Abstract: This essay critically evaluates Charles
Kraft’s contributions to the theoretical and practical development of
cross-cultural communication through his ‘incarnational’ model, where the
‘supracultural’ God becomes fully human through Jesus to interact with human
beings, thereby communicating across the gap between his supracultural realm
and that of culture-bound humanity, achieving receptor-orientated communication.
Strengths to his theoretical contribution include the simplicity of his model,
described by scholars as “innovative in theoretical formulation, illustrative
in field experience, practical in illustrations, comprehensive in coverage,
etc.” Critics say the model is biblical but not scriptural, a form of
reductionist theology, ignores the role of the Holy Spirit, and is not possible
to live out. Kraft’s model is a valuable cross-cultural gospel communication
tool which is a lot more effective than the old colonial model. The question is
how one can draw a line between dynamic equivalence and over-contextualisation.
A recommended approach is to be humble learners, taking the locals’ culture
seriously and trying to see the world from their perspective, and being open to
the work of the Holy Spirit.
This essay critically evaluates Charles
Kraft’s contributions to the theoretical and practical development of
cross-cultural communication through his ‘incarnational’ model. I will indicate
the strengths and weakness of his theoretical contribution with reference to a
range of other writers on culture and communication and pay particular
attention to the potential value of his work to the communication of the
Christian message to those of a different cultural or religious worldview.
Charles Kraft was born into a non-Christian
family in Connecticut in 1932. While he was still a child his mother
was dramatically converted through a letter from a cousin, who was a graduate
of Wheaton College and a missionary in Sudan. So he grew up hearing about
missions, Africa and Wheaton.
He intentionally studied at Wheaton to prepare for missionary service. He went
to Nigeria in 1957 to do missions.
In his mission work in Nigeria, he became involved in linguistics and its
application to Bible translation.
The growth was so rapid there that he was baptising 150 a month. Kraft had witnessed and often encouraged the transition from the old colonial model,
where the focus was on telling others what enlightened outsiders thought
“locals” should know to enabling locals to see Jesus in their context.
He limited himself to teaching the leaders and baptising and he lets the
Nigerian leaders do all the preaching, evangelising and grassroots teaching.
Kraft observes that in many mission lands
the nationals see very little difference between the role of “missionary” and
that of “colonial government administrator”.
The Nigerians whom Kraft worked with assigned such a high prestige to the
missionary role that they were virtually regarded as fitting into the “God”
category rather than into the “human being” category. This type of stereotyping
meant that the Nigerians think the missionaries were not expected to operate by
the same rules the human beings operate by,
producing a predictable, isolating and depersonalising definition of the
position and activities of the missionary.
This is a situation similar to that which God faced in his relationships with
the Jewish people over the years in spite of his association with them.
Humans had come to feel that God, being so far “out of it” with respect to the
problems and difficulties of the human scene, could not possibly understand
what “human beingness” is really like.
So we fitted God into a stereotype that effectively insulated us from active
concern about God or our relationship with God. But then God in Jesus broke out
of that stereotype and incarnated himself into a real human being among us,
making himself vulnerable, able to be talked back to, able to be criticised by
humans, able to be tempted. Though Jesus was God and had every right to remain
God, he refused to cling to his rights as God, so that we could actually see,
hear and touch him as he dwelt, not above or apart from us, but truly among us.
Kraft believes there are four principles
for breaking stereotypes. 1) Frame of reference: People attempting to
communicate with each other on the basis of different frames of reference find
that very little, if any, of the intended information gets across in
undistorted form.
If God simply spoke a “heavenly language” rather than a human language, the
message would not get across. Therefore, God has chosen to operate within the
linguistic frame of reference of human receptors of his message.
2) Predictability: The more predictable the less impact. God had a choice of
means he could employ to communicate his life-saving message to humans. He
could have became a human being and simply announced that he was God, or simply
fitted into the stereotyped understanding that humans had of God. If he fitted
into these predictions, he might well have been accepted by the Pharisees, but
this means the communicational impact of his life would have been only slightly
above the zero level. Whereas, if someone said, “God came to earth as a
peasant,” or God associated with prostitutes and crooked tax collectors,” these
statements make an impact even today because they are so unpredictable, so out
of line with the stereotype.
3) Specificity: Even if the communication is verbal, a greater impact is made
by specific, detailed descriptions of real life, or even illustrative parables
describing true-to-life events. Therefore, Jesus’ life-specific parables and
miracles communicated infinitely more to us concerning God than would all of
the theological abstractions.
4) Discovery: Jesus waited for discovery to take place regarding his identity.
Communication theorists have developed a
series of models based on three fundamental components in the communication process:
the sender, the message, and the receptor.
Kraft believes revelation needs to be receptor orientated because human beings
are totally immersed in culture, while God is ‘supracultural’, therefore God
uses human culture as the milieu within which he interacts with human beings,
thereby communicating across the gap between his supracultural realm and that
of culture-bound humanity.
Kraft believes this model is applicable to missions. Many people of mission
lands may make a series of predictable statements about the missionaries. But
if someone says “This missionary acts like a real human being!” this means
there has been a breaking of the stereotype.[21]
If the missionary’s activity consistently contradicts the stereotype in the
direction of locals’ definition of humanness, the kind of human-to-human basis
for communication that the incarnation employs is established.
Kraft was strongly influenced by the
thinking, teaching, and writing of Eugene Nida. Nida would weave
anthropological, linguistic, communication and missiological principles into a
series of real-life stories.
Evangelical response to Kraft’s ethno theological model of integrating
communication and social sciences with theology varied from positive to
negative. Kraft’s
model is relatively simplistic and is described positively by various scholars
as “innovative in theoretical formulation, illustrative in field experience,
practical in illustrations, comprehensive in coverage, etc.”
Kraft often emphasises that the Bible is not intended to be a textbook in
theology, but rather it is a casebook about mission: God’s mission and our
mission. Well
respected evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry was critical about whether
Kraft is evangelical.
Carson, another critic, believes that Kraft’s reliance on contemporary
hermeneutics has gone too far in that by treating the Bible as a casebook, in
which different narratives or passages might reasonably applied to one
particular culture but not to another instead of asking how the pieces fit
together. The
reason for this criticism is because Carson believes that a truly
contextualised theology is one in which believers from a particular culture
seek to formulate a comprehensive theology in the language and categories of
their own culture, but based on the whole bible. Western Christendom has
generated its liberal Jesus, Marxist Jesus, Mormon Jesus and so forth, but from
the perspective of the Christian who believes that the Scriptures are
authoritative, the core problem behind these reductionist and faddish
theologies is their abandonment of the biblical data.
Wan refutes Kraft’s statement that the
Bible is only “potential revelation” until the recipient interprets it to have
“meaning” using “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” Article III. Wan
believes Kraft’s extensive, almost exclusive use of the communication model and
the emphasis on God’s “dynamic continuous interaction” with humanity would have
similar effects of denying the closed “canon” of the Bible historically and
thus confusing “inspiration” with “illumination”.
God is not just the “message” of Christian communication. Jesus, the Incarnate
Word, is not just the “master/effective communicator”.
The gospel is not like any “message.” Evangelism is not like any communication.
“Communication” is only one dimension of reality. Wan concludes that to be
communication-reductionist is to be simplistic in theory, so Kraft’s biblical
interpretation and missiological formulation is “biblical” but not “scriptural”.
Bevan observes Kraft’s model hold the notion that Christianity is
supra-cultural and questions whether a supra-cultural message, a gospel core, a
naked gospel really exist?
It is important to remember that Kraft
never identifies himself as a theologian. He is a
linguist/communicologist/missiologist.
One of Kraft’s major missionary tasks was to translate the Scripture. In the
mission field, Kraft had to struggle with miscommunication caused by the
intrusion of foreign forms in communicating the gospel in Africa.
It is also interesting to note that Kraft came into conflict with the mission
leaders when he opposed the mission policy against baptising believing
polygamists. This was a society where in order for a man to be a leader he
needed to have more than one wife.
So the mission leaders asked him not to return to Nigeria.
Hiebert, another missiological anthropologist, on the other hand, had to
struggle with syncretism in the Indian cultural context in his mission field.
For him, certain cultural forms, such as syncretism, have more or less deviated
from biblical truth, and he affirms that certain elements within cultural
systems need to be changed or rejected at the beginning point of mission
practice. The
question is, how can we draw a line between dynamic equivalence and
over-contextualisation?
Wan also notes evangelism is different from
other kinds of communication in that it is not human centred. It involves
spiritual repentance and conversion and spiritual reality of being born-again.
“Scripturally” speaking, evangelism is not just a Christian’s effort to
minimise the negative elements of the gospel to “market it” for effective
membership recruitment for a “Christian club”. It is a divinely
motivated/enabled/guided Christian’s effort to make committed disciples whose transformed
lives should be nurtured in the Christian fellowship of the church.
Although the Holy Spirit does not appear in Kraft’s model, it is useful to look
at Kraft’s life to further explore the role of the Holy Spirit in his life and whether
he lived out his own model. Kraft himself described experiencing a “second
conversion” or a “paradigm shift” whereby he had a new view regarding the
nature of the Holy Spirit’s role in the realm of human beings,
after which his personality changed significantly: he became a gentler,
humbler, more caring person.
Kraft had been trained as a Bible translator and his vision resulted in a
creative new program in which over one hundred Bible translators have done
master’s and doctor’s degrees and they are in turn training other translators
in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
So I think the Holy Spirit has a transformative effect in his life and
ministry.
On the other hand, incarnational
identification with the people among whom we live and serve does not mean we
try to “go native.” We cannot, because we already have been shaped and moulded
by another culture. Whiteman admits that in over 30 years of studying
missionaries, he has yet to find anyone who “went too far.” Rather, he suggests
that we can approach the natives as humble learners, taking their culture
seriously and anxious to see the world from their perspective.
In fact, today, Wheaton Graduate School no longer offers a master’s degree in
communication and Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies no longer emphasises
a concentration in communication.
In conclusion, Kraft’s best contribution to
interdisciplinary integration is his insightful analysis of language,
translation, communication and his masterful synthetic model of communication,
such that even his critics complement him.
Kraft has helped many of us to see the importance of doing ministry in context
armed with anthropology, communication, and power tools designed to help us
reach out to real people who seek a relationship with God.
However, models are just ways of dealing with a more complex reality.
The problem is one of integration and application, as communication needs to be
an integrated function in all aspects of missiology.
A recommended approach is to be humble learners, taking the locals’ culture
seriously and trying to see the world from their perspective, and being open to
the work of the Holy Spirit.
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