R E V I E W ARTICLES

The Challenges and Responsibilities of Contextual Theology

John Vincent

Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation, Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds), Vol 1: In the United States; Vol 2: In Global Perspective, Fortress Press 1995, $18 each

Local Theology: Church Community in Dialogue, John Reader, SPCK 1995, €12.99

Models of Contextual Theology, Stephen B. Bevans, Orbis Books 1995, $18.95

The demarcations of theologies done in context are hard to estab- lish. Yet you know when you are there, and when you are not there. Liberation theology is a contextual theology - that is, a reflection, critique and reconstruction of theology done within a context. The context in the case of liberation theology is one of perceived or experienced oppression - the position of the poor, or blacks, or women, or those discriminated against. In these cases, experience and reflection are the primary starting points, the stuff of the theology being how far that context of oppression is felt to be analogous to some biblical paradigms, how the absence of it has warped theology done in other ways, how the new perspective reflects, reforms and rejuvenates various aspects or emphases within theology, and finally how far a new theology from this point of view can be created.

My experience would suggest that the context of the urban, and the context of the urban oppressed, is much more difficult to work from than the contexts of feminism or black or gay experience. The recent volume God in the City (Mowbray 1995) indicates how diffi- cult is the task, and how tempting it is at the end of the day to keep to a single area (children, planning, crime, enterprise, location) and simply to offer a few reflections on these areas based on Bible, theo- logy and Christian practice. The wider questions, concerning either

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the significance of the realities of the urban, or the real purpose (!I of theology, are thus left untouched. And the question of whether from this context, the urban, a new viewpoint is raised which liberates totally new or revised understandings of Bible and theo- logy, is avoided. A contextual theology for or from or alongside urban Britain is still a project before us - as God in the City says, and as I (having started a unit to do it in 1969!) would have to affirm also.

Fortunately and unfortunately, the lines are still unclear as to what exactly a contextual theology is. I have currently twenty students on an MPhil/PhD in 'Contextual, Urban and Liberation Theologies' programme with Sheffield University. It would be easier if one could give rigorous guidance as to method and pro- cedures. But such are only just beginning to emerge. And, for myself, I am bound to say that I enjoy the present unsure situation, which at least encourages trial and error, and means that theology is again once more 'forever starting all over again'.

Stephen Bevans' Models of Contextual Theology should be more help than it actually is. The foreword from Robert Schreiter is hope- ful. But the book in fact produces less than Schreiter's own, still definitive, Constructing Local Theologies (Orbis and SCM Press 1985) in terms of method. But it does another thing - analyses various methods.

Bevans sketches out five possible models for contextual theology. The first is the translation model, in which a 'gospel core' or 'kernel' is surrounded by a disposable, non-essential cultural 'husk', which the translation of the gospel in any culture uses. The gospel was itself conveyed in a tradition or context, and the new culture or social change produces new 'versions' or 'translations'. David J. Hesselgrave and Pope John Paul I1 use this method. The second model is the anthropological method, in which we approach others in different contexts and cultures with humility, to affirm the experienced realities or people unlike ourselves. Max Warren, Robert E. Hood and, above all, Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis and SCM Press 1982) are instances. He quotes Donovan (p. 59):

With great reverence to the Masai culture, we went back to the naked gospel, as close as we could get to it, and presented it to them as honestly as we could. We let them play it back to us - that was the system, to let them play it back. As it was played back we began to see different lights on the very message we

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were trying to bring to them. I would present it as clearly as I could, and they would play back what they heard me saying. That would startle me. There was this constant playing it back and forth, until something emerged that I thought they or we had never heard before. At the end, we began to see that what was emerging was the God of the gospel - one that we did not recognize before we started this thing (The Naked Gospel’, US Catholic, June 1981).

Bevans‘ third model is the praxis model, which Virginia Fabella

Though theologians continue to employ adaptation, which seeks to reinterpret Western thought from an Asian perspective (Bevans’ ’translation model’), or indigenization, which takes the native culture and religion as its basis (Bevans‘ ’anthropological model’), there is the newer thrust to contextualize theology . . . As a dynamic process, it combines words and action, it is open to change, and looks to the future (Asia’s Strugglefor Frill Humanity, Orbis 1980).

This praxis model is based on the continual dialogue between Christian conviction and Christian action, visible in ’the unity of knowledge as activity and knowledge as content’ (Jon Sobrino). Praxis is reflected-upon action and acted-upon reflection, all in one. Leonard0 Boff is joined, I think surprisingly, by Douglas J. Hall as example, plus Asian feminist theologians.

Bevans‘ fourth model is the synthetic model, which ‘takes pains to keep the integrity of the individual message, while acknowledg- ing the importance of taking culture and social change seriously’ (p. 82). Aylward Shorter, Kosuke Koyama, Jose de Mesa are instances. The fifth model is the transcendental model, which attends to ‘the affective and cognitive operations in the self- transcending subject’, operating as ‘an authentic converted subject’ (p. 97). Sally McFague and Justo Gonzalez are examples.

Some kind of discernment as to the situation itself is necessary. Bevans concludes that ’within today’s world of radical plurality and ambiguity‘, the best model must be the most appropriate for the situation. ’It depends on the context’ (p. 112).

The discussion concerning contextualization has been largely taking place within mission studies, in which issues of ‘encultural- ization’ have been important, and the experience of missions taking the message into varied contexts has been the prime source. The

introduces thus:

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question preoccupying many writers in the field is thus still the question of what happens to the gospel when a new context appropriates it.

Meantime, unconnectedly, biblical scholars have been debating ’social location‘. Neither Schreiter nor Bevans is mentioned in the two volumes of Readingfiom this Place. The long introduction by Fernando Segovia is a good place to start. The historical-critical method reveals a variety of contexts foreign to us; literary criticism reveals a variety of narrative principles and conventions, again foreign to us; and cultural criticism, with its regard for the contexts of both text and reader, opens up principles and conventions of other times and cultures. But historical criticism was ‘inbred and thoroughly hegemonic’, and while concentrating on the social location of the work under analysis, ignored that of the readers and interpreters. In literary criticism, meanwhile, different read- ings depended upon the variety of forms identified, but those could be learned by ‘sophisticated impartation and passive acquisi- tion’ (p. 191, and the reader was still very much the taught one who had the tools of interpretation. In cultural criticism, the text’s interest was ’in terms of its broader social and cultural dimensions‘ - social class, class conflict, social institutions, roles and behaviour (p. 22).

Now, says Segovia, there is a ’distinct turn toward the real reader’. This development towards emphasizing the present reader as the decisive context evokes the following:

Thus, with readers now fully foregrounding themselves as flesh- and-blood readers, variously situated and engaged in their own respective social locations, the process of liberation and decolonization moves into the sociocultural domain itself. Different readers see themselves not only as using different interpretive models and reading strategies but also as reading in different ways in the light of the multi-level social groupings that they represent and to which they belong. Such a way of reading ultimately looks upon all interpretive models, retrievals or meaning from texts, and reconstructions of history as con- structs - formulated and advanced by positioned readers, flesh- and-blood persons reading and interpreting from different and highly complex social locations (Vol I, p. 31).

The two volumes of Readingfrom this Place are simply a series of biblical-theological reflections by Christian disciples and biblical students, interpreting their contexts and experience in the light of

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biblical contexts and experiences. The context for the first volume is North America - but then the contexts of sex, gender, class, etc. In the second volume, the distinctiveness of Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America is the first layer of contextuality, into which gender, marginality, isolation and multi-faith are additional layers. This widely-varied exegesis and testimony accords with my

own experience of working with peoples' own theologies. Indeed, the conclusion has to be that there can be no end to the location- contained, loca tiondetermined and location-liberated (through praxis) experiences of disciples. The individual actor/disciple/ participant is also the biblical student/reader/novice. Each piece of discipleship and experience is inspired or supported by each separate piece of biblical material, theological notion or aspect of tradition. A contextual theology is a limitlessly pluralistic theology. A new kind of Catholicity emerges. Whatever comes from Jesus- discipleship and the Jesus mystery, done in myriad places, is holy and catholic' - a contemporary reversal of Vincent of Lerins!

One outstanding problem in plotting how a contextual theology is to be done is the non-communication between theologians whom one would have thought (naively!) would have been in the same country. I had hardly put down the two volumes of Reading from this Place, when a book by a 'Bible and Culture Collective' at Yale, The Post-Modern Bible (Yale 19951, came my way. Segovia and Tolbert, let alone their contributors, get no mention at all. And a quick glance at the Index shows how far apart the two enterprises are.

The book includes reader-response criticism along with structuralist, narratological, poststructuralist, rhetorical, psycho- analytic, feminist, womanist and ideological criticisms:

We are arguing for a transforming biblical criticism, one that undertakes to understand the ongoing impact of the Bible on culture and one that, therefore, benefits from the rich resources of contemporary thought on language, epistemology, method, rhetoric, power, reading, as well as the pressing and often con- tentious political questions of 'difference' - gender, race, call, sexuality and, indeed, religion - which have come to occupy centre stage in discourses both public and academic (p. 2).

This reveals the 'contingent and constructed character of meaning itself'. In the postmodern situation, the pluralism of personal con- textualizing reaches the limits of solipsism and uncommunicability, it seems to me. In other and simpler ways, the context of each

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reader and writer today is obviously a crucial element in contextual theology. The collective comments:

Engaging in self-reflexive reading has meant a heightened sense of our various social locations and speaker-positions, which can- not be reduced to a facile litany of gender, race, class and institu- tional locations. Indeed, we have come to recognize that, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has observed, 'location . . . is not simply an address. One's affiliations are multiple, contingent, and frequently contradictory' (p. 5).

John Reader's book on Local Theology is in the same country, but I think too quickly moves into the conceptual. He records some good studies of 'the local as the Context for Theology', and plays this out in terms of local issues in the community, notably those of housing needs, a play scheme, and an environmental project, plus some- what unrelatedly a 'Cultured Despisers' group. I agree with him totally that the situation facing us is post-Christian - and also post- modem, so that our best tack is to see ourselves as one player alongside others.

One advantage - and disadvantage - of Reader's consequent practice is that it ends up with just another long way round to the old parishchurch doing its bit in the locality, not upsetting anyone, and being friends to all. What has happened is that a particular manifestation of the English context - and a supposedly neutral assessment of it - has elided into an apparently bias-free 'context'. The postmodernity we both espouse would lead us into a more radical critique. What seems to have happened is that a particular view of the Christian gospel - as something generally useful to the society - has produced a context-assimilation which, in the end, has determined the shape of the gospel - the synthetic model in Bevans' terms.

Personal experience of getting people to 'write their own theo- logy' over many years has brought me to a few conclusions. First, that the customary language used by Christians derives more from the ecclesiastical context within which they have been living than from what their practice or their experience actually is. I found myself observing at the Annual Consultation of the Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission that radicals, liberals and evangelicals have all in fact come through similar experiences and discovered similar commitments through their involvement in urban mission over the last twenty years. But radicals, liberals and evangelicals still describe their experience and practice in very different ways.

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The second conclusion is that the perception and description of the context itself is never capable of objective analysis. Every con- textual perception and description is a highly ‘loaded‘ pheno- menon. And even if a supposedly neutral word is used - like ‘poor’ or ’deprived’ or ‘victimized’, the word used will have negative and dismissive constructions for some users and hearers, and positive and affirmative connotations for others. I have often worked with groups on situation, social and structural analysis - and then said at the start of the next session, ’Now we will do something totally different. Now we will do a gospel analysis of the situation.’

The third conclusion is that contextual theology is to be welcomed and worked at as a way of making theological sense of discipleship. So much theology begins with the head, and rarely touches the heart, hands or feet. But discipleship is about feet, hands and heart (in that order!), and.a welcome is long overdue from the academy to the foot-soldiers and troubadours of Christianity. If we got them to tell their stories, we could even end up with an academic discipline of contextual theology which recog- nized and worked from what is out on the streets. My final conclusion is that contextual theology can best be made

sense of inasmuch and in so far as it embodies the absolute basics of one’s existence - not as one analyses them or perceives them culturally, but as they actually are in basic bottom-up experience. Mary Ann Tolbert quotes Adrienne Rich’s description of people situated in society by ‘the facts of blood and bread’.

The ‘facts of blood’ delineate one’s social, personal and familiar alignments, while the ‘facts of bread’ include one’s economic, political and national setting.

Tolbert sees the personal contexts of ’blood’ as ‘race gender, ethnic- ity, sexual orientation and physical integrity‘, and the facts of ’bread‘ as living in a particular contextual setting (Vol. 1, p. 331).

British contextual theologies hold out the hope and expectation that theologizing this time begins with ourselves and where and what we are. They will find many resonances in the tradition. It remains to be seen whether the contemporary confusions and non- communications of the academy serve or hinder their develop- ment.

John Vincent is Director of the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield

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