Christian cultural scholarship, as we discussed last time, is an important part of God's mandate to the church
of Jesus Christ. We bear the stamp of our Creator in our minds, in our ability to develop and use language,
tell stories, create beautiful and useful things, compose music and poetry, and reflect on the world and our
own existence. As Christian disciples, we take up the responsibility to study God's word and will, and apply it
to our generation and our culture; "rightly dividing the word of truth" in witness to both God's judgment and
God's grace. Even as a people in exile, we accept the call to give witness to God's plan for bringing in his
reign of justice, peace, righteousness and human flourishing of every kind. Scholars in the humanities have
an important role to play in God's grand economy, and we have seen some examples of the kinds of work
that faithful scholarship can produce. And yet I fear that unless Christian theologians and Christian scholars
of the broader cultural scene redirect their energies and attention, they will miss out on a major opportunity
that lies before them. We can become so preoccupied with "strengthening the things that remain" (Rev. 3:2)
in the twilight of Western Christendom that we fail to see that the Lord is saying "I have placed before you an
open door" (Rev. 3:8) in the dawning of a new Christian era. What is the opportunity before us, and what is
the peril we risk if we fail to engage it?
The opportunity, I am convinced, is that of bringing our talents and skills to bear on the next major
dispensation in the history of Christianity, one that is now upon us, if we have the eyes to see it. There has
been a surprising work of God in the world over the past century, making Christianity a truly worldwide faith.
The major issue now is whether Christianity can take deep root in the many cultures where it has been
planted, and bring the Gospel to bear on the most deeply felt hopes, fears and needs within each of them. If
it can, says the eminent church historian and mission scholar, Andrew Walls, "we may see . . . a great
creative development of Christian theology; new discoveries about Christ that Christians everywhere can
share; mature, discriminating standards of Christian living; . . . [and] a long-term Christ-shaped imprint on
the thinking" of these emerging heartlands of the faith. "If the quality is poor," Walls warns, "we shall see
distortion, confusion, uncertainty and, almost certainly, hypocrisy on a large scale."
So what is the mandate for Christian scholarship in this new century, and what is the responsibility of
organized movements of Christian scholars, Christian colleges and universities, such as those represented
here? We must become much more strategic and missionary in our outlook and program if we are going to
respond to the open doors the Lord has set before us.
I.
Christian Scholarship as a Missionary Mandate
"Missionary" is not what Christian humanities professors in the United States see when they look in
the mirror, and a "missionary institution" is not what universities such as ours usually aspire to be.
We might like a goodly number of our students to become foreign missionaries, but we do not see
our own mission as being a missionary training college. In the West, such institutions are often
overly narrow in their curriculum, not very attractive to talented students or professors, and have
too narrow a view of what it means to be called of God. We who are Christian university scholars,
however, have our own too-narrow understanding-of what the church's missionary mandate is. The
place to start in correcting that understanding is what has become known as the Great
Commission, Jesus' command in the Gospel of Matthew, 28:18-20, which I am reading:
Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And
surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
Christ's great commission to his church is to "go and make disciples of all nations, . . . teaching
them all that I have commanded you. . . ." That is our mission as educational or discipling agents of
Jesus Christ and his Kingdom. When we read this text, we usually understand the part about
proclaiming the good news of personal salvation in Jesus Christ and baptizing people into
fellowship with him and each other, but what is this discipling the nations? It seems like an odd
thought, perhaps, and it often is ignored. It means that our Savior, who claims "all authority in
heaven and on earth," wants to transform a people's whole way of life. Let us look a bit more
closely at this mandate and its implied task, cultural discipleship.
Too often we evangelicals have made God's plan of redemption seem as though it involves only
the saving of individuals. Every person is precious to God, and God does want each to repent and
be saved, but saved for what purpose? The larger purpose of our salvation, the Bible tells us, is
that we are saved to serve God's kingdom. And what is God's kingdom, in which we become
citizens when we profess faith in Christ and enter the fellowship of believers? The Kingdom is
God's full plan of redemption, the prophets' vision of shalom, that day when our world will enjoy the
reign of justice, peace and plenty, when all has been restored to righteousness, or right
relationships. "Seek first the Kingdom of God," Jesus commands us. That is the main task of the
Christian, to be an agent for the Kingdom, a witness to the Kingdom. We give witness to personal
redemption, for sure, but more comprehensively, we are also witnesses to God's promise to
reconcile all things under the lordship of Jesus Christ. That is the work of discipleship in its fullest
dimension: learning to give witness, in thought, word and deed, to God's grand plan of personal,
societal, global, and even cosmic redemption.
Discipleship at this grand scope, as in discipling the nations, is a daunting task. "If a nation is to be
discipled," says Andrew Walls, "the commanding heights of a nation's life have to be opened to the
influence of Christ; for Christ has redeemed human life in its entirety. . . . Discipling a nation," Walls
continues, "involves Christ's entry into the nation's thought, the patterns of relationship within that
nation, the way the society hangs together, the way decisions are made." There is no one cultural
blueprint for how Jesus' salvation and his lordly demands will be played out in the world's incredible
variety of cultures. So the task of cultural discipleship, of the Gospel taking root and producing a
deep and transforming expression in a culture, is never over, so long as the Lord tarries in coming
again to fully establish his Kingdom. The task is ever so complex, because humanity is so diverse.
Says Walls: "the word of Christ is accordingly forever meeting new situations, going into conditions
that Christians have never experienced before."
Clearly, then, the church of Jesus Christ has a very broad and grand teaching task, and this task of
cultural discipleship, or teaching the nations, is central to its mission. We Protestants have given
serious emphasis to this ministry of teaching. But as presently constituted in our churches,
congregational education cannot go into much depth. We have to admit that compared to what
someone does to prepare for his or her profession or line of work, the Christian education that the
average congregation provides is rather general and introductory. It does not advance us very far
according to our mandate to "teach the nations."
II.
Teaching the Nations: the Missionary Basis of Higher Education
Let me give you a brief excursion into history so you can see how western Christianity has
addressed this problem. The church in the West has dealt with this problem by supporting
educational institutions outside of its own doors. During the early Middle Ages, the advance of
Christianity in Northern Europe was fundamentally attached to the advance of literacy and other
basic learning. For the missionary monks who set up monasteries on the northern pagan frontiers,
teaching the nations meant, first, teaching children to read and write and gain some other basic
knowledge and skills. Over time, groups of learning-minded graduates from these schools began to
form guilds. Often these guilds came under the sponsoring wing of a cathedral, and they received
charters from local governments and permission from the Pope to grant licenses or diplomas.
Over time, says historian John Van Engen, these guilds became universities, and in their
independent legal status they became a virtual third force in society, alongside church and state.
Their graduates were the scholars, lawyers, pastors and gentlemen of medieval and early modern
Europe, and their influence on society for the sake of Christian beliefs and norms was enormous.
The Reformation, you may recall, was begun as a disputation among university theology
professors. It was enabled to survive by the patronage of learned nobles who sympathized with the
reform, and it produced a commitment to having well-educated pastors who could teach the
Scriptures to their parishioners. The missionary task of "teaching the nations" in Northern Europe
took a major leap forward during the Reformation, when university literary scholars translated the
Scriptures into the vernacular languages and musicians developed Psalters for singing the Gospel.
These inventions advanced the cultural discipleship of northern Europe, for the Gospel now was
expressed in the language of hearth and home, and in the music of family parlors and market
squares. Christianity was taking deeper root in the culture and becoming more truly the faith of the
people.
Likewise in North America, from the earliest English settlements in the 17th century and through
the days of the Early Republic, Protestant people were never settled for very long before they
sought to reproduce this powerful educational mission. Only six years after their arrival in 1630, the
Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed Harvard College, both for the education
of pastors and for the development of well-educated community leaders. Two hundred years later,
as the Americans moved the line of settlement westward in the new nation, they repeated this
pattern. In hundreds of these new communities, churches and civic leaders collaborated to bring
higher education to town. In the Michigan Territory, for example, the Baptists founded Kalamazoo
College in 1833, four years before Michigan became a state. The fact that these territories rapidly
became civilized-with schools, libraries, churches, physicians, lawyers, laws and courts, and
dozens of cultural agencies-owes much to these Christian people's desire to see Christian
republics rise from the wild places of North America. Like their Puritan ancestors, they used
academies and colleges to develop able and committed community leaders.
When American and European missionaries went elsewhere in the world, one of the strategic
moves they made was to use higher education to plant Christianity more deeply into the culture.
Hence the founding of Fourah Bay College in 1827 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, by Anglican
missionaries; and Serampore College in southeastern India, founded in 1819 by the Baptist
missionary, William Carey. Serampore College's mission, Carey said, was the "forming of our
native brethren to usefulness, fostering every kind of genius, and cherishing every gift and grace in
them." So for several hundred years, Christians whose roots are in the Western tradition have
considered higher education to be one of their most strategic tools for cultural discipleship.
As we discussed in the earlier lecture, the mission and character of higher education in the United
States changed dramatically in the years between 1880 and 1940. Scientists and the scientific
method became the lords of the emerging modern university. Even the humanities, which for
centuries had been a fruitful partnership between Christian theology and philosophy alongside the
monuments of ancient Greek and Roman thought, had become resolutely secular and "scientific."
Higher education, which had once been the great friend and supporter of the Christian mission in
Western culture, now seemed to be competing with it.
III.
Knowledge of the Orient and the Secularization of Western Thought
One of the most important forces for secularization, one that we did not mention last time, was the
growing knowledge that Europeans and North Americans were gaining of the great and ancient
civilizations of Asia, especially those of China. Europeans were used to reckoning world history by
the Bible, and tracing the history of civilization from Genesis to the present, from Mesopotamia to
points west. Yet European scholars in the 17th century discovered that Chinese civilization had
carefully written histories tracing it back to a time that by European reckoning was before the great
flood of Noah's day. Several European scholars concluded that the flood of the Genesis account
had not been truly global. Could it be that the biblical account of human history was that limited? As
knowledge of China grew, European intellectual critics, such as the 18th century French
philosopher, Voltaire, used the new knowledge of Chinese thought and culture to criticize European
institutions, including their religious base in Christianity. Did not the so-called pagans of Confucian
China hold to standards of public morality at least as high as Christianity? Did not the ancient
annals of Chinese history refute the accounts of the Old Testament? In Voltaire's own history text,
China became the oldest, best administered, and most civilized nation of the world.
Scholars of India as well, who mastered the ancient Sanskrit language and read the histories,
philosophies, poetry and religious texts of South Asian civilization, found some sophisticated
alternatives to European civilization and a Christian world view. By the mid-nineteenth century,
translations of these works were commonly available, so that Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's
pioneering post-Christian philosopher, eagerly reported having seen a copy of the Bagavadgita in
1845. Emerson's religious-philosophical views, known as Transcendentalism, were fortified by what
he learned about Asian religions, and they provided an alternative to American intellectuals who no
longer believed in Christianity as the one true faith. Within the new research universities, as we
have seen, the humanities and the social sciences were accepting the idea that all social and
cultural ideas and beliefs, including religion, were human inventions. Emanating out from the great
German universities to the rest of the North Atlantic world was the growing field of "Oriental
Studies," that brought Europeans and Americans into a deeper understanding and appreciation of
the great ancient civilizations ranging east from Turkey to Japan. The more that scholars learned of
other cultures and their faiths, the more they felt compelled to compare those faiths to Christianity.
Christianity's hold on the Western imagination as God's ultimate and final word about the way of
salvation was seriously weakened.
How did American evangelical and other conservative Christians respond to these great intellectual
challenges, to the loss of support for the Christian cultural mission within higher education? Many
of them withdrew their support from the secularizing colleges and universities and favored instead a
network of conservative evangelical Bible institutes, where learning the Bible was the focus, and
that without any of those troubling methods of modern biblical criticism. With a Bible school
preparation, one might be inoculated against modern secular thought and able to go on to the
university and survive its destructive rationalism.
It is important to note that these Bible schools taught a certain kind of evangelical theology that was
destroying the concept of cultural discipleship. This kind of evangelical thinking narrowed the
concept of God's salvation down to the personal level only, reduced the idea of one's calling or
vocation to "religious" jobs such as preaching, evangelization or missionary work; and devalued the
Christian purpose of education except that which was Biblical Studies, Theology or Practical
Ministry. This change in evangelical theology is what historian Mark Noll rightly called "the
intellectual disaster of fundamentalism."
Through the years, however, there have been Christian colleges, and Christian scholars at other
colleges and universities, who have maintained a Christian approach to the humanities, insisting
that all truth is God's truth. There have been Christian professors throughout the twentieth century
who have argued that one's basic commitments concerning the nature and destiny of the human
race and the origins and direction of the material universe shape the questions, methods and
conclusions that one brings to any field of study.
These scholars and institutions may have been marginal to the great higher education industry in
America, and most of the time they are still less salient in evangelical circles than the Bible
colleges, seminaries, and parachurch ministries. Yet they have kept alive the idea that the kingdom
of God will grow through the teaching of the nations, through the deeper conversion of cultures as
well as individuals. And today, my friends, the often lonely work of these few has begun to bear
fruit. The idea of the integration of faith and learning has become widely accepted among the
nation's evangelical colleges and universities, even those which started out as Bible schools. The
"outrageous idea of Christian scholarship," as George Marsden's recent book is titled, is catching
on with hundreds and thousands of Christian professors.
Yet I fear that many Christian scholars in the humanities are missing the opportunity to be of
greater service, and to make common cause with brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world such
as yourselves. The problem comes because of the instincts and strategies they have followed in
their attempts to stand firm as Christian cultural scholars. These instincts and strategies, by and
large, have been to "strengthen the things which remain." They work to recover the Christian
wisdom of the European past, to remember, appreciate and uphold the Christian thought and
cultural creativity of the European past. Contemporary secular humanities scholars tend to
disparage, forget or ignore these massive Christian contributions to the making of Western
civilization. It has been important for Christian scholars in the humanities, therefore, to reassert the
importance of the Christian religion for the making, sustaining and improving of western civilization.
It has been important for rebuilding the morale and creative imagination of western Christian
scholars as well to see the great achievements prior generations. As a cultural historian, I would be
the last to disparage this sort of intellectual move, a recovery of the Christian wisdom of prior
generations. It is a strategic task for Christian scholars in the West, the cultural conversion of which
is still our aim. And yet, there is this matter of the open door set before us, of fresh opportunities to
apply the principles of cultural discipleship elsewhere in the world. If we focus only on
"strengthening the things that remain" in the West, and worse, if by implication we assume that a
Western Christian orientation and agenda is what Christians in the South and East ought to
emulate, we have made a profound mistake. God is setting before us all some open doors, for we
live in an amazing new day for the Christian cultural mission. How amazing? Let me show you.
IV.
World Christianity
You Christian leaders in Korea have been working on the front lines of what, in global perspective,
looks like a new dispensation in the world history of the faith. As the American church historian
Mark Noll recently pointed out, when the delegates at the great world missionary conference in
Edinburgh in 1910 surveyed the global scene and tried to envisage God's mission in the new
century, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Who among them
would have thought, Noll asks, that in less than a century, 60 percent of the world's Christians
would live outside of that region? In religious demography alone, the world's Christian heartlands
have shifted from the North Atlantic region to the South and the East, and we are already seeing
signs of a corresponding shift in the church's strength and agenda setting for theology and ministry.
I do not want to dwell on these trends overly long, but at least some illustrations of what I mean are
in order. First, in Latin America, where for centuries the Roman Catholic faith has been dominant,
evangelical Protestantism has been growing rapidly for 30 years. In Brazil, where nearly 90 percent
of the nation is Catholic but less than 10 percent of Catholics regularly attend church, the
Protestant minority, with very strong patterns of religious commitment, probably is the majority in
church on Sunday morning. In Guatemala, fully a third of the nation is now Protestant. One should
use "Protestant" advisedly, because the vast majority of the emerging non-Catholic Christians are
in the Pentecostal movement, not the older Protestant traditions.
What will become of Latin American society and culture as a result of this momentous religious
change? We can only speculate, of course, but what one sees in many places where Protestantism
grows is social fragmentation and civil strife. Traditional leaders resent the rift in community
solidarity as evangelicals do not participate in the revelry of religious festivals and in many cases
feed into an emerging business class. Violence breaks out, evangelical churches are burned, and
people get hurt. As the Protestant movement gains some social footing, however, we are seeing
challenges to the age-old patterns of class, property ownership and politics in Latin America as the
middle class grows and gains more power. Great Britain and the United States provide historical
precedents for this pattern, but it is not certain that the Latin American evangelicos will develop the
drive for democracy and social reform that transformed British and American society and politics
150 years ago.
In all of Africa at the beginning of the last century, there were fewer than nine million Christians.
Today there are 350 million believers. Over the next quarter-century, that number may well double.
The African continent, especially its regions south of the Sahara, is now home to the world's
fastest-growing concentration of Christian movements and traditions. The largest congregation in
the world, I have been told, is in Seoul Korea. But the largest church building belongs to a
Pentecostal church thirty miles west of Lagos, Nigeria. It seats fifty thousand people, and when it
holds outdoor revival meetings, two million people attend. Waves of disease, violence and famine
make the African scene resemble crisis-laden late medieval Europe, or perhaps the Book of
Revelation. These tragedies will continue in the years to come, and among the professional Africa
watchers, opinion is deeply divided as to whether the continent will ever climb out of the crisis
mode and find its own way forward.
There is hope for Africa, however, from a source that even the most sanguine secular pundits often
ignore: a rising generation of post-colonial Christian leaders, both in the church and in government
and civil society. In some African countries that have found their way back from the abyss, Uganda
being a notable example, this new generation of Christian leadership is forming the backbone for
civic peace, economic growth, and democratic polity.
Christianity was born in Western Asia, and has been present in points further east since ancient
times. The modern missions movement, signified by William Carey's mission to India in 1792,
looked first and most intently toward the East. Asia's advanced civilizations and ancient traditions of
theological, philosophical and ethical thought, Western missionary theorists assumed, would make
that continent the most congenial receiver of the Christian message. Christianity has grown in Asia,
nearly fifteen-fold over the past century, from 20 million adherents in 1900 to some 300 million
today. In this, the most populous region of the world, however, Christians remain a tiny minority,
both in Asia's largest nations and its smallest. Christians number about 2.5 percent of India's 1
billion people and 3 percent of China's 1.3 billion people. Very few Christians at all live in small
Buddhist nations such as Nepal and Bhutan. Contrary to earlier assumptions, Christianity has
grown most rapidly among those people who have been at the margins of the great Asian
civilizations or who have been less attached to the great Asian religious traditions. Christianity's
strongholds in East Asia are here in South Korea and in the Philippines, two civilizations that have
been oppressed by the larger powers.
In both India and China, Christianity continues to grow. As it does, it challenges the cultural and
political powers. Indian nationalism is resurgent just now, and Hindu nationalist organizations have
been emboldened in their denunciations of Christian evangelism and philanthropy. In this
permissive climate, nationalist agitators have incited riots against churches, and Christian leaders
have been beaten, jailed, and burned out of their homes. Indian Christians seem bolder these days
in reaching out beyond their traditional strongholds, but as they enter areas of Hindu strength, they
experience increased resentment and persecution.
Christianity in China also challenges the establishment. Catholicism in particular is viewed as a
threat to the state's authority. The current Polish pope instigated the fall of Communism in Eastern
Europe, Chinese rulers believe, and they are determined not to let this foreign-led religion have its
way in their land. The Catholic Church in China is split between those congregants who have
accepted state-appointed bishops and those unauthorized Catholics who look to Rome. In like
fashion the Protestant wing of the faith is divided into registered and unregistered religious bodies.
Leaders of unauthorized Christian groups, Catholic and Protestant, are regularly harassed and
jailed, and their congregations closed. Nevertheless, Christianity remains strong and vibrant in
China, having multiplied in number at least twenty-fold since the missionaries were expelled a halfcentury ago.
This quick and very broad-brushed tour of global Christianity hardly suffices to explain the faith's
dynamism and the challenges it encounters in diverse settings, but it does help illustrate one of the
most stunning trends of the twentieth century. Christianity has experienced a major shift in its
popular base. Christianity is truly a global religion; it is predominantly nonWestern. The faith's
patterns of thought, worship and witness, even in the West, are bound to reflect this new reality in
the coming century. Three major trends are riding this wave of change, and they provide a radically
different context for Christian cultural thought and witness than that of the Western missionary era
now passing.
First, the global church is gaining new leaders. The twentieth century was an ecumenical age, in
which North Atlantic Christian leaders in missions and theology initiated and led great global
fellowships. The vision was worldwide, but the orientation and agenda were European. By the
1990s, however, ecumenical leadership and agendas were changing. In 1994, the Vatican
sponsored a historic African Catholic Bishop's Conference, which featured such speakers as
Francis Cardinal Arinze, the gospel-preaching prelate from Nigeria, who is rumored to be a
potential candidate for the papacy. At the Lambeth Conference of the worldwide communion of
Anglican Churches in 1998, African and Asian bishops took over the theological and pastoral
agenda. They refused proposals for ordaining practicing homosexuals and emphasized instead the
church's calling to evangelize, combat poverty, and overcome political oppression. In 1999, the
World Alliance of Reformed Churches, whose secretariat in Geneva had been dominated by liberal
Europeans, named Dr. Setri Nyomi, an evangelical Presbyterian theologian from Ghana, as its
executive head. Conservative evangelical Protestants have experienced similar trends in recent
years. The theological commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) has been led by
Asian, Latin American and African theologians for nearly two decades, and Jun Vencer, a lawyer
and lay ministry leader from the Philippines, has been the WEF's general secretary since the mid1990s.
The second major trend is the changing agenda for Christian theology. The most pressing issues
are shifting from what Mark Noll calls "the jaded discontents of advanced Western civilization" to
matters of poverty and social injustice, political corruption and the meltdown of law and order, and
Christianity's witness in a situation of religious pluralism. World Christian thought leaders in this
new century are thus becoming, as the Anglican evangelical leader John Stott once put it, both
more conservative and more radical. They are more conservative in affirming the apostolic
doctrines, and especially the immanent presence and power of God. They are more radical in
insisting that Christians offer a prophetic, biblically charged witness against unjust social orders and
a vision for a more rightly ordered society and government.
The third major trend has to do with the church's world mission. There are now 400,000 expatriate
or cross-cultural missionaries in the world, and those from outside the North Atlantic region
outnumber the European and North American missionaries. Koreans, I have heard, are witnessing
in Siberia, Kenya and Brazil. Nigerians are going to Niger and to darkest London; indeed, the
largest church in London today has a Nigerian pastor. Ghanaians and Liberians, meanwhile, are
bringing the gospel to Grand Rapids.
V.
A Teaching Moment for World Christianity
It is well-nigh impossible to make general statements about the "nature of the moment" in
contemporary global Christianity, because of its radical diversity. In some places outside of the
West, such as Egypt and Ethiopia, Christianity has been around for many centuries. In others, such
as in Nepal, it is a new and rather fragile movement. But let me try out a generalization anyway. In
many places, from West Africa to South America to East Asia, popular Christianity, especially in its
Pentecostal and other evangelical varieties, has come to a new stage of its existence. Like earlier
revival and renewal movements, these new evangelical movements in the Global South and East
are evolving from peace-disturbing, establishment-upsetting religious upstarts into settled
denominations and fellowships. When the revival fires cease to be white hot, revivalist groups get
busy building institutional "fireplaces." People have been saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy
Ghost, battles have been fought to revive sleeping traditions or to break free and start new ones.
But Jesus has not come back yet, so there is a new generation to nurture, and a surrounding
society in which to sustain a witness. Changing times seem to mandate equipping the saints for the
longer term.
My friends and colleagues, this is where we come in. Popular Christian movements now see the
need for cultural discipleship. As I discovered in some recent investigations, evangelicals are
founding dozens of new universities, in Latin America, in tropical Africa, and right here in Korea,
which is one of the "hot spots" in the growth of Christian higher education. There is a widespread
sense that higher education is a strategic venture for the long-term sustainability and influence of
Christianity in its new cultural settings. The pentecostal leaders of the Central University College in
Accra, Ghana, refer to this broader vision as "the great commission of our Lord Jesus Christ in its
multifaceted dimensions." They see their task as sharing in God's concern for reconciliation and
justice throughout human society and for the liberation of man; evangelism and social action,
without fear or favour, denouncing evil and injustice wherever they exist; being part of Christian
duty and necessary expressions of Christian doctrines of God and man's love for one's neighbour
and obedience to Jesus Christ; to exhibit His Kingdom ethics and to spread its justice and
righteousness in the world.
More specifically, according to Vice-Chancellor E. Kingsley Larbi, Central University College aims
to help solve "the crisis of leadership [that] is the greatest threat to an African renaissance."
Likewise in Latin America, a Christian university spokesman from the Dominican Republic declares,
"Pentecostalism is coming of age as a second and third generation begins to ask, 'Now what?'
Saving souls has become routine in many cases and there is a desire to make a more significant
contribution to the surrounding context."
When I looked at what these new universities were teaching, what their professors and students
were studying, however, there seemed to be a mismatch between the rhetoric of intentions and the
content of the curriculum. To develop Christian leaders who approach their societies from the
perspective of a Christian world view, and who have a "big picture" understanding of the social,
political, economic, religious and cultural dynamics at play, the studies must be broad. The
humanities and social sciences must play a central role. What I see, however, in many new
Christian universities are degree programs that focus on professional certification and technical
skills, with perhaps some courses in Bible and theology on the side. Many of the new Christian
universities thus look like the other recently founded private universities in this age of privatization.
They emphasize the commercial and technical subjects that students and parents most easily see
as turning education into well-paying entry-level jobs. They are, in effect, preparing knowledge
workers for the new global economy. There is nothing wrong with that aim, on the face of it. Indeed,
it has a measure of social justice to it, in that one of the main factors that keeps poor nations poor
is their lack of access to such technical skills. Evangelical universities can make a valuable
contribution in this sense to the welfare of their nations. But where are the studies that will enable
evangelical Christians to be reflective and critical leaders and decision makers? Where are the
professors who will teach students to be agents of God's shalom? Biblical and theological studies
alone cannot do this. In order to understand how the Gospel speaks to a culture, Christians need to
be careful students of culture as well as of the Gospel in its original scriptural setting, or in its earlier
theological formulations.
Conclusion: A Call to Cultural Translation and Conversion
Indeed, I would contend that theology is always culturally conditioned and contextual. The problem is that
many of our theologians don't see this very clearly. They sometimes seem to assume that they are dealing
with disembodied ideas. Rather, the Word of God comes to us in culturally mediated forms, embodied in
Jesus of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jew, and inscribed in the human languages and cultural idioms of the
Greek and Hebrew Bible. As Lamin Sanneh has put it so brilliantly, the heart of the Christian mission is
always translation, and translation is a profound act of cultural scholarship. So theology needs to understand
its necessarily contextual situation, and it needs to acknowledge its reliance on work from a Christian
perspective in the humanities and social sciences. What we have instead, too often, is theology and cultural
studies which are implicitly referenced to the intellectual problems of the post-Enlightenment West, trying to
answer the "cultured despisers of religion." These are the issues western Christian intellectuals must
contend with on their home turf, to "strengthen the things which remain." But the call of cultural discipleship
elsewhere in the world, where the front lines of Christian thought and witness now are, is quite different. It
points us to poverty and social injustice, political corruption and the meltdown of law and order, and
Christianity's witness in situations of religious pluralism. My message to Western Christian scholars, then, is
to be cognizant of these open doors for Christian thought and witness elsewhere in the world. Perhaps,
many of us should shift our own scholarly attention to the South and the East.
To Korean Christian scholars, my advice is to pay much closer attention to your own cultural context, both
past and present, and ask what it will take to see Christianity, which has grown so rapidly here, put down
deep roots in Korean cultural soil. It needs to speak more directly to the hopes, fears, traditional values,
artistic imagination and sense of historical trajectory of the Korean people. Christianity, says Andrew Walls,
"is fundamentally about conversion, about human life turned towards Christ. Conversion is not substituting
something new for something old; nor adding something new to something old. It is about turning what is
already there." Walls alludes to a thought from the early church theologian, Origen, that just as "the curtains
of the Tabernacle must have been made from Egyptian cloth," so it is the task of God's people today "to take
the things of the heathen world, and furnish from them things for the worship and glorification of God." So
what would a converted Korean culture look like? I ask this question because Christian brothers and sisters
in the West have a stake in your future. The arrival of believers from the South and the East is adding new
dimensions to the fullness of the body of Christ. We will discover, through you, new things about our Savior,
and about his Gospel as it achieves new things in your land. Korean Christian universities and networks of
Korean Christian scholars can play a strategic role in this task of translating the Gospel into Korean, but they
must focus much more scholarly attention on these Gospel-and-culture matters.
Joel A. Carpenter
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA