Contextual theology is having a moment. Consider the Canadian Institute for Empirical Church Research (CIECR) at Wycliffe College. Dr Gina Zurlo from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity was one of the keynote speakers at CIECR’s December 2024 conference of Church researchers and leaders. Her topic focused on global Christianity by the numbers. No surprise then that January’s Theology Pub Night featured Dr Victor Ezigbo chatting with CIECR’s executive director Dr Stephen Hewko on Everything “wrong” with Global Christianity.
Perhaps it takes someone like Dr Victor Ezigbo to invite a room of diverse listeners to the considered work of contextualizing their theology. Ezigbo is Wycliffe College’s first Professor of World Christianity and Intercultural Ministry and was less than a month into his tenure at Wycliffe when he shared at Pub Night. He captured and held the room's interest through his careful weaving of personal testimony, anecdotes from his research, and history (Bible, Church, African, Indian).
Ezigbo embodies the interdisciplinary scholarship he believes you need to grasp the “World” in World Christianity. He is curious, open, and as he describes it, willing to have a coffee with someone whose devotion to Christ may challenge his. For Ezigbo, theology is about answering the questions people have about God, and while we must always deal with the translatability of the Christian faith, we must also deal with its integrity. The non-negotiables of the Christian faith, regardless of contexts, are neither theological issues nor beliefs rendered by theologians writing from a particular framework, time or place. Rather, they lie in “the recognition of what the Scripture tells us about Jesus of Nazareth.”
“We know that people’s devotion to Christ will vary from place to place and from culture to culture,” he said. ‘People devote themselves to Christ for different reasons. And as they dialogue with the person of Christ, they also reveal something about their own culture, about their own experience, about their own struggles, about the questions that they address to Him.”
A scholar trained in systematic theology whose research interests and work have unpacked and broadened the field of contextual theology at large, Ezigbo shared that the main issue contextual theology surfaces is that of relationship: what is the best way to understand the relationship between the Christian faith, especially the Gospel, and the diverse cultures that the Christian faith encounters?
To understand that relationship, Ezigbo invited his listeners to think about what “World Christianity” is not.
It is not “global Christianity” - the common denominators shared by Christian communities around the world. It is not Christianity “somewhere else” – like the international foods section at a supermarket. It is not “Christianity in the non-Western world” – a derivative of Western Christianity brought by missionaries. Nor is it a term that references the Christian faith’s “sudden” acquisition of multiculturalism. As we read in the New Testament, the Christian faith has always been bicultural.
What then is World Christianity? Ezigbo suggested that its animating core is communal devotion to Jesus in all its variegated manifestations and developmental trajectories. It is the recognition that you don’t have to become a Westerner to be truly Christian – the problem with the Christendom mindset that played a significant role in the European advancement of the Christian faith. It means that different cultures will have different words and metaphors to describe Jesus: Messiah (Jews in Jesus’s day), Lord (Greek-speaking Christians and Gentiles), ancestor (Nigerian "grassroots" communities).
“Let’s take an interdisciplinary approach to the issues of contextualized theology,” Ezigbo suggests. “It’s one thing to explain who Jesus Christ is to someone using their own metaphors, like ancestor, but as they engage this Christ from the wells of their own context, they’re going to have questions for Him. What do you do about that? Let’s train theologians to engage those questions.”
He hopes Wycliffe will be a place where grassroots theologians and academics can meet to dialogue, and where students can be trained to move beyond explanatory models of contextual theology.
As a theologian, he's "come to recognize the finitude of the human mind when dealing with the mystery of God and the mystery of Christ." As he put it on Pub Night: "We need the eyes of all these Christian communities around the world to begin to fully appreciate what Paul talks about as the depth and width and breadth of the love of Christ. And as we do this, we will learn from each other.”
