Incarnation and Intercultural Mission: God Doesn’t Need to Cross Boundaries

 God Doesn’t Need to Cross Boundaries

In the previous post I showed that incarnation is enculturation, and that changing understandings of what it means to be human demand new understandings of what is meant by incarnation. In the 21st century, can we really regard incarnation as boundary crossing? Only if we want to buy into a model that valorizes the remnants of empire.  

1. A more positive understanding of incarnation might begin by observing that in scripture God doesn’t cross boundaries, because between God and humanity there are no boundaries to cross. God is present everywhere at all times, in all lives and cultures. We too easily forget that the Ptolemaic system that dominated Graeco-Roman and subsequent Western (including Islamic) cosmologies isn’t Biblical, but is built on entirely different set of cultural presuppositions about the ordering of the cosmos. The Bible identifies “high places” and even the sky as the domain of God, but even that represents the kind of cultural borrowing of which I’ll speak in a moment. 
2. It is only later that Christians adopt the Ptolemaic system that places the realm of God beyond a boundary of epicyclical realms of increasing perfection culminating in the crystalline spheres of the stars. In scripture our help may come from the hills, but God is always as close as the Law written on our hearts and the life-blood that flows through our bodies. God’s image is already written into every human’s inmost being. 
3. So revelation isn’t boundary crossing, it is manifestation, it is emergence, it is an event in the inner person and life of the community of those whom the spirit prompts to sight and understanding. God says to Israel through Moses: "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. (Deuteronomy 30) 
4. The Word didn’t travel to become flesh any more than God’s breath traveled to enter the living beings at creation. It simply chose to dwell fully, to be fully manifest in a human person. Consider John 1, although I would gladly work through an exegesis of the birth narratives if we had time. The author of the gospel writes:
1. "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
2. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
5. The Word is coming into the world. The Word becomes flesh and then dwells among us. This isn't so much travel as it is manifestation. 
6. But what does this say about culture? "Becomes flesh and dwells among us" of necessity meant becoming historical and cultural as well as physical. Flesh, “sarx” in John’s gospel, cannot be merely meat, despite the implications of the word incarnation. It more clearly references Genesis 1 and the Hebrew word for what emerges when God breaths God's Spirit into Adam. They are “nephesh.” The Word became a living being and all that this entails, which is a person shaped by history, society, and culture. And so perhaps we do need to remind ourselves of the birth narratives, which so clearly place Jesus in a family located in a specific time, place, culture, and society.  This is a critical paradox - That in his uniqueness Jesus becomes universal. By becoming culturally located, he becomes like all of us. 
7. God binds God’s self to a social location, a history, culture, and a body. That is what it means to be fully human. Yet this act of God in the context of scripture is radically inclusive. Scripture teaches that God reveals God’s self among the nations in many times and places. Just look at the Genesis narratives, or more explicitly Amos 9 where God recounts to Israel how God has providentially guided many nations, not least Israel's rivals. Or as in Psalm 87 which I read at the beginning we see that the nations of the earth come to Zion with no need to apply for a visa, or even permanent residence. Their names are already recorded as citizens of the realm. Alfred Lord Tennyson got this right when he recounted in his Mort d’Arthur the dying king saying to Bedivere, "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” 
8. What Incarnation offers is thus not exclusion, but a necessary opportunity for human participation in God’s work. The uniqueness of Incarnation affirms that our full humanity, not least our embodiment as determined by social, cultural, historical and biological environments can be fit for God’s Reign. In Christ we can know ourselves once again as children of God, born of water and the spirit, hearing as if for the first time God’s call to care for creation, be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. We can know that our power to participate in God’s mission is restored by Christ’s defeat of all those powers that hinder us. 

God’s Mission is Intercultural

1. But now let me take this a step further. Because we understand our restoration as embracing us as flesh, as historical, cultural, physical creatures, so we can also grasp that the full scope of God’s saving work can only be understood interculturally. As understood in scripture, we are, in the flesh, not merely cultural, but intercultural beings. 
2. If we look across the scriptural telling of the history of humanity and Israel, we find that it is invariably intercultural. There is never just a single people’s group, a single language or culture, making its ways through the natural world.  Every key moment in Israel’s history is an intercultural moment, and Israel itself, like its worship traditions, is shaped by constant interaction with other peoples. Whenever Israel begins to valorize its own purity prophets like Amos, Isaiah, and Micah arise to remind it that God has been providentially at work in the histories of its rivals and enemies. As the Psalmist says, you can’t escape God even if you go to the ends of the earth! How fascinating that we sometimes believe we can still take God there. Or better, from Isaiah 19:23 - In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The LORD Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.” Israel is not the only nation that is a blessing on the earth. 
3. This intercultural world is also the world of Jesus, not least in his lineage that is filled with those outside Israel’s tribes. Jesus constantly comes into contact with Samaritans and Greeks and affirms that they have genuine insight concerning God’s Reign. Incarnation becomes the ratification and reiteration of the revelation that God is active and present in all cultures and histories in their interaction with one another. Which is to say, in their history, which is always history of intercultural engagement. Nor is God present in some vague metaphysical way or through some hidden providential hand, but in their visible histories, wisdom, and indeed capacity to nurture faith.
4. But if Israel led an intercultural existence, it is only because that is the nature of humanity. We misconstrue the incident at Babel is an inevitable dividing of human kind. It was simply God’s way of sending us on our mission. As soon as humans spread out across the earth, they begin bumping into each other, inter-marrying, and in general sharing their languages, cultures, and worldviews. Israel, with its founders, its prophets and its kings is the child of Babel. And in the New Testament? Any idea that God’s Reign was going to be a monoculture was put to rest by the apostles at the council in Jerusalem. The apostolic church is an intercultural church or it isn’t apostolic. 
5. The Bible, God’s Word, comes to us as an intercultural document; words spoken in various dialects of Hebrew rendered in Greek and read in cultural contexts that may have shared the language, but not the basic assumptions of the writers. The Bible was born to be translated, and was translated as soon as it was born. The Word emerges incarnate among us from the intersection of constantly changing cultures, not by leaping from one fixed cultural location (as if such a thing even existed) to another. 
6. I spent a fair part of my life working on the translation of the Bible into Malay. It was a fascinating and complex process. But most of all it was revelatory. God’s Word isn’t transmitted from one language into another. It emerges through the continual dialogue and intersection of its original cultures and those of its translators. At every step in the translation of scripture not only indigenous Christians, but non-Christian’s play a role. Language claims us as its own, not the other way around. As those of us who speak more than one language know, language shapes our self-understanding even as we speak it. I am not, I cannot be the same person when I speak Malay, German, or English. And because I finally learned to read the Bible in Malay, I cannot be the same person I was when I read it only in English. As Lamin Sanneh so brilliantly demonstrated, God’s Word emerges in the process of translation, at the intersection of cultures. 

What does that mean for contemporary Christian Mission? I'll take that up in Part 3.