Topic: Contextualisation/Indigenisation/Inculturation

Indigenisation:
Right from its earliest days, Christian mission came into contact with the reality of cultural
diversity. The problem is keenly felt even in the modern world. The Gospel can only be
expressed in terms of culture and therefore has to be transposed from one culture to another in a
rich variety of ways. The arduous process of detaching the church from the dominating Western
culture has been characterised by concepts such as adaptation and accommodation, and in more
recent times by neologisms such as “indigenisation,” “contextualisation,” and “inculturation”.
The different words place different accents, but all have the same purpose, namely, the
integration of cultures with the Christian faith. 1 This paper is, therefore, an attempt to understand
the meanings of indigenisation, inculturation and contextualisation respectively and to elucidate
their presence and the roles they played in the history of mission.

Indigenisation:
According to Kosuke Koyama, Indigenisation means a “theologically informed endeavour to
make the content and expression of Christian theology, ministry and life adapted and rooted in a
community of different cultural localities.” For him the purpose of indigenisation is to create an
authentic Christian community.2 Indigenisation was more common in Protestant than Catholic
circles. Russel Chandran understands the practice to mean ‘the setting forth clearly of the
Christian message, once for all revealed, and... the interpretation of this message in a manner
“challengingly relevant” for each generation’. This means a reformulation and reinterpretation of
the revelation, for no ‘one formulation can exhaust the full meaning of revelation’.

The most famous expression of indigenisation has been the ‘three selfs’ – self-support, self-
government and self-propagation – invented by Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson and developed
by Roland Allen. Indigenisation was intended to create as rapidly as possible a local church
which was not forever dependent on foreign assistance and upkeep.3

Inculturation:
Inculturation represents another important model of contextualizing theology and is of recent
origin – even though it is not without precedent in Christian history. Pierre Charles introduced
the concept “enculturation” into missiology, but it was J. Masson who first coined the phrase
Catholicisme inculture (“inculturated Catholicism”) in 1962. It soon gained currency among
Jesuits, in the form of “inculturation”. It was soon also accepted in Protestant circles and is today
one of the most widely used concepts in missiological circles. 4 A. R Crollius paraphrases
1
Karl Muller, “inculturation,” Dictionary of Mission, edited by Karl Muller, Theo Sundermeier, Stephen B. Bevans
and Richard H. Bliese (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 198.
2
As quoted in J. W. Gladstone, Indigenisation of Christianity, http://www.ichenetwork.net/Mission_3.pdf
3
J. Andrew Kirk, What is Mission? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 89.
4
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Bangalore: Centre for
Contemporary Christianity, 2006), 561-562.

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inculturation as “the integration of the Christian experience of a local church into the culture of
its people in such a way that this experience not only expresses itself in elements of this culture ,
but becomes a force that animates, orients and causes innovation within this culture so as to
create a new unity and communion, not only within the culture in question but also as an
enrichment of the Church universal.”5

This has been a concept particularly favoured within Catholic missiology: ‘Inculturation works
dialectically in a “marvellous exchange”: the transformation of a culture by the Gospel, and the
expression of the Gospel in terms of that culture’. The Catholic emphasis on the sacramentality
of the whole of life means that that Church has tended to lay more stress on the embodied
manifestation or the presence of the Gospel than on its verbal proclamation. This has been
derived from the centrality in Catholic thought of the incarnation of the Word: “The Church is to
be completely at home among each people in the same authentic way that Jesus was at home in
Nazareth. This is genuine Catholicity.” 6 Inculturation is a process of the insertion of the whole
Christian way of life into a culture or cultures understood in the wide sense of the term. The
Church and culture though they are relatively independent, must encounter each other
dynamically for their own mutual benefit and enrichment through the process of inculturation.
The insertion of a Church into a particular society must, in other words, be so profound that she
may be entirely “at home” in it and may become a part of it after the example of Christ who
bound “himself, in virtue of his incarnation, to the definite social and cultural conditions of those
human beings among whom he dwelt”.7

Contextualisation:
The understanding of the incarnational nature of Christian faith has developed further with the
growing awareness, from the 1950s onwards, of the ways in which political commitments and
social action affect the mission of the Church in particular cultures. In general terms one might
say that political and social analysis have joined anthropology as tools of discernment in the
struggle of the Church to be faithful to the Gospel and relevant to the particular historical
moment. Taken originally from Jesus’ dispute with some religious leaders of his day (Matt. 16:2-
3), ‘reading the signs of the times’ has become an additional task of the theology of mission.

Contextualisation recognises the reciprocal influence of culture and socio-economic life. In

relating Gospel to culture, therefore, it tends to take a more critical stance towards culture. The
concept first came to prominence in the early 1970s in the arena of theological education. It is
intended to be taken seriously as a theological method which entails particular ideological
commitments to transform situations of social injustice, political alienation and the abuse of
human rights.8
5
Karl Muller, “inculturation,” Dictionary of Mission…, 198.
6
J. Andrew Kirk, What is Mission..., 90.
7
Avila cmc, “The Cultural Milieu of India and the Necessity of Inculturation” in Chuch in Context, edited by
Kanichikattil Francis (Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 1996), 168-169.
8
J. Andrew Kirk, What is Mission…, 91.

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The Genesis of Contextual Theology:
The word “contextualisation” was first coined in the early 1970s, in the circles of the Theological
Education Fund, with a view particularly to the task of the education and formation of people for
the church’s ministry. It soon caught on and became a blanket term for a variety of theological
models.9

For many centuries every deviation from what any group declared to be the orthodox faith was
viewed in terms of heterodoxy, even heresy. This was the case particularly after the Christian
church became established in the Roman Empire. Arianism, Donatism, Pelagianism,
Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and numerous similar movements were all regarded as doctrinally
heterodox and their adherents excommunicated, persecuted, or banned. The role of cultural,
political, and social factors in the genesis of such movements was not recognised. The same
happened at the occasion of the Great Schism in the year 1054; henceforth, the Eastern and
Western churches would declare each other to be theologically unorthodox. History repeated
itself in the sixteenth century when, after the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics denied each
other the epithet “Christian”. In subsequent centuries the Council of Trent and the various
Protestant confessions were employed as shibboleths to determine the difference between
acceptable and unacceptable creedal formulations.10

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) interpreted the Protestant Reformation not as an attempt

at restoring the primitive or apostolic church. What has once been cannot simply be brought back
in a later period. The Christian church is always in the process of becoming; the church of the
present is both the product of the past and the seed of the future. For this reason, theology must
not be pursued as an attempt at reconstructing the pristine past and its truths; rather, theology is a
reflection on the church’s own life and experience. Thus, Schleiermacher pioneered the view that
all theology was influenced, if not determined, by the context in which it had evolved. There
never was a “pure” message, supracultural and suprahistorical. Every text, it was now
recognised, had a peculiar Sitz im Leben, which the scholar had to determine, particularly with
the aid of form criticism. During the nineteenth century and, more particularly, in the twentieth
century, the recognition of the way in which theology was conditioned by its environment
became the received view in critical theological circles. 11 The real breakthrough in this respect
came with the birth of Third-World theologies in their various forms. It was indebted to the
WCC’s Theological Education Fund, later called Programme for Theological Education, for
initiative and inspiration in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Its director then was Shoki Coe, a
theological educator from Taiwan who did much to focus attention on the relation between the
text and context in theological schools and seminaries. Although there was no surprising

9
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 527.
10
Ibid…, 528.
11
Ibid…, 529-530.

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breakthrough, the contextualisation model encouraged innovative theological education in the
Third World and firmly put cultures in the forefront of continuing theological efforts. 12

Gospel and Culture in History of Mission:

The Christian faith never exists except as “translated” into a culture. Lamin Sanneh rightly says
that the early church, “in straddling the Jewish-Gentile worlds, was born in a cross-cultural
milieu with translation as its birthmark”. It should therefore, come as no surprise that in the
Pauline churches, Jews, Greeks, barbarians, Thracians, Egyptians, and the Romans were able to
feel at home . The same was true of the post-apostolic church. The faith was inculturated in a
great variety of liturgies and contexts – Syriac, Greek, Roman, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian,
Maronite, and so forth. Moreover, during this early period the emphasis was on the local church
rather than the church universal in its monarchical form.13

After Constantine, when the erstwhile religio illicita became the religion of the establishment,
the church became the bearer of culture. Its missionary outreach thus meant a movement from
the civilised to “savages” and from a “superior” culture to “inferior” cultures – a process in
which the latter had to be subdued, if not eradicated. Thus, Christian mission, as a matter of
course, presupposed the disintegration of the cultures into which it penetrated.

The modern missionary movement has thrown up any number of crucial questions related to the
Gospel and culture which make some serious reflection vitally important. Perhaps none is more
far-reaching than the extent to which the Gospel, brought by Western missionaries to Africa,
Asia and Latin America, had an impact on indigenous cultures. The indigenous cultures were
misunderstood, caricatured and humiliated, and the churches born as a result became subcultures
alienated from the living tradition of the peoples. To ‘civilise’ was seen as an indispensable part
of evangelisation. There is also another view that appears to regard the indigenous peoples as
passive objects of Western initiatives, whereas on many occasions they resisted the destruction
of their cultures by all kinds of creative adaptation of the message.14

Western Christians were unconscious of the fact that their theology was culturally conditioned;
they simply assumed that it was supracultural and universally valid. Since Western culture was
implicitly regarded as Christian, it was equally self-evident that this culture had to be exported
together with the Christian faith. The strategy by which this was to be put into effect was
variously called adaptation or accommodation (in Catholicism) or indigenisation (in
Protestantism). It was often, however, limited to accidental matters, such as liturgical vestments,
non-sacramental rites, art, literature, architecture, and music.15

12
Choan-Seng Song, “Culture,” Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, edited by Nicholas Lossky(Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 259.
13
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 562.
14
J. Andrew Kirk, What is Mission…, 81.
15
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 562-563.

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Catholic missionaries, in particular early Jesuits like de Nobili and Ricci, in their mission
adopted the accommodation of the faith to the peoples of India and China. So also the
Propaganda Fide, in its extraordinary policy statement in 1659, advised its missionaries not to
force people to change their customs, as long as these were not opposed to religion or morality.
In spite of this instruction, the Jesuits soon ran into difficulties, particularly because of what
came to be known as the “Rites Controversy”, in both China and India. A papal bull of 1744,
Omnium sollicitudinum, forbade all but the most trivial concessions to local custom and ordered
an oath of submission, which was to be taken by all missioners. In 1773 the Society of Jesus was
suppressed. Soon after, all Jesuit missionaries were recalled until they were restored by papal
decree in 1814. The oath introduced in 1744 was not repealed until 1938.16

Protestant missions on the whole, were even more suspicious of “non-Christian” cultures than
Catholics. They allowed some freedom but in the main worked for an exact reproduction of
European models. They deliberately set out to encourage indigenisation in course of doing
mission among the younger churches whom they considered as the “lower” form in the
celebrated case of the “three-selfs”17. In both Catholicism and Protestantism, then, the prevailing
image was a pedagogical one (the younger churches were to be educated and trained in order to
reach selfhood or “maturity”, measured in terms of the “three-selfs”). The outcome was not the
younger churches never “grew up” and most of them could survive only if they resolutely
segregated themselves from the surrounding culture and existed as foreign bodies.18

Around 1860 the autonomy of the young churches could be seen in large print on every sensible
missionary program, long before anybody in the West even dreamt about other kinds of
autonomy for colonised countries. Pope Benedict XV, particularly in his encyclical Maximum
Illud (1919), was one of the first to promote the right of the “mission churches” to cease being
ecclesiastical colonies under foreign control and to have their own clergy and bishops. The new
reality also finds expression in the fact that there are today (according to the calculations of
Barrett, 1990) many more Christians outside than inside the traditional missionary-sending
countries and that many of these younger churches have themselves begun to send out
missionaries. By the late 1960s it became evident that a decisive shift had taken place, even in
the mind of Westerners, from a Europe-centred world to a humankind-centred world. Yet even at
the Vatican Council the voices of Third-World church leaders were still muffled, as they were in
Protestant ecumenical gatherings of the time. Only since the Bangkok CWME meeting (1973),
has it become clear that global ecclesiastical leadership is inexorably passing toward Third-
World Christians.

It was finally recognised that a plurality of cultures presupposes a plurality of theologies and
therefore, for Third-World churches, a farewell to a Eurocentric approach. The Christian faith
must be rethought, reformulated and lived anew in each human culture, and this must be done in
16
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 564.
17
Self-government, self-support, and self-propagation – formulated by Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn.
18
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 564-565.

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a vital way, in depth and right to the cultures’ roots. Such a project is even more needed in light
of the way in which the West has raped the cultures of the Third World, inflicting on them what
has been termed as “anthropological poverty”. Paul VI chose in favour of inculturation, as did
John Paul II, particularly in Catechesi Tradendae (Apostolic Exhortation of Pope John Paul II,
1979). Pope John Paul II’s commitment to the project was further underscored when he founded
the Pontifical Council for Culture in 1982. A similar evolution can be found in Protestantism. A
landmark event was the Consultation on Gospel and Culture, sponsored by the Lausanne
Committee in World Evangelisation (1978) in Willowbank, Bermuda.19

Colonial Mission in India & Culture:

When we speak of the colonial mission, particularly with regard to India, it has to be remembered
that for the first two centuries it was exclusively that of the Catholics. The first Protestant
missionaries were of the Danish-Halle Mission, the pioneer being Bartholomew Ziegenbalg who
landed at Tranquebar on the south-east coast of India in 1706.

C. R. Boxer comments, "European missionaries were, by and large, predisposed to consider

themselves the bearers not merely of a superior religion but of a superior culture, the two being so
inseparably intertwined". Though some like Robert De Nobili or John de Britto took the trouble to
learn Indian culture and adapt themselves to the culture, for most others their host culture was either
basically inferior or oddly exotic. Missionaries rarely sought conversion in terms of a change in
religious beliefs alone, but also demanded from the converts changes in cultural practices as these
were viewed as symbols of idolatry or paganism. Local cultural symbols were replaced by
"Catholic" rites and symbols and celebrations of the feast of Christian saints.

The first missionary to take Indian culture and religions seriously and to make himself well-versed
in them was Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656). He came to Madurai, the centre of Tamil culture, in
1606 and soon was convinced that the only way to influence and evangelize high caste Hindus was
by adapting Christianity to the culture . De Nobili declared himself to be a Brahmin as he was not a
Portuguese but an Italian with an aristocratic origin. He adopted the life style of a brahmin and
dissociated himself from the Portuguese missionaries and the Christians of parava origin. The Halle
missionary Ziegenbalg stressed vernacular literature as well as the study of Hindu Philosophy and
religion. The latter project was discouraged by the authorities in Germany (P Beaver1981:197). The
most famous of the Halle missionaries was Christian Frederick Schwartz. He exercised tremendous
influence with Indians of all religions due to his adaptation and accommodation to the culture

The Serampore Trio - Carey, Marshman and Ward - fostered the growth of an independent church.
They encouraged also the study of Hinduism. The great century of the Protestant mission started
with the founding of the Baptist missionary Society by William Carey in 1792. However, as Pierce
Beaver takes pain to show, the missionaries stressed the "civilizing" objective even in countries with

19
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission…, 565-568.

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a high culture such as India and China because they regarded the local culture as degenerate and
superstitious- a barrier to Christianisation.

Alexander Duff, a missionary to India and the first one formally commissioned by the Church of
Scotland to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology, advocated already in 1866, a Missionary Institute
that would study, the questions arising from the encounter of the Gospel with other cultures.

On the other hand it has to be emphasized, all the missionaries, irrespective of denominational
differences, had utmost interest to learn the Indian languages. In fact many Indian languages were
blessed with the literary tools such as grammar, dictionary, etc., by the efforts of missionaries. They
have helped to inspire vernacular cultural revivals, in many parts of India.20

It has also to be admitted that in most cases, Christian converts frequently resisted the indigenization
attempts of the missionaries, and embraced Western patterns of behaviour, even if it could be due to
the antecedents and earlier impressions conveyed by the missionaries. Many converts from the
depressed classes perceived Western cultural patterns as offering them a superior identity compared
to the cultural practices of their former days. So naturally they were not eager to continue such
practices which signified caste oppression.21

Conclusion:
When we contemplate the relationship between Gospel and culture, it is important to keep in
mind that basically the Christian faith is the same everywhere but the way it finds expression
may differ from culture to culture. It can be observed that right from the apostolic times, the
Church had to face the problem of the relation between the Gospel and the cultures. The
fundamental particularity in mission is culture understood in the integral sense. Culture is the
externalization of the human nature created by God. It gives a people their identity and rootedness.
Every culture has its humanizing and dehumanising elements. Contemporary Indian context amply
substantiates this. We are in the middle of a struggle to set right the aberrations of Christian
mission during the colonial era which linger still in the form of what Pope John XXIII called
‘cultural neo-colonialism’.22 Against this backdrop we have presented inculturation as the
continuation of the work of Jesus Christ through the community of his disciples so that every
culture can be transformed into the Kingdom reality. In contrast to the past fascination with
accommodation and translation, today it summons the community of the disciples of Jesus for
identification with the poor and contestation of the dehumanising aspects. When we consider the
interaction of Gospel values with those of other cultures, we should be careful not to mix up
form and content or to mistake the husk for the kernel. The basic message will remain permanent
and unchangeable although the external trappings may vary. The 19 th and early 20th century ideas
20
Jacob Kavunkal, Culture and Mission: Colonialistic Times and Beyond.
http://www.svdinm.org/reading/mission.doc
21
Jacob Kavunkal, Culture and Mission: Colonialistic Times and Beyond.
22
Ignatius Hirudayam, “Theology of Inculturation and Mission” Debate on Mission (Madras: Gurukul Lutheran
Theological College and Research Institute, 1979), 152-153.

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of ethnocentrism and a Western monocultural world are untenable today. 23 Proper dialogue with
cultures that foster mission requires docility to the Spirit for guidance, willingness to take risks,
readiness to learn from mistakes, openness to correction and ability to dialogue with sincere
openness. Thus, the Indian Church must adapt herself to the cultural milieu at every stage and in
every form of her ministry.

Bibliography
Avila cmc, “The Cultural Milieu of India and the Necessity of Inculturation.” In Church in
Context. Edited by Kanichikattil Francis. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 1996.

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Bangalore:

Centre for Contemporary Christianity, 2006.

Gladstone, J.W. Indigenisation of Christianity, http://www.ichenetwork.net/Mission_3.pdf

Hirudayam, Ignatius. “Theology of Inculturation and Mission.” In Debate on Mission. Madras:

Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, 1979.

Kavunkal, Jacob. Culture and Mission: Colonialistic Times and Beyond.

http://www.svdinm.org/reading/mission.doc

Kirk, J. Andrew. What is Mission? Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

Michael, S.M. Christianity and Culture: Authentic in Dialogue, Beyond Relativism and
Ethnocentrism.

Muller, Karl. “inculturation.” Dictionary of Mission. Edited by Karl Muller, Theo Sundermeier,
Stephen B. Bevans and Richard H. Bliese. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997, 198-201.

Song, Choan-Seng. “Culture.” Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement. Edited by Nicholas

Lossky. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991, 257-
259.

23
S. M. Michael, Christianity and Culture: Authentic in Dialogue, Beyond Relativism and Ethnocentrism.