Michael Horton on Contextualisation and Culture

Michael Horton, ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’, Modern Reformation 18, 1 (January-February 2009), 14-18.

The January-February 2009 issue of Modern Reformation contains several pieces devoted to the theme of ‘Christ in a Post-Christian Culture’.

William Edgar, ‘Culture and Calling: The Open Question’.
Michael Horton, ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’
David F. Wells, ‘Living in the Matrix’.
Jack Schultz, ‘Culture and the Christian’.
David Gibson, ‘Text, Church, and World: A Theology of Expository Preaching’.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, ‘Flying for Jesus’.
John Warwick Montogomery, ‘God at University College Dublin’.

Horton reminds us that ‘contextualization [the attempt to situate particular beliefs and practices in their concrete situation] is hot’ (15). But he fears that many today know more about their ‘target market’ than they do about the ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’. He is concerned that pastors are becoming ‘technicians, entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats who know the niche demographics of this passing age better than they know the Word by which the Spirit is introducing the age to come’ (15).

Not that contextualisation is unimportant, he says, reminding us how we and our beliefs are shaped by cultural habits, language and customs, and noting that we take it seriously when preparing for an overseas mission trip, but ‘are less sensitive to the ways in which our own faith and practice are shaped for good and ill by our own location’ (15).

Nonetheless, Horton wants to sound cautions, and does so under four headings.

A savior, not a symbol

Horton is particularly cautious about using the analogy of the incarnation for our contextualisation.

It is sometimes suggested that just as the Word became God-with-us, so the church must ‘incarnate’ Christ’s life. For Horton, however, ‘Jesus is a Savior, not a symbol. His incarnation is unique and unrepeatable. It cannot be extended, augmented, furthered, or realized by us. It happened… [Jesus] did not come to show us how to incarnate ourselves, but to be our incarnate Redeemer’ (15). Granted, there are places where we are called to follow his example, but nowhere are we told ‘to imitate, repeat, or extend Christ’s incarnation’ (16). We don’t ‘incarnate’ Jesus by our contextualising activity, we seek to ‘recontextualise’ our churches around him.

Contextualizing contextualization

Contextualisation itself needs to be contextualised. Horton draws here on sociology and philosophy of science to remind us that although all knowledge is shaped by language, beliefs and practices, and that presuppositions are inescapable… yet, however, recognising these ‘are formative is different from the assumption that they are determinative’ (16). Systems of thought can unravel and be overthrown.

Moreover, ‘when we make a particular context normative, we essentially concede that there is a captivity from which Jesus Christ cannot liberate’ (16). Ironically, such historicism has ‘become its own kind of dogmatic, universal, and totalizing claim’ (17).

Christ confronts culture

Contextualising approaches work with ‘a basically affirmative relationship to a given cultural context’ (17); but it may also be necessary to prise open cultural assumptions and practices at various points.

‘Whether we identify them as late modern or postmodern, our cultural assumptions should be studied and recognized not chiefly so that we can make the gospel more relevant and inviting to our neighbors, but so that we can recognize the particular ways in which they – and we – have become resistant to the gospel’ (17).

As Paul notes in the early chapters of 1 Corinthians, people had trouble understanding the gospel ‘because it was a solution to a problem they did not even consider’ (17). Where, then, might the gospel challenge rather than accommodate today’s dominant cultural paradigms?

What time is it?

Horton draws attention to the New Testament distinction between ‘this passing age’ and ‘the age to come’, a more significant division of history, perhaps, than ancient, medieval, modern, postmodern… This being the case, Horton expresses concern about accommodating message, methods and mission to ‘this passing age’ (17).

‘Taking the gospel more seriously than we take our context, we recognize that it is the age to come – breaking into this fading age through the gospel – that is normative.’ In Christ is ‘the normative location’ of every believer, ‘whether in ancient Thessalonica or contemporary Shanghai’ (18).

He ends with a plea that we ‘learn to speak our own language again and take our cues from the practices God has instituted for his own work among us as he creates the kind of community that is as strange as its gospel’ (18).