International Theological Video Conference

4 October 2004

Prof. Stuart Bate (Johannesburg): – Evangelization and Culture– to penetrate culture with the Good News, cf. Evangelii nuntiandi, 18) and the challenge of a break (discidium) between the Gospel and Culture. (cf. EN 20)

"From the time the Gospel was first preached, the Church has known the process of encounter and engagement with cultures" (Fides et Ratio, 70). This is because human beings live in a world of culture. Indeed, to be human is to be cultural (Cf Gaudium et Spes, 53). Culture allows us to communicate by providing us with language, symbols, narratives and discourse. Human cultures supply our worldviews, our beliefs, our values, our ways of thinking and our motivations for action. Indeed with John Paul II we can affirm that human beings are the subject of culture as well as its object or goal (AAS 72 (1980) 735-782 §6-7) and that culture affects all strata of human activity.

Evangelisation always comprises a cultural component since it implies the communication of a message for the salvation of people. The message is always transmitted within a cultural framework though the receivers may hear it within their own, different cultural context. This distinction is often at the heart of the Church’s mission and, consequently, one task in the evangelisation of cultures is to ensure that the message communicated really becomes good news for the salvation of those receiving it. The elements of this task are succinctly traced in the encyclical Slavorum Apostoli where the Holy Father reflects on the evangelisation of his own cultural ancestors by Cyril and Methodius, missionaries from the Greek Byzantium culture.

The goal of evangelisation is always conversion, experienced as the total transformation of our way of life. This is why "evangelizing means bringing the Good News into all the strata of humanity, and through its influence transforming humanity from within and making it new: (EN 18). It is not just a question of changing the religious dimension of what it means to be human but all dimensions of what it means to be human.

The first words of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel describe the experience of evangelisation: "the time (kairos) is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand so repent and believe in the good news" (Mk 1:15). These words remind us that the experience of evangelisation is found in the events of human life when the kingdom of God bursts in. Jesus clarifies the nature of this experience in the parables and especially in Matthew 13:44-46. This experience of the presence of the kingdom of God is like finding a treasure hidden in a field. The response of the finder is immediate: he "goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field". In the parables of the treasure hidden in a field and the pearl of great price we find the same 3-fold pattern which sums up the basic experience of irruption of God’s kingdom into human life. First, is the advent of kingdom as gift of God into someone’s world. This powerful and joyful experience, when the time is fulfilled, leads to a reversal of recipient’s world and this is the metanoia or conversion moment in their lives, the second step in evangelisation. Finally this conversion naturally leads to an empowerment to action expressed in the parable as selling everything in order to buy the treasure. Evangelisation always leads to transformation in our values and activities and consequently our priorities. That is why the Pontifical Council for Culture stresses that "It is a question not only of preaching the Gospel in ever wider geographic areas or to ever greater numbers of people, but also of affecting and as it were upsetting, through the power of the Gospel, mankind's criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration and models of life, which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation" (PAC 4).

Since each human culture reflects God’s creation it has the possibility to enrich the expression of the Gospel in human flesh for all peoples. This is because no one culture can express the fullness of the gospel entirely and so different cultures may reflect its light revealing nuances of expression and life which are an illumination for the whole of humanity. That is why many expressions of Christianity, which began as local phenomenon, have come to have universal significance. Monasticism, the Celtic forms of penance, as well as Greek and Latin ritual processes are but three examples of this. In individuals this same principle is expressed in the lives of saints. All are holy people who manifest God’s presence in their time and context. But Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, Ignatius of Loyola and even Paul of Tarsus, are saints for us precisely because what they did and said locally has universal significance. Devotions, too, have often begun in one place and spread elsewhere. Consider the Rosary, the Infant Jesus of Prague, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Corpus Christi processions, and the charismatic renewal. All of these represent part of the process of the inculturation of the gospel in different ages of the Church’s history and in different cultural contexts. All have spread and affected the Church elsewhere. The evangelisation of culture and inculturation always happen locally but they are never just a purely local affair. For that reason many differing cultural expressions of the faith can be an evangelising message for the whole of humanity.

From the very beginning of its existence, the Church has had to deal with the question of the challenges provided by the beliefs and values of local cultures which are being evangelised. Evangelisation of peoples always implies cultural change. Whilst some aspects of human cultures may be compatible with the evangelisation experience and be purified by the transforming message of the Gospel, there is always a fundamental split (discidium) between human cultures and the Gospel. The experience of Abraham is paradigmatic here: "The cultural break with which Abraham's vocation began, he who was the ‘father of believers’, conveys what happens in the depths of the human heart when God erupts in the existence of human beings, revealing himself and arousing the commitment of their whole being. Abraham was spiritually and culturally uprooted to be, in faith, planted by God in the Promised Land" (PAC 3). I will deal with this issue in the next presentation.

Pope Paul VI reminds us that "the split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times" (EN 20 ). Right from the beginning of the Church, Christians have had to participate in this drama. It is narrated particularly clearly in Acts chapters 10 and 11, as the Church discerned God’s will in matters of Jewish culture for Gentile Christians. Today, however, this ‘drama of our time’ is increasingly manifesting in the emergence of a new global configuration that is rapidly transforming the structure, behaviour and beliefs of human life. New social spaces and new domains of human interaction are being created which will lead to the emergence of new social identities and cultures. The principal factor driving this new transformation is ‘the increasingly interconnected character of the political, economic, and social life of the peoples on this planet’. Satellites have brought the media into the lives of people everywhere. The cellular telephone system is transforming even the African continent as it jumps rapidly into the global communications culture. The Internet has empowered individuals and groups both to inform and be informed on a scale that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago.

This transformation is creating a number of new divisions between the Gospel and culture. I will deal with two of them in this paper. The first can be articulated as the dispute around the nature of truth. The information communications network has led to a multiplicity of networked social spaces in which people can create new kinds of societies, both geographical and virtual. Internally, each community is able to operate according to shared interests, proclivities and values. But the network allows interaction between such communities via global communications systems. This means that people are constantly confronted with others who do not share their values and beliefs in a way that did not happen in the past. One result has been a crisis of knowledge regarding truth. As Pope John Paul II remarks: "Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth" (FR 5). This view refutes the claim of religions to posit universal truths like the truth of scripture or Church teaching. In the end this becomes a huge problem as it raises all kinds of ethical problems about the universal validity of notions such as ‘human rights’, good and evil. In such a world truth inevitably become predicated on power, whether economic, political, military or cultural as, for example, in the global communications media.

Clearly this is a major challenge not only for religion but also for society in general. The encyclical Fides et Ratio has been an important response to these views which, in the end, remain highly abstract since in the real world we do have to search for commonly held views on matters which concern us all as a global community. The encyclical reminds us that, on the one hand, knowledge is clearly accessible through natural reason about which human beings can reach consensus. At the same time ‘there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known" (FR 9). God has willed this revelation in Jesus Christ which is accessible to us in faith enlightened by the Holy spirit as ‘the fullness of grace and truth’ (Jn 1:14).

A second division between Gospel and culture is found in the rise of popular culture, which is socialising people into belief in simplistic and immediate solutions to problems in terms of the metaphor of consumerism. Popular culture has been able to benefit from information technology which provides movie stars, singers and sports personalities with access to global audiences. This has allowed them to become a powerful elite involved in billion dollar industries. Some have been able to use star power in attaining political power to achieve high office. Popular culture also represents a move away from the priority of the written and the ‘clear’, found in the modern age, to the audiovisual, symbolic and experiential of popular culture. As a result, image, impression and emotion have moved to the centre of cultural truth.

The emergence of simplistic universal popular culture, with easy answers to complex problems, runs the risk of robbing people and societies of their intellectual integrity. Religions that conform too much to this culture tend to become just one more consumer product to be attractively packaged and marketed. For these reasons, simplistic responses will inevitably be dehumanising. The Church must respond to this challenge on the level of human reason and human faith.

The ‘split’ brought about by the rise of popular culture clearly affects issues of ecclesial praxis. One danger emerges from a response that creates clear but culturally unacceptable, or unimportant, answers to practical, intellectual and ethical matters facing people in the world today. This leads to a church which will become irrelevant as it represents a refusal to respond to the cultural and epistemological challenges of the networked world. But, on the other hand, if the Church’s praxis just reflects the views of culture then we will have no message. This is a response which uncritically buys into popular culture and offers a simplistic Christian message which, whilst initially satisfying, will not respond to the complex challenges of the time. Many new religions, and fundamentalist groups are like this. To avoid these extremes we must ensure that ecclesial praxis is rooted, in the message of the Gospel and the truths of faith as a response to the social and cultural life of people. Such an ecclesial response has been described as one that ensures ‘compatibility with the Christian message and union with the universal Church’. This union is essential to ensure that social and cultural issues do not dominate the discourse leading to the problem of the first extreme just mentioned. It also networks the resources of the Church, a condition for the possibility of engaging the intellectual and cultural challenges of the time in forging authentic theological responses to the complexity and challenges of the information revolution.

Salvation in Christ is good news for all and Christians are required to proclaim the kerygma wherever they can. We should not be surprised to find that in our world today the culture of modernity has brought tremendous new challenges to the Church’s evangelising mission. In Redemptoris Missio, the Holy Father has outlined the nature of an effective response in three specific types of mission which are required to respond to the complexity of today’s challenges. These are the mission ad gentes, the church’s pastoral care of the faithful and the mission of "new evangelization" or a "re-evangelization" to ‘entire groups of the baptized [who] have lost a living sense of the faith, or even no longer consider themselves members of the Church, and live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel" (RM 33). These indicate ways in which good news may continue to reach all people so that the message of Jesus may touch their hearts.