Lesslie Newbigin returned home to England after serving as an Anglican missionary bishop in India. In his book, Foolishness to the Greeks, he laments the fact that the Church has fallen into one of two traps as it has sought to engage its surrounding culture. The Church has either fallen into “indigenization,” wherein the language, history, and culture of the surrounding ethos is compromised for the sake of preserving the peculiar culture of the Church, or into “adaptation,” wherein the peculiar message of the Church is compromised for the sake of relating to the contemporary ethos of the particular culture.
The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms – forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of “modernization.” The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, "adaptation", was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary’s preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture.
Newbigin advocated the use of the term “contextualization” to help us understand the “culture of the moment” differentiating between the message of the gospel, the context of the culture of the Christian missionary, and the context of his contemporary cultural environment. Bruce J. Nicholls describes contextualization as “the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate cultures and within their particular existential situations.”
An adaptation of Aristotle’s three parts of persuasive speech (logos, ethos, and pathos) can be used to examine the effectiveness of the preaching act. The authentic logos (the content of God’s Word) must be given in the authentic ethos (the perceived ability of the conveyor of the logos to connect with the receptor language, history, and culture of the contemporary context) with authentic pathos (the perceived authenticity, authority, and integrity of the conveyor of the message).
Authentic Christian Spiritual formation has always connected the logos of God to the ethos of the contemporary audience through authentic pathos. With Newbigin’s warnings, one can evaluate whether a specific Christian proclaimer has committed “indigenization,” wherein the ethos is compromised for the sake of logos, or “adaptation,” wherein the logos is compromised for the sake of ethos. Rather, one must “contextualize” the unchanging logos to the contemporary ethos and speak with authentic pathos. Bruce Nicholls describes contextualization as “the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate culture and within their particular existential situations.”
Newbigin also warns against the absorption of the logos into the ethos of the conveyor of the message. One must observe the “culture of the moment,” differentiating between the cultural context of Spiritual formation and the context of the audience’s cultural environment. One must evaluate all three dimensions of authentic communication in the act of Christian Spiritual formation in the experience of a sermon. The picture below shows a simple scale of how one might evaluate the logos of the message being preached. One can appraise whether a sermon reaches a low, medium or high standard in the exposing of the actual meaning of the text being exposed.
