The Myth of an Un-contextualized Gospel

You have never heard the un-contextualized Gospel. There is one simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Every Gospel conversation or presentation you’ve ever heard has already been contextualized. If it wasn't, you couldn’t hear it. In a bygone era of the foreign missions enterprise, before anyone came up with the term “contextualize”, people used to speak of “indigenizing” the Gospel. But that term implied that the missionary was seeking to take his own civilized, “pure” Gospel and smuggle it into the receiving culture in native garb. This was all temporary though. The missionaries’ cultural goal was to get the natives to adopt “sensible Christian values”. Of course, this generally meant white, individualistic European and American cultural values. But there was a problem that few missionaries seemed to realize at the time: the Gospel of American and European society had been just as contextualized for them as it had to be for anyone else. This idea only began to be explored in depth later in the 20th century. In reality, the way the Gospel is contextualized in our modern, Western society would look alien to first-century, Near Eastern Christians. Certainly we are not so naive as to think that ours is the first culture that has a grasp on the "pure" Gospel. No culture, including mine or yours, has a monopoly on the Good News. While I’m sure there are more, I want to give you three problems we bring about when we shirk a well-thought-out contextualization of the Gospel. 

A Cultural Superiority Complex

First, by thinking that we possess an “un-contextualized” Gospel, we artificially set ourselves on a plane that does not exist. This is most obvious in the fact that each one of us heard the Gospel in a language we understand. As soon as any particular language is used to convey the Gospel, contextualization has already begun. The claim falters literally as soon as we open our mouths. Nevertheless, it is tempting to assert that ours is an un-contextualized Gospel because it implies the superiority of our own culture. It tickles our pride to think that we have an exclusive claim to the “pure” Gospel. But despite our seeming conviction that the American Evangelical sub-culture is the closest thing to Eden (God save us!), there is no place for bigotry in the body of Christ. To assert that we have an un-contextualized Gospel is to say that the Gospel in its purest form meshes ideally with our Western, individualistic, consumerist way of life. Thankfully, that’s very unlikely.

Yet this underlying assumption of cultural superiority is why some Christians get fidgety when the topic of contextualization crops up. There is an unspoken belief that changing the cultural forms in which the Gospel is presented will automatically lessen or “defile” its purity. Perhaps what we are really afraid of is letting go of the privileged status we’ve given our own preferred cultural forms. We may even be willing to don the trappings of another sub-culture for a short time for the sake of getting our message out, but we are unlikely to admit that these forms are as valid as our own. Fear of contextualization is often just a thin veil for a cultural superiority complex. 

A Shallow View of the Gospel

Secondly, in refusing the endeavor of Gospel contextualization, we rob ourselves of a deeper, more well-rounded understanding of the Gospel. Lesslie Newbigin was a British missionary who lived in the 20th century and served in India for some 40 plus years.  He writes in The Open Secret of a mutual benefit for the missionary and the receiving culture. He warned that we must not see our project of contextualizing the Gospel as merely uni-directional. The missionary himself must allow the unique worldview of the receiving culture to critique his own culturally myopic view of the Gospel. The interaction between the cultures of messenger and listener must, of course, be rooted in the Word of God. We all have a tendency to read the Bible through our own cultural lens. After all, we have no other with which to view it. Sometimes a person from another culture will read the same text we do, but come to a somewhat different conclusion on its meaning or implications. This forces both missionary and “native” to continually return to the Word and re-examine their understanding. Could it be that some aspect of what the missionary had hitherto believed is actually a by-product of his own culture's bias, rather than rooted in the Word of God itself? The interchange of contextualization refines and deepens our understanding; the messenger and the receiver both grow together in the Gospel.

As an American missionary who has been on the foreign field for over a third of my life, I can attest to this reality. Only in stepping outside of our own cultural comfort zones can we come to see the flaws inherent within it. The same is true of the American Christian sub-culture. Too many Christians have begun to view the Gospel through the narrow lens of the American-Evangelical sub-culture. What we fail to realize is that ours is also a contextualized understanding of the Gospel. It's simply tuned to the cultural values of middle-class, Western individualism and consumerism. In taking on the daunting, humbling project of contextualizing the Gospel to others, we also open up the possibility of having our own misperceptions corrected. Contextualization done well and humbly leads to a richer insight into the Gospel for both messenger and receiver.

Incarnation Implications

Lastly, when we refuse to embrace the call to contextualize the Gospel, we are rejecting something in the essence of the Gospel itself. It only takes a cursory reading of the book of Acts to see that the early church took contextualization seriously from the beginning. Those parts of the church which refused the project out of a cultural superiority complex quickly cut themselves off from the power and movement of the Holy Spirit. The Judaizers were a prime example of this.

But there is more. By spurning contextualization not only do we ignore the example of the early church; we contradict the nature of the Gospel. There is no greater “contextualization” than the incarnation of Christ. When God came in the flesh, He showed that there was almost no limit to His willingness to contextualize the Gospel so that we might understand. Jesus was not an ethereal philosophy but a flesh-and-blood man who brought the salvation of God into the cultural context of first-century Israel. His message was was spoken in Aramaic, often couched in agrarian parables sensitively honed to the context of His audience.  

Early in its history, the church rejected a heresy called “docetism”. This heresy taught that Jesus didn’t really become a man. He merely had the outward appearance of a man, but certainly would never soil His perfect “heavenly culture” with the trappings of human flesh. This heresy was roundly condemned at the council of Nicea. All true Christians today readily acknowledge that God Himself unabashedly took on real flesh, conforming Himself to our cultural forms. But the ironic part is that we are often not willing to similarly humble ourselves. We only grudgingly stoop to contextualize the Gospel to others who are culturally different from us—if we do so at all—though the cost for us is much less than it was for Jesus. While we cling to the doctrine of the incarnation, we deny its implications. Christ took on our cultural forms to bring the Gospel to people who would then continue the project of contextualization to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Great Commission itself implies the challenge of astutely, winsomely, humbly contextualizing the Gospel. In the end, the call for Christians to embrace the project of Gospel contextualization is merely a call to follow the example of Jesus. “Everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.” (Lk. 6:40)