What you see depends on where you are standing. What you can tell others about what you see depends on how you speak, relate and act. Whether or not others are convinced about your vision depends on culture, desire and imagination. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Graham Ward writes seeking an answer to the question: ‘What makes a belief believable?’ (p. 1). He writes from the standpoint of one engaged in a mission to the pluralistic, postsecular, globalised city. How does one do theology in this context? How does one enter the conversation with a believable, prophetic, culture-changing voice? In this three-chapter book, Ward exa-mines a case from the history of theology, applies theories of culture change from anthropology, and deploys notions of cultural production to shed light on the relationship between cultural transformation and religious practice.

Ward begins with an analysis of the discursive practices of theologians to see how Karl Barth was able to enter the conversation of his times, both as an agent in his own right and as subject to the discourse that had gone on before he arrived. Barth was able to change the flow of the conversation. Ward asks how Barth, within his habitus of possibilities and imaginaries, was able to fashion a challenge to the dominant discourse that was believable. Interestingly, though Barth criticised Schleiermacher and tried to situate himself as being countercultural, his practice was to do contextual theology. Ward claims that it was this productive syncretism that made his theology believable.

In Ward's project, ‘cultural negotiation is always syncretistic’ (p. 16). This dynamic syncretism is the place where there is hope (p. 5) and cultural transformation (p. 11). A theology spoken in language beyond the habitus cannot be understood, much less believed.

Ward agrees with postmodern anthropology that culture is contingent on the materials at hand, constructed continuously by agents, and contested in a variety of arenas (p. 47). This is what makes culture change not only possible but, counter intuitive as it may seem, the normal state of affairs. Thus, cultural production is always an exercise in power which cultural hermeneutics deconstructs and exposes.

This approach opens a way for a cultural practice that holds great promise. Though Ward does not pursue the issue, an important missiological question is this: if Barth can do theology in his context, can Kabalua (or any other local person) do theology in her context? Ward's position, that theology can only be done within the local community with local materials through local hermeneutics, leads to the conclusion that all theologies are local theologies. Just so: if theology is to be believable, prophetic and culture-changing, it must both emerge from and speak to its local context.

This position opens up the possibility that knowledge, even truth, can be powerful and persuasive precisely because it is local and relational, not because it can make the claim to be universal and detached. This subverts the notion of epistemic privilege and resists epistemic marginalisation. Yet, this position need not fall into an individualistic relativism because we are talking from the standpoint of a community, from within a tradition that itself may have internal diversity.

This is where the incarnation defines truth; the universal God has been made known to us best in the scandal of the particular Jesus. All knowledge of God is incarnational, meaningful in time and place, or else superficial. Local hermeneutic community theologies are not only possible, but necessary for the full theological reflection of the church.

Ward's project is really about the practice of apologetics in culture, the only place it can be practised. There are times, however, when the argument seems limited to Western cultural categories. Kant made the mistake of imagining only two levels: the local individual and a universal level of reality. Perhaps this was because he could only envision German culture in between. Ward does hint at a ‘hierarchy of standpoints’, but we might take the argument farther by speaking of ‘nested hermeneutics’. The anthropologist, Reyna, suggests that there are layered hermeneutical schema, beginning with neurons and synapses and rising through various levels of individual and group organisation (Stephen P. Reyna, Connections: Brain, Mind, and Culture in a Social Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002)). Reyna argues that this ‘interpretative hierarchy’ works with memories to discern the present and envision the future. In fact, there are many layers of interpretation, not just public and private.

Ward's points are well taken, even if the read is a difficult journey. But, if we are going to continue down the path of developing local theology, then we need to explore local cultures to discover (not impute) categories that already exist in local hermeneutic schema. This would seem to be the next step beyond Ward's worthy foray into hermeneutics and cultural transformation, another way of talking about the building of the kingdom in each local setting.