CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 9
Church Growth,
Conversion, and Culture
MISSION is the proclaiming of the kingdom of the Father, and it concerns the rule of God over all that is. We have seen, therefore, that the church has been led by the logic of its own gospel to move beyond preaching into actions of all kinds for the doing of God's justice in the life of the world.
But mission is also sharing the life of the Son, for it is in Jesus that God's kingdom is present in the life of the world, and this presence is continued - under the sign of the cross - in the community that confesses Jesus as Lord and belongs to him as his body. We have therefore to speak about this community, how it grows and is sustained in its mission. It is futile to talk about the task of the church as agent of liberation -in whatever terms we understand that task -unless we also pay attention to the ways in which the church in any place comes into being and grows. It is useless to talk about the task if you are not concerned about the agency that is to carry out the task. We have to ask not only "What is to be done?" but also "Who is to do it?" The opening announcement of the gospel, "the kingdom of God is at hand," is followed at once by a call addressed personally to Peter and Andrew, James and John, to follow Jesus and to share in the work of the kingdom. The calling of men and women to be converted, to follow Jesus, and to be part of his community is and must always be at the center of mission.
One of today's most influential schools of missiology takes this as its central emphasis. The Institute of Church Growth of the School of World Missions, located at Fuller Theological Seminary and under the leadership of Dr. Donald McGavran, has forced missionary agencies in many parts of the world to ask why churches do not grow and to plan deliberately for church growth and expect it as the normal experience of missions. Dr. McGavran's convictions were developed out of his experience in India, where he observed that some churches were multiplying rapidly while others in similar situations stagnated. He saw that these contrasting experiences resulted from contrasting missionary methods. On the one hand was the method centered on the "mission station." (Since "mission" means going and "station" means standing still, one might think that "mission station" was the perfect contradiction in terms. It has been, nevertheless, the central element in the program of missions during most of the modern period.) In the "mission station" approach, as McGavran sees it, converts are detached from the natural communities to which they belong, attached to the foreign mission and its institutions, and required to conform to ethical and cultural standards that belong to the Christianity of the foreign missionary. The effect of this policy is twofold. On the one hand the convert, having been transplanted into an alien culture, is no longer in a position to influence non-Christian relatives and neighbors; on the other hand the energies of the mission are exhausted in the effort to bring the converts, or more often their children, into conformity with the standards supposed by the missionaries to be required by the gospel. Both factors have the effect of stopping the growth of the church. Schools, colleges, hospitals, and programs for social action multiply, but the church does not. McGavran traces this failure to a misreading of the Great Commission. According to the text of Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus instructed his apostles to disciple the nations, to baptize, and to teach. The order of these three words represents an order of priorities that must be observed. The primary business of missions is to disciple and baptize. Teaching must follow, not precede, the others. It is no doubt the task of the church to teach men to observe all that Jesus has commanded, but this can come only after they have been part of the church. The "mission station" strategy has resulted in the stopping of growth because missions have been devoted to perfecting the energies that should have been given to discipling. By contrast, the strategy of the "people's movement" actively seeks and fosters the corporate decisions of whole social groups to accept the gospel. This avoids the breaking of natural relationships. "Men become Christians without social dislocation so that the resulting churches have leaders and loyalties intact. Churches are therefore likely to be more stable and self-supporting and to bear up better under persecution." I Churches that are the products of such people's movements tend to grow, and in fact the great majority of those who have become Christians from among the non-Christian religions have come in this way.
In a paper prepared for the International Congress on World Evangelization (Lausanne, 1974) McGavran spelled out his essential concern in the following theses:
(1) Huge numbers of people remain in ignorance of the gospel, and they will not be reached by their Christian neighbors.
(2) They must hear the gospel in terms of their own cultures, for "God accepts world cultures."
(3) Therefore there must be deliberate crossing of cultural frontiers: the natural growth of churches through contacts within the same culture will not accomplish this.
(4) The aim must he that in every piece of the cultural mosaic that makes up human existence there shall be "Christian Churches which fit that piece and are closely adapted to its culture."
(5) The future belongs to the masses. They have "a built in receptivity to the Good News." Therefore enormous growth is possible if the right methods are followed.
To this brief summary of McGavran's thought, which has been developed in many volumes relating to different situations, it should be added that he has consistently urged that the resources available for mission should be applied in places where rapid church growth is possible and to methods that will favor its occurrence. The specific task of missions is to "disciple the nations." Their work must be judged by their success in doing just that.
If I have given anything like a fair summary of the teaching of the Church Growth school of missiology, I hope I have shown that it contains important elements of truth. The criticism of the "mission station" strategy has a great deal of force. It is also true that missions have, in McGavran's phrase, tended to put perfecting before discipling and thereby fallen into the old legalist trap. They have become the proponents of a new law rather than of a liberating gospel. The church has been made to appear more like a school where examinations have to be passed than a place where the community meets to celebrate its freedom.
Moreover, it is right that Christians should continually be asked why their churches do not grow and why they are so little concerned about the multitudes who have not heard the gospel or who, having heard it, have rejected it.
The Church Growth school of missiology raised basic questions in at least three fields:
1. The relations of numerical church growth to the message of the kingdom.
11. The meaning of conversion and the relation between discipling and perfecting.
Ill. The relation of gospel and church to culture.
We shall look at these three issues in turn.
I
1. There can surely be no doubt that anyone who is committed to a cause will rejoice when the number of those so committed multiplies. And anyone who knows Jesus as Lord and Savior will rejoice when people come to know him and will grieve when he is ignored or rejected. This is something that surely cannot be gainsaid. And when we turn to the story of the first days of the church as we have it in the Acts of the Apostles, we find a lively interest in numerical growth. On the day of the Pentecost, we are told, three thousand people were added to the church (2:41). Shortly afterwards we learn that the believing men numbered five thousand (4:4), and again we are told that "the disciples were increasing in number" (6:1) and that "the number of the disciples multiplied greatly" (6:7). After the arrest and release of Peter we are again told that "the word of God grew and multiplied" (12:24), and at the beginning of Paul's second missionary journey it is said that the churches in Syria and Cilicia "increased in numbers daily" (6:5).
But when one has given due weight to this obvious delight in the numerical growth of the church, one must also observe that the rest of the New Testament furnishes little evidence of interest in numerical growth. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus does not give the impression of being interested in large numbers. There is implied delight in the marvelous multiplication of the seed that falls into good ground (Mark 4:8) but also explicit joy over a single sheep that was lost and is found (Luke 15:3-7). It is indeed interesting that Luke, who shows such evident delight in recording the multiplication of believers after Pentecost, also records several sayings of Jesus that suggest that the coming of God's kingdom does not at all depend on the number of those who expect it and pray for it. "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth'?" (Luke 18:8). The emphasis falls upon the faithfulness of the disciples rather than upon their numbers.
Neither does a study of the Epistles seem to disclose any interest in numerical growth. We do not find Paul concerning himself with the size of the churches or with questions about their growth. His primary concern is with their faithfulness, with the integrity of their witness. His own concern is that he may "fully [preach] the gospel of Christ" so that "the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit" (Rom. 15:15-19). He is willing to "become all things to all men" that he may "by all means save some" (I Cor. 9:22), but all of this is "for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings" (9:23). In the first letter of Peter the believers are told always to "be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you ... with gentleness and reverence" (I Pet. 3:15). There is a deep concern for the integrity of the Christian witness, but there is no evidence of anxiety about or enthusiasm for rapid growth. In no sense does the triumph of God's reign seem to depend upon the growth of the church.
The Johannine Gospel and letters show a persistent concern about the world, for which and into which the Father has sent the Son and the Son has sent the church. But there is nowhere any suggestion that the salvation of the world depends upon the growth of the church.
Reviewing, then, the teaching of the New Testament, one would have to say that, on the one hand, there is joy in the rapid growth of the church in its earliest days, but that, on the other, there is no evidence that the numerical growth of the church is a matter of primary concern. There is no shred of evidence in Paul's letters to suggest that he judged the churches by the measure of their success in rapid numerical growth, nor is there anything comparable to the strident cries of some contemporary evangelists that the salvation of the world depends upon the multiplication of believers. There is an incomparable sense of seriousness and urgency as the apostle contemplates the fact that he and all people "must appear before the judgment seat of Christ" and as he acknowledges the constraint of Jesus' love and the ministry of reconciliation that he has received (11 Cor. 5:10-21). But this nowhere appears as either an anxiety or an enthusiasm about the numerical growth of the church.
2. If we turn from the New Testament to the later pages of church history, we find, of course, periods of rapid numerical growth, of no growth, and of diminishing numbers. In the period following the conversion of Constantine the church multiplied. So did numbers at certain times during the conversion of the tribes of northwest Europe and during the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. We do not look back on these periods with great satisfaction. It might be argued that, for example, the peoples of Central and South America who were baptized by the thousands in the time of the conquistadores were not truly converted. But this fails to take account of McGavran's argument that discipling must precede "perfecting." On McGavran's principle it is difficult to see how one could fault the procedure of the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries. And it is a matter of historical fact that many groups that were originally Christianized in this way have become and remained strong and vital Christian communities. The fisher-folk of the Coromandal Coast - the Paravas - were baptized en masse in 1534 as a condition of Portuguese protection from Muslim raiders. The task of teaching them the elements of the faith was taken up only eight years later by Francis Xavier, but they have remained among the strongest and most stable Christian communities in India. McGavran's argument has certainly much to commend it, and yet it is surely also true that the church is least recognizable as the body of Christ when it is growing rapidly through the influence of military, political, and economic power.
And even apart from such examples of rapid growth through mainly secular influences, we have to ask whether the church is most faithful in its witness to the crucified and risen Jesus and most recognizable as the community that "bears about in the body the dying Jesus" when it is chiefly concerned with its own self-aggrandizement. When numerical growth is taken as the criterion of judgment on the church, we are transported with alarming ease into the world of the military campaign or the commercial sales drive. Sentences such as the following may be acceptable in the boardroom of a powerful mission agency with plenty of resources, but they sound quite different to those who are to the receiving end of the operation: "Unresponsive areas should be occupied light/v. A blitzkrieg of missionaries in a resistant area usually serves to alarm the religious leaders and to harden the people in their unbelief. Better to keep the witness there light, ready to move in heavy reinforcements when the culture turns responsive.
3. I come back to the very simple point that I made at the beginning of the discussion. Anyone who knows Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior must desire ardently that others should share that knowledge and must rejoice when the number of those who do is multiplied. Where this desire and this rejoicing are absent, we must ask whether something is not wrong at the very center of the church's life. McGavran is therefore right to press upon us the question "Why is there not more concern for the multiplication of believers and more evidence of its happening'?" He is right also in his criticism of missions for adopting practices that put in the center not a liberating gospel, but a series of demands for conformity to ethical and cultural standards set by the missionary. He is right in insisting that the missionary has a specific task - not the whole task of evangelism, nurture, prophetic witness, and action for justice and compassion. but the more limited task of "discipling." This is not to deny that the others named and many more must be included in any full statement of the church's calling; it is only to insist that this is true within the broader spectrum and more limited calling. The missionary is to "disciple the nations." The other things must not be left undone, but they must not deflect the missionary from the essential thing to which he or she is called - to bring "the nations" into allegiance to Jesus Christ.
There is a partial -- but not, I think, a total - correspondence between this and the survey that Paul makes of his own missionary work. In writing to the church at Rome about his travel plans, Paul says that he has "fully preached the gospel of Christ" all the way from Jerusalem to Illyricum, and that therefore he has "no longer any room for work in these regions" (Rom. 15:17-23). Paul can say that he has finished his work as a missionary in a specific region. Clearly he does not mean any of the following three things: that all the inhabitants of the region have been converted, baptized, and incorporated in the church; that all those who have been baptized are now fully mature Christians for whom no more "perfecting" is needed; that everyone in the region has heard the gospel. In what sense, then, can he be said to have finished his work? In the light of all we can know about the preaching and practice of Paul, we would have to answer that through his preaching and through the work of the Holy Spirit there have been formed throughout the region communities of men and women who are being offered acceptably to God as the firstfruit of the Gentiles. The coming to birth of these communities of the saints - those whom God has called and claimed as his own - is the fruit of his work. Others may come after him and build on the foundation he has laid, as Apollos did in Corinth (I Cor. 3:5-I5). His task as a missionary is clear, limited, and - literally - fundamental. He is sent to lay the foundation stone of the church, and that stone is Christ. The result of his work, in other words, will be a community that acknowledges Jesus Christ as the supreme Lord of life. When this community exists, the missionary has done the work for which lie was sent.
4. This discussion of Paul's understanding of his apostolic calling prompts a reference to another missiologist who, like McGavran, was a persistent critic of the missionary methods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roland Allen (1868-1947) served as a missionary in China until 1903. Thereafter he did not (like McGavran) found an institute, but lie wrote a succession of hooks and articles arguing with great persistence that the methods of contemporary mission were not those of Paul. He contrasted what Paul achieved in ten years of work with what modern missions had failed to achieve in a century. Paul could say that in four great provinces he had completed his work. By contrast, missions in Asia were still only at the beginning and no end was in sight. What was the reason for the difference?
As Allen looked at Paul's missionary methods he saw four decisive points of difference from modern methods.
(a) When, as the result of the preaching of the gospel, a Christian community has come into being, Paul entrusts the whole responsibility to the local leadership and moves on. He does not do what modern missionaries have done: he does not build a bungalow! The new converts are simply "committed to the Lord in whom they believed" (Acts 14:23), and the missionary moves on. His work is done.
(b) Paul does not establish financial relations with the new church. There are no subsidies or grants-in-aid. By becoming Christians the new converts do not lose their independence.
(c) Nor do they lose their status as adults. They are not treated as children. At no point does Paul lay down laws in the manner of the ten commandments. When he is consulted he advises, but his advice is largely based on the ethical teaching generally acknowledged in surrounding society. Even on the question of contact with idolatry he does not lay down authoritative rules, but appeals to their own best judgment (I Cor. 10:14-22). In spite of the decrees of Acts 15:29. Paul refrains from legislating in any binding manner on the subject of food offered to idols (I Cor. 8). Even when, as in his dealings with the Galatians, he has to charge them with what could amount to apostasy, his language shows that he sees them as adults who must be reasoned with, not as subordinates who can be commanded. The fact that he speaks of them as children with whom he is again in travail is vivid testimony to his own spiritual anguish, but the argument that immediately follows is addressed to mature men and women capable of following a subtle and passionate argument (Gal. 3 and 4). All of this is very far from the style in which missionaries have often claimed to direct the development of "their" own converts.
(d) Finally - and perhaps most important - Paul does not impose on them a ministry chosen and trained by himself. He has his colleagues and helpers - Timothy, Titus, Tychicus, and the rest - but they are available to be sent from church to church on special missions. The local ministry of each church is formed from its own membership. In contrast to this, modern missions have insisted on the necessity for training a new kind of leadership in schools and seminaries directed by the foreign missionary on the basis of the missionary's perception of ethical and intellectual priorities. Consequently, whereas the churches formed by the work of modern missions have been able to develop a fully native ministerial leadership only after decades and even centuries of training, Paul could address the church in Philippi "with the bishops and deacons" within a very few years of the first conversions.
The central thrust of all Roland Allen's writing is expressed in the title of a posthumously published work, The Ministry of the Spirit. Allen's charge against modern missions was that they had been tempted by their alliance with colonial powers to act as though the mission of the church could be pursued in the style of a cultural and educational campaign, as though the object was to multiply replicas of the sending churches. In contrast to this Allen rightly saw that in the New Testament portrayal of mission the central reality is the active work of the living Holy Spirit himself. It is the Spirit who brings about conversion, the Spirit who equips those who are called with the gifts needed for all the varied forms of ministry, and the Spirit who guides the church into all the truth. The Spirit is not the property of the sending church or the missionary who is sent. It is not part of the missionary's duty to mold the new church into the style of the old. The Spirit is sovereign and free. and the missionary must trust the Spirit to do his own work. Where Christ is confessed, where the word of the gospel is preached and the sacraments of the gospel are administered. and where there is a ministry that links the new community to the wider fellowship of the catholic church, there, Allen believed, the Holy Spirit must be trusted to provide all that is needed, and the missionary has done his or her work and can move on.
Allen was not much heeded in the days when missions could still count on the superior power and wealth of the colonizing nations. Those who have served as missionaries through the years of decolonization have been better placed to listen to his words. In my own experience of evangelism in South Indian villages, I have seen how the gospel can spread and living churches can be multiplied and grow if one is willing to refrain from imposing Western patterns of ministry and training and to allow those whom the Spirit touches within the life of the village communities to develop styles of leadership congruous with the native culture. I have seen enough to be convinced that Roland Allen's central thesis is true.
5. It is clear that there are important differences between Allen and McGavran. Allen is not primarily concerned about numerical growth: he is concerned about the conditions under which spontaneously growing churches come to be born and to develop. But what they have in common is the conviction that missions have been wrong in their insistence that it is their business, as an essential part of their work, to impose on younger churches ethical standards laid down by the sending churches. In the language of McGavran, they have confused "discipling" with "perfecting." In Allen's language, they have relied on the pressure of the law to mold new churches into conformity to Christ, when they should have trusted the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word and sacraments of the gospel in the life of the community. Both of them therefore stand together in the sharpest possible antithesis to the theologians of liberation.
For liberation theologians the essential commitment is to action for God's justice in the life of the world. The true church consists of those who are so committed. Only this is "to know the Lord." Those who claim to be Christians in virtue of baptism and church membership but are not so committed are no part of the true church. They may cry "Lord, Lord," but they do not do the Father's will, and in spite of all their piety the Lord whom they claim to know disowns them (Matt. 7:21-23).
For both Allen and McGavran, on the other hand, the essential commitment is to Jesus Christ in the fellowship of his people. Right action for the doing of God's will in the life of the world will follow from this. McGavran would agree that Christians must he involved in the struggle to build a just society but insists that "the most potent element in that struggle, namely multitudes of Christian cells where men meet around the Bible to seek the will of God and to open themselves to his righteousness and power." must not be denied to them.In spite of mutual acknowledgment of the truth in each other's views, McGavran and Allen lead out into sharply diverging lines of action and to deep mutual distrust and antagonism. The matter in question is the ethical context and content of conversion, and to this we must now turn.
II
1. In her book Theology in an Industrial Society Margaret Kane outlines two contrasting ways of understanding the church's mission. The two are summarized in parallel columns as follows:
While not giving an unconditional endorsement of B, Miss Kane insists that although A is the typical attitude of church people, the points made in B are essential for any relevant style of mission in contemporary society. A similar concern is expressed by many in the demand for a "contextual theology," by which is meant a theology that gives primary attention to the issues that people are facing at that time and place and insists that the gospel cannot be communicated except in terms of these issues. In the correspondence between M. M. Thomas and Hendrikus Berkhof that followed the Mexico conference of 1963, the former repeatedly insisted that we have to begin by asking, "What is the form and content of the salvation which Christ offers to men in the secular world'?" and that we can only answer that question by looking at the actual needs and aspirations of this man. In fact, these aspirations are in one sense or another the creation of the gospel, and "the Message comes alive at the cutting edge between the Gospel and the quest of modern man for a truly human existence." Indeed, "nobody knows the Message in a historical vacuum."5 It is on the basis of such convictions as these that the advocates of "contextual theology" are suspicious of traditional forms of evangelism. which appear to consist of the repetition of *'unchanging propositions handed down from the past" and to evade the obligation to "penetrate the world and point to the signs of God's activity in it." For this kind of evangelism, it is held, is irrelevant to the actual decisions that men and women must make if they are to act in line with what God is doing in the world now and to the actual form that "salvation" must take if it is to appear as salvation for contemporary human beings. It is obvious that from this point of view McGavran's separation of "discipling" from "perfecting" and Allen's insistence that the duty of the missionary is finished when a living church has come into being are both to be condemned. Both of these, in this view, could be quite irrelevant to the real business of mission, which is concerned with people's response through decision and action to what God is doing in the life of the secular world now.
I feel the force of this argument very acutely. Any critic of traditional styles of evangelism can easily point to examples of conversion that are not merely irrelevant but actually counterproductive in relation to the real ethical issues of the time and place. It is notorious that the times and places from which successful evangelistic campaigns and mass conversions have been reported have often been marked by flagrant evils such as racism, militant sectarianism, and blind support of oppressive economic and political systems. How are we to evaluate a form of evangelism that produces baptized, communicant. Biblereading, and zealous Christians who are committed to church growth but uncommitted to radical obedience to the plain teaching of the Bible on the issues of human dignity and social justice'? And how can we defend a form of evangelism that has nothing to say about the big issues of public righteousness and talks only of questions of personal and domestic behavior'? Can we agree that the big ethical issues are secondary matters, which can be attended to after conversion'? Can there be any real "discipling" that does not include as an essential element the ethical commitments that McGavran puts into the category of "perfecting"'? Is there - and here we must listen again to the Latin Americans - is there any knowledge of God that is not at the same time the doing of God's will'? Can "discipling" and "perfecting" be separated even for a moment? Can there be any preaching of the "text" of the gospel except in an explicit relation to the "context" of the contemporary world?
These questions imply their answers. There cannot be a separation between conversion and obedience. To be converted in any sense that is true to the Bible is something that involves the whole person. It is a total change of direction, which includes both the inner reorientation of the heart and mind and the outward reorientation of conduct in all areas of life. The original announcement of the gospel ("the reign of God is at hand") led immediately to a call to be converted ("repent"), to believe in the present reality of God's reign, and to follow Jesus. All of these belong together as part of a single action. The call to conversion is not given in a vacuum. It is in the context of a call to follow Jesus, and what is meant by following Jesus is spelled out in his teaching and example.
2. What are the implications of this" Does it mean that conversion is essentially a matter of ethical choice, a decision to act in a different way'? It certainly means following Jesus, but what concretely does this mean for a man or woman in an African village or a South American ,fine//a now? There have always been missionaries and evangelists who were sure they knew the answer. The answers have covered an almost infinite spectrum of ethical issues. from drink, gambling, and dancing through polygamy and circumcision to commitment to the battle against communism, racism, or fascism. The answers varied widely but the accent was always firm: "Until you have abandoned A, B, and C and accepted X. Y and Z, you cannot be regarded as a truly converted Christian." Looked at from another time or place, this is easily recognized as the old substitution of law for gospel against which Paul had to fight in the first days of the church. From a distance one can easily see the relative character of the ethical choices and one can condemn the evangelists who falsely absolutized them. One can also see how time and again the law brings death and not life when it is put in the place of the gospel. The church becomes the agent of a moral crusade that divides mankind into allies and enemies instead of being a body of people who can be agents of liberation for all without distinction because they are themselves liberated from bondage to law. It is easy to see this from a distance. It is much harder to see how the church here and now can escape from this kind of legalism without becoming ethically irresponsible. Can there be any true conversion that does not involve, here and now, a new way of behaving and therefore a new decision on the ethical and political issues of this time and place`?
No, there cannot. There are not two stages in conversion, one religious and the second ethical. To that question there can be only one answer. But a new question has now to be put: Who has the right to decide the ethical content of conversion at any time or place - the evangelist or the convert? The place where the virus of legalism gets into the work of evangelism is the place where the evangelist presumes that he or she knows in advance and can tell the potential convert what the ethical content of conversion will he. This is what has happened over and over again. The missionary has had the power and has believed that he or she had the right to lay down the ethical preconditions for baptism - that he or she was ruler over the gospel instead of being its servant. The missionary has failed to realize that the living Christ, speaking through the Scriptures, can speak directly to the new convert in a way that is not just an echo of the words of the missionary. At this point we have to listen to the witness of converts as much as to that of evangelists. If we do so we shall find that in many instances the impact of the life and teaching of Jesus has led the convert to understand the ethical content of conversion in a way markedly different from the way it was presented by the missionary.
In his account of the beginnings of Christianity in Uganda, John V. Taylor has shown very vividly how the first converts (most of whom were young men at the court of the Kabaka) felt the demand of the Gospel upon their consciences in ways that had little connection with the ethical teaching of the missionaries. The latter laid great stress on the necessity for an immediate abandonment of polygamy as the condition for baptism. But in the hearts and consciences of the converts other questions were being raised by the gospel and especially by the teaching and example of Jesus himself. They saw in him a new pattern of behavior, calling for humility and for willingness to share the work and the hardship of the poor. They saw that slavery was incompatible with allegiance to Christ, and they found themselves engaged in a deep struggle between the "old man" and the "new man of Christ," of which the missionary was only dimly aware.6
Who has the right to decide the ethical content of conscience? Most modern missions have assumed that the church that is entrusted with the gospel has this right. McGavran and Allen deny this, and I think they have the New Testament on their side. I must refer to what was said in Chapter 6 about the work of the Holy Spirit in mission and particularly about the story of Peter and Cornelius. If the church that is the bearer of the gospel has also the right to lay down for new converts the ethical implications of conversion, the mission has become simply church extension. I have insisted that to regard it so is to fail to acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Holy Spirit, who in his own way brings the truth and power of the gospel home to the hearts and minds of people outside the church and gives them free insights into the will of God, by which the church itself is corrected and its understanding of the gospel is enlarged. If this is denied we become victims of the very human and understandable but fatal error against which Paul had to fight on behalf of the Gentile converts for their freedom in the gospel. Paul insisted in this struggle that he was maintaining the absolute supremacy and finality of Christ. The preaching of the gospel of Christ cannot be made auxiliary to the fulfillment of the law. Christ is seen to be the fulfiller of the law only when he has been seen to be the end of the law.
Most missiology has been written by missionaries rather than by converts. If we had attended more diligently to the testimony of the latter we would have learned that the experience of conversion to Christ does indeed have a necessary ethical content. It does mean a new way of acting. But the point of ethical crisis is often quite different from the one in the mind of the missionary. This is especially true in cases where the work of the missionary includes the delivery of the written Scriptures. In these cases the missionary may find that the point at which the conscience of the convert has been awakened is far away from the point that seemed to the missionary to be crucial.
3. 1 am pleading for a recognition of the sovereignity and freedom of the Holy Spirit to bring the word of God in Jesus Christ to the consciences of men in his own way. I am insisting that the work of evangelism must never become a crusade to persuade people to adopt the ethical stances of the evangelist. I am drawing attention to those times and places where the church, in a pathetic pursuit. latches onto some contemporary political enthusiasm. And I am recalling also those times and places at which the church has so identified the gospel with a particular ethical or political program that it has been filled more with hard and censorious fanaticism than with the joyful assurance of abounding grace to sinful men and women.
And yet I know that there is a danger of deceiving myself when I speak about the freedom and sovereignty of the gospel. The gospel is preached by men and women whose corporate life reflects certain ethical priorities. They may be honestly convinced that they are simply preaching Christ, but the Christ whom they preach will be seen to reflect the kind of values they cherish. Even in preaching Christ they will be, knowingly or unknowingly, advocating their own belief's about what is good and true and desirable. And if their beliefs are such that they fail to take account of the real powers at work in society, their preaching of Christ will be - to that extent - irrelevant to the real ethical choices to which God is calling humans.
And yet again, our limited and distorted images of Christ do not destroy his sovereign freedom and power. Paul can rejoice when Christ is preached even insincerely, for Christ is greater than our understanding of him. This is a matter both for encouragement and for warning: encouragement because the sins that deface the church do not destroy the power of the gospel, warning that the church must be ready and expect to receive correction from the converts. Even when the church has done its best to discern the signs of the times, to understand what are the powers at work in the world, and to point to the issues where decisions have to be made in the conflict between the reign of God and the power of evil, this understanding is partial. limited, and distorted. The human situation is more complex and subtle than even the best Christian analysis can penetrate. Therefore the church cannot make a total identification of conversion to Christ with a particular set of ethical decisions based on its own analysis. It must speak to the best of its ability about what obedience to Christ will involve. But it must also recognize that its own ethical perceptions are limited and blurred by its own sinful self-interest. In preaching Christ it will certainly make clear (perhaps more effectively by example than by word) that conversion will have ethical implications. But it must also be ready to be surprised by the fresh insights of the converts into the ethical implications of the gospel and must expect to have to revise and correct its own patterns of obedience. This point is obscured when we think of mission in terms of "foreign missions." In this case the sending church is insulated from the correction that it needs to receive from the new converts. Mission, as I have insisted, is not just church extension. It is an action in which the Holy Spirit does new things, brings into being new obedience. But the new gifts are for the whole body and not just for the new members. Mission involves learning as well as teaching, receiving as well as giving.
4. The church misunderstands itself if it thinks that it is itself the place where the truth and righteousness of the reign of God are embodied as against the reign of evil in the world. This ancient temptation to identify the church with the kingdom of God seems to be present again in some manifestations of the theology of liberation. The relation of the church to the kingdom is a more complex one and, I am convinced, can be truly grasped only by means of the trinitarian model.
Conversion is to Christ. It is primarily and essentially a personal event in which a human person is laid hold of by the living Lord Jesus Christ at the very center of the person's being and turned toward him in loving trust and obedience. Christ is the Son of the Father by whom all things are made, sustained, and ordered toward their true end, anointed by the Spirit to proclaim the kingdom of his Father and to manifest it in bearing upon himself the sin of the world.
Conversion to Christ is therefore also commitment to be with him and with all who are so committed in continuing in the power of the same anointing, proclaiming, and bearing. It is commitment to follow Jesus, with all who are so committed, along the way of the cross - the way of fearless and trustful encountering and enduring the power of evil in the contemporary world.
The company of those so committed and so following does not possess in itself the fullness of understanding or of obedience. It is a learning community. Part of that learning will be the prophetic discernment in the power of the Spirit of the issues where evil is to be encountered and endured. Part of it will be the receiving of correction and enlargement by those whom the Spirit calls in discipleship. The Spirit is not the property of the community but is its lord and guide, going ahead of the church and using both its proclamation and its endurance to bring fresh people to conversion. The church cannot lay down in advance for such people what commitment will mean but must, like Peter in the house of Cornelius, learn from them new lessons about its own obedience. As a learning community that can only press forward from partial to fuller understanding of the Father's reign, the church will know that it cannot impose its own ethical insights at any one time and place upon those whom the Spirit calls into its company. It must always press on toward fuller obedience but at the same time proclaim Christ as Lord above and beyond its own faulty obedience, and expect and welcome the correction of those whom the Spirit calls into commitment to Christ.
I am bound to conclude, therefore, that Roland Allen is right in saying that a missionary's work is done when there has been called into being in any place a living church furnshed with the means (Scripture, sacraments, and a ministry linking it with the universal church) by which it may learn and grow in obedience to Christ. I cannot find, on the other hand, that McGavran is right in his insistence upon numerical growth as the criterion of success in mission or in the way "discipling" and "perfecting" are related in his writings. For the essential witness of the church that the Holy Spirit takes and uses to bring humans to conversion is the witness (ntarturia) given when proclamation is linked to the full ministry of the suffering Servant of the Lord who discerns, encounters, and bears in his body the sin by which the world rejects God's rule. The church's struggle toward "perfecting" in the sense of being more perfectly conformed to the model of the suffering Servant of the Lord can never be in competition with the work of "discipling," which in fact is not our work but that of the Holy Spirit himself.
III
We come now to the third issue raised by the Church Growth school of missiologists, namely, that of the relation between conversion and culture. No one can deny the truth of McGavran's thesis that the growth of the church has often been grievously hindered because of a failure to recognize and honor differences of culture. The consequence of this failure is that conversion separates the converts from their own culture, robs them of a great part of their human inheritance, and makes them second-class adherents of an alien culture.
Like many earlier missiologists McGavran draws attention to the fact that the Great Commission includes the command to "disciple the nations." The implication is that those who are to become disciples are not individuals considered in isolation, but human beings whose nationhood is part of their being. The gospel, therefore, is to be addressed to the whole human community, since the real human life of its people is bound up inextricably with the language and culture of the whole. There is a strong tradition in German missiology that has laid great emphasis on this. Gustav Warneck (1834-1910), generally regarded as the founder of Protestant missiology, insisted that the ties that hold society together should as far as possible be preserved and that the aim should be the conversion and baptism of whole communities rather than of individuals. The great work of Christian Keysser (1877-1961) in the highlands of New Guinea was based on the principle of "tribal conversion," according to which the whole community is brought to the point of accepting Christianity, and only after this are individual members baptized. In this way everything possible is done to avoid the disruption of the culture and social organization of the people. Perhaps the extreme example of this method is the work of Bruno Gutmann ( 1876-1966) among the Chagga people of Tanzania. Gutmann believed that the basic forms of tribe, neighborhood, and age group are part of the God-given order of creation, and the work of missions is to build upon and to perfect these created realities. From this point of view such ideas as "civilization" and "development" represent the enemy against which missions must guard the peoples among whom they work.
It is beyond question that missions conducted on these principles have led to the formation of strong, stable, and growing churches. But the dangers are obvious. Gutmann's basic created forms are easily recognizable as Hitler's "blood and soil," and theologians like Karl Barth have denounced such doctrines. To ascribe absolute value to the forms of social organization at any one time and place is both historically naive and theologically intolerable. All social organization is subject to change, and it is absurd to describe a particular manifestation as part of an unalterable order of creation. More seriously, this is intolerable from a theological point of view: it is to ascribe to elements in the structure of the created world a finality that belongs only to Christ.
When we speak of culture in its broadest sense, we are speaking about the sum total of ways of living that shape (and also are shaped by) the continuing life of a group of human beings from generation to generation. We are speaking about the language that enables them to grasp, conceptualize, and communicate the reality of their world; about law, custom, and forms of social organization, including marriage, family, and agriculture. These things shape the life of each member of the society. They are also shaped, modified, and developed from generation to generation by the members of the society. From the point of view of the individual member they are given as part of the tradition into which he or she is born and socialized. But they are not changeless absolutes.
If we are to grasp theologically the meaning of this "sum total of ways of living" from the point of view of the gospel, I think that we must do so by means of Paul's doctrine of the powers. If we take all of the references in the Pauline epistles both to the "powers" and to the related words such as "rudiments" (stoicheia), it is clear that he is speaking of such things as the political order (Rom. 13), the law (Gal. 3:23-4:11), and the complex of rules and prohibitions that were current in the religious world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century (such as in Col. 2:8-23). Paul speaks both positively and negatively about these things. Positively they have been created in Christ and for him (Col. 1:15-16). Negatively they have been disarmed by Christ on his cross (Col. 2:15). The powers of state, religion, law, and custom all conspired and combined to crucify Jesus. By this act they revealed their own insufficiency (I Cor. 2:8). They have been disarmed. They can no longer usurp the place that belongs to Christ alone. They can no longer separate those who are in Christ from the direct presence of God himself in Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:38-39).
The "powers" are created in Christ and for Christ. They serve his purpose. They make human life possible. They provide the ordered framework within which it is possible for human freedom to develop. There is the orderly structure of nature, of the seasons, of day and night. There are the political orders and the rule of law. There is an accepted and understood language upon which we depend for learning, understanding, communicating. There are customs, traditions, norms for conduct upon which we rely to guide us in the actions we have to take from minute to minute. Without these given structures we could not begin to become human beings. We depend upon them to enable us to develop the very powers by which we can begin to question them.
They are given, but they are not changeless and absolute. They are part of the created order; they exist through the creative love and power of God. But that does not give them the status of changeless absolutes. Final authority belongs only to Christ. In his cross, where the powers combined to destroy him, Christ has established a place where we are related directly to God himself - a place, therefore, from which we have the freedom to judge, criticize, and challenge the powers. They still exist and perform their necessary functions. But they must serve the purpose of Christ, and they are open to challenge by those who are in Christ, those to whom has been entrusted the secret of God's purpose to sum up all things, including all the powers, with Christ as their head (Eph. 1:10).
The bearing of this upon the question of conversion and culture is obvious. McGavran speaks of humanity as a vast mosaic of different cultures, each of which is "psychologically closed to the rest of the world." He says, therefore, that "adaption of Christianity to the culture of each piece of the mosaic is crucially important." And it follows that "the true goal is to multiply in every piece of the ,ncu nificent mosaic truly Christian churches which fit that piece, are closely adapted to its culture, and recognized by its non-Christian neighbors as our kind of show.' "7 What shall we say of this picture?
1. It is true that there are still living in some parts of the world communities that are in a large measure "psychologically closed to the rest of the world" and that have a common culture that is relatively static. But this description of human culture is not completely true even of such rare communities, and is wildly untrue of the vast majority of mankind. Certainly all human beings live in groups that share common cultural elements, but the following considerations will show how misleading the image of the mosaic can be.
(a) Every human community is changing. Some change more rapidly than others, but none is absolutely static. All the elements of culture, even in the most stable communities, are changing.
(b) Culture is not an ethically neutral entity, and cultural change cannot be a matter of ethical indifference. Some forms of social organization, of political order. of family life, of personal behavior, must be judged to be better than others in the light of the revelation in Christ of God's purpose for humanity. We may have to recognize that at certain times and places such institutions as slavery, polygamy, the dowry system, and the capitalist system exist as an integral part of the culture of a society and that the Christian convert cannot separate from them without ceasing to be part of that society. But we may also hold, nevertheless, that other ways of ordering the economic, marital, and political life of society are better and that there is an obligation upon Christians to seek to change these elements in a culture. The fact that something is part of a particular culture does not mean that the Christian can give it unconditional endorsement.
(c) In every community there are conservatives and there are reformers, and there are different issues upon which the members of the society will take different sides. The danger inherent in all programs for the "indigenization" or "acculturation" of the gospel is that they involve the church with the conservative and backward-looking elements in the society. A study of the missionary history of the nineteenth century will show, on the other hand, that some of the foreign elements that were accepted by the converts from the missionaries were welcomed precisely because they made a break with the traditional culture and therefore came as reinforcement for younger elements in society who were impatient of old tradition. And where foreign missionaries, bearers of a culture considered (rightly or wrongly) to be "advanced," have tried to confine the "indigenous" church to the traditional language and culture of the past, they have been deeply and rightly resented. It is sufficient to mention the word "apartheid" to make the point.
(d) It is not true that the communities that are defined by a common culture are "psychologically closed to the rest of the world." Even in the remotest areas of the Amazon forests there is some mutual contact and some penetration of new ideas. And for the vast majority of the human race there is a continuous process of mutual influence between different groups. No group so absolutizes its own culture as to be immune to outside influences. Moreover- and this is still more important - a growing proportion of the human race lives in urban areas, where each person is normally part of several cultural communities at the same time. An example may be taken from the city of Madras. There are probably almost a quarter of a million Christians in that city of three million inhabitants. McGavran (if I understand him) thinks that in the interests of effective evangelization the Christians should be organized in separate groups according to their caste origins. This, in his view, would make it easier and more natural for Hindus from the same caste to be converted. I leave aside, for the moment. the fact that most Christians in Madras would reject this on ethical grounds, believing that it is an essential part of Christian witness to the guardian and guarantee of the culture and fails to challenge it. The other danger is that the language and the life-style of the church should be such that they make no contact with the culture and become the language and lifestyle of a ghetto. Between these two extremes lies a wide spectrum of possibilities, parts of which have been explored in Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. This classic work deals with the relation of church and culture within a single culture and does not raise the difficult and complicated questions that arise in the communication of the gospel from one culture to another. How, in seeking to preach the gospel to people of another culture, does the church find the proper path between a kind of accom modation that robs the gospel of its power to challenge traditional ways of life and a kind of intransigence that either fails to communicate altogether or else alienates the converts from their culture? To this difficult question we must now turn.
2. (a) Any attempt to preach the gospel involves using the language spoken by the hearers. That language has been shaped by and has shaped their experience of life. It is the form in which they seek to grasp and make sense of the whole range of human experience. It embodies their beliefs about life and death. about sin and virtue, about guilt and forgiveness. about salvation and damnation. about soul and body, about time and eternity, about God and man. None of the language is "neutral"; it embodies beliefs to which its users are committed. These beliefs are not the same as those of the evangelist. Nevertheless the evangelist has no alternative except to use this language, doing the best to find words that will come as near as possible to creating in the hearers the beliefs the evangelist wants to share with them. When he or she has done the best to find idioms of speech, of lifestyle, of rite and liturgy that will most effectively embody the truth of the gospel, the evangelist will still have to recognize that these idioms, shaped as they are by a different set of beliefs. will distort the truth that they are employed to embody. There is no way of avoiding this fact.
(b) But in putting the matter in this way I have oversimplified it. I have left out of the account the fact that the idioms of speech and conduct by which the evangelist grasps and expresses the gospel are themselves shaped by the evangelist's culture. One who has had no experience of the sharp clash of culture may be unaware that this is so and may suppose that the way he or she understands the gospel is the way it "really is." No doubt - especially if he or she is well instructed in the Reformed faith! -- the evangelist will agree that his or her understanding of the gospel is always subject to correction by reference to the Bible. He or she will he confident that the Bible provides the sure standard of teaching and that it will confirm the truth of the gospel as the evangelist has tried to communicate it. And so the evangelist takes early steps to ensure that the Bible is translated and placed in the hands of the receptor community and that they are taught to read it.
(c) But the introduction of the Bible changes the situation. It is not long before the Bible begins to make its own impact on its readers in the receptor community. In its stories, its prayers. its ethical teachings, and above all in the figure of Jesus as he presents himself to fresh eyes through the medium of print, the readers are confronted with something that raises questions both about their traditional culture and about what has been offered to them by the evangelist as "Christianity." A threecornered relationship is set up between the traditional culture, the "Christianity" of the missionary, and the Bible. The stage is set for a complex and unpredictable evolution both in the culture of the receptor community and in that of the missionary. As an illustration of the former, one could point to the massive development of the so-called African Independent churches. These have developed by a process of ferment, renewal, and schism within the churches established by Western missions, and the studies of David Barretts have demonstrated an extremely close correlation between the formation of the Independent churches and the availability of the Scriptures in the languages of the communities concerned. That is to say that the Bible has operated as an independent source of criticism directed both against the Christianity of the missionaries and against the traditional culture of the tribe. The Independent churches are marked not only by the rejection of certain aspects of Western Christianity but also by an equally sharp rejection of elements in the traditional African culture. Werner Hoerschelmann has documented comparable movements in South India.9
It must be admitted that the Western churches that have sent missions to Asia and Africa have remained very largely unaffected by the development that I have described, because their missionaries have operated at a distance from the sending churches and on the extreme periphery of their consciousness. But like others who have spent long periods in foreign missionary service. I have to hear witness that the experience of living for most of four decades as part of an Indian church has made me acutely aware of the cultural conditioning of the Christianity in which I was nurtured, and of the culture-bound character of many of the assumptions that are unquestioned by English Christians. I shall have to revert to this point later.
(d) I said that this triangle of forces made up by the culture, the invading culture, and the Bible sets the stage for a complicated and unpredictable evolution. This is no uniform pattern. Sometimes the impact of the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ is such that questions concerning the traditional culture drop into insignificance. They are regarded as adiaphora. Only after some time do the converts begin to draw from their new experience critical questions about their traditional culture. More often the first response is a strong reaction against the traditional culture. It is "the world." which is still in the power of evil. The new life in Christ is so absolutely new that the old must be put away. At this stage it is the Christianity of the invading culture that is accepted and welcomed. The message is so closely linked with the messenger who brought it that there is no desire to separate them. There is a sharp rejection of elements in the old culture that, even if not evil in themselves (such as music, drama, and visual art), are felt to be evil because of their association with the rejected worldview.
After the passage of some years, often in the second or third generation of the church, a new situation arises. The church has now become so much at home in a new thought-world that the old no longer poses a threat. The old culture has been for these Christians desacralized. Its music, art, dance. and social customs are no longer feared because of their pagan associations; in fact they begin to be prized as part of the world that God loves and that he has given to humans. The church begins for the first time to think about the relation of Christ to culture. It begins to experiment with the variety of possible models for this relation. In some cases, as for example in many of the South Pacific Islands, a new Corpus Christianuin comes into existence. There is a practical identification of church and society, and Christ is seen as the one who harmonizes and reconciles the old culture. In other situations, especially where the church is a small minority, there is a strong effort to reverse the alienation from local culture that marked the first conversions and to approach the older culture in a spirit of acceptance and openness. The tendency then will be to search for christological models that can be accommodated within the thought-world of the older culture. And again there will be movements of renewal, which often take the form of a sharp attack upon elements both in the church and in the old culture. There is an almost infinite variety of different situations, and none of them is static.
(c) It is already clear that we have moved a long way from the simple picture of a culturally uncontaminated gospel being planted in a series of culturally isolated. stable, and homogeneous communities. In fact the Christianity that the missionary brings is already conditioned by his or her own culture. and the community to which Christianity is brought is a changing entity exposed to contact without and tension within. I have suggested that within the receptor community a complex evolution is determined by three factors: the traditional culture, the Christianity of the missionary, and the witness of the Bible. But it is clear that this also is far from being the full picture. In the modern world all human communities, with very few exceptions, are exposed to cultural influences of many kinds from one another. We do inhabit a single planet, and we are more and more closely crowded together. The threecornered relation of which I have spoken is not isolated from this contact. Each of these patterns of development is part of the vast and infinitely complex pattern of intercultural influence on a global scale. And the Christian communities within each culture, being bound together in the growing fellowship of the ecumenical movement, have to be open both to the cultures in which they participate as members of nations, citizens of cities, workers. thinkers, and so on, and also open to the Christian testimony of those who inhabit other cultural worlds but share a common allegiance to Jesus Christ. This openness to Christians of other cultures and the experience of ecumenical fellowship that it makes possible will provide a continuing critique of the ways in which the church within any culture is related to that culture. All will acknowledge in principle that the gospel cannot be completely domesticated within any culture. The Christ who is presented in Scripture for our believing is Lord over all cultures, and his purpose is to unite all of every culture to himself in a unity that transcends, without negating, the diversities of culture. But, as we well know, the Scriptures alone do not suffice to prevent us from the attempt to domesticate him within our cultures. The bewildering variety of ways in which Jesus has been portrayed by Christian artists who have the same Bible in their hands but belong to different cultures is sufficient evidence of the cultural conditioning of our reading of Scripture. We need the witness of Chris tians of other cultures to correct our culturally conditioned understanding of Scripture.
Starting from the simple case of a missionary preaching the gospel for the first time in a community that has not previously heard it, I have moved on to a picture of the church as a global fellowship in which the same three-cornered pattern of relationships is continuously developing. At the level of the local church one can picture an ideal situation in which there is at the same time full openness to the local culture, to the Scriptures, and to the witness of other Christians in the ecumenical family. The day-to-day worship and word and witness of the local church has to be developed in relationship to all of these in such a way that it becomes credible to the inhabitants of the local culture as sign, instrument, and foretaste of that one universal reign of God that is the true origin and goal of this and every human culture. It must communicate in the idiom of that culture both the divine good that sustains it and the divine purpose that judges it and summons it to become what it is not yet. At the world level the corresponding picture would be of a fellowship of Christian churches open to and rooted in all the cultures of humankind within which they are severally placed, and so renewing its life through ever-fresh obedience to Christ as presented in the Scriptures that it becomes an increasingly credible sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's reign over all nations and all things.
The contemporary ecumenical movement is it frail, limited, and stumbling move toward such it vision of the universal fellowship of churches. I shall say something of its limitations in a moment. But first it is proper to acknowledge with thankfulness that within these limitations it is a real movement toward this goal. Like multitudes of others who have shared in ecumenical meetings I have experienced the strain and even contradiction between different understandings of the gospel that have arisen out of different cultural situations. I have been tempted to ask whether the contradiction was not total, whether we were really speaking of the same reality when we used our different languages about Jesus and the gospel. But I have also known again and again, as others have, the experiences of finding - as we prayed together, studied the Scriptures together, and listened to one another's experiences of Christ - that there was and is one Lord Jesus Christ to whom we are in our different ways hearing witness, and that he has indeed hound us together in himself in bonds stronger than those that hind us to our several cultures. It is out of such experiences that we return to our local churches with fresh awareness of the sharpness of the Word of God as it is addressed to our own cultures.
But with these thankful and positive statements I must also speak of the limitation of the contemporary ecumenical movement. And here I am not speaking of the limitations that beset any movement because of the weakness and sinfulness of those who participate. I am referring to a very specific defect that has far-reaching implications for the present discussion of church and culture. The contemporary ecumenical movement was born among the churches that share the culture that has developed in Western Europe and North America in the past centuries and that has undergone enormously rapid transformation since the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century. All its work is conducted in the languages of Western Europe. Only those who have had long training in the methods of thinking, of study and research. and of argument that have been developed in Western Europe can share in its work. This way of thinking has become so dominant throughout the world during the past two centuries that it is very difficult for those who have never known anything else to realize that it is only one of the possible ways in which men and women have found it possible to make sense of their experience.
I may perhaps be able to make the point clear by the following illustration. Anyone who has lived within the Tamil churches knows that rich resources of living Christian faith and experience are embodied in the continuing stream of Tamil Christian lyrical poetry, a stream that has flowed for a century and a half and is still flowing strongly. The people who write and read and sing these lyrics do not take any part in the work of the ecumenical movement. These lyrics cannot be translated into European language without losing their power and beauty. The world of thought, the concepts through which they capture and express the deepest Christian experiences are not those that appear in the documents of ecumenical meetings. Only those Tamil Christians who have undergone a long and rigorous training in Western methods of study, argument, and experiment can participate in these meetings. It is almost impossible for them to communicate in these meetings what is most vital and powerful in the life of the churches from which they come. I am sure that similar testimony could be given about the Christian culture of many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
For those who have never lived in any other cultural world than that of the contemporary West it is very hard to see that theirs is only one of the tribal cultures of humankind. They are inclined to see it simply as the "modern scientific world view." It is the only way in which systematic and rigorous thinking can he done. Anything else has to be translated into these forms before it can be seriously studied. Even so sensitive a thinker as Hans Kung advises the theologians of the great world religions that they will have to "develop scientific theologies in the modern sense" before we can have a really fruitful dialogue among the world faiths. 10 Because of this dominance of one set of cultural patterns. the whole ecumenical movement is severely limited, and Christians who inhabit this cultural world do not receive from Christians of other cultures the correction that they need. It is true that there is at present some enthusiasm for "third-world theologies." but these are usually theologies written in the language of Europe and (it must be frankly said) are too often echoes of earlier phases of European thought - Marxist. Hegelian, or other. The real power of Asian and African Christianity does not lie in these productions. It lies in the very heart of the Christian life and practice of peoples who naturally live out their Christian faith in the idiom of their own culture and who continue to win their own people to Christ's service through this witness.
Theologians of the "older" churches have often expressed their anxiety lest the "younger" churches of Asia and Afria should yield to the temptation of syncretism and should develop theologies too closely shaped by their traditional cultures. Because of the total dominance of European culture in the ecumenical movement, there has seldom been any awareness among Western theologians of the extent to which their own theologies have been the result of a failure to challenge the assumptions of their own culture; and because theologians of the younger churches have been compelled to adopt this culture as the precondition of participation in the ecumenical movement, they have not been in a position to present the really sharp challenge that should be addressed to the theologies of the Western churches. The point that I have to make in the final section of this chapter will perhaps illustrate this contention.
3. I have described the interaction between gospel and culture as a continually developing relationship within a triangular field, of which the three points are the local culture. the ecumenical fellowship representing the witness of Christians from other cultures, and the Scriptures as embodying the given revelation. with its center and focus in the person of Jesus Christ. In discussion of these matters with colleagues who belong to the cultural world that understands itself to be committed to the modern scientific worldview, I have found that while there is no question about the first two points of this triangle, there is considerable questioning of the third. In other words, the modern Western theologian will fully recognize the necessity for openness to and dialogue with the local culture, and for the ecumenical dialogue with the whole Christian fellowship. The question will he whether, and in what sense, the Scriptures can he said to function as a third and independent party in this development. When such a place is claimed for Scripture in a discussion within the modern scientific world, three objections are likely to be raised.
(a) The Bible itself represents the experiences of one particular culture or complex of cultures. The New Testament speaks the languages and uses the models of a particular time and place in human history. It is not Switzerland among the cultures of the world, no "neutral zone," no "nonaligned state." It arises out of the experience of people, or a group of peoples, among all the peoples of humankind. It is indelibly marked by their cultural peculiarities and it is embodied in their languages. How, then, can it be absolutized, given an authority over the products of other cultures'?
(b) Within the New Testament itself there is a variety of interpretations of the gospel. Some appear to be shaped by models drawn from the Old Testament, some from Iranian mythology, some from the world of Greek philosophy. How can this collection of varied models, all related to particular temporary and local forms of culture, provide criteria by which all future models, based on the whole range of human culture, may be tested?
(c) Critical study of the New Testament, using the tools of modern historical research, has led many scholars to believe that it is impossible to have any knowledge of the life, character, and teaching of Jesus sufficiently reliable to provide a criterion for judging the future developments. We cannot, it is said, be sure how far the material in the New Testament represents the character and message of Jesus himself and how far it represents the beliefs of the primitive church.
These questions obviously raise issues that could only be adequately discussed in a series of volumes, but the present discussion requires some attention to them because they obviously affect the integrity and authority of the Christian missions.
(a) It is, of course. unquestionable that the Bible has its locus in one particular part of the whole fabric of human culture. This fact is indeed the constant horizon of the biblical narrative from the time it is said God chose the clan of Eber from among all the seventy nations that made up the human family. Here is a primitive expression of the dogma, which is central to the Christian tradition, that God has chosen one people among all the people to be the unique bearer of his saving purposes for all nations. In contemporary Western culture this is confronted by the statement that it is impossible to believe that one among all the cultures should have this unique position. The alleged impossibility rests upon another dogma regarding the meaning of human experience. Here two different dogmatic systems confront one another, and I know of no set of axioms more fundamental than either of them, on the basis of which it would be possible to demonstrate the truth of one of these dogmas and the falsity of the other. According to one dogma, world history is in some sense a coherent whole, and it is therefore possible to affirm that certain events have a unique significance for the entire story. According to the other dogma, there are no events that have such unique significance and therefore no universally valid affirmation can be made about the meaning of history as a whole. The Christian affirmation about the unique significance of these events is a dogmatic statement made as part of the total faith-commitment to Jesus as Lord. The contrary affirmation rests upon a different dogma, which belongs to the dominant "myth" of contemporary Western culture. Here the question at issue is not one of "translation" from one cultural world to another, but the clash of ultimate faith-commitment.
However, the acknowledgment that this particular part of the whole fabric of human culture has a unique place still leaves open the question about the manner in which this uniqueness is to be interpreted. Does it mean that the cultural forms of the Semitic world have authority over all other cultural forms? Are those who accept the uniqueness and finality of God's revelation of himself in a Jewish male of the first century obliged to accept the cultural forms in which that revelation was given? Plainly no, for the New Testament itself records the debate that arose within the primitive community at the point when the testimony about Jesus moved from a Jewish into a Greek culture. The answers given to the question were not clear-cut, for the "decrees" recorded in Acts 15:29 include purely Semitic elements that could not be and have not been accepted as permanently valid. But the answers given do make plain that incorporation into the community of Jesus Christ did not mean acceptance of the cultural world in which Jesus himself had lived and which he had accepted. Jesus himself apparently never questioned the law of circumcision. The decisive mark of membership in the new community was nothing definable in terms of culture, it was a reality - apparently quite unmistakable - recognized as the presence of the Holy Spirit.
With this I have already moved into the second of my three questions, that of the variety of voices with which the New Testament speaks of Jesus.
(b) The fact that the New Testament contains not one but several interpretations of Christ prompts the following reflections.
(i) The first is a negative one. There is a variety, but not an unlimited variety, of Christologies in the New Testament. In determining which of the traditions regarding Jesus should be included in the canon and which should be excluded, the church was guided by the belief that the name of Jesus referred to a real man who had lived at a known time and a known place, and that therefore traditions must be verified against the testimony of original witnesses or of those who were related to the original witnesses by a continuous tradition of public teaching. By this test certain interpretations of the person and teaching of Jesus had to be rejected. Those that were accepted, varied as they are, were united by the fact that they were judged to be reliable reports about the same person. The inclusion of a variety of different accounts, and the absence of any attempt to iron out these differences so as to create a single picture, is evidence of the fact that the controlling factor was the actual person who had lived - not the doctrines about him.
(ii) The second reflection is positive. It is important for a faithful doing of Christian theology that we should affirm and insist that the New Testament contains not one Christology but several. This is not an unfortunate defect to be regretted or concealed. It is, on the contrary, of the essence of the matter because it make clear the fact that Christology is always to be done in via, at the interface between the gospel and the cultures that it meets on its missionary journey. It is of the essence of the matter that Jesus was not concerned to leave as the fruit of his work a precise verbatim record of everything he said and did, but that he was concerned to create a community that would be bound to him in love and obedience, learn discipleship even in the midst of sin and error, and be his witnesses among all peoples. The varied Christologies to be discovered in the New Testament reflect the attempts of the community to say who Jesus is in the terms of the different cultures within which they bore witness to him. If there were to be discovered in the New Testament one definitive Christology framed in the ipsissirna verba of Jesus himself, the consequence would be that the gospel would be forever bound absolutely to the culture of first-century Palestine. The New Testament would have to he regarded as untranslatable, as is the Qur'an among Muslims. We would be dealing with a different kind of religion altogether. The variety of Christologies actually to be found in the New Testament is part of the fundamental witness to the nature of the gospel: it points to the destination of the gospel in all the cultures of mankind. The unity of the New Testament, the fact that it contains not every Christology but only those that were judged to be faithful to the original testimony, reflects the origin of the gospel in the one unique person of Jesus.
(iii) These two reflections, negative and positive, lead to the affirmation that the New Testament, read as it must always he in the context of the Old, provides us, in the variety and unity of its interpretation of Jesus, with the canon - the guide and regulator of our doing of Christology. It shows us that Christology must always be something that is in via, incomplete, but it shows us that the road has a real starting point in the historic fact of Jesus Christ who lived, taught, died, and rose again under Pontius Pilate. that it has a real destination in the universal confession within the varied cultures and faithful mutual openness within the ecumenical fellowship.
(c) This brings us, however, to the third of the questions that modern critical study of the New Testament poses: Do we, in fact, have such reliable knowledge of "the historic fact of Christ" as would enable us to speak thus of a known starting point for the journey of Christology? Obviously it is impossible to discuss such a large and much debated question here: it is, however, necessary to draw attention to one point in the debate that is relevant to the discussion.
I have already sought to show (in Chapter 7) that the application of modern methods of critical historical research to the contents of the New Testament involves two distinct issues from the point of view of the present discussion. On the one hand it involves the use of greatly improved tools for examining the origins of each tradition and the factors that have shaped its formation and influenced its transmission. But it involves also the presuppositions that control the use of these tools. Every attempt to write history involves, as I have already argued, assumptions about what is significant, and therefore assumptions about the ultimate meaning of the story that alone can give significance to any part of it. But the question is that of one's ultimate faith-commitment. The question has to be pressed whether the skepticism of many Western theologians about the possibility of a reliable knowledge of the "Jesus of history" does not arise from an uncritical acceptance of the implicit faith-commitment that has dominated the culture of the (admittedly large and influential) tribe to which they have belonged since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
The body of the New Testament writing was formed within a community that believed that the ultimate meaning of the whole human story had been declared in the total fact of Jesus Christ as the first witness had known him. Within the limitations of the historical methods available to them within their culture, they created and handed on a record that was faithful to the original testimony of those who had known Jesus in the flesh and who were the witnesses of his resurrection. The controlling belief that shaped the selection and handling of the material was that in Jesus the meaning of the whole of history is revealed. Within this perspective the Jesus of history is the Christ of faith.
It is of course possible to hold a completely different view of the meaning of the story or to hold (as the Indian tradition has generally done) that the story has no meaning. It is clear that a momentous shift took place about two hundred years ago in the thinking of the people of Western Europe about the way in which the story was to be understood. The idea of progress, that is to say the idea that the meaning of the story is to be found in the progressive mastery of man's reason over the powers of nature and over tradition and social structures inherited from the past, seems to have become operative in the European mind during the eighteenth century. When history is understood in this way, it is obvious that the story about Jesus cannot have the decisive place. In fact, from the period of the Enlightenment to the present day, world history is normally taught in schools and universities from a point of view that puts into the decisive place such things as the development of modem science, the industrial revolution, and the evolution of modern forms of political order. The story about Jesus may still have a central place in "religious instruction," but it will have only a marginal place in "world history." It retains a place in the sphere of personal religion. but it does not determine the way history as a whole is understood.
It is natural that in studying the biblical records as history a scholar operating within the assumption of modern European culture will bring to them these assumptions. The work of the historian will be governed by assumptions other than those expressed in the hymns and prayers used in church. The historian will have to try to understand Jesus from the standpoint of a "modem critical historian." and it will inevitably follow that the historical Jesus whom he or she discovers will be a different figure from the Christ of the Christian faith. It is not that there are two different realities. There is only one Jesus and only one set of records. The difference lies in the prior assumptions brought to the study of the records.
Of course, it has to be added immediately that the Christ of faith is seen very differently from different cultural perspectives. I have already fully acknowledged this. I have affirmed my belief (part of the fundamental commitment upon which the whole mission of the church rests) that these different perceptions are perceptions of one real person who is decisive for all that it means to be human. I have insisted that these different perceptions are never to be absolutized but have always to be subject to correction within the believing, worshiping, serving, and witnessing fellowship of churches. But - and here is the essential point for the moment - I have argued that this ecumenical fellowship is distorted by its dependence almost entirely upon one set of cultural models, namely, those of the Western world. Consequently the necessary ecumenical correction is not applied to the theology that arises within this culture. Its practitioners find it hard to recognize that the "modern scientific view of history" is only one among a number of possible ways of looking at history. They find it difficult to recognize the culturally conditioned nature of their fundamental presuppositions. They are therefore tempted to absolutize these presuppositions and to relativize the traditional testimony about Jesus. It is the urgent need of the hour that the ecumenical fellowship of churches should become so released from its present dependence upon one set of cultural forms that it can provide the place wherein we are able to do theology in the only way that it can be done properly - by learning with increasing clarity to confess the one Lord Jesus Christ as alone having absolute authority and therefore to recognize the relativity of all the cultural forms within which we try to say who he is.