fire
August 18th, 2005 by Andy
Ok, fire. Fire is our metaphor for the way that God encounters culture. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about God is that God comes. God doesn’t just sit up in the divine council waiting for us to come. We all know that we’d never make it. Instead God comes to us. This is the heart of the Biblical story. From Genesis through Revelation, time after time, God comes to meet his people. Each and every time God encounters not only human beings but also the culture that inevitably surrounds us. Think about it. God can’t come to a person with out being relevant to that person’s culture (language, geography, ethics, morality).
So when God comes to dwell with us, and this may seem obvious, but God comes as Jew. Jesus was a Jew. The color of his skin and eyes, the shape of his face, the way he dressed and even the way he smelled was Jewish. Does this mean that out of all the myriad variety of human beings on this planet the ancient Jewish people are the best representation of God? Certainly not. God comes with a message, and in order that God might be heard and understood, God becomes relevant to Israel in the form of Jesus Christ. But Jesus was different. He was very much a part of the Jewish culture, but also he was more. He was the very best of that culture. He encountered the culture of the Jewish people and like a purifying fire, proceeded to transform it.
Encountering culture means being relevant and transformative. It does not mean unconditional accommodation of culture. But if the church has learned anything from the highs and lows of the last few centuries of missionary activity, it’s this: in order to communicate the good news of the Kingdom of God, we must first become relevant (in more than just language) to the culture. Fire seems a good metaphor for this encounter considering the frequency that God chooses to appear in fire (think burning bush, pillar of fire and smoke and pentacost just to name a few). So what does it mean to encounter and be transformative in our culture? This is a question that must constantly be asked if we are to be faithful witnesses of the Kingdom of God. To put it bluntly, relevance to culture is not optional.
Now as the message gets communicated in any given culture, the temptation is to view the whole combination as the gospel. At which point it gets scary to talk of changing the way we communicate when the culture changes. It’s a hard thing to say what is culture and what is not and I think the truth must be worked out in community, so….. Let’s start talking…
NOTE: disagreement is healthy and helps us learn and grow and I welcome it. In fact, the truth is that I really enjoy it (I’m sick, I know). Only let’s be generous with each other. Love you folks!
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I guess the question I have in regards to this is…how far do we go to make ourselves relevant to the culture? At some point the culture and Christianity will clash, and violently at times because the ‘culture’ as we know wants nothing to do with the message Christ brought, and more often than not considers him to be less that who he is. I’m definately excited that the church is catching up in regards to using technology to help transform the communities around it, using music as a means to reach others, even using movies to give a picture as to what is being discussed. But where is the line…where is the point where truth and relevance do not mix because of how the culture views what is relevant and what is not?
Comment by Michael — August 18, 2005 @ 2:52 pm
p.s. I want a shirt with the fire element on it.
Comment by Michael — August 18, 2005 @ 2:53 pm
for me, it helps to think like a misisonary. I’ve got to go into the culture around and learn the language. I’ve got to figure out their family structures and value systems. I’ve got to make relationships and listen carefully to how they communicate to each other at a level beyond language. Then I’ve got to sort out what is enduring truth and what is my own culture in how I understand the Gospel and Christianity. Then we can start to think about contextualizing the message to a new culture.
I am so with you, Michael. The Kingdom of God will collide with the ‘principalities and powers of this dark world’. We cannot allow ourselves to simply accomadate culture. If a culture says there can be no such thing as a metanarrative (which our current culture is fond of saying), we must speak back into our culture that yes there is a grand over-arching story and God’s the storyteller. We must be willing to stand up and be prophets to our culture. But we must also recognize how much and how fast our culture changes around us.
So, for the sake of clarity. I use the word relevance to describe the kind of contextualization that a missionary would do in a new cultural context. And, I tend to describe the kind of thing that Michael brings up as accomadation… [and, I’ll work on the t-shirt thing
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Comment by Andy — August 18, 2005 @ 10:05 pm
Ok, I thought that is what you meant by your first post but wanted to clarify it. So what do you think is the primary language of this culture?
Comment by Michael — August 19, 2005 @ 12:18 pm
One thing that I think is so important to keep in mind is that the load isn’t completely on the shoulders of the missionaries. Yes, they start the process of allowing people to hear the “good news,” but it is so important for the missionaries to find leaders within that given culture who can be even more effective than the missionaries themselves. When I think about it, it is an amazing thing to imagine different cultures taking the messeges of the bible and creating them into an beautiful story that applies to them, not just to out Europeanized view of Christianity.
Comment by Ben — August 30, 2005 @ 12:44 pm
Are we willing to pass the baton to the next faithful women and men and give up control of what they do with it? Are we really? Good question…
Comment by Andy — August 30, 2005 @ 9:40 pm