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Believing in the Future:
Towards a Missiology of Western Culture
David J. Bosch
The Christian faith in a
postmodern world:
The Protestant legacy on the
privatisation of religion
Catholicism has succeeded better than Protestantism in withstanding the
erosive impact of the Enlightenment for theological reasons as well as
sociological ones. Hans Kung suggests
that fundamental to medieval scholastic theology (and thus to all subsequent
Catholic theological thinking), there is a harmonious scheme of nature and
supernature in which everything fits a position classically formulated by
Thomas Aquinas. This theological
approach has a proclivity toward the model H. Richard Niebuhr identifies as
“Christ above culture” (in Christ and
Culture, 1956). This position can
also lead to the adoption of a position of “the Christ of culture”. In neither model is there a fundamentally
unresolvable conflict between Christ and culture, or between faith and
reason. The Protestant position,
however, suggests a position of “Christ against culture”, which presents an
abiding incompatibility between the church and the world. This meant that believers had to commute
between different plausibility structures: in church determined by the
Christian faith, but when in the factory or the hospital determined by the
mechanistic paradigm. In the course of
time this led to a dichotomy of completely different world views and fostered a
private religion which had no real function in society as a whole. Religion was relegated to the private sector,
to the world of values where people are free to choose what they like.
A post-ideological era or a
neo-ideological one?
Kung suggests we have moved into a post-ideological era (away from
Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, etc).
But perhaps for the time being we will have to contend with new “soft”
ideologies: the “
Contours of a Missiology of
Western Culture
We need a
missiological agenda for theology, not merely a theological agenda for
missiology. From this fundamental
perspective several others flow:
Mission is more
than and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting
people to the universal reign of God. It
has to do with the way we relate to the society in which we find ourselves
In response to
rampant secularisation we may be seduced into concentrating on the religious
aspect of missiology only, leaving the rest to secular powers and bowing to the
pressure on the church to limit itself to matters of the soul of the individual. We must resist this temptation. It belongs to our missionary mandate to ask
questions about the use of power in our societies, particularly the way power
is used to limit, exploit and destroy life.
It follows that missiology needs to go hand in hand with social and
political ethics. As we call people back
to God we must hlp them to articulate an answer to the question “what do we
have to become Christians for?”
There is already
much believing in Western society (though hidden and latent). We don’t need to introduce more religion (by
talking more about God in a culture that is becoming irreligious), but to
express ethically the coming of God’s reign, to break with the paradigm
according to which religion has only to do with the private sphere. It is not to fall into the heretical trap of
believing we have to build God’s kingdom on earth, but rather to help make it
more visible, more tangible, and to initiate approximations of God’s coming
reign.
We are in society
as “resident aliens”, which implies no call to quietism but rather to existing
in missionary encounter with the world.
The task of
postmodern theology is to interpret the Christian message at a time when the
rebirth of religion, rather than its disappearance, poses the most serious
questions. There is apparently more God
than we think! In this regard Harvey Cox
talks about “some artesian religious quality,” “some subcutaneous spirituality”
that seems to persist in people.
We can be more bold
and confident than we tend to be in the face of irreligiosity. People worship gods even if they do not know
it or deny it vehemently. We have to
proclaim to them that there is no other god but God and that they should worship
no foreign gods. On the basis of the
missionary’s personal encounter with the Christ of the Gospels s/he can
proclaim the living God to their contemporaries, seeking the searchers,
providing new roots to the uprooted, caring for those who do not care, giving
direction to those who live by the horoscope, and gently touching the deeper
stirrings in the hearts of those who sense that what they enjoy today cannot be
all there is, those who seek after the spiritual dimension of life and an
antidote to dehumanisation.
By and large the
revival of religion is not evident in the mainline Churches and their Sunday
services, but outside the historical churches, or at least outside the
traditional activities of these churches.
Six other ingredients of a
Missiology of Western Culture
1.
A missiology of
Western Culture must include an ecological dimension.
2.
It must be
counter-cultural, though not in an escapist way, communicating an alternative
culture to that of the insatiable desire for self-gratification.
3.
It will have to be
ecumenical. This implies, at the very
least, an explicitly critical attitude towards denominationalism. More than empire-building mission is the
communication of the good news about the universal and coming reign of the true
and living God.
4.
It will have to be
contextual. We assume that the Gospel
was deeply indigenised and contextualised in the West, and then exported. Now the West seems to have turned its back on
the Gospel. Was it perhaps because the
Gospel was never properly contextualised?
Or perhaps so overcontextualised that it lost its radicality and
disctinctive character and challenge?
5.
A missionary
encounter with the West will primarily have to be a ministry of the laity. The Church’s ministry will be more credible
if it comes from those who do not belong to the priestly caste, and second,
only in this way will we begin to bring together what our culture has divided:
the private and public, for the lay members of the Church clearly belong to the
public and secular world whereas the priests and clerics belong to a separate
“religious” world.
6.
Our witness will be
credible only if it flows from a local, worshipping community. Theology has no life unless it is borne by a
community – the same is true of mission.
The missionary endeavour hinges on the nature and life of our local
worshipping communities and the extent to which they facilitate a discourse in
which the engagement of people with their culture is encouraged. Local church “happens” where believers are
involved in what is critical for people and society.
Evaluation criteria
Even if we take seriously all of the above dimensions and ingredients,
we will have no guarantees of success.
God does not ask about the extent of our successes, however; rather we
are asked about the depth of our commitment.