Reformation Faith Today

Several pastors and cultural critics have written about contextualization.

Mark Dever:

Reading through recent mailouts of upcoming pastors conferences, knowing some of the speakers’ books and churches, reading the topics to be addressed, I’m struck again by the carefulness with which a faithful pastor must consider the issue of adapting the unchanging Gospel to his current context.  Of course contextualization always takes place, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged.  To acknowledge it is better, because then we are more self-aware of choices we’re making, and we are also better able to be examined by others on those choices.  Such awareness of our contextualizing also encourages humility, and hinders us from claiming alone to be the “I am of Christ” kind of party that Paul warned the Corinthians about.

 

 

And yet, contextualization presumes either positive or at least neutral cultural images or ways of communication which can be used by the Gospel.  Are there any cultural images or ways of communicating that can’t be used for Gospel purposes?  The answer would have to be “Yes”, (though we might disagree about what those are). 

 

 

And what happens when a certain image or mode of communicating is inextricably linked with an anti-Christian worldview?  David Wells summarizes the issue:  “To put the matter succinctly:  those who see only the contemporaneity of this spirituality—and who, typically, yearn to be seen as being contemporary—usually make tactical maneuvers to win a hearing for their Christian views; those who see its underlying worldview will not. . . . When rival worldviews are in play, it is not adaptation that is called for but confrontation.” David Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs (2005), pp. 155-156.

To find out more of what David specifically uses as an example, you’ll need to turn to that section of his book.  But in all our concern for evangelism and contextualization (excellent, Christ-like concerns) we should not be blind to implications of our decisions.

 

 

In a decision you’re making right now about your own congregation, could you imagine a situation in which your intention is simply to adapt becoming a situation in which you would have no option but to confront?  It’s worth thinking about.

David Wells:

 Biblical revelation was given in a particular cultural context but it is also intended to be heard in our own context. This revelatory trajectory, then, has a point of origination and a point of arrival. It is the fact of inspiration and the contemporary work of the Spirit which secure a consistency between its terminus a quo [end from which; starting point] and its terminus a quem [end to which; ending point]. The work of the Holy Spirit was such that the responsible human agents who were used in the writing of Scripture were able to employ cultural materials and, indeed, to shape the revelation in terms of their own understanding, but what God the Spirit willed should be revealed was exactly what was written, and the content and intent of this revelation were alike transcultural. The biblical revelation, because of its inspired nature, can therefore be captive neither to the culture in which it arose nor to the culture in which it arrives. It was not distorted as it was given, nor need it be distorted as we seek to understand it many centuries later in contexts far removed from those in which it was originally given. . . .

It is the task of theology, then, to discover what God has said in and through Scripture and to clothe that in a conceptuality which is native to our own age. Scripture, at its terminus a quo, needs to be de-contextualized in order to grasp its transcultural content, and it needs to be re-contextualized in order that its content may be meshed with the cognitive assumptions and social patterns of our own time.

. . . Theology is that effort by which what has been crystallized into doctrine becomes anchored in a subsequent age and culture. It is the work of making doctrine incarnate. God’s Word is “enfleshed” in a society as its significance is stated in terms of that cultural situation. . . .

. . . Theology differs from doctrine as what is unrevealed does from what is revealed, fallible from what is infallible, derived from what is original, relative from what is certain, culturally determined from what is divinely given. Doctrine cannot change from generation to generation, otherwise Christianity itself would be changing. Theology must change in each succeeding generation, otherwise it will fail to become a part of the thinking processes and life-style of that generation. The attempt to change doctrine imperils Christian faith; the unwillingness to incarnate doctrine in each age by theology imperils the Christian’s credibility. In the one case Christianity can no longer be believed; in the other, it is no longer believable. . . .

Contextualization, then, is but another name for describing the servant role of theology. The Son of God assumed the form of a servant to seek and save the lost and theology must do likewise, incarnating itself in the cultural forms of its time without ever losing its identity as Christian theology. God, after all, did not assume the guise of a remote Rabbi who simply declared the principles of eternal truth, but in the Son he compassionately entered into the life of ordinary people and declared to them what God’s Word meant to them. But in so doing, the Son never lost his identity as divine. Christian thought is called to do likewise, to retain its identity (doctrine) within its role as servant (theology) within a particular culture.

. . .[R]eformation should not be seen merely as a past event but should always be a contemporary experience. In every generation the Word of God must be heard afresh and obeyed afresh if the God of that Word is to be accorded our obedience at the places where it really counts.

Phil Ryken via Lig Duncan:

 I do not think for a moment that the church should aspire to become irrelevant. There is always a need for Christians to speak the gospel into their own context. Rather, my concern is with the ever present danger of over-contextualizing. Consider what happens to a church that is always trying to appeal to an increasingly post-Christian culture. Almost inevitably, the church itself becomes post- Christian. This is what happened to the liberal church during the twentieth century, and it is what is happening to the evangelical church right now. As James Montgomery Boice has argued, evangelicals are accepting the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, adopting the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods. In theology a revision of evangelical doctrine is now underway that seeks to bring Christianity more in line with postmodern thought. The obvious difficulty is that in a post-Christian culture, a church that tries too hard to be relevant may in the process lose its very identity as the church. Rather than confronting the world the church gets co-opted by. It no longer stands a city on a hill, but sinks to the level of the surrounding culture.”

Philip Graham Ryken, City on a Hill: Reclaiming the Biblical Pattern for the Church in the 21st Century (Moody Press, 2003), 22.

C.J Mahaney:

“We might get the wrong impression from Paul, when he writes in 1 Corinthians 9:22 that he has become ‘all things to all men,’ that he might by all means save some. Paul was not unbending in meeting people as they were, where they were. He was widely adaptable. But we might get the wrong impression from this passage, if we read it in isolation from Paul’s other statements about ministry, as if 1 Corinthians 9 were the whole of his mind. The fact is that Paul was not infinitely flexible in his outreach strategies. He had limits, and in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 he explains one of his boundaries:

‘When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God, in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (RSV)’

Paul deliberately chooses (’I decided’) not to meet the culturally conditioned expectations of his hearers….The most embarrassing aspect of the gospel—a crucified Savior, a loser Messiah—was the very thing Paul concentrated on. Paul is here exposing to view the controlling center of his ministry strategy. ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ was for Paul, the ultimate criterion for what we today call ‘relevance.’ And with his typically refreshing outlook, the apostle defined relevance not as we tend to do. For him, relevance had to be defined not in terms of meeting audience expectations but in relation to the centrality of the Cross. His preaching agenda was set by that theological center, not by his audience….

Now, what lessons may we preachers today learn from this amazing passage of Scripture?

First, a biblical preacher critiques his methods, his forms of contextualization, his adaptations to culture, his style, not primarily by the standard of culture but by the superior standard of the gospel itself….The message of the Cross must discipline and control us—indeed, limit us—even though that puts us at a disadvantage in winning an audience.

What one observes in evangelicalism today is that, while many preachers can declare allegiance to all the right doctrines, their theology makes little difference in their preaching beyond drawing the widest, most amorphous and seldom alluded-to boundaries. Their formal credentials may be in order, but the theology they affirm sits very lightly on their actual practice of ministry. It is invisible to their people. Such ministers demonstrate little doctrinal specificity or even discernment—intentionally so?—in their message and style. The biblical gospel may be formally obligatory, but it is personally uninteresting and strategically incidental. Such ministers may be exacting in their methodology, but they are vague in their theology—a curious arrangement of priorities! For Paul, such thinking would have been completely alien to his soul. For him theology reigned supreme in every aspect of his ministry. Theology for him, energized him, cheered him, emboldened him. It was his ministerial fountain of youth. One wonders how far we may drift from Pauline ministry and still retain a plausible claim to biblical authenticity in our work.”

I could go on and on with more great stuff from this article. I recommend every pastor obtain and read it for himself, and apply it to the leadership and preaching of your church.  Assign the article to your pastoral team or eldership and together evaluate your church in relation to the content of this article. We must do more than nod our heads as we read, we must make application to our pastoral ministry in very specific ways.

How about your pastoral reading list—is it more focused on the latest pragmatic pastoral fad than the cross of Jesus Christ? Are there more books on your desk from the business section of Barnes and Noble than there are the great works of Calvin, Edwards, Owen and Spurgeon?  Let us not be numbered among those for whom “theology…sits lightly on their practice of ministry” or pastors who are “exacting in their methodology, but vague in their theology.”

May it never be said of our pastoral ministry that the gospel was “formally obligatory…but personal uninteresting and strategically incidental.”  Instead, by following the example of Paul, let “theology reign supreme” with the message of “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” May this be the “the controlling center” of our preaching content, the structures and practices of our church and our evangelistic strategy. Then, and only then, will the church be truly relevant to our culture.