Witnessing together in context

Subsection 1.3

Proclamation as Witness
Community as Witness
Service as Witness
Witness in context
Text, context, contextualization
Characteristics of contextualization
Semper Reformanda

The search for authentic witness has always been important in the life of the church. Its proclamation, the kind of community it forms and encourages, its service and its theology are all shaped by the different contexts in which the church finds itself. In the last half-century, the recognition of the significance of context has caused a revolution in ecumenical theological reflection. It has impacted both the church's missionary practice and its search for unity, and has given birth to new concepts.

At the assembly of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in Whitby, Canada, in 1947, kerygma (proclamation) and koinonia (community) emerged as key theological terms for the understanding of mission. In the fifties a third element, diakonia (service), was added. The IMC conference at Willingen in Germany of 1952 took over these three elements, adding martyria (witness) as the overarching concept.¹ For the next decades, witness through proclamation, fellowship and service dominated missiological discussion as the most appropriate and comprehensive portrayal of what mission is supposed to be.

Proclamation as Witness

The community of those who believe in Jesus Christ has from its very inception been primarily a remembering and a narrating community - a storytelling community.

The whole of the Bible may be seen as a collection of stories and narratives, some of which are quite dangerous [challenging the status quo] and provocative. The hearer who is affected by these stories will not remain a hearer but will become a doer of the word.

The American theologian Walter Brueggemann illustrates the force of storytelling with a beautiful example taken from the collection of memories about the prophet Elisha. It is a "provocative story", calling in question the world as it seems to be. That world is a world where injustice gives birth to further injustice, in an apparently unbroken and unbreakable chain.

Provocative stories create new perspectives and transform the lives of people. A new vision, a new way of behaviour, is given to us in narrative mode, the only mode available outside "royal rationality" (Brueggemann).² Only stories lie beyond "royal reason". In order to know something different, Israel must know differently. The story is about human hurt, under threat from Syria. It is about human amazement, mountains filled with horses and chariots of fire that Israel did not know were there and cannot explain. It is a tale of transformation in which the sighted ones become blind, the blind sighted (cf Jn 9.29-41) and the enemy is transformed into a festival partner who goes peaceably away. This is a transformation that permits new patterns of conduct and policy; it is a more excellent way because a vicious cycle is broken.

The story concerns the real shift of power in the world. It is partisan, delegitimizing, from below. The key action is Elisha's petitionary prayer. The decisive result is the power to see the world differently, to see it according to the reality of God's rule. By delegitimizing and empowering, the story transforms. It does not just remember a world that was. It creates a world that could be - even though the kings insist that such a world is not possible. It playfully probes to see what kind of world might exist were the canon of control, the authority of kingship, and subservience to established power not taken too seriously.³

To witness is to proclaim a different reality, God's reality: this reality, turned upside-down as the outcome of God's rule. Proclamation can take the shape of a narrative, but it may also take the form of a gesture or a symbol, which sometimes speaks louder than speech. Today, as in the past, it opens up new ways of understanding.

Community as Witness

This ancient, beautiful, formative story is full of suggestion. At the table of the Lord real unity and community are born. The breaking of the bread together reveals the heart of the unity of the disciples of the Lord. The secret is indicated by the suggestive words about the recognition of the Lord. Aroused by stories like this, a new community comes into being. It is always around the table of the Lord that communion is established or broken. This table-communion is the formative and unifying force that gives birth to the people of God.

In this community all of us, no matter what our education, colour, social status, gender or age, belong. All are invited to tell their own, often obscured, stories. All are invited to connect their individual and collective stories with the greater narrative - the story of the exodus from Egypt, the story in Genesis of men and women created in the image of God, the story of Jesus the man of Nazareth on his long road to Jerusalem and the cross, and finally the story about a new Jerusalem, a city from heaven, dressed as a bride. Thereby, our life-stories receive a new significance.

When we read the Bible, we are not so much interpreting the Bible as interpreting our own lives and life of our community in the light of the Bible.

Communion or community, when realized, is in itself a witness to the gospel, a sign and instrument of the breakthrough of the kingdom of God. What happened once, a group of people coming together around the Lord's table, telling their life-stories and interpreting those by connecting them with the story of Jesus, has continued ever since. All over the world, in all contexts, it continues to form new communities. The Kampen consultation in 1993 explored the contours of those new communities and the necessary conditions for ecclesiogenesis (the coming into existence of the church), and identified important issues for reflection:⁴

• the central place in the gospel of the poor and the marginalized, with the challenge this presents to existing structures of power in church and society;
• the full participation of women in the life of Christian communities and in society at large, and the need for all churches to ordain women;
• the need to liberate church traditions that domesticate the Spirit, and to encourage an awareness of the Holy Spirit as present in loving actions;
• the need to develop theologies based on the identification of Jesus Christ with those who suffer, and to see the authority of Scripture in terms of its power to liberate and transform both individuals and communities;
• the need to re-examine the movement for Reformation in the 16th century as contextual theology;
• the need to celebrate the Lord's supper as a feast of life, not as a sacrament of exclusion.

The call to witness in context challenges the witnessing church to create an inclusive community, critically engaged in action, questioning the inequality of access to resources, and recognizing the positive nature of diversity in a community which is united but not uniform, and in which individuals receive from one another as well as give. Christians are personally involved in the matter of semper reformanda. The message challenges the messenger. Community, as an essential part of witnessing in context, leads to the evangelization of the church.

Service as Witness

This is the story of a courageous woman who dared to resist the king, who - by the very act of spreading out the impaled bodies of her sons - called upon God, and who succeeded to turn the heart of the king. She received what she prayed for: the recognition of a basic human right. The act of this particular woman makes clear in what sense ministry or service can be seen as witness. Over against "royal ethics" (even those of King David) this "widow" calls upon God's righteousness.⁵ The ministry of this woman illustrates what is the ministry of all. The whole church is summoned to a prophetic ministry: to lift up the voice of those who are voiceless. The church is called to be present in the name and in the place and for the sake of those who have been denied a name and a place and a right to "be there", to present and to represent them. But prophecy and prayer go hand in hand. The whole church is called also to mention their names and their fate in God's presence, to present and to represent them before the Lord. This double representation is what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had in mind when he wrote in prison that the church is only church when it is a church for others.

Ministry has traditionally been understood as the preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and service. As such, it has been carried out primarily by people called, trained and appointed by a particular Christian community. While such institutional arrangements may have been effective, several factors call us to a new and more inclusive understanding of ministry.

Increasingly, the notion of ministry as something done by some (a select group) to others is questioned. Ministry is not so much ministry to the community, as ministry of the community and ministry with the community. All human beings, regardless of their status or social position, are in constant need of renewal and mutual service. All Christians are called to ministry by virtue of their baptism (Rom 12.3-8; 2 Cor 5.17-20; Eph 4.7,11-12). The gifts of the whole people of God should be freely used to shape both church and society in the light of the new humanity proclaimed and inaugurated by Jesus Christ.

As Christian communities try to relate more closely to their context, they discover new, contextually appropriate, patterns of ministry. Emerging ministries call for the involvement, not just of the ordained or the "professional", but of the whole church: ministries to the aged, to drug addicts and substance abusers, to the victims of domestic or communal violence, to refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, or to those suffering from HIV/Aids. The growing number of the "Aids-widows" in several African countries - women who have lost their husbands because of Aids - demands a new ministry. The unfavourable reaction of the people around them, Christian people included, illustrates in what sense this kind of ministry means witnessing to the gospel.

The goal of such ministry is to make visible the dream of God's kingdom: to heal wounds and divisions, to create new coherent relationships between individuals and communities and to stand at the side of those who are being victimized. Often it involves living in communities of people of different races, colour, culture and religion. Creating a caring and sharing community is in itself ministry and proclamation.

Witness in context

The question is not whether the gospel has something to tell us, but what it has to tell us and what it asks of us. That will be different for each and every person, and for each and every group of Christians. To put it in the imagery of the apostle John: the encounter with the risen Lord means something specific for each and every disciple. For Mary the encounter differs from that of Peter, and yet again from that of Thomas. It is like that because the encounter does not take place in an empty house, but in a home where people live, where people laugh and where they shed tears.

From what has been said so far it will be clear that the content and form of witness are most intimately related to the context. Provocative questions about that relationship emerged at a WARC consultation in Senegal in 1991.

A Latin American wondered whether 16th- and 17th-century Reformed theology is able to take seriously the doctrine that men and women are created in the image of God, or to see people as they really are, as people already touched by grace. Does the reality of poverty have any theological significance in our view of salvation? Or must we admit that the Calvinist doctrine of grace and redemption does not have anything to do with economic and social reality, other than pulling people out of this "realm of darkness"?

An African questioned the widespread opinion that the African cultural and religious inheritance, when seen in the light of the gospel, showed only darkness. Can Reformed theology admit that the God known by Christians in the west was already known in Africa, long before the missionary movement started? Can it recognize that Africa has a special knowledge of God as the source and giver of life, life-in-community?

An Asian asked painful questions about the west's labelling of Asia as pagan.⁶

An urgent search for true contextual witness is apparent in questions such as these. What is at stake is what incarnation is all about. The divine has taken human form not only in Judeo-Christian cultures and contexts, but also in African, Asian, Latin American, and secular western cultures and contexts. Witness that only repeats what has been said during the last four centuries in a mainly western context runs the risk of becoming irrelevant in contexts that see human and cosmic reality in a different way.

Text (Scripture), context, contextualization

This is a tale filled with suggestion and imagination:

It calls forth Luther, who cried out that the Bible needs to be delivered from its chains, as he remembered that the Bibles in the monasteries were chained to tables.

It suggests that people in every context and every generation are invited to read the Bible anew, to interpret it with fresh eyes for themselves, unhindered by others; and

It suggests that the Bible invites people to liberation and celebration of human existence within their own contexts.

The tale leads us towards an understanding of contextualization. Contextualization establishes a meaningful relationship between text and context. It is a process in which the past experience of the community enshrined in the text (Scripture) opens up in the light of contemporary reality and enables us to perceive this reality in a critical way. The context is where and how people live their lives. It is their house, and the world around them. It is those elements that crucially influence the lives of people and make up their identity: economic and political (western/non-western, poor/rich), social (man/woman, employed/ unemployed), or cultural (how people create for themselves a world to live in and an identity between yesterday's truth and expectations for tomorrow).

Contextualization involves critical reflection on the context. The context is carefully analysed, in the belief that God has something to do with the world and that God is at work in the world. Contextualization first penetrates and clarifies our reality on the basis of, and with the help of, belief in God's kingdom. Secondly, contextualization relates and interconnects the two worlds: the reality of faith and promise and the daily, familiar reality.

In short, contextualization shows us the world as God's world (Ps 24) and requires us to watch intently to see where God is at work, so that we may become involved in that work. It is the constantly reiterated process of analysis and confrontation with the reality of God's kingdom within the constantly changing context.

Contextualization is a dynamic approach, which, by empowering people to affirm their own humanity, fights against imposed and false universalisms of various kinds. Contextualization does not deny universalism; however, the universality the Bible envisages is rooted in incarnation. That means that God's presence in the world penetrates every context, but can never be constrained by any. Paul tells us how concrete incarnation is: the gospel descends to the very depth of humanity where life lies in all its nakedness (Phil 2.5-8).⁸

Characteristics of Contextualization

1. Contextualization is more than adjustment to cultural forms (music in the liturgy, etc.). It is an opening up to the world and setting in motion of the transforming power of the gospel.
2. Contextualization breaks with a dogmatic approach. The starting point of contextual theology is not an idea, such as revelation, reason, nature, or doctrine, but the specific social relations, the hopes and fears of people - the context.
3. Contextualization implies a specific method. It starts with a social and cultural analysis so as to discover a "soteriological framework" and to discern the symbols through which the consciousness of people in a given context is expressed. It is with this that we confront the biblical stories. The liberating and healing result of this dialogue between text and context is the discovery of the gospel within the context itself.
4. Contextualization needs "new eyes for reading", eyes which are trained to search the context and accustomed to "the light from below". More than half a century ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer was already aware of the value of reading from another perspective: "It is an experience of incomparable value to learn to look at the great events of world history for once from below from the perspective of the marginalized, the suspected, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the despised, in short the suffering".⁹
5. Contextual theology is non-academic, biblical theology. Its approach is narrative and its gift is wisdom.
6. Contextualization turns away from universalistic-globalizing ways of thinking. It can be seen as the struggle of churches and Christians to define their identity in terms of their own cultural reality, by connecting the basic tenets of Christian faith (missio Dei, creation, incarnation, salvation/ liberation, etc.) with their own historic, existential experience. Contextualization is not only an issue for the third world churches, but also an urgent necessity for Christians and Reformed churches in the north, who are used to expressing their faith in creeds and liturgical forms shaped by the specific (contextual) circumstances of the 16th and 17th century. For them also, contextualization means to decontextualize, in order to come to an appropriate recontextualization.

Semper reformanda

Rethinking the common witness of the church through a new contextualization is not a new idea. It is implicit in the classic Reformed demand: ecclesia semper reformanda! The realization of the assignment, semper reformanda, is always difficult, because it always puts us in the position of leading a life as church in and at the same time beyond "normality". But it is precisely on the narrow rim of the "in" and the "beyond" (eg beyond "royal reason") that the gospel seems to draw people, as if that is the place where to meet their Lord.

One of the most probing (and comforting) stories from the early church about a community living as witness in "two worlds" that has been saved from oblivion is the letter to Diognetus, dating from the second century.

It goes without saying that the picture in the letter to Diognetus is highly idealized. But the picture is most helpful in the sense that it reminds churches and Christians of their commitment to witness in context, while at the same time it suggests that the source of their witness is from beyond. That source is what brings them together in their witness. It is the Holy Spirit who time and again provokes us to come to a new understanding of the gospel and inspires us to find new ways. The unity we seek is built upon this conviction.

Notes