Ancient Gospel, Brave New World: Jesus Still Saves Sinners in Cultures of Shame, Fear, Bondage, and Weakness; and The Transcultural Gospel

Ancient Gospel, Brave New World challenges the tendency in missiology to emphasize various aspects of Christ's work for different cultures. In particular, Burns addresses the sharp dichotomy between guilt/innocent cultures and honor/shame cultures. He insists that the presumed problems, whether guilt or shame, are not in fact different problems. Rather, the gospel addresses the fundamental inadequacy of human effort in all cultures through the central doctrine of justification by faith. Burns identifies points of experiential inadequacy—whether shame, fear, bondage, or weakness—and helps set the conversation about the gospel and cultural types in a wider context. The companion study volume, The Transcultural Gospel, focuses on how Christ provides the answers to human longings in various cultures and is suitable for a small-group study.

Ancient Gospel is divided into two sections. The first covers theological ground, while the second explains his typology of five cultural types. Burns is in conversation with Jason Georges, Jackson Wu, and other advocates of how the honor/shame cultural dynamic can help Christians re-read the Bible and communicate effectively in these cultures. He believes the now-common cultural triad (honor/shame, guilt/innocence, and fear/power) is inadequate. Rather, missiologists ought to identify various experiential problems and seek out solutions in the gospel. In short, righteousness—specifically justification by faith and the imputed righteousness of Christ—is the master key for unlocking a deeper experience of the gospel in every culture (p. 3).

The first four chapters argue for a trans-cultural gospel. The first reminds us that the divine word transcends the echo-chamber of human cultures, whether a reconstructed Ancient Near-East culture (of which Burns is skeptical) or a what-it-means-to-us reading of the Bible that privileges local culture. The second identifies the fundamental human tendency to seek "enoughness" through "merits, loyalty, fealty, obedience, and compliance to the internal moral code" (p. 95). But if Scripture tells us that our problem is sin and that we never have "enough" to overcome that sin, then good aims such as honor and spiritual power are subordinate to the larger purpose of God in salvation—namely the forgiveness of sin and restoration of a right relationship with him.

The third chapter calls out a cultural pluralism that has become, under the influence of critical theory, a cultural exclusivism. Burns challenges the claims of "privileged positions" within a culture because these leave a culture without a voice from outside. Instead, he proposes that contextualization must deal with a culture's relationship to "virtue" and "myth," that is, its reflection of the transcendentals (the true, good, and beautiful) as well as the one true story of the world as revealed in Scripture. To the worry that our interpretation of Scripture may be culturally-conditioned (or -poisoned), Burns responds that regeneration provides Christians with "an otherworldly, transcultural lens" (p. 154).

Chapter four provides a defense of post-apostolic doctrinal language for guiding thought about God. Burns grounds the unity of the gospel in God's simplicity, as will be seen below. He follows Craig Carter and others toward a "Bible-centeredness" in contrast to a "Bible-onlyism" (pp. 169–70). Forms of Bible-onlyism in missionary practice can ingest a full helping of pragmatism unwittingly by grounding practice on shaky, single-verse interpretations. For example, such approaches have led missionaries to disparage theological education, to unduly elevate a single text (e.g., the person of peace), and to reject Reformation-era doctrines as insufficiently biblical because of non-biblical vocabulary.

The next five chapters are the constructive core. Each proposes a human need and the gospel's response. Chapter 5 introduces Christ's imputed righteousness and penal substitution as the center of an atonement theology. Burns pushes back against a binary between guilt and innocence. Instead, he highlights positive righteousness as the goal. And this goal comes by faith alone apart from any merit or self-generated loyalty of our own.

Chapter 6 argues that if a culture values honor and fears shame, the gospel's solution is to appropriate Christ's honor freely by faith, rather than for humans to demonstrate loyalty to the honorable Christ and so accompany his status. Burns cites a missionary colleague who instructed converts that "faith is counted as honoring to God if it demonstrates complete, loyal devotion to him" (p. 246). Burns pushes against this broadly New Perspective reading of Paul in order to maintain that the act of faith is distinct from any act of "loyalty." Such loyalty becomes a form of merit and leaves believers in the uncertain state of asking whether their loyalty is enough.

Chapter 7 addresses a human desire for peace that is constantly interrupted by fear of demons and other spiritual powers. Burns helpfully moves through a desire for spiritual power to a deeper need for peace. Peace only arrives when we can live out a faith in Christ's full atoning work that has destroyed the power of sin and death.

Chapter 8 attempts a fresh cultural value system with the binary of bondage and freedom. This applies to western individualism in which people sense themselves in bondage to pathologies, addictions, or social structures, and seek freedom. The problem is that they seek this freedom through a "lust for liberty, self-sufficiency, and personal autonomy" (p. 306). The gospel here announces a true freedom to live in light of God's kingdom through the accomplished work of Christ.

If chapter 8 touched on personal autonomy or self-actualization, chapter 9 addresses the dangers of living under the weight of material poverty and the temptation to seek solutions in material wealth. Burns calls this a sense of "weakness" that seeks "strength." We find this strength, again, in the finished work of Christ.

This book brings a defense of traditional reformational theology to missiology. As in his previous book, The Missionary-Theologian (Christian Focus, 2020), Burns is blunt in his disagreements. In addition, several digressions on hot topics (divine simplicity, reading Scripture with the tradition, marxism/statism) travel wide afield. The argument from divine simplicity, in particular, makes too much of what is an important doctrine. Burns wants to say that an un-composite God gives an un-composite gospel (pp. 162–65; e.g., Gal 1:6–7). Certainly there is only one gospel, but to say that the gospel takes diverse forms is not necessarily to impugn divine simplicity. Divine simplicity is unique to God's essence and only faintly analogical to creaturely artifacts. While the existence of a trans-cultural gospel is compelling, I wonder if applying divine simplicity to the task is an example of "illegitimate theological transfer" (after the exegetical fallacy of illegitimate totality transfer) similar to the over-use of "incarnational" as a ministry paradigm or "perichoretic" to describe human relationships.

Nevertheless, Burns throws down the gauntlet in challenge to missiologists who believe a re-reading of Scripture entails either a devaluing of or explicit renunciation of justification by faith alone and penal substitutionary atonement. On the constructive side, Burns's typology of human needs and Christ's response reminds us that the guilt/fear/shame triad is a recent proposal and deserves scrutiny as we face (1) the diversity of supposedly honor/shame cultures, and (2) the impact of post-Christian worldviews in line with expressive individualism. This corrective indicates a positive direction for classifying cultures and a gospel response. Every contextualized expression of the gospel needs to ask, "How is this faithful to the trans-cultural gospel revealed in Scripture and in agreement with the broad stream of Christian tradition?" Burns ensures that such a question cannot be ignored.