12 Contextualization, True and False
Throughout these chapters I am suggesting that the gospel is to be understood as the clue to history, to universal history and therefore to the history of each person, and therefore the answer that every person must give to the question, Who am I? In distinction from a great deal of Christian writing which takes the individual person as its starting point for the understanding of salvation and then extrapolates from that to the wider issues of social, political, and economic life, I am suggesting that, with the Bible as our guide, we should proceed in the opposite direction, that we begin with the Bible as the unique interpretation of human and cosmic history and move from that starting point to an understanding of what the Bible shows us of the meaning of personal life. And, more specifically, I have suggested that we are to understand the mission of the Church in the light of the fact that the meaning of contemporary history is that it is the history of the time between Christ's ascension and his coming again, the time when his reign at the right hand of God is a hidden reality, the time in which signs are granted of that hidden reign but in which the full revelation of its power and glory is held back in order that all the nations-all the human communities-may have the opportunity to repent and believe in freedom. One could therefore say that the Christian world mission is the clue to history in a double sense, which one might characterize as proclaiming and propelling.
On the one hand, by proclaiming Christ the Christian world mission offers to all people the possibility of understanding what God is doing in history. By its witness-in word and deed and common lifeto the centrality of the work of Jesus in his ministry, death, and resurrection it offers to all people the possibility of understanding that the meaning and goal of history are not to be found in any of the projects, programs, ideologies, and utopias which offer themselves in competition with one another; the rise and decline one after another of movements promising happiness in the future; movements which sweep forward for a time and then falter and fall back like the ceaseless movement of the waves on an ocean shore; but that it is to be found in a person and a history which breaks decisively through this endless succession by breaching the final barrier of death and opening a new horizon for human affairs, a hope which on the one hand affirms and energizes all those human hopes which correspond to God's purpose as revealed in Christ, but yet on the other hand transcends them all. The Church, reaching out to every human community, living a life which is centered in the continual remembrance and reenactment of that central revelation, offers to all peoples a vision of the goal of human history in which its good is affirmed and its evil is forgiven and taken away, a vision which makes it possible to act hopefully when there is no earthly hope, and to find the way when everything is dark and there are no earthly landmarks. This is what I have called the proclaiming aspect of the Church's world mission as it relates to universal history.
On the other hand, the mission has what I must call a propelling role. It presses events toward their true end. This is the abiding significance of the apocalyptic teachings of the New Testament. The coming of the gospel changes the course of events. It awakens people out of the age-long slumber of what Arendt van Leeuwen called the ontocratic society, the way of life which exists in societies where it is taken for granted that all things are governed by what is and not by what shall be.
J. L. Myres in his book The Dawn of History has an opening chapter entitled "The People Who Have No History." It is a reminder to the reader that vast numbers of human beings have lived and died without leaving any history. They have lived (as millions still do) in the belief that things are what they are and will not be fundamentally changed; that hope for a different future is a delusion born of desire, a delusion which the wise will avoid because they know that what will be will be and no desire of ours can change it. In such societies there may be a story to be told about small units-the family, the city, the school-because in these one can trace movement toward significant goals. But for human affairs as a whole there is no history. The coming of the gospel into such a society introduces the vision of a new world, a different world, a world for which it is legitimate to hope. It creates, as we say, a revolution of expectations. The point of van Leeuwen's book (Arendt van Leeuwen, Christianity in World History, 1964) was that even the secularized forms of the Christian hope which have fueled the European idea of progress and have made possible the explosive growth of modern science and technology have had the same effect on the old ontocratic societies. They have created an explosion of expectations and therefore a deepening crisis when these expectations are not met.
This can be illustrated from almost any page of the missionary history of the past hundred years, and nowhere more vividly than in China. It was the young graduates of the Christian schools and colleges who made the break with the old China, who had a glowing vision of a new China communicated to them by the kind of teaching they had received from missionary teachers, and who became convinced that Christianity could not deliver what it promised, who turned to Marxism with its promise of a new world tomorrow. I have listened to young Indians who said, "Christianity taught me to believe in the possibility of a different world; Marxism showed me how to get it." It does not take more than a generation to discover that Marxism necessarily betrays the hopes by which it lives. I am told that it is only some of the old in China who are still Marxists. But the point is that neither China nor India nor any other society can go back to where it was before this vision of a different world was brought to it. Burma has tried to do it by isolating itself from the West, but the attempt is doomed to failure. Once the old ontocratic mold is broken it can never be restored. History is propelled inexorably toward the future.
I have suggested that the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament are the clue for our understanding of this. The coming of Jesus precipitates the crisis of history. Once a vision has been given of the new age, there will be prophets offering the blessings of the new age on terms other than those offered in the story of Jesus. The question of the meaning and goal of history can no longer be evaded. The conflict between rival visions of that goal rages. There is war and tumult. This is among the signs of the fact that the end-the real goal of historyhas come near in Jesus. All of this is brought before us in the last book of the Bible in a series of vivid pictures. The ascended Jesus has a sharp two-edged sword coming from his mouth, for the word of the gospel has that sharpness to divide truth from falsehood. He is the slain Lamb who alone can unseal the scroll of history and declare its meaning and end. We are shown a series of catastrophes in each of which there is both destruction and restraint of destruction. We are shown the appearing of the power that wars against the Lamb, the antichrist, embodied (as all spiritual powers are embodied) and taking the form of Roman imperialism with its apparatus of propaganda. We are shown in the figure of the rider on the white horse the preaching of the gospel through all the world. We are given a vision of the thousand-year reign of the saints to encourage us that it is proper to work for goals within history. But finally we are shown the end of history, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth and the coming down of the Holy City as a gift of God's grace and as the consummation of history. It is the slain Lamb who opens the seals and unleashes the woes on the earth. His weapon is the word of testimony. He is followed by the company of those who have shed their blood for the testimony of Jesus. It is he who leads history to its true end, through the faithfulness of those who follow him in his testimony. The mission of the Church is not merely an interpretation of history; it is-in Berkhof's phrase-a history-making force. It is that through which God brings history to its goal, and only because this is so does it provide the place where the goal of history can be understood. It is not only declaratory; it is performatory. It can be the first because it is the second.
There has been a long tradition which has isolated the declaratory element in the Church's mission and insisted that it must have priority. Evangelism, the direct preaching of the gospel, it is often said, must be the first priority. Everything else is secondary or-at best-auxiliary. The missionary movement at the present time suffers from the running battle between those who make this emphasis on the primacy of evangelism, of the declaratory function of the Church, and those who insist that the first priority must be given to action for challenging injustice, prejudice, and oppression, action for justice and peace. For how, it may be asked, is a Christian message to be credible if its meaning is not being illustrated in patterns of action which correspond to it? And yet the New Testament has many passages which speak of the power of the word. It is the seed that, small and vulnerable as it is, can bring forth immense fruit. It is the sword by which the ascended Lord destroys his enemies. It is the power of God for salvation. Is there not good biblical ground for affirming the priority of preaching over any other kind of action in the mission of the Church?
If we turn to the Gospels we are bound to note the indissoluble nexus between deeds and words. A very large part of the first three Gospels is occupied with the acts of Jesus-acts of healing, of exorcism, of feeding the hungry. And while in the Fourth Gospel there is a larger proportion of teaching, yet most of this teaching is explanatory of something Jesus has done: the healing of a paralytic, the feeding of a multitude, the giving of sight to a blind man, and the raising of a man from death. These four mighty works of Jesus form the context of the long passages of teaching from chapter 5 through chapter 11, and the discourse with Nicodemus is explicitly stated to have arisen from Jesus' mighty works. The intimate link between acts and words is made very clear in the mission charge to the twelve as it is given in the tenth chapter of Matthew. At the outset this is simply a mandate to heal and exorcise. "He called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity." Then follow the names of the Twelve. Nothing is said here about preaching. Only in verse 7 do we read: "Preach as you go, saying 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand."' Clearly, therefore, the preaching is an explanation of the healings. On the one hand, the healings-marvelous as they are-do not explain themselves. They could be misinterpreted-as in fact they were by Jesus' enemies, who attributed his healing works to Satanic power. The works by themselves did not communicate the new fact. That had to be stated in plain words: "The kingdom of God has drawn near." That means that there is a call for radical decision, for repentance and faith. The healings by themselves, uninterpreted, do not make such a demand. They could be fitted into the existing order. After all, there were other healers and exorcists in Galilee and Judea. Healings, even the most wonderful, do not call this present world radically into question; the gospel does, and this has to be made explicit.
On the other hand, the preaching is meaningless without the healings. They are the true explanation of what is happening, but if nothing is happening no explanation is called for and the words are empty words. They do not answer any real question. They can be brushed aside as mere talk. They are only meaningful in the context of the mighty works. They presuppose that something is happening which calls for explanation. Here I may refer again to the point to which I drew attention earlier, namely that almost all the great Christian preachings in Acts are made in response to a question. Something has happened which makes people aware of a new reality, and therefore the question arises: What is this reality? The communication of the gospel is the answering of that question. The world has a thousand other questions which it is eager to ask. The Church does not necessarily have an answer to any of them. In any case, the answering of the world's questions is not the Church's business. But the answering of this question is the Church's first business. And the question is only asked if there is some evidence that the new reality is present. What is this new reality?
In the Gospels the new reality is the presence of Jesus himself. He is here. In him the kingdom of God has come near so that it now confronts men and women with its reality and requires them either to be so radically turned around that they recognize the truth and believe, or else to continue on their way facing in the wrong direction and pursuing that which is not God's kingdom. The presence of that new reality is attested by the mighty works of Jesus, which in turn call for the explanation which is the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom. But does that presence come to an end with the ending of the story of the incarnation? There are those who in effect say, "Yes." Jesus, they say, did not intend to found a church. He preached the kingdom of God and called men and women to seek it. Those who came after (and of course St. Paul is the primary villain) substituted the Church for the kingdom and thus subverted the intention of Jesus. If we are to be true to the intention of Jesus today we must put in the center of our vision not the Church but the kingdom. Now one can see the grain of truth which has produced this belief. The Church is not an end in itself. The growth and prosperity of the Church is not the goal of history. The Church is not the kingdom of God. This is the truth, but it does not warrant the conclusion drawn from it. Jesus manifestly did not intend to leave behind him simply a body of teaching. If that had been his intention he would surely have written a book and we should have something like the Qur'an instead of the book we have. What he did was to prepare a community chosen to be the bearer of the secret of the kingdom. This community is his legacy. The Fourth Gospel makes this very clear, both in its interpretation of the prayer of Jesus on the night of his passion and in its interpretation of his commission to the apostles after his resurrection. In the great consecration prayer Jesus, facing his death on the cross, says, "As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth" (John 17:18-19). After the resurrection Jesus is represented as saying to the disciples, "As the Father sent me, so I send you"; and the word was accompanied by the gesture which showed what the manner of the sending was to be: "He showed them his hands and his side" (John 20:19-20). The intention of Jesus was not to leave behind a disembodied teaching. It was that through his total consecration to the Father in his passion there should be created a community which would continue that which he came from the Father to be and to do-namely to embody and to announce the presence of the reign of God. And the authenticating marks of that body, when it is true to its nature and calling, will be that it shares the passion of Jesus. The Church is not authorized to represent the reign of God, his justice and his peace, in any other way than that in which Jesus represented it, namely by being partners with him in challenging the powers of evil and bearing in its own life the cost of the challenge. When Church and kingdom are set against each other, then the language of the kingdom can be used, and is constantly used, to sacralize whatever is the contemporary program for justice and peace. The message of the kingdom then becomes again a form of the law. It is a corpus of ethical demands. It has the effect which law divorced from gospel always has, of hardening the conscience and mightily increasing the power of evil. The new thing which has dawned with the coming of Jesus is twofold: first, that the kingdom of God is no longer a formal concept into which we are free to pour our own content in accordance with the spirit of the age. The kingdom of God now has a name and a face: the name and the face of Jesus. When we pray, "Your kingdom come," we are praying, or we ought to be praying, as the early Church did, "Maranatha: Come, Lord Jesus." The fact that liberal Protestantism separated these two, was willing to talk about the coming of the kingdom but not about the coming of Jesus, is a sign of betrayal. Second, the new thing is that we have already been given a foretaste of the kingdom in the gift of the Spirit to the believing and committed community. It is the presence of this foretaste, this arrabon, this gift already of a true measure of the justice and peace of the kingdom, that makes the Church a witness to the gospel and that makes its preaching gospel and not law. It is the presence of this new reality which (when the Church is faithful) prompts the questions to which the preaching of the gospel is the answer. The true missionary dialogue, in other words, is not initiated by the Church. In a secondary sense it is initiated by the outsider who is drawn to ask: What is the secret of this new reality, this life of praise, of justice, and of peace? In the primary sense, however, it is initiated by the presence of the Spirit who is the arrabon of the kingdom, and whose presence leads people (perhaps without the prior knowledge of any missionary or evangelist) to make this inquiry.
It seems to me to be of great importance to insist that mission is not first of all an action of ours. It is an action of God, the triune Godof God the Father who is ceaselessly at work in all creation and in the hearts and minds of all human beings whether they acknowledge him or not, graciously guiding history toward its true end; of God the Son who has become part of this created history in the incarnation; and of God the Holy Spirit who is given as a foretaste of the end to empower and teach the Church and to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Before we speak about our role, the role of our words and deeds in mission, we need to have firmly in the center of our thinking this action of God. This is the primal reality in mission; the rest is derivative. I am aware that this doctrine of the missio Dei has sometimes been used to support concepts of mission which bypass the Church and even bypass the name of Jesus. That is a radical misuse of the concept, of which I shall say something in a moment. But here let me say that if we place in the center of our thinking the reality of God's mission, we shall be saved from two wrong concepts of mission which are at present deeply dividing the Christian community.
On the one hand, there are those who place exclusive emphasis on the winning of individuals to conversion, baptism, and church membership. The numerical growth of the Church becomes the central goal of mission. Action for justice and peace in the world is a secondary matter. It is not the heart of mission. The gospel, it is said, is about changing people, not about changing structures. (I shall try in a later chapter to show how this neglects the very important biblical teaching about the principalities and powers, but I leave that aside for the moment.) The emphasis here is exclusively on the salvation of the individual soul and the growth of the Church. The primary task is evangelism, the direct preaching of the gospel in words-spoken or written. Action for social justice and peace may be a way of drawing people to hear the gospel, but it is not an intrinsic part of the gospel itself. The preaching of the gospel of salvation from sin and of the offer of eternal life is the primary business of the Church.
On the other hand, there are those who condemn this as irrelevant or wrong. The gospel, they will say, is about God's kingdom, God's reign over all nations and all things. At the heart of Jesus' teaching is the prayer: "Your kingdom come; your will be done, as in heaven so on earth." The central responsibility of the Church is indicated by that prayer. It is to seek the doing of God's will of righteousness and peace in this world. A Christian community which makes its own self-enlargement its primary task may be acting against God's will. In societies such as India where good men and women seek to overcome interreligious strife and to build up the common life, the Church's program of aggressive evangelism is threatening. What is needed-it will be said-is not evangelistic preaching but action by Christians along with all people of goodwill to tackle the terrible problems of the nation, to free the oppressed, heal the sick, and bring hope to the hopeless.
If I am not mistaken, the conflict between these two ways of understanding mission is profoundly weakening the Church's witness. The conflict continues because both parties have hold of important truth. And I am suggesting that both parties are inadequately aware of the central reality, namely that mission is not primarily our work-whether of preaching or of social action-but primarily the mighty work of God. What is true in the affirmation of the evangelical side of this debate is that it does matter supremely that every human being should have the opportunity to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, that without a living Church where this witness is borne neither evangelism nor Christian social action is possible, and that the gospel can never be identified with any particular project for justice and peace however laudable and promising. What is true in the position of the social activists is that a Church which exists only for itself and its own enlargement is a witness against the gospel, that the Church exists not for itself and not for its members but as a sign and agent and foretaste of the kingdom of God, and that it is impossible to give faithful witness to the gospel while being indifferent to the situation of the hungry, the sick, the victims of human inhumanity.
I am suggesting that both parties to this dispute need to recover a fuller sense of the prior reality, the givenness, the ontological priority of the new reality which the work of Christ has brought into being. Because Jesus has met and mastered the powers that enslave the world, because he now sits at God's right hand, and because there has been given to those who believe the gift of a real foretaste, pledge, arrabon of the kingdom, namely the mighty Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity, therefore this new reality, this new presence creates a moment of crisis wherever it appears. It provokes questions which call for an answer and which, if the true answer is not accepted, lead to false answers. This happens where there is a community whose members are deeply rooted in Christ as their absolute Lord and Savior. Where there is such a community, there will be a challenge by word and behavior to the ruling powers. As a result there will be conflict and suffering for the Church. Out of that conflict and suffering will arise the questioning which the world puts to the Church. This is why St. Paul in his letters does not find it necessary to urge his readers to be active in evangelism but does find it necessary to warn them against any compromise with the rulers of this age. That is why it was not superiority of the Church's preaching which finally disarmed the Roman imperial power, but the faithfulness of its martyrs. That is why the risen Jesus, according to the Fourth Gospel, when he sent out his disciples to continue his work, showed them his hands and his side. That is why, according to Luke's account, he told them that it would be the coming of the Holy Spirit that would make them witnesses, because the Spirit is the presence in foretaste of the kingdom. When the mission of the Church is seen in this way, several things become clear.
1. First, it is clear that to set word and deed, preaching and action, against each other is absurd. The central reality is neither word nor act, but the total life of a community enabled by the Spirit to live in Christ, sharing his passion and the power of his resurrection. Both the words and the acts of that community may at any time provide the occasion through which the living Christ challenges the ruling powers. Sometimes it is a word that pierces through layers of custom and opens up a new vision. Sometimes it is a deed which shakes a whole traditional plausibility structure. They mutually reinforce and interpret one another. The words explain the deeds, and the deeds validate the words. Not that every deed must have a word attached to explain it, but that the total life of the community whose members have different gifts and are involved in the secular life of the society in which they share, will provide these occasions of challenge. But no one will know exactly when and where and how this happens. It is always a work of the Holy Spirit. It is always mysterious. The ways by which the truth of the gospel comes home to the heart and conscience of this or that person are always mysterious. They cannot be programs and they cannot be calculated. But where a community is living in alert faithfulness, they happen.
2. Second, it is clear that action for justice and peace in the world is not something which is secondary, marginal to the central task of evangelism. It belongs to the heart of the matter. Jesus' action in challenging the powers that ruled the world was not marginal to his ministry; it was central to it. Without it there would be no gospel. But Jesus' challenge was not in the name of an alternative way of exercising power. He did not offer an alternative government. He did not repeat the story of which history has so many illustrations, the story of the victim of op pression who, in the name of justice, dethrones the oppressor and takes his seat on the same throne with the same instruments of oppression. The manner of Jesus' challenge, the way that led through his own death to resurrection and the sharing of a new life with the community he formed to go the same way through history to its end, opened up a new route through history along which every human rule would stand under both the judgment and the mercy of God.
3. And so, third, it is made clear that action for justice and peace can never mean total commitment to a particular project identified unambiguously as God's will. The concept of missio Dei has sometimes been interpreted so as to suggest that action for justice and peace as the possibilities are discerned within a given historical situation is the fulfillment of God's mission, and that the questions of baptism and church membership are marginal or irrelevant. That way leads very quickly to disillusion and often to cynical despair. No human project however splendid is free from the corrupting power of sin. To invest one's ultimate commitment in such proximate goals is to end in despair. The history of the Church furnishes plenty of illustrations of the point I am making. At various times and places loyalty to the Church has been identified as invoking the defense of feudalism against capitalism, the defense of aristocracy against democracy, the defense of the free market against Marxism, and the support of movements of liberation based on a Marxist analysis of the human situation. Adrian Hastings in his history of English Christianity in the present century has reminded us that for the first two decades of this period the Christianity of the English Free Churches was interpreted as almost necessarily involving support for the Liberal Party. When the Liberal Party destroyed itself, the Free Churches suffered a blow, a loss of identity, from which they have hardly begun to recover (A History of English Christianity: 1920-1985, 1986). It does not require much knowledge of history to recognize that, with all its grievous sins of compromise, cowardice, and apostasy, the Church outlasts all these movements in which so much passionate faith has been invested. In their time each of these movements seems to provide a sense of direction, a credible goal for the human project. The slogans of these movements become sacred words which glow with ultimate authority. But they do not endure. None of them in fact embodies the true end, the real goal of history. That has been embodied once for all in the events which form the substance of the gospel and which-remembered, rehearsed, and reenacted in teaching and liturgy-form the inner core of the Church's being. To commend this gospel to all people in all circumstances, to witness to it as the ultimate clue to the whole human story and therefore to every human story, can never be unnecessary and never irrelevant, however much it may be misunderstood, ignored, or condemned.
4. But, fourth, it is immediately necessary to say that this fundamental truth can become a source of disastrous error if it is used to withdraw those who believe the gospel from responsible engagements in the immediacies, the relativities of the political and cultural life of their times. The vision of the ultimate goal of the human story must not be used to withdraw attention from the immediate possibilities which the Lord of history offers. As those who understand the whole human story in the light of the biblical story, we have the responsibility to discern by faith the duties of this particular moment. We have no guarantee of infallibility in our judgments. If history teaches anything it is that the most faithful believers may judge wrongly. But at the heart of faith is the assurance that God is able to forgive our errors and even to turn our wrong choices to good ends. The fact that we may be mistaken must not be supposed to excuse us from action, for inaction is itself a fateful choice. As Reinhold Niebuhr has taught us, we have an absolute duty to choose the relatively better among possibilities none of which is the absolutely good. We shall differ from one another but only while carefully listening to one another, respecting one another's choices, and remaining one body because we know that what we do in the liturgy and life of the Church has an ontological priority and an enduring reality far beyond these choices that we make.
5. Fifth, it follows that the major role of the Church in relation to the great issues of justice and peace will not be in its formal pronouncements but in its continually nourishing and sustaining men and women who will act responsibly as believers in the course of their secular duties as citizens. There will indeed be occasions when the Church acting corporately through its appointed leaders will have to remind those who hold power that they are responsible for all their actions to the one who sits at the right hand of God, and to warn them when they pursue policies manifestly contrary to his revealed nature and will. But these pronouncements will lack authority if they are not reflected in the activities of believers from day to day in their secular involvement.
6. Finally, there will always be the need to point explicitly to the central reality by which the Church exists, to the central verities of the gospel, to Christ incarnate, crucified, risen, regnant at God's right hand and to the promise of his coming to judge the living and the dead. This preaching of the gospel can never be irrelevant. But if the Church which preaches it is not living corporately a life which corresponds with it, is living in comfortable cohabitation with the powers of this age, is failing to challenge the powers of darkness and to manifest in its life the power of the living Lord to help and to heal, then by its life it closes the doors which its preaching would open. That does not mean that the preaching is void, because there is no limit to the power of the word of God. But it means that the Church comes under severe judgment from him who will ask of us not about our confession but about our commitment to doing his will.