Contextualization
A minister walks into a building and up to the counter and proclaims: “I am here to free every prostitute you are forcing to work here!” The person behind the counter looks at the minister incredulously, and then raises their hands palm up in exasperation and declares: “Look around you. Don’t you know where you are? This is the public library!” The minister immediately apologies and with a voice mindful of their surroundings but full of righteous indignation whispers: “I am here to free every prostitute…”
The moral of this story is, we can declare a clear message and understand the response to that message but if we do not fully contextualize our ministry within our surroundings, we are in danger of committing absurdities.
This essay is the introduction to a serialized white paper. A white paper written as a collection of essays expanding on and further describing the concepts introduced in this first essay. Each one will explore aspects of the expression of the ministry of Jesus Christ in our post Christian, information saturated and science driven culture.
An expanded exploration of Scripture
To contextualize Christian ministry within culture we must first provide a working definition for what we believe human culture is.
Human culture is largely an organized malevolent spiritual environment designed to continuously corrupt and disrupt the expression of God's love through an ongoing deception. A deception that began with Adam and Eve and continues through the present day. Although it was the original condition of man that God's love be expressed organically as culture, we are now largely unaware of the true nature of love or this spiritual environment's opposition to its human expression.
In light of this definition, a practical understanding of humanity’s original spiritual nature contrasted with its current fallen nature is the only way to effectively demonstrate the truth of culture’s ongoing effects on everyday life and the need for the cure found in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
These contrasting human natures are illustrated for us in the descriptive and historical portions of the information contained in scripture. This information, though secondary to God's plan of salvation, is important to this practical understanding of what a human being is and what a human being was created by God to be.
However, if we study scripture no further than God’s essential plan of salvation and neglect an earnest study of this secondary biblical information, we are restricting the Holy Spirits leading into all truth. Losing this larger perspective on the Bible exposes Christian belief to groundless attacks within culture and may allow defenses of the Christian faith that have no scriptural foundation.
The essential biblical exploration of God’s plan of salvation can never be exhausted. However, neither can the exploration of the information secondary to salvation that describes the nature of humanity and creation. Both categories of biblical knowledge are boundless and necessary to representing the Christian narrative effectively in mainstream culture.
Such an expanded representation of God’s word in the larger culture is unrivaled in its ability to frame the human condition as well as inform all human knowledge. The fullness of truth contained in the Bible is not constrained by the distant horizons of knowledge within view of any academic discipline or religious tradition.
The contents of God’s word are limitless and expansive and are to be explored with fearlessness, awe, and a humble heart. The Bible cannot be treated as mere punctuation to man’s accumulated understandings. Man’s scientific, philosophical, and theological understandings merely punctuate and clarify for us the expansive content of biblical truth.
The fundamental, but largely unrecognized, reality of all human attempts to acquire knowledge is that man’s reasoned conclusions are constrained and validated by a disciplined yet expanded exploration of the truth revealed in the Bible, not the other way around.
Our Opportunity
The 21st century Christian Church can express the authentic Christian Idea, which includes an introduction to God’s essential nature, throughout every aspect of the larger culture. This calls for a practical application of scriptural text and principles to the questions being asked within the culture, whether they are scientific, philosophical, or religious. Information is now being disseminated at the speed of light through ubiquitous technology and the authentic Christian idea must be included in the conversations that ensue.
The everyday questions that arise from just living a human life in all its ever-changing challenges must be addressed directly and without compromise. The Bible is equal to the challenge, and as we benefit from the diligent study of scripture in relationship with God, becoming benefactors of the revelation that God freely gives, so are we.
Every attempt to answer these essential questions falls somewhere within one of two broad and general worldviews. If you believe that biblical knowledge is constrained by the collective knowledge of man, then it follows that you are the captain of your fate and arbiter of your purpose. This leads you to decide for yourself, through man’s accumulated understandings, what is good and what is evil.
Alternatively, if you believe that scripture is the immeasurable bastion of the truth of existence then it follows that man is subject to the truth of God as expressed in scripture. Therefore, you are obligated to fulfill your God given purpose as God's representative in the earth.
As a practical matter, all of us practice one of these two irreconcilable internal beliefs. Our struggle with how to live our everyday lives is often an expression of the tension between these two worldviews.
This internal tension has been especially felt by anyone who has asked so little of scripture as to make it impossible to defend but has asked just enough to make it possible to reject. For instance, anyone who has asked, “If God is real why have I been disappointed by the Christian lives of strangers, pastors and parents,” “If God created this world why is it so full of indiscriminate pain, hardship, and suffering,” “If God is love why do we seem to live without purpose and die without significance?” This internal tension has been felt pointedly by anyone who has ever had the internal secret longing of their heart of heart implore: “Why are things so?”
An expansive exploration of scripture is the Church’s obligation to these asking hearts.
Vernon L. Harper
Next: Knowing and Sharing God