City to City DNA: What is Contextualization?
The following is an abridged excerpt from Chapter 7 of City to City’s collection of papers, Gospel-Centered City Ministry: The City to City DNA, in which Redeemer City to City’s co-founder and former chairman, Timothy Keller, details the organization’s core values.
The full video version of Chapter 7: Contextualization can be found below. The entire series of papers and videos is available here.
WHAT IS CONTEXTUALIZATION?
Contextualization is adapting the expression and practice of biblical truth to people of a particular culture, so it is as understandable and compelling to them as possible, without compromising that truth in any way. That means we must avoid two things: over-contextualization, which fails to honor the truth by altering the truth itself rather than its expressions and practices; and under-contextualization, which fails to honor the truth by making it unnecessarily alien and incomprehensible.
Contextualization distinguishes between essentials and nonessentials. On one hand, we must be sure not to remove any of the essentials of the gospel that may potentially offend, such as the teaching on sin, the need for repentance, the lostness of those outside of Christ, and so on. On the other hand, we must be sure to remove any nonessential language or practice that will confuse or offend the sensibilities of the people we try to reach. Determining the difference between essentials and nonessentials is an inevitable part of contextualizing to new cultures, new times, and new generations.
Contextualization is not giving people what they want to hear. It is giving them what God says (that they may not want to hear!) but embodied in cultural dimensions to which they can relate, and argued for in terms they can understand and on the basis of things they already believe.
Contextualization is to be “receptor” or hearer-oriented rather than exclusively “sender” or speaker-oriented. It is to lovingly take on the burden and do more of the communicative “work” necessary to connect so that the listener does less. This is the Christ pattern of servanthood applied to communication. It happens at the intersection of God’s unchanging Word and our constantly changing world and settings.¹
THE BIBLE AND CONTEXTUALIZATION
The book of Acts shows us contextualization in the early church. In Acts 13:16–41, Paul shares the gospel in a synagogue to Jews, those who believed in the God of the Bible. In Acts 14:8–17, he shares the gospel to a pagan, “blue-collar” crowd. Finally, in Acts 17:19–31, he speaks to a “white-collar” pagan audience—the philosophers on Mars Hill. The differences and similarities between each of these gospel presentations are striking. They show that the eternal gospel is being expressed in different ways to different listeners. Elsewhere, Paul says that, as an evangelist, he contextualized not just his message but himself.
By living in a community and truly becoming part of the society, a missionary allows people to see the gospel embodied in love, honesty, kindness, and loving our neighbor. This enables nonbelievers to get a sense of what they might look like as Christian members of their own culture.
The work of the Holy Spirit is directly involved in contextualization. Jesus begins the book of Acts saying that the Holy Spirit would move them to take the gospel to “Jerusalem … Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8). In other words, it was the will and work of the Holy Spirit to break through cultural barriers and enable the church to proclaim the gospel in different social settings. Then, in one of the great cultural moves forward, the Spirit sets up the meeting of Philip with the Ethiopian official (Acts 8:29, 39).
All throughout the Bible, authors contextualized. But perhaps most telling of all is the fact that Jesus’ incarnation was itself an act of contextualization. God did not just come to earth as a human. He came as a Jewish Galilean, a particular, culturally contextual human being, so we could understand and grasp who he is. Jesus is the Word become flesh (John 1:14). He is the “exact representation” in human form “of [God’s] being” and of “the radiance of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3). God adapted to us and accommodated human nature.
Just as Jesus became fully human yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), so are we to adapt and accommodate the gospel message to cultures without compromise. Indeed, Jesus says in John 20:21 that “as the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
WHY CONTEXTUALIZE?
Contextualization is inevitable, theologically. Nothing in Scripture is revealed to simply be known abstractly. Rather, everything is revealed to be obeyed in our concrete situation (Deuteronomy 29:29). Calvinist theologian John Frame notes:
Over and over, preachers (and others) try to proclaim the “meaning” of the text and then its “application”—the first part is “what it means,” the second “what it means to us … [But] every request for meaning is a request for an application … The one who asks doesn’t understand the passage well enough to use it himself … A person does not understand Scripture, Scripture tells us, unless he can apply it to new situations, to situations not even envisaged in the original text (Matthew 16:3; 22:29; Luke 24:25; John 5:39ff.; Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16ff.; 2 Peter 1:19–21-in context).²
Frame’s argument is this: we don’t understand what a text means unless we understand how we are to use it and obey it in our own concrete situation. When we use this approach in ministry design, the results are radical. Many biblical scholars have tried to distill a single, pure ministry design or church structure from the Bible which must then be faithfully reproduced whatever the context. Frame argues that this is a misunderstanding of Scripture as covenantal revelation. Instead, the biblical absolutes that give the church its form must take different shapes as they become expressed in different times and cultures.
All theology is, to one degree or another, already culturally contextualized in its very form. For example, systematic theology synthesizes and organizes doctrinal truths around some of the key issues and questions we ask. But what determines the questions on that list? Why does a theologian ask the particular set of questions he or she does? It is largely because our experience in our time and culture suggests such questions to our mind. Then we seek answers to them in the Bible. The result is a culturally influenced systematic theology.
Consider this example: the Bible clearly directs us to use music to praise God, but as soon as we choose a kind of music to use, we enter a culture. As soon as we choose a language to speak in—or whether to aim its vocabulary at the educated or the less educated, at the artistic or the entrepreneurial or the technological—we are moving toward the social and cultural context of some people and away from the context of others. We do this when we choose a particular level of emotional expressiveness and intensity and even when we choose an illustration as an example for a sermon. We become more accessible to some and less accessible to others.
Thus, every systematic theology ever written is “contextualized” already. And in every age and culture, we must come to Scripture with new questions relevant to that time and society.
Since we are not relativists (who teach that truth is entirely subjective and bound by our experience), we should not discard or demote the penetrating and comprehensive confessions of past eras. But new congregations must not only propagate formulae that were the result of another century’s set of questions; they must also answer the questions of their own age and apply the gospel to the forms of confusion and brokenness we confront now.
To read a fuller explanation of the principles of contextualization and the dangers to avoid, see the full DNA paper here.
Notes:
1: Harvie M. Conn, Eternal Word and Changing Worlds: Theology, Anthropology, and Mission in Trialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984). See also “Contextualization: Where do we begin?” in Evangelicals and Liberation, ed. C. Amerding (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1977); “Normativity, Relevance, and Relativity” in Inerrancy and Hermeneutic: A Tradition, A Challenge, A Debate, ed. Harvie M. Conn (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing, 1988).
2: John M. Frame, Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (A Theology of Lordship) (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987), 83-84.
About the Author
Timothy Keller was the Chairman of Redeemer City to City and the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he started in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For over twenty-five years, he led a diverse congregation of urban professionals that grew to a weekly attendance of over 5,000.