Outlined Transcript:
Hi everyone,
I want to begin a new series on one of the books I often receive requests to teach from at seminars, conferences, and seminary classes. It is also one of the standalone books I use in some of the classes I teach. It is called The Transcultural Gospel.
The publisher has recently released a new cover design for the book, so if you go to Amazon, it may look a little different from the version I have here, but the title is the same.
I have also shown you these short booklets before: Christ Our Righteousness, Christ Our Peace, Christ Our Strength, Christ Our Honor, and Christ Our Freedom. These are short study booklets that correspond to the chapters in The Transcultural Gospel.
Resources for Evangelism and Discipleship
The chapters in The Transcultural Gospel are more practical, dealing with pre-evangelism, apologetics, and evangelistic discussions. The smaller booklets are more theological and apologetic, designed for discipleship, answering difficult questions, and helping make applications to unbelievers.
They are intended to work together, although The Transcultural Gospel is also a standalone book. The smaller booklets are easy to carry in a Bible sleeve or throw into a bag, and they work well as simple discussion and study resources.
Christ Our Freedom has recently been translated into Thai, and I think we are going to translate Christ Our Peace into Thai next.
For this video, I simply want to give you a quick overview of the main idea behind the book.
Why “Transcultural”?
I called the book The Transcultural Gospel rather than using the word “supracultural.”
By supracultural, I would mean that the gospel supersedes culture or stands over and above culture. That is certainly part of what I mean when I say the gospel is transcultural. The gospel transcends culture.
But there is another reason I chose the word transcultural. The gospel not only transcends and supersedes culture. It also transforms culture.
I did not want this to be simply a “gospel over culture” approach, although in many ways I tend to lean in that direction. It is also a “gospel transforms culture” approach.
The gospel must first transcend culture. It must stand over culture before it can give meaning to a culture and redefine the value systems within it.
It can mortify, or put to death, the sinful parts of a culture. Some cultures are very far gone and are suffering under the wrath of God's abandonment. Other cultures more closely approximate the image of God and the law of God revealed in nature and in the conscience.
Some of those cultures may be more readily shaped and renewed by biblical meaning, biblical values, and biblical teaching through the law and the gospel.
What the Law and the gospel Do to Culture
I have said in previous videos that the law breaks down what is unholy in a culture, while the gospel can redeem beautiful aspects of a culture that have been tainted and spoiled by the curse.
Sometimes the law and the gospel come into a culture and demolish it to the ground.
Think of an old, dilapidated house. There may simply be no reason to preserve much of it. Perhaps part of the foundation can remain, but the bones, piping, joists, and framing may be decayed, eaten by termites, rusted, rotten, or covered in mold. At that point, it may be better simply to tear it down and rebuild.
As I have shared before, some cultures can become so far gone that something similar is necessary.
Other cultures, however, may more closely approximate the intentions of the law written on the conscience. They may value certain things that are genuinely good. Those things are not sufficiently righteous in themselves, but they may be moving in a right direction.
In those cases, the law and the gospel can make sense of the deeper longings of the human soul that are already present within that culture.
Connecting Felt Needs to the Real Need
That is what my book is trying to explore.
What are the universal human longings? What are people's real needs? What are their felt needs, and how do those felt needs correspond to their true need for the gospel?
As evangelists, missionaries, and Great Commission servants, how do we identify those longings and make sense of them in a way that clearly communicates the gospel without accommodating the gospel to the culture?
How do we communicate the gospel clearly and faithfully without hyper-contextualizing it, taking on too much cultural baggage, or redefining the gospel according to cultural categories?
That is what The Transcultural Gospel is about.
A New Series
The book has been widely used around the world. It has been translated into Burmese, several other translations are underway, and I am frequently asked to speak and teach on its themes.
So in the next several videos, I am going to walk through the book chapter by chapter and give you some simple summary statements from each one.
Stay tuned.
Thanks.