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Any consideration of practicing the Christian faith in a religiously pluralistic society or of introducing the Christian faith to a previously isolated society quickly raises a number of questions, including the following: How can the gospel of Jesus Christ and a given culture interact? Does translating the gospel into cultural forms always result in syncretism? Historically, accusations of syncretism flourish in times of pluralism or whenever the prevailing religious consensus is threatened. From the early centuries of the Christian church to colonial Africa to Nazi Germany to modern-day Europe or twenty-first century America, we find allegations of syncretism against some group that is combining gospel and culture in ways we deem inappropriate. In Calvin’s Geneva, for instance, those who wanted to place images inside the sanctuary were labeled syncretists.
If a “pure gospel” is an impossibility and God’s self-revelation occurs through cultural media (human flesh, the texts of the Bible, the acts of individuals or communities, etc.), then revelation and culture, or gospel and culture, will always be intertwined. Often the nature of the interconnectedness between the gospel and human cultures is fraught with conflict. Charges of syncretism are levied when one believes that a particular theological formulation has too much culture and not enough gospel. Others may cry, “Irrelevant!,” when they sense that a theological formulation is too disconnected from the people it is seeking to address.
One way of thinking about the relationship of the gospel and culture is as a continuum with the gospel on one side and culture on the other. Since the pure gospel pole is uninhabitable and the pure culture pole is undesirable for Christians, contemporary theological reflection takes place between the poles, one hopes closer to the gospel side so as to avoid the dreaded syncretism. After all, syncretism was the epithet applied to many early versions of African Christianity that made colonial Europeans nervous. Could you have Christians who played drums or danced in worship, who visited “traditional” healers, or who did not wear neckties? Many Africans learned about neckties at the same time and from the same people who taught them about Jesus Christ. Today many African men are tired of wearing neckties (and other Western and colonial trappings), but they want to hold on to Jesus Christ. So they are trying to figure out what it was they learned about Jesus Christ that was so wrapped up in Western culture that it should be thrown out with the necktie and what about Jesus is authentic revelation that should be kept and repackaged in African cultural categories.
Typically, the label of syncretism has been applied by those in power to discredit a differing or a challenging view. “Syncretism” thus often has a negative connotation. Barth barely referred to syncretism at all, and when he did it was clearly something to avoid or overcome. Bediako quipped that the goal of theological reflection was “relevance without syncretism.” More recently, some postcolonial theologians and others on the underside of power have sought intentionally to embrace the label of syncretism. While each case would need to be evaluated on its own, the actions of these authors raise an important question: to some degree, are all Christians syncretists? If all theology is engaged and articulated in cultural categories and a pure gospel is not possible, then all of us are mixing theology and culture and all of us are syncretists. The charge then becomes that you are more syncretistic than I am. In response to centuries of Westerners labeling African Christianity as syncretistic, Bediako replied that he believed that Western Christianity was more syncretistic than African Christianity and that Western syncretism was worse because Westerners did not know where their cultural convictions stopped and their theological convictions began.
The flat continuum of gospel and culture, with syncretism somewhere in the middle, fails to account for real-life complexities and also treats the gospel and culture as polar opposites instead of culture as a means to convey the gospel. Our understanding of syncretism needs to be revised and rethought. For those who find cultural expressions of the gospel threatening, what if syncretism was not hurled as an insult but instead was considered as an opportunity to expand one’s understanding of the gospel, or even of expanding the gospel itself?
(Excerpted from chapter 6)
