Contextualization and Presuppositions

We have much ground to cover as we awaken to the growing global conversation of the two thirds of the church not in the West. “Contextualization” brings to mind trite conversations on superficially packaging western theology with colorful, cultural trimming – e.g. Africans will want to dance during church, the Japanese will maintain a more authoritarian ecclesiology. But at its core, contextualization calls into question the nature of truth as well as what Andrew Walls has dubbed the ‘infinite translatability’ of our faith.

In his excellent essay, “One Rule to Rule Them All?”, Kevin Vanhoozer helpfully outlines three poor attempts at contextualizing Christianity. First, the belief (soundly refuted in The Drama of Doctrine) that truth is supracultural, able to be decoded from concrete expression and encoded into a new one – “Instead of profitable pastoral instruction, theologians begat system after system, exchanging their ecclesial birthright for a mess of propositionalist pottage”. The second attempt is an uncritical, syncretistic drawing from a supposed united backdrop of philosophy and religion for shaping faith. The third pitfall is “going local”, making one’s primary allegiance to context rather than text as if they were at odds.

Western theology has borrowed heavily from philosophy. In fact the two become eerily indistinguishable in many discussions on systematics. Now third world theologians are replacing philosophy with the social sciences serving the hermeneutical function of acknowledging the interpreter and the practical function of addressing present-day injustice. I am seeing this firsthand in Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako’s Jesus and the Gospel in Africa. Quoting J. V. Taylor he asks, “But if Christ were to appear as the answer to the questions that Africans are asking, what would he look like?” He finds confidence in the answer because “we are not introduced to a new God unrelated to the traditions of our past, but to One who brings to fulfillment all the highest religious and cultural aspirations of our heritage”. Why, Vanhoozer asks, “can theology borrow from Plato but not from primal religions”?

There is indeed a supra-cultural, supra-chronicle, supra-linguistic true God, but he will never be known as such. Instead he has determined to make himself known in time, space, and language, an act riddled with its own presuppositional complexity (e.g. N. T. Wright’s “three worlds” of Paul). And here is where Christianity parts ways with Islam, which is only at its truest form in Arabic: this complex text has since been disseminated and Spirit-accompanied into tens of thousands of language, people, socio-economic groups and in turn blossomed into multi-faceted expressions. The dirty details of Babel notwithstanding, this is God’s plan that charts its course through the promise to Abraham, the commission of the church, and the worship of the new earth.

How do we faithfully expose, sharpen, and embrace presuppositions in this light? How do we maintain malleable yet still breakable doctrines? How might new voices grow our Christology rather than shrink it to the least common denominator? And how do we hold fast to the rule of faith by which all gospel expressions are accountable?

Genesis 30: A Postpropositional Attempt Part II

Admittedly it is easier to smell a rotten egg (propositionalism) than lay a fresh one (postpropositionalism). Kevin Vanhoozer is helpful in the realm of doctrine, but what about exegesis? If there is any miscarriage between the theory and a responsible reading of the text it must be scrapped.

Genesis is notorious for vociferous narratives seemingly disproportionate to their content (67 verses on finding Isaac a wife – more than the Fall and Flood combined!). Unless we are willing to enter the story on its terms and not a search and rescue effort for timeless truths, few are fit for the fifty-chapter marathon that lies ahead. True to the exacerbating promise made to Abraham where people and land never seem to join hands to jumpstart a “great nation”, Jacob finds himself hundreds of miles from home on the verge of fostering a massive family. What ensues is a 30-verse account of a fertility war waged between sisters of one husband.

Because the Word employs such violent metaphors concerning itself, we ought not expect stepping into its world will be a costless, comfortable endeavor. Our modern world of egg donors, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood is subverted by the opening line: “When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb…” This Creator God has developed a habit of breaking into his creation-set-in-motion (“sprout”, “yield”, “seed”, “fill”, “multiply” in Genesis 1) to act.

The characters at least acknowledge, if they are not always in agreement with, God’s interaction with the created order. Rachel’s barrenness is God withholding fruit of her womb (30.2) and her fertility is God’s remembrance (30.22). The names of Leah’s sons become Ebenezer’s to this seeing and hearing God: “Because the Lord upon my affliction…Because the Lord has heard…” Imagine a world in which the birds and the bees is still the rule of the day but all stands or falls by the will of God. The relationship that follows between God and the sisters is not unlike Brueggemann’s dialectic of self-assertion (complaint) and self-abandonment (praise) – sinful motives not withstanding, neither woman is slavishly self-effacing nor ignorantly self-determining. Both lay claim to God’s ability to provide and give thanks when he does.

God’s outpouring of blessing on Abraham’s seed is effectual but not efficient – effectual because he has a chosen nation in view, but not efficient because in his mercy he remembers Rachel. On paper her fertility is expendable. Judah, the royal offspring, is born along with nine other boys. Leah, Bilhah, or Zilpah seem perfectly capable of producing another two for a rounded twelve. But despite the tinge of idolatry Rachel carries with having children (or her overt idolatry elsewhere, 31.19), God graciously ‘remembers’ her and grants her two strong tribes. Rachel acknowledges this as nothing less than God removing her reproach.

More than just a reminder of the reality of our world, this reproductive explosion is a building block in a nation that will culminate in the Messiah. Rachel and Leah’s walk with God is only partially exemplary. There is covenantal ambiguity here – the promise to Abraham stands but remains unfulfilled, the Law has yet to come. An age is inaugurated in this Messiah with a new paradigm of God’s breaking into the created order. We have received lavish, ludicrous promises that the believer’s self-assertion has the ear of the King (Jn 14.13-14) in a way that has never been done before (16.23). His effectual but still not efficient answering now follows not the trajectory of building a nation Israel but bringing a kingdom. In that day, the Messiah declares, “you will ask nothing of me” (16.23, interestingly our present sorrow turned to that joyful day is compared to a woman giving birth).

If we love by obeying (Jn 14.21), we demonstrate faith by working (Jas 2.18), we walk in deed and truth (1 Jn 3.18), where else do we expect to gain understanding except by doing (Lk 11.28; Jn 7.17; 13.17; Rom 12.2; Eph 4.15; Heb 5.14; Jas 1.22)? To file this devotional on a cognitive shelf, even an easily accessible one, is to fail to grasp what it says. Faithfully inhabiting such a world, sharpening one’s longings by it, disciplining one’s prayers for it, imagining new ways to obey in it requires “constant practice” (Heb 5.14). Embodiment is the purest form of exegesis. This is why the author to the Hebrews commended the flock to “imitate their faith” (Heb 13.7; 6.12) – i.e. a flesh and blood performance of what the text says.

How do we believe, obey, and practice Genesis 30? My world is not the closed system crafted by my fog of unbelief. My Creator sees, hears, and remembers and then moves to act. One facet of such a world highlighted here is the role of prayer – appealing to God both for what is scientifically inevitable (conception) and improbable (overcoming barrenness). What materializes in the Christian life is a dual-dialectic of prayer. I approach the throne for that which is effectual but not necessarily efficient. Do my requests keep the mounting momentum of time in view – “that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (Jn 13.13)? Do they also vigorously defend the Son’s delight of granting abundant life (Jn 10.11)? The road from the cross to the eschaton is not a straight one. God liberally takes leave of it to deliver blessing and suffering that may fail to amount to any direct kingdom fruit. But I also approach the throne with self-assertion as well as self-abandonment. Refusing to make my requests known is at best faithless, false humility and at worst outright disobedience. Refusing to lay them down however is faltering under the weight of the cross.

Above all the chapter as well as the book is a solicitation to believe. Eight of the ten stories of faith told in Hebrews 11 are found in the book of Genesis. Inasmuch as I acknowledged my alien status and bank my life on the heavenly country, I walk the road of Genesis.

Genesis 30: A Postpropositional Attempt Part I

The fertility war of Israel’s founding women is a preacher’s nightmare. Not even NT writers, for all their fantastically imaginative exegesis, will touch it (outside acknowledging that it really happened, Mt 1:2; Ac 7:8). But that makes this story the perfect postpropositionalist attempt. After all, the more time-bound the details of the story are the more broad the timeless principle must be to bridge the historic, societal, cultural, economic, scientific, linguistic gap between “them” and “us”.

Traditionally the timeless truth of this text might be, ‘God is sovereign over all things’ (or moralistically Jacob’s treatment of Leah or the sisters’ treatment of each other). Without demonizing propositionalism, several things are troubling about this interpretation. First, what becomes important is the timeless principle and not the narrative fluff – Genesis 30 is a verbose, round about way of saying what I’ve been able to say in six words. Second and similarly, it has the adverse affect of flattening the text and sucking the wonder out of it. Third, as comments in the previous blog have pointed out, it is not entirely clear what single, “juicy” timeless principle lurks behind the story. And fourth, it treats doctrine like an object suspended in air for which we can all slip out of our pesky cultural skin to examine it from no particular vantage point. If a timeless principle is preached in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a meaningful sound? To say, ‘God is sovereign over all things’ in a vacuum is to say nothing at all.

For the sake of brevity but hopefully not simplicity I suggest at least a three step process to embody the text. First, in narratives like this one the story is the message. We are not being invited to harvest it but indwell it. Flannery O’Connor says it well about her own writing when people ask for the story’s main point: “And when they’ve got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story. Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction”. Genesis 30 taps into a running theme of the whole book of a God who has created the world and then engages in its affairs, here down to the minutia of sperm and egg. What does life on the ground in Paddan-aram look, sound, feel, and think like with such a God? – an exercise Vanhoozer calls “not mastery [of the text] so much as apprenticeship”.

The through-line of the divine drama conceived in a series of building promises to humanity will not allow us to reduce this work to personally embodying the story alone. It is not a snippet of daily life in the Ancient Near East that proves helpful but a building block in a very carefully crafted redemption. Thoughtfully opening and closing wombs creates a genealogy the Gospel writers found worth celebrating and ties God’s sovereignty in creation and our lives to a very specific end.

The second step requires the hard work of faithful imagination. The reality of the world of Genesis 30 looks different in the Ancient Near East than it does in modern America. How do we as children of this God take our cues from His Word and learn to live, love, and pray in our world? The third step challenges the notion that much understanding has happened up until this point. It is not an application of understanding then doing but understanding by doing. It is, as my pastor pointed out, the circularity of Paul’s prayer for the Colossians: filled with spiritual wisdom to walk in a worthy manner to gain more spiritual wisdom. At the end of the eschatological day it’s not our talk of blueprints but our house that faces the floods.

* I am indebted to Wright, Doriani, and Vanhoozer for prompting me in this direction.