In this article, Mark Love critiques the influential missiological paradigm that equates Christian mission with the translation of a universal “gospel message,” a view Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls articulate. He argues that this approach wrongly assumes interpreters can abstract the gospel from its cultural and narrative particularities. Drawing on the theological insights of Willie James Jennings and David Bentley Hart, alongside philosophical hermeneutics from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the essay reconceives the gospel not as a static message but as an ongoing apocalyptic event—a “sustained apocalypse”—that continues to unfold within history. Through biblical analysis and theoretical reflection, Love advances a shift from translation and contextualization toward understanding as the telos of mission and emphasizes how meaning emerges within an “in-between” space where diverse cultural horizons meet. In this framework, mission becomes a shared process of discerning the gospel as living “news” embedded in cultural particularities, offering a more theologically robust and postcolonially sensitive account of Christian witness.
It should never be forgotten that Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or sapiential path or system, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or conceivable sequel.
This is the only true faithfulness to the memory of an absolute beginning, a sudden unveiling without precise precedent: an empty tomb, say, or the voice of God heard in rolling thunder, or the descent of the Spirit like a storm of wind or tongues of fire. In a very real sense, the tradition exists only as a sustained apocalypse…1
In his groundbreaking work in missiology, Translating the Message, Lamin Sanneh extols the virtues of the principle of translatability that he sees at the heart of Christian mission.2 The virtues are numerous. It is undeniable that the missionary practice of translating the Bible and other documents of the faith in many cases preserved languages and cultures that might otherwise have vanished under the waves of Western imperialism. It is also clearly the case that translation empowered indigenous expressions of Christianity, even in those cases where the missionary intent was less open to local expression of the faith. Contextualization became the ultimate achievement of those committed to the translatability impulse, the mark of sensitivity to the reception of Christianity over the cultural expressions of a sending culture.3 Sanneh’s work is impressive in what it accomplishes.
Still, the book’s title reveals much about Sanneh’s commitments, which are open to critique. Chief among these assumptions is that the gospel is a message to be translated.4 This sounds innocuous enough, but determining what constitutes “the gospel” is fraught with difficulties. One might ask, for instance, if the faith is primarily a message or a way of life? What is it, in other words, that is being translated? A larger issue, however, concerns the translation process outlined by Sanneh and his teacher, Andrew Walls. For them, vernacular translation is not merely an activity of mission, but the defining characteristic of mission as a whole. Walls, for instance, uses the incarnation as a warrant for understanding mission in these terms.
Incarnation is translation. When God in Christ became man, Divinity was translated into humanity, as though humanity was a receptor language…Bible translation as a process is both a reflection of the central act on which faith depends and a concretization of the commission Christ gave his disciples. Perhaps no other specific activity more clearly represents the mission of the church.5
These sweeping statements equating translation with mission deserve examination.
In Translating the Message, Sanneh considers the gospel as something extractable from the particularities of a culture, making a “culture (sg)” expressible in terms of “essences” and “non-essentials,” the gospel being transcendent of those realities. He writes, “Translation forces a distinction between the essence of a message and its cultural presuppositions, with the assumption that such a separation enables us to affirm the primacy of the message over its cultural underpinnings.”6 What is required, then, in translation is the identification of an essential message transcendent of cultural particularities. This type of identification is problematic both on the origin side (how is any message above the cultural?) and the receptor side (once translated into the vernacular, how does it retain its cultural transcendence?)
Walls explains this process in greater detail than Sanneh. Translation of a message proceeds on the “principle of revision,” that is, some aspect of the message needs to be exempt from revision to transcend local realities. This exemption for Walls is Christ. Walls understands, however, that there is no Christ apart from the particularity of time and space, “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” hence the dilemma in translation. It is not clear how the particularity of Christ can be separated cleanly from other elements of the narrative. How would Jesus be separated, for instance, from the particular story of Israel without turning a person into a theory or an abstraction? Are elements of Jesus’ life exempted, or are there aspects of his life subject to the principle of revision (that is culturally bound, like his maleness)? And if one could isolate Jesus from the rest of the story in that way, how would Jesus be extracted from the particularity of the missionary, or from the particularity of a gospel account, for that matter, in a mission engagement? And what are we to make of the resurrection claim that Jesus continues to be living among his people, making the rest of the New Testament a witness to Christ? Is Christ extractable from these testimonies? Walls seems most comfortable in this vein when referring to Jesus as the logos, perhaps a way of turning Jesus into a message or concept safe from the reaches of revision and reducing Jesus to a Word, albeit a word made flesh.7 Even here, the difficulties in identifying an element safe from revision remain.
Sanneh seems to understand the gospel as a “message of repentance, faith, and forgiveness” that allows Christianity to appeal directly to individuals. The gospel is a message concerning the salvation of the individual. For Sanneh, this individualized account of “the gospel” allows for a more seamless assimilation to the local culture, the individual’s salvation being separable from larger material and social realities.8 How would Sanneh square this gospel, separable from the material and social, from the preaching of Jesus concerning the gospel of the kingdom of God?
Willie James Jennings presses this very issue with Sanneh and Walls’ notions of mission as translation. According to Jennings, vernacular translation is simply not broad enough to account for the entirety of mission. To speak of mission as translation would encompass worlds, not just languages or messages, which would both be simultaneous across cultural situations and would include social and material realities. From Jennings’ perspective, Sanneh’s failure to account for worlds with all their complexity leaves him precisely in the place he is hoping to leave, an ethnocentric account of the gospel. By failing to account for the translation of worlds, both Sanneh and Walls describe the results of translation still inscribed within the world of modernity, the world they occupy. And for both, the story of colonialism is replaced with the modern story of nationalism. As Jennings notes, “Sanneh believes that the practice of translation engaged in by missionaries opened them to the possibility of repudiating cultural imperialism. If the practice of translation disrupted colonialist hegemony, it did so by making room for something else, cultural nationalism.”9
This is not simply Jennings’ interpretation of Sanneh. These are Sanneh’s own words quoted by Jennings: “Mission furnished nationalism with the resources for its rise and success, whereas colonialism came at it as a conspiracy. At the heart of the nationalist awakening was a cultural pride that missionary translations and the attendant linguistic research stimulated. We might say with justice that mission begot cultural nationalism.”10 For Jennings, this updated form of ethnocentrism is barely an improvement. The act of vernacular translation, as told by Sanneh and Walls, results in an endless series of cultural relativizations in which the ethnocentric skin of the originating culture is shed for appropriation in the process of receiving one. For Jennings, this endless relativizing allows ethnocentrism in through the back door of nationalism. Jennings attributes all of this to a thin view of translation he detects in Sanneh and Walls.
The first relativization in the story of mission by translation involves the Hellenization of Christianity, effectively severing it from its roots in the story of Israel. Walls and Sanneh both view this “move out of Israel” as paradigmatic for all subsequent translations of the faith. This move universalizes the faith, trading the story of Israel’s Christ for the universal story of Jesus as Lord, relativizing Israel’s story and every subsequent cultural account of the faith.11 Jennings sees this not only as a supersessionist account that sponsors a docetic Christology, but also as a failure to account for the translation of worlds. The task of Christian mission, for Jennings, is to translate worlds simultaneously within the Christian world of “Israel’s house.” A definitive move away from colonialism comes not through a universalizing of the faith, but by claiming the story’s particularity—the story of Israel’s Messiah.12
A universalizing move too easily makes the story I occupy as normative. The faith becomes “my faith,” a personal account of “repentance, faith, and forgiveness” and the practices that attend to that understanding. A thin view of vernacular translation related to a message with an accompanying, weak (modern) concept of culture is simply not ample enough to parse the complexities of cultural exchange.13 I would term Sanneh’s approach as modern, a two-footed duality, the weight of cultural transaction as translation shifting from one foot to the other, from a subject to an object or from a sender to a receiver. What is lacking is space, a staging for the missionary encounter that belongs neither to the sender nor the receiver—a space, even, for God’s own agency.
While I applaud many of the points made by Sanneh and Walls related to the necessity and power of vernacular translation, I want to push the imagination beyond their conception, steeped as it is in modern conceptions, and offer instead a more hermeneutical account of mission that takes the story of Israel’s Messiah as necessary rather than as a cultural husk to be left behind. And I want to suggest that this fits better with biblical accounts of the term “gospel” than what is often meant when it is reduced and generalized as a message. The gospel itself bears phenomenal characteristics related to the particularities of the world that allows it to function hermeneutically. It is the announcement of an ongoing event. To this last point, I now turn my attention.
The Gospel as News: A Persistent Apocalypse
Hart’s provocative statements cited at the beginning of this essay highlight not only the apocalyptic nature of the original announcement of the coming of God but stress its continuing persistence in defining the living tradition of the Christian faith, what Hart calls a “sustained apocalypse,” an event without precedent or sequel.14 It is the future coming of God that constitutes the tradition rather than an unbroken continuity with the dogmatic deposits of Christianity through time. Tradition’s coherence, in other words, is provided by the future and not the past.15
Hart devotes the first half of Tradition and Apocalypse to critiques of the work of John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel, both of whom try to establish criteria whereby “the tradition” might be seen in an unbroken line from the beginning (even if only implicitly) to the present. “Both men were trying to navigate the middle passage between two perils. Both were seeking to open Catholic dogmatic tradition to the discoveries of modern historical scholarship while also blunting the sharper edges of scholarship by arguing for the tradition’s intrinsic rationality. And both wished to do this without denying either church dogma or academic history its autonomy and its own sphere of competence.”16 While Hart lauds the attempts, especially in the case of Blondell, he ultimately finds them both to be failures. The historical record simply depicts too much diversity and disjointedness to locate a fixed dogmatic certainty that could be termed “the tradition.”
With no recourse to the past to provide “the tradition,” Hart turns to the future. With reference to Blondell, Hart concludes
To make a case for the kind of living tradition, however, he should not have looked backwardly so avidly into the realm of history, or upward so obediently to an exalted realm of ideas grounded in an authority that is its own justification, but should have looked forward with sustained attention to that sole mysterious horizon where the historical and ideal—the truth of time and timeless truth—naturally and necessarily coincide. And that is, and can only be, the eschatological horizon.17
For Hart, the eschatological horizon ties the Christian faith in each subsequent generation to its inception, not dogmatically or doctrinally, but in mood and posture. The apocalyptic origins of Christianity carried forward the whiff of a radical inbreaking, “an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of dissolution that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again.”18 I would add, and this is the point of sojourning through Hart’s argument, that this existence between its apocalyptic ferment and eschatological telos is characterized by news, by good news.
By this I mean that the present moment, an expression of the already and not yet, is always given to discernment, is forever in search of understanding, and is always discovering more fully the newsworthiness of God’s decisive action toward the world in Christ through the power of the Spirit. The gospel, then, remains the gospel to the extent that it continues in the modality of news, which is always expressible, but is not reducible to an essence or discrete message to be translated.
Gospel Texts
The apocalyptic scaffolding Hart recommends for understanding tradition aligns well with biblical uses of the word “gospel,” which I would distinguish from current popular understandings of the term. The sense of apocalyptic as a revealing, or even as an interruption of the experience of life given to us by the principalities and powers of this age, conforms well with the modality of news. And the fact that this unveiling comes to us not as inscribed dogma or detailed instruction but through the events of history makes discernment the missional activity of God’s people. Neighbors, strangers, localities, and cultural particularities are not simply recipients of God’s movement toward creation in Jesus but carry the generative potential of news. Here, the binary relationship of subject/object and sender/receiver breaks down. Translation gives way to something more robust—something thicker—the hermeneutical telos of understanding. Before making the case for understanding as the telos of mission, let me first explore the biblical testimonies to the term “gospel” to see whether this perspective holds.
Biblical texts understand the term “gospel” in relation to apocalyptic realities. Isaiah 52, for instance, speaks of the gospel in relation to the future return of God to Zion, an event that would bring the exile to an end in favor of God’s anticipated saving rule on behalf of Israel. This announcement of God’s dramatic advent on Zion’s behalf bears a striking resemblance to the Synoptic Gospels’ report of Jesus’ preaching, namely the announcement of the in-breaking kingdom of God. “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15).
These apocalyptic texts are not typically cited in current, popular definitions of “gospel.” Instead, many turn to Paul, whose multiplicity of metaphors provides the opportunity to cherry-pick language that fits preferred atonement theories. This reading of Paul, however, overlooks the larger apocalyptic framework that characterizes his writings.19 For Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus mark a dramatic turning point in the ages. Paul is a two-age thinker, which includes both the present age that is perishing, or passing away, and the coming and enduring age, which Christians can belong to and serve in the present. Christians live in the overlap of these two ages, groaning along with creation and the Holy Spirit in anticipation of the glory eventually to be revealed when God is all in all (Rom 8:18ff, 1 Cor 15:42-56). Living in the realities of the already but not yet, Christians find in the apocalyptic “word of the cross” a way to distinguish between the powers of this age and the power of the age to come (1 Cor 1:28-2:6).20 Anticipating the day of the Lord, Christians are those who are “being saved,” an already/but not yet sign of the apocalypse of God in Christ (1 Cor 1:18).
Paul’s use of “gospel” and his understandings of the salvation offered by God are no less apocalyptic than those of Isaiah or the Synoptics. For Paul, “the grace of God has appeared (apocalypse),” saving us from this present evil age and liberating us from the powers of this age that rule through the dominion of sin and death. In all three textual traditions, whether it’s God’s return to Zion, or the coming of the kingdom of God, or the revealing of a new creation eventuated by Christ’s death and resurrection, gospel is the announcement of an apocalyptic event. And because this announcement anticipates a later fulfillment, it continues to produce news in what Hart refers to as a “sustained apocalypse.”21
A word of clarification is in order for the word “event.” I’m not using “event” to evoke Barth’s notion of revelatory eruptions from eternity into ordinary time. Rather, by “event” I mean something more than a mere verbal proclamation, a happening,, or an advent with phenomenal characteristics. In the case of the biblical use of the word “gospel,” the event announced relates to the coming of God for the deliverance of his people and the salvation of the world. Deliverance and salvation go well beyond Sanneh’s “repentance, faith, and forgiveness,” and include the social and material circumstances of those being delivered into the eschatological realities of the kingdom of God.
The Hermeneutical Shape of News
James Brownson suggests that the term “gospel” served as a hermeneutical framework for the earliest Christians as they navigated the relationship between tradition and context. In making the case for the hermeneutical function of gospel, Brownson points to other religious terms available to Christians that were not chosen to stand in for what they offered the world: e.g., truth, law, instruction, mystery, or word (logos). It’s not that Christians did not use these terms, but they did not carry the same normative status as gospel. This choice for gospel over other terms might be related to the first Christians’ cultural aggressiveness, or their openness to allowing context to shape their understandings. Terms like truth, law, and instruction are more conceptually closed, placing what is to be delivered above and/or prior to local conditions.22 News is more conceptually open and, therefore, more sensitive to what is encountered on the ground.
Tying these observations concerning the hermeneutical structure of news to the exploration of apocalyptic in the previous section, the gospel is to be discerned in the overlap of the ages. Gospel, then, exists not above or prior to the local realities, but occurs precisely within them. The coming of Jesus as the conveyor of the good news of the kingdom of God suggests as much. The incarnation ties gospel to the particularities of time and space. Jesus is not a principle to be translated from one locality to another, but rather a thickly articulated life to be encountered and embodied in every circumstance.23 As Mark Heim states, this incarnational impulse, “We won’t know the full meaning of the gospel until it has gone every place in every time.”24 This shift from the gospel as a message to be translated to gospel as a sustained apocalyptic event presents a bag full of distinctions, a fundamental one being a shift from contextualization to understanding.
One final point needs to be made related to the previous discussion on the eventfulness of what is being announced. Part of the phenomenon of the gospel texts explored above (Isaiah 52, Mark 1, I Cor 15) is the social location of the announcement. The announcement of the coming of God’s reign is not made by occupying forces—Babylon, Persia, Rome—but by captive Israel, not by any stretch of the imagination a world power. The story elements found in the gospels match this located-ness: born in a manger, coronated in the muddy Jordan river in a wilderness region, ministry primarily among Galileans, crucified by civil and religious authorities outside the city gates. This important detail of social location related to the eventfulness of the gospel announced is lost, glossed over in an account of the gospel as a message of “repentance, forgiveness, and faith,” an account annexed from the details of the story of Israel’s Messiah.
Context or Understanding
Bosch suggests that the term “contextualization” is of fairly recent vintage, a term that served the interests of a postcolonial missiology.25 A theology professor of mine twitched with uneasiness, however, whenever we used the term or concept in class or in a paper. Turns out contextualization shares some of the same limitations as translation as a telos for mission. To con-text something assumes a prior “text.” What is this text? Who determines what comprises this “text”? By what measure and by whom is it deemed contextualized? At its bottom, the problem with both translation and contextualization is a failure to fully escape a subject-object conceptuality, a concept hoped to be avoided in a postcolonial missiology. As mentioned above, both are two-footed approaches, shifting the subjective weight back and forth from sender to receiver. What gets overlooked is the in-between, to use the language of hermeneutical philosophy—e.g., Heidegger’s Dasein—an eventfulness or appearing that escapes the subjectivities of both sender and/or receiver. In fact, Heidegger critiques the subject-object orientation as an abstraction, even a false consciousness, that emerges only after a more fundamental way of being in the world has been forgotten.
Gadamer, following Heidegger, sees understanding as the result of “fruitful prejudices,” our understanding being dependent on prior, communally determined understanding. Gadamer uses the image of horizons to depict what he means by understanding. A horizon refers to the background of meanings and assumptions by which persons experience the world. Understanding occurs in a fusion of horizons, when another horizon interrupts our meanings or assumptions and creates something new. The significance of Gadamer’s depiction of understanding for our use is that a fusion of horizons is always something new.26
Hermeneutics, steeped within an ontology of understanding, makes room for Hart’s “sustained apocalypse” and the biblical definitions of gospel traced above. Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” names the meaning that emerges in the endless encounters with other horizons as “news.” Moreover, this “news” is, by its very nature, surprising or unanticipated. It is a revelation—a possible event carrying meaning in a sustained apocalypse (my words, not Gadamer’s).
Gadamer’s account of how meaning emerges, however, still feels primarily linguistic or even textual. This is where more robust accounts of the “in-between” are needed, e.g., Heidegger’s Dasein, or Taylor and Ricoeur’s “social imaginaries,” which provide more embodied notions of understanding and meaning.27 The significance of embodied accounts for mission runs in two directions. First, embodied accounts depict mission as a “thick” encounter with multiple and simultaneous agencies. Translation, in contrast, presents a “thin” approach within a double reduction—gospel reduced to message, and the message reduced to an essence. Translation views gospel as settled in its essence and transcendent of the cultural (Sanneh and Walls’ “principle of revision”). In contrast, a hermeneutical account seeks gospel meaning within the cultural, the particularities of all cultural settings being potentially generative of understanding gospel as “sustained” apocalypse.
Let me be clear about the distinction I am making at this point. Walls and Sanneh certainly would understand the task of the missionary as providing a thick description of the receiving context, or better, as one provided by the context. It would be required for vernacular translation. They would even claim that the missionary is emancipated from the sending culture in the effort of vernacular translation. And through translation, there is even a sense of the ongoing. The distinction, though, is to be made precisely here. Walls and Sanneh view the gospel as rising above the cultural, universalizing it through abstraction, even through individuation, a relativizing of nonessential cultural husks. In contrast, a hermeneutical understanding would view the gospel as emerging precisely within the cultural. As we have already seen in Jennings’ critique, this universalizing tendency in Walls and Sannneh brings through the back door what they have endeavored to keep out of the house altogether—ethnocentrism, this time tied to nationalism rather than colonialism.28
This brings me to the second way an embodied account is significant: the in-between. Again, the translation impulse is a two-footed approach (subject-object, sender-receiver), a direct and reciprocal encounter between two distinct parties. Nothing is before the subjectivities of either party. A hermeneutical account assumes a mediation of understanding and meaning that occurs in the in-between, the understanding into which we are thrown. There is more at play in the encounter or event than just the respective subjectivities or worldviews, but also the possibility of an alternative “staging” or “hosting” that transcends what we bring or receive. Before I provide a theological account for this staging or hosting, I want to be clear that we bring not an essentialist account of who we are or what we represent, but inescapably, we bring everything. In reference to the Christian story, we do not bring only an abstracted account of Jesus’ life, say his death and resurrection, but the entire canonical witness to Jesus as Israel’s messiah and our own experience and interpretation of that witness.
Which brings me to the mediating space of the in-between. In an in-between, we might say that all encounters are mediated by the Spirit of God, a life force independent of distinct parties. It is striking that Sanneh is largely mute about God’s agency. In a binary (sender/receiver), there is little need to appeal to God’s involvement. An “in-between,” however, leaves space for the appearance of something not totally accounted for by the direct encounter of sender and receiver.
The issue of staging also brings us back to Jennings’ critique that Israel is jettisoned in Sanneh and Walls’ account of translation. By universalizing the story above the particularities of the story of Israel, we are left with only the realities of sender and receiver and the subsequent need to find a message beyond the reach of revision. By insisting on the mediating presence of the story of Israel’s messiah, a staging is imagined in which neither sender nor receiver can claim ownership. This is what Jennings seems to mean by “the translation of multiple worlds simultaneously.” Translation takes place within “Israel’s house,” the location within which Christian worlds are created. The particularity of “Israel’s house” covers the entire world. “Through Christian faith, new languages and the people who speak them are drawn into that house.”29 So, when a European encounters an African, they place between them a story that neither of them owns. They work together, in the staging provided by a story that does not belong to them, to come to understanding.
Here, I want to return to Sanneh’s emphasis on the importance of texts, but through the lens of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur speaks of the autonomy of texts. The shift from face-to-face to writing creates a “threefold autonomy:” from the intention of the author, from the cultural conditions that produced the text, and from those who first received the text. This autonomy, what Ricoeur calls “distanciation,” means that no one owns the text—not the author, the missionary, or the recipients. This distance, or autonomy, is exactly what is needed for meaning to emerge in front of the text.30 It is not simply the fact of a text translated into the vernacular that accounts for local meanings apart from the intentions of a missionary, but the very fact of a text itself. The encounter of text and reader will inevitably produce new meanings in the world created in front of the text. These meanings evade the intentions of the community that produced the text and expand the possible habitable worlds for those encountering it anew. Though Ricoeur does not speak directly to this situation, we might see the otherness of the text as a mediating factor between persons in a mission encounter. This third element, an in-between, in mission encounter allows for space not available in a one-on-one, intersubjective encounter. This space, or distance, keeps open the possibility of transcendence, or even the movement of the Holy Spirit in human encounter that goes beyond the intentions of sender or receiver.
In this case, Christian Scripture contains diverse accounts of Israel and its messiah, Jesus Christ, who, by virtue of the resurrection, is Lord of all. The text does not belong to the missionary, culturally speaking. In mission, this autonomous set of texts is placed in-between to see what news might be discovered together in a fusion of horizons, in the furtherance of a sustained apocalypse.
Conclusion
While Sanneh’s insistence on the vernacular translation of Scripture is an indisputable good in the practice of mission, his insistence that translation represents the entirety of the mission enterprise is misguided. It misses at both levels: defining what is meant by “gospel” and relating to modern philosophical assumptions wed to notions of translation and contextualization. I am proposing shifts in the understanding of mission that ultimately better serve Sanneh’s concerns for a postcolonial missiology. These shifts include understanding the gospel in the way the term is used biblically, as the announcement of an apocalyptic event rather than as an essential message transcendent of cultural particulars—what Hart terms a “sustained apocalypse.” Gospel does not occur outside or above the cultural, but precisely within it. This distinction is accompanied by a philosophical shift away from the modern “turn to the subject,” with its attendant splits (sender/receiver), and toward philosophical hermeneutics,, which provides for what I am designating as as “the in-between” as a mediating space (a staging for the appearing) for shared understanding. The telos of mission would shift accordingly from contextualization to understanding as a fusion of horizons, keeping the gospel in the mode of news.
1 David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023) 135, 143.
2 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd edition (New York: Orbis, 2009).
3 David Bosch claims that the telos of mission as contextualization is a fairly recent development, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York:Orbis, 2011), 412.
4 I am all in favor of translation as an indispensable activity in mission. Sanneh’s claims press further than this, putting all of mission under the rubric of “translation.”
5 Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996), 27-28.
6 Sanneh, Translating the Message, 156.
7 Walls, 26, 46.
8 Sanneh, 65.
9 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 156.
10 Sanneh, 106.
11 Walls makes this point with clarity. He reads the experience of the early Christians in Antioch, where Jew and Gentile worshipped together for the first time, as a calculated risk to “drop the time-honored word Messiah” for the word “Lord,” a risk Walls claims “saved the Christian faith for the world.” The Missionary Movement, 17-18.
12 Jennings, 158-159.
13 For a historical account of the development of “culture” from the perspective of a theologian, see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).
14 Hart, 143.
15 These conclusions are stated most clearly in the final two chapters of Tradition and Apocalypse. Early in the final chapter he prefaces his argument this way: “I do not assume before beginning my reflections that there exists any account of Christian tradition that can plausibly demonstrate either the historical or logical coherence of its doctrinal developments and institutional expressions. . . Any real, living, and organic unity is shaped, governed, and sustained by a teleology, which is to say at once the intrinsic limit to and perfect realization of all its potentialities.” Hart,154.
16 Hart, 88.
17 Hart, 94.
18 Hart, 137.
19 The recovery of Paul’s “Jewishness” in recent scholarship highlights the apocalyptic framework that pervades his writings. Unlike the typical Reformation reading of Paul which focuses on the salvation of the individual sinner by faith through grace, Paul’s focus is seen to be eschatological and cosmic. Cf. James Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, (Eerdmans, 2008) as a primer for the broad movement in Pauline scholarship that encompasses the work of prominent scholars: e.g. Wright, Hays, Beker, Martyn, Gorman, Sampley, Achtemeier, and many others.
20 I like Arland Hultgren’s distinction between “forensic” understandings of salvation and Paul’s “apocalyptic” gospel. “The forensic (anthropological/anthropocentric) imagery is all but completely overshadowed by apocalyptic (theological/theocentric) imagery. While a forensic residue remains, Paul’s gospel essentially sets forth a message of the revelation of God’s righteousness. The forensic model is anthropological and anthropocentric: how can the sinner be justified before God? The apocalyptic imagery employed by Paul is theological and theocentric: what does the gospel of the atoning death of Christ say about God and God’s action toward the world?” Hultgren, Paul’s Gospel and Mission, (Fortress, 1985) 37.
21 This recurring nature of good news might be seen most clearly in 1 Cor 15:2 where Paul refers to the gospel as that which was “received (past tense), in which you stand (present tense), through which you are being saved (ongoing future tense).”
22 James Brownson, Speaking the Truth in Love: New Testament Resources for a Missional Hermeneutic (TPI, 1998).
23 An objection might be raised that Paul speaks of the gospel as a message, and even narrows the message proclaimed to a brief summary of the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances in 1 Cor 15. This is true on the surface of things, but the message proclaimed by Paul encompasses past, present, and future which speaks to its ongoing eventfulness. Also, Paul often depicts the result of his preaching as something that happened in a demonstrable way (e.g. 1 Thess 1:6; Gal 3:1-2). His views of preaching conform to Hebrew understandings of the word that accomplishes what it proclaims. “The gospel happened among you, not in word only, but also in power and the Holy Spirit with full conviction” (1 Thess 1:6, translation mine).
24 This is a quote from a presentation Heim made at Rochester University, October 2018. These sentiments can be found in S. Mark Heim, The Depths of the Riches, A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Eerdmans, 2001) 136-139.
25 David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission, 20th anniversary edition, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), 430.
26 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Continuum, 1985).
27 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham: Duke, 2003). Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 3rd edition, John Thompson, translator (New York:Routledge, 2003).Taylor defines a social imaginary as being reflected in norms, habits, and rituals in addition to theories.
28 This is stated plainly in Sanneh, 81, and critiqued by Jennings, 160-161.
29 Jennings, 158-159. There is much at stake here for Jennings. The move away from the particularity of Israel’s Christ and toward an unmoored universalism, an abstraction in which faith too easily becomes “my faith,” results in the loss of place, and with it the loss of bodies, leaving Black bodies susceptible to a racial imagination resulting in subjugation.
30 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, John Thompson, translator (Cambridge, 2016), 91-94.
