Gospel and Cultures

There are few conversations in Christian theological circles these days more full of energy than the one concerning gospel and cultures. There are many reasons for this, some external and some internal to the dynamics of the Christian experience. Some of the energy is simply around defining terms. For instance, what do we mean by culture, or as you'll see in my use, cultures. Several, notably Kathryn Tanner, have traced the shift in the meaning of this word. It once referred only to the achievement of a particular society, or more precisely, the achievement of a certain class. Only some were cultured, namely the elite.

Now we refer to culture as a whole way of life, as a web of significance, as something in which all of us participate and find a common life. In fact, culture is no longer simply something we achieve or produce. It precedes us, shaping our identities to a large extent through language, convention, rituals, and images.

One more shift, one under way in my opinion, is to see culture less as a spatial category, and more in temporal terms. Culture precedes us because it is moving, like a stream, which means it is also eluding us in some ways. We can no longer speak of it as something fixed. It is less a continent to explore and map (spatial), but more a stream to navigate (temporal). And because it is moving and not fixed, we also recognize that culture(s) is both plural and specific. Some have stopped using the word culture at all, preferring cultural. We can say something is cultural without nailing something down as the culture. Others talk about cultural flows, a variety of streams in which we find ourselves. No matter how you speak of it, notions of culture are still being explored.

This is an important conversation for Christianity because of its unique relationship through the centuries to cultures. Christianity has proved fairly nimble in crossing cultural boundaries. Imagine, for instance, the boundary crossing impulse in telling the story of Jesus in a language other than the one he spoke. Islam and Judaism, generally speaking, are much more wed to a particular cultural expression rooted in a particular language. Christians are eager to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible and do not require adherents to read the Bible in its original language. This is a pretty big deal.

It is also striking to me that the New Testament is comprised of documents representing a season of transition in the life of the people of God. It is a missionary literature propelled by the impulse that there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. This universalizing tendency in Christianity has to take into account every culture it encounters.

There is much to say here, and perhaps over time we can say more. But what I think is still largely lacking in the contemporary conversation is a rigorous discussion of gospel.

I often hear people say that the gospel is a constant, but the tactics, methods, or modes that we use are cultural. The gospel, here, is a fixed content. Like spatial understandings of culture, it is a fixed container. The way to make the gospel relevant is to give it a contemporary facelift, communicate it in ways that are meaningful to a particular culture. The relationship is kernel and husk. The gospel is the kernel, the seed that never changes. The husks are the cultural elements that can be peeled away. They are temporary, simply a matter of expediency. Relevance here is using movies or U2 concert footage to make the gospel more culturally accessible.

This is to be preferred to a view of gospel that overidentifies everything we do as the gospel. Some churches won't change at all because they think of everything as fixed. They think of Christianity in spatial terms. It can be identified completely and finally through certain characteristics, or marks of the church, that are immutable.

The problems here are numerous. Most critique from a theological perspective focuses on the naive understanding of the relationship between content and form. How we do something is just as much content as what we say. Form is meaning, and the adoption of cultural forms is a risk, perhaps inevitable, that threatens the particular formfulness of Christianity.

I appreciate this critique and have said things like this before. But I am coming to think that the greater problem in a kernel-husk view of gospel and culture is that it always makes the world a secondary concern to church. The church has the kernel, the world the husks. The world is only valuable as an illustration. The church can settle the gospel and its own identity beforehand in some kind of pure form, without any engagment with the world. This tempts theology to think of its task as settling certain topics related to certain notions of God (primarily owing to a substantialist ontology, i.e. spatial), rather than tracking the leading of a living God in the world he loves (more temporal?).

So, I want to see if there might be a similar gain for the term gospel to the one that delivered notions of culture from a fixed, spatial understanding.

And gospel is the place to start, I believe, for this reason. It is the term coined by the early Christians to indicate the mode of relationship they had with others. What does it mean to define a relationship in terms of news? In distinction to law or instruction or mystery or even truth? This is a vitally important question.