Lausanne World Pulse – Escaping from the Prison of a Westernized Gospel
By Knud Jørgensen
“The dynamic of Christianity…is not in the sacredness of cultural forms—even those that God once used. The Christian dynamic is in the venturesomeness of participating with God in the transformation of contemporary cultural forms to serve more adequately as vehicles for God’s interaction with human beings. What we seek is a Christianity equivalent in its dynamics to that displayed in the pages of the New Testament.”1
Since the beginning of the new millennium, mission has been facing a dramatic shift in direction, from the East and South to the rest of the world. Mission is multidirectional, from everywhere to everywhere. Indeed, the majority of missionaries today come from the Global South.
This poses a challenge for Western churches, imprisoned as they are by the view that Western theology is universally valid. The Greco-Roman, Western framework of Christianity has remained in force up until our time. The Western character of the Church has resulted in churches that were born as a result of missionary work and therefore have adopted a Western style of belief.
Fundamentally, Christianity is universally equal for all; however, the forms of Christianity have not always been so.
In order to realize such universality, Christians in all cultures and nations have an equal right to produce their interpretation of the Christian faith. This implies a need for self-theologizing. Churches in the West carried out such self-theologizing for centuries. This was largely based on a shared culture. It is time to realise the limitations of that culture. We are obliged to seriously study our relationship with our own culture and how this relationship formed our understanding of the gospel. “A plurality of cultures,” writes David Bosch, “presupposes a plurality of theologies and therefore, for Third-World churches, a farewell to a Eurocentric approach…The Christian faith must be rethought, reformulated, and lived anew in each human culture.”2
A Norwegian colleague, Notto Thelle, uses the term “the double conversion of the missionary” to describe his own life and his encounter with people of a different faith in Japan. This encounter changed him as a missionary and made his Christian faith unfold in a larger world. I experienced something similar. Ten years in Ethiopia and many additional years in close contact with China and Asia have changed my life, my faith, and my theology. Two additional factors along the road of conversion were (1) meeting with the East-African Revival and (2) encountering growing and transformed churches and Christians in Ethiopia and China.
|
The biblical texts do not suit the unengaged theology of the Enlightenment. For the same reason, the missiology of the Global South resonates most closely with the biblical texts. |
Letting Missiology Challenge Western Theology
This has, in the course of the years, made me realise that our Western theology is in “Constantine” bondage. This bondage implies a deep crisis of communication. The way out of the bondage and into the future is to let missiology challenge and even replace my Western theology.
The Asian missiologist Hwa Yung claims that “any authentic indigenous theology—indeed, any theology for that matter—must be missiological and pastoral in its fundamental conception.”3 Missiological means that which relates to the mission of the Church; pastoral refers to the process of nurturing the growth of converts and bringing them and their churches to maturity in faith and witness. This implies that the pastoral is linked to the missiological: “If the above is correct, then every theology must ultimately be judged by its efficacy in enhancing or obstructing the mission of Christ, the missio Dei.”4
My first years in Ethiopia made me realise that major parts of the theology I inhaled as a student in Copenhagen in the 1960s were quite far from being “authentic indigenous theology.” Rather, it was a theology developed within the Constantine epoch and therefore characterised by the fact that the Church was more preoccupied with “Christianization” than with mission. Today, we staunch, conservative Lutherans—and other established churches—need to admit that we are at the end of an era. This calls for a dramatic readjustment process.