For Context: Dr. David Fitch

Episode # 01

🎙️ Episode Overview

In this inaugural episode of For Context, Luke and Gino interview David Fitch. Fitch is the founder and director of the Doctorate in Ministry in Contextual Theology program at Northern Seminary. On this episode, they discuss a bit of the program’s origin story as well as why and how contextual theology works as a discipline. Give it a listen!

For Context is sponsored by Northern Seminary. To learn more about the Contextual Theology program (or any of the number MA, M.Div, and D.Min offerings), visit seminary.edu.

📚 Resources

* David Fitch: Fitch’s Provocations

* Gino Curcuruto: Following Jesus Into the Ordinary

* Luke Stehr: Faith In Situ

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Episode Transcript

Gino Curcuruto:

I’m Gino Curcuruto

Luke Stehr:

And I’m Luke Stehr

Gino Curcuruto:

And you’re listening to For Context

Luke Stehr:

A podcast about Northern Seminary’s Doctorate of Ministry in Contextual Theology. So today on For Context we have Dr. David Fitch, who heads up the Contextual Theology program at Northern. He’s a ton of fun, we hope you enjoy the episode. Gino, do you want to say anything more to introduce Fitch?

Gino Curcuruto:

Well I think it’s good we were able to start this podcast with an interview with Fitch, so he can kind of give us a history of the program, what the intent back in the day was, and where it’s heading in the future.

Luke Stehr:

So it’s a great episode, we had a ton of making it, and we hope you enjoy it, and it’s enough that you wanna stick around. It’s our first For Context ever, and we hope it is enough you wanna keep sticking around. If you’re on Substack, go ahead and hit that “Subscribe” button that way you can make sure you know when new episodes release.

Gino Curcuruto:

For our first episode of For Context, we are happy and pleased to have as our guest Dr. David Fitch. We are, both Luke and I are both as those who have listened to our intro, know that we’re students in the Contextual Theology D.Min. program at Northern Seminary, of which Fitch is the director, the founder, the chief instigator, and all of those other things that people will call him. So we wanted to get him on the podcast from the beginning and ask him a little bit about the history of this, where the idea for this program started. What was the inspiration, why the need you go ahead and riff on those ideas for us please.

David Fitch:

First of all, I’m honored to be on the first podcast of this podcast.

Luke Stehr:

It’s an honor.

David Fitch:

I’m feeling very, very honored. But you guys need to work on your radio vibe. We call it in the business, we call it the radio vibe. Gotta have a vibe.

Luke Stehr:

We did almost call this “Fitch’s Old Time Radio Show.”

Gino Curcuruto:

Yeah, we were thinking about that as the name, “The Old Time Fitch Radio Show.”

David Fitch:

Definitely by choice on name don’t go that direction. It’s going to,

Luke Stehr:

It would’ve been a tribute to someone we’ll keep nameless.

David Fitch:

You’re going to go from, we now have three listeners, all three of us being ourselves, and we’re going to go down to two if you do that.

Luke Stehr:

We are,

David Fitch:

We just, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just great to be on this podcast. What’s it called again, Luke?

Luke Stehr:

For Context.

David Fitch:

I dunno.

Luke Stehr:

He’s not sure about this.

Gino Curcuruto:

Wow. Wow. We didn’t know we were doing critique. We thought we just going to get a little bit of a,

David Fitch:

Can I just give you two words? Radio vibe. You got to have a radio. I know. It’s a podcast. Radio vibe. Alright, this is amazing ladies, gentlemen, great to be on For Context here, live in whatever studio this is. I have no idea where we are. And let’s get going with the show. Yeah, do Luke, let’s get going with the show. I know you have some questions.

Gino Curcuruto:

Yeah,

David Fitch:

Tell us Luke, by the way, Luke actually sent me the questions. I did not have time to actually read the questions.

Luke Stehr:

You don’t need them. You don’t need them. We’re off the cuff. It’s even better.

David Fitch:

It’s even better.

Luke Stehr:

So live radio feeling that you just so desperately crave.

David Fitch:

Yes.

Luke Stehr:

So this program started several years ago. What was the inspiration for starting a contextual theology program? And maybe there are some people out there, like the many people I talk to week in and week out who go, what the heck is contextual theology? So what’s the inspiration for it? And maybe define some terms in there.

David Fitch:

There’s a little bit of history here. We started, started by calling it, I don’t know, D.Min. in missional theology or missional, I can’t remember. And then the name didn’t thoroughly capture what we were trying to do. We were trying to give pastors a theological frame to engage the cultures that they’re surrounded in for the gospel. And the missional thing kind of got lost in a bunch of the whole missional movement. This is like 20 years ago when I was Gino’s age 20 years ago actually. I would be possibly slightly younger than you. But anyways, all that to say, all that to say that, yeah, there are issues all around us in the culture that we operate. Pastors, churches, theologians operate out of a mindset of a Christendom, the mindset we’re in charge. We get to tell people where they’re wrong. We get to go out and give them the gospel on our terms.

And all of this is no longer functioning well in the places it still functions in maybe Southern Baptist worlds and where Luke lives. But that was a beneath, that was a little surprising turn there. But doesn’t,

Luke Stehr:

Not a Southern Baptist, just for the record,

David Fitch:

but doesn’t work in places where Christendom and Christianity and the culture have split. And so we wanted to give people tools, understandings, ways of thinking, how to engage a local culture for the gospel. And there are issues out there. There’s racism, there’s sexuality, gender, there’s economics, there’s politics. It’s all become very divisive. How do we engage it for the gospel? We believe God’s at work in these spaces to bring not only healing transformation to these spaces, but bring people to himself in Jesus Christ as Lord. So that’s my opening salvo, the D.Min. in Contextual Theology. But for you two guys who are still in the middle of your program, what do you think, I mean, where is the touch point that is of importance for you in this program? Give me a touch point.

Gino Curcuruto:

Yeah, well, you mentioned it there of what does it look like to take the gospel into the many cultures that we live around among. And oftentimes one of the things that attracted me to this program is oftentimes we give lip service to that and we try to contextualize the gospel without learning the context in which we live. So the heavy emphasis on knowing the cultures on learning and reading broadly and studying these concepts is really helpful. That I’m not just giving lip service to this idea, but actually engaging my neighbors and understanding things. Sometimes actually understanding why they live the way they do more clearly than they do.

Luke Stehr:

And I think for me, I had a pretty good robust foundation coming out of my master’s studying missiology, culture, all these things. And so I was already very used to thinking kind of along those terms, particularly from a more world Christianity perspective, but increasingly found myself in more secularized spaces and western contexts and wanted to go more specifically into the issues that present in those western contexts and environments, which Northern’s program is not exclusively talking about those things, but there’s a strong focus on the North American, European post-Christian context that I wanted to expand my knowledge and my ability to be a good practitioner in those spaces.

David Fitch:

Yeah, yeah, very helpful. The complexity here is often missed by the context that I’ve come out of, which is mainly white evangelicalism. Although I come out of a brand that is more like holiness Pentecostal. And that in and of itself is a different, it’s got a different theo-vibe than say most reformed theologies. But having all that, there’s still a problem here. I like to use the example of sexuality. I like to go right there to the most conflictual issue of our...

Luke Stehr:

Nice and easy.

David Fitch:

And I like to say, okay, we as a church like to make pronouncements. We affirm LGBTQIA+ used to be just LGBT or we do not affirm. And these are postures and policies which we think address the cultural issue of sexuality, but written into this approach is a posture of A.) power over, and B.), not listening to our surrounding cultures and even understanding what it might mean to say I’m gay. We assume because we are caught in these Christendom postures that we know what it means to say I’m gay. We do not. And this of course is now a most recent book that was published last year, the end of last year by Yarhouse and his co-author, who I can’t remember her name right now, I think it was 72 different sexual identities.

If you think you know what your, the struggling students, let’s just say the 10 year olds, the 15 year olds they’re going through and you just assume, we do not affirm or affirm you’ve missed the whole engagement process. Likewise, if you just assume that the average person who’s going through these identity locations or struggles or whatever you want to call it, that you understand their histories and what brought them there and where the issue is, you will never connect. And all you will do is reinforce the existing ideological things that are going on in sexuality as well as the very ways culture is shaping sexual identity, much of which even Judith Butler would say is caught up in the sins of the world. I’m talking about misogyny, patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera, other objectification of bodies, commodification of attraction, all this stuff. Now you just see, we just riffed on that for like three, five minutes and there’s multiple layers. And so now can just, so the first thing maybe you want to learn if you’re going to be a contextual theologian is just stop yourself. Stop yourself and go listen to people and what’s going on so that the gospel can be proclaimed and people can be invited into this reconciliatory presence of Jesus Christ to save the world. Okay. That’s my little speech comments on that, Gino, or

Gino Curcuruto:

Yeah, I want to say something Luke, but you go ahead first,

Luke Stehr:

I think too, as I think about how do you explain this, we’re both serving in ministry, in churches. How do you explain this stuff? Someone in your church is like, what are you studying? What are you talking about? And so Gino and I are in the middle of our program, which we’ve talked about, and I think we both just finished a book by Bo Lim a Contextual Theological Interpretation. But basically the idea is how do you get from there to here?

One of the difficulties of biblical studies as it’s been done is it keeps the text isolated in its historic context. And so how do we make this bridge between the text of scripture and the context of where we live today? And so contextual theology for me, if I was going to steal a line from Mark Glanville, it’s the through line of how you get from the text to the context. So learning to understand the current context and connect it back to that context. And that’s not always a one for one equal translation, which we talk about all the linguistics behind that, but it’s really how do you get from there to here and how do you help people here understand there?

David Fitch:

Yeah. And in a minute, I thought you were going to go this direction with your comment, Luke. I thought you were going to say something like how do we explain this to the people we’re ministering to?

The first thing, I’ve been in many of these conversations about the sexuality discussion. By the way, it’s not just sexuality, it’s not just gender, it’s racism, it’s economics. It’s the way we think about our jobs. It’s the way we think about money. It’s the way we think about the poor. It’s the way we think about salvation. Everything. In order to enter the world and proclaim the gospel, you have to listen to what God’s saying, doing and discern what is of God and what is of savior, if I can put it, what is of the world, what is of destruction. And so I thought you were going to say, how do I explain this to our people? I can’t imagine trying to, one of our co-classmates, Greg Armstrong talked to me the other day and he said, I’m just blowing my leader’s mind with the stuff they have no idea. When I go, I go, what are you crazy? Are you trying to make them to contextual doctorates? This is not what your goal is to do with this program is turn all your leaders into doctorates in contextual theology. No, this gives you the tools to lead through and open conversations, deepen the conversations, and then illumine the Holy Spirit’s work so as to cooperate and proclaim the gospel. I thought you were going to go that direction, Luke. I’m very thankful. Surprised. I’m thankful you did not by the way.

Gino Curcuruto:

Well, I was thinking as you were using the example of sexuality that we get caught up often, and maybe I’m oversimplifying this, but we get caught up in binaries in just saying that there’s a binary, there’s a right and a wrong or there’s a this way or that way, whether it’s sexuality or it’s politics, anything we could talk about and say, we don’t even know what we’re saying, we just say it’s this or that. And then we argue from that perspective. And so one of the things that I do say to people in our congregation when they ask about this is that I’m learning to complexify things so that they meet what actually humans are like to actually get that there isn’t just one simple answer that we’re engaging. We need to understand people, we need to understand more of the complexity and not just get caught up in ideological arguments.

David Fitch:

That reminds me of something our pal Greg Boyd once said to me, we refuse at this church to make people into policy statements.

Luke Stehr:

Yes.

David Fitch:

Because really a lot’s going on. I don’t appreciate being made into a policy statement. It happens to me all the time. By the way, I need grace and mercy to give people grace and mercy when they make me into a policy statement. I’m going to go off on a rant here in a minute, but I am a white, an old white dude. People want to caricature me based on that, what do you call it? Category. And they have no clue as to my history, my life, what I’ve lived. I’ve lived through the suffering, the pain parts of my life. Anyways, so all this to just reiterate folks, can the church please stop itself and can it go be among and with people and listen, learn to ask good questions, and then out of that discern what God is doing. I think of the average gay or lesbian person.

I know for a fact this might get me in trouble, but I know for a fact that a lot of what is going on in their interrelational connections is goodness. There is a lot of goodness there. And matter of fact, I would say that maybe the average, the several gay men I have met have better ways to make friendships with other men than what we call straight male, our pathetic ability to have good relationships with men or women for that matter. Do you think that that’s not where God’s working? And then do you think that that’s also not that the structures of sexuality and gender have been so screwed up in our culture that maybe some of what’s going on here in LGBTQIA is a response to the sinful, the corrupt things going on in culture with that? We often respond to sin by going deeper into sin, and we can’t just give everything a blanket right up, oh, it’s all good, it’s all of God. That’s another blanket overstatement, caricature policy statement, movement of power over. You are now exerting your power over. Can we please stop doing that? Did that that make sense? It does.

Luke Stehr:

It absolutely makes sense. Yeah. And so I think it’s a willingness to question and not take the base assumptions of culture, but it’s an interrogation or a curiosity and it’s a call to a curiosity of the local as opposed to trying to make universal proclamations that may not fit everywhere. And if you want to, I could go off on so many side tangents on that that I just don’t need to get into. But yeah, I think at its core that’s what this program, at least for me has been about. I haven’t finished. We’re going to interview some grads and see if I’m on the right track there, but yeah. Yeah.

Gino Curcuruto:

I’m wondering if you would share Fitch, some of the influences on you for seeing a need for a type of program like this. Where did that come from? Who have you learned from that influences this?

David Fitch:

Can you still hear me? I just got a notice. Okay. Before I do that, Gino, something is pressing in upon me by the Holy Spirit that I feel the need to talk about.

Gino Curcuruto:

Great.

David Fitch:

A lot of people, a lot of people hear me when I’m talking like this. Let’s just say about the hot topic of sexuality or racism or a lot of people hear me as somewhat of a relativist that I’m going to change the doctrines of scripture, history, tradition, Christianity, historic Christianity to fit in with a context because after all fits, you’re complexifying gay sexuality here and you’re making it fit into scripture. First of all, I just want to ask, how do you two answer that question and then I just want to blow that up because I refuse to be a relativist when it comes to contextual theology. How do you two?

Gino Curcuruto:

Well, when people ask me, isn’t Fitch just relativizing scripture? Because people ask me that, they don’t necessarily ask me the question directly as far as what was the way you said it, including gay sexuality into my theology. Was that or scriptural or scriptural understanding? I mean, I get called a lot of things and that would be one of them. I think that I’m asking them how they interpret what is in the scriptures directly to something that isn’t mentioned in the scriptures.

David Fitch:

Alright, well that was kind of boring, but anyways.

Okay, just kidding. Luke, what would you do?

Luke Stehr:

I think I work in a Baptist setting, so it’s always good for me to kind of make these appeals to scripture as a good place to start. And I think most people are just unaware of just the complexity of scripture itself. You start peeling back the layers of the Bible and even just the translation of scripture into English or other languages. And it’s just so much more complicated than I think we can come away thinking when we just hold an English Bible in our hands going like, well, this is it. This is what I’ve got. And so one of the things that came to mind as we’re talking is we even forget just how complicated of a decision it is to contextualize the name of God into a local language.

And so if you’ve only ever read the English Bible, then one of the things you don’t realize is one of the biggest debates in translation is how do you translate the name of God into Chinese? And you have different approaches advocated by different Bible societies, but they effectively make really strong theological statements just by how they name God in a local language. And so again, for me, contextual theology is about how do we get there to here. So when we think about scripture, when it talks about sexuality, well, A, we’ve got to be good contextual theologians of the past. I think that’s where we lean on good methodology of historical critical interpretation, which does a good job of analyzing the social, cultural, political, historical factors of the past, but then recognizing that it’s not a one for one to the present. And so specifically on issues of gender and sexuality.

Well, Gino, you’ve said there’s no direct conversation about that from there to here Greco-Roman and Hebrew views of sexuality, in some ways they’re just so radically different than the way we think about sexuality here today, that we can’t make one for one, but we can try to do some good theology of how people relate to one another on the basis of gender, on the basis of sex. I’m still thinking we’re getting ready for our New Testament and context class this summer just finished reading Paul and Gender by Cynthia Westfall. Super excited to have her, but I once again come away realizing that Paul in writing about gender is just a brilliant human being who subverts the categories of his time

Is effectively a contextual theologian of his own time, taking the categories of gender, of sexuality, of power, and really tweaking them, subverting them, reworking them towards the ends of the kingdom. And that’s what we have to do here today. So what are the categories? So to do that we actually have to have a conversation about what is happening in contemporary sexuality and gender studies. What is the cultural belief about gender and about sexuality? Because if Paul was going to use the metaphors and images of gender and sexuality in his time, well, we have to do that here too. We have to analyze what those categories mean in order to subvert them and put them under the lordship of Christ.

David Fitch:

Yeah. So I’ll take it one more step than the two or three steps you just talked about. And I’ll just say we don’t get to make things up. We didn’t just land out of the, I don’t know, off of the planet Saturn and became a Christian. There is a long history here, both in the west and the east. We are part of the west. We live where we live. And so there is some wisdom in there. There’s some wisdom in understanding what scriptures did. What Paul did was basically Jesus upended and overturned the patriarchies and the hierarchies within the sexual gender space, but he did so by entering into those household codes.

So he went in and talked and said, but here’s how Jesus takes what is and transforms what is into something so much more, so much different. I want us to be able to do that with the current sexual paradigms we have, find ourselves in not just accommodate, endorse blanketly affirm, give our approval, which is a Christendom posture, not just say no to it all and give our disapproval, which is a Christendom posture, but enter in and how does Jesus and his transforming power overturn and reveal and heal the brokenness between genders. But we don’t give up that for centuries that we’ve understood marriage is now monogamy, not polygamy, not not polyamory, not no. For some reason, and lemme just be very specific for the way that Jesus comes to redeem and restore male and female and the two shall not be put asunder from which. So when Jesus said there is no more divorce, and the disciple said, I think it’s Matthew 18 somewhere, are you kidding me?

Why anybody get married if there’s no more divorce? Okay, he’s overturning and transforming the ways that people think about being male and female to restore it to, and this is only possible in Jesus Christ. So anyways, all that to say, we don’t give any of that up. When we enter into what’s going on in the sexuality crisis or confusion or multiplicities and alternatives in our culture, we enter in and do discipleship. And I think that’s so important. So if anyone’s hearing me always a relativist far from it, I’m a contextualist. I know we’ve gone on too long on this.

I found that post evangelicals often go into the text and say, well, they we’re not talking about the frame of homosexuality. We don’t call it gay or lesbian sexuality. That was not this.

So they disarm the scripture and what it’s saying about past current day sodomy and so forth. But at the same point then they go, but we bless this because of certain principles like covenant monogamous principle. But all I’m trying to say is you can’t just leave the one behind and not extend into the present what Jesus has been doing and what he continues to do in terms of the healing and transformation of sexual identity, gender constructs the brokenness between genders, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s what, if we get anywhere in contextual theology, that’s what we need to understand. Those two dynamics. We go into the context, but we don’t just enter with nothing. We extend what God has done in Christ through the scripture, through the church, into these realities.

Gino Curcuruto:

Are there times and places where going into the context does change how we understand what we’re extending in there?

David Fitch:

Change. Change I don’t like.

Gino Curcuruto:

I’m intentionally vague

David Fitch:

Change.

Gino Curcuruto:

I’m Intentionally vague there.

David Fitch:

I get worried about the word change. We’re going to change the gospel. No, we’re not. We’re going to extend

The gospel. So I’m currently trying to write a book. I’m not too far into it and the deadline is looming, but I’m writing the book about the many gospels and I talk about the various entry points to the gospels. And I got into an argument on Facebook recently about,

Luke Stehr:

it’s a great place for an argument.

David Fitch:

Reform theology and reform theology kind of lifted up the idea of substitutionary, view of the atonement and justification by faith alone. And what it did was it individualized salvation. And it also changed the terms from a Roman Catholic church that at that time was corrupt and you had to go through these processes and if you disobeyed this, you were going to hell, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So in that context, that understanding of salvation and atonement really, really changed Europe and really, really brought a lot of people into the fold of Jesus Christ in a way they hadn’t been before,

But go across the ocean and go into the present time. Is that the view on salvation atonement, soteriology the way we need to understand what Christ is doing, or is there another part of the story that Christus Victor emphasizes his victory over the powers and the principalities? That to me is where I find most people struggling with the overwhelming powers and principalities of addiction or the powers and principalities of government and evil. And how do I live my life in victory over that Jesus has already accomplished a victory over that. Now let’s live into that and let him be Lord of our lives and bring Satan down. Okay. Anyways, all that to say, did I change the gospel? No, the gospel is this one long story. I just emphasized one part over another because of the contextual implications of our time that are no longer the same as 15th century Reformation Europe. Is there an amen in the congregation?

Luke Stehr:

Amen. Oh, there’s amen here. And I think that’s again, we’re going to borrow from Bo Lim, but just other people who talk about the translatability of the text, every time we translate the text of scripture into a new language, the theological vocabulary just expands. And it’s not that we’ve changed the text per se, but we’ve added just a new range of richness, a new depth to what we can actually talk about theologically because we learn as we translate and as we contextualize. But does it change the text?

Gino Curcuruto:

Well, I think that I’m asking the question from the perspective of the person saying that Fitch is a relativist and seeing, I wanted to hear a clear articulation of this isn’t a change, this is contextualization, this is a bringing forth of something into a new context, maybe in a way that hasn’t had to be described this way because this context is new and that’s helpful. People might see that simplistically as change and that’s not what it is.

Luke Stehr:

And I think for those people, I would just say go look at the history of translation. Go look at the history of the gospel spreading into new cultures around the world. Now how that’s happened over time and the concepts that get just used to explain what’s happening.

David Fitch:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Now, there are some people that would disagree with what we’ve said in relation to the gospel Horton’s view of the gospel, this classic justification by faith and the ordo salute us, the order of salvation comes, then comes sanctification, comes glorification. Anyways, he claims in that book on the gospels four views of the gospels, he claims that that was always there. That’s always been the gospel from the first day on. It just got lost or it got somehow obscured and it was the Reformation. And Dr. Horton, if I’m misrepresenting you, I apologize, but I read that I think pretty carefully. And then I read another one of your books on justification. It appeared that you were doing the same thing. We have a minor, maybe it’s not minor disagreement. Okay. Because I think that the reformation found this like Luther was actually on the toilet when he was reading Romans.

And he found justification by faith alone. And this made so much sense in the struggle that he was going through in his own life with the Roman Catholic Church. And it by the way, God used them to save hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who were wandering aimlessly discouraged by their future through what had become a corrupt Roman Catholicism. So all I’m saying is there are people that are disagree with us. Yes, let’s just talk amongst ourselves and see, I think we need to contextualize the gospel all the time, especially when now we’ve become a multi-ethnic multicultural world, multiple cultures. Let us not think, if you don’t believe in the penal substitutionary view of the atonement, you’re going to hell. That might not be the entry point. We need to reach people with the gospel. Maybe we’ll get there eventually. Maybe people will find the, I prefer the representational view, which kind of encapsulates that substitutionary view of Jesus. But we don’t need to start at the same place every single time.

Gino Curcuruto:

Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with calling Horton’s view? Maybe not his saying we lost it and now we found it again. But if this was just a view from the reformation that is a contextual theology, if he could see it as a contextual theology and say that is for a time and place helpful. I mean, I know that we have to talk about language and we have to talk about so many things to do that, but it seems like we kind of get stuck in and maybe ossify our theology in a context and then make it that for all time and argue against it.

Luke Stehr:

I think this is the challenge of contextual theology to systematic or historic approaches is that we recognize that every theology is a contextual theology and that’s actually advantageous. That’s by design. I think that’s how God has wired the Kingdom, the Church, scripture. It’s meant to be contextual. Things that come to mind as we make an argument if we have to make an argument for contextual theology. Lamin Sanneh talks about how in Africa when translating the Bible, again, translation is just such a good test case to prove the validity of contextual theology. So in African translations, when a foreign word was chosen for the name of God, those people who ended up converting to Christianity were actually significantly more likely to then convert to Islam because the imposition of a foreign notion of God felt un-African but Islam felt more African than the foreign Christianity which they had converted from their tribal religions. But when an indigenous word was chosen for God, like a local linguistic name for the high God was used in the translation for God’s name, those people were actually significantly more likely to stay Christian because it felt natural, contextualized to them. Contextual theology is necessary for us to effectively be God’s people in a place and at a time and to demonstrate and live out the good news where we are.

That’s good.

David Fitch:

Yeah. That’s so huge. And there’s complexity there. So a lot of people are listening to this going, oh my goodness, this is relativism. They just changed the name of God. Now this foreign country that we’re bringing the gospel to now thinks of God in terms of their God. We’ve just done a shift there is Lamin Sanneh, I think he said Christianity is the most translated contextual faith in the world. A hundred thousand different tribes. Peoples have learned the gospel through their own languages, but it’s not a unilateral thing, which is what Lamin Sanneh is saying. I don’t translate my ideas into their language holding onto my ideas. I got to be in the language long enough to understand what’s going on to even have a cross. Oh, that’s what that means and makes sense in relation to who Jesus is. But we don’t give up Jesus and we don’t give up what God has done in Jesus and God is still God. But we need to find ways to communicate. And so often translation, this is what Willie Jennings does in that one chapter of that guy, I can’t remember now where he talks about how the guy landed in Peru and just basically translated Euro-Christianity into Peruvian terms,

Thereby enforcing his worldview on them. And what ended up doing was creating a white Christianity among a non-white peoples.

Luke Stehr:

And that’s a huge risk. Missions history is full of those stories,

David Fitch:

Right? But also missions history is full of a lot of good stories too. But it is, I happen to be on a call, a theology circle, Jesus collective, and my African brother Edam goes, look, look, I know you white people want to insist you colonized us all here in Africa. We see on the call he’s speaking from Africa. But look, you did a lot of good things. Let me tell you three or four things that have changed my life because some person missionary from North America came here a hundred years ago and proclaimed Jesus. But at the same time, there’s a lot of bad things, cultural things. So I just want to say this is the navigation. It is that we’re all in and we’re in hit now here in North America. Can we be true to the call, the challenge to engage our new culturals, which are by and large post-Christian except for Southern Baptist, where Luke lives there to declining. Can’t we engage these populations for the gospel of Jesus Christ and see what God’s up to? Amen. I think we can engage the Southern Baptist for the gospel of Jesus Christ as well.

Okay, I hope no one’s in trouble after this podcast. They’re going to come for me.

Luke Stehr:

So they’re not paying attention. But what’s different about this program as opposed to other programs? What’s unique about Northern’s Contextual Theology D.Min. that you can only really get here and by here, I mean there because I’m in Texas and you’re in Chicago.

David Fitch:

Well, let me try to be diplomatic for a change. I do believe that most doctorate of ministry programs have turned into some sort of pastoral self-help programs. Is that diplomatic? It’s diplomatic enough. There’s a lot of programs out there that, and rightfully so, pastors need spiritual formation and building up of their own formation in Christ and they’re out on an island somewhere and they’re getting slaughtered by the, I mean being pastors very, very difficult, especially in the environment that we’re in today.

So I don’t want to take anything away from those programs, but this program’s, not that you get a lot of that here in our program, but we are really building a ability or a wherewithal to navigate the cultural challenges that we’re facing really for the first time. Last 25 years have just presented unbelievable new challenges to being a pastor. If you’re going to engage the culture for Christ and people are lost, I don’t mean lost going to hell lost. I mean pastors are just going swimming in this, what am I going to do? Responding to this conflict into my church over sexuality? How do I navigate racism in my context? It seems like we’re divided and fighting each other. How do we understand what’s going on ideologically? It’s everywhere. It’s taking over my church. And so this is going to give you a breath of theological understanding where you can take a deep breath, trust Lord, and navigate with good questions and leadership and probably help a whole lot of other pastors as well as well. I think a good half of the program graduates are teaching in either a seminary or in a denominational processes helping people understand these issues.

We have people going to do their doctorate PhD from this program because it gives you such a good foundation. You can go to a Euro doctorate where you really don’t get the classwork foundation to go with a few, three or 4,000 euros. Not that that’s nothing. And develop yourself if you want to go that route. It’s a different kind of program and we’re very proud of it because we really have been, I don’t know of another program that quite does what we do and puts it all together in one place. We got some of the premier teachers in their fields teaching in all these various, we just talked about scriptural interpretation for context.

We got Cindy Westfall coming. We talk about how to engage cultural issues like racism, economics. We’ve got Jonathan Tran, we’ve had Mark Mulder teach ethnography for the last 10, 15 years. He’s a sociologist from Calvin that just does a great job. Al Roxburgh has been a part of this program since its beginning. He’s kind of thinking about leadership and how do we lead churches into context and he’s dealing with all the frameworks. I don’t know anyone who else who does that. So we have just figures guiding and teaching in the program and I don’t know anybody else who quite puts it together like this.

Gino Curcuruto:

Yeah, that’s really helpful.

David Fitch:

Course I’m bragging like crazy right now.

Gino Curcuruto:

Well, no,

Luke Stehr:

I think’s well deserved. Let another lips praise the

David Fitch:

I know Proverbs 27

Gino Curcuruto:

I do think because of time we probably want to wrap this up. It’s been super helpful to hear from you on this Fitch. I mean, I think we probably do have a couple of listeners, maybe not tons of people, so don’t worry about boasting a little bit about the program. We’re asking you to do it

Luke Stehr:

It’s probably just people in our cohort at this point.

Gino Curcuruto:

So you’re good. Chances of Michael Horton listening to this podcast, absolutely zero. So if you do,

David Fitch:

Michael, I love you and we have a disagreement. Let’s do a podcast on this one. Let’s get Michael Horton on this podcast. That’s great context and soteriology.

Gino Curcuruto:

That sounds great. We’re going to do that. So we’re going to wrap up for now, but thank you for being with us Fitch. Luke, always good to talk to you. We’re not going to say over and out because that’s like a radio thing that some other guy does, but we’ll just say we’ll catch you next time.

David Fitch:

Love you guys!

Luke Stehr:

Thanks.

Gino Curcuruto:

Thank you.

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