Relating the Gospel to Culture: Learning from Jesus’ Way

I remember a passage in the journal of pioneer missionary to Cameroon, Joseph Merrick. In it, he writes about feeling his anger rise as he heard the drums and songs of the Isubu people from afar when visiting them for the first time. That reaction captures a common problem in cross-cultural missions: presuppositions.

Presuppositions are the usual tendencies of some missionaries when approaching culture. They don’t take time to investigate the meaning and raison d’être of the people’s cultural practices. they quickly assume that those practices are of the devil. Other Christians swing to the opposite extreme and think that there is nothing wrong with culture and believers simply need to adapt to it.

According to H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic book Christ and Culture (1951), there are actually 5 main schools of thought on how the gospel should relate to culture.

1. Christ Against Culture
Main Idea: Culture is fallen, corrupt, and hostile to God. The Christian must reject it and live as a separate, counter-cultural community.
Representatives: Tertullian, Tolstoy, some Anabaptists, radical monasticism.
Slogan: “Come out from among them and be separate.”

2. The Christ of Culture
Main Idea: Culture and the gospel are essentially in agreement. Culture is seen as the arena where Christ’s values are already being realized. Christianity adapts to affirm and support the prevailing culture.
Representatives: Liberal Protestantism in the 19th-early 20th century, Albrecht Ritschl.
Slogan: “Christ fulfills the best in culture.”

3. Christ Above Culture
Main Idea: Culture is good as God’s creation and order, but incomplete. Christ completes and perfects it through grace and natural law.
Representatives: Thomas Aquinas, Roman Catholic synthesis of faith and reason, medieval scholasticism.
Slogan: “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”

4. Christ and Culture in Paradox
Main Idea: There is a fundamental tension and paradox. The Christian lives under two authorities: God’s kingdom and the world’s order. You obey both, but they are not reconciled in this age.
Representatives: Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, Lutheran “two kingdoms” theology.
Slogan: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none… a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

5. Christ the Transformer of Culture
Main idea: Culture is fallen but redeemable. Christ converts, renews, and transforms culture from within. The goal is cultural transformation, not withdrawal or accommodation.
Representatives: Augustine, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, Reformed/Neo-Calvinist tradition.
Slogan: “Every square inch belongs to Christ.”

In actual fact, we can’t objectively determine what should be the relationship between Gospel and Culture if we don’t have a clear definition and understanding of the two realities. Culture is a system of thoughts, beliefs, values, behaviours and practices that are common to a group of people. While the Gospel is God’s word incarnated in the person of Christ and addressing each group of people.

From these definitions, we understand that culture is a human reality, meanwhile the gospel is a divine one. Man being a fallen being, we can rightfully affirm that his culture is corrupted. Yet with the Imago Dei (God’s Image) still dwelling in Man, we can also rightfully affirm that the Imago Dei in him also manifests in his culture in one way or the other. In other words, though distinct from it, God remains present and active in human culture.

The incarnation of Christ remains the most patent demonstration of the fact that God still intervenes in human culture though it is fallen and depraved. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

How Did Jesus Relate to Culture?

In Christ, the incorruptible Word of God entered a fallen culture. His example shows us another way beyond simple rejection or uncritical acceptance or even a state of paradox. Three things stand out:

First, Jesus had a very good understanding and mastery of the Jewish culture.
He debated the teachers in the Temple at age 12 and amazed them with his understanding (Luke 2:46-47). He could quote Scripture, cite precedents from David and the priests (Matt 12:3-5), and speak to the meaning of Moses’ seat of authority (Matt 23:2-3). You can’t transform what you don’t understand.

Second, he never termed the entire culture as being good or bad.
Jesus distinguished between God’s command and human tradition. To the Pharisees he said, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions… You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” (Mark 7:8-9). Yet he also affirmed what was right: “You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matt 23:23). He could say to the Samaritan woman, “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), affirming God’s work in Israel while critiquing other elements.

Third, he confronted each cultural practice individually, affirming or rejecting them in their entirety, and in other cases affirming or rejecting only part of the practice.

• He wholly rejected the Corban tradition that allowed people to avoid caring for parents (Mark 7:11-13).
• He wholly affirmed tithing, justice, mercy, and faithfulness, while rebuking their neglect (Matt 23:23).
• He partly affirmed and partly reinterpreted the Sabbath. He rejected the Pharisees’ added restrictions, but appealed to the Sabbath’s original purpose and declared, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt 12:8).
• In the case of the woman caught in adultery, he upheld the law’s seriousness about sin but rejected its hypocritical application, saying, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Jesus’ approach was neither withdrawal nor accommodation. It was discerning transformation from within.

So How Should We Relate the Gospel to Culture?

Upon what has just been said above, permit me to share a few ideas about how to relate the Gospel to Culture as Theologians, Pastors, Evangelists, Missionaries, etc.:

1. Avoid assuming that all about culture is wrong or right. Jesus shows us that evaluation must be specific, not blanket.
2. Take enough time to study that specific cultural practice without any preconceived idea about it. Understanding comes before judgment.
3. When facing a cultural practice, make sure you understand its why and how, then examine the why and how in the light of Scriptures. Get the meaning before you measure it.
4. When examining a cultural practice in the light of Scripture, ask yourself these three questions:
   a) Should we totally affirm it or totally reject it?
   b) Is it redeemable?
   c) Can anything in it serve as a bridge in reaching out to the people with the gospel?

Conclusion

The missionary task is not to transplant one culture over another, but to bring the light of Christ into every culture. The danger, as Missiologist Charles Kraft warns us, is twofold: the danger of going too far into syncretism, where the gospel loses its distinctiveness, and the danger of not going far enough, where the gospel is never understood and assimilated by the people it’s meant to reach.

Jesus’ way gives us the pattern. He entered a culture fully, understood it deeply, affirmed what reflected God’s intent, and confronted what distorted it. If we follow him, we will neither flee culture in fear nor be swallowed by it. Instead, we will be agents of its renewal, working for the day when every square inch reflects the lordship of Christ.