Dae Ryeong Kim's articles

A Methodology for Theologizing in Mission in Modern Culture

The Place of Culture in Theology in Modern World
 

Now, seeing the growing influence of the entertainment industry represented by Hollywood on shaping pop culture, expanding its realm into the spiritual and religious world, what should be theologian’s influence to this challenge of Hollywood pop culture? Or, as Grenz put it, “What does Wheaton have to do with Hollywood?” What is the role of culture in theology? To what extent ought Christian theologians take culture seriously?

Stanley J. Grenz (2,000) contrasts two extreme opposite paradigm in responding to culture. One is from the liberal, while the other is from the conservative evangelical camps. Although an ancient problem, the question of the relationship between culture and theology has generated an intense and often heated discussion since the late nineteenth century.

In fact, the liberal theology of the nineteenth century was largely shaped by theologian’s response to the culture of the days. Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) is a classical example of this response. Schleiermacher and other liberal theologians who followed him sought to give place to culture in their theological reflections. But while their intent was to make faith relevant to the culture of modern era, they went to too extreme. As Grenz remarks it, it was their fault to link theology too closely with the cultural impulses of the day. According to him, any theologian who takes culture seriously risks elevating culture above the Biblical message or allowing contemporary thinking to sit in judgment over Christian teaching. And sensitivity to culture does open the way to a drift into syncretism, as critics of liberalism repeatedly point out.

Admitting the mistakes made by the liberal theologians, Grenz, however, reminds us of that that the other extreme direction can be also a mistake. In their attempt to avoid these risks, many evangelicals have tended to the opposite extreme. Because theology involves the discovery of truth that is transcultural, they argue, theologians need give little, if any, thought to culture.  These scholars rightfully warn against the perils of cultural accommodationism. But the question is if our theologizing should be free of cultural relevancy. Grenz points out that evangelicals who seek to construct a culture-free theology are attempting the impossible. We simply cannot escape from our cultural context into some transcultural vantage point no matter however intellectual our theological discussion is. Theology has to do with culture since all theology is by its very nature as a human enterprise culturally embedded. Grenz asserts, “When we look back to the supposedly grand, culture-free, timeless theological systems of past eras, we can see how culturally-conditioned-or culturally-sensitive-they actually were.”

Grenz argues that attempts to construct a culture-free theology—that is, theological reflection without cultural consideration--are theologically and Biblically unwarranted. His position is that divine truth is always culturally embedded rather than Rather than coming to us in transcultural form,. Lesslie Newbigin points out that this is the case with the gospel itself: "We must start with the basic fact that there is no such thing as a pure gospel if by that is meant something which is not embodied in a culture. . . . Every interpretation of the gospel is embodied in some cultural form. Justo Gonzales confirms this assessment. "The knowledge of Christ never comes to us apart from culture, or devoid of cultural baggage," he writes. Gonzales then explains:

From its very inception, the gospel was proclaimed within a culture. Jesus came to his contemporaries within the circumstances of the Jewish culture of his time and place. Its was as Jews-more concretely, as Galilean Jews-that his first disciples received him. Ever since, in the passage to the various forms of Hellenistic culture, in the conversion of the Germanic peoples, and in every other missionary enterprise and conversion experience, people have met Christ mediated through cultures-both theirs and the culture of those who communicated the gospel to them.

As Gonzales's statement suggests, the culture-specific nature of divine truth arises directly out of the doctrine of the incarnation with its reminder that the Word became flesh in a specific cultural context (John 1:14). In keeping with the nature of the incarnation, Paul readily drew from Greek cultural artifacts. Hence, he appealed to the works of pagan poets in his conversation with the Athenian philosophers (Acts 17:28). John Goldingay notes, "Paul is the great discursive theologian in Scripture, but his systematic, analytic thinking characteristically takes the form of contextual theological reflection."

After all, the divine truth takes a cultural form when it is revealed to us human beings living within a cultural context. Theology has cultural implications. The goal of our theologizing is,then, culture-specific as well. As the incarnate Word, Jesus ministered to culturally-embedded people in first-century Palestine in a culturally sensitive manner. Hence, he approached the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-24) in a manner quite different from his response to Nicodemus (John 3:1-21). So also our calling is to serve the present generation by speaking within and to the cultural context in which God has placed us. Apart from a few noteworthy exceptions, a near-consensus has emerged among theologians today, which says that theology must take culture seriously. Colin Gunton (1990) states the point starkly, but succinctly: "we must acknowledge the fact that all theologies belong in a particular context, and so are, to a degree, limited by the constraints of that context. To that extent, the context is one of the authorities to which the theologian must listen."

In this comparison of the two extreme models responding to culture by theologians, we with Grenz come to the conclusion that we will need to develop better paradigm. It is now evident that we need to take account of culture in our theological reflection. A theological method that acknowledges the connection between theology and culture must avoid both the error of cultural accommodationism on the one hand and the misguided quest for a culture-free theology on the other. Instead, it involves an interactional approach (Cf. Dyrness 1989) that brings the Biblical message (together with the Christian heritage) into critical conversation with contemporary culture. This leads us to our next inquiry, “what is entailed in this interaction?”
 

  © Article first posted on the Internet on January 7, 2002.

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