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).

Prior to Donavan’s book, the vision I had of missionary principles was that the missionary, like Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, merges into the culture to whom he/she seeks to serve.

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

me.
“As I [Donavan] began to ponder the evangelization of the Masai, I had to realize that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture and tribal...customs and traditions. In this realization would have to rest my whole approach to the evangelization of the Masai” (p. 30). He further stated,
At that moment facing me was that vast, sprawling, all-pervasive complex of customs and traditions and values and dictates of human behavior which was the Masai culture, a nation in the biblical sense, to whom I had to bring the gospel. At this point I had to make the humiliating admission that I did not know what the gospel was. (p. 31).
So, Donavan argued, it had to be rediscovered. In seeing this for them, I began to see it for myself as well (p. 186).
As Donavan began, he realized “that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture and tribal...customs and traditions…” (p. 30) the message was beyond google language translation, it had to address a “vast, sprawling, all-pervasive complex of customs and traditions and values and dictates of human behavior…” (PAGE). It had to bring effective communication to a nation, an ethnos to whom the gospel was being brought. Donavan needed to give the message, but first it had to be rediscovered. “In seeing this for them, I began to see it for myself as well.” (p. 186).
For the Masai: