Chapter One
Ralph D. Winter
Introduction
In our weak moments we may all have hoped for, or anticipated, a global church of Jesus Christ that would all speak English and reflect exactly the flavor and customs of the cultural tradition in which we ourselves have been reared. And be called Baptist, Vineyard, or Presbyterian, etc..
This is not going to happen, and it would be a tragedy of uniformity if it did. We are much richer due to our differences, different emphases, different perspectives. It may not be obvious but it really does take a multi-cultural movement to understand a multicultural Bible. Our unity across the globe is not the same as uniformity. We may not have to go so far as the Koreans, who have developed over fifty different Presbyterian denominations. But we must at least allow the Koreans to speak Korean.
Hard Question: Who is a Christian?
We do get into difficulty, however, when we try to define boundaries of acceptability. The simple question of who is a Christian and who isnât, turns out to be not so simple. For example, to our knowledge no one in the New Testament called himself a Christian. Apparently, what we call âthe early churchâ did not accept the Roman governmentâs designation for several centuries, and even then the Armenians may not have done so for centuries more. And, the Ethiopic/Amharic church perhaps still later.
Who is Included?
After all, the word Christian is basically a Greek word, and in the New Testament was apparently a term of derision (âmessiah-nutâ?). Greek believers within Synagogues were called âdevout personsâ or âGod fearers,â and Jews who followed Christ were sometimes called âNazarenes.â It is just possible that either in the Aramaic spoken in Nazareth or the Semitic sister, Syriac, a word sometimes employed for believers was the word âMuslimâ meaning âGod fearer.â
While we do not know all the details, we do know that there has never been a standard term for truly believing followers of Jesus Christ. The name above the church door does not confidently establish very much. It might read âChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saintsâ but the use of these key words does not in itself guarantee anything about those inside the door, their intellectual beliefs or, much less, about their heart beliefs. And, what if above the door it says nothing about either Jesus Christ or His church? What if it merely says, Zion Fellowship or Kingdom Hall or Roman Catholic, or Assembly of God?
What I am trying to establish is that we cannot judge the truly saving faith of individuals by the formal or informal name of their fellowship. Sure, we can guess. I would rather accept people in an Assembly of God than in a Kingdom Hall, but even that for any specific individual is ultimately guesswork.
Who is Excluded?
Well, if we canât include people by going by the names they employ, how about excluding people by name? This has been done. For example, for many Protestants, the designation âCatholicâ clearly defines a person lost in a system of works righteousness. And, if you start to speak of Hindu believers in Christ the same people will think you are talking complete nonsense.
Missiological Distinction: 3 levels
However, by now, around here at least, many of us see the situation as more complicated than that. In the missiological context it is not so uncommon for us to hear people making a distinction between the cultural tradition and the religious tradition of a people. More specifically, it is possible to speak of three levels, culture, religion, and faith, although the first two are often difficult to distinguish between.
Cultural and Religious Levels
That is, it is not easy for a missionary to discern what is part of a religious system and what is purely cultural. For example, a Roman Catholic may go without a tie in reflecting his secular California culture, but âcross himself in moments of desperation as part of his religious culture. Both of these âlevelsâ are cultural in one sense, and are easily confused.
The fact is that missionary advance down through the centuries has rejected some and assimilated other pagan religious features. For example, we still wear wedding rings and throw rice at weddings, features which no doubt originally had religious meanings in Roman culture. Even more boldly we have converted an Anglo-Saxon religious ceremony exalting a spring Goddess of fertility, Eostre, as an Easter ceremony, a transformation which took a lot of nerve, it would seem. And, everyone knows that the 25th of December was originally a pagan day of celebration utterly unrelated to either the date or the meaning of the birth of Christ.
The Level of Faith
Thus, the historical record is plain to see: it is apparently possible for our expanding faith to encompass and effectively employ both religious and nonreligious cultural elements of a non-Christian society. Of course, there will always be purists who will try to go back to Jewish culture, such as the Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, who may doubt that either Easter or Christmas should be celebrated by Christians. But both of these groups merely reflect widespread revival convictions in the larger Evangelical movement at the time of their birth as new movements. Evangelicals today, of course, donât recall, or perhaps donât want to recall, their own revival heyday of reexamined faith in the 1840s and 50s when slavery, routine eyeball gouging, alcoholic beverages, smoking, and even tea and coffee were seen as pagan and evil. The immense power of that particular revival time swept many entire industries out of existence, such as the industry supplying glass eyes to those losing a wrestling match in a tavern fight.
At this point it must be clear that every form of Christianity contains cultural elements which do not have Biblical origins (such as eyeball popping), and that the early Christians at least were true Christians without being called Christians. It is time furthermore when we should recognize that the many different forms of the cultural tradition called Christianity are unevenly âpureâ or Biblical. Even attempting to be Biblical, if all you do is to elevate the Hebrew language, calendar, customs and diet, for example, does not in itself guarantee the presence of the kind of heart faith the Bible itself distinguishes from culture and religion.
Missiological Comparison: Four Basic Perspectives
With these thoughts in mind it is possible logically to imagine four different comparisons or evaluations or perspectives of the relation between two movements, whether we are speaking of Jewish and Christian or Christian and Muslim, Christian and Hindu, and so forth. In doing this we have to simplify our categories to the point that one tradition is definitely a flawed representation of Biblical truth while the other definitely does not fall short.
Each of these four basic perspectives has a rationale. The Conservative may be no more than ethnocentric or it may be based on a great deal of detail.
The Supercessionist is the view that the first tradition is now invalid and is superceded or replaced by the one in the right hand column (a perspective sometimes called âreplacement theologyâ).
The Liberal says they are both just fine.
The Missiological says almost the opposite: that they are both seriously flawed.
The Continuum
However, things are not quite so simple. In the additional diagram showing a declining staircase of movements I have very simplistically and impressionistically indicated the âdistanceâ a given movement might have from the perfect, Biblical movement, which of course is Evangelicalism. This represents roughly, as I say, the degree of difference in culture, religion and faith, and suggests the degree of âculture shockâ an Evangelical might find among people in one of these other spheres. That is, Evangelicals are closer to Protestants than to Catholics, some say closer still to Orthodox.
The problem when generalizing for an entire cultural sphere is that the individuals within that sphere range in a wide spectrum of difference. Some are legalistically holding to the expected norms. Others are true fundamentalists and hold to the norms out of true conviction. Others may be bi-cultural with some other culture and be considerably loosened up from the norms. Thus, for any specific individual we are baffled when it comes to âbrandingâ that person with âheresyâ or âbiblicalâ labels on the basis of our generalized assessment of that personâs entire sphere.
Then, we are further given pause when we try to take into account the kind of culturally-Hindu followers of Christ who apparently exist in large numbers in certain parts of India. Who have something of a âhybridâ status, being culturally Hindu but Biblical in their faith.
The Key Question: Who is Jesus?
As a general approach our best step forward is Jesus Christ, except in the case of the Jews. Nothing is as pure and authoritative and as compelling as introducing people and societies to Jesus Christ. Even Jews, if approached from within their cultural sphere may be open to the glory of the Father which shi...