Jesus within or without culture?

My faith and action class is blowing my mind. We are reading a book entitled The Primal Vision by John V. Taylor. Written in the 1960s during the culmination of independence for various African nations, Taylor’s arguments provide great insight into the problems of African Christianity and morality today. Many of his predictions concerning the fate of the church in Africa have come true, and it makes me wonder what this continent would look like if only missionaries had heeded his advice decades ago.

By our standards of our Western evangelicalism, Taylor is a radical whose doctrine brings extreme repercussions. Every time I pick up his book, attend class, and even read my Bible during personal quiet times (an extremely western, individualistic priority), I feel my cultural roots tearing way from their foundations and floating upon a grey area of uncertainty that is surprisingly firmer in its connection to the whole than was my small island of thought.

He describes the worldview with which an African, steeped in African Traditional Religions, approaches the self, world, and God. For an African, a person’s existence is not an individual phenomenon but rather a part of the interconnected whole. We might find biological or geographical fascination in tracing our family tree, but the African sees man as “literally a family tree, a single branching organism whose existence is continuous through time, and whose roots, though out of sight below earth, may spread further and wider than all the visible limbs above.” Man is a scattered self and only finds life and existence within the community.

How does the Gospel of ‘personal relationship’ and ‘dying to self’ make any sense in this context? We bring the Gospel which fits perfectly into our individualistic worldview, but that same message of personal sin against God and the need for a personal Saviour does not translate into the community where people are so interconnected that they find their being within each other. Taylor wrestles with this much better than I ever could, so I shall let him explain it himself.

It is the lordship of Christ which is in question. Either he is the Lord of all possible worlds and of all human cultures, or he is Lord of one world and one culture only. Either we must think of the Christian Mission in terms of bringing the Muslim, the Hindu, the Animist into Christendom, or we must go with Christ as he stands in the midst of Islam, of Hinduism, of the primal worldviews, and watch with him, fearfully and wonderingly, as he becomes—dare we say it?—Muslim or Hindu or Animist, as once he became Man, and a Jew. Once, led by the Spirit, the Church made its choice in this matter at the council of Jerusalem and dared to win the Gentiles by becoming Gentile. Paul and those who followed him did not wait for history to reduce the Greco-Roman world to chaos and drive its derelicts into the arms of the Church. They claimed that world in its strength and reformulated the Gospel in the terms of its wisdom. So Christ in his Church answered the call of the Greeks; he came where they were and became what they were. From within their own culture he challenged their strength and judged their wisdom. He turned their world upside down, just as he had turned Judaism upside down—just as, indeed, if he enters our Churches today, he turns our Christianity upside down. So would he challenge and judge and revolutionize the African worldview; but he must do it form the inside.

So we are left to wonder. Must the message of the gospel be cloaked in only one cultural that must be stamped on everything? If so, then we must recant our western super-churches and start seriously looking toward the Jewish culture into which Christ came incarnate. After all, our worldview has only existed for the small slice of centuries of thought. But we know this isn’t so because of Paul’s ministry to Gentiles. He didn’t require circumcision into the Jewish tradition for them to become Christians, so we see Paul confirming the spread of a saving Messiah to cultures other than Jewish.

Perhaps there is a completely separate culture of Christ that fits into no culture. Paul seems to hint at this in 1 Corinthians 2 when he spoke not in the wisdom of when but in the Spirit and power, knowing nothing among them but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. But what about him becoming “all things to all people?” And Jesus did come start his own society or culture, he followed Jewish tradition and changed people from within their culture.

This leaves only one scary conclusion that has many implications. The gospel of Christ not only should, but must be preached within all existing cultures and change and refine them from the inside out instead of the outside in. How far this philosophy can go, I don’t know. Is it syncretism? Is it watering down the gospel? Or is it adding new depth and perception of God’s character to our narrow, individualistic western view of relationship with God?