Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

it: thus, the ongoing siren call of the postmoderns toward ‘tolerance,’ not truth. When
Christianity ceases to be counter-cultural and committed to its foundations, it begins to
embrace the surrounding culture, attempting to please it, rather than prophetically
challenge it. Christianity in much of the West has lost its sense of purpose, or raison
d'etre. A church at peace with its surroundings has lost its antithetical position, preferring
comfort and compromise, whose heart has become apathetic. “The church remains
socially and salvifically relevant only as long as it is in tension with culture” (Hunsberger,
1996:78; cf., Mat. 10:34-39).
Another clear signal that Western Christianity has lost its direction and first love (cf.,
Rev. 2:4f) is that for many Christian scholars in the West, theologizing has become an
almost endless rehashing of the past -- rather than engagement with present and future
challenges. The mainline churches do not seem to know what to do about their decline,
neither are they willing to make the changes necessary to bring true and lasting change
about -- so deep is their compromise with culture. Andrew F. Walls says that proper
theologizing is occasional and local in character. Any organization that is self-consumed
and backwards looking, is an organization in decline. Forward-looking, progressive, and
proactive organizations need to be cognizant of history, but must not be stuck in the past.
It is a historiographic truism that one moves forward best with an understanding of the
failures of the past, yet not living in the past. African theologian John Mbiti wisely
observes:
It is utterly scandalous for so many Christian
scholars in [the] old Christendom to know so
much about heretical movements in the second
and third centuries, when so few of them know
anything about Christian movements in areas
of the younger churches (John Mbiti, in
Jenkins, 2002:4).
Christians in the non-Western world do not often have time to ponder the theological
minutia their Western peers do. The often harsh realties of life in the Two-Thirds World
(e.g., poverty, AIDS, natural disasters) means that theologizing done there has little place
for “the barren, sterile, time-wasting by-paths into which so much Western theology and
research has gone in recent years. Theology in the Third World will be, as theology at all
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa