What is contextualization, and it is biblical?
We must never compromise biblical truth. We must, however, express this truth to widely varying cultures. Contextualization is this bridging process. The missionary seeks to impart the meaning of the Gospel in a meaningful way to a new audience. He leaves behind his cultural biases and even adapts the form of his message to provide better points of commonality between the Gospel and his target audience.
Definitions of Contextualization from Leading Missiologists
Gilliland (1989) defines contextualization in the following manner:
The way in which the Word as Scripture, and the Word as revealed in the truths of culture interact in determining Christian truth for a given people. For the purpose of missions there must be a maximizing of the meaning of Christian truth for the particular situation in which and for which the message is developed.
Darrel Whiteman’s definition contains the concept of process and continuance in one’s own culture:
[Contextualization] attempts to communicate the Gospel in word and deed and to establish the church in ways that make sense to people within their local cultural context, presenting Christianity in such a way that it meets people's deepest needs and penetrates their worldview, thus allowing them to follow Christ and remain within their own culture.
Samuel Escobar explains contextualization this way:
It refers to the way in which the text of the Bible or Christian theology is understood within its own cultural and historical context in order to apply its meaning in different contexts...However, the term contextualization may also be understood in a more general way as a movement that seeks to affirm local cultures in their search for autonomy and full expression, as a reactive process in contrast to globalization.
David Hesselgrave warns that definitions of contextualization focus too much on cultural relevancy rather than Biblical faithfulness. Hesselgrave, therefore, crafts a definition contextualization that focuses on cultural “meaningfulness” rather than on “relevancy.”
Hesselgrave writes:
I define it [contextualization] in terms of “cultural meaningfulness”...I will use the term to refer to the process of communicating the biblical Gospel in such a way as to make it meaningful to the people of any given cultural context.
I could list many other worthy definitions. Contextualization as “the attempt to communicate the message of the person, works, Word, and will of God in a way that is faithful to God’s revelation...and that is meaningful to respondents in their respective cultural and existential contexts,” as advocated by David Hesselgrave and Ed Rommen.
Charles Kraft emphasizes the role of God as “The Contextualizer” and speaks of “receptor-oriented language.” If God’s Son became incarnate, lived and spoke in a contextual way, God’s representatives ought to display the Gospel in a way that becomes incarnate in the target culture too.
Elements in common with all these definitions include (1) A transcultural Gospel, (2) communicated in varying ways (3) with an aim to make the trans-cultural message meaningful to varying cultures by the use of varying forms.
Missiologists also sometimes emphases the following: (1) we must not change the basic content of the Gospel, only its presentation, (2) our aim is effectiveness, meaningfulness and sometimes relevance, and (3) our practices are in line with the practices of Jesus, the Apostle Paul and other NT writers. Finally, (4) there are also dangers of not contextualizing.
Section III – History Of Contextualization
Contextualization is a new word but not a new concept. Contextualization has been practiced throughout the history of the church as it has spread out to new cultures. Dean Flemming explains:
Although the term contextualization was quite recently minted, the activity of expressing and embodying the gospel on context-sensitive ways has characterized the Christian mission from the very beginning.
Ancient examples of contextualization can be seen in the Greco-Roman world as early apologists argued for the rationality of Christianity using Greek logical categories. The early church Fathers took their queue from the Apostle John’s use of “Logos” and crafted a distinctively Christian philosophy. Many of the early apologists worked in the world of Greek logical categories and vocabularies. If Christianity had first traveled East rather than West the Athanasian Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Formulation of Chalcedon might never have been written since immersion into Greek thought influenced Christianity to develop along creedal lines and scholastic formulae.
Douglas Hayward locates one of the oldest examples of contextualization among the Heliand, where “The Gospel was rewritten as a ballad and was sung in the mead halls of Saxon Germany in the 9th Century.” Todd Johnson mentions the efforts of Alfred the Great, Saint Patrick of Ireland and Roberto D Nobili - who became in appearance a Hindu holy man in the 1500’s - as examples of early contextualization. The China Inland Mission missionaries took on the dress and habits of the Chinese. There are many other such examples.
Who coined the term contextualization? Though practiced long before the word was coined, the actual coining of this term occurred in 1972. Shoki Coe first used this term in a World Council of Churches’ publication, “Theological Education Fund Report,” in the book Ministry in Context.
Todd Johnson describes this first usage:
A few short years ago, in 1972, Shoki Coe first used the term "contextualization" in a publication of the World Council of Churches. "
The rise of contextualization paralleled the rise of postmodern thought. It carried with it the same matching blessings and curses. These matching concepts helped demolish the myth of a monocultural Gospel, but some slipped into the false belief that transcultural items are rooted in culture as well. We have a God who has accommodated to culture, but we still have a God above culture. Some advocates of contextualization have forgotten this. While missiologists explored this concept as a key to enter resistant cultures with the Gospel, liberation and feminist theology also utilized contextualization as a means to spread deviant theologies.
Hesselgrave analyzes the aftermath:
When administrators of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches launched its Third Mandate Program (1970-78) to encourage the “contextualization of theology,” most who responded to that challenge were Third World theologians of a liberal or neo-orthodox persuasion. Their resultant contextualized theologies displayed a profound appreciation for indigenous cultures and religions, including black theology, African theology, liberation theology, waterbuffalo theology, third-eye theology, and the theology of the pain of God.
However, these contextualized theologies invariably left a great deal to be desired when measured against the biblical text and biblical theology.
The Lausanne Consultation on Gospel and Culture met at Willowbank in 1978. Controversy ensued. The results: “several papers drew sharp criticism and had to be revised.” Charles Taber created the Journal, The Gospel in Context in 1978 and David Hesselgrave included a chapter on the subject in his 1978 book, Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally. Later, Hesselgrave devoted a whole book to the subject in 1989 with the title, Contextualization. The first popular book discussing contextualization was Charles Kraft’s Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective, published in 1979. Hiebert, in 1982, also begin to speak of “critical contextualization.”
In the years that followed, contextualization affected nearly every area of missiology in almost every location and people group around the globe. Now, its influence seems to be everywhere and it is one of the most discussed and debated issues in missiology.
Section IV – The Biblical Data
As Stan Guthrie points out, “Contextualization may be a new term, but it is not a new concept. It has been around for as long as the Bible.”
The Old Testament:
The transcultural God enters culture. He does so in understandable and culturally meaningful ways. He spoke to Ancient Near East audiences, and they understood. One example, very simply put: God gave Moses his law on Sinai on tablets of stone, not on floppy disk!
God accommodated to human culture, working through social patterns of that day. Meredith Kline and other reformed scholars even point out that the structure of whole books of the Old Testament, such a Deuteronomy, were patterned after Ancient Near East Suzerain-Vassal treaties.
Douglas Hayward often demonstrates God’s Old Testament divine contextualizing by giving this curious assignment:
One of the interesting assignments that I give to students in my classrooms is that of asking them to read 50 of the Psalms and to record all of the images of God that they can find. This typically includes terms such as “my high tower, my shield and my sword, a rock and a high place” along with a host of others all indicating mental and cultural images that were important to a pastoral culture and an emerging nation-state. Then I ask them to record all the images of God in the Gospel of John. They discover there that God is spoken of as: the Word, the Way the Truth and the Life, the Door, a Vine and its branches, as well as other images that reflect a mercantile culture...”
Adequate space prevents all that I could write. Summary: God contextualized. He entered the cultural forms of the Ancient Near East to make His Divine Plan understandable.
The New Testament:
Dean Flemming recently detailed the New Testament occurrences of contextualization in great detail. I’ve listed only a few key examples here, but many more exist, the New Testament being rich in contextualization. The prime example: Christ himself - the Son of God incarnate as a Palestine Jew.
Christ communicated Himself to others in a contextualized way worthy of study. As Hesselgrave writes:
Though our Lord ministered within the confines of the worldview of Judaism, He nevertheless adapted to interests, needs, and “points of view” within various contexts. He did not communicate with the rich young ruler in terms of the new birth, or with the woman of Samaria in terms of “selling what she had and following Him,” or with Nicodemus in terms of the Water of life. All three approaches would have been valid as concerns God’s eternal truth, but they would not have been valid as adaptations within the respective contexts”.
Jesus contextualized Himself as a Jew, abiding by Jewish custom and using local language to express truth: “From the beginning the gospel was voiced in local, culturally conditioned forms.”
Want a divinely penned example of contextualization in action? The ministry of the Apostle Paul is a case study of “Apostolic Adaptation.” Look at Paul in both Acts 14 and Acts 17. These two sermons, studied together, provide an inspired case study of how the Apostle varied his subject matter, manner of address and illustrations - all to make the Gospel meaningful to different audiences. He even quoted local literature – pagan poets - and appealed to local myth. The Gospel writer Luke, of all the sermons which Paul preached, picked these sermons to record. Why? To give a clear model for engaging “foreign” cultures.
Do you know that Peter contextualized the Gospel too? Peter’s apostolic adaptation to different audiences is often overlooked, but just compare Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 with how he interacted with Cornelius in Acts 10. Also, Peter’s two epistles to poor, persecuted saints also focus on Christ’s suffering as an example for us. Peter displayed a Christ living a holy life under persecution, a fitting model for an audience undergoing similar circumstances.
The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 drove the nail in the coffin for anyone who values culture over Christ. The resounding verdict: one did not need to first become a Jew in order to become a Christian. The Gentiles did not need circumcision; only those particularly troublesome cultural sins for the Gentiles were forbidden. We need not export “civilization” first before we give “Christianity.”
The New Testament displays one long record of contextualizing practices. The New Testament writers had the habit of “dipping into pagan vocabulary.” Paul paints Jesus as the “pleroma,” a term widely used by the Proto-gnostics (Colossians 1:19). Christ is He in whom all the fullness of God dwells, forever recapturing this word from paganism. Paul quoted pagan poets (the Phaenomena of Aratus the Stoic). The Apostle John redefines the “logos” for Christian use. Ralph Winter concludes “we must not suppose that the message of Christianity, clothed in the new garments of the Greek world, was damaged by this new clothing.”
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