Gospel and Culture: An Ongoing Discussion Within the Ecumenical Movement.

Walker, Andrew

On the surface, this WCC pamphlet by Wesley Ariarajah, deputy general secretary of the World Council of Churches, is informative, well written, and a straightforward account of the gospel-and-culture debate within ecumenical circles from the 1938 world mission conference to the WCC Conference at Canberra, Australia, in 1991.

In fact the book is overshadowed by the Canberra conference, where Professor Chung Hyun-Kyung, in the name of the Spirit, challenged both the patriarchal and the universalist tendencies of Christianity, seeking in their place a celebration of difference and the right of Christian contextualization. The professor was challenged by the Orthodox delegation, who objected to what they saw as a cavalier approach to the issue of the Spirit and creation (the theme of the conference). In particular, they objected to the splitting off of pneumatology from Christology, as if the Spirit (or some spirit or other) was free to roam where he will without the presence of the Son.

This open clash demonstrates the chasm in gospel-and-culture debates between those who believe that one must hold to the "faith once delivered to the saints" and those who accept that the story must be changed to fit indigenous cultural self-understanding.

In this respect, below the surface, Ariarajah's account is disingenuous and incomplete. It is disingenuous because he presents the debates from 1938 to the present time as if they were a story of reactionary die-hards gradually being overcome by the forces of liberation. It is incomplete because Lesslie Newbigin's critique of Western culture (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society [1989]) is nowhere to be found.

Andrew Walker is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Education at King's College, London.