CONTEXTUALIZATION IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
By Dean Flemming
Apollos (IVP). 344 pages. £17.99
ISBN 978 1 844 741 007
When you teach the Bible, do you just read it out in the original Hebrew or Greek? I thought not. You try to present the material in a way that both engages and challenges the particular group you are addressing. That’s contextualisation. Most of us just haven’t given it a fancy name, but neither have we given it much thought. Dean Flemming has.
Dean Flemming is a missionary teacher and pastor from a Wesleyan-Nazarene background. This book is the fruit of 30 years of work in a variety of different cultural contexts around the world. It is clearly written, well thought out and attractively printed. It is not light reading, as the Apollos imprint of IVP should warn you, but the clear focus and the constant repetition of the theme make it quite understandable.
Everything?
Flemming contends that everything in the New Testament is contextualised, i.e. tailored to a target audience and expressed using language and images that audience was familiar with. He wants us to learn from the writers of the New Testament; they provide a model for the process as well as the product of contextualisation.
In the first of two chapters on Acts he shows us how the church reluctantly moved beyond its Jewish/Palestinian culture and learned to speak the gospel within the cultural landscape of the Mediterranean world. The conversion of Cornelius and the Council of Jerusalem are central. In his second chapter, he compares three of Paul’s sermons, showing how Paul tailored the presentation (not the content) of the gospel to the group at hand. Much of the exposition is insightful and helpful.
There are five chapters on Paul’s epistles, including a good discussion of whether there is a normative element to the gospel that transcends the various contextual expressions of it. Flemming finds this normative element to be the true story of God’s saving work in human history, flowing from creation to consummation, and centring on the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
In his chapter on the Gospels, Flemming argues that the four Gospels are four contextualisations of the one story, shaped for particular target audiences. Finally, he discusses Revelation, which is a word on target to seven specific churches, helping them to contend as Christians within a particular political and cultural setting. He does not dismiss its future import, but intentionally concentrates on its relevance to its original hearers.
Too much liberalism
This is a good book. Flemming has swallowed far too much of contemporary liberal scholarship for my liking, but much of his exegesis of the biblical text is penetrating and stimulating. And his aim is certainly right. To express the truth in ways that both engage and challenge. To ‘learn to sing the gospel story in new keys so that people may encounter Jesus in life-changing ways’.
Barry Seagren,
retired pastor and L’Abri staff member
