EMQ » July–September 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 3
By Mika Vähäkangas
Pickwick Publications, 2020
216 pages
US$26
Reviewed by Xiaowen Jiang, a student at Fuller Theological Seminary.
In Context, Plurality, and Truth: Theology in World Christianities, Mika Vähäkangas argues that increasing ethnic diversity and cultural and religious plurality due to globalization present a challenge to Christian theology. Vähäkangas, a Lutheran Finnish Protestant theologian, spends half of his time teaching and doing research in Africa. He uses many examples from Africa in support of his argument.
In the introduction, Vähäkangas describes how Christianity is currently changing and presents the aim and structure of this study. He proposes that diversity and pluralism are not new things but are simply increasingly recognized. His book is a reaction to the phenomenon in the theological dimension. In next section, he examines the connection between globalization and Christianity and discusses the economic, informational, and cultural dimensions of globalization, as well as their impact on Christianity and its theology. In light of these factors, the author argues for a renewal of theology, illustrating the necessity of theological renewal in a modern pluralistic world in the next section. He argues that theology, once a Eurocentric discipline, needs to “take the present context seriously” (63) to retain its academic and ethical credibility without losing its relevance to the faith community.
The next sections discuss the concept of contextuality. Section 4 examines “the relationship between religious truth and its context-boundedness…and its roots in Christian traditions” (64). While analyzing the existing theories of contextual theology, Vähäkangas argues that they are too academically orientated to reflect the spirituality and practice of the Global South. In section 5, he proposes a model of contextual theology based on Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and Stephen Bevans’s Models of Contextual Theology. In section 6, the author controversially argues that Christianity and its theology are essentially syncretistic, meaning that as Christianity takes root in a culture, it draws from the culture’s religious and philosophical elements, leading to various and multifaceted expressions. The author argues that this translatability of Christianity, founded upon the incarnation, contributes to its spread across cultures.
The last section addresses how theologies maintain pluralism while avoiding submitting to relativism. Vähäkangas proposes four inter-related concepts of theology: God is the ultimate Mystery, God reveals himself, theological concepts are expressed in words, and religious languages express various connotations. The last section summarizes what the previous sections have argued.
Context, Plurality, and Truth is a must-read for students and scholars in systematic theology and mission studies. The question the author attempts to answer, “How can we make theological sense of religious plurality both within and outside Christianity?” is relevant to both missions and theology. Vähäkangas’s recognition of the practical character of the South’s theology is brilliant, which echoes Peter Phan’s observation that Asian theology is practical rather than propositional. Vähäkangas’s response to the challenge of pluralism and crisis of relativism is worthy of the attention of contextual theologians.
For Further Reading
Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Bevans, Stephen. Six Models of Contextual Theology. Orbis Books, 2002.
Bevans, Stephen. An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective. Orbis Books, 2009.
