Charles Kraft Anthropology

Charles Kraft was a mentor by practice, teacher by trade, and functioned in the classic sense of a professor taught what he practiced. In the 1950s, he served as a Brethren missionary in northern Nigeria and, leaving the field, taught anthropology and African languages. Moving into the faculty at Fuller Seminary, he taught Christian anthropology from a Gospel centered, critical realist approach. Pioneering the field of ethno-theology (Paris, 2015, p. 81), he taught that to navigate effectively across cultural boundaries one needed to, in face of the scripture, deconstruct their own culturally based perspectives, discover the meaning of the original culturally based message, and then - with dynamic equivalence - reconstruct the original meaning into the form of a new language/culture. To illustrate, he gave us a book to read by a Donavan, a catholic missionary’s story of the gospel given to the Masai of Kenya (Donovan, V., 1982).

Reading Donavan’s Christianity Rediscovered revealed a profound problem: I was still a westerner. As Kraft in dry humor would simply say, “The problem is you have the wrong mother”. I had no intention of exchanging mothers. I simply wanted tools for the job; I wanted techniques by which I could effectively bring a message of Christ to part of the world and see love established. I wanted science of mission studies to show me the way. I had no intention of “going native.” Donavan did not spend the rest of his life with the people; he didn’t become part of their tribe. He just wanted to effectively communicate a message. His story intrigued