Contextualized Contraband

How contextualization smuggles in all sorts of undesirable things.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the term ‘contextualization’ and therefore I have lost count of the number of times that the term has left me confused and more than a little suspicious (the two being the same number).

A full examination of the concept would take a far greater amount of time than I currently have available. Such a discussion would need to wander through epistemology, doctrine of scripture, a discussion of the nature of biblical law, and even to some extent touch on eschatological convictions. It would have to interact with numerous writers, missiologists, theologians (both orthodox and heterodox) and grapple with a host of modern church-planting networks, big names in the evangelical world, and presumably streams of thought I have yet to come in contact with.

This post is simply my attempt to put into writing issues that I have with the concept of contextualization as it is commonly taught to evangelical Christians who are, at least theoretically, committed to the inerrancy of scripture. The idea as it is taught to, and received by, the thoughtful everyday believer.

For our purposes then:

Contextualization is an attempt to adapt the presentation and application of the gospel message in a way that makes it culturally understandable to those you are trying to evangelize.

“We have translated the old words of the bible to be understood by the new reader”, the argument goes, “now it is time to translate the culture as well.”

“After all,” to give the inevitable next step “In Acts 17 Paul looked around Athens and described the gospel in terms that the Athenians would understand.”

So far as this goes, there is very little to object to. I think that the Acts 17 exposition is carrying more weight in this particular argument than it can carry. But by-and-large the point is granted. Communication requires a medium, and that medium must connect at both ends for anyone to understand what is going on.

The problem is however that this seemingly innocuous definition of contextualization becomes the thin end of a wedge that carries with it a host of things that at best leave the church incapacitated in its missionary attempts, and at worst leads to moral and epistemological relativism which is entirely foreign to the truth revealed to us in scripture.

Once the term, and with it a tame version of the concept, has been deemed ‘safe’ for evangelical believers it’s very easy for a host of other things to be smuggled in under its wings.

In the rest of this post, I aim to lay out some of that conceptual contraband.

Contextualisation’s Contraband

One of the key parts of a worldview within which contextualization is possible, even desirable, is the idea that there are vast swathes of human existence that are religiously and morally neutral. Indeed, this myth of neutrality is so central to the way many imagine contextualization today that I don’t think it’s able to stand without it. Clothing is morally neutral, food is morally neutral, all aesthetics are morally neutral. These things, it is said, have no Christian way of doing them therefore they are all up-for-grabs. The only thing that can guide decisions in such areas is preference. Not personal or individual preference though, that would be too obviously absurd and too obviously guided by sinful desire for the edifice to hold together for long. Instead, the sole guide in these areas is an abstracted ‘cultural’ preference.

Often the myth of neutrality extends far beyond aesthetics into areas we generally consider to be more substantial such as education, economics, the role of government. There is no way to do these things in a particularly Christian way (it is supposed), they are morally and religiously neutral, they can and must be fluid, flexible, and fall almost entirely in line with what the receiving culture already knows and loves.

This radical myth of neutrality often extends even to church practice. Authority in the church must meet the receiving culture’s preferences, hymnody (or lack thereof) must conform to the standards of the receiving culture. All of it is neutral, any established patterns or principles are ‘western’ accretions and any of it must be left behind when it is thought to be getting in the way of ‘communicating the gospel’.

This is compounded by a tendency in contextualizing circles to have a somewhat loose relationship with biblical inerrancy and authority. The introduction of ‘another culture’ can make even those who say they are committed to the inerrancy of scripture embrace some strange amalgam of post-modern epistemologies and views on scripture.

For some, the only authoritative thing in the bible takes the form of a secret message, a hidden essential meaning stashed away within an error-prone text. The actual words of scripture are like the outer husk of a nut which can be stripped away to find the bit that really matters, the kernel of truth.

For others, the bible becomes an expression of human ideas about things that God did in the past. The acts of God were the authoritative thing, the real revelation, and what we have written down are the reflections of heavily culture-bound men, who’s perspective may be interesting but are indelibly marked by their standpoint.

The divine authorship of both scripture and history are forgotten, and the bible becomes a functionally human book in everything but the absolute essentials. It becomes a book blown about by the changing winds of culture, rivalrous raw-power, and the vague ephemera of a so-called ‘communal interpretation’.

Wave goodbye to the scripture’s supreme authority over all things. Leave behind any notion that the words of the bible are the very words of Christ himself. Abandon the clarifying sword of the Spirit, authoritative in every legitimate application, and greet in its place a minimalist ‘gospel’ that sometimes (just-about) touches on the forgiveness of sins for eternal life and fills the hollow shell with whatever suits the desires of the culture.

Christ comes with a Culture

Many contextualizers claim that they are doing nothing wrong, after all, they aren’t changing the nature of the gospel to suit their audiences. They say this because they maintain the basics: we are sinners, Jesus died on the cross and rose again, now we can be forgiven. And in so far as they do maintain these things then praise the Lord. There are many temptations to abandon even these things, so it is good that they have resisted those temptations.

But these gospel basics alone are a denuded gospel. To treat everything else that the word of God says as more-or-less unimportant results in a truncated gospel. It leaves family life, civic life, personal life, even church life, untouched by the Lordship of Jesus Christ and untouched by his authoritative word. Perhaps the contextualisers have preserved the basics of the gospel untouched by many threats but casting aside everything except the basics of the gospel leave most of human existence untouched by it.

For the best of these contextualisers, the bible is authoritative in everything it says, but it quite frankly doesn’t have much to say.

Missionaries and church-planters need to get out of the habit of treating large swathes of the bible as mere cultural accretions. They need, in other words, to understand that the bible does not come out of a culture, it instead comes with a culture. Many of the Christian forms of the past are not a result of ‘cultural imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ or some sort of western hegemony over theology. The singing of psalms in church is not the result of a ‘cultural’ preference. The restriction of the office of elder, pastor, and head of household to men is not an archaic cultural quirk. Meeting on a Sunday is not a western thing. These are applications of the authoritative word of God, a word that has something to say about everything. In so far as these things are ‘western’ it is because the west has been shaped by the word of God for such a long time, and not the other way around.

Christ comes with his kingdom, that kingdom has a culture, and the shape of that culture is every corner of the word of God faithfully applied to the situation at hand.

Some closing thoughts

Perhaps some will read everything I have said so far and hear me saying that we can just take everything from one place and transpose it somewhere else and, voila, our job is done. That is not what I am saying. It takes hard work to apply the unchanging norms of scripture and apply them to the myriad situations we find ourselves in. It involves understanding the normative principles of scripture and an intimate understanding of the situation in front of us¹. In so far as the situations differ, the specifics of the application of scripture may also look different. But that is a very different prospect than the idea of most modern contextualization, the idea that there really aren’t many principles in the bible to be applied in the first place.

I am also not saying that western missionaries have always applied the scriptures correctly to the situations in front of them. However, their failure was not a failure to contextualize. It was often simply a failure to understand the scriptures².

In closing then, let me simply issue an exhortation that we be on our guard against any strategy that seeks to diminish the inerrancy, authority or (crucially in this case) the applicability of the word of God in every part.

And let’s be alert to the possibility that seemingly innocuous ideas can be used to smuggle in all sorts of contraband. Contraband that would leave us not only ineffective in our missionary and church-planting endeavors, but also leave us at risk of abject faithlessness and apostasy.

¹ I here borrow from John Frame’s tri-perspectival approach to biblical ethics. For more, see ‘Doctrine of the Christian Life’ (2008, P&R)

² To give an example that I have heard: The case of western missionaries converting polygamous tribal chieftains.

It is said that these western missionaries, not knowing what to do with a new Christian who had multiple wives already, told their new converts that they must now put away all wives except their first. A wife who suddenly finds herself husbandless is not generally in a good position. And so, it is said, these missionaries appeared to be destroying families and they gave the gospel a bad name. If only they had understood the culture more clearly, they wouldn’t have failed at communicating the gospel!

However, this is not an issue of contextualization and not knowing the culture, it is an example of not knowing the bible! Such men should have had biblical principles of dealing with polygamy in mind all along, for if you are set on applying the whole bible there are many such principles on display ripe for application (e.g. Ex. 21:10, Deut. 21:15-17, as well as 1 Tim. 3:2).