Global Paradigms, Culture and Religion

What does it mean to be part of global Christianity? How do we cope with diversity and truth in a multicultural context? Is Syncretism a betrayal of the Gospel or a necessary part of conversion? What does mission mean in a multi-religious world? Are David Bosch's elements of an emerging ecumenical paradigm the last gasp of modernist missiology or foundations for thinking about Christian mission in a newly religious post-modern age of globalisation?

This page has some introductory questions which arise out of awareness of living in a multicultural and multi-religious world in which every culture may be a vehicle of the Word of God. We bear witness to this in Bible Translation, but have more difficulty when it is extended to styles of worship and to theological formulation. It may be that we need better ways of stating our intention of being loyal to God and faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ.  Some emails in which I explored some of these questions are also included.

Key Text Philip Jenkins, The next Christendom, the coming of global Christianity, OUP, 2002.

Theology of Religion

The Bible seems to affirm people who have different ways of worship as well as condemning some ways of worship, including within the believing community. Where does this leave us? They are not all prophets of Baal out there - some of them are not only seekers after truth, they are heading in a similar direction.

Christianity and Culture

If we don't in practise and in theory admit the validity of other cultures we are actually claiming our own is the only one capable of sustaining Christian faith.

Syncretism

The real problem with syncretism is not only that everybody does it but conversion is impossible without it. See Thinking about syncretism.

What does it mean to think about Global Christianity?
What does it do to truth?

Some slightly edited emails written in January 2004:

Andrew Walls dictum about a post-Western Christianity and a post-Christian West means both affirming one's local and national needs (i.e. Kiwi, or North American, or wherever) and then connecting seriously with international Christianity. Setting one up at the expense of the other does not help either. People need to know where the numbers are and what they are doing to faith and theology and international networks. It also means other faiths and other places need to be part of the curriculum and non-Western authors have to be on the reading lists.

The global correctives of Lamin Sanneh (reminding us of the role of mission in preserving culture and dignifying all cultures with the capacity to bear the Word of God) are important, yet perhaps not as significant in relation to Asia as they may be in relation to Africa. I see new critical frameworks emerging and Karel Steenbrink is one person who I think is alert to some of this even if to some people he is too far down the track of Muslim hermeneutics of Christian texts. It seems that the rest of the world is catching up with the failure of the modernization equals secularization thesis, but this is something that scholarly opinion has been saying in relation to Southeast Asia for rather a long time.

Dunedin, 24 January, 2004

On the identity of Jesus, loyalty and direction are more important than detail, even if we need to get a bit less fuzzy about what this guy is like that we are loyal to.

From a global Christianity point of view Schweitzer's 19th century German liberal face at the bottom of the Christological well was not the end of the search for the historical Jesus but rather it's beginning. We start to see some answers when others are invited to look down the well also, not simply the well of critical wissenschaftlich history, but also of personal spirituality, community worship, and the mission of church in society. Seeing Christ in the reflections of multiple others and finding that we are still seeing Christ.

Some of the debate relates to hermeneutics and the need for multiple, multicultural, reader-response readings of the text. We  need to apply Bevans' Models of Contextual Theology to Christology. People find it confusing to move from single centres of hermeneutical authority to multiple centres, but I can't see how else we can do it. Pluralism to me is not a route to relativity, but a route to confidence about the things which have proved themselves across time and culture - Schreiter's New Catholicity without the institutional hegemony.

I suspect some contributions to the debate will show their hands as being scared that postmodernism, syncretism and relativity are the End, i.e. the end of my understanding of truth as defined by my tradition and its institutions, liberal, catholic, fundamentalist, evangelical. However the debate may well be reinforced by some from the "other" traditions speaking precisely that sort of language - just as in the gay ordination debate the extremes have an interest in defining it as a conflict between worldly unbelieving relativism and bible believing fundamentalism. For both those groups that may indeed be how it is; but this misses all those people, more or less liberal or more or less conservative, who find the issue not of a very different order from other complex hermeneutical and ethical problems the church has managed to face in the past.

There are still common understandings that it is possible to have reasonable confidence about. In contemporary experience this is conflict resolution 101 (see Robert and Alice Evan's workshops - that is global theological rubber hitting the existential road). Of course it does involve going through the mountains of cultural understanding and populist readings of the text, not around them. We might find though, that about the stuff that matters, in the intentions of its creeds and liturgies if not always in its formulations and fads, and in the long run of things, Christian tradition may not be so very wrong.

Dunedin, 25 January 2004.

All theologies are contextual, there are no other kind, and the normative relates to the contribution of all of them, though not all equally of course. Reality might be elsewhere, but this I think is a fair ideal.

Bosch was at the end of the day a theologian from above trying to be fair to all the theologies below, but his fundamental angst is late modernism, go to woe.

Normative and idealist language is important even when contextualisation is affirmed. The scriptural and human traditions are about things as they should be as well as things as they are - e.g. what the difference between what the bible teaches and what the bible describes. This is a breakthrough for some in their understanding of the nature of the bible, but it only goes a small way towards the problem of the dynamic nature of the ideal, and the problems when the ideal of one generation and circumstance is the fallen reality of another.

There is a common theme here - how post-modernism changed mission and missiology when the binary polarities of the world changed after 1989/90. There are issues which can only partially be answered by 1980s and earlier texts, however prescient. And well past 1990 it is still hard to find stuff which goes beyond the faddish exploitation of new academic freedoms and limitations, to develop new integrative frameworks, and the new paradigm Bosch was not actually in a position to describe.

Somewhere in all this is may also be my plea to see worship theology and mission as a dynamic of which mission is not the foundation and judge and reason for the other two. I still want to see theology as the starting point, even if it must be discovered, reformulated, learnt and corrected through worship and mission. Truth exists independent of our formulation and experience of it, just as God does. The conventional orthodox priority of mission over theology and worship seems to me to be just shifting authority between word, experience and deed. I guess at the end of the day I am a word/Word person, but not separate from the other two. This may be a totally different debate, or it might give a clue for the new paradigm.

Dunedin, 29 January 2004

How do we have "globalization of theological education" when in fact everything is
contextualized and localized?

It's about:

1) Needing to do justice to how things are - naming and analyzing what is already there as part of understanding and influencing the process.
2) Taking seriously the usual stuff about Western media, money, capital and politics ruling the world, along with Western theologizing, questions, and solutions.
3) Taking seriously the globalization of non-Western ideas - e.g. but not only via Disney looping back into 2
4) Empowering and learning from minority / local Christian cultures (as in a post-modern affirmation of diversity) - parallel to, if you can say it without being patronizing, the church needing the weak and the handicapped to be the Church of Jesus Christ.
5) Providing a basis for critiquing and affirming our local Christian faith and lifestyles
6) Saving us from the tyranny of new local theologies which seek to be totalizing explanations - as feminism, liberation theology, and contextual theology have in some hands appeared to seek to do.

The irony in the loop, as in postmodernism generally, is that it becomes a metanarrative when it purports to reject them. The logical flaw though is less important to a postmodern than a modern. It is a deliciously revealing irony that the "Gotcha!" perception of this by a modern, draws the response "So what?!" from a post-modern. I think its better to think in terms in being skeptical about metanarratives and recognize the need for some new ones - partly because we need straightforward models of how to think and live. Some level of reconstruction of the deconstructed is needed, but that is just what is done in every generation. As they say about eschatology, don't worry, it is not the end of the world.

Dunedin, 30 January 2004

There is a difference between saying there is no one normative faith and saying there is no normative faith, just as there is a difference between saying there is no absolute version of the truth and saying there is no absolute truth. Logical positivism says if we don't know it, it cannot be there. There is a real philosophical point here, but I think they are wrong.

There is stuff which is real even if we don't know it. There is absolute truth. There is normative faith. Our knowing is always "in part" - and on a continuum as a valid kind of knowing. The scientific repeatable experiment in the same conditions with the same outcomes has a different place on the "in part" continuum from religious/theological and personal knowledge, but both are a kind of knowing, albeit better differentiated than confused. There are degrees of objectivity and subjectivity, rather than mutually exclusive categories only one of which has value. That is why Schreiter's New Catholicity and Bevan's plurality of models are important. All forms of human knowing are not at the same place on the spectrum of uncertainty or the spectrum of truth may well have more than one dimension.

Jenkins warns about expecting or using Third World theology to solve First World problems, and he is right, but it is not the whole story. I would put it that it is wrong to expect Third World theology to solve First World problems in First World terms. Support over particular issues comes at a price and with a spiritual package that has all sorts of other stuff in it. I would talk more the language of corrective and enrichment than I would of support.

Dunedin, 31 January 2004

John Roxborogh, with thanks to my long-valued partner in dialogue, Robert Hunt.

References:

Bevans, Stephen B. Models of Contextual Theology, Faith and Cultures Series. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002.

Bosch, David Jacobus. Transforming Mission : Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, American Society of Missiology Series ; No. 16. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991.

Evans, Alice Frazer, Robert A. Evans, and Ronald S. Kraybill. Peace Skills : Leaders' Guide.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Jenkins, Philip. "After the Next Christendom." International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 20-22.

Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Sanneh, Lamin O. Encountering the West : Christianity and the Global Cultural Process : The African Dimension. London: Marshall Pickering, 1993.

Schreiter, Robert J. The New Catholicity. Theology between the Global and the Local. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999.

Steenbrink, Karel A. "The Rehabilitation of the Indigenous. A Survey of Recent Research on the History of Christianity in Indonesia." Exchange. Journal of Missiological and Ecumenical Research 22, no. 3 (1993): 250-63.