The Questions Context Asks of Theology
Some years ago, while Loré and I were living in București, a neighbor came to our door carrying a plate of food. Her father had died, and she was offering us pomana, a customary Romanian gift made in memory of the deceased. At first glance, the situation seemed straightforward. Our neighbor was grieving, the food was an expression of hospitality, and accepting it appeared to be the gracious response. Yet beneath that simple exchange were questions we were not prepared to ask.
Among some Romanian and Rroma communities, pomana can carry meanings beyond remembrance. The food may be connected to beliefs about providing for or placating the spirit of the dead. Was our neighbor simply honoring her father, or was she participating in a religious practice involving the spirit world? Would accepting the food communicate compassion, agreement, or both? Would refusing it protect Christian witness, or would it unnecessarily offend someone in grief? The plate at our door was more than food. It was a cultural form carrying meanings we did not yet understand.
The encounter illustrates why theology must listen to the questions context asks. Context does not determine whether something is true, but it profoundly affects the questions people bring to truth, the meanings they hear in our words, and the forms through which faith becomes visible. Theology developed elsewhere may provide faithful answers, yet still fail to recognize the question being asked.
No Theology Comes from Nowhere
Theology is often presented as though it were articulated from a place above culture. We acknowledge that African, Asian, Latin American, or Indigenous theologies are contextual, while Western theology is simply called theology. Yet every theology is expressed in a language, organized according to particular intellectual habits, and shaped by historical concerns. It may speak beyond its original setting, but it never emerges outside one.
Recognizing this does not require us to surrender theological truth to relativism. It requires reflexivity—the humility to acknowledge how our identities, experiences, assumptions, and cultural locations influence what we notice. A reader formed by individualism may see personal salvation where another reader first sees the creation of a new community. Someone living under political oppression may hear the announcement that Jesus is Lord differently from someone accustomed to religious freedom. A community shaped by fear of spirits will bring questions to biblical texts that may never occur to a secularized Western reader.
The text of Scripture has not changed, but the readers have. Context does not create truth; it brings particular questions into our encounter with truth. Sometimes those questions illuminate aspects of Scripture that another culture has overlooked. At other times, they expose assumptions we have mistaken for biblical convictions.
This is one reason theology needs the global and historical body of Christ. Theological understanding is deepened when believers from different cultures read Scripture together, test one another’s conclusions, and listen across time to the witness passed down from the apostles. A hermeneutical community does not guarantee a perfect interpretation, but it makes it more difficult for one culture to confuse its perspective with the whole counsel of God.
Scripture’s First Missional Move
In Missiological Theology, I propose two axioms for reading Scripture missiologically. The first is that Scripture makes its missional move to its original audience before it makes that move to us. Biblical texts were not written in a cultural vacuum. Their authors used recognizable words, genres, social conventions, images, and arguments to communicate divine truth to particular people.
When Paul used terms such as euangelion, kyrios, and sōtēr, his audiences already knew them. Good news could announce an imperial victory, while lord and savior were titles associated with rulers and benefactors. Paul used language present in the world of his hearers and invested it with meaning centered on Jesus. To confess Jesus as Lord was both theologically true and publicly consequential.
Even translation reveals the relationship between form and meaning. English translations speak of compassion or of refreshing the hearts of the saints where a literal rendering might refer to bowels or inward parts—the ancient location of affection and emotion. The words change because preserving the ancient form could obscure the intended meaning.
Careful interpretation therefore asks how a text communicated within its first historical and cultural setting. What did the author intend? What assumptions did the original audience share? What did particular words, practices, and social relationships signify? Historical, archaeological, linguistic, and cultural study do not weaken the authority of Scripture. They help us hear the missional move Scripture made toward its first audience.
Scripture’s Move into a New Context
The second axiom follows from the first: the missiologist, together with cultural actors, helps Scripture make a missional move toward a contemporary audience. This is not permission to make the Bible say whatever a culture wishes to hear. It is the demanding work of expressing biblical meaning faithfully in another setting.
I describe this process as missiological exegesis. Biblical interpretation remains accountable to Scripture and draws upon the wisdom of the hermeneutical community, reason, and experience. But the missiological task also requires dialogue with people and attentive observation of their context. We exegete both the biblical text and the contemporary world. Missiological reflection takes place where these acts of listening intersect.
This changes the missionary’s posture. The missionary enters as a learner, listening for the concerns, fears, loyalties, and symbols through which people understand their world. The governing question is not merely, “How can I explain my theology in their language?” It is also, “What is God already doing here?”
My early ministry in Romania exposed how easily missionaries answer questions people are not asking. Western evangelical presentations often began with individual guilt and separation from God. Yet Romanians emerging from communist oppression interpreted their lives through suffering, communal identity, religious tradition, and perceived divine liberation. Faithful witness required more than translating an imported presentation. It required asking how the story of Jesus addressed the Romanian story.
Forms Are Never Empty
The difficulty is that cultural forms do not carry the same meaning everywhere, and they are rarely as neutral as we imagine. A meal may express hospitality, memorialize the dead, establish social obligation, or facilitate communion with spiritual powers. A building may communicate stability in one context and foreignness or political threat in another. A title such as pastor may describe a gift of care, a paid professional, the chief executive of an institution, or a religious celebrity. The form may appear familiar while its meaning has shifted considerably.
Contextualization can fail in two directions. Under-contextualization imports foreign forms and assumes they are universally Christian, producing a church that may be orthodox yet culturally foreign. Over-contextualization adopts local forms without examining the meanings and allegiances they carry, producing an expression that may feel indigenous yet obscure Christian uniqueness.
The answer is to distinguish form from meaning without imagining they can be completely separated. Some forms can be adapted with meaning centered on Christ. Others are so closely bound to idolatrous allegiance that their use confuses Christian witness. Still others may be retained because they already express hospitality, community, justice, or hope in ways that correlate with the Christian story.
This discernment is especially important when considering insiderness. People who encounter Christ should not have to abandon their cultural identity to adopt foreign Christianity. At the same time, following Jesus brings every identity and allegiance under his authority. The question is which forms can bear Christian meaning, which meanings must be transformed, and which practices must be left behind.
Context Is a Conversation Partner, Not the Judge
To say that context asks questions of theology is not to say that context possesses the final word. Cultures, including our own, contain beauty and brokenness, insight and idolatry. Every context reveals something of humanity made in the image of God, and every context distorts that image. For this reason, culture must be heard appreciatively and evaluated critically.
Christian theology remains accountable to God’s revelation, centered on Jesus, animated by the Spirit, and discerned within the global and historical community of faith. Practices that require idolatry or obscure allegiance to Christ cannot be justified because they are culturally meaningful. Conversely, practices should not be rejected merely because they are unfamiliar to outsiders.
Context functions best as a conversation partner. It brings questions to Scripture, exposes the cultural clothing of our theological systems, and presses us to distinguish divine meaning from inherited forms. Scripture, in turn, addresses the context—affirming what reflects God’s purposes, confronting what deforms human life, and directing every cultural longing toward its fulfillment in Christ.
Learning to Ask Before We Answer
At our neighbor’s doorway in București, Loré and I accepted the pomana. Because we did not believe the deceased would benefit from it, we chose not to eat the food. In retrospect, our response accomplished neither the clarity of refusal nor the hospitality of participation. We unintentionally affirmed a practice we did not understand and missed an opportunity to speak with our neighbor about grief, death, resurrection, and life in Christ.
The failure was not that we lacked a theology of death. We lacked the cultural understanding necessary to recognize the theological question standing at our door. We had biblical answers, but we had not yet learned to ask what the plate of food meant.
Practitioners encounter similar moments everywhere. Before accepting or rejecting a practice, we must ask what it means, what relationships it sustains, what allegiances it implies, and what our response will communicate. We must listen to local believers, examine Scripture within its original world, draw upon the historic church, and remain attentive to the Spirit. Faithfulness cannot always be hurried.
Theology does not become less truthful when it listens carefully to context. It becomes more aware of the questions it has answered, the questions it has ignored, and the assumptions it has carried unnoticed. Context does not determine the truth of the gospel. It helps us discern how that truth must be heard, understood, and embodied among particular people. The missionary task is not simply to carry answers across cultures. It is to join a conversation in which Scripture, community, and context help us recognize what God is doing and how we might faithfully participate.