Theology Today - Vol 50, No. 2 - July 1993 - BOOK REVIEW

Jesus in Global Contexts
By Priscilla Pope-Levison and John R. Levison
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. 232 pp. $17.99.

This book is a report on the conversations about christology taking place in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America. The theological, ethical, and liturgical form given to the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord is no longer dominated by the academic traditions of the Western church. At the end of the twentieth century, Jesus is being confessed and interpreted in a host of religious and cultural settings throughout the world. This husband and wife team of young evangelical theologians sees a new future for christology emerging from the contextualization of Jesus in the many places where he is confessed as Lord. Their basic conviction is that the inherent vitality of Jesus and the proclamation of the reign of God allow the gospel to be heard and confessed in contexts radically different from those of Western civilization. The contextualization of Jesus in the folk religions, cultures, artistic forms, and social patterns of our pluralistic world is creating new christologies. This book is an introduction to those christologies and the conversations that have given rise to them.

The world has always been religiously and culturally plural. What is new is our recognition of this pluralism and the commitment to make a faithful confession of Jesus within these many differing cultures. Gone is the time when the price of becoming a Christian was the abandonment of indigenous culture to become a kind of spiritual and emotional expatriate to the culture of the mission station or even that of the North American or European theological school. The rousing vitality of the Christian communities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa has created a fresh context for faith that carries the confession and celebration of Christ far beyond anything imagined before. Even here in North America, the radically new insights of liberation and feminist theologies have given us fresh resources for expressing the meaning and plumbing the depth of faith in Jesus Christ. This book introduces this worldwide contextualization of Jesus.

To speak of the contextualization of Jesus all over the world is a daunting task. The authors have approached it with great vigor. They

322 - Jesus in Global Contexts

have consulted church leaders from a host of countries in their travels. They have opened themselves experientially to the vitality of churches seeking to be faithful to Jesus in new and unexpected ways. They have been there to sing and dance, to pray and listen. They have studied the liberation theologies academically here in the United States. The new theological developments in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have produced a substantial literature to which these authors have been attentive. They are knowledgeable about the proceedings of the meetings held by third world theologians. They report all this in anecdotes, brief summaries, and sweeping generalizations. The number of different christological formulations in this material is legion. When you add to this thumbnail sketches of the social, political, and economic situations in various parts of the world, the material crammed into this book is overwhelming. An easy flowing style moves one through the material to produce a book that can serve as an introduction for the general reader. However, generalizations are often inaccurate or at least confusing. This book suffers the limitations of all theological travelogues. The idiosyncracies of what is heard in one time and place often ends up serving as a characterization of a larger movement or development.

This book, like many recent works on contextualization, could be greatly helped by historical perspective. Radical experiments in the contextualization of Christian faith have not emerged only in the last few years. While they are often reported with the kind of breathless excitement that greets freshly minted ideas, such experiments have been under way since the last century. In India, for example, the radical contextualization of Jesus got its start with Man Mahon Roy in the middle of the nineteenth century. The mentions of Raimundo Panikkar and M. M. Thomas give at least some cognizance of this already long and sophisticated Indian development. Similarly, the contextualization of Jesus in the Islamic world and by churches there has been given detailed treatment by Kenneth Cragg in his Jesus and the Muslim and The Arab Christian.

The authors of this book are part of that doughty band of evangelicals who are able to deal with liberation theology affirmatively. However, they are markedly nervous about the movement of charismatic renewal and charismatic christologies, which they exclude from their study. As difficult as these charismatic christologies may be for the thought and life of the churches, they represent a massive and growing sector of Christian life. Jesus is increasingly confessed as Jesus Lord of the Spirits by Christians all over the world. To speak of contextualization requires that we deal with this development as difficult as it is to comprehend for either traditional church people or even liberation theologians.

Donald G. Dawe
Union Theological Seminary
Richmond, VA