There has been a growing recognition of a ‘gravitational shift’ in the global Christian population from the western world to the non-western world. Much of this has happened in historical studies and, more recently, the social sciences. In contrast, the Anglophone theological guild is still heavily focused on European theological giants and their various tomes. However, in German-language theological scholarship since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a growing engagement with this gravitational shift in what has been termed ‘intercultural theology’.
Intercultural Theology, an English translation of Judith Gruber's 2013 PhD, originally written in German, attempts to offer theoretical considerations into what this notion offers to the broader study of Christian systematic theology. The book begins with an analysis of the historical developments which gave rise to the German discourse in ‘intercultural theology’ (or Interkulturelle Theologie) and its introduction into Anglophone discourse by Walter J. Hollenweger and Werner Ustorf, both at the University of Birmingham. Gruber helpfully outlines the contours of various twentieth-century predecessors to intercultural theology, missiology and contextual theology. Missiology was born at the turn of the twentieth century out of the study of the art of mission and its goal of implantatio ecclesiae. In contrast, contextual theology arose in the 1960s and 1970s through the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians as a paradigm shift away from missiology's focus on ‘objects of mission’, to a global church with pluriform expressions of local theologies. As these non-European theologians were speaking about contextual theology, European (or German) theologians began to speak about intercultural theology – the ‘inter’ emphasising the intertwined connections the plurality of cultures have with one another.
Following this historical retelling, chapters 3 and 4 offer constructive theological considerations to intercultural theology, by bringing together systematic theology with cultural studies. Chapter 3 argues that systematics needs to take serious account of the cultural turn – the move in the broader humanities and social sciences which has given rise to postcolonial, poststructural and postmodern studies. Gruber convincingly shows that Christian identity has always been intercultural (e.g. ‘neither Jew nor Greek’), and this interculturality demands a radical hermeneutical approach. That is, there ‘is a (radically) hermeneutical circle between the testimony of the church and the manifestations of God's presence in history’ (p. 117). Briefly – and in this reviewer's mind, too briefly – chapter 4 argues that the church has tended to develop normative parameters of Christian identity and, therefore, ‘silenced’ the heterogeneity within the global church by declaring any difference as heresy.
The concluding chapter 5 builds on these prior two chapters to reassess the theological understanding of the biblical canon, arguing that it is both a product and a producer of interculturality. Mainly engaging the Vatican II document Dei Verbum, Gruber challenges established theological approaches to the canon as silencing its inherent interculturality. Instead, with a postcolonial lens, ‘it can be read as a material document of the inclusions and exclusions through which Christian identity was forged under asymmetrical relations of power’ (p. 149). She argues that such readings can unsilence the interculturality of the canon and open up profound theological reconfigurations in the hermeneutical circle between revelation and tradition.
Regretfully, there are some aspects of this book may frustrate some of its readers. For instance, it is surprising that a work of this kind draws primarily on European and (select) North American sources – few majority world writers are referenced. Moreover, having first been written in the faculty of Catholic theology at the University of Salzburg, the text assumes a Catholic readership. Protestant readers may find it surprising to see missiology and contextual theology described with the metaphors of ‘accommodation’ and ‘inculturation’, respectively – two terms dominant in and often limited to Catholic (especially Jesuit) discourse. Likewise, the chapter on canon could have engaged Karl Barth's writings on revelation and the mixed reception Barth received from a number of important European and Asian Christian thinkers. On the other hand, the emphasis on Catholic theology also complements the broader Anglophone discourse in world Christianity, which has tended to revolve around Protestant developments.
Overall, this an important work which introduces Anglophone scholars into the growing debates in German scholarship. Judith Gruber offers readers a provocative reconception of the theological enterprise which challenges the priority of a European hegemony. Moreover, it is a clarion call to fellow theologians to undergo a paradigmatic shift in their discipline in order to reckon with the rapid changes in the global church – or to suffer the fate of obsolescence.
