Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:56:12.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cross‐cultural Ministry in Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Eugene Hillman CSSp
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

How fruitful is this Decade of Evangelization going to be? The analyses and proposals offered in this essay refer specifically to the missionary enterprise in Africa south of the Sahara. But the implications are much wider, touching even the raison d‘être of each one of Christianity’s multiple ecclesial manifestations.

Because the world‘s irreducible cultural pluralism cannot be ignored with impunity, much less scorned and replaced with alien cultures, the declining esteem for what missionaries have done may be seen as an inevitable consequence of the European and American cultural monomania that produced a network of dependent Western spiritual colonies through sub-Saharan Africa.

Much lip-service was, of course, given in official ecclesiastical documents to the goal of establishing culturally integrated, self-sustaining, indigenous Christian churches with their own vibrant missionary outreach and original cultural contributions to the universal family of Christians. Far from ignoring the local cultures of the people being evangelized, much less destroying them with foreign ways of being human and religious, missionaries were supposed to accept and evangelize the cultures themselves. This has been the official position of the Catholic Church, in theory, ever since St Paul, on this very issue of cultural pluralism, ‘withstood Cephas to his face ... in front of everyone’ (cf. Gal.2; Acts 15).

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 72 , Issue 846 , February 1991 , pp. 59 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Hillman, Eugene, Many Paths: A Catholic Approach to Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 59–60Google Scholar.

2 Arrupe, Pedro, ‘Catechesis and Inculturation’, Teaching All Nations, 15:1 (1978)21Google Scholar.

3 Paul VI, ‘Evangelization in Africa Today’ (26 Sept. 1975), Christ to the World, 21:5 (1976) 294.

4 See Hillman, Eugene, ‘Inculturation’, inThe New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Komonchak, Joseph A. et al (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1987) 510–513Google Scholar. For more on this, see Shorter, Aylward, Toward a Theology of Inculturation (Maryknoll. N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988)Google Scholar; also Gittins, Anthony J., Gifts and Strangers: Meeting the Challenge of Inculturation (New York: Paulist Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

5 Rossano, Pietro, ‘Christ's Lordship in Roman Catholic Perspective’, in Christ's Lordship and Religious Pluralism, edited by Anderson, Gerald A. and Stransky, Thomas F. (Maryknoll. N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1983) 103Google Scholar.

6 Secretariat for Non‐Christians, ‘Attitudes of the Church Toward the Followers of Other Religions: Reflections on Dialogue and Mission’ (1984), reprint in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 9:4 (1985) 187–191.

7 Cox, Harvey, A Christians Encounter with Other Faiths (Boston: Beacon press, 1980), 6Google Scholar.

8 Rahner, Karl, ‘Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’, Theological Investigations 20 (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 78Google Scholar.