Newbigin: the gospel and culture

Lesslie Newbigin gives as good a working definition of "culture" as I've ever come across. It is "the sum total of ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation." These ways of living include language, the arts, technology, laws, and social and political structures. And fundamental to any culture are the "set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things" i.e., religion. There's no getting around it. Religion is part of culture. Drawing out the implications of this fact for Christian mission was a major part of Newbigin's work. Read him and you'll begin to see how easily we can confuse our cultural assumptions with the gospel.

Here's an excerpt from Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) . . .

The words Jesus Christ are the Greek rendering of a Hebrew name and title, Joshua the Messiah. They belong to and are part of the culture of one part of the world — the eastern Mediterranean — at one point in history when Greek was the most widespread international language in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time, is there or can there be a gospel that is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.

Quotes from Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: A Reader, ed. Paul Weston (pp. 108-109)