Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture
Andrew Walls wrote this essay for Missionalia in 1982, the same year he founded the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at Aberdeen. He came to the question with a working knowledge of two Christianities: he had taught in Sierra Leone at Fourah Bay College and in Nigeria, and had watched African churches whose vitality embarrassed the categories that European scholarship brought to them. The essay was addressed to a moment when the numerical center of the Christian faith was visibly shifting southward, when Western missionary confidence had collapsed, and when the standing question was whether the gospel that arrived wrapped in Victorian clothing could ever be separated from that clothing — or whether Christianity was simply Western religion under another name.
Walls answers by way of a thought experiment. He imagines a long-lived scholar from Mars, a professor of comparative inter-planetary religions, dropping in on Christian communities across two millennia: Jewish believers in Jerusalem around AD 37, temple-going and circumcised; the bishops at Nicaea in 325 arguing over a Greek philosophical term; Irish monks on the Atlantic coast around 600, standing in freezing seawater reciting psalms; black-coated gentlemen in Exeter Hall in the 1840s, organizing missions and the abolition of slavery; and white-robed Aladura Christians dancing in a Lagos street in 1980. The visitor would find the cultural discontinuity almost total. What he would find continuous is narrower and stranger: the centrality of the person of Jesus, the same Scriptures, bread and wine, water, and the conviction of belonging to a single community across time. From this Walls draws the two principles that have made the essay famous. The indigenizing principle holds that God accepts people as they are, which means Christianity always takes up residence inside a particular culture and speaks its language. The pilgrim principle holds that God then unsettles them, tying them to a history and a people not their own and setting them at odds with their own society. Both operate at once. The gospel is therefore always a prisoner of culture, never available in a culture-free form, and always culture's liberator, judging from within what it has adopted.
The essay became one of the founding texts of world Christianity as a field, and the two principles are now standard vocabulary in missiology, intercultural theology, and the study of translation. It remains the clearest short answer to the charge that Christianity is inherently a Western export.
Who should read this: anyone doing cross-cultural ministry, anyone teaching or studying mission history, and Western Christians who have not yet reckoned with how much of what they call the faith is in fact their own culture. Readers wanting a practical handbook for contextualization should look elsewhere; this is a historian's argument, and it offers a lens rather than a method.