Questions of Context: Reading a Century of German Mission Theology

A story of Volker

Flett and Wrogemann begin the modern story of German missiological contextualization thinking with the work of Gustav Warneck, “the father of German missiology” (16), and his focus on local groups of people. Warneck called these cultural groupings “Volk.” For Warneck, each of these Volker, or people groups, should strive to embody the three stories that make up the gospel story: (1) the story of God relating to humanity; (2) the story of Jesus, a first-century Jew; and (3) the story of how these first two stories are embedded in each Volk’s culture. For Warneck, each of these embeddings is unique, and each/all have an equal potential to be true. Thus, the gospel is nowhere foreign and everywhere universal; Christianity “possesses a universal adaptability. As it may not be identified with a particular state form (such as the monarchy) or a political party direction (such as conservatism), so it is not bound to a specific cultural level or specific form of society” (42). In other words, “mission is the Christianization of a Volk, of a people” (41).

To be sure, Warneck’s understanding of the gospel and its relation to Volk was, and still is, a powerful beginning step toward a theory of mission contextualization. It is a frontal attack on the colonialisms and imperialisms that have too often beset Christian mission. Unfortunately, in the German context at least, Warneck’s Volk teaching has proved susceptible to abuses, two of which changed the future of German missiology. Both abuses had to do with the seemingly irresistible temptation to rank cultures by their success (or lack thereof) in embedding the gospel story in their foundational myths. The problems in some cases were so severe that the very use of the German term “Volk” has become problematic for some. Several circumlocutions for the term are used, “culture” being a common one. One of the authors of this book often uses “collective we” as a way of identifying these people groups. For most, however, the idea represents the starting point of any contextualization theory—it simply took a hundred years of scholarly discourse to disabuse it of its dangers and abuses.

The first abuse Warneck knew of and fought against was put forward by one of his contemporaries, Ernst Troeltsch, who has also been assigned a “father of” title—in his case, “the father of Western liberal humanism.” Troeltsch taught that although many cultures attempted to embed the gospel story in their mythos, Western civilization has done it the best. And because it is the best, not only should it be the normative model against which other cultures should be measured, but it should be the civilization that all other cultures should emulate. The mission task therefore is not to help embed the gospel story per se in the cultures it encounters but instead to embed Western civilization. It may be that Troeltsch would consider us to be splitting hairs at this point, since Western civilization, at least as he understood it, contained the gospel story. Still, “for Troeltsch, the power and content of Christian mission rests in Western civilization. Mission takes the form of the export of this culture for the purpose of Westernizing other cultures” (10).

The second abuse came later but can also be seen as related to Warneck’s Volk teachings. One of the rationales for Warneck’s contextualization was that each culture’s earliest history had God-created “primal ties” that needed to be recovered and emphasized as the gospel became embedded in that culture. As Bruno Gutman put it, “How differently the word friendship sounds to the person still rooted in German agrarianism! For him, friendship does not mean associating himself with others whom he has freely elected, but rather a God-given order, the natural association with his kinfolk” (50–51). This teaching, which theologians often call the “orders of creation,” turned out to be useful to Adolf Hitler and National Socialism’s program of Germanification. Although in general, German missiologists were not the abusers here, it was obvious that this understanding of rationalistic, nationalistic contextualization had to be divorced from Christian mission.

Several vehicles were used to argue for the divorce, the first being an eschatological understanding of history, along with mission’s role in that understanding. The eschatological argument, inspired by Oscar Cullman’s understanding of salvation history, runs something like this: We live in a period “between the times” of Jesus’s first and second comings. It is a time of mission because the task is to connect the past (God sending Jesus) with the future (the parousia, when God’s kingdom is fully realized). In such a scheme the most important ways to evaluate mission efforts are not by their current manifestations but by what they might mean for the future, the end times. Thus, by placing the evaluative measure for success in the future, the temptation to elevate one culture above another was muted.

This emphasis helped mitigate the all-or-nothing ideological battle between culture and culture, but it did little to help another ideological battle—the danger of seeing the church over against, and superior to, the world. Thus, a second vehicle used to argue for the divorce between Christian mission contextualization and National Socialism was a new emphasis on the place of the gospel, moving somewhat away from the church and toward the whole world. Although the planting of growing churches was still an important mission goal, it is a goal that serves a larger goal, God acting in the world in order to establish the kingdom of God on earth: “Because God’s own mission is to the world (Jn 3:16), God’s sending activity does not follow the sequence of God-church-world, but rather God-world-church. This attributes a different theological status to the world. It ceases to be the church’s ‘front lawn’ or ‘not-yet-church,’ becoming instead an independent and mature entity. The church exists for the world’s sake, not vice versa” (107). Although it is important to still see the primary action venue of mission as Volker—local people groups—the way of ranking the Christianity displayed in the Volker moves away from current time and physical space to eschatological time and the metaphoric space of God’s kingdom on earth. These intentional changes in Christian missions’ times and places left mission in the hands of God (missio Dei) and all of humanity’s contributions to that mission.

So we search not for the “Volk” that understands and does mission the best. Nor do we look for an institutional church that represents that best understanding (theology) of mission—and does mission best. No, we search for a way of talking to one another that accepts different mission theologies and honors kingdom-of-God progress in whatever Volk group it manifests itself, regardless of method. The principal mission problem and potential solution lie in communication, that is, hermeneutics.

It is hard to overestimate the contributions of Theo Sundermeier to this hermeneutical turn of German missions. And it is a hermeneutical turn of unusual complexity. The perceived need was a way of communicating when the outcome is not predetermined by the past (tradition) but can be understood only as a largely unknown feature of God’s future (eschatology). Sundermeier contrasts this twenty-first-century communication challenge with the way talking to one another has traditionally been viewed—as a (1) sender sending a (2) message to a (3) receiver. There are many problems with this simple, linear, one-way model of discourse, the primary one being that it doesn’t comport well with reality. In real life, people communicate by a back-and-forth exchange of ideas.

Intercultural theology addresses this problem. Intercultural theology as championed by scholars such as Henning Wrogemann endorses the salvific universality of the Christian gospel. But in spite of its universality in principle, in practice it takes many, many forms in a wide range of local variants of Christianity. Christianity includes many Volker in its expression and has the capacity to include many more—as many as there are Volker, in fact. Thus the form of communication demanded by intercultural theology recognizes that “the awareness of being affiliated with each other challenges these variants of Christianity to keep on renegotiating normative contents of Christian doctrine and praxis with each other in tension between universality and particularity” (184).

The story doesn’t end here, now, in the present—it extends eschatologically into the future. But it is here at the interstices of intercultural theology and intercultural hermeneutics that we find ourselves preparing for God’s missional surprises today.

Complexities

The German contextualization project has as its foundation the “collective we” ideal—that is, that groups of people united by language, custom, religion, and geography have a unique way of looking at and processing what they see and experience. And because that vision is contingent on time(s) and place(s), each Volk’s way of looking at the world is unique. And the corollary of that uniqueness is that the best—perhaps the only—people who can fully understand that particular Volk are full-fledged members of that group.

Contextualization theory thus makes for difficult missiological practice. The difficulties may take many forms, but let me suggest three. Each of the three I will mention shares a common desire to see the gospel of Jesus Christ spread throughout the world to all peoples, tribes, and nations—that is, to all groups of people and cultures. First, contextualization theory makes the missionaries’ task harder. Context-sensitive missionaries want to present the gospel to a culture. Yet their task is severely challenged because they are not members of the Volk, of the collective we; they can begin to learn about the way the collective we sees the world only in secondhand fashion—by learning the language and living among the people. And even then, the knowledge they gain will forever be inferior to the understanding members of the group have of their own culture. Members learn intuitively, instinctively, and implicitly. Nonmembers, missionaries, learn by rote, through whatever “textbooks” are available—language courses, member-sage testimonies, everyday experiences, and the like. Embedding the gospel in a new culture is difficult no matter what; for a nonmember to attempt it on his or her own is almost impossible.

Second, contextualization theory, if valid, makes the embedding of the gospel in terms the members of a collective we can understand difficult. It is difficult for the members of a group, the missionized, because they are members of the group, the collective we. The very virtues that complicated matters for missionaries, complicate it further for the missionized. Contextualization for nonmembers is difficult because they are nonmembers, yet it is difficult for members precisely because they are members. Why? Consider: The gospel story is not value-free. Although contextualization theorists are optimistic about the prospects of the gospel’s elasticity, its ability to translate into any Volk, contextual theologians also recognize that the full gospel story will challenge a Volk’s values at certain points and demand change. As a member of a particular collective we, I am hard-wired to think that “our” cultural forms are the best. Any challenge creates dissonance. My first impulse is to reject. Many ducks need to line up—indeed even change lines—before I can see congruence between “your” gospel and “my” culture.

Third, an additional complexity arises when Volker social science, contextualization theory, and the gospel of Jesus Christ meet for battle on the missiological fields of life. Be warned: this complexity is an elephant in the room. Flett and Wrogemann do not mention it. And it doesn’t stand out in the events of their one-hundred-year history. For want of better terminology, let me call it “the Western academic complexity.” Put most simply, in order to tell their story, Flett/Wrogemann had to choose a form of communication. They could have composed a lyric poem or written a novel or embarked on a lecture tour. Indeed, they could have started a podcast. They had choices, and whatever choice they made had consequences. They chose to write a scholarly book. Furthermore, readers who understand their book the best are members of a Volk we call the “Western academic community.” This form of Volk favors the rational over the experiential, empirical evidence over exemplar stories, footnotes over liner notes, and thinking over feeling. As usually told, the gospel story is none of those things. We are thus presented with a significant hermeneutical challenge.

None of these three complexities—or any of a score of others—need be seen as disqualifiers or even criticisms of the work Flett and Wrogemann have done. Hopefully, though, they do provide an inkling of the challenges of mission work in the twenty-first century. And together they contribute solid evidence in favor of the primary challenge of mission work today as identified by our authors. It is a hermeneutical challenge requiring a particular form of discourse.

Discourse of a certain sort

In the face of such cultural complexity, Flett and Wrogemann advocate discourse among differing cultures, religions, and, most especially, churches around the globe. Especially churches, because in the case of communities of Christian faith that cannot fully understand one another, conversation, discussion, and dialogue have the most promise of moving us forward in attaining the goals of mission. In the case of communities of Christian faith, you see, the goal is more than understanding one another. To be sure, understanding is important, but only if it leads to cooperation in the mission task—only if it leads to what we might call a kind of unity that doesn’t require uniformity of either thought or practice. The question twenty-first-century German missiologists, like our authors, face is whether or not discourse—“written or spoken communication”—can meet the challenge of irreconcilable cultural diversity.

Yet, what kind of discourse can begin to take account of thousands and thousands of Christianized collective we’s across the globe? Get them talking to one another? Learning from each other? Respectfully critiquing one another? Supporting others in the common task of glorifying God by building God’s kingdom on earth? It seems incredibly difficult. “Easier said than done,” one might say (as Flett/Wrogemann do on p. 218). But when it comes to the contextualization of the gospel in non-Christian cultures, an opposite saying might be more appropriate: “Easier done than said.” When two cultures interact, contextualization takes place no matter what. The real difficulties arise when one attempts to manage the process toward a certain end, a procedure that requires expression in words that communicate what is happening—and what we would like to see happening. In cultures we have no hope of understanding fully. Finding the right words is easier done than said.

It is a sure thing, in the authors’ eyes, that not just any old kind of discourse can pull this off. Since it is not possible to both honor one’s cultural uniquenesses and arrive at a globally acceptable uniformity of dogma, the kind of discourse common to the pure rationality of science and philosophy simply will not do. Nor will civil discourse, the kind we use to vote certain kinds of morality in and vote other kinds of morality out. Aesthetic discourse—the way artists, poets, and musicians arrive at mutual respect and appreciation—may be the most useful. Theo Sundermeier calls our attention to this when he notes that “appreciating art means to expose oneself to the world of the culture in question and to its religious superelevation. And intercultural hermeneutics cannot do without this approach” (148). Still, in the end, we would all agree that religion is more than art. And intrareligious hermeneutics of the kind we are discussing here needs a discourse shaped and suited to its religious tasks. How might we characterize that specialized kind of conversation? It has at least the following four key features.

Discourse that assumes transcendence

Transcendence, as we use the term, means more than “the most important thing in my/our life.” As we use the term, it means (1) that which is totally different and outside from what we experience with our biological instincts, sensory perceptions, and/or rational deliberations; and (2) that which has some sort of superintending role over our lives—again, what our instincts, perceptions, and/or reasons tell us. Time or place or culture do not regulate transcendence. Nor is it regulated by our mental and material worlds or by our definitions. Everything else about our life is thus regulated. But not the transcendent. Not the “wholly other,” as Karl Barth called it.

When human beings refer to the transcendent, we understand them to be talking about the religious or spiritual (to use the Western, English terms). Each religion or spirituality has a name and description for the transcendent realm. Christians call it God. And in talking about anything related to that specific religion or spirituality, the transcendent real is assumed. When talking about Christian mission, for example, we mean the wholly other nature of God and God’s ultimate superintendency over mission—what we believe, say, feel, and do. Some Christians refer to this as missio Dei, meaning the last word and the final goals of mission are not in the hands of the church or missiologists or intercultural workers but in the hands of God.

At every step of Flett/Wrogemann’s narrative, German missiologists assumed transcendence as one of the bases of their discourse. It shows especially well in the discussion regarding what theologians call the orders of creation. If Volker, however they are defined, are worth respecting, saving, and embedding with the gospel, then in some way their existence and cultural content need theological warrant. The orders of creation for each collective we is the way God set up the culture in the first place, what Bruno Gutman called each culture’s “blueprint of reality” (62). Each cultural blueprint is different. Each is worth saving—even if changed to some degree by the implications of the gospel. Missiological discourse that lacks the element of transcendence is masquerading as religious dialogue, but at most it is merely preparation for the real dialogues to come. It may be useful to add that transcendence itself must be assumed, but the content of what transcendence means to a culture can vary dramatically and become a topic of conversation.

Discourse based on eschatological thinking

Eschatology, as we use the term, means more than what Christians think will happen in the last one thousand years of humanity’s existence. As we use the term, eschatology means (1) what will happen in the last days of humanity’s existence, to be sure, but also (2) that what will happen is contingent on nothing but God’s will and (3) that as human beings (i.e., God’s created creatures), we have very limited specific knowledge of what will happen in the “last days” (the parousia). Thus, conversations that take eschatological thinking seriously are shot through with provisionality, ambiguity, and humility. They constantly question one’s practices, goals, and analyses, and they constantly seek the input of those who have different practices, alternative goals, and conflicting analyses.

As was the case with transcendence, eschatology—the understanding of history’s last things—takes many forms. In the specific field we are examining (discourse related to missiological contextualization), eschatological thinking means we see ourselves living in a time between past time (including creation and the life and teachings of Jesus Christ) and future time (the events of the Christian parousia: Christ’s second coming and judgment). We live in the time between the times of full knowing, a time hurtling forward from “seeing in a glass darkly,” to a time where we “see Christ face to face.” We are in a time already heavily seeded with God’s mission in action, the missio Dei, but also a time where much growth and fruit are yet to come. In such a time between the times we can practice mission only imperfectly, and in such a time our judgments about what is true and false, and good and evil, are approximate. Mission theory and theology can only partially understand the truth.

Discourse carried out primarily by communities, not individuals

Communal thinking, as we use the phrase, refers to believing and acting that carefully balances what the whole community thinks, as well as that which individual members of that community think, say, and do. It means that when Christian mission agents deliberate with other Christian mission agents about mission theology and mission practice, they are aware that they unavoidably represent both their communities’ thinking and their own thinking about whatever subject is under discussion. German missiologist Theo Sundermeier attempts to capture this kind of discourse in the term “convivency”: “Sundermeier grounds mission in mutual help, reciprocal learning, and joint celebration. Convivency refers to a communion of life, a communion of learning, and a communion of feast. . . . The church has to live with others, on an equal footing” (139).

Discourse that takes the “inter” in intercultural seriously

Intercultural theology is a cooperative theology done in the interstices among two or more cultures. It respects difference by allowing discussion not predicated on either agreement or “victory” by one side or the other. One of the primary theorists of intercultural theorists, Henning Wrogemann, details a more specific definition: “(1) Intercultural theology reflects on the missionary/boundary-crossing inter-actions of Christian faith witness motivated by the claim that its salvific message has universal validity. (2) These interactions interrelate with the respective cultural, religious, social, and other contexts and players to give rise to a wide range of local variants of Christianity. (3) The awareness of being affiliated with each other challenges these variants of Christianity (4) to keep on renegotiating normative contents of Christian doctrine and praxis with each other in the tension between universality and particularity” (184).

Why is this book so compelling?

I find this book compelling, for a couple of good reasons. First, it is a short book covering a relatively short period of Christian history in a single, smallish, geographic locale—Germany. Second, the subject matter—missiological contextualization—is important, but so are scores of other Christian theological subjects. So what distinguishes this book in such a way as to make me label it important? Several reasons.

First, it gets the question right. If the goal of mission is to facilitate the process by which “all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9) call Jesus Lord, then finding ways to cooperate with all forms of the global church is crucial. The task, then, is this: how to increase cooperation among diverse, global Christianities regarding the mission project.

Second, the strength of German scholarship. For those of us who have been involved in the Christian mission project, the contributions of German theologians have been invaluable. Insights into how they arrived at some of their mission analyses, which this book provides, are invaluable.

Third, the specter of National Socialism. One of the principal tragedies of the twentieth century was German Nazism and all that that phrase brings to mind. The role of the church in opposing (and unfortunately in a few cases supporting) that movement needs further explication. This book provides a little of that explication regarding Christian mission.

Fourth, Flett/Wrogemann get the answer right. Instead of trying to show how one Volk’s answers regarding how to do better mission is the right set of answers or arguing for a single, all-encompassing mission theology, the way forward is to engage in better discourse with our coreligionists. And not hope for closure, but instead put our trust in an open, hermeneutical humility among us all until Christ comes again.