Foreword
The most authentic meaning of mission lies in the ability to propose the Gospel as an important dimension for the quality of existence and for the fulfilment of every woman and man. This is the experience that the New Testament attests to in the life of the early Christian communities. Within it are two precious indicators: on the one hand, the conviction that the kerygma is the announcement-proposal of a project that concerns the expectations of humanity and culture, although it requires a not-easy path of transformation; on the other hand, evangelization experiences the need to create the conditions for a religious and ethical experience in light of the revolution of the values of the Kingdom. The consequence of this experience is that mission is linked to the questions of existence in its personal, political, economic, and environmental dimensions. For this reason, in the history of mission there have been different models of the ‘evangelization of cultures’ that have marked the evolution of the experience and the idea of mission.
1. On the Trail of Some Models
From this angle and by way of synthesis, an analysis of the methods of the processes of evangelization of cultures, carried out in his time by V. Neckebrouck, may prove useful. Through certain key categories—such as “acculturation,” “adaptation,” “incarnation,” “contextualization,” and “liberation”—he allows the limits and potential of the inculturation of the Gospel to emerge. Although schematically, a indicative frame of reference emerges for grasping the particular meaning of the concept of inculturation, which, as can be seen, is a complex and articulated process that encompasses different interpretative levels.
Behind the word acculturation, anthropologically understood as a cultural phenomenon produced by the encounter between groups of individuals bearing different cultures and by cultural change, the history of evangelization processes has shown how, in fact, what occurred was a mono-acculturation, designable by the somewhat equivalent terms of Christianization and Westernization. This option was modulated through the rejection of indigenous religions and a critical, if not rejecting, attitude toward traditional customs. While not considering it entirely inappropriate, acculturation seems to pay its debt to a Western model as the sole criterion of authenticity for the cultural incarnation of Christianity.
The method of adaptation has followed a threefold path. At the beginning is the proposal of the message made by Western missionaries, which almost always unfolds within the categories of their own culture. Subsequently, the message must be freed from all that does not belong to its unalterable core—in substance, liberating it from specifically European cultural elements. Finally, it must be re-clothed, so to speak, in forms typically African, Asian, or other. However, the need for adaptation is not sufficient, especially since it seems limited to the context of practical theology and liturgy.
The incarnational method respects the need for attention to indigenous cultures as an irrepressible given, although the risk is that of predetermining the meaning of culture in a static way, almost isolating it in a museum of formulations, traditions, and customs that do not respond to the movement of life and the journeys of communities and societies. This method has been integrated with the principle of “contextualization,” which is more attentive to the dynamics of cultures and to social and ideological phenomena that intervene to modify given cultural readings.
Finally, keeping in mind that the Gospel brings with it a transformation of cultural, social, ethical, and religious reality, the method of liberation has established itself as the instrument that allows for living the socio-cultural vicinity in analogy with the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, in respect for otherness but also in criticism of the ‘structures of sin.’
2. The Horizon of Culture: Meaning and Project
It appears evident that the understanding of the process of inculturation is strictly linked to the concept of culture and to its delineation in relation to the organization of existence. Against the backdrop of the idea of cultural exchanges, inculturation is attentive to the relationship that Christianity realizes with cultures, starting from that process of acculturation (encounter between culture and culture) that cannot be considered obvious in its premises and linear in its consequences. For a fundamental reason: the evangelization of cultures operates a reciprocity, in the sense that the reality of the Gospel and the cultural world nourish and fertilize each other in the development of their respective projective potentialities. If inculturation proceeds as a kind of cultural contact, nonetheless this process raises the question of how much culture Christianity can absorb within the objective of a cultural transformation.
Defining culture is by no means simple, although it appears as the social filter of the real with which we give meaning to our experiences of the world. It is a variable response, interacting with the complexity of the human condition and its precariousness, becoming a socially inherited way of life. At this level, culture has an adaptive function, as an anything-but-static response of a given social group to its environment, in the attempt to maintain equilibrium in the search for identity. If, then, culture tends to be valid as a system of life project, it is only so if it accompanies the movement of the existence of men and women, contributing to equipping the human being who, from their status of incompleteness, is driven to explore, innovate, and organize, to the point that cultural identity is progressively constructed as a form of human self-organization.
Culture constitutes a complex, articulated, and dynamic system, to interpret which it is necessary to grasp models and rules of functioning. At the same time, it is understood as a relationship of parts, where intervention on one element of the system has constant consequences on the other elements and on their connection. For this reason, it is appropriate to keep in mind some basic dimensions.
- First of all, the human being gives form to their experience through signs, symbols, and models of behaviour, which refer to a specific context (geographic, economic, political, religious, etc.).
- Secondly, culture is transmitted through the rules of communication and with different and multiple languages that are not indifferent in transmitting values, norms, and contents.
- Thirdly, culture nourishes itself on historical memory, which selects, transmits, and develops cultural elements from the past, to re-elaborate them and hand them down to the future choices of the individual and societies, even with the possibility of modifying such elements.
- Finally, culture favours a process of defining identity. It appears as a global vision of existence which, however provisional, constitutes one or more responses to the questions that come from experience and reflection on the mystery of the human condition and its history.
3. The Dynamics of Interculturation
Inculturation can and must contribute to the creation of a different culture, in which encounter and relationship are distinctive criteria. Is the originality of the Gospel according to open identities, spaces capable of configuring forms of qualitative coexistence, conceivable? The task that falls to inculturation is inscribed in the historical responsibility of promoting culture as a place in which to organize and enjoy the goods of life, aware that outside of it the believing experience risks irrelevance. For an essential reason, the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi of Paul VI recalls: «to reach and almost to overturn, by the strength of the Gospel, the criteria of judgment, the determining values, the points of interest, the lines of thought, the sources of inspiration, and the models of life of humanity» (n. 19). The consequence is important: assuming the human condition and its grammar implies a process of evangelization that intersects the fundamental questions of life, in the awareness that the constitutive link between Christianity and culture refers back to the history of liberation and emancipation of humanity.
To insert the leaven of the Gospel, then, is to initiate a compelling cultural process, because it contributes to giving new cohesion and form to culture, helps to broaden the gaze to the universal values that no culture can include and exhaust, and calls for entering into a conviviality of differences, in which cultures inaugurate a style of reciprocity. According to this logic, inculturation knows that, from an anthropological perspective, cultural complexity translates the dynamism of changes that cultures experience, not always spontaneously. Systems of life and social projects are often subjected to accelerations that sometimes force people and societies not to balance value choices and guiding principles. For this reason, the effort and the possibility of sharing common values as a stimulus for openness between cultures and within them proves precious. The risk of closed universes, of cultural prejudices that become insurmountable due to the relativity of every cultural value, induces forms of risky particularism. This does not at all imply the denial of one’s own tradition and identity, but an openness to others, aware of a broader ethical intentionality that invites cultures to a capacity for collaborative confrontation.
From this angle, one can maintain that inculturation is a hermeneutic process: it provokes the need for reinterpretation, as it suggests another, broader perspective, marked by a demand for universality. At the same time, it experiences the re-comprehension of its dynamism and its contents, inserting itself into the historical concreteness of a culture, through values, symbolic codes, and behaviours that reflect the reciprocity of the relationship between Gospel and culture. Nevertheless, the event of inculturation sets in motion critical processes of knowledge characterized by the value of liberation-salvation that the Gospel attests to insofar as it expresses the possibility of a different humanity, in which ethics and religion are at the service of the promotion of life. The encounter of cultures is the fundamental reason why inculturation must flow into interculturality; otherwise, an authentic encounter between Christianity and culture would be artificial and perhaps unrealizable.
4. Toward an Intercultural Style
The fundamental question in the itinerary of an intercultural Christianity is how it is possible for the Gospel to open up to the future of interculturality as a style of life and exercise of a new humanity. This implies entering into a dialogical relationship with culture, which is always in movement to configure an alternative world, assuming the task of establishing a culture of the neighbour, of the other as different and partner in a quality of life.
The first effect is that of recognizing relativity and cognitive modesty as a guiding principle of existence. The experience of cultural diversity places us on the benches of a demythologization of our way of understanding life, ethics, religion, politics, etc. It is precisely cultural diversity that acts as a resistance to the presumption of general principles capable of unifying and governing the real. Otherness calls into question one’s own point of view, deconstructs the presumption of being identical, and is a necessary component of our humanity and subjectivity.
The second effect is that the encounter with other men and women obliges us to discover the plurality of worlds and visions of life that disturb our omnipotent ego, warning it of its insufficiency, neither cognitive nor affective. It is a true and proper overturning, in which diverse otherness makes us encounter our own identity as a good no longer private, teaching us the most difficult lesson to accept: openness and listening, attention and solidarity, respect and care, the ability to understand and also that of transforming oneself in relation to the new and the different.
The third effect is that opening oneself to the other and understanding them is by no means simple, especially if the other is a stranger, an outsider. A complex and paradigmatic figure, the stranger symbolically expresses the one who comes from outside, from unknown territories, who, even in their proximity, appears strange, often unrepresentable. For this reason, perhaps, estrangement appears with a twofold meaning: of strangeness and of fundamental difference. It is no coincidence that the figure of the stranger has often been (and still is) declined in many ways: as an enemy, as one who has no rights because they possess nothing nor reside in a place, as an invader, a clandestine, always on the margins of any possibility of understanding and integration.
The ethics of interculturality, in short, demands the exercise of responsibility. Awakening to the other, encountering them gratuitously, without imperialistic aims, broadens the horizon of interculturality to the question of justice and peace in political, economic, and environmental terms.
5. Mission: Reactivating the Interculturality of the Gospel
If mission is founded on the style and message of Jesus Christ, it is because it reinterprets the relationship with the other as a criterion for verifying the quality of the proposal: before the other who does not belong to my group, a stranger in their cultural and religious particularity, the encounter can only occur in analogy with the inaugural gesture of love that God has placed as the paradoxical law of existence. A law that invokes the self-transcendence of the subject in concern for the other, to the point of substituting oneself for them, as the parable of the Samaritan shows, so that the ethos of the future may be initiated, demanding responsibility and an eschatological and critical gaze on the inadequacies of history. In all likelihood, here lies the intercultural suggestion of Christianity: in establishing the asymmetrical relationship, it articulates that culture of the gift that can re-oxygenate a style of life in which the conviviality of differences predominates. If the gift is for the other, it is because it appeals to a reciprocity that involves persons in qualitative relationships. The Gospel, in short, offers itself as the third party in intercultural dialogue, because it can help cultures to meet, to weave exchanges, beyond their own particularity and up to the transformation of the protagonists. It opens spaces not yet explored, in which to exorcise the fear of the other and to bring forth a style of life marked by the flourishing of the good, of fraternity, and of freedom. In this sense, the evangelical proclamation becomes a pedagogical itinerary of confrontation, leading culture to a discernment of its own intentions and claims, from whose choice may depend either the clash of civilizations or the dignity of difference. Hence, for the proclamation of the Gospel, there derives the task of a necessary insertion into the logic of culture (and of cultures). To evangelize culture is, then, to participate in the creativity of a better humanity, accompanying its choices, its turns, its failures.
It is understood, therefore, how evangelization is articulated against the backdrop of the interpretative legitimacy of Christian communities, responsible for a reading of the Gospel capable of discerning the paths of the history of effects and cultural conditioning. Verisimilarly, here one can identify a decisive methodological breakdown for the theological dynamism of mission and for the pastoral processes that follow from it.
a) Putting the liberating experience of the Gospel at the centre. At a first level, the necessity must be affirmed that the close relationship between Gospel and culture allows for the liberation of the fundamental experience, which is the surprising irruption of the values and criteria of the Kingdom. This concerns, that is, that relationship between evangelization, liberation, and humanization that is also a history of tension, which settles into the understanding of theological exercise and the prophetic configuration of ecclesial communities. The reason lies in the real acquisition of culture and, in particular, of the ethical space of men and women that constitutes the necessary condition for speaking of a different image of the world and of history. Outside of an immersion in the lives and struggles of those who seek a quality of existence, especially of those who live in the marginality of society, there is no authentic evangelization, because it would be artificially induced and not the fruit of an involvement with people, aimed at the achievement of common objectives. Such involvement evokes and demands an ecclesiological attention that must focus on the liberating dimension already present in religiosity and culture, whether Christian or of other religions, in an apprenticeship that makes the movement of inculturation and evangelization reciprocal.
b) In view of a prophetic evangelical style. A second indication must be based on a dimension of critical correlation: offering criteria of reference so that the good news of the Christian event may dialogue with the many social, economic, and political situations, inviting them to a process of discernment and change. This is the crucial and most delicate juncture, and the impact is neither obvious nor programmable in advance. At stake is freedom in responsibly assuming the outcomes of a different vision of life that the biblical narratives and the story of Jesus propose as a paradigm of a new culture. Nevertheless, it is a matter of opening a fruitful interpretative conflict that clashes with solutions of accommodation of the Christian proposal. In this sense, evangelization in this phase is not yet concerned with giving form to a local ecclesial community, but with creating the conditions for a process that aims at the real awakening of consciousness of what the evangelical style entails for society, especially where structures of injustice hinder the concrete history of emancipation and affirmation of human dignity.
c) Bringing the human and the common good to flourish. But, in particular, the process of evangelization of culture must aim at the re-creation of the human fabric, an indispensable prerequisite for reformulating a culture that promotes the good and peace. The outcome of this objective, while assuming a logic of cooperation, inserts into its horizon the perspective of religious experience in view of new lifestyles. In this way, the believing experience can and must play a role of critical reserve with respect to socio-cultural structures that prevent many women and men from living freely and with dignity. Commitment to the environment, the economy, and politics are strictly linked to the social responsibility of believing witness, an expression of a spirituality of compassion and solidarity that cultivates humanity according to the values of the Kingdom. Only in this perspective will evangelization be able to give form to Christian communities whose model of thought and dialogical approach to questions concerning common life can contribute to the narration and construction of a culture that places the flourishing of the human at the centre. “People must seek to live the meaning and values of the Gospel in their culture, but the Gospel must always be a presence that challenges, an untamed, counter-cultural force. However, the cultural incarnation of the Gospel must never be such as to lock the Christian community in a ghetto. “The evangelical community is a community on mission and must always be ready to challenge the general culture, regardless of the relationship it has with it.”
Carmelo Dotolo
Abstract
The most authentic meaning of mission lies in the ability to propose the Gospel as an important dimension for the quality of existence and for the fulfilment of every woman and man. This is the experience that the New Testament attests to in the life of the early Christian communities. Within it are two precious indicators: on the one hand, the conviction that the kerygma is the announcement-proposal of a project that concerns the expectations of humanity and culture, although it requires a not-easy path of transformation; on the other hand, evangelization experiences the need to create the conditions for a religious and ethical experience in light of the revolution of the values of the Kingdom. The consequence of this experience is that mission is linked to the questions of existence in its personal, political, economic, and environmental dimensions. For this reason, in the history of mission there have been different models of the ‘evangelization of cultures’ that have marked the evolution of the experience and the idea of mission.
The understanding of the process of inculturation is strictly linked to the concept of culture and to its delineation in relation to the organization of existence. Culture tends to be valid as a system of life project, it accompanies the movement of the existence of men and women, contributing to equipping the human being who, from their status of incompleteness, is driven to explore, innovate, and organize, to the point that cultural identity is progressively constructed as a form of human self-organization. In this sense, inculturation can and must contribute to the creation of a different culture, in which encounter and relationship are distinctive criteria. The event of inculturation sets in motion critical processes of knowledge characterized by the value of liberation-salvation that the Gospel attests to insofar as it expresses the possibility of a different humanity, in which ethics and religion are at the service of the promotion of life. The encounter of cultures is the fundamental reason why inculturation must flow into interculturality; otherwise, an authentic encounter between Christianity and culture would be artificial and perhaps unrealizable. This produces a threefold effect: a) that of recognizing relativity and cognitive modesty as a guiding principle of existence; b) the encounter with other men and women obliges us to discover the plurality of worlds and visions of life that disturb our omnipotent ego; c) opening oneself to the other and understanding them is by no means simple, especially if the other is a stranger, an outsider.
On the paradigm of the Samaritan, to evangelize culture is, then, to participate in the creativity of a better humanity, accompanying its choices, its turns, its failures. Mission, then, must be articulated around three indicators: a) putting the liberating experience of the Gospel at the centre; b) inaugurating a prophetic evangelical style on a dimension of critical correlation that offers criteria of reference so that the good news of the Christian event may dialogue with the many social, economic, and political situations, inviting them to a process of discernment and change; c) bringing the human and the common good to flourish. In other words, it means focusing on the re-creation of the human fabric, an indispensable prerequisite for reformulating a culture that promotes the good and peace.
