Review of Contextualization and the Old Testament: Between Asian and Western Perspectives

Hwang, Jerry. Contextualization and the Old Testament: Between Asian and Western Perspectives. Carlisle, UK: Langham Global Library, 2022, pp. 238, $28.99, paperback.

Hwang’s book will challenge many readers such as students and academics of theology from monocultural backgrounds, missiologists with an underdeveloped theology of contextualization of God’s revelation in the OT. However, scholars from both disciplines will greatly benefit from Hwang’s careful and considered reading of themes and methods from both sides that will furnish deeper insights for interdisciplinary scholarship for OT studies and mission.

Jerry Hwang is an Old Testament scholar and associate professor of theology at Trinity Christian College (Illinois) whose writing engages OT studies, Asian culture and missiology. His book, Contextualization and the Old Testament, breaks new ground in an area seldom delved by OT scholars and missiologists alike – the intersection of OT and mission theology in the area of contextualization.

The book seeks to explore the “contextual and contextualizing posture of the OT within its world as models for our methods of contextualization” (10) by doing “Asian contextual theology with Asian ingredients … rather than … something pan-Asian for the sake of outsiders” (18). It is inspired by, and follows up on Dean Fleming’s Contextualization in the New Testament (IVP Academic, 2005). For Hwang (citing Fleming) “‘contextualized theology is not just desirable; it is the only way theology can be done’” (1). Along the way, he addresses the “monocultural West’s anxiety about syncretism in the OT [that] led to the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of contextualization in the OT” (13). 

At the heart of the book are two questions: “[I]s contextualization a well-meaning imposition from Western missiology which neglects to involve non-Western Christians in the process of developing an indigenous theology [and] has the paternalism of Western colonialism been unknowingly reproduced by Western missiology in dictating to non-Western Christians the ‘contextual’ forms their theology ought to take?” (2)

To answer these questions, Hwang introduces the concept and history of (evangelical) contextualization (ch 1) and discusses the foundational matter of language, bible translation and contextual theology (ch 2). Thereafter, six themes in the OT are examined: divine translatability and term questions for “God” (ch 3), official, folk and prosperity religion (ch 4), covenant, law and kinship (ch 5), honor, shame and guilt (ch 6), aniconism and iconography (ch 7), and creation and pantheism (ch 8). Throughout the book, Hwang shows how OT faith is both “distinctive but also firmly grounded in its ancient Near Eastern context” (15).

Three examples highlight his argument and method. Concerning divine translatability and term questions for deity (ch 3), Hwang argues that the Hebrew word for God in the OT, El, has similarities and dissimilarities with other ancient Near East deities (50-52) – that it is an “epithet for a deity whom Abram recognizes as synonymous with Yahweh (Gen 14:22) but when found with unique constructions such as “El the God of Israel” (Gen 33:20) and so on (46:3) El “is a proper name rather than an appellative title (i.e., ‘god/God’)” (51-52). In fact, such “El-compounds identify [God] as a Semitic high god, while also polemicizing against characteristics of both El and Baal” (50). In this perspective, the OT “contains numerous lines of evidence that Israel” was henotheistic, not monotheistic (50, 56). In this way, the OT God situates himself within the ancient Near East context but also contextualizes himself as unique and superior to other gods (56). As an application, if the OT is understood in this way, “the Western [and Islamic] understanding of monotheism that is unable to conceive of other ‘gods’” is problematic (57, 69-70). For example, the English rendering of God (not ‘god’) is capitalized (implying monotheism) and the vexing question whether Yahweh is the “same God” as Allah (in Islam) becomes more complicated due to this original Western presupposition (57-60).

In another chapter (on covenant, law and kinship), Hwang analyzes how a misunderstanding of berit (“covenant”) when rendered as “contract” or “law” comes “at the expense of the kinship ideas underlying the Hebrew term” (94) and a “fixation on the legal basis of ideas of unconditionality and conditionality in conceiving God’s relationship to people” (95). In missiological writings, when the notion of the covenant is later connected to themes of honor and shame, what is easily missed is the understanding that God’s covenant with his people actually “relativizes the power dynamics which typically operate between patrons and clients” (101). Hwang observes that many contemporary missiological writings have emphasized the unequal power dynamics but not its relativization in the OT (108-115). Consequently, a corrective in this is needed in current missiological discussion on honor and shame in Islamic contexts as well as in Chinese contexts.

At the heart of the book are two questions: “[I]s contextualization a well-meaning imposition from Western missiology which neglects to involve non-Western Christians in the process of developing an indigenous theology [and] has the paternalism of Western colonialism been unknowingly reproduced by Western missiology in dictating to non-Western Christians the ‘contextual’ forms their theology ought to take?”

Hwang’s treatment on creation and pantheism (ch 7) is possibly the most thought-provoking and controversial. Here, he asserts how the OT language of nature does not demythologize spiritualized elements from it but rather has similarities with ancient Near East understandings of “vitalism” or “life” in not just the animals and trees but also in the rocks and hills (166-167). As examples, he notes that in the OT, the “earth is a narrative [not just poetic] character in Israel’s history who … can hear God’s voice (Jer 22:29; Mic 1:2), rejoice (Psa 96:11; Isa 49:13), cry out (Gen 4:10), mourn (Isa 24:3; Jer 12:4), eat or swallow (Num 16:34), vomit (Lev 18:25, 28) … in a manner likened to humans” (167). While such examples have been viewed as poetic or metaphorical elements in Western hermeneutics, Hwang believes otherwise. For him, the OT shows how God identifies himself within the pantheistic context and gods of ancient Near East beliefs while at the same time contextualizing himself to be a superior and transcendent Creator (184).

The book’s final chapter concludes with Hwang arguing that it is the OT that provides the key model of how God contextualizes himself and his revelation to people, not “Western” models of how the latter defines what is (orthodox) contextualization or syncretism.

The book brings together many tensions but also creative stirrings that have been gestating in OT, systematic and missiological scholarship in the last two decades that have challenged traditional notions of a dualism in theology, aniconism in systematics and Western vs Eastern dichotomies in missiology. For biblical and systematic theology scholars, it provides a significant corrective to many previous works on contextualization and syncretism in theology and missiology. It is also a thoughtful and thought-provoking work that forces readers to reexamine the lens in which we view the Bible, theology and theologizing.

For missiologists, Hwang has profitably mined reliable interlocutors in the area of world religions also in anthropology to present a more holistic hermeneutic of the OT that upholds the uniqueness of YHWH while unfolding how the OT context places God among the gods in its contextualization.

Hwang’s book will challenge many readers such as students and academics of theology from monocultural backgrounds, missiologists with an underdeveloped theology of contextualization of God’s revelation in the OT. However, scholars from both disciplines will greatly benefit from Hwang’s careful and considered reading of themes and methods from both sides that will furnish deeper insights for interdisciplinary scholarship for OT studies and mission.

If Hwang fulfills the thesis of his book – “the OT’s acts of contextualization within its ancient Near Eastern context [not only] train[s] modern Christians to live faithfully in their various Far Eastern contexts” (15), Christians elsewhere in the world will also find much to appreciate from his work.