Context! Context! Context!
Why are we so afraid of context?
Why are we so uncomfortable with contextual theology?
Why do we assume that if something is contextual it is also weak and unbiblical?
Why do we contextualize some things… and refuse to contextualize others… like it’s ok to contextualize stoning in the Bible, but not women’s role in ministry… why? I don’t know!
Last year my church went to Honduras for a short-term missions trip. Let me remind you that we are a first generation Korean church, sending a team of Korean-American young adults to minister to first generation Hondurans, and I, the leader of the team am a Romanian- American… Context! Context! Context!
I don’t have many memories of Romania, but I remember when the missionaries came into Romania after communism fell. When they looked at us they saw a backwards people who had been fooled by communism all those years… they looked at us with pity and assumed that we as a people knew nothing… and they came to save us. They presented to us the American Gospel… not the gospel that was applicable and livable in our context.
Stephen Bevans defines contextual theology “as a way of doing theology in which one takes into account: the spirit and the message of the gospel; the tradition of the Christian people; the culture in which one is theologizing; and social change in that culture.”[1] I think that part of the reason we’re so afraid of contextual theology is because context is determined by culture, and we’re afraid of culture. We’re uncomfortable with the differences between cultures and not only that, we subconsciously (and maybe consciously) tend to think that one culture is better than another. Ethnocentrism might be the root of our difficulty with contextual theology.
In talking about reality in light of contextual theology Ian Barbour points out that we don’t simply see, “we only see as.”[2] We only see as we are and through the eyes of our circumstance. We read the Bible through glasses that are stained by our culture, family and upbringing. I’m not sure why we as Bible believing Christians have such a hard time accepting that.
[1] Bevans, S. “Contextual Tehology as Theological Imperative” in Models of Contextual Theology. 1-10. (Maryknoll New York: Orbis Press, 2002), 1.
[2] Bevans, 2.
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