VULNERABLE MISSION

MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 110–133
There is vast diversity among literate cultures; conflating literacy with Western thought
will never do. 38 Yet, the VM advocacy of only local thinking styles among oral cultures
runs up against theological education that makes Scripture central. Nussbaum contends
that the contrast between orality and literacy is superficial, but superficial or not, illiteracy
is a component of orality. To concretize the issue, what should theological education
look like for my illiterate or functionally illiterate Arequipeño brothers and sisters?
Scripture stands as a testimony to the people of God’s enduring, trans-cultural impulse
to center theology upon the written word. We may make historical caveats about the
illiteracy of the majority, the priority of narrative, and the variety of cultural patterns
that mark the reception of the text, but these do not obviate the nature of Scripture as
scripture. Moreover, the rabbinic and Hellenistic modes of theology canonized in the
New Testament demand to be met on their own terms by readers of every culture. At
this point, it hardly needs saying, the cultures of the Bible stand at tremendous distance
from US, Latin American, and African cultures alike. How could missionaries who focus
upon Scripture not introduce foreign thinking styles? The use of local language in missiology
intends to mitigate the distance, but as Nida said, the purpose is still in virtually
every context “to inculcate wholly foreign concepts.”
The Western tradition’s historical-critical tools may be indelibly marked by the culture(s)
in which they developed, but it is something else to say they are irredeemably compromised.
Christopher Wright says:
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There is no point, it seems to me, in swinging the pendulum from Western hermeneutical
hegemony and ignorance of majority world biblical scholarship to the fashionable adulation
of anything and everything that comes from the rest of the world and the rejection of
established methods of grammatico-historical exegesis as somehow intrinsically Western,
colonial, or imperialistic. 39
At their best, historical-critical tools allow us to meet biblical cultures on their own terms.
If the choice is between attempting that cross-cultural encounter with the text or subjugating
it to the autonomy of a local thinking style, theological education should choose
the former in every context. As a scholar who has spent much of his career giving the
Latin American context a voice to critique and improve Western hermeneutics, René
Padilla’s words on this point are weighty:
It has been argued, however, that . . . the grammatico-historical approach is itself typically
western and consequently not binding upon non-western cultures. What are we to say to
this? . . .
No interpreters, regardless of their culture, are free to make the text say whatever they
want it to say. Their task is to let the text speak for itself, and to that end they inevitably
have to engage with the horizons of the text via literary context, grammar, history and so
on. . . .
38 See, e.g., the discussion of various logics in Marlene Enns, “Theological Education in Light of Cultural
Variations of Reasoning: Some Educational Issues,” Common Ground Journal 3, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 76–87. University
students from both China and the US are both highly literate, but Chinese students reason holistically.
39 Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: IVP
Academic, 2006), 42, fn. 14.