Photo by Pratham Gupta on Unsplash
Over the last few years I’ve had two or three major “aha!” moments—times when lightbulbs turned on in my head that significantly altered the trajectory of my thinking and practice.
One such moment was when it finally dawned on me that when it comes to Christian worship specifically, and just the way a person pursues and expresses their faith in general, there’s no such thing as cultural neutrality; there’s no acultural expression of faith and worship.
What I mean by this is that somehow, some way, I’d picked up the idea that some people mixed in worldly culture when they worshipped God, while others—the holy people—had figured out a way to shed “worldliness” and pursue only “heavenly” forms of faith and worship.
For example, I had become convinced that using percussion instruments in corporate worship was “worldly.” Similarly, I believed that wearing a suit and tie “to church” was a reflection of rising above worldly influences, while wearing jeans and a t-shirt meant that one had been influenced by the culture around them.
It had never occurred to me that, quite miraculously, the forms of worship that had somehow risen above worldly culture bore an amazing resemblance to white, European preferences. In this model, people came to worship neatly dressed—men in suits, women in dresses (which were often long). They basically followed the same “order of service,” replete with introits, doxologies, a sermon, and a benediction. The music consisted of songs—called “hymns”—that were written mostly by white men, with few exceptions, who lived somewhere between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was accompanied almost always by a piano or an organ.
But the “aha!” moment came when I realized that, in fact, such an approach had not risen above worldly culture but was simply one expression of it. Organs weren’t manufactured in heaven; they too, like guitars or drums, were created by people who lived in this world and inhabited a particular culture. And, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, three-piece suits aren’t featured in heaven’s spring clothing catalogue—at least as far as I can tell. In fact, everything humans create—instruments, clothing, buildings, songs—is, by definition, “worldly,” since it’s created by people who inhabit this world.
Actually, this whole concept is borne out of a very profound theological reality—and it’s actually one of the primary ways that Christianity separates itself from other religions. Christianity maintains that God, in the person of Jesus, “translated” himself, so to speak, so that finite human beings could relate to and understand an infinite God. Not only did God, in the person of Jesus, take on human flesh in general, but he did so at a specific time and in a specific place. In that sense, he inhabited a particular culture, which was no more or less worldly than any other culture.
Even Scripture is an “accommodation,” in the words of John Calvin, to the “rude and gross intellect of man.” It’s God’s attempt to put his infinite wisdom into language that finite and limited creatures can understand. And, perhaps even more staggeringly, he did so through the pens of those finite creatures, thus relying on their unique gifts, experiences, personality quirks, and cultural contexts.
This is perhaps most acutely seen by the fact that there are four different accounts of the life of Jesus. Each writer, while affirming the basic details of the Jesus-story, presents it in slightly different ways, according to their own perspective, understanding, and personality (inspired, to be sure, by the Holy Spirit—at least as far as I’m concerned).
This is how Christian theology works in general. The way Christian theology is explained and articulated is done according to a particular cultural context.
When the Apostle Paul thus explained that a person was “justified by faith,” he utilized language that was based upon a particular context—explaining it in ways that his audience would have understood. If Paul had been living 200 years later, or writing to a different audience, he likely would have explained it in a different way (which, in fact, he did when he wrote to the Galatians instead of the Romans, or the Ephesians instead of the Colossians—and all the more so when James or Peter explained the Jesus-message rather than Paul).
This doesn’t relegate theology or the Jesus-story to complete relativity, implying that there’s nothing absolute or universal about it. It’s simply to recognize the tension that the incarnation reflects—that of explaining timeless truth in time-bound and culturally-determined ways.
Many people who’ve been missionaries to cultures significantly unlike their own often have the advantage of understanding the contextual and cultural nature of transferring the Jesus-story (though, admittedly, one of the great black marks on the history of Christian missions has been the ways in which missionaries have failed to make a distinction between their western understanding of the Jesus-message and the Jesus-message itself, thus forming their converts in western culture, and stigmatizing other cultures).
One such individual, who has been extremely influential in this whole conversation, was Lesslie Newbigin, a British clergyman who spent many years as a missionary to India. Spending time in India allowed him to recognize, when he returned to England, that westerners had conflated the cultural packaging of the Jesus-story with the Jesus-story itself.
“Every interpretation of the gospel is embodied in some cultural form,” he thus explained. “The missionary does not come with the pure gospel and then adapt it to the culture where she serves: she comes with a gospel which is already embodied in the culture by which the missionary was formed.”
This is big. By this he meant that missionaries often think they have to take the Jesus-message and figure out a way to contextualize it to the people and the culture to which they’ve been sent, believing that their prior understanding of the gospel is already free from any cultural packaging. That, of course, is good as far as it goes—since there are many people who don’t even recognize this important task.
But what Newbigin is pointing out is that recognizing the reality of contextualization must take place even before one tries to contextualize the Jesus-message to someone else. That’s because we ourselves heard (and accepted) the Jesus-message in a way that itself was contextualized. Indeed, the infinite God has had to contextualize the truth about himself all along to finite people.
And this is not only the way things are, it’s all well and good and beautiful—pointing to the humility of God.
Recognizing this important idea has all sorts of significant implications, most of which I won’t mention here. But it can, among other things, help us de-westernize our understanding of, approach to, and presentation of faith, which has often been the cause for much racial and ethnic chauvinism. More practically, it can also liberate us from insisting that certain liturgical practices (i.e., the way we worship together) are somehow sanctioned by God and therefore holy—when, in fact, they may simply be the way one particular culture has chosen to express its worldly worship of an other-worldly God.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.