Contextualization: True & False

I recently posed some questions about the "gospel and culture" debate that has so forcefully returned itself to to the table of Christian dialogue in recent years. Perhaps some of the most cogent and broad-minded words on this issue have come from, Lesslie Newbigin, the late British pastoral theologian too often neglected by the knights at the table. The delicate theological balance he presents may serve to woo polarized "fundamentalists" and "emergents" back to a place of mutual appreciation and consideration. In the least, I have been so wooed.

The gospel is addressed to human beings, to their minds and hearts and consciences, and calls for their response. Human beings only exist as members of communities which share a common language, customs, ways of ordering economic and social life, ways of understanding and coping with their world. If the gospel is to be understood, if it is to be received as something which communicates truth about the real human situation, if it is, as we say, to 'make sense,' it has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and has to be clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them. And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community's life must be so ordered that it 'makes sense' to those who are so invited. It must, as we say, 'come alive.' Those to whom it is addressed must be able to say, 'Yes, I see. This is true for me, for my situation.' But if the gospel is truly to be communicated, the subject in that sentence is as important as the predicate. What comes home in the heart of the hearer must really be the gospel, and not a product shaped by the mind of the hearer. It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumberable 'lives of Jesus' were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus. But that criticism has much wider application. If one looks at the long history of Christian art one can see that in successive portraits of Jesus the self-portrait of the age-the Byzantine picture of Jesus as the supreme Emperor, the Pantocrator; the medieval picture of the pain-drenched figure on the cross, the blond, fair-haired boy of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal, and the Liberator Christ modeled on Che Guevara. In each case the figure of Jesus has been so painted as to fit the reigning cultural ideal, but what does this gallery of portraits have to do with the real Jesus? How can the gospel 'come alive' in all these different cultural contexts, and still be the same authentic gospel? That is the problem of contextualization.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in Pluralist Society (Ch. 12).