Contextualizing Sin for Cross-Cultural Evangelism

Contextualizing Sin for Cross-Cultural Evangelism Authors: Richard Y Hibbert and Evelyn C Hibbert Richard and Evelyn Hibbert served as missionaries with WEC International for 20 years in Western Asia, Bulgaria, the U.K, and Australia, involved in church planting and leadership development. Richard is currently the Director of the School of Cross-cultural Mission at Sydney Missionary and Bible College, Australia and Evelyn is a cross-cultural and educational researcher in Western Sydney.

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Missiology: An International Review 2014 42(3): 309-321 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. http://mis.sagepub.com/content/42/3/309.refs © Richard and Evelyn Hibbert

Abstract This article explores the problem of sin being miscommunicated because of mismatches between missionaries’ and host people’s understandings of sin. It illustrates this problem in various cultural contexts and demonstrates how this problem is exacerbated when missionaries have a limited and fixed conceptualisation of sin. It examines how an understanding of sin can be more effectively communicated by appreciating the multifaceted nature of sin and the gospel, by analysing how the local people view sin, and by examining how the Bible speaks to that particular understanding of sin.

The Problem: Miscommunicating Sin Missionaries hope that as they communicate the gospel to people from different cultural backgrounds than their own, their hearers will understand the message and feel that it is speaking specifically to them. For this to happen, “people need to hear and read the gospel translated into their thought categories. . .” (Kuzmic 1990:202). But this kind of translation into the thought categories of people is often hampered when missionaries have a fixed and limited conceptualisation of sin and of the gospel. The gospel is the good news about salvation from sin and its terrible effects on humanity. Contextualization has been applied more frequently to facets of salvation than to concepts of sin. For communication of the gospel to be effective, people need to be convicted of their sin. As missionary anthropologists Wayne Dye (1979) and Robert Priest (1994) have shown, the human conscience varies across cultures in what aspects of sin it is sensitive to, and missionaries must therefore learn what kinds of wrongdoing are already bothering the people’s consciences and emphasize these in their explanations of the gospel. Presentations of the gospel that focus on a single conceptualisation of sin that is well understood and keenly felt in one cultural context often fail to be apprehended as good news in a different cultural context, resulting in the gospel message being seen as irrelevant. Miscommunication of sin across cultures can arise from three types of mismatch between the local people’s and the missionaries understanding of sin. The first of these is a mismatch between the actions missionaries and local people see as sinful. The local people don’t see a particular behaviour being used by the missionary as an example of sin as particularly harmful, and the people see other behaviours as extremely sinful and which the missionary does not. This mismatch has been observed in many contexts. People in one village in Papua New Guinea, for example, were acutely aware of the sinfulness of disobeying their husbands and leaders, refusing hospitality, and showing anger, but the missionary to the village focused his

preaching instead on the sinfulness of polygamy, betel nut chewing, and smoking—things that were not seen by the people as sins (Dye 1979, 440). Among many African people groups, according to Swailem Sidhom (1966), a person’s action is considered wrong only if it negatively affects their own community rather than on the basis of a fixed moral code. This means that “stealing from a fellow clansman is viewed with horror because relationships there are on a personal level, but stealing from an outsider, where relationships are impersonal, is looked upon with approval” (247). Among the Shilluk people, “stealing a basketful of dura, the staple food of the Shilluk people, is far more reaching in seriousness than murdering an outsider” (Sidhom 1966:245). A missionary who gives stealing or murder as examples of sin without specifying who is being stolen from or murdered is likely to be miscommunicating. Robert Priest (2006) poignantly illustrates the consequences of the mismatch that exists between the conception of sin held by “Dave”—an imaginary north American first term missionary—and that of the Aguaruna of Peru, who realises that “his discourses on sin are failing to hit the mark:” He will look around for visible evidence of specific sins. . . . He will notice Pujupat’s two wives and will immediately think he has found a sin to which he can point. He assumes the second marriage resulted from excessive and sinful sexual desire. He does not realize that when Pujupat’s brother died, leaving a rather unattractive wife and three sickly children, Pujupat was pushed to marry her, despite his reluctance, and that rather than feeling guilty to wanting too much sex, Pujupat feels virtuous for having overcome his temptation not to care for her children in the morally prescribed way. (186) Meanwhile the Aguaruna, who are acutely aware of meat gluttony as a sin because of the scarcity of protein, notice that when they invite Dave to a meal he eats relatively large amounts of meat. They have gone several days without protein of any kind, and begin to see him as a “meat glutton”, one of the worst types of sinner. From time to time, short-term teams of Anglo-Saxon background missionaries with some knowledge of Turkish came and helped us in our church planting ministry among the Millet (Muslim, Turkish speaking Roma) in Bulgaria. When these visitors asked local people if

they were coming to the church meeting that day, they would invariably answer “Yes” even though they did not intend to come. Team members initially found this extremely frustrating as lying was such a serious sin for them. For the Millet, however, lying is not seen as one of the worst things a person can do, and in some situations is seen as the morally best course of action. When they replied “Yes” to inquiries about whether they were coming to the meeting, they were employing what Duane Elmer (1993:118-120) calls the ‘relational yes’ which serves to protect both the question-asker’s face and theirs and communicates respect. For the Millet, other sins such as not offering hospitality to a visitors are seen as much more serious than lying and are therefore more appropriate illustrations of sin in initial presentations of the gospel. A second kind of mismatch that can lead to miscommunication of sin is a mismatch of vocabulary for sin which occurs when missionaries look for and consistently use a single word for sin. Missionaries usually find words for theft, adultery, gluttony, and pride fairly easily, but look in vain for one word that encompasses the full meaning of the English word sin. Mark Strand (2000) explains that many Chinese people misunderstand what sin means because zui, the primary word used to translate sin, means to violate a country’s laws and expresses only the forensic aspects of sin which does not resonate well with the Chinese relational view of wrongdoing. In Africa, Sidhom (1996:243) explains “it is very difficult to find in the vernaculars a word corresponding to the word ‘sin,’ yet he proceeds to give lists of words used by the Shilluk, Bari, and Luo peoples which come under the general heading of sin. The Peruvian Aguaruna have a similarly rich vocabulary concerning moral failure including words meaning disgusting, failing to conform to the ideal, damaging, morally reprehensible, malicious, disobedient, messy, and filthy, but trying to force the whole meaning of sin onto one word is not possible or helpful (Priest 2006, 189-192). A third kind of mismatch that gives rise to miscommunication of sin is a mismatch between the missionaries’ and local people’s affective responses to sin. Anthropologist Robert Levy observed that Tahitians stressed the shame (ha’ama) they felt when they did wrong and that the

feeling of guilt was "downplayed to the point of conceptual invisibility" (1977:342). Shame-- the feeling of danger of disapproved behavior being seen and becoming known to others in the community—was, for these Tahitians, the primary catalyst for conviction of sin. In contrast, early nineteenth century missionaries to this region looked for a particular kind of sorrow for sin that centred around a sense of guilt. “They wished their converts really to feel their guilt” (Gunson 1978:223). The problem with this kind of mismatch between missionary and host people’s affective responses to sin is that missionaries may try to inculcate the feelings they had when they were first convicted of their sin and fail to recognize the signs that the Holy Spirit is bringing conviction to the people they work among in a different way. In the first few years of our work among the Millet in Bulgaria, we used to explain sin in terms of breaking God’s commands and hoped that our hearers would feel their guilt and want to hear more about how they could be forgiven. But we found that this way of portraying sin, true as it is, rarely resonated with those we were talking to. When we eventually discovered that the Millet viewed sin primarily as uncleanness and began to explain sin in these terms, we found many people readily agreed that they had dirty hearts and were keen to find out how their hearts could be cleansed. People who felt their sin tended to experience their sin as an overpowering sense of needing to be made clean rather than as a burden of guilt (cf. Hibbert 2008).

Biblical Perspectives on the Multifaceted Nature of Sin Cross-cultural missionaries can overcome the problem of their explanation of the gospel being perceived as irrelevant firstly by discovering and appreciating their host culture’s ways of thinking about sin and secondly by identifying how these concepts of sin are related to the Bible’s multi-faceted portrayal of sin. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection provide a comprehensive solution to all the devastation that sin, in all its dimensions, has brought to people’s lives. Missionaries must learn to adapt their message to their audiences by selecting from the comprehensiveness of the gospel to focus on those aspects of sin that the local people feel most

acutely and facets of the gospel that most directly address those aspects of sin (cf. Hesselgrave 1991:152-155). Western theologians have often defined sin primarily in terms of violating God’s moral law. Protestant theologian Wayne Grudem (2007:490), for example, defines sin as “any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature,” and Catholic theologian William May (1990:958) defines it as “a freely chosen act known to be contrary to the eternal [i.e. God’s] law as made manifest in our conscience.” These definitions of sin are biblically based but they cannot capture all of sin’s many facets; there are dimensions to sin other than failure to conform to God’s moral law that are equally important and often closer to the lived experience of people in the missionary’s host culture. The Bible portrays sin in many ways. One way it depicts sin is as humanity’s denial of our dependency on God and rejection of him, leading to a breaking of relationship with him (e.g., 1 Sam 8:7-8; Jer 2:13; Migliore 1991:130-131; May 1990:959). Another way the Bible sees sin is as the destruction of community through people’s failure to live out God’s primary intention for them, which is to live in community with God, other people, and creation (Grenz 1994:242244). Cornelius Plantinga has named this failure “shalom-breaking” (Plantinga 2010:4). Sin can equally be seen as corruption of human nature. One of the main ways people have corrupted themselves is by polluting their relationships with elements that should not be there, for example by polluting a friendship by adding social ambition to it (Plantinga 2010:13). Sin is also portrayed in the Bible as defilement or pollution of the one who has sinned and as something requiring cleansing (cf. Hibbert 2008:349-350). Another way of understanding sin that has rarely been stressed by Western theologians is as dishonouring God (Tennent 2007:77-103). Many missionaries from the West have tended to think of sin primarily in terms of law-breaking. A key disadvantage of focussing on this conceptualisation of sin is that it becomes all too easy for recipients of a law-focussed message to concentrate only on sins (acts of wrongdoing which break God’s moral standards) rather than sin, which is a condition that “infects

the core of our being” (Grenz 1994:239). Yet sin, like a disease, goes far deeper than the great variety of symptoms it can produce. It includes not only wrong acts and thoughts, but sinfulness— the inherent inner disposition to think or do wrong (Erickson 1985:578). Sinful acts arise from within us (Mark 7:14-23; Matt 12:33-37), from a corrupt heart and mind (Jer 17:9; Rom 7:18; Eph 2:3; 1 Tim 6:5). Both the “root” condition of sin and its “branches” or manifestations are multifaceted: Sin is first of all a condition that is simultaneously judicial and moral, legal and relational. Accordingly, we sin because we are sinners rather than vice versa. Standing before God as transgressors in Adam, we exhibit our guilt and corruption in actual thoughts and actions. If we cut off one diseased branch, another one—pregnant with the fruit of unrighteousness— grows in its place (Horton 2011:427). Sin’s multi-dimensional nature is strikingly demonstrated by the wide variety of terms used for it in the Bible’s original languages. More than twenty Hebrew and Greek words are translated into English as sin (Priest 2006:192). The range of meaning is so wide that in order to get an overview it is helpful to categorize the meanings into groups. Erickson (1985:567-575) suggests these seven categories: (1) Missing the mark or failing to reach God’s standard because the person is deliberately aiming at the wrong mark (translating the Hebrew word chatha and the Greek hamartia); (2) Irreverence and an absence of righteousness (the basic meaning behind the Greek words asebeo and adikeo and their derivatives); (3) Transgression of a command (from the Hebrew word avar and its closest Greek equivalent parabasis); (4) Deviation from the right course (translating the Hebrew awal); (5) Rebellion or betrayal of trust in a relationship (including the Hebrew pasha, the Greek apeitheo and their derivates, and the related Hebrew term maal and Greek word parapipto); (6) Bending or twisting, implying perversion or distortion of the person and of the purpose for which they were created (from the Hebrew word awah); and (7) Abomination (from the Hebrew shiqquts and toebah), emphasising God’s revulsion of sin. Sin is a profound and multi-faceted reality that encompasses all the effects of the Fall on humanity and on creation. Every dimension of life has been distorted from the original design of the Creator by the sinfulness of humanity. “Evil and sin weave their way into every

aspect of God’s creation and every dimension of human personhood and life on earth” (Wright 2010: 40). Physically, humanity and the whole of creation are subject to decay and death, intellectually we have been corrupted so that we try to excuse our sin, socially every human relationship is fractured, and spiritually we are alienated from God. Sin has affected not only individuals but also societies and their structures, so that “no society or collectivity, no institution or group, can claim to measure up to what it should or could be” (Haight 1991:107; cf. Escobar 1975:309). In contrast to the Bible’s teaching about the pervasiveness of sin, Western Christians have tended to understand sin primarily in terms of individual disobedience to or breaking God’s commands. This tendency to confuse God and his righteousness with a list of laws may reflect the Western bias towards the content rather than the context of verbal communication (cf. Hall 1990). When we ask students in Bible Colleges in Europe and Australasia “What is sin?” they usually list actions that break God’s specific laws or commands, including murder, lying, stealing, and committing adultery. Western Christians often see Adam’s sin purely as transgression of the command or law that God had given to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yet there are ways of conceptualising Adam’s sin that do not focus on law-breaking. For example, God’s words to Adam can be understood as a warning that God gave to preserve their relationship. The New Living Translation hints at this when it translates Genesis 2:15-17 as: “But the Lord God gave him this warning: You may freely eat any fruit in the garden except fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely die.”

Cultural Examples of The Multifaceted Nature of Sin Different facets of sin are emphasised in different cultures. Jacob Loewen describes an encounter between a missionary and a Lengua man in Paraguay whose horse kept grazing on the missionary’s garden. The missionary had explained to the man that he did not want the horse on his property but it continued to stray into the garden. Loewen records: After several weeks of this the missionary was exceedingly exasperated and felt that other methods were now legitimate. He got a club and rather unceremoniously beat the animal as he drove it from his property. To be sure the horse did not return next day, but one of his Indian friends came and spoke to him about his deed. “You did not live like a man: you beat a horse that did not know better. You were angry. It is not good for a missionary to be angry.” (Loewen 1975:142-143)

While the Western missionary probably saw “blowing off steam” by beating the horse as legitimate given the circumstances, Loewen (1975:141, 143) explains that the Lengua interpreted the missionary’s action as wrong as they believe that a good person will have a stable ‘innermost.’ Speaking about Africans in general and Ghanaians in particular, Kwame Bediako (2000:26) writes “in our tradition, the essence of sin is in its being an antisocial act.” Vincent Donovan (2003:45-46) illustrates this by describing how among the Masai the sin of the individual damages and is responded to by the whole community. A son who offends his father is seen not only to have seriously damaged their relationship but also to have disrupted the whole community in which they lived. The son would be banished from the community, ostracised by his peers, and thought of as carrying a curse that would bring misfortune to anyone who got close to him. The son’s sin is understood to block the community from receiving blessing from God. The community also plays a key role in facilitating forgiveness and reconciliation. In order to restore the harmony of the community the father’s peers would encourage the father to ask God for “the spittle of forgiveness” so that he could forgive his son and restore blessing to the village. If, after praying to God for it, the father is given this spittle, the son’s peers then go out and find him.

“They will accompany him back to the village. And his father will be waiting with the other elders. The two groups will cross from different sides of the village towards each other in the center. When they arrive there together, the son will ask his father’s forgiveness, and the father will spit on him, and forgiveness comes, and there is great rejoicing.” (Donovan 2003:46) The Gospel is a Multifaceted Narrative The good news of salvation must be contextualized for people in each cultural context by being expressed in terms of their cultural and linguistic forms as well as their needs (Conn 1984:197; Kraft 1989:125-127) so that it makes sense to them, meets their deepest needs, and penetrates their worldview (Whiteman 1997:2). For the gospel to be contextualized effectively, missionaries must grasp that both the gospel and the problem it offers solutions for (the extensive sinfulness of mankind) are multifaceted. In particular, missionaries’ understanding of sin and evil must be contextualized so that they can conceive of and perceive the wonder of what Jesus offers and explain sin in terms that make sense to the local people. The gospel cannot be confined to a single set of terms or images, as Dean Flemming compellingly demonstrates in his comprehensive volume Contextualization in the New Testament. “Any attempt to reduce the gospel to a set of pre-fabricated formulations that can be carried about and unpacked for all situations runs contrary to both the spirit of the New Testament and the nature of Christian mission” (Flemming 2005:296). Each of the four Gospels, for example, emphasizes a different aspect of Jesus’ identity and role, and the many presentations of the gospel by the apostles in Acts and in the epistles highlight different themes. A plethora of emphases can be seen in the various presentations of the gospel in the Bible. The Willowbank Report on Gospel and Culture states: The Bible proclaims the gospel story in many forms. The gospel is like a multifaceted diamond, with different aspects that appeal to different people in different cultures. It has depths we have not fathomed. It defies every attempt to reduce it to a neat formulation (Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization 1978:8) The Bible, then, offers no single definitive articulation of the gospel that we can use as a template in all situations. Yet there is only one gospel. As Peter Kuzmic (1990:201) points out,

“the New Testament never uses the word gospel in plural.” At the gospel’s heart are the historical facts about Jesus Christ through whom God has brought salvation to humanity. “The gospel centres on the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as God’s way of saving us from death and of making us members of his eternal kingdom” (Goldsworthy 2003:47). For the apostle Paul, whose life and ministry revolved around the gospel, and who used the term “gospel” (euaggelion) more than any other biblical writer the “radiating centre” of the gospel was Christ1. In simplest terms, the content of the message Paul preaches is “Christ” (Rom 16:25; 1Cor 1:24; 15:12; Phil 1:15-18) or “Son of God” (Rom 1:9; 2 Cor 1:19; Gal 1:16) or “Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor 4:5), all of which stand as shorthand terms for his gospel. It is above all “the gospel of Christ” (Rom 15:19: 2 Cor 9:13; Gal 1:27; Phil 1:27), a message about Jesus, God’s beloved son. (Flemming 2005:94). The master story of who Jesus is and what he has done is the centre of the gospel. It can only be understood, however, in the light of the rest of the Scriptures. “There is a sense in which the whole Bible is the gospel, from Genesis to Revelation. For its overriding purpose is to bear witness to Christ . . . .” (Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization 1978:8; cf. Loewen 1980:118). The apostle Paul emphasizes that the facts about Jesus are embedded in the whole of the Scriptures when, in reminding the church at Corinth of the gospel he writes: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. . . .” (1 Cor. 15:4; cf. Gal 1:11-2:10). For Paul the gospel is rooted in the whole of Scripture, and, as a result, the gospel in its totality “must be drawn from the deep well of the whole Bible. . . ” (Wright 2010:199). One image that may help missionaries gain a more comprehensive view of the gospel is to see it as a multi-stranded narrative composed of several stories that are closely intertwined (Witherington 1998:237-253). The strands of the narrative may be pictured as spokes of a wheel, each of which leads towards the centre which is Jesus and his work to save humanity (cf. Conn 1984:194-197). James Packer (1980:104-109) discerns six such stories that comprise the gospel: The stories of the Kingdom, the people of God, the grace of Christ, the glory of Christ, God's image restored, and humanity's joy begun. Although these six stories are not a

comprehensive summary of the gospel’s multi-stranded narrative, they illustrate some of its key emphases. Like a rope and its strands which when unraveled each form a rope in itself, each story is itself an authentic portrayal of the gospel, but the totality of the message only appears when all of these stories are put together.

The Gospel Addresses every Facet of Sin The gospel addresses every facet of sin. It is “big enough, wide enough, enduring enough, to speak to each dimension of the human condition in human cultures . . . universal enough to take away the sins of the world” (Conn 1984:197). Yet the gospel is often thought of and expressed in terms of just one facet of sin and a corresponding dimension of salvation. This can prevent people from realising how profoundly they need Jesus, especially when formulations of the gospel that have proved helpful in one cultural context are exported to another cultural context. Chris Wright (2010:273) notes that “we have tended to concentrate on one or another aspect of the biblical good news to the detriment of others.” Many popular expositions of the gospel used in the Western world, for example, focus on the legal or forensic aspect of salvation: humanity’s guilt as a result of breaking or disregarding God’s laws and Jesus’ paying the penalty for sin so there is now forgiveness and no more condemnation. This approach, reflected in presentations such as “The Roman Road,” “The Four Spiritual Laws,” and “Two Ways to Live”2 has helped many people in the West begin to follow Jesus, but is inadequate in the Majority world where other aspects of sin and salvation such as shame and God’s bestowing of honour, as well as the promise of restored community must be emphasised if the gospel is to be understood and embraced (Tennent 2007:77-103). When people from other cultural backgrounds hear a law-focussed message, they often hear a different content than was intended (cf. Loewen 1980:116,121) and this unifocal understanding of sin can prevent hearers of the message from another culture from apprehending what sin is and how the gospel is good news.

Steven Ybarrola (1995) provides an example of the kinds of misunderstanding that can occur when people from other cultures encounter this formulation of the gospel. He observed a group of North American short-termers that had gone to the Basque region of Spain to share the gospel, and that had been trained in using the Campus Crusade tract “The Four Spiritual Laws.” In Ybarrola’s view, the Basque people, who had suffered for nearly forty years under the oppressive laws established by the Franco regime, perceived the ‘laws’ referred to in the tract very differently to the short-term missionaries, and that this misunderstanding led them to reject the message. The judicial aspect of salvation with its emphasis on guilt and forgiveness is solidly based on Scripture and is particularly emphasised in the book of Romans, yet the Good News about Jesus is so much more than any single formulation of it, including this law-focussed Western formulation. Concise formulations of the gospel that are developed to help Christians share their faith are helpful starting points, but they are not the totality of the good news. If we are to be effective messengers of the gospel to people of vastly different cultural backgrounds than our own, we must rediscover the wholeness and wideness of the gospel so that we can draw on those aspects of the message that are most immediately relevant to them. This requires us to hold firmly to the heart of the gospel—God’s saving activity in Christ—while recognising that this heart or centre must be expressed in context-specific ways. For Nicodemus this meant hearing the gospel in terms of needing to be born again, while for the rich young ruler it meant hearing the gospel in terms of giving up his wealth and following Jesus. For someone whose deepest need is for community, the most relevant initial expression of the gospel would focus on the church as the community of God’s people in which relationships are healed in Christ (cf. Conn 1984:195, 197). One way that cross-cultural missionaries can rediscover the scope of the gospel is to re-examine the various aspects of Christ’s saving work. Grenz (1994:454) refers to this as “the multifaceted significance of Jesus’ atonement.” Each aspect of what Christ achieved addresses a different facet of sin. Five aspects of Christ’s saving work are summarized in table 1. They are (1) Redemption: We are redeemed from sin, death, and Satan (cf. Matt 20:28; 1 Pet 1:18-19); (2)

Propitiation: We are no longer under the wrath of God (1 John 4:10); (3) Justification: We are declared forgiven and right with God. (4) Reconciliation: We are reconciled to God so that we are now his friends (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:21-22); and (5) Sanctification: We are set apart by God to belong to him and for his purposes (1 Pet 2:9; Heb 10:10; 1 Cor 6:11; cf. Boice 1986:322-323; Grudem 2007:580, Grenz 1994:454-461; Erickson 1985:812-815, 942-974).

Redemption

Propitiation

Justification

Reconciliation

Sanctification

Which facet of sin is focussed on?

Sin’s (and Satan’s) power to enslave people

Enmity with God

Failure to live up to God’s law; rebellion

Broken relationship with God and with other people

Moral corruption and impurity

What were the consequenc es?

Slavery to sin and Satan

Being under God’s wrath; fear

Guilt

Enmity with God, enmity with other people

Inability to please God

What Jesus did

Jesus gave himself to God as the ransom for all humanity, and triumphed over sin and Satan

Jesus bore the wrath of God

Jesus paid the penalty of death that was demanded by the law

Jesus bridged the gap between humanity and God and restored their relationship, and also destroyed the barriers between people

Jesus made us holy by clothing us in his own perfection.

Result

We are freed from sin and Satan to become God’s servants

We are freed We are forgiven We are friends with from God’s and declared God wrath and can righteous approach God without fear Table 1: Five aspects of Christ’s saving work

We are set apart to God and his purposes and are able to please him

None of these aspects on their own nor even all of them together can exhaust the full meaning of what Christ has done on the cross (LaHurd 1996:220). Other aspects of the atonement include regeneration, adoption into the family of God, and union with Christ, each of which are well represented in theological texts. Still other aspects of Christ’s saving work that are often not emphasised in western theology, including “restoration” in the sense of Jesus taking away our

shame by publicly bearing it (cf. Tennent 2007:94-95), and “cleansing” in the sense of Christ cleansing from the complete defilement that sin brings (Heb 9:13-14; 10:22; cf. Hibbert 2008). As people come to faith in Christ, part of the missionary’s task is to help them grow in their knowledge of God and the amazing richness of his grace (cf. Eph 4:11-13; Col 1:10, 28) by introducing them to facets of the gospel other than the one that they emphasised in their initial presentation. Continuing to focus on just one aspect of salvation to the neglect of others leads to “a loss of the richness of the New Testament proclamation and the centuries-long meditation of the church on the meaning of the atoning work of Christ. (Migliore 1991:154).

Implications: Missional Theologizing about Sin In order to communicate the gospel clearly in a new cultural context, missionaries must make the effort to understand how the local people view sin and then speak into those ways of seeing sin from the Bible. They will need to engage in what Tite Tienou and Paul Hiebert (2006) have called “missional theology” and apply this to sin, which will involve three steps: (1) “phenomenology”—studying the way the local people understand sin; (2)“ontology”—examining the Scriptures concerning sin and the people’s understanding of sin; and (3) “missiology”— building a bridge between the Bible’s and the people’s understanding of sin. Several recent examples of missional theologizing about sin illustrate the kind of work that missionaries must engage in. Christopher Flanders’ (2011) study of face among Thai shows how face is intricately connected to a sense of shame and unworthiness, how the gospel addresses this shame, and how the gospel can be explained in terms of God’s offer to restore face and honor. Robert Priest’s (2006) study of sin among the Aguaruna provides a rich explanation of sin and the gospel in “experience-near” words such as tsuwat, meaning “filthy” and shows how the gospel can be explained as cleansing from tsuwat that Christ provides. Mark Strand (2006) explores the concept of xiao jing or filial piety among Chinese people and shows how sin can be explained as a failure to obey and honor our Heavenly Father.

Missional theologizing about sin, then, will require missionaries to take the following steps: 1. Analyze the people’s view of sin. To do this, missionaries will need to gather and analyze cultural data related to sin. This will include carefully observing things like what people scold their children for and what they praise them for, what people criticize or praise adults for, what arguments are over, things the people fear, hate and condemn most, and the words they use in describing these. It will also involve deep-level discussion with them to try and understand how they view morality, justice, heroism, and failure, and careful study of their creative arts to try to identify themes associated with wrongdoing. 2. Study the Scriptures to understand view of sin and evaluate the people’s understanding in the light of this. Once missionaries have an understanding of how the people view sin, they need to examine the Bible’s teaching about sin including the many stories and examples that illustrate different facets of its nature and effects. They will explore in what ways the Bible’s teaching about sin can be framed in terms of host people’s words and thought categories and in what ways the Bible’s teaching complements, modifies, or challenges the people’s understanding. This step requires an inductive approach to theology rather than reliance on pre-formulated doctrines. 3. Build a bridge between God’s Word and the people’s understanding of sin. In this final step, missionaries will try to answer the question “What is God’s Word to this people concerning sin?” They will formulate a biblical response to the problem of sin as the people see it. This will involve selecting from the multifaceted richness of the gospel the most relevant dimensions of the gospel that speak to the people’s understanding of sin, and communicating these in ways that are both faithful to Scripture and that engage the people fully.

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1 The noun “gospel” (euaggelion) occurs 60 times in Paul’s letters, with many more

occurrences of equivalent terms such as “proclamation” (kerygma) or “word” (logos) (Flemming 2005, 92). 2 As an illustration of this focus on the forensic aspect of salvation, one explanation of the “Roman Road,” in explaining sin, states “We have all sinned. We have all done things that are displeasing to God. There is no one who is innocent. . . . Jesus’ death paid the price for our sins” http://www.gotquestions.org/Romans-road-salvation.html); “The Four Spiritual Laws” similarly states that God sent Jesus “to die on the cross in our place to pay the penalty for our sins” (http://www.GodLovesTheWorld.com); “Two Ways to Live” states “The debt we owed God, Jesus paid by dying in our place. He took the full force of God’s justice on himself, so that forgiveness and pardon might be available to us” (http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au/2wtl/box4.html).