The first noticeable reality of Pentecost was that different people groups were speaking about God (and the gospel) in their own languages. The second reality is that they went home and carried that reality with them and began to form witness in new locations.

John Franke’s new book, Missional Theology, calls all of this “missional multiplicity” and appeals to an older expression of his “manifold witness.” The essential ideas of this chapter are that gospel truth expresses God’s Truth in particular settings in particular ways while also being a faithful witness to the gospel.

Because his favorite words are multiplicity and plurality and diversity he will make uncomfortable those who want uniformity and propositions to form the core of the mission. The ambiguity or tension between the gospel tradition and the local expression is for Franke some kind of compatibilism (I’m using the term as expressed often in Katherine Sonderegger).

It all begins with Pentecost:

The action of the Spirit here effectively decenters any particular language or culture with respect to the proclamation of the gospel and the mission of the church. The implication is that no single language or culture is to be viewed as the sole conduit of the gospel message.

Christian historian and missiologist Lamin Sanneh contrasts this approach to mission with that of Islam, which “carries with it certain inalienable cultural assumptions, such as the indispensability of its Arabic heritage in Scripture,law and religion.” He asserts that, at its best, Christian witness follows the Pentecostal pattern in the Acts narrative and prefers “to make the recipient culture the true and final locus of the proclamation, so that the religion arrives without the presumption of cultural rejection.”

At this point most then critique the missionary movement but such criticisms are often facile. Yes, of course, there was the importation of some Euro-centrism but it’s not that simple because anyone who knows what missionary work was actually like knows story after story of integrated and even localized gospel work. Most of the critics of missionary work don’t do missions at all and wouldn’t have a clue on how to start or what to do. If the critics believe in mission they need to show how it is being done more faithfully.

Back to the expansive impulse of the church in translation. The whole Bible can be read in 698 languages. 1,548 languages have the New Testament, while more than 1,100 have some of the Bible in their language.

The availability of the Bible in these languages has led to the ever-increasing establishment of culturally and socially diverse witnessing communities throughout the world. These new communities are called to live out an alternative way of life in the world as every tribe and nation bears witness to the good news of God’s love for all people.

The upshot of this history is that all churches everywhere, and the theoiogies they affirm, are “culture churches” and “culture theologies.” All bear the marks of their particular cultural settings. All are shaped, in ways both conscious and unconscious, by the assumptions and intuitions that are part of their social and historical contexts, even where they express dissent from aspects of their cultural surroundings.

Franke enters often in this chapter into the tension between Truth and truth, God’s Truth being Truth and our articulations of God’s Truth being truth, and local expression. Whether his compatible approach sustains itself will be tested over time. Of course, the questions arise about the viability of a measured truth in the gospel, in Christology, in the Trinity, and in soteriology – and other facets of theology. He attempts to sustain them in a local context.

Image: Cover Photo

I think he would be helped by studying, for instance, the sermons in Acts where Peter and Paul move from context to context and preach the gospel in each. And from studying the sense of faithful saying in the Pastoral Epistles. The tensions at work may be more soluble with concrete studies of contextual relocations in the New Testament itself.

I like his idea of “manifold witness” better than plurality. I’m not sure he sees them much different.

But he dives into this very problem with his lengthy discussion of Revelation, a discussion that reminds of his previous studies. There is the:

  1. The Word Revealed
  2. The Word Written (Scripture)
  3. The Word Proclaimed

Quite Barthian of course. He wants to maintain an infinite qualitative distinction between God and humans and he wants Truth as truth to be knowable. This is all common theological wrangling, and it’s all very important.

Which raises the bugbear for much of this discussion about plurality: the problem of tradition. He contextualizes tradition.

The Christian tradition, viewed as a series of local theologies, serves as a resource for theology, not as a final arbiter of theological issues or concerns. It provides hermeneutical context or trajectory for the theological task. The history of Christian theology, past theological formulations, the history of Christian worship, and the practices of the Christian community all serve to assist the church in the task of proclaiming the faith in contemporary settings.

Franke enters as well into Truth vs. truths, or truths closer to Truth and farther away from Truth as truths.

Hence, all of this leads – remember this is a kind of precis of more volumes to come – to missional theology being:

  1. Dialogical
  2. Open and committed to the other
  3. Beyond foundations (foundationalism)
  4. Against totality

And therefore theology is fundamentally ongoing and developing and local and full of multiplicity.