Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 12:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: The Sonship Of Christ In The Contexts Of Mission: Chalcedonian Retrieval As Missiological Necessity Among Muslims
Author: Brandon D. Smith

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The Sonship Of Christ In The Contexts Of Mission: Chalcedonian Retrieval As Missiological Necessity Among Muslims

Brandon D. Smith

Cedarville University

Matthew Aaron Bennett

Cedarville University

From its earliest days, Christianity is a faith that has demonstrated its ability to be articulated, believed, and practiced in a multitude of cultural contexts. Its Scriptures have been translated into a multitude of languages, and its manifestations have appeared in countless places and eras. The task of the Christian missionary, then, is the translation of the unchanging message of the gospel into the changing contexts of the world in a perennial dance requiring exegesis of both text and context. To avoid the imposition of extra-contextual interpretive pressure, some missionaries and global theologians encourage the development of contextual Christologies that prioritize concepts and terms relevant and native to the culture over biblical or creedal terminology. To the contrary, this article contends that the Chalcedonian articulation of the Sonship of the second person of the trinity has enduring cross-cultural relevance for contemporary Christian missiology.

Key Words: Chalcedon, Christology, contextualization, Divine Filial Terms, Insider Movement, missiology, Muslim Idiom Translation, retrieval

Stephen Bevans begins his influential book Models of Contextual Theology with a jarring claim. The first sentence of the first chapter reads, “There is no such thing as ‘theology’; there is only contextual theology.”1 Bevans goes on to provide examples of this claim by listing different adjectives that precede various theological programs, such as African theology, feminist theology, and liberation theology. Bevans’s book illustrates a common understanding among missionaries approaching new cultural contexts, languages, and peoples: the missionary task is successful when it results in the Christian message being expressed in the cultural forms

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native to the context.2

As he presents various models of contextual theology, Bevans provides a broad representation of the contemporary discussion concerning the articulation and application of biblical theology in the process of contextualization. In the first chapter he concludes,

Contextualization points to the fact that theology needs to interact and dialogue not only with traditional cultural value, but with social change, new ethnic identities, and the conflicts that ar...