Inculturation

Inculturation is the process by which a religion, in Christian usage, the gospel, takes root in a particular culture and comes to express itself in that culture's forms. The term is Catholic and twentieth-century, becoming standard after the Second Vatican Council, and it is distinguished from the older "adaptation" or "accommodation" by claiming a deeper and mutual process: the culture shaping the expression of the faith, and the faith transforming the culture.

The underlying question is as old as the religion. Acts 15 records the first and decisive instance, whether gentile converts had to be circumcised and keep the Jewish law, and the decision in the negative is what made Christianity portable in a way it would otherwise not have been. Every subsequent expansion raised the question again.

Its most instructive episode is the Chinese Rites controversy. Jesuit missionaries in China from the late sixteenth century, Matteo Ricci foremost among them, adopted Chinese dress and learning, used existing Chinese terms for God, and judged the ancestral and Confucian rites to be civil honours compatible with Christian faith. Dominicans and Franciscans disagreed, holding them idolatrous. Rome eventually ruled against the Jesuit position, decisively in 1704 and 1715 and again in 1742. The Kangxi emperor responded by restricting Christian missions, and the church in China was set back for two centuries. The rulings were substantially reversed in 1939, and the episode is now generally treated within the Catholic Church as an error and serves as the standing cautionary example in discussions of inculturation. The parallel controversy over the Malabar rites in India followed the same course.

Modern practice has gone considerably further. Vernacular liturgy after Vatican II; African and Indian liturgical adaptations; the use of local music, art, architecture and gesture; and the Zaire Use of the Roman rite, approved in 1988, are the visible results. Theological inculturation, using local philosophical vocabularies to express Christian doctrine, as African, Indian and Latin American theologians have done, goes further still, and African episcopal conferences have made it a sustained priority.

The limits are where the argument sits. Critics warn of syncretism, of adopting practices carrying meanings incompatible with the faith, and of a relativism in which the gospel becomes whatever a culture already believed. Advocates reply that the alternative is not a culture-free Christianity but an unacknowledged European one, and that Greek philosophical vocabulary and Roman legal categories were themselves inculturation, since naturalised by long use and no longer recognised as local. Both observations are correct, which is why the question of where the line falls has never been settled in principle and is argued case by case.

The word inculturation is younger than the practice it names, and tracing when it hardened into official vocabulary is itself informative. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit superior general, is usually credited with popularising the specific term inculturation in a 1978 letter to the Society of Jesus, proposing it as a translation nearer to "incarnation" than the older missiological word "adaptation" allowed. Paul VI's 1975 exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi had already argued for evangelisation reaching a culture's own criteria of judgement and values without the word itself. John Paul II then used inculturation repeatedly and gave it magisterial weight, including in Redemptoris Missio in 1990.

Protestant missiology arrived at a related idea by a different route and a different name. "Contextualization" is generally traced to a 1972 report of the Theological Education Fund on training for ministry, and it was developed partly as a corrective within Protestant circles wary of a term so closely associated with Catholic magisterial usage. The two words are now often treated as near-equivalents, though contextualization's Protestant origin carries a stronger emphasis on the local church's own theological agency and a lighter one on institutional ratification from a centre.

Orthodoxy rarely uses either word, not from indifference to the question but because its own account of liturgical translation, running back to Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs, treats vernacular and local liturgical form as an ordinary consequence of autocephaly rather than a distinct theological project needing its own name.