OK, so why did I quote Andrew Walls, and what do the quotes actually mean?
Walls basically tracks the history of the Christian Gospel through the centuries and across different nations and cultures. What we see is that one of the ways the Holy Spirit ensures the continuation of the Gospel/Church over the ages, has been the very fact that it is translatable into different settings, nations and cultures. Not only so, but Walls argues that as the Gospel progresses through these stages it in itself changes, and these changes can both last into the future and also all combine to add to the fulness of the Christian Gospel.
In brief we could say the very act of God becoming flesh, the Incarnation itself, is an act of translation, as God, through His Son, enters the world of humanity. This in itself was culture specific in that Jesus was very definitely a Jew, born into a Jewish context in a specific point of history.
The early Church was basically a Jewish sect, with the early Christians all being Jews, and continuing to worship at the Temple in a Jewish way. Then we have the major shift into Gentile territory, and we see the Gospel itself adapting and changing to effectively communicate into a different culture. Studying the Book of Acts we see for example Paul's methodology and communication technique radically change from setting to setting, depending on who he is communicating with. One simple illustration highlights this (one you may not have noticed before) but when the Gospel enters into Gentile territory the title Messiah is effectively dropped altogether. This was a Jewish word which any Jew would understand. For Gentiles it was alien - and it is here where basically the word "Lord" comes into being - not just because of its Old Testament basis, but more especially because it was a word used of the Roman Emperor - and one any non-Jew would understand.
Look also at for example the "Jewishness" of the Gospel of Matthew, compared with the expressions in the Gospel of John. Matthew, in writing to the Jewish Church can easily use Old Testament pictures, examples and illustrations (look how often he writes, "this was to fulfill..." some O.T. passage) and how in communicating he even alters "kingdom of God" to "kingdom of heaven" - he uses that which communicates most effectively to his culture.
John on the other hand uses none of this - and instead is full of Greek, Stoic philosophy - and from that we get terms such as the Logos - the Word. (This would have been double-dutch to Matthew's readership).
So within the New Testament itself we see the Gospel being changed and altered in the way it is communicated to new groups of people and different cultures. And rather than diminish the Gospel, it added to it.
And what began in the New Testament has continued through the history of the Church. Walls asks us to imagine a space traveller visiting the Church at different points through the years - he would have visited a Jewish sect in the Temple; a Gentile/Greek church; the Church of the early Fathers discussing intricate points of Latin terminology (from which the great creeds come); the Institutional church of Constantine; Celtic monks in Ireland living in caves and standing in the sea to cleanse themselves from sin; the pre-reformation church; the post-reformation church; the Puritan phase; the Victorian stage of the 18th century - and now maybe the Pentecostal/African Church which now predominates the Christian scene numerically. Walls argues that this space traveller would be forgiven for hardly realising that all these groups were the Christian church in its different manifestations as it tried to be relevant to the culture it found itself in. But the one church it was, being faithful to the one Gospel.
And so the challenge perhaps for us today is to say, as the Church is obviously failing to be relevant to this present culture - is it because we ourselves are not wrestling with the issues in the same ways as the early Apostles did, and many after them, to make their message make sense in a foreign cultural situation? To fail to grasp these issues is to fall into the trap that the early Missionary movement fell into in Africa and beyond, and impose a cultural trapping into a foreign and alien situation.
In the West we are in danger of all becoming clones of what is effectively a bland form of Anglo-American Evangelicalism. Where are the cultural differences? Why should the Church in Scotland look like that in America? Why should the Church in Inverness look the same as the Church in Glasgow? Why should the church in Castlemilk look the same as that in Morningside? We need to be relevant to the culture and setting we're trying to reach. We sometimes try to hang on to the cultural baggage of previous generations in the false belief that we are being faithful to the Gospel, while all we are doing is actually being unfaithful to the wonder of the Gospel to speak in different ways to different people.
Stuart Blythe has taken some of Walls' quotes to his own blog (The Word At The Barricades) and argues for the need for a "Tartan Theology" (New Blogger supports Blythe...). The on-going discussion there may be worth a look! (And OK - I haven't been short!)
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