The Gospel – Fixed or Dynamic?

In January 2000, I went to the Asian Institute of Liturgy and Music (AILM) in the Philippines as a volunteer in mission. The purpose of the institute is to preserve and teach the rich diverse ethnic traditions of Asian music and all that is conducive to worship and the interpretation of the gospel.

I was included in the seminary accreditation team of the Association of Theological Education in Southeast Asia. We visited six seminaries — three in the Visayas, the middle islands, and three on the main island, Luzon. I had opportunity to meet people of pew and pulpit from a variety of churches. Listening and reading, I taught some and learned a great deal more.

I concluded that two distinct but interrelated tasks are ahead of members of Western churches that engage in mission in Africa or Asia: (1) indigenization and (2) interfaith dialogues are the order of the day.

Indigenization

Indigenization or inculturation is needed when a message is taken from one culture to another culture. If the message — in our case the gospel — is to be rooted in a different soil, adaptations are required.

The Presbyterian church has a good record. Most of our missionaries have been sensitive to people and their culture. In the United States, Presbyterians were the first to change from a Board of Foreign Mission — sending and receiving — to COEMAR, the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations. Even so, we taught what we knew: Western reasoning in exegesis and preaching, and Western hymns, style of worship and church government.

All this needs no excuse; our record shows that we understood the need for change. But do we understand it now?

Sadly, many of the voices supporting mission today cry for evangelists — not well-diggers or nurses or development experts. Sadly, many of the people who advocate evangelization have the least sensitivity to peoples’ setting, culture and thought patterns.

I have traveled in the last three decades in many parts of Asia; repeatedly in India and Korea. But only in Pakistan and the Philippines did I spend enough time for ongoing conversations with church people and for reading, reading, reading Asian theologians.

No general statement can be made about Asia: it is a diverse continent with great ethnic and linguistic and religious diversity. But something can be said of the whole. All historical religions originate in Asia. And Asia’s common history speaks of various colonial powers that left behind diverse heritages or consequences.

If the Philippines, a former Spanish colony with successful Catholization in the 16th and 17th centuries, are excluded, Christians in the rest of Asia are one percent of the population. Why did we do so poorly? Asian theologians think this is the result of disregard and disrespect for the cultural setting of those to whom the gospel is preached. Their heritage did not really matter in the eyes of some.

Consider the opposite: children in India used new English-language textbooks this summer. They met Mary and her lamb as “Meera and her cat.” “Rain, rain go away” was changed in the editions for the water-thirsty western Indian states into “Rain, ran, come again.” As a teacher remarked, “We don’t want children to be threatened by a new language. They should enjoy it.”

How much more true when it comes to the gospel. They should enjoy it! How is it that many of us would oppose asking our Asian sisters and brothers what adaptation is necessary to set Christ in their midst? Not with gimmicks, but with respect and true listening. How is the gospel to be proclaimed without the strangeness of Western culture, with respect for the culture of the hearers?

Consider Paul’s days in Athens (Acts 17:16-34). Paul does not say everything is equally right: he argues “in the synagogue with Jews and devout persons, and also in the marketplace” (v. 17). Some “philosophers debated with him” (v. 18).

In his sermon on the Areopagus, Paul refers courteously to their tradition (v. 23) and anchors his message into their context: he starts with what is familiar and valuable to them. He even quotes their poets (v.28), and we continue to quote, “In him we live and move and have our being.”

No one can read the New Testament and maintain that the gospel is preached in the same way throughout. Even in one book, Acts, the early chapters are rooted in the Jewish tradition; not so in the later section, when Gentiles are addressed.

This is what we did not fully realize in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Now we note it as we hear and read Asian theologians on the need for indigenization. To see the importance of this issue in an eminently readable book, turn to the Taiwanese Presbyterian theologian, C.S. Song, in Tell Us Our Names (Orbis, 1984).

The critique of our culture does not ask us to get out of our skin, to become non-Western people and think as the Jerusalem church did before A.D. 70. We are to be critical and reject what is wrong, unjust, exploitive in our culture.

When we are respectful to Asian cultures, we are not embracing Muslim or Hindu or Confucian teaching and practice. But we listen attentively to our sisters and brothers in Asia and learn from them what title of Christ is significant to them. We ask: What does the symbol of the cross say to them? What posture do they find most worshipful — standing, kneeling, sitting on the floor, prostrating themselves?

Think of our Western diversity at the Lord’s Table. We understand that there are many ways humbly to accept Christ’s gift of his body so that we may become his body. Yet some preach today as if there is a single way to believe and live and all else is condemned. They seem not to know that when people in Asia or America or anywhere else become Christians, they will know what is acceptable in their culture and what must be left behind.

Those who fear the loss of orthodoxy as the Euro-American debating table is extended all over the globe ought to read Asian and African theologians. The do not imitate us, neither do they adopt the thoughts of their Latin American sisters and brothers. They find their own voices — an amazing diversity of voices — and discuss the essence of the Christian faith.

Interfaith Dialogue

The second major task for Westerners doing mission work in Asia is interfaith dialogue. This is not a new agenda; it has long been advocated by some of the most grounded Christians. As a denomination we have been part of the interfaith dialogues in both the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, but on the congregational level we have been engaged less and less.

Some Presbyterians shudder at the thought of talking with Muslims or Buddhists, unless we are preaching to them. Well, we may teach them, but only if we learn from them. That is what interfaith dialogue is all about. Two Christians in our midst have borne powerful witness to the need for dialogue with those of other faiths.

In his writing, lecturing, also speaking on television, Huston Smith has shared his insights. The son of China missionaries, he teaches us that the one and only God has spoken “in diverse ways” in the world’s major religions and we will come to a much deeper understanding of the Christian faith by studying and learning some of those diverse ways. Professor Smith remains a faithful Methodist.

Thomas Merton, whose memory and influence continues to radiate from the Gethsemani Monastery — so near to, yet so far from Louisville — has helped the church to uncover the treasures God has hidden in major religions. Merton’s testimony influenced Vatican II concerning other religions. Merton remained Roman Catholic; his heritage was celebrated in 1996 with a dialogue on the spiritual life by Buddhist and Christian monastics (Mitchell, Donald W. and James Wiseman, eds., The Gethsemani Encounter, Continuum, 1998).

There are voices in the Presbyterian church that would shout down any call for interfaith dialogue. “We have the truth,” they assert. But we live in an age when all absolute statements are not only questioned but often denied, not because of skepticism, but because we know more.

Even physicists doubt objectivity. How can religious people claim their own understanding is absolute and objective? When we defend the truth of the faith, we are not defending God or God’s self-revelation. This is theology and theology, however correct, is human work. God is not engaged in theology, we are.

What we confess is what we comprehend of the Christian faith. That is why “Every theological approach is a partial and incomplete witness to the gospel” (Nickle, Keith F., and Timothy F. Lull, eds., A Common Calling, p. 66, Augsburg, 1993).

The change that Asian Christians are pleading for in our proclamation is not to relativize the Christian faith and its message, but to come to terms with the concept of plurality. Not every religion is equally true, nor goes equally far, but “. . . all religions contain facets of truth and . . . people experience the one absolute God through different manifestations” (G. M. Nalunmakal, Bangalore Theological Forum, Sept.-Dec. 1996, p. 88).

As long as we think that we are the only carriers of God’s Truth, we cannot put out our hand to others. Truth matters immensely. God is Truth. Our knowledge is a glimpse of that Truth. Is that why Christ commanded us not to hold the right doctrine, but to “love one another even as I [Christ] loved you”? Not sentimental but sacrificial love is asked of the churches now: Fear not, be courageous and listen to what others have learned about the one and only God who “so loved the cosmos” that God gave the one and only Son.

Asian Christians remind us that theology is not only intellectual; it is also intuitive. Faith, and the doctrine it embraces, lives not only in our mind, but also in our heart — or does not live.