Theological Education and Contextualisation

Explores: Contextualisation theory’s emergent critique of theological education, amidst an historical awakening of “Majority World Churches” to responsibility for participation in the missio Dei:

1. Contextualisation Theory

   A New Way of Theologising · Effective Engagement with Context

2. Signs of the Times

   Discerning Signs of the Times · Responding to Signs of the Times · Emergence of World Christianity

In the aftermath of its establishment, contextualisation rapidly became a “blanket term for a variety of theological models” (Bosch 1991, 421). However, the original intent of Asian theological educator Shoki Coe was straightforward: “an initiative to rethink and reform theological education” (Shenk 2005b, 47), wrestling it away from the historical influence of Western tradition and hegemony and redefining it’s purpose to fit it more appropriately to the needs of the emerging indigenous churches of the Majority World.

Theological education as not primarily for the few who are going into the ordained ministry, but for the whole people of God (Coe 1973, 239).

This assertion summarises one of the bedrock convictions that Coe held about the nature of an appropriate reformation of theological education. In particular, he wanted to highlight inappropriate distinctions between clerical ministers and laity, if that distinction in any way obscured the vocational service of “the whole community and every individual member of it”:

Appropriate theological education is the education of the whole church for its mission in the world, and our program of theological education in any church should start at this point, rather than concentrating exclusively on the training of a very small group in a more restricted and technical sense … From what has been said above, it is hardly necessary to emphasize that the ministry of the Church belongs to the Church as a whole as well as to every member within it. There are no ‘lay’ members of the Church who are without a ministry in it; the Church is a ministerial priesthood of the laity or people of God. We must not allow the development of a special order of diakonoi to obscure the truth that the whole community and every individual member of it has a ministry which participates in the one ministry of Christ (Hwang 1962, 14).

The question effectively posed by Coe — who published his earlier papers under the name C.H. Hwang — is, thus, how can theological education be appropriately reformed to uphold this foundational, formational, unified purpose so that every member is being equipped for vocational service?

Unified bibliography.