Incarnation & Culture

“The very fact of the incarnation reminds us that what God wants to make known of himself is not available in culture per se. The human cultural world provides the raw material, as it were, for the gospel; but the gospel cannot be reduced to the means of its cultural production.”

~ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “What is Everyday Theology?” in Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, et al (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Academic, 2007), 42.

Faithful & Relevant

“Now it is comparatively easy to be faithful if we do not care about being contemporary, and easy also to be contemporary if we do not bother to be faithful. It is the search for a combination of truth and relevance which is exacting.”

~ John Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press), 43.

Newbigin on Domesticating Jesus

This story from Lesslie Newbigin ought to cause us to pause and reflect carefully and prayerfully on what it means to “contextualize” the gospel. I don’t think this sort of thing happens only in India.

When I was a young missionary I used to spend one evening each week in the monastery of the Ramakrishna Mission in the town where I lived. . . . In the great hall of the Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship is offered before this picture. Jesus was honored, worshipped, as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history. To me, as a foreign missionary, it was obvious that this was not a step toward the conversion of India. It was the co-option of Jesus into the Hindu worldview. Jesus had become just one figure in the endless cycle of karma and samsara, the wheel of being in which we are all caught up. He had been domesticated into the Hindu worldview. This view remained unchallenged.

~ The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1989), 3.