13 No Other Name
The gospel is addressed to human beings, to their minds and hearts and consciences, and calls for their response. Human beings only exist as members of communities which share a common language, customs, ways of ordering economic and social life, ways of understanding and coping with their world. If the gospel is to be understood, if it is to be received as something which communicates truth about the real human situation, if it is, as we say, to "make sense," it has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and has to be clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them. And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community's life must be so ordered that it "makes sense" to those who are so invited. It must, as we say, "come alive." Those to whom it is addressed must be able to say, "Yes, I see. This is true for me, for my situation." But if the gospel is truly to be communicated, the subject in that sentence is as important as the predicate. What comes home to the heart of the hearer must really be the gospel, and not a product shaped by the mind of the hearer. It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus. But that criticism has much wider application. If one looks at the long history of Christian art one can see in successive portraits of Jesus the selfportrait of the age-the Byzantine picture of Jesus as the supreme Emperor, the Pantocrator; the medieval picture of the pain-drenched figure on the cross, the blond, fair-haired boy of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal, and the Liberator Christ modeled on Che Guevara. In each case the figure of Jesus has been so painted as to fit the reigning cultural ideal, but what does this gallery of portraits have to do with the real Jesus? How can the gospel "come alive" in all these different cultural contexts, and still be the same authentic gospel? That is the problem of contextualization.
The debate about contextualization has been carried on mainly among those engaged in cross-cultural missions, what used to be called foreign missions. The reasons for this are obvious; when we seek to translate the Christian message into the language and culture of a people which has lived outside the range of Christian influence, the problem has to be faced. As we shall see later, it is in fact a problem involved in every communication of the gospel, whether in one's own neighborhood or at the ends of the earth, but it will be helpful to begin by looking at the problem as it has presented itself to those engaged in crosscultural mission. The actual word "contextualization" is of recent coinage. Older discussions used such terms as indigenization, adaptation, and accommodation. The reasons for dissatisfaction with these words are twofold. In the first place they have tended to relate the gospel to past traditions and to underestimate the forces in every society which are making for change. In the second place they have sometimes seemed to imply that what the missionary brought with him was the pure, unadapted gospel, and that "adaptation" was thus a kind of concession to those who had not the advantage of having a Christian culture. But of course the truth is that every communication of the gospel is already culturally conditioned. The word "contextualization" seeks to avoid both these dangers and to direct attention to the need so to communicate the gospel that it speaks God's word to the total context in which people are now living and in which they now have to make their decisions.
Some of the most famous debates about true and false contextualization have raged around the daring efforts of the Jesuit missionaries to India and China in the seventeenth century, especially Mattheo Ricci at the imperial court of China and Roberto de Nobili in South India. Earlier Portuguese missionaries in India had required of their converts a total break with traditional Hindu customs, including caste, with the result that Christian converts were automatically excluded from Indian social and cultural life and were reckoned among the untouchables. De Nobili, by contrast, lived the life of a high-caste Indian in respect of food, clothing, and such customs as the wearing of the sacred thread. He en couraged his converts to remain within their caste affiliations, treating caste as a purely social institution which, from the point of view of the gospel, did not raise any fundamental issue of faith. While the converts gathered by the Portuguese missionaries remained outside the Hindu world, following Western customs and dependent on Western missionaries, the converts of the Jesuit mission became a rapidly growing group within the world of Hindu culture. The Jesuits were furiously attacked by the other missionary orders, and the battle, which lasted for more than a century, led to repudiation of De Nobili's methods by Rome. But, more importantly, later Indian Christian sentiment has also rejected his acceptance of caste. For him caste was a matter of social organization and did not raise a question of faith. For later generations this was unacceptable. Caste was seen as something fundamentally incompatible with the gospel. A daring effort at contextualization has, in this later view, betrayed the gospel. Yet customs which the Franciscan missionaries had condemned as heathen have been accepted by later generations of Indian Christians as harmless.
The discussion of these questions at the present time is made difficult because of the emotional hangovers from the colonial period, both among the former colonial powers and among their former colonies. The churches of the Third World belong to societies which are struggling to achieve authentic nationhood after a period in which their cultures were overshadowed by the Western invasion. Churches in these countries, or at least some of their Western-educated leaders, are eager to shed the remaining cultural trappings inherited from the Western missionaries, and to prove their truly national character. Churches in the old colonial powers, ridden by feelings of guilt, are eager to apologize for the fact that their presentation of the gospel was so much colored by their culture, that they presented a European or American gospel instead of the pure, unadulterated article, and-for the same reason-are eager to welcome and applaud any expression of Christianity which is authentically Asian or African. Sometimes it seems that it is acceptable, however bizarre, as long as it is clearly not European. Thus we applaud in the younger churches a synthesis of nationalism and Christianity which we deplore in our missionary grandparents. And the irony is still more complex. In many cases the thing which made Christianity attractive to the younger generation of Asians and Africans was precisely that it brought with it access to the skills, the learning, and the technology of the West. Thus contemporary Indian and Chinese writers are often found praising the work of missions just because they opened the way for what is called "modernization"-that is to say, the acceptance of the science and technology of the West. This is a reminder of the fact that cultures are never monochrome and static; they are always complex and changing. Within any community there will be cultural conservatives and cultural radicals. The former will resist the invasion of foreign ideas, while the latter will welcome them just because they are different from the tradition. Thus the Western missionary, often a traditionalist in her own culture, becomes the ally of the radicals in the country to which she goes, while the conservatives in that culture will find a welcome among the radicals in the Western world just because the cultureAsian or African-which they are clinging to is different from that of Europe. The great movement of foreign missions in the 150 years from 1800, and the ecumenical movement which developed out of this, opened the eyes of European Christians to the extent to which Christianity had become domesticated within Western culture. The rise of various forms of Third World theologies has challenged this domestication. And since it is the Europeans who are now the accused, it is difficult for a European Christian to draw attention to the danger that Asian and African Christianity might suffer from the same kind of domestication. The question therefore must be addressed as objectively as possible, with as much freedom as possible from the emotional effects of guilt on the one side and resentment on the other. How far should the gospel be "at home" in a culture, and how far should it resist domestication. What is true contextualization?
We must start with the basic fact that there is no such thing as a pure gospel if by that is meant something which is not embodied in a culture. The simplest verbal statement of the gospel, "Jesus is Lord," depends for its meaning on the content which that culture gives to the word "Lord." What kind of thing is "lordship" in the culture in question? The gospel always comes as the testimony of a community which, if it is faithful, is trying to live out the meaning of the gospel in a certain style of life, certain ways of holding property, of maintaining law and order, of carrying on production and consumption, and so on. Every interpretation of the gospel is embodied in some cultural form. The missionary does not come with the pure gospel and then adapt it to the culture where she serves: she comes with a gospel which is already embodied in the culture by which the missionary was formed. And this is so from the very beginning. The Bible is a book which is very obviously in a specific cultural setting. Its language is Hebrew and Greek, not Chinese or Sanskrit. All the events it records, all the teachings it embod ies, are shaped by specific human cultures. And, of course, it could not possibly be otherwise. Something which is not expressible in any human language, which is not embodied in any human way of living, which is not located in any specific time or place, can have no impact on human affairs. Here we are back again with the doctrine of election. I have tried already to suggest what I have called the logic of election. God's universal purpose of blessing has to be wrought out through specific acts at specific times and places and involving particular people. It is wrought out in history, and history is a matter of these specific and particular places, times, and people.
Would this mean, then, that Hebrew culture has to become the world's culture? Is this, in fact, just one more version of the familiar imperial story, the conviction of one human culture that it is the way for all? That is, indeed, what is explicit in the universal claim of Islam. God's will as it is communicated in the untranslatable Arabic of the Qur'an is that to which every human society must conform. There can be no adaptation. There can be no translation of the Qur'an, for translation is always adaptation. If it were true, as the Qur'an affirms, that Jesus was not crucified, then indeed he would simply be one of the messengers in the series that culminates in Muhammad. But the earthly mission of Jesus ended on a cross. The corn of wheat had to fall onto the ground and die. The new reality born of that dying, the new creation of which the risen body of Jesus is the foretaste, is of a different nature. It is not simply a prolongation of the life of Jesus. It is the beginning of a new epoch in human history in which the guiding clue is held in trust for all by that community which lives by the life of the crucified and risen Jesus.
Would this mean, then, that this new community would be simply an extension of Israel, of that particular cultural community which can be spoken of as "Israel after the flesh"? So it seemed at first. It seemed obvious that all who were "in Christ" would be bound to keep the whole law, including that foundation pillar of the law which Jesus himself had never questioned, namely circumcision. The words of Scripture seemed unequivocal: "Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant" (Gen. 17:14). But it was made clear to the first Christians-not by their own unaided reason but by the fact that the Holy Spirit was freely given to uncircumcised believers-that this was not so. What, then, are the essentials in the way the community lives which cannot be changed? Is all the long schooling of Israel in the Torah, the loving instruction of God, now to be thrown overboard? Do we say, "In Christ, anything goes"? If "culture" is rightly defined as the whole way in which a community lives together, then surely Christ must have something to do with culture. But exactly what? The decrees sent to the Gentile churches by the elders in Jerusalem laid on them the obligation to keep certain of the Jewish dietary laws which later Christian centuries have judged unnecessary. If even such fundamental things as circumcision, the sabbath, and the laws about food are thrown overboard, what remains? If one of the ten commandments can be scrapped, what justification is there for insisting on the others? What is required, in any culture wherever it may be, by Christian obedience?
Many have answered, and still answer, that question by invoking some highly general concept. Jesus Means Freedom is the title of a widely read book. Jesus is the liberator, and whatever liberates men and women is authentic following of Jesus. Or, perhaps, "Jesus means justice," and whatever serves to overturn injustice is authentic discipleship. Or, perhaps more common, "Jesus means love." Following Jesus means living a life of universal and unconditional love. The effect of these moves, of course, is that the gospel is replaced by a moral law or a political program, or-more often-a combination of the two in which a particular program is invested with a degree of moral passion which raises it above the level of merely pragmatic argument. The other effect is that the Church is bypassed, since it is obvious that many people who are committed to the practice of freedom, justice, and love have nothing to do with the Church.
But if the gospel is not to be identified on the one hand with a particular pattern of behavior bound to one of the many cultures of humankind, nor on the other hand with abstract moral or political principles, how exactly is it embodied? To put the question as it arises in cross-cultural mission, what are the conditions for saying that the gospel has been truly communicated? When can the missionary say, "Mission accomplished"? Here let me call as witness one of the most penetrating and provocative of recent writers on missiology, the China missionary Roland Allen. Allen, who served in China in the early years of this century, carried on a sustained polemic against the missionary methods of his time and contrasted them with those of St. Paul. St. Paul, he argued, never stayed in one place for more than a few months, or at most a couple of years. He did not establish what we call a "mission station," and he certainly did not build himself a mission bungalow. On the contrary, as soon as there was art established congregation of Christian believers, he chose from among them elders, laid his hands on them, entrusted to them the care of the church, and left. By contrast the nineteenth-century missionary considered it necessary to stay not merely for a lifetime, but for the lifetime of several generations of missionaries. Why? Because he did not think his work was done until the local church had developed a leadership which had mastered and internalized the culture of Europe, its theological doctrines, its administrative machinery, its architecture, its music, until there was a complete replica of the "home church" equipped with everything from archdeacons to harmoniums. The young church was to be a carbon copy of the old church in England, Scotland, or Germany. In rejecting this, and in answering the question, What must have been done if the gospel is to be truly communicated? Allen answered: there must be a congregation furnished with the Bible, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry. When these conditions are fulfilled, the missionary has done her job. The young church is then free to learn, as it goes and grows, how to embody the gospel in its own culture.
I believe that Allen was right, and that his argument has a wider relevance. If one takes the argument out of the particular context in which he was writing, that of cross-cultural mission, and asks, How is the life of Christ, the life which is a true foretaste of the kingdom, continued in the period between the ascension and the parousia? the answer must be somewhat as follows. It will not be by the universal application of an unchanging pattern of personal and social behavior as laid down in the faith and practice of Islam. It will not be in a series of abstract moral and political principles. It will be in the life of a community which remembers, rehearses, and lives by the story which the Bible tells and of which the central focus is the story told in the New Testament. This remembering and rehearsing will be through the continual reading of and reflection on the Bible and the continual repetition of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. And it will maintain its link with, its continuity with the body of men to whom Jesus said, "As the Father sent me, so I send you," through a ministry in which the personal call of Jesus, "Follow me," is continued through the generations, not in abstract moral or political principles but in the actual personal encounters in which men and women who have themselves been called, call others to follow. It is this actual body, this community which as a matter of historical fact has existed through the centuries from the first apostles, which is the prior reality, having ontological primacy over the particular styles of life and ethical codes and political principles which it may develop as it seeks to be faithful in its situation. Once again we have to insist that since the response to the gospel has to be made in freedom, and since all human beings are fallible, there will not be unanimity in the ways in which the Church in any time and place seeks to "contextualize" the gospel, seeks, that is to say, so to proclaim and to embody the life of Jesus that his power both to sustain and to judge every human culture is manifest. The New Testament itself makes it clear that there have been from the very beginning sharp differences among Christians about how to relate to the surrounding culture. The passages in the epistles to the Romans and to the Corinthians referring to controversies about food offered to idols are ample evidence of this. One must expect that this will be so to the end. If Christian obedience were to be exhaustively defined in terms of following one or other "line" in respect of all these controversies, the Church would have splintered into fragments long before the end of the first century. That it did not do so is, I am sure, the central clue to answering our question about true and false contextualization. Where there is a believing community whose life is centered in the biblical story through its worshipping, teaching, and sacramental and apostolic life, there will certainly be differences of opinion on specific issues, certainly mistakes, certainly false starts. But it is part of my faith in the authenticity of the story itself that this community will not be finally betrayed. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. But where something else is put at the center, a moral code, a set of principles, or the alleged need to meet some criterion imposed from outside the story, one is adrift in the ever changing tides of history, and the community which commits itself to these things becomes one more piece of driftwood on the current.
I have been speaking about the question of contextualization as it has arisen in the practice of cross-cultural mission. But at the present time the question is very widely raised in situations where the crossing of cultural boundaries is not involved. There is at the present time a growing number of particular styles of theological development under the broad rubric of theologies of liberation. There is the Latin American liberation theology, which may be regarded as the mother of them all, arising from the experience of extreme oppression in that continent. There is black theology in various forms arising out of the black experience. There is feminist theology which has as its context the experience of male domination. Most recently there is the Indian Dalit Theology which already boasts a professional chair in Madras, and which arises from the experience of the communities to which Gandhi gave the name "Harijan" (people of God) but for which an older name is now felt to be more appropriate-the crushed people. All these theologies take as their starting point the experience of domination and oppression. They interpret the Bible story as the story of liberation from oppression. They see Jesus as one who identified himself with the oppressed. For them, therefore, true contextualization is the identification of the Church with the oppressed and with their struggle to find liberation. The heart of Christian discipleship is this "struggle." The struggle is of course something which goes on far beyond the boundaries of the Church, and which in many cases bypasses the Church altogether because the Church is frequently on the side of the oppressors and not of the victims. It follows that the first step in a true theology is the "option for the poor." Sound theology, we are frequently told, must begin with the aspirations of the people. Both theology and ecclesiology must be done "from below." The idea that we can do it "from above" is the illusion of traditional theology. All theology, and all biblical interpretation, is done from a specific historical situation. It is not done in heaven, in a sphere above the battle. It is done on earth by people who are part of the battle, on one side or the other. Most theology has been done from within the establishment. It is done by the oppressors. We require, as is often said, a hermeneutic of suspicion. We do not take statements at their face value, even the statements of Scripture. We ask, Who wrote this? What were his interests? What position was he defending? There is no position above the conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed; there is only a position on one side or the other. Biblical interpretation, and the theology developed from it, is either part of the oppression, or it is part of the struggle of the oppressed-whether the oppressed be dwellers in the Brazilian slums, Dalits in Madras, blacks in Harlem, or women everywhere.
Can this be accepted? Clearly the questions asked by the practitioners of the "hermeneutic of suspicion" are legitimate questions. Everyone is influenced by self-interest of one kind or another. The practitioners of the hermeneutic of suspicion are not exempt from its procedures. Their hermeneutic is also interest-governed. Must we, then, abandon all hope of reaching beyond our various interests to the truth? The answer, if I understand these writers correctly, is that we need not despair, because the way the oppressed see things is the way they really are. To understand how things really are, one must stand with the oppressed. The oppressed have an epistemological privilege. Their vision is not distorted by the bias which must always incline those who benefit from the status quo to defend that status. One must therefore go on to press the question: "On what grounds do we know that the oppressed have this epistemological privilege?" In the case of some writers it is fairly clear that the belief in question is part of the Marxist interpretation of history, derived in turn from the Hegelian dialectic, in accordance with which, at the present stage of history, the proletariat are the bearers of truth and of right. They are the messianic people. In the case of other writers the option for the poor rests on the belief that God as he is revealed in Scripture and in the ministry of Jesus is on the side of the poor. These two different positions call for two distinct comments.
In the first case belief in the epistemological privilege of the oppressed is prior to and independent of belief in the authority of Scripture. In many writings of liberation theology it is made clear that the analysis of the human situation in terms of the model of oppression is prior to the appeal to Scripture. It is accepted as axiomatic that the clue to understanding the human situation is found in this model: everywhere there are oppressors and there are oppressed. Justice requires that we stand by the oppressed. Therefore the testimony of Scripture is to be evaluated on this basis. What serves the cause of the oppressed is the real kernel of Scripture. Scripture functions only within this more fundamental scheme. In this case one has to ask about the grounds for this belief. A student of human affairs would normally conclude that while oppression and injustice are undoubtedly an important part of the human scene, most people are in an ambivalent position, oppressors in some situations and oppressed in others; that it is not obvious from a survey of world history that God favors the oppressed; and that many other elements in human experience could be candidates for the position of controlling model. Indeed, if the appeal is not to revelation as found in Scripture, but to the knowledge of human affairs which is available to observation and reason, a good case could be made for asserting that the poor are simply those who have failed in the struggle for existence and-in the interests of the race-will be eliminated by those who demonstrate their fitness to survive.
In the second place, namely where the claim for the epistemological privilege of the poor is founded in Scripture, several comments suggest themselves. First, that while the Old Testament undoubtedly contains many passionate expressions of God's concern for justice for the oppressed, it also contains warnings about the chaos which arises when there is no strong government, about the role of a just ruler in God's merciful guiding of human affairs, and about the fact that the victims of today's injustice frequently become tomorrow's oppressors. If we turn to the ministry of Jesus himself, it is of course clear that Jesus shocked the established authorities by being a friend to all-not only to the destitute and hungry, but also to those rich extortioners, the tax-collectors, whom all decent people ostracized; that the shocking thing was not that he sided with the poor against the rich but that he met everyone equally with the same unlimited mercy and the same unconditioned demand for total loyalty. If we look at the end of his earthly ministry, at the cross, it is clear that Jesus was rejected by all-rich and poor, rulers and people-alike. Before the cross of Jesus there are no innocent parties. His cross is not for some and against others. It is the place where all are guilty and all are forgiven. The cross cannot be converted into the banner for a fight of some against others. And if we look to the beginning of his ministry, to those mysterious days in the desert when he was compelled to face the most searching temptation to take the wrong course, one could sum up the substance of the suggestions of the Evil One in the phrase I have already quoted: "Begin by attending to the aspirations of the people."
I return to the point where I left Roland Allen. I am saying that authentic Christian thought and action begin not by attending to the aspirations of the people, not by answering the questions they are asking in their terms, not by offering solutions to the problems as the world sees them. It must begin and continue by attending to what God has done in the story of Israel and supremely in the story of Jesus Christ. It must continue by indwelling that story so that it is our story, the way we understand the real story. And then, and this is the vital point, to attend with open hearts and minds to the real needs of people in the way that Jesus attended to them, knowing that the real need is that which can only be satisfied by everything that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4). As we share in the life and worship of the Church, through fellowship, word, and sacrament, we indwell the story and from within that story we seek to be the voice and the hands of Jesus for our time and place. Because we are also driven by our selfish desires and interests we will be aware that we require constant correction and that for this we must look to those who share the life in Christ but inhabit different cultural situations. We must always be ready to recognize that we have misrepresented the intention of Jesus because of our own interests. But that correction comes not from some supposed position of epistemological privilege outside the Christian story; it comes from the story itself when we expose ourselves honestly to the need of all people.
I am thus again stressing the priority of the gospel as the message, embodied in an actual story, of what God has in fact done, is doing, and will do. Christian theology is a form of rational discourse developed within the community which accepts the primacy of this story and seeks actively to live in the world in accordance with the story. It can fail by failing to understand and take seriously the world in which it is set, so that the gospel is not heard but remains incomprehensible because the Church has sought security in its own past instead of risking its life in a deep involvement with the world. It can fail, on the other hand, by allowing the world to dictate the issues and the terms of the meeting. The result then is that the world is not challenged at its depth but rather absorbs and domesticates the gospel and uses it to sacralize its own purposes. We have seen that happen in the history of the old churches of western Christendom. It is the experience of the younger churches of the East and South which has alerted us to this domestication of the gospel in our culture. We shall not be dealing appropriately with our guilt about this if it simply leads us to applaud the same kind of domestication in the cultures of the Third World. Professor Kosuke Koyama has described in unforgettable terms the disasters that follow from a religion which merely applauds and does not radically criticize national aspirations (Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai). True contextualization accords to the gospel its rightful primacy, its power to penetrate every culture and to speak within each culture, in its own speech and symbol, the word which is both No and Yes, both judgment and grace. And that happens when the word is not a disembodied word, but comes from a community which embodies the true story, God's story, in a style of life which communicates both the grace and the judgment. In order that it may do this, it must be both truly local and truly ecumenical. Truly local in that it embodies God's particular word of grace and judgment for that people. Truly ecumenical in being open to the witness of churches in all other places, and thus saved from absorption into the culture of that place and enabled to represent to that place the universality, the catholicity of God's purpose of grace and judgment for all humanity.
I began this chapter by saying that the question of contextualization is the question about how the gospel "comes alive" in particular contexts. The history of the Church, and missionary experiences, certainly show that this "coming alive" happens in a myriad of different and unpredictable ways. Nevertheless the gospel is not an empty form into which everyone is free to pour his or her own content. Scripture, it has been wittily said, is not a picnic where the authors bring the words and the readers bring the meaning. The content of the gospel is Jesus Christ in the fullness of his ministry, death, and resurrection. The gospel is this and not anything else. Jesus is who he is, and though our perceptions of him will be shaped by our own situation and the mental formation we have received from our culture, our need is to see him as he truly is. This is why we have to listen to the witness of the whole Church of all places and ages. His word of judgment and grace comes to each person in unique and often mysterious ways. The evangelist may believe that he has so well understood the human situation (for example, as one of oppression) that he knows how to present the gospel (for instance, as liberation). But there are two reasons for questioning this approach. The first is that, however valid may be my understanding of the situation of those to whom I commend the gospel, my knowledge is limited. The situation may look quite different to my hearer. It happens over and over again that the gospel "comes alive" in a way that the evangelist had never dreamed of, and has effects which he never anticipated. The gospel is addressed to the human person as a human person in all the uncountable varieties of predicaments in which human beings find themselves. The gospel has a sovereignty of its own and is never an instrument in the hands of the evangelist. Or, to put it more truly, the Holy Spirit, by whose secret working alone the gospel "comes alive," is not under the evangelist's control. The wind blows freely.
The second reason for questioning the issue-oriented approach to the preaching of the gospel is this. If one begins by defining the situation, for example, as one of oppression, and then offering the Christian message as the answer to the problem, the gospel becomes ancillary to a program. We have defined the issues, and we are responsible for the program. One is in danger of a new kind of moralism: being a Christian is identified with commitment to a particular "line." But when the gospel truly "comes alive," the one for whom this happens knows that sovereignty now lies elsewhere. A new Lord is in control. That sovereignty will issue in a whole range of actions and in a whole style of life, but these will have about them a spontaneity and a capacity to surprise-probably to surprise even the evangelist.
Of course it is always required of us that we listen sensitively to both the desires and the needs of people, and that we try to understand their situation. But neither these desires and needs, nor any analysis of the situation made on the basis of some principles drawn from other sources than Scripture, can be the starting point for mission. The starting point is God's revelation of himself as it is witnessed to us in Scripture. The dynamic of mission is the presence of God the Holy Spirit with power to convict the world and to bring home the truth of the gospel to each human heart. True contextualization happens when there is a community which lives faithfully by the gospel and in that same costly identification with people in their real situations as we see in the earthly ministry of Jesus. When these conditions are met, the sovereign Spirit of God does his own surprising work.