of theology that accompanies the church as it goes about its mission, the one that is forged in the heat of borders-crossing, of frontline evangelism and church planting, cannot avoid these facts. In those missionary situations you “do theology” as you respond to the demands of mission. Such theology is not “an adaptation of an existing theology of universal validity to a particular situation…aided by benevolent missionary paternalism.” Rather, its aim is to offer “a new open-ended reading of Scripture with a hermeneutic in which the biblical text and the historical situation become mutually engaged in a dialogue whose purpose is to place the church under the Lordship of Jesus Christ in its particular context (C.R. Padilla, Mission between the Time [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1985] 86).

As a follow-up to the famous Lausanne Congress of Evangelism (1974), a group of theologians, missionaries, social scientists, and missiologists carried on a study process and a consultation about the relationship between Gospel and Culture. The “Willowbank Declaration” that came out of those deliberations provides a kind of agenda for the theological work of the future. In good evangelical fashion such work starts at a biblical hermeneutical level within a missiological setting. A new reading of Scripture has become possible, as a communal exercise involving the multicultural and international fellowship of believers around the planet. “Today’ s readers cannot come to the text in a personal vacuum, and should not try to. Instead, they should come with an awareness of concerns stemming from their cultural background, personal situation, and responsibility to others. These concerns will influence the questions which are put to the Scriptures. What is received back, however, will not be answers only, but more questions. As we address Scripture, Scripture addresses us. We find that our culturally conditioned presuppositions are being challenged and our questions corrected. In fact, we are compelled to reformulate our previous questions and to ask fresh ones. So the living interaction proceeds” (J.R.W. Stott and R.T. Coote, Down to Earth [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1980] 334).

What this proposal may encompass when applied to theological work I have found illustrated in the writings of a respected Hispanic American theologian from the Methodist tradition, who has not been related to the Lausanne movement. I refer to J.L. Gonzalez, especially in his books Mañana (Abingdon, 1990), and Christian Thought Revisited (above). What Gonzalez offers as a basis for his proposals is grounded in his vast academic work in the field of church history and historical theology. But a key component of his theology is also the effort to take seriously his own cultural biases and to make the critical clarifications which are necessary about the predominant forms of academic theology. His is a dialogical and also a missiological theology: “The task of theology will not be to produce some sort of neutral — and therefore inane — interpretation of the nature of God and the universe, but rather to discover the purpose of God, to read the ‘signs of the times’ and to call the church to obedience in the present situation” (Mañana, 22). As an introduction to his theological work Gonzalez insists on the historical and cultural ground that always is the context of the theological task. He describes what are his own biases, his experiences as a Hispanic Christian first in Latin America and then in the U. S., and then he describes the underlying intention of his contribution: “There is no such thing as a general’ theology. There is indeed a Christian community that is held together by bonds of a common faith. But within that community we each bring our own history and perspective to bear on the message of the gospel hoping to help the entire community to discover dimensions that have gone unseen and expecting to be corrected when necessary” (22).

After the publication of the book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind there has been much debate about the issue of theological reflection within the evangelical camp. Four top evangelical theologians discussed the subject in a special issue of Christianity Today (14 August 1995, 21 27). What I consider a real scandal is the fact that these four giants of the evangelical academic establishment could talk for three hours about theology and culture in the United States without ever mentioning ethnic minorities or the theological work that African American, Asian, and Hispanic scholars have been doing for decades. I wonder if they specialize in that “general” or “neutral” kind of theology for which Gonzalez and myself see no future in this country. One might only hope that the readers of Catalyst who no doubt theologize in the corridors of their seminaries and departments of religious studies, will realize that it is time to change.
 

By Samuel Escobar, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary