It is popular to assert that evangelism cannot be effective without “fitting” the gospel to our contemporary cultural moment. One writer even went so far as to say, “Any church that only does evangelism without first studying the culture in an effort to contextualize does not fully understand the gospel.”

A substantial portion of missional philosophy rests on the belief that the gospel not only may be, but must be contextualized, or adapted, across cultures and subcultures in order to be understood. In a conversation I had with a proponent of the contextualization of the gospel, this person claimed something that may at first seem attractive:

When it comes to the gospel, contextualization is placing the gospel into a context in a way that the gospel can be understood. It is not about making the gospel less offensive. It is not about watering down the gospel. It is not about changing the content of the gospel. It is about making the gospel understandable to a particular context.

Following this line of reasoning, without contextualization, the gospel cannot be communicated in an understandable way, and evangelism becomes impossible. It is popular to assert that evangelism cannot be effective without “fitting” the gospel to our contemporary cultural moment. One writer even went so far as to say, “Any church that only does evangelism without first studying the culture in an effort to contextualize does not fully understand the gospel.”

Those are stark claims. But they reveal the unbiblical assumptions of proponents of such contextualization. They genuinely believe that the gospel is incomprehensible unless it is skillfully and creatively contextualized by a savvy evangelist. But that is, as I said, an unbiblical assumption.

By denigrating the power of the gospel to save of itself (Rom 1:16–17), it leads to the kind of pragmatism that suggests the gospel needs us for its effectiveness.

It suggests that Scripture is hopelessly unclear without the cultural shrewdness of the contextualizer, and thereby it undermines the orthodox doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture.

We can rejoice that the more conservative advocates of contextualization do not always behave consistently with what they confess and are not explicitly calling for watering down or altering the content of the gospel. However, the notion that cultural (and even subcultural) contextualization is needed in order to make the gospel understandable simply disregards the reality that God has already communicated the gospel in a way that it can be understood. To say otherwise is to deny the perspicuity of God’s revelation, both in His Scripture and in His Son.

Further, if we choose our words precisely, the missional philosophy of ministry does not advocate contextualization at all. Rather, this philosophy appears to believe that the proper way to make the Bible understandable is to remove Scripture from its original context and place it into the current contemporary context. This practice would more properly be called de-contextualization, or even re-contextualization.

This is not our task. The proper way to “make the Bible understandable to today’s cultures” is to bring contemporary people into the context of Scripture. We must teach them Scripture and the gospel which lies at its center by bringing them into the cultural context in which the events transpired and in which the text was written. Unlike contextualization, this method allows for the necessary task of concept creation.

Contextualization aims to find common ground with unbelievers, hoping to make it easier for them to integrate the worldview of Christianity into their existing thought structures. Concept creation goes beyond this, recognizing that there are categories of biblical thought and biblical truth that will be entirely foreign to an unbeliever, who “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God…and cannot understand them” (1 Cor 2:14).

All Things to All Men

The biblical support for the missional practice of contextualization comes primarily from two texts. The first is Paul’s dealings with the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill in Acts 17. I will return to this passage later in this post. The other is 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, in which Paul declares that in the context of ministering to Jews he voluntarily submits himself to ceremonial laws so as not to alienate them, and yet in the context of ministering to Gentiles he submits to their conventions so as not to alienate them. He summarizes his gospel focus in this way: “I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).

Missional advocates claim that Paul was practicing contextualization. They leverage this text as an argument for asserting one’s Christian liberties in order to be perceived as relevant, and thus to gain a hearing for the gospel. If the subculture of your evangelistic target is marked by drinking alcohol, tattoos, crass music and crass language, become all things to all men by asserting your liberties in these areas.

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