Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

This blog highlights books from Ralph Winter’s Library and compares excerpts to Winter’s own writings on one or more of the themes from his list of twelve “Frontiers of Perspective.” (See the full list at the end of this blog.)

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(5) Reverse Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

Guder, Darrell L. 2000. The continuing conversion of the Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Darrell Guder served as a committee member for one of WCIU’s doctoral students, Bob Blincoe, U.S. Director of Frontiers. Guder and Ralph Winter shared a common interest in “sodalities,” structures found in early Jewish and early Christian mission, and throughout history, for the purpose of accomplishing special tasks. In this book, Guder includes a section on the challenges of “Translation as Cultural Formation and Transformation” (pages 82ff):

The difficult question of circumcision in the early experience of the church illustrates the difference between literal translation and cultural translation. … Events are translated in such as way that Jesus is recognized as Lord and Savior, his call to discipleship is followed, his teaching received and implemented, and the apostolic witness extended. This must happen so that God’s mission may continue in each successive evangelized culture. … To put it in other words: It was not merely God’s intention that the message, as disembodied language, be translated from one language to another. … If the gospel is faithfully translated, then it continues to work as a two-edged sword. That transformative witness will hallow some elements of the culture, adapt others, and reject others. The receiving culture cannot be any more normative than the culture of the evangelizing witnesses. The desire to control constantly asserts itself here. Cultures try to bring the gospel under their control, attempting to fit the person and work of Christ into their patterns of accepted religious practice. Translation is a risk, and thus the process must be one of continuing conversion.

Compare Guder’s comments to Winter’s explanation of the fifth of his “twelve frontiers of perspective” and in a paper presented to the Frontier Mission Fellowship August 20, 2003.

Winter, Ralph D. 2005. Twelve frontiers of perspective. In Frontiers in mission, ed. Ralph D. Winter, 30-42. Pasadena: WCIU Press.

As I have thought about this, it became to me ominous and suspicious that our own form of Christianity has been unthinkingly assumed to be the most balanced, Biblical, and properly contextualized. Is it possible that we need to know how to de-contextualize our own Christianity before we can ever very successfully contextualize the Bible for somebody else?

            Let’s assume for a moment that our best understanding of the word contextualization here at home is not that of seeking indigenous forms to make our faith, our form of Christianity, more acceptable to others, but also means trying to make sure that existing indigenous forms employed by our own people are accurate carrier vehicles for a true, balanced, Biblical faith. In that case we need to be doubly sure what Biblical faith really is.

            Thus arises the idea of the de-contextualization of our own tradition, or reverse contextualization, which means being willing to find major philosophic or Biblical or theological flaws in our own tradition. It really isn’t the same as asking if the as-is Christianity of our stripe will ever fit into the Hindu tradition. It’s a different task requiring us to talk about the proper contextualization of the Gospel in two directions: into the field culture and, even before that, into our home culture.

Winter, Ralph D. 2003. W. 1234.3 The last act. Paper presented to the Frontier Mission Fellowship, 20 August, in Pasadena, California.

We note Greek followers of the faith who sneered at Jewish believers who maintained their cultural traditions. We note a major spiritual tension arising as both Jesus and the leaders who followed him underscored a theme basic to the Old Testament, which demanded heart faith not just outward compliance with religious forms. Emphasis on faith then appeared to some as a reason for ignoring all outward obedience. This same tension would arise again and again down through history whenever the faith would flow from the forms of one cultural tradition to another.

            True faith always is evidenced in true obedience, but the form of that obedience is always cultural. This was the basis for the hostility aroused against Paul by Jews. It presages the opposition that may arise every time the Gospel takes on new cultural clothing.

Ralph Winter’s 12 “Frontiers of Perspective” represent major shifts in his thinking that “profoundly modified and molded his perception of the mission task”:

(1) Unreached Peoples

(2) The Great Commission and Abraham

(3) From the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task

(4) Failure with the Large Groups and the Off-setting Trend to “Radical Contextualization”

(5) Reverse Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

(6) The Reclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom

(7) Beyond Christianity

(8) A Different Type of Recruitment

(9) A Trojan Horse

(10) Needed: a Revolution in Pastoral Training

(11) The Religion of Science

(12) The Challenge of the Evil One