Contextualization be Damned

The Church is a distinct “language group.” In some obvious senses, that is not true…

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[But] Pentecost reversed Babel, overcoming the babble which followed God’s judgment upon the rebellious nations…

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In that Pentecostal sense, the Church speaks and must speak one language. We have one confession, and with the confession comes a distinct way of naming the world and unique categories for interpreting creation and history.

As a language group, the Church is called to maintain and develop her own, Scriptural naming of the world. When the Church enters a new mission field, she always comes into an existing culture in which the world is pre-classified. The Church enters that situation with a new classification and new names. That is the mission: Christian language penetrates an existing language, and the Church begins to attach new labels to everything she finds.

Contextualization be damned. The Church’s mission is not to accommodate her language to the existing language, to disguise herself so as to slip unnoticed and blend in with the existing culture. Her mission is to confront the language of the existing culture with a language of her own.

Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, 52.