Incarnation and Intercultural Mission 1

I lived most of my life in the 20th century and most of my academic career with 20th century theology. I don't regret leaving both behind if it will help us better serve the gospel in this century, and in the places and times to which we are called.

 Psalm 87

Glorious things are said of you,

    city of God:

⁴ “I will record Rahab and Babylon

    among those who acknowledge me—

Philistia too, and Tyre, along with Cush—

    and will say, ‘This one was born in Zion.’”

⁵ Indeed, of Zion it will be said,

    “This one and that one were born in her,

    and the Most High himself will establish her.”

⁶ The Lord will write in the register of the peoples:

    “This one was born in Zion.”

⁷ As they make music they will sing,

    “All my fountains are in you.”

 

Introduction

1. Today I want to explore the relationship between two concepts: incarnation and culture. In particular I’ll assert that God Incarnate is God encultured. And this helps us better understand both the future of Christian mission and the kind of practical tools we need to become effective in mission. 
2. As contemporary philosophers such as Calvin Schrag, Charles Taylor, and Matthew Crawford and many others have noted, our understanding of what it means to be human in the West has undergone a dramatic shift in the last 300 years. We no longer necessarily understand ourselves in terms of unchanging essences, but in terms of a narrated identity. As importantly we are deeply conscious that our humanity is held not only, or even primarily within ourselves. Our humanity is held in the shared social space that creates the possibilities and limits to our life story.  And what about beyond the West? We have become aware, or should be aware, that neither prior to, nor after the advent of modernity is a Western understanding of what it means to be human normative for all places and times.
3. The value of the concept of culture is that it provides the framework for understanding these different concepts of what it means to be human, both modern and non-modern. 
4. Under these circumstances we cannot simply reiterate the same old theological anthropology based on unchanging essentials upon which traditional understandings of Incarnation have been based. If we have new understandings of what it means to be human then at the very least we need new articulations of what it means to say God has come as a human. If cultures vary in their understanding of what it means to be human then we recognize the possibility of multiple understandings of what it means to say that God is incarnate in Jesus Christ. And these, if we are honest, will change in the future. Indeed I've argued elsewhere that the advent of modern medical technology and the rise in AI are creating a sea-change in human self-understandings as profound as those which occurred in earlier epochs in human history. In short, and I don't want to mince words, there is no such thing as a normative theological anthropology, not even and perhaps particularly not from scripture. Because scripture itself contains multiple different cultural understandings of what it means to be human. 
5. If that sounds unsettling then lets look at the positive side. Out of the possibilities arising when we think of incarnation in relation to culture there grow new possibilities for understanding and enacting our mission within God's Mission in Jesus Christ. We gain a tool for re-imagining how the Good News emerges within the shared social space in which the church finds itself in 2023 in many places across the globe. I lived most of my life in the 20th century and most of my academic career with 20th century theology. I don't regret leaving both behind if it will help us better serve the gospel in this century, and in these places and times.  

 

The Inheritance of the Past

1. One aspect of the old theological anthropology that has been consequential for Christian mission is the idea of distance between God and humanity. Mission was built, in part, on the idea of a boundary crossing God who then sends the Church on a boundary crossing mission. As we used to sing in my youth group, “He came from heaven to earth to show the way, from the earth to the cross our souls to save, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to the skies, Lord we lift your name on high.” 
2. But does this do justice to the witness of scripture that the Word became flesh and dwelled among us? It is my belief that our concept of a boundary crossing God is deeply tied to emerging modernity in the West and the formation of the New International order that was so formative of 19th century mission. A boundary crossing God was suited to the self-understanding of boundary crossing missionaries, and justified both their work and the emergent political order in which it was taking place.  
3. So powerful was the idea of a boundary crossing God that the spacial imagery of a boundary crossing God has become deeply embedded in the contemporary Christian imagination. So it may be difficult to recognize that whatever its past, it may now be out of touch with the worldview of rising generations raised on not only the Copernican view of the universe, but its vast expansion through a series of astronomical discoveries from the 19th century onward and the rise of quantum mechanics and relativity. Even taking an Enlightenment approach and mapping the physical journey from Heaven to Earth as a conceptual/metaphysical journey from transcendence to Immanence, spacial language may not speak to those for whom the distinction between transcendence and immanence has no meaning. For many inhabitants of our time, and many in cultures far away and long ago, that distinction never made sense. Such philosophical niceties never became part of their imagined world. In short, between quantum entanglement and the death of transcendence it isn’t clear how we can imagine a boundary crossing God.
4. Another burden for contemporary missiology from its storied past is the idea that in the incarnation God privileges the intersection of Jewish religion, Graeco-Roman culture, and the Roman Empire. As recently as pope Benedict, and still in textbooks on mission used today, there is an effort to associate God’s providence with that particular moment in human history where the political Roman Empire intersected Judaism in the context of Greco Roman culture. Supposedly just that moment in history made available both the ideas and the means to spread them universally that was necessary to God’s mission. The same kind of imperial thinking would be found at the beginning of the 20th century as well. Those promoting global mission would highlight the system of Roman roads, the brilliance of Greek philosophy, and in the modern world the steamship, telegraph, and railroad.
5. This privileging of Western culture as God-chosen naturally places it at the center of Christian life, and therefore the cultural and social starting point for Christian mission. If one stands in Wesley’s chapel, London, and looks out,  one finds etched into the glass William Blake’s poem, “the New Jerusalem” deliciously looking out on Blake’s grave in the church yard opposite. If it tells us little of Wesley, it certainly says a lot about his successors. The English dreamed of building the new Jerusalem on their fair isle, and Americans pursued the same dream in New England and points west. They mapped Jesus‘ call to his disciples to go from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and the ends of the Earth with a call to go from their cultural centers of the gospel to other cultures both more distant and different from their own. But this is a misleading mapping of reality, and certainly not shared.  China, chung guo, can be translated "the Middle Kingdom" but only so long as you understand the "middle" means the middle of human civilization and history. A Persian map will put Persia, not the North Atlantic, in the Center. Older Islamic maps revolve around the Ka'ba, while older Christian maps made Jerusalem the center. So it is not surprising that when you visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher you can visit not only Golgotha but the original Garden of Eden. 
6. While again our official mission theology disavows such privilege, the center-periphery framework remains active in the ethos of the United Methodist Church and its predecessors. Indeed, many continue to believe that we can be unified by a central set of structures and beliefs documented and mandated by a single Book of Discipline arising out of and shaped by a particular culture in some magical unbroken unity with John Wesley.  Even our ideas of inclusion and exclusion are are based on a center-periphery model. It is hard to escape, and yet I think we need to try. See part 2.