Abstract
Few topics in missiology stir up heartfelt disagreement like Muslim contextualization. For fifty years now, evangelical missionaries have argued over how “Muslim” a Muslim-background church should be. Different passages of Scripture, understandably, have been wielded on different sides, but in this book Derek Brotherson aims to explore what the Bible as a whole has to say to the issue. The conundrums of the debate are manifold—retention of Muslim identity, use of the Qur’an, Muslim-friendly Bible translations—but Brotherson sharpens his focus on a single question: what does the Bible teach about God’s people adapting the religious forms of other faiths to worship the true God?
After a deft overview of decades of missionary discourse, Brotherson moves methodically through Old and New Testament passages, selected for their potential to be either for or against the adaption of rituals from other faiths. Each time he insists on not going beyond, or behind, the intent of the biblical author. For example, even if God did adapt circumcision or temple worship from similar customs in the ancient Near East, this fact should not be read into Genesis 17 or 1 Chronicles 28, which instead function to set Israel religiously apart. When it comes to the New Testament, Brotherson is faced with some famously difficult texts. Attending to Luke’s authorial intent means that the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 pronounces freedom from Jewish Torah but not necessarily freedom to reuse pagan religious forms. On Paul’s teaching about idol food in 1 Corinthians 8–10, Brotherson argues that the apostle sees the food's connections to idolatry as “extremely spiritually dangerous,” urging the Corinthians to curtail their own freedom in every case where the food’s cultic links are known. One mission-field lesson drawn from the “cup of demons” passage (1 Cor 10:14–22) is that continued mosque participation is particularly problematic, since in corporate contexts it is hard for individual worshipers to redefine the significance of what is taking place. The book concludes that while the new covenant affords freedom to select and adapt religious forms for worship, missionaries should be cautious. For Muslim-background believers, Islamic forms might still retain their old meanings; practice should be determined by whatever best enables true, Christ-dependent worship.
While Muslims have guarded the prayer patterns they first adapted from Jews and Christians (see J. Dudley Woodberry, Muslims and Christians on the Emmaus Road, 1989), forms of Christian worship vary widely across denominations, and are themselves in flux. That very flux is what makes this book’s topic so welcome and important—not just for Muslim contexts but anywhere new believers wrestle with their old religious heritage. But Brotherson’s restrained scriptural observations invite the kind of further digging that he has initially ruled out of court. If the gatherings described in 1 Corinthians resembled some of the patterns of Greco-Roman religious associations (see Richard S. Ascough, “What Are They Now Saying about Christ Groups and Associations?”, (2015), is this not part of the backdrop for interpreting those moments when Paul depicts cultic religion as a danger? The book’s category of “other faiths,” designed to bridge the gap between text and mission field, feels anachronistic when applied to the New Testament church and its conversionary but arguably nonproselytizing emergence from within a milieu of various forms of Judaism, God-fearing pietism, and overlapping cultic and civic associations. Today too, we are attuned to look for syncretism in “other faith” contexts, but less where churches worship amid the liturgies and shrines of materialism, individualism, or ethnocentrism. Beyond further exegesis, Brotherson’s work lays the ground for more thinking about sanctification: in what manner should a culture’s most sacred instruments—and objects—of worship be brought into the holy presence of the King?