Incarnation is always Contextual

Many people are unaware that almost all wine producing grapes are produced from vines grafted to a root stock originating in the United States, originally from Texas. Now there is an entire science of matching root stocks that survive well in different climates with the types of vine that can produce grapes in those same climates. But there is more to wine than root and vine. The soil, air, and variations in temperature and altitude make a difference. They are what is known as terroir; all the environmental factors that affect the final flavor of the grape and thus wine. 

But it isn't just grape wine that depends on roots, vines, and terroir. The wine of the gospel likewise depends on these things, and indeed requires new wine skins if it is to come of age.  

When I first arrived in Malaysia in 1985 I was almost immediately challenged by my students with a question: Do you have to move through modernity to arrive at a contemporary theological perspective? Is the intellectual path of Western Christianity the only path one can follow? 

As I became more fluent in Bahasa Malaysia and studied the history and makeup of the language I realized it has some unique attributes. You can express certain aspects of the human experience in Malay that are difficult if not impossible to express in English. Indeed, if the work of Batja Mesquita (Between Us, How Cultures Create Emotions) is correct, then language and culture determine what we are able to feel. Our culture and our language both make possible and limit our experience of being human.

Similarly there are thoughts we cannot think and ideas we cannot know based on the limitations of our language and culture. This doesn't mean we can't change and grow, but growth requires not only new experiences, but an expanding culture and langauge. 

My Malaysian students challenged me, yet they themselves often fell into the idea of a so called Biblical worldview which they believed as non-modern people they could possess while moderns/westerners could not. They ended up reiterating a certain type of western evangelicalism that touts a "supernatural" worldview or "Biblical worldview" as normative; as if somehow God's decision to be incarnate in the world of 1st century Judaism in a Hellenistic environment put God's imprimatur on that particular culture, making it the normative culture for all places and times. 

(The whole idea of a "Biblical worldview" is itself prima facia absurd, since the book emerges over a period of thousands of years in many different cultural settings and two different languages.) 

This idea of a normative Christian worldview paves the way for asserting that Christian witness requires the deconstruction and then reconstruction of cultures and languages to conform to this worldview. This is the essence of colonialist Christian missions; the remaking of others in one's own image so that they can supposedly bear the image of God. 

It makes no difference whether the process of deconstructing a culture generously allows  the maintenance of a belief in some invisible forces and spirits, or insists on transforming them into psychological and social phenomena. Either way it is an insistence on a single normative context, and thus an assertion of domination and power by one people and culture over another. 

 

This has happened again and again in Christian history. But even so it was never what it claimed to be; it was never the promulgation of some original or authentic Christian culture among new peoples. It was always just the imposition of the last Christian culture over the next. And even that imposition was not complete.Recipients, experiencing Christ and filled with the power of the spirit, invariably asserted themselves and their cultural riches into Christianity. The gospel was contextualized in the reception even if it wasn't the intention of the evangelists. 

A deeper reading of history shows that the history of Christian witness to the gospel, and therefore the history of Christian theological reflection on that witness, is a history of enculturation. Just as Christian witness must always be contextual, so also reflection on that witness must be contextual. (See my The Gospel Among the Nations: A Documentary History of Inculturation)

 

The understanding that all witness and theology is contextual arises from recognizing that incarnation is a fundamental principle of God's relationship to humanity, not merely an event. God makes God’s self known as God incarnate. God is Emmanuel; God with us. Note however, God with us, not just God with them, the supposedly more authentic Christians in whose footsteps we gather up the crumbs of their experience and theological reflection.

But if God is with us and not just them it is also true that God's incarnation cannot be limited to a particular historical event or the manifestation of an abstract "humanness." To be fully human, as Jesus Christ is fully human, is to be part of both a particular cultural history and part of the human experience of conscious rationality engaged with the natural world. We cannot understand Jesus if we do not understand the entire history of Israel in which he consciously and unconsciously shared, nor its wider engagement with God's providential care for all the nations of the earth. (See Amos 9 and the book of Jonah for example, or the Wisdom literature.) There is far more to incarnation than an essentialized humanity, one with an essentialized God, temporarily inhabiting a generic human body. 

We cannot understand Jesus as fully human unless we understand that he, like all humans, is only human in a context; a context that is the summation and continuation of many contexts in an unbroken story. That context was a context that not even the second generations of Christians could fully share, for they had their own. Thus the very first thing that happened in Christian witness and reflection was contextualization, or more properly continued contextualization. 

 

The fact that the scripture, the Word of God, was written in Koine Greek, the language of a different cultural context than that of Jesus, is indicative of the extent to which contextualization was critical to witness from the beginning. 

The New Testament properly understood is not a normative statement of Christian doctrine and ethics. It is rather a normative account of the process of contextualization. It gives us a normative account of how the apostles translated their experience of the Christ into a variety of different cultural and situational contexts. Scripture is apostolic as much because it is a contextual witness as because of its ostensible authorship. Put another way, to be an apostle is less to have been present with Jesus in his earthly ministry and more to engage in the process of contextualization in obedience to Christ’s command to be his witnesses not only in Judea, but Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Paul, of course, is the primary representative of this form of apostlicity. 

For this reason the apostolic church isn't created by the laying on of hands from one generation to another, but by the continuation of the apostolic mission of contextualization of the gospel. A stagnant message floating free of contemporary culture, even if preached by the lips of preacher blessed by St Peter himself, would not be apostolic. But a fresh and relevant invitation to follow Christ attuned to the cultural context and language of a people would be apostolic regardless of who laid hands on whom.

 

For some this raises the question of how and whether the Church can recover the original kerygma, the original witness that must be contextualized. How does scripture authorize our witness and thus our theology rather than just a process of contextualization? 

The answer to this question does not lie in the isolation of an earliest strand of witness. Any such strand is a contextualization of the unrecoverable experience of Christ by the disciples. Rather, our witness and theology are authorized through engagement with the Church, represented by its tradition, in the process of listening to and contextually articulating the apostolic witness found in Scripture. To witness faithfully is to place oneself in the trajectory of the Word mapped across the witness of scripture and tradition to the present rather than the reiteration of a supposed original kerygma. The kerygma is a process, not a declaration. 

Or put in other words, faithful witness is to join the story of the church in its faithful witness in specific but ever changing contexts. Thus it is as much a matter of faithful listening to the Spirit as it is the intellectual archaeology of ancient texts. 

 

As Christianity has become multi-cultural, and thus multi-contextual, an authentically enculturated witness is one that takes into account this multi-cultural and thus multi-contextual environment. Engaging with the church as it follows the trajectory of scripture and tradition therefore requires a complex cross-cultural dialogue as a foundation for attentively listening for God’s Word in the present day. 

 

Going further, and to draw the obvious conclusion, it means following the trajectory of the apostles into engagement with God’s self-revelation beyond the realm of Christian culture. As the apostle Paul says in his own contextualizing and enculturating mission, “God has not left God’s self without a witness.” Not even among the idol worshippers of Lystra, Derbe, and our world. (Acts 14) The trajectory of contextualization stretches from incarnation to manifestation, from the Cross the the rainbow stretched across the sky. (Compare Acts 14:17 with Genesis 8:22 - 9:16)

That this account of Christian witness occurs in the narrative of Paul coming to the Jerusalem council in order to speak on behalf of witness to the Gentiles in their own context helps establish the trajectory of contextual Christian witness, as does the clear result of that council in appealing to the covenant with Noah rather than the Jewish Torah.  From the very beginning Christian witness emerges from a polylogue between and among Christians and their world, both natural and cultural. 

In closing it must be acknowledged that this understanding of contextualization as a characteristic of the gospel, and focusing as it does on the narrative trajectory of the gospel rather than privileging particular doctrines or supposedly formative theologies, belongs to the distinctive cultural context of contemporary society. We live in a time in which much of the world understands its identity through narrative rather than declaration. There have been contexts in which creeds were appropriate contextualizations of Christian witness. There have been contexts in which particular theologians were contextually appropriate touchstones of authenticity. But we should not confuse a theology which is appropriate to a theology which is normative. 

 

We do not live in either of those contexts, nor need we recreate them in order to faithfully witness to Jesus Christ.  Our authenticity depends on joining the apostolic story of contextualization and thus requires that we witness within and to our context, if we are to witness at all. It is by our fruit that we are known, and that comes from more than the roots. Much more.