Don Richardson and Contextualization

Don Richardson’s Peace Child is a classic of modern mission writing. In that book, Richardson tells of his experience among the Sawi people of New Guinea, and how he used their traditional custom of exchanging a “peace child” between warring tribes to explain the gospel to them. In his 1981 sequel, Eternity in Their Hearts , he examined dozens of examples of similar missions experiences, arguing that missionaries must learn to see existing traditions, institutions, and myths as providential preparation for the gospel. He examines, for example, various peoples whose mythology includes an acknowledgement of an “unknown God” or a “high God” who transcends the pantheon. Instead of dismantling this whole system, he suggests following Paul’s example and proclaim the Father of Jesus as the “unknown God.” He also details a number of examples of peoples who have some recollection of a lost book; sometimes this myth is accompanied by prophecies that white men would come to restore God’s book to the tribe. Again, Richardson urges missionaries to offer the Bible as the fulfillment of that hope.

Some of the parallels Richardson discovered are nothing short of astonishing. Among the Karen people of Burma, for instance, the creator was known as “Y’wa,” and one of the Karen hymns describes the fall of man from Y’wa:

Y’wa formed the world originally.
He appointed food and drink.
He appointed the “fruit of trial.”
He gave detailed orders.
Mu-kaw-lee deceived two persons.
He caused them to eat the fruit of the tree of trial.
They obeyed not; they believed not Y’wa . . . .
When they ate the fruit of trial,
They became subject to sickness, aging, and death . . . .

As one who has written “Contextualization be damned,” it might seem a tad inconsistent for me to be enthusiastic about Richardson’s work. He is one of the granddaddies of contextualization. But I don’t think it’s inconsistent. What I have condemned elsewhere was a kind of contextualization that shies away from radical transformation or a kind that acts as if the gospel does not come with a cultural form of its own. If contextualization becomes a matter of adjusting the particular and exclusive claims of the gospel to an existing cultural system, or if contextualization operates on the assumption that the gospel can slip into the cracks of any culture because it is a-cultural, then I need not damn it; it’s damned already.

But if contextualization means proclaiming the gospel as the fulfillment (and therefore radical transfiguration) of an existing culture’s best hopes and intentions, then this is precisely what the apostles did. The gospel was fundamentally the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes and culture, but that fulfillment meant fundamental changes in the way Israel looked and lived. The gospel was also the fulfillment of Roman hopes and culture ?Eits hope for peace and security, for a universal KURIOS, for an imperium sine fine ?Ebut in fulfilling Roman hopes, the gospel radically transformed both Roman culture and the very hopes it fulfilled.

So: On the one hand, “contextualization be damned.” On the other hand, “three cheers for contextualization.”