Contextualizing the Faith

A Holistic Approach

Moreau, A. Scott

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493415687
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

This major statement by a leading missiologist represents a lifetime of wrestling with a topic every cross-cultural leader must address: how to adapt the universal gospel to particular settings. This comprehensive yet accessible textbook organizes contextualization, which includes "everything the church is and does, " into seven dimensions. Filled with examples, case studies, and diagrams and conversant with contemporary arguments and debates, it offers the author's unique take on the challenge of adapting the faith in local cultures.

1
Setting the Stage

WHAT IS CONTEXTUALIZATION?

The word “contextualization” is a mouthful! For many, it’s intimidating—and it sounds like one of those academic terms that don’t apply to the real world. Over the past several decades of learning, arguing, teaching, and more learning about the term, I’ve discovered just how down-to-earth the term really is. As adopted in 1972 for mission and church contexts, it’s fairly new, especially in the universe of theological terms; it is still in its infancy, so to speak. And yet in the world of missions and missiology, no term has simultaneously generated more excitement and controversy over the brief life span of its use.

Contextualization

Whether used as a term of approbation or celebration, “contextualization” is a term (and an underlying idea) that has an emotional resonance with many Christians around our world. It resides at the intersection of God’s unchanging Word and the ever-changing settings in which people live out their faith as followers of Christ (Conn 1984). By “unchanging Word,” I’m referring not only to Scripture itself, but also to Jesus Christ as the Word of God and to the gospel he established and communicated through his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection.

The Breadth of Contextualization

Contextualization happens everywhere the church exists. And by church, I’m referring to the people of God rather than to buildings. Contextualization refers to how those people live out their faith in light of the values of their societies. It is not limited to theology, architecture, church polity, ritual, training, art, or spiritual experience: it includes them all and more. Whether we meet in cushioned pews in a climate-controlled European Gothic cathedral, or take the Lord’s Supper of potato bread and palm wine, or actively seek supernatural signs and wonders, or sculpt expressions of our faith from tragedy to triumph, or enter sweat lodges to face our sin and find purification, or go to early morning prayer meetings or late-night concerts, we are all in the process of expressing or engaging our faith in highly contextual ways.

One problem with this is the idea that if contextualization is indeed everything Christians do, then the word becomes meaningless. But contextualization does not focus purely on what we do; it also examines why we do it the way we do. At the intersection of faith and culture, it forces us to step back (as impossible as that is) from ourselves and ask questions about why we practice our faith the way we do. From the simple to the profound, at the heart is the fact that as human beings our faith is always enfleshed because, despite our spiritual nature, we are enfleshed beings (we have physical bodies).

John paints a wonderful picture in Revelation 7:9–10 of followers of Christ “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” standing before the throne of God. John says that they cry out, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” This wonderful picture is a simultaneous blend of uniformity (white robes, all holding palm branches) and diversity (nations, tribes, peoples, languages). Have you ever wondered what language they use? At least from John’s depiction, it’s Greek! As I envision this massive worship experience, I imagine everyone speaking their first or heart language, but all of us understanding one another. This massive gathering of worshipers does not homogenize them: they retain their ancestral and linguistic frames of reference. But they are clearly unified in worship of God and Christ. I see this as a marvelous image characterizing contextualization.

The Dipolar Nature of Contextualization

Contextualization, in the framework of this image, can in one sense be thought of as having two “poles” that are in continual dialogue (drawing from Feinberg 1982). In the Revelation 7 image, one pole is the commonality: the white robes, the palm branches, and the declaration. The other pole is the individuality: nation, tribe, people, language. I’m using them as metaphors for the dipolar nature of contextualization. These two poles—one universal and one local, one transcendent and one immanent, one eternal and one limited in time and place—are in continual dialogue with each other. However, they do not share equal weight. The universal or normative pole transcends human societies, while the individual pole is the locale in which the normative pole is embodied.

The Universal or Normative Pole

As I noted, the first pole is the commonality. In the image from Revelation 7 this is represented by the sameness of the clothing and the declaration. This is the “universal” or “normative” pole. In contextualization, this universal pole is the gospel itself, a commonality that is timeless and universal. Stripped of all the additions people have tacked on over the years, I compress this gospel into a very short and simple phrase: Jesus the Christ is Lord. It will help to unpack this phrase before we look at the other pole.

Jesus

Jesus is the historical, incarnated man who ministered, taught, suffered, died, was resurrected, and will return. He is the very Son of God—not through a biological act, but as an ontological reality that is unique in the universe. He is the actual Son; we are adopted sons and daughters.

The Christ

I use “the Christ” in the phrase because too many people in our society think of “Christ” as his family name rather than his title—he is the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior. “The Christ” is his title and is unique among all creation.

Is Lord

It is this one, Son of God and very God, who is Lord of the universe. His reign is not limited in time or space, and the submission of the entire created order to his reign is its ultimate destiny.

The Local Pole

The other pole is the local setting, as with the individuality in the Revelation 7 image. Whether gathered in a secret house fellowship in a restrictive nation or assembled in an ultramodern megasanctuary in South Korea, Christians are embedded in local settings. They may be embedded enclaves of other cultures (e.g., international churches in many global cities) or never leave their birth environment; either way they remain inescapably embedded. This is the pole that is always changing and dynamic. While the universal pole is eternal, this pole is temporal and ever changing. Changing the metaphor, it is the soil in which the universal pole is embedded.

Introduction to the Dimensions

If contextualization includes every way we express our faith in Christ, how do we determine what should be included? How do we organize our approach? As I noted in the preface, this question troubled me for over a decade, until a colleague introduced me to the dimensional thinking of Ninian Smart (1996), including (in Smart’s order) (1) the doctrinal or philosophical, (2) the ritual, (3) the mythic or narrative, (4) the experiential and emotional, (5) the ethical and legal, (6) the social, and (7) the material dimensions.

Smart was not thinking specifically about contextualization. Rather, he was attempting to find a way to describe religions using universal categories. He did not develop or frame his approach to facilitate my agenda in relation to contextualization. However, even though his approach is a universal and etic (outsider) paradigm framed in a modernist worldview, it does provide a platform for the examination and exploration of contextualization of Christian faith in multiple non-Christian religious settings on their terms. This enables us to consider how we as Christians might contextualize our faith in settings of other religions in ways that make sense to people who practice those religions.

The danger, of course, is that of syncretism: intermingling inappropriate elements of other religions into our Christian faith (Moreau 2000a). This drives some of the criticism of contextualization, namely, that it leads to syncretism (Moreau 2012b, 123–29). However, the reality is that all expressions of the Christian faith are local, embedded in contexts. Our heritage is one of religious encounter and, in some cases, assimilation (such as the Christmas tree). Using Smart’s dimensional analysis no more opens us to syncretism than any other approach might. Rather, it provides a very helpful paradigm of areas to consider for contextualizing our faith.

Over the past two decades I have modified Smart’s dimensions for specific use in contextualization. Through the rest of the book I’ll explain how I approach contextualization of all that the church is, does, and believes—not limited to Christian theology. What follows is a brief explanation of each of the seven dimensions, which I expand on in the chapters to come. Throughout this introduction I’ll be referring to these as dimensions of “religion”—a reminder that I’m keeping the conversation broad at this point, including non-Christian religions, since each dimension is found within them as well as within our own Christian faith.

The Social Dimension

The social dimension refers to the dimension of religion that expresses the linking of people to each other, built on the cultural values of how people are to relate socially in religious contexts. It includes broad, universal social institutions as well as the sense of belonging inculcated through socially experienced religious events. For the purposes of contextualization, and following a framework used in intercultural communication, I identify five specific social institutions: association, kinship, exchange (or economics), learning (or education), and organizational (or political; see Moreau, Campbell, and Greener 2014, 88–94; Hiebert and Meneses 1995). Each of these institutions meets a need (whether religious or other) and has elements that can be identified as being of significance for the survival and growth of the institution. They are all found in every society on the planet. Each has a significant role to play in religious expression and life as well.

Association

Association refers to the reality that all religions are part of societies in which people form groups based on a broad variety of needs and social practices. In a very pragmatic sense, alumni associations typify this. However, our focus is on religious association. Since in associations people are members by some defining characteristic, we can rightly ask what religious types of associations exist and how people are included as well as how people are excluded. An alumni association, for example, only includes people who graduated from the institution of which they are alumni. Associations in religions are characterized by a variety of factors—from the broadest “I’m a Muslim” to the narrowest “I’m a member of the _______ group, which practices _______.” Religious associations may be public or secret; they often have symbols or slogans as well as rituals of incorporation and intensification. They also have means of inclusion and exclusion, whether formal or informal. These include such things as assent to specified beliefs and/or practices, belonging to a particular lineage, having undergone a particular ritual or trial, and much more.

Kinship

Every faith must provide for the biological reproduction of new members and see that they are nourished and cared for during infancy and childhood. It is typically the family (whether nuclear or extended) that provides the basic context for the performance of these activities. Often the early training and socialization of children into a faith is either initiated or takes place by concerned relatives in the family structure. Many faiths also express metaphorical family relationships (spiritual father, mother, brother, sister, child) as well as prescriptions and prohibitions on things such as marriage, inheritance, authority, residence, and the like.

Exchange

Every faith must have some way of producing and distributing various types of capital. There are many types of capital: material (goods, services, money), social (status, power, authority, knowledge), and spiritual (efficacy of prayer, connection to the divine or the supernatural, spiritual vitality). Each type of capital sustains the lives and faith of its members. The institutions and roles that are organized around the production and exchange of these types of capital—including concepts of obligation, debt, pricing, payment, and so on—constitute the exchange system of the faith. Often there is an idealized portrait of the system, which may not correspond to the actual exchanges in the lives of average adherents, and especially in the lives of those at the bottom of the social and/or spiritual capital scale.

Learning (Education)

Learning is a facet of the socialization process that is necessary for all faiths. Whether through formal educational systems (religious schools), nonformal means (apprenticeships), or informal means (socialization through youth groups, faith-based small groups, reading of religious materials, religious experiences, and so on), this component of the social dimension includes all those activities that contribute to providing members with the knowledge, values, and skills of the faith that are considered essential. They are transmitted to members to prepare them to understand and live out their faith in religiously acceptable ways.

Organizational (Political)

All faith communities must have some means of maintaining internal order as well as regulating the relations of their members with other faith communities. Internal threats to a faith’s existence come from the competition for power and control over the various types of religious and other capital noted previously. Since the availability of power has limits in every community, regulation of (and conflict over) the use of those capital resources is inevitable. The legal and political system—how a faith organizes itself—is the network of institutions and social roles that exist to regulate this access to and competition for power. Religions maintain order through formal and informal laws and policies, means of governance, enforcement, leadership to regulate lives of members, and so on.

The Mythic Dimension

The mythic dimension refers to the stories of a culture that reflect its thinking about the world, itself, its laws, and its values. Myth concretizes important values for the culture and enables those values to be passed from generation to generation. Mythography, the study of myth, typically focuses on religious epics including the timeless stories of creation, redemption, and human/divine drama found in a religion’s scriptures, epics, and classics.

In terms of contextualization, I use the term to include contemporary stories as well. They range from stories of heroism to martyrdom, from great success to great failure. I also include oral components including folklore and proverbs. People tell stories of great heroes of their faith, but as warnings they also use stories of people who fail in their religious faith or obligations. In the contemporary sense, Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood (Nigeria), the Marvel Universe, DC Comics, manga, and anime are all purveyors of myth on a global scale. When it comes to myth, as we will see in chapter 6, the question is not, Is it true? Rather, the questions are (1) Does it draw on or utilize the basic ideals of a society? (2) Does it challenge the basic ideals of a society? and (3) Does it capture the imagination?

The Ethical Dimension

The ethical dimension fundamentally refers to how people should behave as they relate to other people, animals, and the world. Ethics are found on the personal, group, and social (or systemic) levels. They are deeply interwoven into the cultural values and doctrine and often enshrined in heroic (or evil) acts discussed in cultural myth. They provide the behavioral maps that we negotiate as we live and interact with others. In this sense, the Ten Commandments and Golden Rule fit the ethical category rather than the doctrinal category. Both the Ten Commandments ...