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Questions I Have on the Contextualization of the Gospel How do we contextualize (to place a word or idea in a particular context) the gospel to different people, living in different places, living in different cultures? It is obvious that I have to take a different approach to sharing the gospel with someone in Africa or India other than the approach I would use in the U.S. It also goes without saying that I would have to use different methods of sharing the gospel for someone in rural Alabama and someone who lives in New York City or Seattle or Chicago. Language and views of God are varied among cultures. It is important to know what context you are in and where the people of that context are coming from. I also think it is important to note that there are Christians living in different cultures within the U.S. as well as Christians overseas who have different views and languages used to describe God. This language and their views have been shaped by their surrounding culture. This has shaped their lens from which they see God and the gospel. Now whose lens is right? If I have been shaped by a Western North American culture and my brother in India has been shaped by an Eastern South India culture, who is right? Well, it depends on which culture you grew up in. For my brother in India, he must surely think that there are things that I do within my faith that he views as wrong from his cultural standpoint. And the same goes for me. I am sure there are things that I disagree with him. I'm not so much talking about theological disagreements (although our theology is very much shaped by the culture we are in) but more social adaptions. For example, what if a small tribe in Africa has recently received the gospel from a Western Christian missionary. However, they believe in cannibalism after death. That when a member of the tribes die, its is only fitting that his body should be consumed by the rest of the tribe. To bury a member of the tribe under the ground, in the dirt, only to be eaten by worms is seen as ridiculous. How does the Western Christian missionary resolve the tension between his cultural standards and that of the tribe. On a less exagerated scale, what about language that is used that is contrary to one's culture? Or what about the consumation of wine or beer? What about cigars? What about halloween? Alot of how these things are viewed from a cultural lens as opposed to a biblical lens. We must understand what lens our audience or context is looking through before we begin to wrestle and work out the tension in these cultural and theological issues. Francis Schaeffer once said if he had only one hour to share the gospel with a person, he would spend the first forty-five minutes finding out what the person believed about God and the last fifteen minutes presenting Christ from that basis. We need to know our context. Then we interpret that context and the methods used to communicate the gospel from a biblical lens. When this happens we can then begin to resolve some of the social and cultural issues that the gospel confronts in varying places, times, and people. The gospel is not interpreted through a cultural lens. Nor is the culture interpreted through the gospel lens. In my opinion, and I could be wrong, the gospel is embodied within a specific culture. Gospel and culture coexist. They do not live seperately from each other. You have to critique the culture from the biblical lens. And you have to critique the biblical lens to make sure that it hasn't been formed by culture, but instead by the Word of God. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we need to be careful to make sure we're not bring a gospel that has been conditioned and formulated by our culture. But instead bring the gospel that is transcendent of all cultures. A gospel that is about the story of human history of all people, in all places, and at all times. Not the gospel product of a modern, Westernized, middle class context.