439 - Christianity as a Second Language

Christianity as a Second Language
Rethinking Mission in the West
By Brian K. Smith

"Can the West be converted?" asked Lesslie Newbigin in a 1985 article by that title.1 Since then, Newbigin's concern for the missionary challenge presented by Western society has been widely echoed. On all sides is the call for mission. Committees and conferences abound, and the need for evangelism is much underlined. At the same time, traditional methods of evangelism seem increasingly ineffective. Indeed, for the church in the West, even the passing on of the faith to its own children has become problematic. In an individualized and privatized society, the question of mission perplexes both clergy and laity alike.

In attempting; to think about the situation we face, it is at once obvious that mere tinkering with existing patterns is insufficient. A more radical approach is required. We need to return to the roots. This essay, therefore, is concerned to reexamine the nature of religious faith and what it means to be Christian. The starting point here is George Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic theory of religion. From this analysis, a vision for mission in contemporary Western culture will be developed.

THE CULTURAL-LINGUISTIC BASE

In 1984, George Lindbeck of Yale University published his seminal work, The Nature of Doctrine. In it, he expressed strong dissatisfaction with current theories of religion and doctrine, which he identified as of three types. The first, associated with traditional orthodoxies, understands doctrinal statements to be cognitive and propositional, that is, they convey

Brian K. Smith is a Baptist minister who served with the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society in northeast India from 1959 to 1976. He is now Principal of Carey Baptist College, Auckland, New Zealand, where he also teaches systematic theology.

1 Lesslie Newbigin, "Can the West Be Converted?" The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, n.s., 6 (1985), pp. 25-37.

 440 - Christianity as a Second Language

meaningful information about objective realities. The second type sees doctrines as noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes" or existential orientations. Lindbeck calls this the experiential-expressionist view. Ever since Schleiermacher defined Christian doctrines as "accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech,"2 this experiential-expressionist view has increasingly come to dominate modern theology. A third type of theory is represented by the Roman Catholic scholars Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Here the attempt is made to combine the cognitive-propositional and experiential-expressionist views into a more powerful, two-dimensional approach.3

"We are not constituted Christians by having certain religious experiences but by hearing and responding to the story of Jesus and Israel."

Finding these theories unsatisfactory as descriptions of how religions actually function, Lindbeck advances an alternative, the so-called cultural-linguistic approach. Fundamental to this is the observation that religions function more like the cultural and linguistic frameworks observed by sociologists' and anthropologists than anything else. On this view, religions are seen as comprehensive, interpretive schemes, rooted in language and culture, ;'which structure human experience and the understanding of the self and the world. Through myth and narrative, and especially through ritual, religions shape and mold, and, thus, in a sense control human experience. 4

Like culture or language it [a religion] is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities. It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and non-discursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which)[ this vocabulary can be meaningfully deployed. 5

Thus, says Lindbeck, religion can be likened to a Kantian a priori, "although in this case the a priori is a set of skills that could be different." 6 While the cultural-linguistic approach reverses the now traditional experiential-expressionist understanding of religion, it does not do so in an absolutist manner. The claim is not that at the, interface between religion as a social'

reality and the inner experience of the individual, the traffic is all one way. As Lindbeck himself readily acknowledges, there is a dialectic.

2 Friednch Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986), p. 76.

3 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), p. 16.

4 lbid., p. 32.

5 Ibid., p. 33.

6 Ibid. 1

 441 - Christianity as a Second Language

Religion and experience each influence the other. 7 What the cultural-linguistic theory is concerned to stress, however, is the primacy of the external, communal factors. Thus, we are not constituted Christians by having certain religious experiences but by hearing and responding to the story of Jesus and Israel. And this story is the story of the community called the church.

In 1956, Lesslie Newbigin, then of South India, published a small book under the title Sin and Salvation. In his preface, Newbigin acknowledged a dilemma he faced in his writing. Having outlined the human condition called sin, and described God's answer to it in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, lie then had to decide how to proceed in answer to the question How does salvation become ours? "In the tradition in which I was brought up," says Newbigin, "it would be normal to begin with a section on ‘Faith’ and work through to a (probably brief) concluding section on the Church. After a good deal of reflection, I decided to reverse the order." 8 One strong reason Newbigin gives for discussing the church before the personal faith of the believer is that this is the order the non-Christian has to follow when he or she comes to Christ. What he or she sees is the visible congregation in the village. It is that congregation that holds out the offer of salvation. Only when a person comes within its fellowship does he or she (usually) come to any deep understanding of the source of its inner life.

Newbigin, I believe, is right. We are Christians first corporately. And if this is so, it means that any progress in mission in individualistic Western culture will depend on the recovery of an understanding of Christian faith as essentially communal.

FAITH AS COMMUNAL

In Western, European culture, the principle of individual autonomy has come to define human existence. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment established the principle of the autonomous mind. Nothing is true except that which reason, that is, my own independent thinking and judgment, can affirm. In reaction to this, the Romantic movement emphasized the importance of personal experience, and through Kierkegaard and later existentialism, this was deepened to the principle of personal decision, the principle of the self-constitution of the individual. On the religious side, individual autonomy found its initial expression in the theology of Schleiermacher, who found the locus of faith in the immediate consciousness "of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God." 9 As noted earlier, it is this understanding of religion as essentially a matter of private experience that has gained wide acceptance in Western culture, even among professed conservatives. Under the impact of the Enlightenment and its subsequent developments, Christian congregations have increasingly become collections of self-contained autonomous


7 Ibid.

8 Lesslie Newbigin, Sin and Salvation (London: SCM, 1956), pp. 8-9.

9 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 12.

 442 - Christianity as a Second Language

"marbled" who roll together on a Sunday morning in the hope that something in the liturgy will contribute to their search for self-transcendence. Correspondingly, churches have moved to become, in Lindbeck's phrase, "purveyors of this commodity." 10

But if religious faith is essentially interior and individual for those inside the church, it is no different for those outside. How often is some presentation of the gospel brushed off with the remark "I have my own religion, thank you," religion here being understood as a set of private and personalized beliefs that need no relation to any outside reality. An interesting commentary on this is the desire of the Statistics Department of the New Zealand government to drop religious questions from the 1996 census, presumably on the grounds that they no longer supply any useful social information. Given this conviction that religion is essentially individual and interior, it comes as no surprise to find that Western society as a whole views the church as at best irrelevant and at worst hypocritical.

In strong contrast to this is the biblical understanding of religious faith. The communal nature of Israelite religion is well known. The Israelites did not become the people of God by virtue of individual experience. Rather, they were constituted a covenant people by the sovereign grace of Yahweh and found their place as individuals within that communal faith. Indeed, so strong is the corporate nature of Israel's faith that in some of its expressions, it is extremely offensive to Western, individualistic sensibilities (for example the stoning of Achan's family in Joshua 7).

"In the letters of Paul nothing is clearer than the idea that Christian life is about being incorporated into a new humanity."

The nature of faith is no different in the New Testament. Jesus gathered a band of disciples and in the context of the cultural-linguistic framework of the Jewish faith, indoctrinated them into the realities of the kingdom of God. Later, in the Book of Acts, the gospel overflowed its Jewish mold and spilled into 'gentile society. Immediately, the communal nature of the new Christian faith became evident. A dispute arose over whether gentiles, in order to become Christians, had to accept the communal sign of circumcision as prescribed by Mosaic law. Becoming a Christian was understood to be the joining of a new people, entering the cultural-linguistic framework of a new community.

In the; letters of Paul, nothing is clearer than the idea that Christian life is about being incorporated into a new humanity. As Christians, we become members of the body of Christ. But as C. S. Lewis points out, in individualized Western culture, we hear Paul's teaching about our being


10 Lindbleck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 126.

443 - Christianity as a Second Language

members of Christ in precisely the wrong way. 11 For us, a "member" is a person who belongs to a debating club or a political party. The members here are a collection of individuals who happen to have joined the organization. But Paul uses member (µ???) in an organic sense. We are members of Christ as the eye, ear, hand, and foot are members of the body. This biblical understanding of faith as essentially communal is summed up by Newbigin:

God's way of salvation is not by enabling a number of individuals to grasp the truth-either by mystical union, or by intellectual enquiry, or by being given one universal and inerrant revelation in code or book; it is by calling a people to Himself, that they may be with Him and that He may send them forth. When the prophets denounce idolatry, injustice and vice in Israel, it is because Israel is the people of God, and is bound by the covenant which He has established by His mighty acts. In the epistles Christians are addressed as this people of God. They are: His royal priesthood, His holy nation. The Gentiles who have believed are described as slips grafted into the one olive tree which is Israel, and which exists before their faith, and will continue to exist even if, by their unbelief, they have to be cut off. What is true of the Gospel story is true of the whole Bible: it is the story of a people which is central. 12

THE LANGUAGE OF FAITH

For centuries, the church in the West has lived in a culture fundamentally shaped by the faith of the Bible. For all its defects and distortions, the Western worldview has been, at root, Christian. Within this culturallinguistic framework, it was easy to assume that the task of mission was essentially one of proclamation. From the church's point of view, many of the sheep may have been lost to the fold, but at least they knew there was a fold and had some idea of what it meant to be "lost." Mission, therefore, was the task of seeking the wanderers and urging them to return to the Shepherd and Guardian of their souls (1 Pet. 2:25). In all this, there was no suggestion of any inherent difficulty with the "good news" itself, that it was in some way foreign to its hearers. On the contrary, since mission was carried out in a Christian cultural-linguistic framework, it was assumed that everyone knew the "language" and that the message could be readily understood by anyone who had ears to hear.

That the Christian cultural-linguistic framework assumed by so much evangelism has disappeared is obvious. But what this means for the mission of the church is much less clear. Shouting louder is clearly no answer in a society that no longer views the world Christianly. Faced with the dechristianization of society, observes Lindbeck, theologians regularly become liberal foundationalists. The first task, they argue, in a society that disregards the gospel, is to make it relevant. To do this, we must identify the modern questions that need to be addressed and then translate the gospel answers into a currently understandable conceptuality. 13 Witness a


11 C. S. Lewis, Fern-Seed and Elephants, and Other Essays on Christianity (London: Fontana, 1975), p. 15.

12 Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (London: SCM, 1953), p. 63.

13 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p. 132.

444 - Christianity as a Second Language

cartoon in an ecclesiastical paper. At the upper left is a church building floating on a cloud. On the ground is the mass of humanity carrying banners Housing Is a Right, Welfare Cuts Bleed, Health and Justice and Work for All. On the right is a small group that has managed to get some ropes around the church building. They are straining with all their might to get it off cloud nine and down to earth. And, say the liberal foundationalists, unless this is done, and the church addresses the real needs of people, the Christian message will not be perceived as relevant. It will fall on deaf ears.

For all its attractiveness, however, the road of translation is a broad way that leads to destruction, the destruction of the gospel. Translation inevitably means that the cultural particularities of the faith are viewed as secondary, perhaps even dispensable. In the interests of accessibility, the peculiar language and culture of the gospel are smoothed away in favor of existing conceptualities. The end result is a reductionism that transforms the gospel into the truisms of its hearers, and the Christian message is served up on the platters of the commonplace.

To cultural-linguistic theorists, translation of this kind goes entirely in the wrong direction. The particularities of a faith are not peripheral; they are of the essence. In fact, it is precisely this alien from-the-outside characte ristic that makes a faith a faith, that is, another way of looking, a worldview different from that which the culture assumes to be the case.

But if the particularities are of central importance, it follows that faith can only be affirmed when the language in which that faith consists has been learned. To become a Christian, one must first learn the language and culture of Christianity. In fact, that is how nearly all of us in the West became Christians. We grew up in the faith. We sang the songs, heard the stories, and, later, read the book. We watched people praying, saw some baptized; and listened to explanations of what it meant to be Christian (sermon's). We were immersed in the language and culture. Finally, in some form of 'personal decision, we took the faith on board in an intentional way for ours' elves. At the human level, we were socialized into Christianity. Without the years of unconscious "language learning," it is highly unlikely that we would ever have made a decision for Christ. Certainly, we would not have, understood what such a thing meant.

MISSION AS CATECHESIS

Because the West is increasingly alienated from its Christian roots, mission can no longer be thought of in terms of "within" and "a return to." As cultural'-linguistic theory suggests, mission in such a society must be construed as the invitation to learn that cultural and linguistic structure within which alone the necessary religious affirmations can be made. We must take our cue from the early centuries of the church. When Christianity moved out of its Jewish cradle into the wide-open spaces of Greek and Roman 'culture, it found itself in an alien world. The ideas and concepts that had been born in a Jewish context now had to be preached in a very different and foreign situation. A small instance of the difficulty is found in

445 - Christianity as a Second Language

Acts 17:18. In Athens, we are told, Paul spoke of Jesus and the resurrection. Some of the local philosophers, not understanding the Christian cultural-linguistic framework, took "resurrection" to be another divinity along with Jesus, perhaps his consort. "This fellow," they said of Paul, "seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods." Faced with incomprehension of this kind, the early church found that the only way forward was to develop a process of instruction or catechesis. Catechesis arose from the recognition that there were in society those who, for whatever reason, were attracted to the Christian faith but needed to learn the "language" before they could be baptized as followers of Jesus. Like any language learning, this could only take place if the would-be followers were incorporated into the new community so that they could absorb its strange new ways of speaking, thinking, and doing. Thus there developed the catechumenate, a recognized period of training during which potential converts identified with the group of believers and placed themselves under instruction with a view to baptism. As Lindbeck sums it up, "Pagan converts to the Catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather the process was reversed: first they decided and then they understood." 14

This point is underlined by Thomas Finn in his discussion of the catechumenate in the early church. Those who wanted to become followers of the way put themselves under a period of instruction and testing. This was

a complex ritual process through which the subjects passed from an old way of life to a new way. They were considered reborn, emerging from the process with a new network of relations and responsibilities, new values and a new status society, or as the ancients put it "a new home and family." 15

Not unnaturally; such a process demanded time for the new learning to take place. In second-century Rome, says Finn, the stages of conversion could occupy three years; in fifth-century North Africa, they might take the better part of a lifetime or only the weeks of Lent; in first-century East and West Syria and Palestine, it might be a matter of days. 16 Only at the end of this time, however, was the catechumen deemed able to say "Jesus is Lord" in any sense worthy of baptism. It is in this sense that we can understand the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the church, there is no salvation). As Luther expresses it,

Therefore whoever would find Christ must first find the Churches. How are we to know where Christ and his faith were, if we know not where his faithful are? And whoever would know somewhat of Christ must not trust himself nor build a bridge to heaven by his own understanding, but go to the Churches, visit and question the same. 17

14 lbid.

15 Thomas M. Finn, Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate: West and East Syria (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1992), p. 3.

16 lbid.

17 Quoted in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1956), p. 213.

 446 - Christianity as a Second Language

LEARNING TO LAY BRICKS

Christian mission is about "making disciples" (Matt. 28:19-20). Stanley Hauerwas compares the process to learning to lay bricks. 18 To become a disciple, he says, is not a matter of a new or changed self-understanding, but rather it is to become part of a different community with a different set of practices. Such a radical change requires much training, not unlike learning; to lay bricks. As an apprentice seeks to acquire the knowledge and virtue necessary to become a skilled practitioner, so the aspiring convert places him- or herself under the direction of those who have already the discipline and habits of judgment that are required to be Christian. Along with such direction goes the learning of a new; language that constitutes the new world the trainee is seeking to enter. To cite an example, much traditional Christian proclamation assumes that "sin" is a universal category available to anyone. But far from being an unavoidable reality of the human condition, sin is something we have to learn as it is identified within the cultural and linguistic structure of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. "We must be trained," says Hauerwas, "to be a sinner. To confess our sin is after all a theological and moral accomplishment. " 19 A further example of the cultural-linguistic basis for faith is seen in the use of the word "God." Outside the Christian context, "God" can mean anything from the philosophic Absolute to the celestial Santa Claus of popular Western piety. What the potential convert has to learn is that for Christian faith, God is very specifically defined. In the New Testament phrase, he is "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." God is now linked inextricably to the story of Jesus of Nazareth and to the Israel that preceded and produced him. God can only be understood Christianly from within that story.

The mission situation that we face can perhaps be further explicated by revisiting the conversion of Saul who became Paul. For many in the evangelical tradition, this is the model conversion. What is not commonly observed, however, is that Saul of Tarsus was in no sense being converted from the "world." He was already in a cultural and linguistic framework that allowed him to move easily from Jewish zealot to Christian evangelist. All his years of Pharisaic training had thoroughly socialized him in the messianic direction. He understood the "language" of the Christian claim only too well. In fact, it was precisely his adamant refusal to speak the "language" that fueled the flames of his anti-Christian persecution.

In the old framework of Western society, when the world was "Christian," Paul's conversion could be used as a model. Men and women could be called to "decide" for Christ. But, increasingly, in our society, people no longer know who Christ is or what it might mean to "decide" for him. How then shall they "decide" in any real sense unless they learn the "language" of the faith? Inevitably, this learning requires some kind of catechesis,

18 Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Sydney: Anzea, 1991), p. 101.

19 Ibid., p. 108.

 447 - Christianity as a Second Language

whether in a formal catechumenate or through informal participation in the life and worship and experience of the Christian community.

CENTRIPETAL MISSION

All this raises an inevitable question. If mission is catechesis, why on earth should any pagan put him- or herself under instruction, even of the most unstructured and informal kind? If Christianity is a second language to be learned, what would induce anyone to make the effort of learning new modes of behavior and the stories of Israel and Jesus?

In his book The Missionary Nature of the Church, Johannes Blauw introduced the terms "centripetal" and "centrifugal" to describe mission in the Old and New Testaments respectively. 20 Mission in the Old Testament, he says, is essentially centripetal in conception. Israel, the chosen people, is among the nations as a witness to Yahweh. Israel is a light to the nations, one to whom the nations come. According to both Isaiah and Micah, in days to come, the peoples will say: "Come and let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, and to the house of the God of Jacob" (Isa. 2:3; Mic. 4:2). In the New Testament, however, the direction of mission is reversed. Instead of the nations saying, "Come and let us go," now there is the instruction of the risen Jesus, "Go and make disciples of the nations" (Matt. 28:19-20). Jerusalem is still the center, but instead of the nations coming to Jerusalem, the gospel is to go out from Jerusalem to the nations. In Blauw's terminology, mission becomes centrifugal. The significance of this change cannot be underestimated. Indeed, in the two thousand years since the resurrection, the dominical imperative to "go" has been at the heart of the missionary movement of the church that has taken the gospel to the ends of earth.

But in emphasising the centrifugal "go" of mission, we have forgotten the other side of the coin, the centripetal. When, as has been the case in the West, mission is conceived as essentially proclamation in an already Christian environment, the question of the drawing power of the church' is of little concern. But if, as has been argued, in an alien, post-Christian world, mission is catechesis, a central question must be Why on earth would people want to place themselves under Christian instruction? At the human level, must there not be something magnetic about the community that bears the message? How else shall the "nations" come? How else shall the pagans around us say, "Let's abandon the gods of Madison Avenue and Wall Street and make our way to the strange God of Jacob"?

At this point, we do well to recall that the same Jesus who commanded us to go and make disciples of all nations also commanded us to love one another (John 13:34-35). The two commands are not unconnected. It was the unheard-of lifestyle of the early Christian communities that attracted people sufficiently for them to become catechumens. Aristides, a second

20 Johannes Blauw, The Missionary Nature of the Church (London: Lutterworth, 1962), p. 34.

 448 - Christianity as a Second Language

century philosopher and Christian apologist, described Christians to the Roman emperor Hadrian as follows:

They love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit of God. 21

The ancient pagan world was attracted to the Christian faith not because it presented a better philosophy or offered more fascinating religious mysteries but b, cause it demonstrated a new kind of community.

NOT I, BUT WE

Here it is important to observe that it was the life of the Christian congregation that was attractive. In typical fashion, Western Christianity has shifted responsibility for an attractive lifestyle from the congregation to the individual believer. Thus, in theory, each Christian is a virtuoso practitioner of the faith, whose performance is supposed to elicit admiration and the question "Why?" from workmates, relatives, and friends. All too often, however, our individual performance is judged substandard. Non-Christian observers expect perfection and are inclined to be severe judges of our efforts to be followers of Jesus. The point of our being followers of Jesus, however, is not that we turn in star performances as individuals but that we are members of a community that lives differently. Only by holding hands and living as disciplined congregations can we have any chance of offering an attractive alternative to the prevailing culture. And when we speak to others, it will not be so much about my experience of happiness and sense of peace as about our experience of living together in a new way. In contrast to the subjective nature of the former (New Agers claim similar things), the life of a community in which people love one another is objective and visible. It can be seen. It raises questions. And to those who seek answers, there is offered not a creed or a philosophy but a story-the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

21 Quoted in Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 14.