Slice of Laodicea

Dr. Walt Scalen is an assistant professor of government at Steven F. Austin State University in Texas. He is also a Slice reader and sent in this excellent article. We hear emergent and seeker pastors alike talk much about contextualism. But where is this emphasis leading the church?

Contextualism Gone Wild

By Walt Scalen

Contextualism in its most benign form is simply the attempt to communicate with people who are different. Some degree of cultural accommodation is inevitable; it is largely a matter of courtesy and common sense. Extreme forms of contextualism, however, result in wholesale imitation and ultimately diminish ones own identity. One of the little examined assumptions of the rabid contextualism that is driving many “progressive” evangelical Christians to adopt every conceivable cultural form as a means of evangelism is that cultural forms are considered to be largely neutral. For example, heavy metal music is associated with a relatively well defined youth sub culture. To reach this group, it is assumed that the Gospel message can be carried by such cultural forms as skulls and other death symbols and yet the message remains intact, unscathed and unchanged. Thus, the magic bullet of the New Christianity: the methods change, but the message doesn’t. This idea is wildly popular, repeated ad infinitum on a daily basis by the millions who consider it an unquestioned and absolute edict. From “Jesus Mosques” to reach Moslems to “Jesus Meditation” to reach mystics, there are no limits to which so-called “European Christianity” must be reshaped to fit every conceivable cultural form.

There are several assumptions on which this line of thinking is based: multiculturalism, relativism, and a simplistic understanding of culture. First, multiculturalism is the position that all cultures are equal because there is no objective standard for evaluating them. This idea is based on philosophical relativism which in its crudest form results in the total absence of standards. Ultimately nothing can be determined to be good or evil because all things are just different. These ideas give rise to the notion of cultural neutrality. Since all cultures are equal, since nothing can be seen as superior or better, ergo, any cultural form can “carry” any cultural idea.

What is missing? First, the largest and most influential cultures of the world were historically related to religions with exclusive truth claims. The Near Eastern cultures built on Islam, the Far Eastern Cultures built on Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and other religions, and Western culture built largely on the foundation of Christianity all claim to be correct and true assessments of reality. Since culture is a shared reality, it is a coherent and largely consistent set of ideas, ideals, values, and norms which produce predictable forms of art, music, family systems, political arrangements, and other cultural outcomes. Historically, the form is typically consistent with the content. In other words, particular ways of thinking produce particular ways of acting. For example, distinctively different kinds of architecture are produced by distinctively different kinds of ideas. The mosque, the cathedral, and the temple are reflections of the cultures that create and build them. Similarly, the notions of multiculturalism and relativism may be dominant ideas in the modern mind, but they too claim exclusive right to the truth, ironically, a violation of their central idea, and they produce predictable outcomes.

The notion that cultural forms can be used interchangeably fails to understand the extent to which every cultural form is implicated, shaped, and formed by the values, standards, or beliefs of a particular culture. In essence, cultural forms are not neutral and cannot be somehow totally emptied of their exclusive views of reality. For example, the Christian Faith is a culture, it makes distinctive truth claims, and it is shaped by a core set of beliefs, values, and practices. But for some so called “progressive” Christians “the Faith once delivered to the saints” is like cultural silly putty that can be molded and shaped into any form and combined with any other set of practices without consequence. For the naive and unwary, imitation is the road to extinction, and the absence of boundaries diminishes and ultimately destroys identity.

Syncretism has always been the danger of excessive contextualism, but somehow the “we are changing the methods not the message” slogan has so resonated with many Christians anxious to see progress in evangelism and growth in numbers that caution has been thrown to the wind. Assuming that all cultural forms are neutral, almost anything is now “worship,” and virtually any outreach method is appropriate for “fishers of men.” This poignant phrase used by Jesus in Matthew 4:19 is widely taken to mean that people should be “lured” into the Kingdom by any means necessary, even deception, in the same fashion that fisherman in the modern era use “lures” to catch fish. The problem with this view is ironically one of context; the fisherman in Biblical times used nets. This approach had much more to do with location and timing than enticement.

Theologically and Biblically, the key assumption driving many evangelistic techniques and church growth methods is that the work of the Spirit can be accomplished by the means of the flesh. This notion produces much “strange fire;” however, the proponents of this idea claim prodigious numbers. “It works,” they say, “look at the bottom line, many are converted!” But what are they converted to? Is it possible that the methods used are so overwhelmingly powerful and the message communicated is so distorted, that “converts” are responding to the familiar rather than being transformed by the unfamiliar?

In the final analysis, it is a clearly historical Christian doctrine that conversion or the Second Birth is a miracle produced by the Holy Spirit rather than by the cleverness of man. Interestingly, in the so-called Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20 and Mark 16:15-16), Jesus does not command His church to convert the lost, but to communicate what He taught and make disciples. It is the resurrected Lord Himself who tells His followers when and where to fish, and He gives the increase.

Author bio:

Walt Scalen had a twenty year career in both the federal and state courts as a probation officer and administrator. He has taught both college and university classes in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and criminal justice. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the department of government at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. During the last few years he has been writing and publishing in the field of the sociology of religion.