If
we learn to “read the Bible with the eyes of los pobres”[i] [the
poor], as well we ought, there is an inherent danger. That danger is a backlash effect in which the
truth we are attempting to communicate is altered by the very context in which
we communicate it. That dynamic comes into
play today as the Church wrestles with the challenges and claims placed against
it by alternative sexual life styles.
Now
truth is not in fact malleable. By its
very nature truth is stable so that as contextualization attempts to mold it to
an acceptable form in the immediate context, the truth itself will resist, even
as the truth, as it is in Jesus, resisted the contamination by the leaven of
the Pharisees and Sadducees, and even the leaven of the hoi polloi, the common
people. At that point the effort of
contextualization will bend, crack, and shatter. It is the old problem of pouring new wine
into old wineskins. Something has to
give, and it won’t be the new wine of truth.
At
the back of my mind are John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius, one emphasizing the
sovereignty and keeping power of God, and the other emphasizing the freedom of
the will and the responsibility of choice.
There is truth in both, but contextualization creates for both Calvin
and Arminius a new problem. How does the
new wine of truth shatter both Calvinism and Arminianism?
On
another level the question has to be asked: was the context of either Calvin or
Arminius the only consideration, or even the primary consideration, in their
attempts to contextualize the truth in a meaningful way to the children of
God? There is an unspoken problem. The eyes with which I read the Bible are
inevitably my own eyes, my presuppositions and oft un-examined personal
context. The attempt to read the Bible
with the eyes of los pobrés is only one element in the problem of
contextualization.
I
am another element, I and my own salvation history, the record of how I
personally both found and perceive the truth.
The Lord says to Ezekiel, “Receive in your heart,” your inner man,
before he says “See with your eyes”.
Then he says “go and say to the people.”
Initially the order in Ezekiel seemed wrong to me, but the order is a
tacit acknowledgment that receiving in the inner man is prior to seeing and/or
perceiving with the eyes that which has been received. Here the truth spoken to my heart in the morning
lections comes into play” “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for out of it
springs the issues of life (Prov. 4:23).
My encounter with the internalized logos is a formative part of the
proclamation.
In
this sense Marshall McCluhan was getting near a truth because the medium has,
for good or ill, become part of the message.
We are called not to proclaim paradosis [tradition], but to witness to
what we have internalized in our own encounter with the living God.
[i]
Obispo Adrian Caceres on contextualizing the Gospel in Latin America, 1988
