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Christ And The Cultures

1978

J.E. Lesslie Newbigin

Scottish Journal Of Theology 31, 1: 1-22.

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Newbigin.net page 1

In our programme of missionary training at the Selly Oak Colleges it is our custom to introduce
the students at an early stage to something of the wide variety of ways in which Christ is pictured
in different cultures. On a wall covered with vivid posters one can see together the Orthodox
Pantocrator serenely ruling all the worlds, the Latin American freedom fighter with rifle over his
shoulder, the black Christ, the tortured and defeated Victim of the medieval crucifix, and the blue-
eyed golden haired boy from the neighbourhood of Dallas, Texas. Beyond these visual
reproductions one thinks of the pen-portraits sketched in the innumerable lives of Jesus in the era
of liberal protestantism, each reflecting the writer’s ideal self-image, all sharing one feature in
common – that the Christ portrayed might be a likely candidate for redundancy but an improbable
one for crucifixion.
The question for the young missionary candidate is, of course, clear: is the Christ whom I
am going to preach just one of this gallery of culturally determined images? Who is the Jesus
Christ in whose service I go?

I
(I) Take as a starting-point the experience which I have often had of standing in a village street
and preaching to a crowd of people for whom the name of Jesus Christ means as much and as
little as the names of Smith, Jones, or Robinson. I preach about Jesus Christ. I tell stories about
him and I tell the stories that he told. But if the hearers are interested enough to begin to ask more
about him, how do I begin to say who he is? There is no way of saying it except by using the
language of my hearers. But this language embodies the world-view, the models, the myths by
which they already make sense of their world. These models are not neutral tools which can be
used for any purpose; they are commitments to a way of understanding and dealing with
experience, commitments which are
 Newbigin.net page 2

in many respects irreconcilable with the Christian commitment. Which model, then, shall I choose
to explain who Jesus is? I have heard Indian evangelists using many models. They may speak of
Jesus as swamy – Lord. But – as in St. Paul’s world, so in an Indian village – there are lords many
and gods many, three hundred and thirty million of them according to the tradition. Is Jesus one of
these innumerable lords? If so, there are more important matters to attend to. Or shall we use a
word that the Tamil language has for the supreme transcendent God – kadavul – a word formed
by a combination of the root meaning ‘being’ with the root meaning ‘surpassing’. Surely an
excellent model-but if we use this name for Jesus we shall shortly have to explain who is the
person to whom this Jesus evidently looks up and prays as Father? Or shall we take the Hindu
concept of the avatar – the descent of God in creaturely form to restore the faltering rule of
righteousness and put down the rising power of evil? But it is of the essence of the Hindu doctrine
of the avatar that it is cyclical: the work of the avatar is for a time only, for that particular point
in the ever-circling process of creation and destruction. The coming of another avatar can in no
sense be the occasion for a final decision; it is just one more in a series. Or shall I simply tell the
factual story of a man who lived two thousand years ago in a country four thousand miles away? I
have heard an evangelist take that approach and seen the crowd melt away, for, in a Hindu view
of the world, this is to identify Jesus with the world of maya, the world of passing events which in
the perspective of reality, is simply illusion.
One could extend this list to include many other models which have been used to say, in
Hindu terms, who Jesus is: the satguru who initiates the disciple into the experience of
realisation; the adipurushan, the primal man who is the beginning of all creation; chit, the
intelligence and will which constitute the second member of the triad saccidananda which
advaita philosophy identifies with ultimate reality. In these and other ways Indian Christian
evangelists and theologians have tried to answer the question: Who is Jesus? What all these
answers have in common is that they necessarily describe Jesus in terms of a model which
embodies an interpretation of experience significantly different from the interpretation which
arises when

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Jesus is accepted as Lord absolutely. There is no escape from this necessity. As an evangelist I
have to accept it if I am to communicate at all.
(2) But, as will be already obvious, I have over-simplified the issue. For I, the preacher,
who speak of ‘the interpretation of experience which arises when Jesus is accepted as Lord
absolutely’, am myself also the product of a culture which has its own models and myths, in terms
of which it tries to make sense of experience. Doubtless these models have been greatly
influenced by the total fact of Jesus Christ: they are, however, certainly not completely
determined by it. My confession of Jesus as Lord is conditioned by the culture of which I am a
part. It is expressed in the language of the myth within which I live. Initially I am not aware of
this as a myth. As long as I retain the innocence of a thoroughly indigenous western man,
unshaken by serious involvement in another culture, I am not aware of this myth. It is simply
‘how things are’. It is ‘the modern scientific world view’. It is the corpus of axioms which are
accepted as such by those who have received a modern western style education. No myth is seen
as a myth by those who inhabit it: it is simply the way things are. Western man is no exception to
this rule. As I stand in that village street and preach Christ, the Christ whom I have been trained to
understand and interpret through the models provided by modern critical, historical, and other
studies, what I communicate is shaped by these models. The Christ whom I set forth is the Christ
who is understood in terms of the models developed at this particular moment in the long story of
the interaction between the Christian tradition and the culture of the north-western corner of the
Eurasian continent. This also is a necessity from which there is no escape.
(3) But there is a third element which has now to be brought into this picture of the meeting
of cultures. As a Christian preacher I do not arrive in the village empty handed. I bring, it is to be
hoped, a Bible translated into the local language, or if not the whole Bible, at least the New
Testament. In parenthesis let it be said that we are here passing over without touching the
enormous cultural and theological issues involved in that work of translation. We are assuming
that the translation has been done and that there will soon be people, probably in the first

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instance young people, in the village who will start to study the Bible for themselves. Contrary to
what one would gather from the reading of much scholarly work on the New Testament, the first
reading of it, especially of the Gospels, makes an immediate and profound impact on the readers.
The figure of Jesus stands out of the pages and confronts them with all the force of a real personal
meeting. And the person who meets them is not clothed in the garments of a twentieth-century
Englishman. He comes to them as one who belongs to a world which is much more familiar to
them than the world of modern European or American Christianity.
There is now a new factor in the situation. The people of the village have in their hands a
story which provides a critique both of their own cultural world and of the cultural world which
the missionary has introduced to them in the name of the Gospel. A triangular relationship is set
up between the local culture, the invading culture, and the Bible. The stage is set for a
complicated and unpredictable evolution of new models of thought and action. This evolution will
occur not only in the receptor community but also, if he is serious, in the missionary and therefore
in the community from which he is sent.
A massive illustration of the first of these possibilities is furnished by the development of
the so-called African Independent Churches. These churches have broken away from the churches
which resulted from western missions, and have developed forms of life and teaching which –
while sharing much that comes from the local culture – also demand a very sharp break both with
the older churches and with aspects of the native culture. David Barrett in his study which touches
more than 5,000 of these movements has demonstrated that there is a very high correlation
between the development of independent church movements in a tribe and the publication in the
language of that tribe of the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament. In a sample group of 742
tribes, the percentages of those within which independency has occurred are as follows:

Where no Scriptures have been published 10%

Where portions of Scripture have been published 56%

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Where the whole New Testament has been published 67%

Where the whole Bible has been published 81%

Barrett summarises the impact of the Bible on peoples converted through the work of
modern missions as follows: ‘With the translation of the complete Bible, however, African
societies gradually began to discern a serious discrepancy between missions and biblical religion
in connection with the traditional institutions under attack. The missions were assaulting their
institutions, but biblical religion emphatically upheld the family, land, fertility, and the
importance of women, and also appeared to endorse polygamy and respect for family ancestors.
With a few exceptions all the institutions listed above (community structure, land and property,
laws and taboos, religious concepts, leadership and symbolism, magical concepts and rituals, and
practices in worship) appeared to African readers to have close parallels or even tacit approval in
one or other parts of the Old or New Testaments’ (Barrett: Schism and Renewal in Africa, pp. 131
and 268).
A small personal illustration of the second possibility may be allowed. I recall my
experience as a young missionary, struggling with the language, called upon to conduct the study
of St. Mark’s Gospel with a group of village teachers. Before long I was deeply involved with the
miracle stories, trying to put into Tamil the way of making sense of these which I had learned in
an English theological college. My class watched me with visibly growing impatience till finally
one of them said: ‘Why are you making such heavy weather over a perfectly simple matter?’ and
proceeded to recount half a dozen examples of miraculous healings and exorcisms from the recent
experience of his own village congregation. What was – within my culture – a perplexing
problem, was, in his, no problem at all. Christ was already known as the one who heals and casts
out devils.
(4) I said that this triangle of forces made up by the local culture, the invading culture and
the Bible sets the stage for a complicated and unpredictable evolution. Sometimes the impact of
the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ is such that questions concerning the traditional culture
drop into insignificance. They are regarded as adiaphora. Only after some

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time do the converts begin go draw from their new experience critical questions about their
traditional culture. More often the first response is a strong reaction against the traditional culture.
It is ‘the world’ which is still in the power of evil.
The new life in Christ is so absolutely new that the old must be put away. At this stage it is
the Christ of the invading culture that is accepted and welcomed. The message is so closely linked
with the messenger who brought it that there is no desire to separate them. There is a sharp
rejection of elements in the old culture which, even if not evil in themselves-such as music,
drama, and visual art – are felt to be evil because of their association with the rejected world
view.
(5) And yet, even at this early stage, there are strong forces which compel the young church
to develop its own answer to the question: ‘Who is Jesus?’ The new converts have to explain their
new allegiance to their relatives and neighbours, and for this purpose must use the language and
the models familiar to them. Frequently this is a quite unconscious process. The message is – so
to say – screened unconsciously and inserted into the thought-world of the hearer. Thus in the
mystical environment of Central Java where the crucified Christ was preached in terms of the
sixteenth-century Dutch Reformed dogmatics, what was actually heard by the Javanese people
was much more a message of the crucified as the great harmoniser who gives peace. (For this
example, and for other insights in this matter, I am deeply indebted to the wide-ranging researches
of Dr. Hans-Ruedi Weber. See his Kreuz & Kultur, pp. 201f and 215.) More systematically there
will be a deliberate attempt as part of evangelistic preaching to find in the local culture models
which can at least point to the reality whom they are coming to know in Jesus. The sympathetic
outsider will be aware all the time that a great deal of the old thought forms is still shaping the use
of language about Jesus. He will note, for example, that even those groups which insist most
strongly on a total break with Hinduism, are working with Hindu models for the interpretation of
Jesus. And, on the other hand, the Hindu who overhears the talk of Christians will discover that
old words are being used to convey new meanings far beyond their normal sense outside the
Church. When, for example, Jesus is described in the
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Tamil Church as ‘Saviour of sinners’, the words employed mean, in normal secular usage, ‘one
who provides free board and lodging for down and outs’. The meaning that the words have within
the Christian community arises from the whole lived experience of the community in Christ. It
cannot arise from any other source.
(6) After the passage of some years, often in the second or third generation of the church, a
new situation arises. The church has now become so much at home in a new thought world that
the old no longer poses a threat. The old culture has been – for these Christians – de-sacralised. Its
music, art, dance, and social customs are no more feared because of their pagan associations.
They begin to be prized as part of the world which God loves and which he has given to men. The
church begins for the first time to think about the relation of Christ to culture. It begins to
experiment with the variety of possible models for this relation. In some cases, as for example in
many of the South Pacific islands, a new corpus christianum comes into existence. There is a
practical identification of church and society, and Christ is seen as the one who harmonises and
reconciles the old culture. In other situations, especially where the church is a small minority,
there is a strong effort to reverse the alienation from local culture which marked the first
conversions and to approach the older culture in a spirit of acceptance and openness. The
tendency then will be to seek for christological models which can be accommodated within the
thought-world of the older culture. And again there will be movements of renewal which often
take the form of a sharp attack upon elements both in the church and in the old culture. There is
an almost infinite variety of different situations and none of them is static.
(7) Since the present paper is written and discussed within the thought-world of one
particular culture and in one particular language, it will be in order to refer to some of the special
problems which arise when what are often called ‘Third World Theologies’ are written in English.
Here a complex double translation is involved. In paragraph (5) I have referred to the basic and
original form of an indigenous christology which arises from the effort of the Christians in a
particular culture to explain to their neighbours who Jesus is. This ex-

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planation must be in the mother tongue and can only be given by making use of the models
provided by that culture. This indigenous christology is taking shape whenever the Christian talks
to his neighbour about Christ and the evangelist stands up to preach Christ. However, it is also the
fact that up to now the greater part of systematic teaching, writing, and discussion on theology in
the churches of the Third World has been carried on in a European language and under the
leadership of scholars trained in the seminaries and universities of Europe and North America. It
has therefore been shaped by logical models and a conceptual framework derived in large
measure from Greek and Latin sources. A tension is thereby set up between the theology of the
seminary and the theology of the congregation and the home. This tension is further compounded
by the psychological pressures of colonialism. It is in these circumstances that theologians of the
Third World, trained in the models provided by a western culture, try to use these models, as
embodied in the European languages, to express a theology developed by the use of the
indigenous models. This process of double-translation, or rather double re-conceptualisation, is a
very difficult one, and not often successful. It will only be when there is a full development of
theological writing and reflection in the languages and concepts of the Third World, and when the
languages of Europe no longer exercise their present domination over the whole ecumenical
theological enterprise, that it will be possible to find a framework within which the problem of
Christ and the cultures can be truly faced. When that time comes it is by no means to be assumed
that a truly ‘ecumenical’ Christology will be in the form of systematic statements framed in the
style of Western philosophy rather than in the form of story and parable typical of much Asian
and African thought – and typical of the Gospels!
(8) Meanwhile it is possible to speak of a provisional framework in the experience of the
ecumenical movement. The Assembly at Nairobi brought together Christians from a vast variety
of different cultures, each bringing an answer to the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ framed in the
terms of his own culture: some of these answers are so mutually contradictory that it was a serious
question whether they could be held within

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one framework of discourse. Would it not have to be confessed in the end that there is not one
Christ but many, and that the claim of the Assembly’s theme: Jesus Christ frees and unites, would
be proved untrue? That question was openly faced in the early days of the Assembly: at the end of
the three weeks of meeting at least one participant would testify that the Assembly had
experienced in its life the truth of the claim under which it met. The vast, bewildering and
clashing multiplicity of the answers which Christians gave to the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’
does not negate the fact that there is one Jesus Christ who is Lord and Saviour of all.
How then are we to do christology in a way which is faithful both to the one Christ and to
the many cultures in which men seek to confess him? At this point we have to turn from a
descriptive to a systematic treatment of the theme.

II
Let me begin by making as clear as possible the sense in which I am using the two terms of the
title.
From my dictionary I take the following definition of culture: ‘The sum total of ways of
living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another’. Four
elements in that definition are important for our understanding of culture in a theological context.
(a) It is a product of human initiative, not an unchangeable datum. (b) It is a social product
created, valued, and transmitted by a group. (c) It exists in transmission. It is a living thing, and if
transmission were to cease, the culture would be dead. (d) It is the sum total of a vast variety of
human ways of living, including language, all the media of communication (verbal and non-
verbal) the stories, myths, and proverbs by means of which experience is grasped and shared,
science, art, learning, religion, methods of agriculture and industry, systems of political and
economic organisation and judicial systems. It includes all of that which constitutes man’s public
life in society. When we speak of culture in the course of a theological discussion we are speaking
about humanity in its public, social, and historical aspect.
For my definition of the other term in the title I shall not go to a dictionary. I speak of Jesus
Christ as the one whom I know and confess as Lord of all that is, whom I know through

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the witness of the Christian tradition primarily embodied in the canonical Scriptures, and whose
coming to consummate all things I await.
Standing within these definitions of the terms, I believe that the question implied in the title
has to be answered first in an eschatological perspective. That is to say that the full answer to the
question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ can only be given when the fulness of humankind has been
gathered into the confession of his name. When any one, standing within any of the cultures of
mankind, says : ‘Jesus is Lord’, the meaning which is given to the word ‘Lord’ is shaped by, and
therefore limited by, the culture in which he speaks. The full content of the word ‘Lord’, the full
meaning of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, can only be that which it will have when every tongue
shall call him Lord. Till then, every confession of his Lordship is partial and provisional. It
follows that a true Christology must be Christology in via, and the way is a missionary way, the
way which the Church must take from the culture of first-century Palestine to all the nations and
their cultures, to the ends of the earth and to the end of time.
It follows from this perspective that three conditions have to be satisfied if Christology is to
be faithfully done. It must be done in the openness of dialogue with the varied cultures of
mankind; it must be done in the openness of learning within the ecumenical fellowship of all
Christians; it must be done in faithful adherence to the given tradition. These three conditions are
mutually interlocked but I shall try to deal with them seriatim.

(i) In dialogue with other cultures

In the perspective which I am advocating it is clear that the full meaning of the confession ‘Jesus
is Lord’ has to be learned by the Church as it goes to meet the cultures of all mankind bearing this
confession. The most primitive Christologies discernible in the New Testament which confess the
Lordship of Christ by means of models drawn from contemporary Judaism can only be the first
and not the last word in Christology. The struggle to confess Jesus as Lord in terms of the models
in which the world of classical culture interpreted its experience led to the formulations of Nicea
and Chalcedon. The Church

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would have been unfaithful if it had simply continued to repeat the formulae with which the
primitive Church of Jerusalem confessed Christ. It had to use the models provided by classical
Graeco-Roman culture. But it had to recognise that these models provided no place ready made
for him. In using these models it had to take the risk that Jesus would be understood as simply one
of the semi-divine saviours in a pantheistic cosmos, in fact that the model would prove too strong
for the message. What did in fact happen, as it is memorably chronicled in Cochrane’s
Christianity and Classical Culture, is that the classical world view disintegrated and that its
fundamental axioms were dissolved in favour of a new set of axioms. The absolute dichotomies
of sensible and intelligible which governed classical science, and of virtue and fortune which
governed the classical view of history, simply dropped away in favour of the new set of models
developed at Nicea and Chalcedon, and the way was prepared for a new attempt in the work of St.
Augustine to grasp the meaning of human experience as a whole.
Evidently, if the perspective which I propose is the right one, the formulations of the third
and fourth centuries, while part of the tradition within which we stand, are not its last word. For a
thousand years following the work of Augustine Christianity was the religion of a small peninsula
of Asia, cut off by Islam from real contact with the great religious cultures of the East. Now that
there is again intimate contact, Christology has to be done in dialogue with these as with the other
cultures of mankind. As I have suggested, Hinduism (to speak only of the one with which I have
some acquaintance) provides a number of possible models within which one may try to make a
provisional statement of who Jesus is. There has to be room for a great deal of experiment, for the
taking of risks, and for critical reflection in ecumenical debate on the results of these experiments.
As an outstanding example of the kind of experiment I mean, let me quote the series of essays on
Karma and Redemption written by A. G. Hogg in 1904 and 1905. Hogg undertook a profound
study of the doctrine of Karma, from which he came to appreciate both its enormous strength and
its weaknesses. He confesses that this study led him back to a fresh study of the biblical revelation
itself. And it led him on to propound an interpretation of Jesus as the one in whom the
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author of the law of karma himself bears the karma of humanity. The power of the argument is
such that the essays have to be reprinted seventy years later, and still challenge the serious
attention of a Hindu thinker (e.g. C. G. S. S. Srinivasa Rao in The Indian Journal of Theology,
vol. 25, No. 1, 1976, pp. 30-7). Here is an example of Christology done in faithful dialogue with
another culture. The model is provided by Hinduism, the concept of karma. The Hindu reader
hears himself addressed wholly in terms with which he has learned to understand his world. He is
not required to master another set of models as a precondition for considering the Christian
confession of Jesus. But he is introduced to Jesus as one who, standing within that familiar model,
bursts it open with the power of a wholly new fact.
(I take a special pleasure in giving this example, because of its intrinsic interest, because
Hogg was a revered friend and colleague whose name is not as widely remembered as it should
be, and because there are so many contemporary writers who appear to believe that inter-faith
dialogue was first invented about ten years ago!)
The two words which Hogg liked to use as defining the proper character of Christian
theology in a Hindu context were the words ‘challenging relevance’. The formulation of the
theologian must be seen to be relevant: it must work with the models which the Hindu is
accustomed to use. It must also be challenging, not accepting these models as of ultimate
authority but introducing by their means the new fact of Jesus whose authority relativises
whatever authority they have. It would be instructive to apply this test to current attempts to do
Christology in terms of the models provided by our contemporary western culture. One would
need to ask in each case two questions: (a) does it enable the inhabitant of this particular culture
to see Jesus in terms of the models with which he is familiar, or does it require him as a pre-
condition of seeing Jesus to emigrate from his own thought – world into another – perhaps from
the past? (b) Does the Jesus who is so introduced judge and determine the models used, or is he
judged and determined by them in such wise that only those elements in the portrait are allowed
which are acceptable to the contemporary culture? By the answers to these questions

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one determines the faithfulness or otherwise of any particular christological formulation.

(I am not forgetting that in fact ‘modern western culture’ is not a single but a multiple
reality. Nor is it unimportant that much recent theology has attempted to use the models provided
by existentialism-a view of life typical of western middle-class culture-and has been much less
ready to use the model provided by Marxism, which would speak more directly to working-class
culture. A rather violent movement in the other direction is provided by contemporary Latin
American liberation theology.)

(2) In the Ecumenical Fellowship

The perspective which I suggest for the doing of Christology, namely the perspective of the
eschatological confession of Jesus as Lord by peoples of every culture requires that Christology
be done in an open fellowship of mutual learning and of mutual correction among all of every
culture who now confess him as Lord and who seek to make their confession challengingly
relevant in their several situations.
If the necessary and risky enterprise of doing theology in faithful dialogue with other
cultures is not to run out into a medley of mutually contradictory types of Christology, those who
are engaged in the enterprise must be open to one another in mutual learning and criticism. If this
were not so, the global effect of the Church’s witness would be a negative one. It would be a
practical denial of the claim that there is one Lord Jesus who is Lord of all.
 The problem which confronts us here is more complicated than is indicated by merely
referring to the vast variety of human cultures. There is also the fact that the Church within a
given culture does not retain a fixed relation to that culture. As already indicated in I (4)-(6)
above, this relation will normally be an evolving one, and the pattern of its evolution is complex.
Thus a Church which is at one period in a polemical relation to the traditional culture of its people
may at another time see its role in the opposite way – seeking to provide spiritual resources for
the renewing and strengthening of the culture. One could cite many examples of Churches in Asia
which, fifty years ago, were primarily concerned to

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emphasise their separation from their culture and are today deeply concerned about strengthening
and renewing these cultures as they struggle towards fuller life in their nations. Ecumenical
fellowship is made difficult by the fact that at any one moment churches in different cultures will
be in different relations to their cultures. The whole spectrum of relationships described in
Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture can be illustrated at one moment in time in different places,
and this makes mutual understanding extremely difficult. A North American Christian, for
example, highly critical of his own culture and very sympathetic to the relatively strange culture
of India, is repelled when he meets a city congregation in India which is relatively unsympathetic
to traditional Indian culture and very open to the West. Indian Christians coming to Britain are
hurt to discover that Christians in Britain are much interested in Hinduism but much less
interested in Indian Christianity. Within any one culture there are always conservatives for whom
the foreign poses an unwelcome threat and radicals for whom the foreign appears as a welcome
ally in their struggle with their own tradition. The culture-critics (Niebuhr’s first category) who
belong to Church A and are in revolt against culture (a) will happily fall into the arms of the
conservatives (Niebuhr’s second category) who belong to Church B and seek to cherish and
safeguard culture (b); but the mutual esteem is deceptive because it rests on a concealed
contradiction. Both cherish culture (b) and both reject culture (a), but their reasons for doing so
are mutually contradictory. Thus the radicals in India will be tempted to imagine that
Christological models must be imported from Oxford or Tubingen, while the radicals in Britain
will want to import theirs from Bangalore.
Real mutual understanding, learning, and criticism have to go on in the midst of these
extremely complex and constantly changing patterns of relationship between Church and culture.
This calls for qualities of discernment and sensitivity, but this is the very heart of the ecumenical
task, and it is one of the conditions of the Church’s faithfulness to its mission.
One of the conditions, but not the only one. Mutual openness is not enough. There must also
be faithfulness to the given tradition. The ecumenical exchange must take place within

Newbigin.net page 15

the one Tradition. But how are the limits of that Tradition to be discerned? How can and should
the Church discriminate, in all this complex, changing and mutually interacting pattern of
relations between Christ and culture, between faithful witness and unfaithful compromise,
between true confession and heresy? This brings me to the most difficult part of my task.

(3) In Faithful Adherence to the Tradition

In my preliminary definition I spoke of Jesus Christ as ‘the one whom I know through the witness
of the Christian tradition primarily embodied in the canonical Scriptures’. The ecumenical task of
mutual learning and correction is centred in and governed by the common tradition of which the
Scriptures are the centre; it is not just a conversation between churches but a conversation of
which the Bible is the centre. The missionary dialogue with other cultures is not simply a dialogue
between cultures; the Bible functions decisively (as I have tried to show) as a third and
independent party in the developing relationship.
As soon as I make these affirmations I am aware, as a product of modern western culture, of
the questions which are posed against them in my own mind (questions which would not be posed
if I were a product of an Indian or African culture).
(a) The Bible itself represents the experience of one particular culture or complex of
cultures. The New Testament speaks the languages, uses the models of a particular time and place
in human history. It is no Switzerland among the cultures of the world, no ‘neutral zone’, no ‘non-
aligned state’. It arises out of the experience of a people, or a group of peoples, among all the
peoples of mankind. It is indelibly marked by their cultural peculiarities and it is embodied in
their languages. How, then, can it be absolutised, given an authority over the products of other
cultures?
(b) Within the New Testament itself there is a variety of Christologies. Some appear to be
shaped by models drawn from the Old Testament, some from Iranian mythology, some from the
world of Greek philosophy. How can this collection of varied models, all related to particular
temporary and local forms of culture, provide criteria by which all future models, based on the
whole range of human culture may be tested?

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(c) Critical study of the New Testament, using the tools of modern historical research, has led
many scholars to believe that it is impossible to have any knowledge of the life, character, and
teaching of Jesus sufficiently reliable to provide a criterion for judging the future developments.
We cannot, it is said, be sure how far the material in the New Testament represent the character
and message of Jesus himself and how far the beliefs of the primitive Church.
These three questions obviously raise issues which could only be adequately discussed in a
series of volumes, but my paper would be left hanging in the air if I did not attempt at least to
sketch the outlines of the answers I would want to give.
A. It is of course unquestionable that the Bible has its locus in one particular part of the
whole fabric of human culture. This fact is indeed the constant horizon of the biblical narrative
from the time that it is said that God chose the clan of Eber from among all the seventy nations
that made up the human family. Here is a primitive expression of the dogma, which is central to
the Christian tradition, that God has chosen one people among all the peoples to be the unique
bearer of his saving purpose for all nations. In contemporary western culture this is confronted by
the statement that it is impossible to believe that one among all the cultures should have this
unique position. The alleged impossibility rests upon another dogma regarding the meaning of
human experience. Here two different dogmatic systems confront one another, and I know of no
set of axioms more fundamental than either of them, on the basis of which it would be possible to
demonstrate the truth of one of these dogmas and the falsity of the other. According to one
dogma, world history is in some sense a coherent whole, and it is therefore possible to affirm that
certain events have a unique significance for the entire story. According to the other dogma there
are no events which have such unique significance and therefore no universally valid affirmation
can be made about the meaning of history as a whole. The Christian affirmation about the unique
significance of these events is a dogmatic statement made as part of the total faith-commitment to
Jesus as Lord. The contrary affirmation rests upon a different dogma which belongs to the
dominant ‘myth’ of contemporary western culture. Here the question at
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issue is not one of ‘translation’ from one cultural world to another, but of ultimate faith-
commitment.
However, the acknowledgment that this particular part of the whole fabric of human culture
has a unique place still leaves open the question about the manner in which this uniqueness is to
be interpreted. Does it mean that the cultural forms of the Semitic world have authority over all
other cultural forms? Are those who accept the uniqueness and finality of God’s revelation of
himself in a Jewish male of the first century obliged to accept the cultural forms in which that
revelation was given? Plainly no, for the New Testament itself records the debate which arose
within the primitive community at the point when the testimony about Jesus moved from a Jewish
into a Greek culture. The answers given to the question were not clear-cut, for the ‘decrees’
recorded in Acts 15.29 include purely Semitic elements which could not be and have not been
accepted as permanently valid. But the answers given do make plain that incorporation into the
community of Jesus Christ did not mean acceptance of the cultural world in which Jesus himself
had lived and which he had accepted. Jesus himself apparently never questioned the law of
circumcision. The decisive mark of membership in the new community was nothing definable in
terms of culture; it was a reality – apparently quite unmistakable – which was recognised as the
presence of the Holy Spirit.
With this I have already moved into the second of my three questions, that of the variety of
voices with which the New Testament speaks of Jesus.
B. The fact that the New Testament contains not one but several Christologies prompts the
following reflections:
(i) The first is a negative one. There is a variety but not an unlimited variety of
Christologies in the New Testament. In determining which of the traditions regarding Jesus
should be included in the canon and which should be excluded, the Church was guided by the
belief that the name of Jesus referred to a real man who had lived at a known time and in a known
place, and that therefore traditions must be verified against the testimony of original witnesses or
of those who were related to the original witnesses by a continuous tradition of public teaching.
By this test certain interpretations of the person and

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teaching of Jesus had to be rejected. Those which were accepted, varied as they are, were united
by the fact that they were judged to be reliable reports about the same person. The testimony of
sixty generations of ordinary readers of the New Testament is a confirmation of that judgment
which cannot be easily ignored.
(ii) The second reflection is positive. It is important for a faithful doing of Christology that
we should affirm and insist that the New Testament contains not one Christology but several. This
is not an unfortunate defect to be regretted or concealed. It is, on the contrary, of the essence of
the matter because it makes clear the fact that Christology is always to be done in via, at the
interface between the Gospel and the cultures which it meets on its missionary journey. It is of the
essence of the matter that Jesus was not concerned to leave as the fruit of his work a precise
verbatim record of everything he said and did, but that he was concerned to create a community
which would be bound to him in love and obedience, learn discipleship even in the midst of sin
and error, and be his witnesses among all peoples. The varied Christologies to be discovered in
the New Testament reflect the attempts of that community to say who Jesus is in the terms of the
different cultures within which they bore witness to him. If there were to be discovered in the
New Testament one definitive Christology framed in the ipsissima verba of Jesus himself, the
consequence would be that the Gospel would be for ever bound absolutely to the culture of first-
century Palestine. The New Testament would have to be regarded as untranslatable, as is the
Qur’an among Muslims. We would be dealing with a different kind of religion altogether. The
variety of Christologies actually to be found in the New Testament is part of the fundamental
witness to the nature of the Gospel: it points to the destination of the Gospel in all the cultures of
mankind. The unity of the New Testament, the fact that it contains not all Christologies, but only
those which were judged to be faithful to the original testimony, and the fact that all are held
together as parts of one canonical scripture, reflects the origin of the Gospel in the one unique
person of Jesus.
(iii) These two reflections, negative and positive, lead to the affirmation that the New
Testament, read as it must always be

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in the context of the Old, provides us – in the variety and unity of its interpretation of Jesus – with
the canon, the guide and regulator of our doing of Christology. It shows us that Christology must
be always something which is in via, incomplete, but it shows us that the road has a real starting-
point in the historic fact of Jesus Christ who lived, taught, died, and rose again under Pontius
Pilate; that it has a real destination in the universal confession of this Jesus as Lord; and that the
two conditions for the journey are faithful confession within the varied cultures, and faithful
mutual openness within the ecumenical fellowship.
C. This brings us, however, to the third of the questions which modern critical study of the
New Testament poses: do we, in fact, have such reliable knowledge of ‘the historic fact of Christ’
as would enable us to speak thus of a known starting-point for the journey of Christology?
Obviously it is impossible to discuss such a large and much debated question here: it is, however,
necessary to draw attention to one point in the debate which is relevant to the discussion.
The application of modern critical methods of historical research to the contents of the New
Testament involves two distinct issues from the point of view of our present theme.
(i) It involves the asking of such questions as the following: What is the source of this
tradition? Does it rely on eyewitnesses, or on verbal or written reports? What are the stages
through which it has passed? What are the influences and interests which could have shaped the
tradition as it was passed on? What independent evidence is there of the reliability of each of the
witnesses or reporters? For the asking of these and similar questions scholars have continuously
improved their tools and increased the volume of collateral information relevant to the answering
of the questions. The community which stands in the tradition of faith in Jesus Christ as universal
Lord is under obligation to press these questions and to use these tools for the investigation of the
sources of its own faith. To seek to evade this kind of research would be to compromise the
Church’s confession at its very centre.
(ii) But historical enquiry is never an ideologically neutral enterprise. As with every other
attempt to understand the

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world of experience, the historian’s attempt to understand the past must begin by seeking to grasp
it in terms of the thought-world which he inhabits and to which he is committed. His effort is
shaped by his culture. He can only understand the past by means of analogies in his present
experience. The past cannot become part of his mental world except by being grasped through
such analogies. This is why history has to be rewritten in each generation. ‘History is a continuing
conversation between the present and the past’ (E. H. Carr). The data of the historian’s work are
those things which were remembered and recorded because they were significant for someone at
some time. The product of his work is an ‘understanding’ of the enormous mass of available data
in terms of their significance for human beings now.
But what is ‘significant’? The answer to that question depends upon a decision of faith
about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the whole human story. The corpus of the New
Testament writings was formed within a community which believed that the meaning of the
whole human story had been declared in Jesus Christ. Within the limits of the historical methods
available to them they sought to preserve and hand on a record which was faithful to the original
testimony of those who had known Jesus in the flesh and who were the witnesses of his
resurrection. The controlling belief which shaped the selection and handling of the material was
that in Jesus the meaning of the whole of history is revealed. Within this perspective the ‘Jesus of
history’ is the Christ of faith.
The ‘model’ of world history with which European scholars operated up to the period of
enlightenment was that provided by this biblical faith. For the past two hundred years other
models have been operative which in different ways see man as the bearer of his own history.
World history is not taught in the schools and universities of Western Europe from the point of
view that the coming of Jesus is its decisive turning-point. It is told from the point of view
(usually unacknowledged) that some element in contemporary human experience, or, to be
precise, in the consciousness of contemporary western man, provides the clue for understanding
the past. It is natural that a historian whose work is part of modern western culture should
approach the New Testament records from the point of

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view of that culture. If within that framework of understanding he searches for the ‘Jesus of
history’ he will certainly find, if he finds anything more than a faint echo, something other than
the ‘Christ of Faith’, for the model in terms of which he understands history is based upon prior
decisions which exclude the faith of the Church. When it is stated that the lineaments of the real
Jesus are, for practical purposes, inaccessible to us, what has happened is that the history
remembered and recorded within the community which confesses Jesus as Lord has been set aside
in favour of a history understood on the basis of a different belief about history – one of the
beliefs which shape contemporary western culture. From the point of view of a discussion of
Christ and the Cultures, this is an excellent example of an inadmissible syncretism in which the
confession of Jesus as Lord of all cultures is suppressed in deference to the requirements of a
particular regional culture. The charge of syncretism, which has been made by some western
theologians against Christians in Asia who are looking for models for an authentic Asian way of
doing Christology, is now being thrown back with much more accuracy upon the theologians of
Europe.
I conclude this third point by affirming my belief that ‘faithful adherence to the tradition
primarily embodied in the canonical scriptures’ can be and should be accepted as one of the three
conditions for the doing of Christology in the perspective which I have described, provided (and
here I recapitulate) that three conditions are fulfilled.
(i) The Church in doing its Christology must be continually in earnest about re-examining
its own tradition, seeking to grasp it afresh in terms of its new and expanding cultural experience,
using for the purpose the best tools for critical research that are available to it, but always
standing within the commitment of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.
(ii) The Church in each culture must do its Christology in fellowship with other Churches,
giving and receiving correction and illumination from the different experiences of those who seek
to confess Jesus as Lord within different cultures.
(iii) The Church must do its Christology in dialogue with those who inhabit cultural worlds
outside of the Church (whether these are religious or secular) in order to learn through
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this dialogue more of the fulness of what Lordship means, a fulness which will finally be made
manifest only when every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the
Father.

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