Let’s talk about church enculturation. How does a church invite people to conform to its culture? As an introduction to the topic, it might be worth considering a few doctrinal matters before looking at a few church culture models.
Two Doctrinal Matters
Before delving into the nuances of a proper enculturation model of ministry, two doctrinal boundaries need to be established. The first relates to soteriology and the second to eschatology. Many dangerous missiologies are built on faulty foundations that put man on a mission to acquire eternal life through his own works or to build a spirit kingdom through certain actions. A biblical understanding of soteriology will have that man is saved by grace through faith apart from his own works, such that his discipleship is completely distinct from his salvation. A biblical understanding of eschatology will have that the kingdom is not yet inaugurated and will come in the future.
On Soteriological Distinctions
God is infinitely holy and therefore cannot have a relationship with that which is unholy (1 Sam. 2:2; Ps. 33:5; Hab. 1:13). His perfect justice demands that sin be punished (Pss. 9:8; 96: 10, 13; Acts 17:31). The sin of the world was laid on Christ at the cross and sin, therefore, does not prevent man from salvation (Isa. 53; Rom. 5:8; Heb. 9:28; 1 Pet. 2:24); however, since natural man still falls short of God’s standard of holiness, he is separated from Him by default and is unable to do any work that could merit righteousness (Isa. 64:6; Luke 19:10; John 3:19-21; Eph. 2:12; Rom. 1:18–3:20). Man is born spiritually dead and heading for eternal conscious torment in the Lake of Fire (John 3:18; 8:24; Eph. 2:1; Rev. 20:11–15), but the believer is saved from this end when He is given a second birth whereby God imputes Christ’s righteousness to him when he fulfills the sole condition of believing in Christ for eternal life (John 3:3–18; Eph. 2:4–9; Phil. 3:9; Rom. 3:22; Rev. 21).
On the source and application of salvific merit, Earl Radmacher puts it well, “A believer receives the gift of salvation not by what he or she did but by what God did. Believers then become stewards with the possibility and opportunity of doing good works—not to become saved, but because we are saved.”[1] To say that believers become “stewards with the possibility and opportunity of doing good works” is a far cry from saying that stewards must do good works for final salvation.
Salvation may be codified as occurring in three phases: justification, sanctification, and glorification. These three terms are not restricted to soteriological uses, but they describe well three phases or aspects of salvation, each of which has vastly different criteria and results. Justification is salvation from the penalty of sin and the only criterion is faith alone in Christ alone. Justification cannot be lost nor does it need to be maintained, so the rest of the Christian’s life is in the second phase of sanctification, whereby the Christian should abide by daily dependence on the Holy Spirit. Glorification is in the believer’s future and will take its final form as the believer spends eternity on a new earth in a glorified body.
Salvation in the justification sense occurs in that first moment of belief in Christ, but sanctification (often spoken of in terms of abiding or discipleship), should occupy the Christian’s life from then onward. Some soteriological schemes put the cart before the horse, such that discipleship becomes a condition for salvation. This often leaves honest Christians wondering if their discipleship is good enough to prove justification, but a positive consequence of a soteriology that keeps salvation distinct from discipleship is that the believer can have assurance of his salvation. Instead of looking to his discipleship as a basis of his assurance, his assurance becomes a basis for his discipleship. One author rightly emphasizes the doctrine of assurance:
Assurance isn’t simply a comforting doctrine. It’s foundational to discipleship. If we want to life a life that is pleasing to God, we must be sure we are His children and will remain so forever… It’s imperative for the believer to know that he’s unconditionally a member of God’s family. Only with such knowledge is he able to grow and mature into the image of Jesus Christ.[2]
The believer no longer needs to fear condemnation, but while he is free from God’s eternal punishment, this does not mean that he is exempt from temporal discipline.[3]
On the Postponed Kingdom
In light of previous revelation, Abraham’s contemporaries knew that their Redeemer—that is, God Himself—would come to earth along with His holy ones to execute judgment and rule on this physical planet (Gen. 3:15; Job 19:25; Jude 14–15). God cut a covenant with Abraham and this covenant serves as the foundation of future covenants that are related to the kingdom.[4] The provisions of the Abrahamic covenant include land, seed, and blessing, which are expanded through the later covenants, known as the land covenant (Deut. 30:1–10), the Davidic covenant (2 Sam. 7:1–17; 1 Chron. 17), and the new covenant (Jer. 31:31–34; Ezek. 36:16–18). These promises make up the fundamental aspects of the messianic kingdom, which is a physical kingdom on land with the messianic Seed as the ruler and the new covenant as the law.
As the Hebrew Scriptures progress, readers are made aware that the messianic kingdom will feature, among other things, a return to the land (Lev. 26:40–45), a curtailing of the curse (Isa. 11:6–9), a Ruler in Israel (Micah 5:2) who is the Branch ruling from the temple (Ezek. 40–46; Hag. 2:1–9; Zech. 6:12), topographical changes (Isa. 11:15–16; Zech. 14:4–11), and Israel’s preeminence (Isa. 14:2; 49:22–23; Zech. 14:4–11). The current dispensation is unlike the messianic kingdom that is described in the Bible.
Jesus came and offered the kingdom, but He did not give a definition for what He was talking about. The reason that He never defined His kingdom is simply because prior revelation had already given a clear description of what He was offering. Several alternatives to dispensational eschatology rest on alternative definitions of the kingdom. To the dispensationalist, a kingdom consists of land, subjects, laws, and royalty. Alternative views try to redefine what the word kingdom means. To the dispensationalist, the attributes of the kingdom that Jesus talked about are found in the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures. Alternative views try to redefine the kingdom into a spiritual realm that is unlike the plainly described messianic kingdom of the Bible.
A False Model: The Social Activism Model
Social activism models are often built on faulty soteriological and eschatological foundations. Rather than seeing Christ’s work on the cross as relating to men’s salvation from hell, woke theologians will often accept a Christus victor view of the atonement. Instead of seeing Christ expiating sin for men to be saved from hell through faith in Christ, the Christus victor theory sees Christ’s task on the cross as removing the curse (which is often described mythologically rather than literally) so that man can live more comfortably on earth. This perspective gained traction after the release of a book that Gustaf Aulén wrote in 1931, which contained such descriptors as:
The victory of Christ over the powers of evil is an eternal victory, therefore present as well as past. Therefore Justification and Atonement are really one and the same thing; Justification is simply the Atonement brought into the present, so that here and now the Blessing of God prevails over the Curse.[5]
This is the view of the atonement that fits best with social activist models. Social activist models shift the church away from the biblical mission of evangelism to a secular mission of healing the planet. This shift would be bad enough as it inhibits people from hearing the Gospel, but the theology also prevents people from understanding and believing the Gospel. For example, Willis Jenkins exposes his view of the atonement by writing:
Inhabiting the reconciliation accomplished by Christ, human relations with all creatures are restored and redeemed. When Christ sets the captives free, he frees them to restorative service in a land damaged by sin. The Christian mission to all the earth means becoming physician and healer to the earth, priests and ministers to all creation.[6]
Notice that the mission is not proclaiming the message of salvation through faith, but rather the mission is to repair the environment through works. This is a works-based religion that shifts the responsibility of restorative work from Christ to men, but it also neglects entirely the real problem of sin and its consequences. This is the message that Jenkins and others preach and it is nothing short of a false gospel.
Embedded into this soteriology is an eschatology that sees the kingdom as inaugurated on earth in a spiritual form and that this spirit kingdom is to be advanced through social activism. As previously noted, Jesus never defined the kingdom because the kingdom had been clearly defined through the Hebrew Scriptures. Likewise, the Bible includes no instruction for growing the kingdom because this is neither the task of the church nor a possibility in light of the kingdom’s nature. However, Christendom has a tradition of kingdom-building and so the man-made mandate to build the kingdom is often the grounds for obscure missiologies such as social activism. That advocates of social activism models see kingdom-building as a current mandate is evident, for example, in the following sample of statements:
Jesus acts through us to bring his kingdom to bear in every space of hurt so that God’s kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven. He sends us out in mision integral to serve as agents of God’s reconciliation, redemption, and justice.[7]
…there remains a basic difference between the reproductive rights movement, concerned with women’s and men’s freedom to choose their parental roles, and the reproductive responsibilities movement, concerned with raising consciousness regarding the universally important small family goal. Perhaps as the environmental crisis continues to deepen and the danger to God’s kingdom on earth becomes increasingly evident, these positions will flow together. Both are based, after all, on vastly strengthening women’s rights, education, and opportunities around the world.[8]
Such queer theologies are concerned to unmask allegedly revelatory or natural idolatry not so that personal capitalism may flourish (that you can do what you like if you have the power and resources to do it) but to herald in a new order, the “kingdom of God” or, more simply, a church where women priests can properly represent Christ and Mary. Of course theologians are not able to make this critique from any foundationalist standpoint, replicating the problem that queer theory aims to unmask, but from within a complex tradition which they must both criticize and learn from.[9]
Through the exegetical work that Glen Stassen primarily undertook, we became convinced that Jesus drew most heavily for his version of ‘Kingdom of God’ on materials in Isaiah, especially the redemptive/restorationist themes of Isaiah 40–66. In choosing to anchor his preaching mainly in this part of Isaiah, Jesus was authentically connected to his Jewish roots but, perhaps like all prophets, selectively appropriated those aspects of the tradition that he wanted to highlight… Stassen and I identified seven ‘marks’ of the Kingdom of God in Jesus’ preaching, citing passages in the Synoptic Gospels that allude to, cite or parallel passages in Isaiah. These seven purported marks of the Kingdom are deliverance (salvation), justice, peace, healing, restoration of community, the experience of God’s active redeeming presence, and joyful human response… To the extent that we practice his peace-making, justice-making, community-restoring, relationship-healing teachings, we participate in the inaugurated Kingdom of God. This is what it means to be a follower, or disciple, of Jesus Christ. This is also the primary task of the Christian Church.[10]
The corporate presence of the Christian community in the world reflects foundational commitments to social justice, often conveyed through the symbol of the kingdom of God. Christian scholars contend that emulating the passion of Jesus for justice in the kingdom of God involves concrete actions in such areas as healthcare reform and ensuring access to healthcare for all persons, as well as requiring justice in health-related realms such as environmental and economic justice.[11]
…environmental practices model a new order, the rule of the Kingdom, and thus, at least proleptically, initiate the universal shalom of a new earth. In this case, stewardship redemptively transforms nature, efficaciously realizing Christ’s restoration of all things.[12]
Using a feminist hermeneutic, I argue that the story [in Luke 7:36–50] is an exercise in erotic performance art that intends to liberate readers into a new relationship with Christ that is body- and pleasure-affirming… Jesus’ and the woman’s amorous performance art signals that excessive desire for the well-being of another’s flesh is the grounds for salvation and forgiveness in God’s new order of being. “The kingdom of God is among you,” says Jesus in Luke 17:21. God’s new order is not “out there” waiting to arrive; it is “here and now” as modeled in this parable of erotic intimacy.[13]
May we begin beating our swords into plowshares now, and the kingdom will begin to be not simply something we hope for when we die but something we see on earth as it is in heaven, the kingdom that is among us and within us.[14]
Any constructive theological project that takes seriously women’s and genderqueer people’s bodies and sexualities is deeply eschatological. That is to say, the vision of how and what the world ought to be and how and what God’s future holds forms the basis and inspiration for much of liberated, feminist, queered embodiment. Especially in a colonized context, an eschatological vision is necessary to discern what liberation, decolonization, and hope might look like… eschatology is… about the promised reign of God in all human experience and in all creation… This “here and now” eschatology fits well with a liberation, feminist, and queer understanding of eschatology. It roots our Christian hope in what God is doing to create a more just and liberated world. Nevertheless, precisely because justice is a major part of what we are hoping for, a sense of the timing and pacing of the eschaton is key.[15]
Because such social activism models are based on a false gospel with a deviant eschatology, they should be rejected wholeheartedly.
An Incomplete Model: The Education Model
Some churches fall into an incomplete model by emphasizing the important task of education while neglecting other church mandates. One way for this to work would be for a church to emphasize certain Bible truths to the neglect of others. In the case of the soteriological model proposed here, it would be possible for a church to teach mostly the passages related to salvation while seeking unity in other matters. As counterintuitive as it may seem, a correction to this incomplete model would not necessarily be to do more, but to teach more. The Bible has plenty of instructions beyond the command for unbelievers to believe, and teaching these from a sanctification framework that emphasizes eternal rewards could help complete the incomplete education model.
An Enculturation Model
Two false models that are contrasted to enculturation are called here the eisculturation and exculturation models. The prefix en– most likely traces to Old French through Latin, but the Greek preposition εν (en “in”) is a helpful contrast to εις (eis “into”) and απο (apo “from”). If enculturation includes the assimilation of an individual into church culture, then eisculturation is the assimilation of the world’s culture into the church and apoculturation is the attempt to make the world assimilate the church’s culture. Eisculturation and apoculturation are my made-up terms, but they describe real trends in missiology.
The church is in the world, but not of the world. That is to say that the world is evil, and this is where the church resides, but the church is to resist becoming worldly like its surroundings. As the church is to go into the entire world, the Body of Christ will inevitably reach different cultures, which may have attributes that are matters of preference and not matters of sin. There is a delicate balance between a church accepting the non-sinful matters of a culture and allowing foreign practices to detract the church from its mission. The eiscultration model is overly accepting of cultures to the extent of bringing inappropriate cultural norms into the church.
The church has a mission to reach the world, but it does not follow that the church will eventually conquer the world. The apoculturation model would have that the church is on a mission to change the world. While a substantial number of healthy churches in a culture may well influence the culture positively, the fact remains that this world is distinct from and opposed to the church. Attempts have been made to integrate ecclesiastical bodies into government; two examples from amillenialist perspectives would be the Roman Catholic Church’s two-sword doctrine to subjugate the government and the Eastern Orthodox Church’s doctrine of symphonia with the government. Such arrangements have only ended in further drifts from the Bible. More recently, postmillennialism has been trending in American evangelicalism; this trend seeks to conquer governments and instill revised forms of the Mosaic Law. Such systems of theonomy are not biblically sustainable.
The enculturation model maintains the church/world distinction. Rather than mimicking the world as the eisculturation model does, the enculturation model rejects the world and forms its own culture. Rather than busying itself with changing the world as the apoculturation model does, the enculturation model is more occupied with improving itself. By understanding a distinction between justification and sanctification, the enculturation model does not stop short with evangelism, as an incomplete education model might; rather, it teaches a holistic Christian worldview that necessitates calls to action. However, these calls to action are not those that are found in the social activism model. Rather, the calls to action are driven by biblical commands as well as the general conformity of lifestyle that comes when one matures in the faith.
Bibliography
Aulén, Gustaf. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement. Translated by A.G. Herbert. London: S.P.C.K., 1975.
Campbell, Courtney S. “Death and Dying.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice, edited by Michael D. Palmer and Stanley M. Burgess, 572–582. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Claiborne, Shane. The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006.
D’Costa, Gavin. “Queer Trinity.” In Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, edited by Gerald Loughlin, 268–283. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Goepfrich, Daniel. “The Nature of the Coming Messianic Kingdom as Found in Its Covenants.” Journal of Dispensational Theology 18, no. 55 (Winter 2014): 209–223.
Gushee, David P., and Cori D. Norred. “The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics.” Studies in Christian Ethics 31, no. 1 (2018): 3–12.
Harms, Gregory, and Todd M. Ferry. The Palestine-Israel Conflict. 4th ed. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
Holst, Carol. “Forging Common Ground on Population Issues.” In Eco-Justice—The Unfinished Journey, edited by William E. Gibson, 187–198. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004.
Jenkins, Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Radmacher, Earl D. Salvation. Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000.
Romero, Robert Chao. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020.
Voelkel, Rebecca M. M. Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the Movement for Justice. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017.
Wallace, Mark I. “Early Christian Contempt for the Flesh and the Woman Who Loved Too Much in the Gospel of Luke.” In The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, edited by Margaret D. Kamitsuka, 37–48. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010.
Wilkin, Robert N. Secure and Sure: Grasping the Promises of God. Irving, TX: Grace Evangelical Society, 2005.
Witzig, Kurt. “Distinguishing God’s Punishment and His Discipline.” In Should Christians Fear Outer Darkness? by Dennis Rokser, Tom Stegall, and Kurt Witzig, 339–385. Duluth, MN: Grace Gospel Press, 2015.
[1] Earl D. Radmacher, Salvation (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000), 12–13.
[2] Robert N. Wilkin, Secure and Sure: Grasping the Promises of God (Irving, TX: Grace Evangelical Society, 2005), 48, 50.
[3] Kurt Witzig, “Distinguishing God’s Punishment and His Discipline” in Dennis Rokser, Tom Stegall, and Kurt Witzig, Should Christians Fear Outer Darkness? (Duluth, MN: Grace Gospel Press, 2015), 339–385.
[4] Daniel Goepfrich, “The Nature Of The Coming Messianic Kingdom As Found In Its Covenants,” 212.
[5] Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, A.G. Herbert, trans. (London: S.P.C.K., 1975), 150.
[6] Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89.
[7] Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social justice, theology, and Identity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 43.
[8] Carol Holst, “Forging Common Ground on Population Issues” in eco-justice—The Unfinished Journey, William E. Gibson, editor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 187–188.
[9] Gavin D’Costa “Queer Trinity” in Queer theology: Rethinking the Western Body, Gerald Loughlin, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 270.
[10] David P. Gushee and Cori D. Norred, “The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics” Studies in Christian Ethics 31:1 (2018), 6.
[11] Courtney S. Campbell “Death and Dying” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social justice, Michael D. Palmer and Stanley M. Burgess, eds. (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 572.
[12] Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace, 89.
[13] Mark I. Wallace, “Early Christian Contempt for the Flesh and the Woman Who Loved Too Much in the Gospel of Luke” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, Margaret D. Kamitsuka, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 38, 42.
[14] Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 355–356.
[15] Rebecca M. M. Voelkel, Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the Movement for justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 79–80.
