A New Way of Thinking About Doing Evangelism and Church Planting 

While anthropologist Marvin Harris, the father of cultural materialism, theorized that "behavior determines thought," a similar theory entered the field of missiology. It was called “contextualization."  Its premise was: SOCIAL EXISTENCE within a certain context CREATES MEANING. Its corollary was: No word has an inherent or Divine meaning.

 

Since contextual behavior determines meaning, there exists no Universal Lexicon which contributes to the psychic unity  of man. Instead, "Meanings belong to the people."  According to anthropologist-missiologist Charles Kraft, one of the chief advocates of contextualization, "words, like all information-bearing vehicles...derive their meanings from their interaction with the contexts in which they participate".  

 

Contextualization, as a missiological strategy for bringing God's Truth to a society, is all about a new way of doing evangelism, church planting, and community development.  To my surprise, I discovered this new way to do missiology had combined empiricism, functionalism, theology, and the belief that all meanings are derived from CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE.  Society must be organized on mechanistic principles.  Every cultural form must serve a function which must adequately serve an existential need.

 

For example, for the contextualizer, "the function of the form we call 'marriage' is to legitimize procreation ...or a function (purpose) of marriage may be to enable young people to escape from their parents" (Kraft),  or the function of marriage may be to provide every household with a son-in-law whose ascribed function is supply the household with fish and wildlife (the Chácobo).

 

For the Miccosukee tribe of South Florida, the function of marriage was to provide every matrilineal clan a.k.a. "family"  with a needed sperm donor to produce children for his wife's "family."  By reducing spiritual roles to functions, they had mechanized their societies.

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In these cases, the merging of two mutually exclusive concepts, the concepts of purpose and function becomes a standard procedure of the contextualizer.  As theologian  Derrik Bailey (1910-1924) points out in The Mystery of Love and Marriage, they are not the same. Instead of giving priority to reproductive functions of marriage, the Bible gives priority to the spiritual and unitive purpose of marriage, that is, to the development of a 

"new, organic, biune relation in which man and woman give themselves to one another entirely without stipulation, yet  so that while their independence is “ broken down, the individuality of each is enhanced and developed.”  

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And, 

"The unitive end of marriage takes precedence over the procreative end simply because it stands in closer relation than the latter to essential nature of henosis." 

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The unitive end of marriage is not material, but spiritual.  The spiritual purpose of marriage the Greeks called henosis, that is, union or unity.   But for the contextualizer, no cultural form has a divine purpose, but rather, a specific function designed to fill a specific existential need.  It is the stuff of culture. The result? "Biblical cultural relativism."  According to missiologist-anthropologist Charles Kraft, “Biblical cultural relativism postulates that God recognizes and employs the sociocultural adequacy principle [of functional forms].”

 

The Sociocultural Adequacy Principle

Now what is the sociocultural adequacy principle all about?  It is about absolutizing meanings which "belong to the people."   In the words of professor Kraft, "it is appropriateness of meaning, not simply of form, that we are advocating."    Contextuallizers are advocating that meanings attached to cultural forms like family, marriage, husband, wife, son, daughters, and gift-giving must have "appropriate meanings."  And the "appropriate meanings" are derived from CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE.  For the contextualizer, no cultural form has an inherent, God-given meaning. 

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But if words have been stripped of their inherent God-given meanings, it becomes impossible to know what God's Rules for Living expressed in the Ten Commandment are, even though "God spoke all these words [for Living] to Moses" on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 20:1).  The words God spoke to Moses must be deconstructed in the age of cultural relativity to mean the Mosaic Law reflects the transcendent meanings of unconscious archetypes, not the Mind of God. There exist no meanings which belong to God because, for the contextualizers,  "meanings belong to the people."

 

The new theology of ascribed functions say: CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE PRECEDES AND RULES ESSENCE, that is, what it means to be created in "the   image and likeness of God." Whatever meaning a society attaches to a cultural form, the new life in Christ demands no change in behavior because whatever meaning a people attach to a sociocultural form the meaning represents the cultural norm. Not only does its meaning represent a cultural norm which belongs to the people, it is a meaning shaped by a society's contextual environment. 

 

If God exists, he is a  God who promotes cultural relativism and cultural diversity.  The new life in Christ demands no change in behavior because the learned forms are assumed to be adequate for every contingency. 

 

Now the idea that cultural forms to which are attached meanings which belong to the people I find to be in fundamental opposition to what Jesus declared in Matthew 9:16-17. He declared: 

“The old forms are not suited to the new religious life emanating from me. To try to embody the latter in the former is to proceed in a manner as much calculated to defeat its purpose as when one tries to patch an old garment with piece of unfulled clothe, which, instead of mending it, as it is intended to do, only makes the rent greater than ever; or as when one seeks to fill old bottles with new wine, and ends up losing wine and bottles together. The new life needs new forms” (Emphasis added).

Not only did Jesus not employ the "sociocultural adequacy principle," he announced that "the new life needs new forms" because the old forms simply were not "adequate."  The old forms had been shaped by what the apostle Paul called the “basic principles of the world” (Col 2:8).  The contextual shaping of the old forms by "the basic elements of the world" meant being “organized on mechanistic principles ...[in which] every part must be made to function smoothly within the totalitarian whole.”  

 

For both the Chácobo and Miccosukee, I discovered that social life had been "organized on mechanistic principles." Instead of marriage serving a Divine purpose in which husband and wife were spiritually united as one, marriage served two different functions, each function shaped to meet a specific need.  

 

For the Chácobo, marriage was all about obtaining a food supplier for the household-of-five.  For the Miccosukee, marriage was all about obtaining a sperm donor needed to produce children for the wife's "family" which anthropologists call the "matrilineal clan." 

 

Convictions

1. "If language cannot convey transcendent truth, though it is a medium created by God to serve this purpose, the Bible can point to nothing but the belief systems of those who wrote it."  (See: Dillistone, F. W.  1951.  The Structure of the Divine Society.  Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, p. 223) 

2. The sociocultural adequacy principle affirms the mechanization of cultural forms and the merging of mutually exclusive concepts like purpose and function.

3. The sociocultural adequacy principle rejects the idea that cultural forms can have attached to them inherent or Divine Meanings.  For example, if a society classifies cross-cousins and parallel cousins as "siblings," as most do, then the classification is valid because "meanings belong to the people."  But logic say: No cousin can be a sibling. 

4. Whenever missiologists promote the idea that every missionary, community development worker, and Bible translator must “must accept and work within structures and processes of others that are different from one’s own social game,” they are promoting the postmodern idea of contextualizing the Word of God. 

5. To assume that one can do appropriate missiology without taking into account the existence of a universal Plumb Line of Conceptual Constants a.k.a..epignosis Knowledge.