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5Church and Mission Reflections onContextualization and the ThirdHorizon

D.A. CARSON

A. INTRODUCTIONNo work proposing to discuss some of the more disputedbiblical themes relating to the church can afford to ignore

the current ferment over the mission of the church. Thefield is vast and the disputed areas many; but this essayfocuses on the interface between the new hermeneutic andcontextualization. Before addressing such matters directlyhowever it may be worth mentioning a couple of othermatters that impinge deeply on the current discussion overmission even if they cannot be probed here.

First in the contemporary climate the notions of evangel-ism and mission are de eply offensive to some. Many Westerntheologians consider the idea of winning people to Christ aparochial vestige of past imperialism; and not a few 'thirdworld' theologians agree. A recent volume by the Chaplainof the University of Kent, for instance argues againstboth exclusivism and inclusivism and for the pluralismrepresented by Ernst Troeltsch, W. E. Hocking, Arnold

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2 4 The Church In The Bible nd The World

Toynbee, Paul Tillich and John Hick. Another recent volume records discussion on such points amongst participantsfrom a broad theological spectrum. There is little agreement; but what becomes readily apparent is that the mostfundamental division of opinion has more to do with theauthority status of revelation than with mission theory itself.Those who hold that God has revealed himself propositionally in the Scriptures, and definitively in the person andwork of Jesus the Messiah, emphasize mission; those whoargue that the religion of the Bible has no authority orrevelatory status above the documents or traditions of otherreligions tend to de-emphasize mission. Of course, there aremany mediating positions. It is common to stress the lightgiven to all men (a variation on the argument of Acts 17)and affirm that Christianity preserves the highest revelation,not the only revelation. In itself, the argument is innocuousenough, and few thoughtful conservatives would wish todisagree with it;3 but it easily becomes the justification forthe dubious theory of the anonymous Christian - and, paceKarl Rahner,4 it is hard to see how that theory can fail tovitiate at least the urgency of mission. Senior and Stuhlmueller have recently tried to ground Christian mission in thesense of mission exemplified in the early church;5 but despitethe many useful insights in their work, their mediatingposition is rather more historical in its orientation than anattempt to determine what is in any sense normative for thechurch today. And much as conservatives may disagree withhis conclusions, S. G. Wilson s nevertheless right in hisanalysis:

. . . we must face squarely the central, obstinate fact of[Paul s] christological exc1usivism. Ifwe leave this untouchedthen we shall, like Barth, remain essentially faithful to Paul.For many, however, his exc1usivism t be abandonedand his absolutism relativized. And Paul, of course, does notstand alone. The rest of the New Testament and most formsof Christianity since share essentially the same view Weare engaged, therefore, in no mean undertaking but can atleast take comfort in the thought that we are dealing with thecentral issue. For if the challenge of other religions affected

Church and Mission: COnlexlUalization and Third Horizon 2 5only the peripheral parts of Christian tradition the problem could readily be resolved at least for those who arealready satisfied that they can be reinterpreted or jettisonedwithout loss. We are dealing, however, with the heart ofPaul s gospel

t would take us beyond the scope of this paper to attemptto justify, exegetically and epistemologically, the view thatbiblical Christianity is a uniquely revealed and authoritativenon-negotiable; but even these brief remarks may help us tosee that behind the hermeneutical questions there sometimeslurk even more fundamental questions about the authoritystatus of biblical Christianity.Second a large number of technical essays on the NewTestament have reached conclusions that put a substantialdistance between any commandment of Jesus and the actualcross-cultural evangelistic practices of the early church. Forinstance, both Best7 and Scobie8 argue that although Jesusallowed Gentiles some participation in the blessings heinaugurated and envisaged, he authorised no Gentile mission. The post-resurrection great commission records cannot be treated as the commands of the historical Jesus(especially in Scobie s thought); and the actual impetus toevangelize Gentiles is thought to have originated with theHellenists who scattered from Jerusalem after the martyrdom of Stephen. There can be no fundamental objection tothe historical analysis of where such cross-cultural (or, better, cross-racial) evangelism was first practised; but slightlydifferent application of critical thought might happily conclude that the ultimate impetus goes back to Jesus himself -and behind him to a host of Old Testament texts understoodin the light of the person and work of Christ. The narrowerfocus of Best and Scobie and others tends to reduce theurgency of such evangelism by making it in its origins almosta sectarian enterprise.Of course, it is true that there is no good evidence thatthe church as a whole, after the resurrection and ascension,promptly set out to obey the great commission.9 Much oftheir witness was the overflow of their life in the Spirit. Butthis fact cannot reasonably be used against the relative


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importance of the great commission; for even after Pentecostthe church had to go through repeated struggles in order tocome to grips with such matters as the relationship betweenthe Mosaic covenant and the new one promised by Jeremiahand inaugurated by their Lord before his death, or theprecise force the law of Moses was to have in this neweschatological situation - even though such matters hadbeen dealt with, sometimes directly and sometimes in symbol-laden language and acts, py the Master himself in thedays of his flesh. Both Acts and the epistles testify to thefact that, guided by the Spirit, the early church grew in itsunderstanding of its message and task, This means that wedare not seek to limit our grasp of that message or taskby focusing too narrowly on some early period where thechurch s understanding was still immature.

Numerous other questions spring to mind, but they cannot be addressed here. I need only mention that there aremany useful books that attempt to give a theology of mission,a biblical foundation for the enterprise;lO and in additionthere are a few more recent works that deal sensitively andpowerfully with the relationship between doing justice andpreaching grace .l1 One might also mention recent worksanalysing Paul s mission theology and practice,12 a penetrating doctoral dissertation on Paul s self-understanding of hisvocation,13 another that sheds considerable light on one ofthe reasons why Paul was able to operate effectively inso many cultures - namely his careful training of andpartnership with local co-workers,14 an essay that exploresthe extent to which even Paul s theology finds its genesis inmission,1s and, conversely, another essay that calls contemporary theology back to its central missiological task. 6 Allof this is only to say that we are in a period of immenseferment over the subject of missions; and the complexity ofthe issues and the diversity of viewpoints loads even thenarrow subject of communication to the third horizon withcumbersome and interrelated problems.

We may begin with some elementary observations on thenew hermeneutic. Older hermeneutical models focused onthe processes by which the interpreter, the subject , interpreted the text, the object . The unwitting premise was very

Church and Mission: Contextualization and Third Horizon 2 7

often the historical positivism of von Ranke. The newhermeneutic posits a hermeneutical circle between theinterpreter and the text. When the interpreter in attemptingto understand the text asks questions of the text, the questions themselves emerge out of the limitations that characterize the interpreter; and therefore the responses that theinterpreter hears the text giving are skewed to fit his owngrid. Inevitably, however, those responses in turn shape theinterpreter, and make him marginally different from whathe was before he approached the text. Therefore the nexttime the interpreter asks questions of the text, the questionsemerge from a slightly different matrix than did the first setof questions; and therefore the new responses will be skewedto a slightly different grid. Thus not only is the interpreterinterpreting the text, but the text is interpreting theinterpreter. And this interchange can go on and on, settingup a hermeneutical circle . In this model, understandingdoes not depend in any important way on a grasp of thereferents of words, but emerges out of the heart of languageitself. Mere words kill; advocates of the new hermeneuticspeak of language poisoning . Authentic understandingtakes place when a text so interprets the interpreter that aflash of insight occurs, a kind of revelatory experience, alanguage-event Sprachereignis).

There is much to be learned from the new hermeneutic.We human beings cannot escape either our sinfulness or ourfiniteness; and both are guaranteed to make the matrix outof which our questions emerge different from the matrix ofevery other human being. There is a horizon of understanding unique to each individual. Pushed too far, of course,the new hermeneutic must result in the unqualified subjectivity of all knowledge - even that of the more radicalskeptics who try to convince us by their writings that theyare right. How then may two individuals communicate? Howmayan interpreter discover the meaning of a text, withoutsuccumbing to a theory that postulates unqualified polyvalence of meaning - a d if feren t meaning for each interpreter,and indeed for the same interpreter at each new approachto the text? The solution seems to be along the followinglines.


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Each knower must begin with thoughtful distanciation ,i.e. a careful distancing of himself and his own horizon ofunderstanding from that of the text or of the other person,in order to hear what the text or the other person is sayingwith s little interference as possibile from the knower sown mental baggage. By coming to understand the manydifferences between one s horizon of understanding and thehorizon of understanding of the text or of the other person,it becomes possible to make appropriate allowances. If theknower then tries to put himself or herself into the other splace as it were (or, to use the modern jargon, if the knowerattempts to fuse his horizon of understanding with that ofthe text), there is less danger of major semantic distortion.The hermeneutical circle becomes a hermeneutical spiral,enabling the interpreter, the knower, to approach the mean-ing of the text asymptotically.17

We have thus been,introduced to two horizons - thehorizon of understanding of the knower or interpreter, andthe horizon of understanding of the text. Contemporarydiscussion of mission, however, goes a step farther and dealswith the third horizon - viz, the horizon of understandingof the group or people being evangelized. The first horizonis that of the biblical documents or, as some would have it,of the first g e n e ~ t i o n of Christian believers as that perspec-tive is preserved in the New Testament. The second horizonis ours - i.e. that of established Christians who seek tounderstand the Scriptures. There are, of course, some majorhurdles to cross if we are to understand the Scripturesaright - if we are going to fuse our own horizon of under-standing with that of the text so as to arrive at an accurateunderstanding of that text. Similar hurdles also presentthemselves when we try to cross from the second horizonto the third: in short, when we try to evangelize and teachthe content of Scripture to another group or people. Indeed,the greater the cultural gap between the evangelizing churchand the target people (or, otherwise put, between the secondand the third horizon), the greater the potential for massivedistortion of the message.Two preliminary caveats should be entered at once. First,the terminology just introduced already masks a considerable

Church and Mission Contextualization and Third Horizon 2 9

oversimplification. It is rare to find a Christian who has beenconverted simply by reading the New Testament. Morecommonly there has been at least one intermediary andperhaps there have been many - other Christians who havepresented, Christ to him and borne witness to the truth ofbiblical Christianity in their own lives. Therefore the personwhom we now label as belonging to the second horizon ato ~ e time belonged to the third - or even the fourth, fifth,slxth or nth. And even if someone becomes a believer simplyby reading the Bible, without any human intermediary, inone sense there were intermediaries involved in the Bibletranslation that made the Scriptures available to him in hisown language. I shall return briefly to this question at theend of this paper; but for the moment it is enough tonote the complexities while nevertheless using the simplifiedterminology. Second, although there are many importantparallels between, on the one hand, the move from the firstto the second horizon, and, on the other, the move from thesecond to the third horizon, so far as the difficulties incommunication are concerned, there is nevertheless oneimportant distinction. In the former, the onus is on whatwe might call the receptor - i.e. on the person belongingto the second horizon; for it is that person who is trying tounderstand the Scriptures. But in passing from the secondhorizon to the third, the onus is on what we might call thedonor - i.e. on the person who is trying to communicatethe message. That person is still at the level of the secondhorizon.If there are ambiguities surrounding the third horizonterminology, they are nothing compared with the range ofmeaning ascribed to contextualization . In this instance,however, definition stands at the very heart of the issue,since it is determined by the entire synthesis that is adopted.t seems wise therefore to approach contextualization alittle more inductively. I shall not attempt to sketch in whatI understand by the term, and how it relates to the thirdhorizon, until the closing pages of this paper. This much at

least may be said: the term is very slippery. At one point itwas indistinguishable from experimental theology ;18 but itsoon came to serve as the term that commonly supersedes


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'indigenization'. The latter was frequently summarizedunder the 'three selfs : an indigenous church is self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. 'Contextualization'goes beyond this to include the notion that the church isdoing its own theology in its own context. Broadly speakingthere are two brands of contextualization. The first assignscontrol to the context; the operative term is praxis, whichserves as a controlling grid to determine the meaning ofScripture. The second assigns the control to Scripture, butcherishes the 'contextualization' rubric because it remindsus the Bible must be thought about, translated into andpreached in categories relevant to the particular culturalcontext.

The concerns of the new hermeneutic and of contextualization have thus begun to merge. Both are concerned withthe difficulties inherent in passing content from one knowerto another, or from a text to an interpreter. To put thematter another way, the theoretical and practical difficultiesin moving from the first horizon to the second remain inplace when moving from the second to the third. Indeed, aswe have seen, a new difficulty is introduced. In the modelswe have used, when communication takes place form thefirst horizon to the second, the burden of responsibility restswith the second (i.e. the receptor); but when communicationtakes place from the second horizon to the third, the burdenof responsibility still rests with the second - now the donor.Tha stands at the heart of missionary endeavour.It is important to recognise how innovative these modernconcerns for the third horizon really are. Fewer than twentyyears ago, it was possible to publish a hefty volume onevangelism and mission and never mention the hermeneutical difficulties involved in communicating the gospel to thethire} horizon. 19 But today a tremendous amount of energyin missiological circles is poured into problems connectedwith contextualization.

This phenomenon manifests itself in many ways. It isseen not only in endless journal articles, many of them moreor less popular, that tell how some missionary or otherovercame an unforeseen cultural or linguistic hurdle,20 butin, a long stream of major articles and books that tackle

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the question head-on. 2 Popular books relate how a properunderstanding of a local culture make possible the effectivecommunication of the gospel;22 and more serious studiesgrapple with the relationships between Christianity andculture. 23 Technical works on cultural anthropology and itsrelation to mission abound; and the work of Wycliffe BibleTranslators and the United Bible Societies continues to pourout a stream of technical monographs and books, some ofwhich have become standard texts for new generations ofseminary students. 4Various theological syntheses are beingproduced in the ' third world' 5 and experts are applyinginsights from contextualization theory to related questionssuch as TEE (theological education by extension) programmes.26 None of this means there is widespread agreement. Far from it: there is massive theological and methodological disarray in the area. The sole point to be made at themoment is that the subject is everywhere being discussed.In order to keep the subject narrowly focused, the rest ofthis paper proceeds in dialogue with the influential articleof Daniel von Allmen on the birth of theology. 27 Some essayscapture a mood or put into words what many others havebeen struggling to articulate. When such essays are published, they immediately gain assent and wide recognitionnot necessarily because they are cogent or their argumentsunassailable, but because they burst onto the theologicalscene just at the time when they seem to confirm the opinionsof many readers. Apparently, something like that has happened to von Allmen's important essay; and so it providesa suitable backdrop to the following reflections on the thirdhorizon.

In what follows I shall first of all summarize von Allmen'sarguments, and then proceed to a discussion of exegeticaland methodological problems associated with his work.Finally, I shall try to assess von Allmen's judgment of thekind of contextualization that ought to take place as oneattempts to evangelize people of the third horizon, andconclude with some slightly broader formulations. 28


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222 The Church In The Bible And The World

B A SUMMARY OF VON ALLMEN S ARTICLEAt the heart of von Allmen s thesis is his argument that

the correct model of contextualization is already providedfor us in the New Testament. t is this feature that makes hiswork so crucial. Von Allmen s essay was itself a responseindeed, a response to a response. The late Byang Kato hadresponded to the growing dangers he perceived in the workof such African theologians as Harry Sawyer and JohnMbiti.29 Emerging as the dominant evangelical voice inAfrican theology before his untimely death,30 Kato haddetected in certain strands of African theology what hevariously called Christo-paganism, syncretism or universalism and in which he saw a real threat to the futureevangelical church of Africa. 3 Against this protest, vonAllmen suggests Kato is too tied to Western theology. VonAllmen sets out not only to reaffirm that an African theologyis necessary but also to show how it is possible on the basisof a true fidelity to the New Testament .32 In other words,the force of von Allmen s criticism of Kato is that he is notbiblical enough, and that Scripture itself authorises the kindof contextualization von Allmen advocates.

Von Allmen turns to the New Testament, and begins byassuming that the Judaic, that is Semitic, character of theChristian faith at its birth is beyond question . 33 Within onegeneration, however, the church found its firmest footing onHellenistic soil. Von Allmen therefore proposes to discoverwhat were the forces behind this Hellenization of Christianity, and what sort of people were its first exponents . 34

Von Allmen distinguishes three movements, almost stagesbased on three types of people. The first is the missionarymovement. This explosion came about without the initiationby the Jerusalem pillars (Gal. 2:9 ; indeed, the Aramaicspeaking apostles were caught unawares by these developments. What happened rather was that Philip and his Hellenist brothers saw in the persecution that was scattering thema divine call to preach the gospel outside the limits ofJerusalem 35 This was partly because they had the linguisticcompetence: they were at home in Greek and familiar withthe LXX. Even at this stage, however, this Hellenistic

Church and Mission: Contextualization and Third Horizon 3

missionary movem.ent was not a missionary movement inany modern sense. No one was being commissioned or sent.It was simply a work of evangelism undertaken underthe pressure of external events (of persecution) that wereunderstood to be providential . 36 All of this suggests to vonAllmen that in this first adaptation of Christianity to a newcontext , although there was a missionary thrust it was notthe thrust of people from one culture evangelizing the peopleof another, but the spread of Christian witness from Hellenistic Christians to Hellenists. In other words:

No true indigenization or contextualization can take placebecause foreigners, the missionaries , suggest it; on the contrary, true indigenization takes place only because the indigenous church has itself become truly missionary, with orwithout the blessing of the missionaries . 7

The second movement is that of translators . In one sense,as von Allmen rightly points out, no translation was needed.The missionaries and those being evangelized shared Greekas a common language, and even a Greek Bible, the Septuagint. What concerns von Allmen here is something else: viz.,the manner in which the Hellenists, who had received theGospel from the lips of Aramaic Christians, translated itinto Greek for the pagans. By Gospel I mean here, therefore,the living preaching 38 Von Allmen uses form critical h o r ~and appeals to Cor. 15:3-5, to insist that the Hellenistswere not free-lances: there were limits to how far they coulddigress from the tradition that had come to them. But atelling step came, he says, when the Hellenistic believerschose kyrios to render Hebrew rabbi and Aramaic mario Theresult was a title for Jesus that served simultaneously as,among Jews, a Greek transcription of the divine Name,and, among others, as the word used to pay honour to theEmperor. This is the pre-Pauline history of the title. VonAllmen asks:

Was it a fatal slip? Criminal truckling to the Greeks andRomans? Paul does not look at it in that way, since he makesthis very title of Lord the centre of his theology. In any case,there can be no talk of truckling when to confess Jesus is


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224 The Church In The Bible And The WorldLord' exposed one t persecution for refusing Caesar thehonour he claimed for himself. 39

What all this assumes, von Allmen argues, is that 'thenative preachers were bold enough to be themselves,

while remaining faithful to the foundations of the faith theyhad received, to sift critically the received vocabulary inorder to express themselves intelligently to their linguisticbrothers .4o

The third movement was the rise, not of theologians, butof poets - i.e. those whose work assisted the church in itsindigenous worship. Von Allmen approves the thesis ofSchlink, that 'the basic structure of God-talk is not thedoctrine of God but the worship of God .41 We may examinethis movement, he says, by studying some of the hymnspreserved in the Pauline epistles. Von Allmen selects as histest case Phil. 2:6-1 I He prints it in poetic format, puttingin parentheses the bits that many scholars hold to be Paulineredaction. Von Allmen's chief point with respect to thishymn, however, is that the parallelism between 'taking theposition of a slave and 'becoming like a man' (2:7) is not aJewish or Jewish-Christian idea at all; for among them aman was not considered to be a slave. I t is for the Greeks,particularly at this late date, that man s a slave, bound handand foot in submission to all-powerful Destiny' 42 Moreover,von Allmen argues, 'it would be possible to find in thehymn a number of other expressions which find their closestequivalent in the Gnostic myths of the Original Man: the'divine estate', the equal of God'. 43 But none of this isdangerous syncretism, von Allmen argues, for in this hymnthe language used decribes not 'a mythical Original Manlosing his divine form and assuming a human appearance';for only the vocabulary remains, and 'it is used to sing thepraise of Jesus of Nazareth who entered history as a man offlesh and blood .44 'We must see in this hymn an interesting,and indeed successful attempt to express the mystery ofthe condescension of Christ in the characteristically Greekvocabulary .45

From this, von Allmen draws a more general conclusion:

Church and Mission Contextualization and Third Horizon 5The theologian has no right t fear the spontaneous mannerin which the Church sometimes eXpresses the faith. If theapostles had been timorous and shut the mouths of the poetsthrough fear of heresy, the Church would never have foundfooting on Hellenistic soil. Thus the way things happen inthe primitive church teaches us that in the Church the lifeand faith is sic] the primary thing. Missionaries do notpreach a theology but rather the Gospel (the good news).Nor is the response of faith yet theology, but rather worshipor hymns proclaiming the mighty deeds of God in JesusChrist.46

I t is only following these movements, von Allmen argues,that theologians are wanted, exemplified by Paul. But evenhere, he points out, Paul is not a systematician in any modernsense. The two functions of theology are the critical andthe systematic; and Paul in his writings devotes himselfprimarily to the former. By this, von Allmen means thatbefore adapting an already coined formula, Paul examinesit critically ; and his criterion is 'the received faith .

He does not demand that doctrine should be in literal agreement with the primitive Christian preaching. But whatevermay be its formal expression, the doctrine must correspondto the inner thrust of the apostolic faith, and so eschatologyis an essential element of Christian theology. Provided onereintroduces this moment of expectation, this eschatologicaltension, then why not use Greek terminology?47

Along this line, von Allmen argues that the church beganwith the language of master/disciple, and adapted it to theHellenistic mystery religions of the day to make Christianityover into 'the definitive and absolute mystery religion . 48The one limitation Paul imposed on this Greek influencewas resurrection language. Christ may be like Osiris orKore when Paul says 'You died with Christ', but Paul isindependent of Greek thought when he says 'You have beenraised with him' - especially so when he sets the ultimateraising as a hope for the future.Along similar lines, Paul in Colossians (whether the epistlewas composed by Paul or someone from the Paul school)I .B.W-O


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responds to the strange amalgam of Judaizing and syncretismby setting over against the worship of angels the supremeheadship of Christ. Paul begins, von Allmen argues, withthe central fact that Jesus is Lord - Jesus as crucified andrisen. This central feature of Christianity enables Paul torebut the Colossians. This is what von Allmen means by theordering function of theology .

Even amidst the fiercest polemic, Paul remains firmly rootedin the basis of the Christian faith; Christ who died and wasraised. It is only from this centre that one may dare tosay anything at all; and all theological statements, whetherpolemical or constructive, must be set in relation to thiscentre. 49

Von Allmen then turns from the New Testament to theproblem of how anyone, African or otherwise, must properlyset about doing theology in his or her own context. At thispoint he is building on his biblical analysis in order toaddress problems of contextualization. Before setting forthhis own proposal, he briefly describes three impasses thatmust be overcome.The first is paternalism. Paternalism expresses itself notonly in the sense of superiority manifested by Westerntheologians, but also in the colonized complex of Africansand other victims of colonization. In the first century, thepower relationship between the cultures was if anything thereverse of the modern problem: the Jewish-Christians musthave felt threatened by the all-pervasive Hellenistic culture,not the other way round. Von Allmen s solution is thatAfricans become aware of the value of their own culture inits own right, so that they may bring to birth an Africantheology that is more than a theology characterized byreaction . 5 Moreover, just as the Hellenistic-Christi an movement in the first century was the work of Hellenists themselves. In a spontaneous movement, so also must Africansdo their own theology; and this means that Westernerscannot without paternalism even encourage Africans to geton with it. Rather: Once and for all, then, there must be

Church and Mission: Contextualization and Third I Iorizon 7

trust . And clearly this principle must be extended beyondAfrica to all missions-receiving nations.The second impasse is heresy. Von Allmen says that sinceeveryone is a heretic in somebody s eyes ,51 we must treadvery cautiously. His study of the New Testament leads him

to conclude that at the first stage of indigenization, peopleare not too worried by dangers of heresy; and in any case,in Paul s writings,

the heretics are not to be found among the Hellenistic progressives but rather among the Judaizing reactionaries whofeel themselves obliged to denounce the foolhardiness or therank infidelity of the translation project upon which theChurch has become engaged in Hellenistic territory. But,remarkably enough, this very conservatism goes hand inhand with a, perhaps unconscious, paternalism. The legalismof the Colossian heresy is accompanied by a disproportionaterespect towards other powers than Jesus Christ.52

The third impasse is an approach to contextualization thatperceives it as an adaptation of an existing theology. TheHellenists, von Allmen argues, simply proceeded with evangelization; and the theology eventually emerged from withinthis Hellenistic world - but as a later step. Von Allmen sconclusion is stunning:t must be said with all possible firmness: there can be

no question, in our days either, of an Africanization ora contextualization of an existing theology. Any authentictheology must start over anew from the focal point of thefaith, which is the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ whodied and was raised for us; and it must be built or re-built(whether in Africa or in Europe) in a way which is bothfaithful to the inner thrust of the Christian revelation andalso in harmon y with the mentality of the person who formulates it. There is no short cut to r,e found by simply adaptingan existing theology to contemporary or local taste. 53

What this means s that so far as it is possible, AfricanChristians, and indeed all Christians, must begin tabula rasa.Missionaries should provide working tools and building


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materials to believers not yet able to train their own people,and then leave them to get on with the task.

Rather than teach a theology (even a theology that claims tobe a New Testament theology ) what w should try to do ispoint out what the forces were that governed the elaborationof a theology on the basis of the material furnished by theearly church. This is the reason why, in my opinion, thestudy of the history of traditions in the early church is ofcapital importance in Africa even more than elsewhere. 5

In short, what von Allmen proposes is that no one hasthe right to tell or even encourage Africans to get on withthe task, as that would smack of paternalism; and meanwhileno one has the right to provide them with any theology, asthis would vitiate the principles of contextualization as heunderstands them. We must simply let the African churchbe African; and an African theology will ultimately result.

C PROBLEMS IN VON ALLMEN S BIBLICAL EXEGESISThere are many points of detail in von Allmen s exegesis

that could be usefully raised; but I shall restrict myself tofour areas. Like him, I shall largely dispense with the clutterof detailed footnotes, and sketch in a response with fairlybroad strokes.

I Von Allmen s reconstruction of the earliest stage ofwitness is seriously deficient. As we have seen, he denies theinft.uence of the Aramaic-speaking apostles, assigns all creditto the Hellenistic believers who interpreted the outbreak ofpersecution as a divine call to preach the gospel outsidethe limits of Jerusalem, and from this deduces that truecontextualization takes place not because outsiders (theAramaic-speaking Christians) suggest it, but because theindigenous church (the Hellenistic Christians) have themselves become truly missionary.

As I have already acknowledged, it is true, as Boerspointed out some years ago, that the church in Acts is notpresented as a community of believers with an immediate


and urgent sense of commitment to carry out, in an organisedand methodical way, the great commission. Nevertheless,the arguments of both Boer and von Allmen could do witha little shading.First, the church began from a tiny group. I t did notbegin as a multinational missions agency with boards andhead offices and district conferences, plotting the systematicevangelization of the world. It began with a handful of peopletransformed by the Spirit of God and by the conviction thatwith the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah thepromised eschatological age had begun. Immediately therewas witness - not the strategic witness of careful planningbut the spontaneous witness of irrepressible spiritual life,the most effective witness of all. In this atmosphere of earlypulsating beginnings, it was inevitable that each group ofearly believers shared their faith primarily with those of itsown language and culture. But at this very early stage, todraw lessons about the slowness of the Aramaic-speakingcommunity to reach out to the Hellenistic world is no morerealistic than to draw lessons about the slowness of theHellenistic church to reach-Out to the Aramaic-speakingworld. Luke s narrative simply does not address the kind ofquestions von Allmen seems to be posing.Second, even at the earliest stages of Christianity, andwithin the Aramaic-speaking community, there was a consciousness that what was being experienced was the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant by which all peoples onearth would be blessed (Acts 3:25). And when the Aramaicspeaking church faced the first strong opposition, thebelievers prayed for holy boldness to speak the word courageously (Acts 4:24-30). I t is very difficult to distinguish thisfrom the attitude of the Hellenistic believers when theyfaced persecution. There is no evidence pace von Allmen)that the latter alone saw in persecution a special divine callto preach the gospel outside the confines of Jerusalem.Rather, the believers scattered, the Aramaic-speaking onesto places congenial to them, and the Hellenistic believers toplaces congenial to them - both groups still boldl y witnessing. Even then, the Hellenistic believers spoke, at first,primarily if not exclusively to Greek-speaking Jews (Acts


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I I : 19-20 - a point von Allmen finds so difficult he has tosay that Luke probably shaded the account here to preventthe stealing of Paul s thunder and keep for him the honourhe thought his due . 56 But a simpler explanation lies immediately to hand, provided we are not trying to squeeze the textinto a preset mold. The Hellenistic believers were in thefirst instance themselves Jews; and so quite naturally theywitnessed within their own Greek-speaking Jewish environment. In this sense there is no major cross-over of racial andcultural and linguistic barriers by either Aramaic-speaking orGreek-speaking Christians at this point. And when theHellenistic believers do begin their witness before Gentilesin Antioch (Acts 11 :20 -21 , the account is placed after theevangelisation of Samaria and of Cornelius, about whichmore in a moment.Third the reticence the Aramaic-speaking believers ultimately displayed was not over the fact of evangelism amongGentiles, but over the conditions of entrance to the messianiccommunity. 57 Many streams of Judaism were aggressivelyproselytizing others in the first century; so it is not surprising, even from the perspective of their background, thatearly Jewish Christians, both Aramaic- and Greek-speaking,,did the same. The debates behind Gal. 2 and Acts 15,therefore, do not stem from problems in mere indigeneityor contextualization, still less from carelessness about thegreat commission (or, in much modern discussion, its inauthenticity), but from a massive theological question: Onwhat grounds may Gentiles be admitted to the messianiccommunity? The answer had to do with the way in whichthe new covenant could be seen to be related to the old; andthe synthesis forged by these debates in the early churchwas used by God to contribute to the writing of our NewTestament documents.To reduce such complex and frankly unique circumstances to the parameters of the modern debate over contextualization is to distort and trivialize (however unwittingly)the biblical evidence. It is historical nonsense to label theHellenists progressives and thereby tie them to modernliberal theology, while labelling the Aramaic-speaking Christians reactionaries in order to bracket them with modern


evangelicals. Indeed, it is worth observing that according toLuke the first opposition that resulted in a martyr sprangfrom a conservative Hellenistic synagogue (Acts 6:9) Thisentire point is so important that I shall return to it fromanother perspective in the next division of this paper.Fourth within the synthesis I am suggesting, the largeamount of space Luke devotes to the conversion of theSamaritans (Acts 8) and to that of Cornelius and his household (Acts 10-1 I) is eminently reasonable - the lattercompletely unmentioned by von Allmen, and the formerbarely so. The Cornelius episode is particularly instructive;for here, before there is any record of witness to nonproselyte Gentiles by Hellenistic Jewish believers, anAramaic-speaking apostle is sent by the Lord to a Gentilewho is not, technically, a proselyte. The point of the story,carefully repeated by Peter before a suspicious Jerusalemchurch, is that if God by pouring out his Spirit on theGentiles, as on the Jews, has shown that he has acceptedthem, can Jewish believers do any less? This point does notconcern the crossing of merely cultural, racial and linguisticbarriers, as significant as such barriers are. The them/usdichotomy stems from Israel s self-consciousness as thepeople of God, and therefore from the clash between God santecedent revelation in what we today call the Old Testament, and God s revelation in Christ Jesus and all that hascome from it. The Jewish believers raise their questions notat the level of contextualization, but at the level of theology -indeed, at the level of systematic theology, for their questionultimately concerns the way in which the old and newcovenants are to be related to each other. But none of thisdoes von Allmen consider.

Fifth part of von Allmen s arguments about the reticenceof Aramaic-speaking apostles stems from silence. The truthof the matter is that Luke does not purport to give us acomprehensive history of the early church, but a highlyselective one. After Acts : I , we know nothing or next tonothing about the ministries of (say) Matthew or Thomasor Bartholomew or Andrew. Extra-canonical sources are notvery reliable in this area; but some of the best of them tellus that Thomas, for instance, proclaimed the gospel as

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The Church In The Bible And The World

far east as India, where he was reportedly martyred. VonAllmen s sweeping concl us ons regarding the Aramaic-speaking apostles are therefore based not only on a rather selectiveand anachronistic approach to Acts, but even on the book ssilences.

Sixth the above arguments suggest that Luke is lessinterested in providing us with a merely sociological analysisof how various groups in the early church functioned, thanwith detailing how the resurrected Christ, by his Spirit,continued to take the initiative in building his church. Thereare indeed heroes and villains in Acts; but above all there ison display the missionary heart of God himself. Not onlydoes the initiative belong to God in the Cornelius episode,but even in Acts 2 the gift of tongues enables Jews fromevery linguistic background to hear the wonderful works ofGod in their own language - not only the principal reversalof Babel but the demonstration of the principial removal,and not by Hellenistic or Aramaic-speaking Jewish Christians but by God himself of the temporary barriers surroundinghis old covenant people. The theme of prophecy and fulfilment in Acts is designed to display the inevitability of thedawning of the gospel age - precisely because it is Godwho planned it and is even now bringing it to pass by hisSpirit. To force this magnificent panorama into lesser moldsis to fail to understand it. We may learn some useful lessonsabout contextualization in the pages of the New Testament;but we must not force this book into our preconceivedcategories, nor compel it to provide detailed answers toquestions it scarcely considers.

2. In almost every case, von Allmen s conclusions are notentailed by or even very clearly suggested by the exegeticalevidence he presents. To take but one example: After discussing the role of the poets in leading the church in worship,von Allmen, as we have seen, draws some more generalconclusions. The Theologian has no right to fear the spontaneous manner in which the Church sometimes expressesthe faith. If the apostles had been timorous and shut themouths of the poets through fear of heresy, the Churchwould never have found footing in Hellenistic soil . 58 Evenif von Allmen s exegesis of Phil. 2:6-1 s basically correct,


there is no way to make it support so broad a conclusion.Von Allmen himself points to areas in which the earliestwitnesses and apostles refused to follow Greek thought,which implies that the church was not willing to give thepoets an entirely free hand. In any case, although it is truethat a growing church, like the first century church, oftenproduces its own hymnody, it is illegitimate to deduce fromPaul s citation of one particular hymn that he had no rightto check any hymnodic form of expression. Von Allmen serror in logic immediately becomes obvious when his argument is set out in syllogistic fashion:

I Poets preceded theologians like Paul.2. Paul approves a particular poem.3. Therefore no theologian has the right to call in question

the content of any hymn.In reality, to provide a competent assessment of how far theapostles were willing to step in and question the theologicalformulation (including the poetry) of others, it would benecessary to examine all that the New Testament has to sayabout heresy - a point to which I shall briefly return.

Thus to argue that the way things happened in theprimitive church teaches us that in the Church the life offaith is the primary thing 59 is to obscure some importantdistinctions. In one sense, of course, this argument is valid:the early church was little interested in the niceties oftheological argumentation for its own sake, but in life livedunder the Lordship of Christ. But this life of faith did notperceive faith to be exhaustively open-ended: it had anobject, about which (or whom) certain things could beaffirmed and other things denied. Indeed, I would arguethat the church was interested in theological formulations,not for their intrinsic interest, but precisely because it rightlyperceived that such formulations shaped and controlledmuch of the life of faith believers were expected to lead.In any case, von Allmen s conclusions in this regard seemto depend rather more on an existentialist hermeneutic thanon his own exegesis. 603. Von Allmen s presentation of the development of Chri-


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stology6 is questionable at a number of points. I shallmention only three. First, the background on which he reliesfor his judgment reflects only one line of research, thatof the history-of-religions school made popular in NewTestament studies by such scholars as Reitzenstein andBousset,62 and mediated to us by Rudolf Bultmann andothers. Not only is this line of scholarship in less favourtoday than it once was, but also its many intrinsic weaknesseshave been made clear by significant publications which acommitment to even-handedness might at least have mentioned. Brown, for example, has shown that the use ofmysterion in the New Testament finds its closest antecedentsnot in Greek mystery religions but in a semitic milieu.63Again, it is not entirely clear that full-blown Gnosticism, asopposed to neoplatonic dualism, antedates the New Testament;64 but even if it does, the differences between it and theNew Testament presentation of Christ s death are profound.And to what extent may the in Christ language reflect, notGreek mysticism, but forensic identification with Christ?65

Related to this is a second criticism. To what extent dothe demonstrable developments in the ascription of labelsand titles to Jesus of Nazareth reflect innovation removedfrom the historical actuality and to what extent do theymerely reflect clarified and growing understanding of whatwas in fact true - an understanding mediated in part bythe pressure of events, including opposition? This sort ofquestion von Allmen does not raise; but it is essential thatwe consider it if we are to understand what he himself meansby developments that remain faithful to the foundations ofthe faith . 66

Consider, for instance, his treatment of kyrios. There islittle doubt that Paul understands Jesus is Lord to be aconfession not only of Jesus lordship , i.e. of his authority,but of his identification with Yahweh, rendered kyrios in theLXX. Was the apparent development from master-disciplerelations ( my lord meaning rabbi or the like), to fullascription of deity to Jesus, in accord with or contrary towhat Jesus himself was and is If von Allmen would respond,Contrary to , then certain things inevitably follow: (r) Thetruth of Christological confessions does not matter, but only


the sincerity and naturalness to any culture of its ownformulations. (2) Jesus himself should not be identified withYahweh at any ontological or historical level, but only at thelevel of confessions which mayor may not reflect reality.3) Remaining faithful to the foundations of the faith canin this case only refer to existential commitment to an emptydass not to foundations of the faith in any propositionalor contentful or falsifiable sense. 4) How a culture respondsto the gospel, i.e. with what degree of contextualization, isfar more important than the content of the gospel proclaimedand believed. If on the other hand von Allmen wouldrespond, In accord with , then again certain things inevitably follow: (r) He holds that Jesus really was and is Lordas Yahweh is Lord , even though some time elapsed beforethe disciples fully grasped this. (2) More broadly, he has inthis case committed himself to what is sometimes called theorganic view of the rise of Christology: i.e. that the fullblown doctrine grew out of the truth dimly perceived but

truly there in the beginning of Jesus ministry. The development is one of understanding and formulation regardingwhat was, not innovation and inventive explanation of whatwas not. (3) Remaining faithful to the foundations of thefaith therefore has objective criteria, rendering some formulations unfaithful. 4) The gospel itself includes true propositions and historical verities, and at all such points is nonnegotiable, even if it clashes with some dearly held culturalprejudices.

Which answer, then, would von Allmen give? I am uncertain, for his essay does not make this clear. Perhaps it is alittle troubling, however, to find him asking whether theadoption of kyrios was a fatal slip . His answer is that it wasnot truckling if it exposed believers to persecution. Trueenough; but was it a fatal slip?I myself hold to the organic view I outlined above;and elsewhere I have sketched in the kind of growth inundetstanding that was involved. 67 It is arguable, forinstance, that even in the parables Jesus tells in the synopticgospels, the figure who clearly represents Jesus (in thoseparables where he is represented at all) is frequently a figurewho in the Old Testament metaphorically stands for Yahweh


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The Church In The Bible nd The World

(bridegroom, or farmer, for example - there are eight otherexamples).68 Certainly, there is ample evidence that Jesusrepeatedly applied to himself passages from the Old Testament that had reference to God. There even appears to bedominical sanction for using Lord in reference to Jesus(Matt. 2 I :3), even though it is very doubtful that the disciples understood all of this at the time. The question arisestherefore whether the shift to Greek kyrios was so veryinnovative after all, or largely the result of increased understanding of who Jesus truly was, in the light of his resurrection and ascension. And in any case, if the gospel was goingto be preached in Greek at all, Greek terms had to be used.The crucial question, therefore, is whether the Greek termsused by Hellenistic believers were filled with pagan content,or with Christian content in harmony with the gospel truthtransmitted. Von Allmen implicitly recognises this when hepoints out that the man in Phil. 2:7 is not the Original Manof Gnostic mythology, regardless of the term s provenance.Context is more important as a determinant of meaning thanis philological antecedent. Why cannot the same insight bedeployed in other cases?

Similar things may be asked about von Allmen s treatmentof the slave-man parallel in Phil. 2:7. Apart from the factthat here as elsewhere in his essay von Allmen sweepsthe Greeks together into one undifferentiated structure ofthought,69 the question is whether the hymn s formulationsays something untrue of Jesus. In fact, it does not put himin the condition of a slave bound hand and foot in submission to all powerful Destiny . Although some Greekthought conceived of man s plight in such terms, the wordfor slave has no necessary overtones of such thought; andin this context the essence of Jesus slavery is his voluntaryrefusal to exploit his equality with Go d7 in order to becomea man, not involuntary submission to inflexible and unavoidable Destiny. In what sense, therefore, has anything ofsubstance in the gospel been changed by this Greekterminology?

Third, von Allmen s use of vague language blurs important distinctions. Paul, von Allmen says, does not demandthat doctrine should be in literal agreement with the primi-


tive Christian preaching . 71 What does literal mean in thissentence? t cannot mean verbal , since we have crossedfrom Aramaic to Greek. But what, then? Von Allmen simplysays that the doctrine must correspond to the inner thrustof the apostolic faith .72 Not to the apostolic faith itself, wenotice, but to its inner thrust . We may ask how this innerthrust is to be isolated, or, to put it it another way, who isto determine it. Calvin? Barth? Bultmann? Von Allmen?The only answer von Allmen gives here is that since newhope is part of the inner thrust of the faith , thereforeeschatology is an essential element of Christian theology .73But eschatology is a slippery word 74 in modern theology.In Bultmann s thought, it has nothing to do with the returnof esus at the end of the age, the present inauguratedkingdom then being finally consummated in a new heavenand new earth. Rather, it is reduced to the tension in theexistential moment of decision. Does von Allmen followBultmann, then, when he rhetorically asks, Provided onereintroduces this moment of expectation, this eschatologicaltension, then why not use Greek terminology? 75 Why not,indeed - provided it is the same eschatological structure asthat of the historic gospel. But if this eschatological tensionhas been redefined as this moment of expectation by appealing to Bultmannian categories, the inner thrust of the apostolic faith appears to have come adrift. There is no longerany objective gospel at all; and appeals to an inner thrustmay simply hide infinite subjectivity. Once again, I am leftuncertain where von Allmen stands in all this, or what hereally thinks about Bultmann s reinterpretation of Paulineeschatology, because his language is so vague; but I ampersuaded his approach would do well to heed the wiseassessment of Beker:

First Corinthians 5 provides us with an impressive examplethat the coherent center of the gospel is, for Paul, not simply, an experimental reality of the heart or a Word beyond wordsthat permits translation into a multitude of world views.Harry Emerson Fosdick s dictum about the gospel as anabiding experience amongst changing world views , or

Bultmann s demythologizing program for the sake of the


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The Church In The Bble And The World

kerygmatic address of the gospel, is in this manner not trueto Paul s conception of the gospel. However applicable thegospel must be to a Gentile in his contingent situation, itdoes not tolerate a world view that cannot express thoseelements in the apocalyptic world view . . . that to Paulseem inherent in the truth of the gospel And far fromconsidering the apocalyptic world view a husk or discardableframe, Paul insists that it belongs to the inalienable coherentcore of the gospel . . . It seems that Paul sacrifices dialogicalcontingency to dogmatic necessity by imposing a particularworld view on Hellenistic believers. And if Paul imposes adogmatic interpretative scheme on the cor e of the gospel,he seems to require not only faith as fiducia but also faith asassensus. 7

4. Von Allmen s overarching reconstruction of he development of early Christianity depends on a reductionisticschema that runs more or less in a straight line from Judaismto Hellenism. More careful work has shown how misleadingthis schema is 77 Judaism was already impregnated withHellenistic concepts and vocabulary. Almost certainly theapostles themselves were bilingual or trilingual. At the sametime, many New Testament documents (e.g. the Gospelof John) that had previously been classed as irremediablyHellenistic have been shown, since the discovery of the DeadSea Scrolls, to have at least linguistic links with the mostconservative strands of Judaism.The same point can be made by again referring to twoobservations to which I have already alluded in this paper.First, there is no record of Hellenistic Jews being evangelizedby Aramaic-speaking Jews. This is because the church wasbilingual from its inception. It could scarcely be otherwise,considering that most if not all of the apostles came fromGalilee. Even von Allmen s expression the Aramaic-speaking apostles' is misleading; for in all likelihood, both theEleven and Paul were comfortable in both Aramaic andGreek. Of course, many Jews who became Christians duringthe first weeks and months after Pentecost were from theDiaspora; and presumably most of these would not be fluentin Aramaic, but would be more at home in the Hellenisticworld than would those who had spent all their lives in


Palestine, even in Galilee; but it was never the case that apurely Aramaic-speaking church had to learn Greek in orderto reach out to Greek-speaking Jews. For von Allmen therefore to distinguish the Hellenistic wing of the church fromthe Aramaic wing as if the former were the freshly evangelized and therefore the exclusively indigenous church whichalone could become truly missionary is to propound disjunctions with no historical base and which offer no directparallels to modern problems in contextualization, and fewparallels to modern problems in crossing the bridge to thethird horizon.Second we have seen that the really significant movementrecorded in the New Testament documents is not fromJudaism to Hellenism, linguistically and culturally considered, but from the old covenant to the new. This development had racial and cultural implications, of course, butprimarily because the old covenant was enacted betweenGod and one particular race. Profound theological questionstherefore had to be faced, in light of the new revelationbrought by Jesus and confirmed and clarified by the HolySpirit in the early church. Modern problems of contextualization cannot in this regard be seen as parallel to the firstexpansion to Gentiles - unless new revelation is claimed asthe basis on which the modern expansion into the newlanguages and cultures is taking place

C. BROADER METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN VONALLMEN S ESSAY

There are two methodological problems in von Allmen sarticle that deserve separate consideration, one relativelyminor and the other major.

I The minor problem is found in the frequent disjunctions that force the unwary reader to either/or reasoningW/hen other options are not only available but arguablypreferable. For instance, as we have seen, von Allmenapproves the work of Schlink, who by concentrating on theform of God-talk argues that the basic structure of Godtalk is not the doctrine of God but the worship of God. 78


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The Church In The Bible And The World

Quite apart from the question as to the relation betweenform and content (a notoriously difficult subject), this conclusion is far too disjunctive: doctrine or worship. After all,even in worship the worshiper has some notion of the God heis worshiping; and therefore unless that notion is completelyineffable, he has some doctrine of God. Even the postulate'God is utterly ineffable is in fact a doctrinal statement. Itis logically impossible to be involved in worshiping God ora god without a doctrine of God, even if that doctrine is notvery systematic, mature, well-articulated or for that mattereven true. Meanwhile von Allmen's approval of the Schlinkdisjunction has done its damage by giving the impressionthat so long as there is worship, doctrine really has noimportance and can safely be relegated to a very late stageof development. The kernel of truth in his analysis is thatit is possible to have doctrine without being involved inworship - a pathetic and tragic state indeed; but that doesnot mean the converse is possible, let alone ideal.

Or to take another example, von Allmen concludes: 'Evenamidst the fiercest polemic, Paul remains firmly rooted inthe basis of the Christian faith: Christ who died and wasraised. It is only from this centre that one may dare to sayanything at all 79 Now the first of these two sentencesis true, even if slightly reductionistic. Indeed, we must insistthat Paul's understanding of Christ's resurrection will notcompromise over such matters as a genuinely empty tomb,and an objective resurrection body. It is certainly true thatthis is one of the cornerstones of the faith Paul preaches.But it is going too far to use this non-negotiable truth as thesole criterion by which all must be judged. True, no aspectof genuine Christianity can tamper with this central truth,or ly in its face; but it is not true that this is the only non-negotiable for Paul - as if, provided a person holds tothis centre, all else is for the apostle negotiable. That isdemonstrably not true. The eschatological error in Thessalonica, or the assorted moral errors in Corinth, are notresolved by simple reference to Christ's death and resurrection; yet Paul is adamant about the proper resolution ofthese matters as well. Indeed, as von Allmen has phrasedthings, someone might believe that Jesus died and rose from

Church and Mission. Contextualization and Third Horizon 24

the dead exactly s Lazarus rose from the dead, and still beholding to the 'centre'. But Paul would not agree; for Christ'sdeath and resurrection is qualitatively different from allothers. If so, we must say in what way it was different (e.g.his was the death of God's Son; it was an atoning death; hisbody after the resurrection was different from his bodybefore death ,in ways that Lazarus' body was not; etc);and by saying in what way we are admitting other nonnegotiables, other matters essential to Christian faith. Theimplicit disjunction only from this centre, from nowhere elsesuddenly begins to fray around the edges.

2. But there is a far more important methodological problem with von Allmen's work. At the beginning of his essay,he sets out to show that the creation of an African theologyis both necessary and possible 'on the basis of a true fidelityto the New Testament' 80 In a sense that I shall shortlyelucidate, I entirely agree that an African theology is bothnecessary and possible. But von Allmen's way of establishingwhat is in 'true fidelity to the New Testament' is not theway most readers of the New Testament would judge suchfidelity; and therefore it needs to be clearly understood.

Von Allmen does not attempt to justify his position onthe basis of what the New Testament documents say buton the basis of his reconstruction of their development. Theauthority lies not in the content of the Scriptures, but invon Allmen's understanding of the doctrinal changes thoseScriptures reflect. This is manifest not only in the thrust ofvon Allmen's essay, but especially in its conclusion: 'Ratherthan teach a theology (even a theology that claims to be a

New Testament theology )', he writes, 'what we shouldtry to do is point out what the forces were that governedthe elaboration of a theology on the basis of the materialfurnished by the primitive church'. 1 The 'material furnished by the primitive church' can only be a reference to theNew Testament documents (and perhaps also to other earlyClflristian literature - though for the earliest period we arepretty well shut up to the New Testament); so von Allmenis saying that we should not attempt to teach the content ofthese documents, but restrict ourselves only to deductionsabout the forces that generated the elaborations found inCI .BW. p


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these documents. And what is in conformity with vonAllmen's understanding of these forces s precisely what hesays is in fidelity to the New Testament' In reality, ofcourse, his theory is not in fidelity to the New Testamentbut to his deductions about the forces that shaped the NewTestament; for as we have seen, these deductions frequentlyrun counter to what the New Testament documents actuallysaJlMore troubling yet is von Allmen's confidence regardlngthe objectivity and reliability of the scholarly reconstructionhe sets forward as the core of the new curriculum. But Ishall let that point pass for the moment to focus a little moreclear lyon the cardinal difference between Byang a t ~ a ~ dDaniel von Allmen. In brief, it is the source of authonty lnChristianity. Both profess allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord.But which Jesus? The Jesus of the Jehovah's Witnesses? TheJesus of von Harnack? The Jesus of Islam? For Kato, it isthe Jesus of the New Testament, because for him the NewTestament documents are authoritative. Therefore everyreligious claim or precept must be tested against that standard. For von Allmen, it is not entirely clear how theconfession 'Jesus is Lord' is filled with content; and althoughhe appeals to the New Testament, in reality he is appealingto his reconstruction of the forces that shaped it. Thatreconstruction serves as the supreme paradigm for an endlesssuccession of further reconstructions, and in that sense gainssome authority. But the documents themselves, in theiractual content, are stripped of authority. A person mighttherefore confess 'Jesus is Lord' but mean something verydifferent from what Paul or Luke means. Does this notmatter? Von Allmen seems to want to defend a core of gospeltruth as one of the final criteria; but it is not clear how thatcore can avoid endless changes in content, making it no coreat all but the proverbial peeled onion.The same sort of problem appears in Kraft. 82 Basinghimself on von Allmen's article, Kraft assigns Luther'sdescription of James as an 'epistle of straw' to Luther's'unconscious ethnocentrism' 83 without struggling withLuther's later growth in understanding both of the gospeland of the nature of the canon. 84 The point, according to


Kraft, is that the Bible is a 'divine casebook tha,t embracesmany different models of appropriate religion, each in itsown way reflecting the non-negotiable core. Different cultures will feel most at home with this part or that part ofthe Bible, and prefer to overlook or ignore other parts.Luther found Paul congenial, and was uncomfortable withJames. Well and good, Kraft argues: let each culture choosethose parts that speak to it most clearly. This diversityproduces many different theologies; and, writes Kraft:

We need to ask which of these varieties of theology branded'heretical' were genuinely out of bounds (measured by scriptural standards), and which were valid contextualizations ofscriptural truth within varieties of culture or subculture thatthe party in power refused to take seriously. It is likelythat most of the heresies can validly be classed s culturaladaptations rather than s theological aberrations. They, therefore, show what ought to be done today rather than what oughtto be feared. The 'history of traditions' becomes intenselyrelevant when studied from this perspective.85

Note, then, that the 'scriptural standards' to which Kraftrefers are not what the Bible as a whole says, but an arrayof disparate theologies each based on separate parts of theBible, an array that sets the limits and nature of diversetraditions and their development. In treating the Bible as a'divine casebook' Kraft s very close to von Allmen in theway he conceives of biblical authority.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would argue that thereare five problems in their conception. The first raises anhistorical question. By suggesting that 'most' of the historicalheresies of the church ought to serve us today as models forwhat ought to be done in different cultures, has Kraftreflected deeply enough on the nature of heresy? Certainlyecclesiastical powers have sometimes persecuted f ~ U p S that

w ~ r e more faithful to the Scriptures than the powers themselves; but that is not quite the spectre that Kraft s raising.He s arguing rather that ecclesiastical powers have persecuted groups with positions that more closely align tocertain paradigms found in the Scriptures than do the pow-


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ers - while the powers themselves retain a superior fidelityto Scripture with respect to other paradigms found in Scripture. But surely it is the very nature of heresy to grasp apiece of truth and inflate it out of all proportion. I do notknow of a single heresy where that is not the case. But nosuch heresy could Kraft s approach ever detect, since thevery essence of his programmatic call is to foster groupsthat adopt parts of Scripture congenial to them. How, forinstance, would Kraft respond to the central Christo ogy ofJehovah s Witnesses, or to any other Arian group? I am notasking how he would respond personally, as if his ownChristology were suspect: that is simply not the point. How,rather, would he approach the question, methodologicallyspeaking, of their acceptability within a broadly orthodoxframework?The second question is theoretical: namely, is this the waythat biblical authority is to be perceived, on the basis of itswitness? I would answer with a firm negative. Of coursethere were cultural forces at work in the development ofthe biblical books. But the question is whether God sosuperintended those forces that the Bible s documents areto be read not only as historical documents that reflect theprogress of revelation in redemptive history but also as awhole, not merely as case studies but as a divinely orderedprogression that results in a unity of thought, a world inwhich there is prophecy and fulfilment, type and antitype,dark saying and clearer explication, diverse styles and genresand languages but a complementarity of thought - allresulting in the possibility of finding unambiguous biblicaltruth for many kinds of doctrinal, ethical and intellectualmatters, not simply disparate and potentially mutually contradictory truths .8The third problem concerns the extent to which thesemodels depend on the paradigm shift theory of Kuhn andothers. 87 Even if he was largely right regarding the substantial incommensurability of competing scientific paradigms,Kuhn never suggested that there is a total change in meaningwhen one moves from one paradigm to another. Some thingshold under both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.Indeed, one might argue that some elements (e.g. the law


of the excluded middle) are necessary constituents of everyconceivable paradigm. More important, recent study hasshown that Kuhn s work needs serious revision, and shouldnot be depended on for too great a degree of support.88

The fourth problem is practical. It is true, as Kraft says,that ever culture finds certain parts of the Bible more congenial than others. On this basis Kraft seems to encourageeach culture to operate with its own canon within thecanon . But this inevitably means that the final authorityrests, not in the Bible, but in the culture. The canon comesto lose all canonical authority. If a society is polygamous, itmay follow Abraham or David (Kraft s example); but thenwhy not follow, in some other culture, Mosaic law regardingslaves, stoning, temple ritual and the bitter-water rite? Howabout wiping out entire peoples? A Hitler might find suchaccounts and commands very congenial. On the other hand,does any society find the Sermon on the Mount congenial?The problem is not only how the Old Testament passagesto which I ve just referred relate to later revelation (part ofthe second problem, above), but also how the Bible can everhave any prophetic bite at all. In my understanding ofthe canon, the preacher who is sensitive to the culturalsensibilities of his hearers will not only exploit their canonical preferences, and seek to relate the parts of the Bible intoa self-consistent whole, he will also take extra pains topreach, teach and apply, within this canonical framework,those parts of Scripture his hearers find least palatable. Thismay not be his first step; but it is a necessary step, forotherwise no prophetic word will ever be heard, no correction of culture, no objective canonical balance. It appears,then, that advocates of a certain kind of contextualizationare aware of the dangers of what might be called Scriptureplus (i.e. the distortion of Scripture s message by the dogmatic addition of cultural baggage), but are insufficientlysensitive to the dangers of Scripture minus - the distortionof the message by preferential removal of those parts of theBible s message that seem uncongenial.

The fifth problem concerns the nature of von Allmen sappeal to a core gospel which he does not see as culturallynegotiable, or, to use Kraft s expression, the supracultural


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truth of the core. But I shall return to this problem in thenext section.

E. REFLECTIONS ON VON ALLMEN S THREE IMP SSESThe first impasse to a truly African theology, in vonAllmen s view, is paternalism There is real insight here. Wehave all witnessed or heard about those horrible situations

where a Western missionary squelches the honest probingofan African or other student who is questioning the missionary s interpretation of Scripture at some point. The putdown might be in terms like these: What right do you haveto question this interpretation? This is the product of twothousand years of study and thought. Your business is togo and learn it ' May God forgive all teachers who employsuch tactics, especially those who do so in the name of theauthority of Scripture while unwittingly elevating traditionabove Scripture. Moreover, von Allmen is wise to point outthe inverted power structures when we compare the firstcentury with the twentieth.

Nevertheless, von Allmen s solution - simpl y to let theAfricans get on with it, offering neither criticism nor encouragement (because that too is a reflection of paternalism) butsimply trust - is in my view not nearly radical enough.Unwittingly it falls into a new kind of paternalism. Whiletheologians in the West are busily engaged in cut and thrustamong themselves is it not a kind of inverted paternalism thatdeclares a respectful hands off' policy to African theologiansand biblical scholars? Surely it is far better to enter intodebate with them. The real problem lies in heart attitude.The solution is the grace of God in the human life, gracethat enables Africans and Westerners and others alike tolearn from and criticise each other without scoring cheapshots or indulging in one-upmanship .The second impasse to a truly African theology, in vonAllmen s view, is a fear of heresy Certainly there is a greatdanger in this area, found not least in Western missionarieswhose zeal is great but whose knowledge is slim. But vonAllmen gravely underestimates the seriousness with which

Church and Mission: Contextualization and Third Horizon 247heresy is taken in the New Testament, and overestimatesthe amount of diversity there. 9 At what point, for instance,can von Allmen sympathize and emphathize with the sentiments expressed in Matt. 7:21-23; John 3:36; Acts 4:12;Gal. 1:8,9; 2 Tim. 2:17-29; Rev. 2I:6-9? Even Paul s famous'all things to all men (I Cor. 9) unambiguously presupposelimits beyond which he is not prepared to gO 90Granted the truthfulness of Scripture and the rightness ofthe canonical approach I have briefly sketched in, Christianshave not only the right but also the responsibility to learnfrom and to correct one another on the basis of this agreedstandard. This must not be in any witch-hunting or judgmental spirit; but failure to discharge these responsibilities in agracious and thoughtful way may not only reflect invertedpaternalism but a singular indifference to the truth claimsof the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints(Jude 3).The third impasse in the way of a truly African theology,according to von Allmen, is the perception that contextualiz-ation must e merely the adaptation of an existing theologyAgain, there is considerable insight here. Will that theologybe truly African which simply takes, say, Hodge s SystematicTheology and seeks to rewrite it for some African (or Burmese or Guatemalan or any other context? Anyone who hasthoughtfully worked cross-culturally for an extended period.of time knows the answer to that question. There are far toomany church clones, extending all the way to the style ofbuildings. David Adeney in conversation has drawn attention to a sign he saw in Shanghai before the revolution,announcing the presence of the Dutch Reformed Churchof America in China .

Nevertheless, von Allmen s solution, to foster a true tabularasa and insist that a truly African theology can only flowerwhen it emerges without reference to any existing theology,is impossible; C1nd even if it were possible, unwise. t isimpossible and unwise for four reasons:

(I) t is impossible because a tabula rasa is impossible. Ifthe new hermeneutic has taught us anything, it is taught usthat. Even if we were to follow von Allmen s suggestion andteach only tools and the history of traditions, we would


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still be conveying some theological content. Teaching Greekinvariably includes Greek sentences from the New Testament; and translating them entails theological decisions aboutthe history and development of traditions as well as linguisticexpertise. Moreover, one cannot talk about the history anddevelopment of traditions without talking about the traditions themselves. Even initial evangelization and churchplanting could not possibly have been accomplished byconveying no more than Christ died and rose again . Andin any case, even what one does not teach is teaching something. If a lecturer refuses to discuss, say, the interpretationof Romans or the language used of the atonement, he orshe will invariably appear to be hiding something, thusconveying a distateful impression - e.g. that such mattersare religiously unimportant, or frightening, or too difficult.

(2) It is impossible because there is no core of gospel truthin the sense presupposed by von Allmen, no supraculturaltruth in the sense demanded by Kraft. 91 They both treatthe Scriptures as having only casebook authority, examiningit for every hint of cultural development, while neverthelessinsisting that there is an undissolved core of indispensablegospel truth, a supracultural truth. In one way, this is fartoo radical; in another, it is not nearly radical enough. It istoo radical, I have argued, because it reduces the locus ofnon-negotiable truth to one or two propositions such asJesus is Lord or Christ died and rose again , when in factthe corpus of non-negotiable truth embraces all of Scripture;that is the data base from which theological reglection musttake its substance and controls. But now I wish to arguethat in another way the position of these two scholars isnot radical enough, in that it seems to think the core orsupracultural confessions escape all restrictions of culture;and that is demonstrably untrue.

Consider, for example, the sentence Jesus is Lord . Wemight all agree that no Christianity is possible where thisthree-word sentence is denied. But to a Hindu, the sentencemight be happily accommodated within his syncretisticframework. In that context the confessin is far from beinga sufficient test of genuine Christianity. To a Buddhist, itwould mean Jesus s inferior to Gautama the Buddha, for it


still predicates something of Jesus. To a Jehovah s Witness,there is no entailment regarding Jesus deity. And to anexistentialist, the same sentence is a mythological expressiondesigned to call us to the decisions that characterise authenticexistence.

My point is that from the perspective of human perceptionand formulation there is no supracultural core However theheart of the gospel be conceived by human beings, it isconceived in a particular linguistic, cultural, philosophicaland religious framework. Only God is supracultural. Butthis does not relativize the gospel. Far form it; it simplymeans that the supracultural personal God, in order tocommunicate with his finite and culture-bound sinful creatures, necessarily had to accommodate the form of his communication to their space-time limitations, their historicalcontingencies. From God s point of view, of course, truthmay be supracultural; and for our part we may cheerfullyinsist that truth is supracultural in that it can be communicated to many different cultures. But it cannot be communicated to each culture in the same way; it cannot be communi- .cated supraculturally. Thus it is difficult to see how we candetermine what the supracultural core really is once we haveabandoned the given of Scripture. And even that givencomes to us in the garb of culture. None of this entails therelativizing of the truth; but it does mean that if any personis to understand the culturally conditioned Scriptures andapply them aright, he must, as part of the exercise, seek toshape his own horizon of understanding to that of thecultures and languages of Scripture, and then make thetransfer of meaning back to his own environment. 92 To putthe matter another way, I must find out what Jesus is Lordmeans in the Greek New Testament, how it functions, howit is coordinated with other truth, and then seek to confessthe same truth in my own language and culture - even ifit takes a paragraph instead of a three-word sentence, or acomplete overturning of my conceptual framework (as, inthis case, must happen to, say, the Buddhist). That it isalways possible to convey any truth in another culture shouldbe obvious to anyone with the most rudimentary knowledgeof linguistics: if modern developments in that discipline have


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taught us anything, it is that cross-cultural communicationis possible, even if seldom straightforward.Thus, although we may wish to speak of a core of truthswithout believing in which one cannot be a Christian, eventhis core cannot be approached supraculturally. Someonemight object that if everything is embedded in culture, theneven the cross suffers the same fate. Does this not suggest,it might be asked, that the cross itself is optional? Whatwould have happened if God had decided to send his Sonto New York or Manila in 1985? Should we not try todiscern God s purposes behind the cross, behind this particular cultural form? But the question itself betrays the problem: it presupposes that we have access to supraculturaltruth in some direct fashion. Even if we decided affirmatively - that is, that we should try to discuss the meaningof the cross apart form the cross itself- we would inevitablycouch the principle we thus discovered in some othercultural garb - ours The truth of the matter is that all wehave is the revelation God did in fact give; and it is cast incertain historical and cultural frameworks that cannot bedisregarded, for we have no other access to God s truth.It appears, then, that there is no intrinsic philosophicalreason why the entire Bible cannot be seen (as it claims t ibe) as a definitive and true revelation, even if all of it is, inthe sense just explained, culture-bound. And this suggeststhat the appeal of von Allmen, Kraft and others s epistemologically and hermeneutically naive.

(3) It is unwise because von Allmen, believing his proposed tabula rasa to be possible, and his particular reconstruction of gospel traditions neutral, is in fact promulgatinghis own brand of theology, while honestly but mistakenlythinking himself above the fray. No blindness s worse thanthat which thinks it sees (as John 9:39-41 points out). Is itnot obvious that even as Western evangelical missionariestry to impose their theological frameworks on their converts,so Western missionaries of more liberal persuasion try toimpose their scepticism and relativism on theirs?93 Far betteris it to admit these tendencies, and become aware of thelimitations these inevitabilities impose on the cross-culturalmissionary.

Church and Mission o n t e x t u a l i ~ a t i o n and Third Horizon 25

(4) It is unwise because it fails to grapple with the thirdhorizon. Modern debate over hermeneutics commonlyspeaks, as we have seen, of the two horizons; missiologistsforce us to think of the third. If the second horizon ofunderstanding is that of the reader or interpreter of Scripture, that horizon of understanding will be at least roughlysimilar to that of the interpreter s colleague in his ownculture; so that when the interpreter has fused his ownhorizon of understanding with the first (that of the text) soeffectively as to have facilitated a true transfer of meaning,he becomes capable of learning to think through the meaningof the text in his own language and cultural framework; andthen it is a relatively small step to communicate these findings to his colleague. Of course, the interpreter s ownunderstanding may still need considerable correction,revision, deepening and so forth; but for the sake of simplifying the argument, let us suppose that he s substantiallyright in his understanding of the text, the fusion operatiOil lhaving been responsibly carried out. If this interpreter nowwishes to communicate the truth he has learned to person.of another culture, of course, he faces the third horizon, thatof the target person or group. To communicate accuratelythe substance of what he has learned, the interpreter, nowa witness or preacher of sorts, must fuse the horizon of hisown understanding with that of the hearer - for a start, hemust learn a new culture. The truth he wishes to conveymust then be passed on in the words and actions andparameters of that language and culture. That is one of thethings that makes an effective missionary. In time, the newhearer, now a convert, learns to fuse the horizon of hisunderstanding with that of the biblical text; and because heprobably knows his own culture better than the missionaryever will, he has the potential, all things being equal, tobecome a far clearer and more effective witness and theologian in his own culture than the missionary does.

One problem, of course, is that the missionary may unwittingly incorporate a lot of his own cultural baggage into thegospel he is preaching. But that substantial truth can beconveyed across cultures is demonstrated by both vonAllmen and Kraft themselves: they are read, and understood,


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25 2 The Church In The Bible nd The World

by Africans and Westerners alike. A second problem is thatthe new convert may have unwittingly picked up some ofthis unnecessary baggage from the missionary. But it isprecisely in fostering the fusion of the convert s horizon ofunderstanding with that of the biblical text, which bothmissionary and convert agree is the basis of authority fortheir shared faith, that there is a possibility of the convert sdivesting himself of these unwise and sometimes unwittingaccretions, a possibility of developing a genuinely contextualized theology.

In fact, as I suggested in the introduction, the model canbecome far more complex yet, because each generation ofbelievers tries to grapple with the way the gospel given inthe Bible has been understood in other ages, branches andcultures in the history of the church; and this involves stillmore fusing of horizons if true understanding is to be gained.That is what makes a competent historian.

94 Moreover, vonAllmen frequently speaks of a genuine frican theology overagainst Western theology, as if these two labels representundifferentiated wholes; whereas in fact there are manydifferent Western theologies (not to mention cultures andlanguages) and even more African theologies (and culturesand languages). Why should Byang Kato s theology be criti

1987 Church and Mission

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