JoelH
July 25th, 2008, 06:40 AM
Hi brothers and sisters in Christ,
I trust the title would have caused anxiety among a few that I had defected to the dark side. I have been thinking about contextualization and its rationalization for some time, especially as practised by the Emerging Church type that still speaks orally of doctrinal orthodoxy but that "communicating the gospel post-modernly".
Contextualization has been justified because of a dubious claim of "it must be contextualized (or fitted) to the culture it is brought to. This includes making sure the gospel is spoken in a language people can understand with concepts that were faithful to the Bible and simultaneously understandable by the hearers. This kind of ministry takes great wisdom and careful scrutiny by God’s people to ensure neither syncretism nor sectarianism occurs. Every church has a contextualized gospel and therefore must continually undergo reform to continue the missiological work of the gospel in their time and place. When churches fail to reform, they inevitably begin to die and become increasingly disconnected and irrelevant to the people and cultures around them.". (claim taken from Gospel Class, Mars Hill Church (Mark Driscoll's church), http://www.marshillchurch.org/audio/GospelClass0307.pdf )
All of this sounds good from human logic, however, our culture is very often have been taught and shaped by philosophers. I was reading a press release of Maxim Institute (New Zealand) of a new book "Silent Legacy: The unseen ways great thinkers have shaped our culture" by Paul Henderson and John Fox. Philosophers, it seems, "unrecognised, often unread, [but] they have fundamentally shaped the way that we understand ourselves, our culture and the choices we make, from our modern fixation with child-centred learning, to our rationale for introducing MMP [proportional representation]. We are called to make decisions about whether to vote based on our ethnicity, how to weigh the evidence of the competing policies, whether to vote in our own interests or those of others. In all these things, the past weighs on us. Plato, Hume and their fellow thinkers are not just names on the spines of university library books, but men who had ideas. Their ideas stuck. Hume allowed the nineteenth century's emphasis on autonomy, individualism and scepticism. Plato caused us to believe in an ordered universe, while Descartes taught us to reason. Rousseau laid the foundations of the French revolution, causing oppression and bloodshed. Marx also brought revolution, and with it tyranny across the face of the earth, while Foucault changed the way we view our very identity."
( source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0807/S00236.htm )
In other words, culture is not really a spontaneous and organic development, but rather, results of studies and commentaries by a few groups of learned philosophers - they help shape a generation of society's leaders through avenues of learning, that in turn affects the educated class through institutes of learning, and through intellectuals to celebrities, and on to the average folks on the street through celebrities or education. Our means of government, the methods we use in our quest for knowledge, our discussions around the nature of the universe, justice or beauty, draw their inspiration and lines of argument from these thinkers and their first conversations.
All of this pinpoints contextualization as contingent upon the whims of these very philosophers' thoughts. If we follow cultural contextualization, no matter how you cut it, it is still interpreting the Bible ultimate through the pins of Hume, Derrida, Rousseau, or Foucault's thoughts, and because of corruption of fallen's minds due to man's sin nature, these are very often truth mixed with errors. Ultimately it is possible to be saved, but we are forever trapped behind man's philosophies rather than God's truth.
Coming back to Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, it does revere philosophers of various ages of their contributions of thoughts that shaped various historical epochs, but there is not even a critical attitude towards philosophers' thoughts. All of these discoveries together paint a very interesting picture.
I come away with a conclusion, and I thank God for leading me to read this press release by the Maxim Institute. Yes, Christians should be aware of the current intellectual climate surround them, but any line of thoughts of contextualization the cross through culture is to engage in compromise. In other words, I am more convinced than before that contextualization is ungodly.
YBIC,
Joel
I trust the title would have caused anxiety among a few that I had defected to the dark side. I have been thinking about contextualization and its rationalization for some time, especially as practised by the Emerging Church type that still speaks orally of doctrinal orthodoxy but that "communicating the gospel post-modernly".
Contextualization has been justified because of a dubious claim of "it must be contextualized (or fitted) to the culture it is brought to. This includes making sure the gospel is spoken in a language people can understand with concepts that were faithful to the Bible and simultaneously understandable by the hearers. This kind of ministry takes great wisdom and careful scrutiny by God’s people to ensure neither syncretism nor sectarianism occurs. Every church has a contextualized gospel and therefore must continually undergo reform to continue the missiological work of the gospel in their time and place. When churches fail to reform, they inevitably begin to die and become increasingly disconnected and irrelevant to the people and cultures around them.". (claim taken from Gospel Class, Mars Hill Church (Mark Driscoll's church), http://www.marshillchurch.org/audio/GospelClass0307.pdf )
All of this sounds good from human logic, however, our culture is very often have been taught and shaped by philosophers. I was reading a press release of Maxim Institute (New Zealand) of a new book "Silent Legacy: The unseen ways great thinkers have shaped our culture" by Paul Henderson and John Fox. Philosophers, it seems, "unrecognised, often unread, [but] they have fundamentally shaped the way that we understand ourselves, our culture and the choices we make, from our modern fixation with child-centred learning, to our rationale for introducing MMP [proportional representation]. We are called to make decisions about whether to vote based on our ethnicity, how to weigh the evidence of the competing policies, whether to vote in our own interests or those of others. In all these things, the past weighs on us. Plato, Hume and their fellow thinkers are not just names on the spines of university library books, but men who had ideas. Their ideas stuck. Hume allowed the nineteenth century's emphasis on autonomy, individualism and scepticism. Plato caused us to believe in an ordered universe, while Descartes taught us to reason. Rousseau laid the foundations of the French revolution, causing oppression and bloodshed. Marx also brought revolution, and with it tyranny across the face of the earth, while Foucault changed the way we view our very identity."
( source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0807/S00236.htm )
In other words, culture is not really a spontaneous and organic development, but rather, results of studies and commentaries by a few groups of learned philosophers - they help shape a generation of society's leaders through avenues of learning, that in turn affects the educated class through institutes of learning, and through intellectuals to celebrities, and on to the average folks on the street through celebrities or education. Our means of government, the methods we use in our quest for knowledge, our discussions around the nature of the universe, justice or beauty, draw their inspiration and lines of argument from these thinkers and their first conversations.
All of this pinpoints contextualization as contingent upon the whims of these very philosophers' thoughts. If we follow cultural contextualization, no matter how you cut it, it is still interpreting the Bible ultimate through the pins of Hume, Derrida, Rousseau, or Foucault's thoughts, and because of corruption of fallen's minds due to man's sin nature, these are very often truth mixed with errors. Ultimately it is possible to be saved, but we are forever trapped behind man's philosophies rather than God's truth.
Coming back to Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, it does revere philosophers of various ages of their contributions of thoughts that shaped various historical epochs, but there is not even a critical attitude towards philosophers' thoughts. All of these discoveries together paint a very interesting picture.
I come away with a conclusion, and I thank God for leading me to read this press release by the Maxim Institute. Yes, Christians should be aware of the current intellectual climate surround them, but any line of thoughts of contextualization the cross through culture is to engage in compromise. In other words, I am more convinced than before that contextualization is ungodly.
YBIC,
Joel