Gospel Culture Encounter

“Every Christian is both a member of the universal church and also a participant in a particular culture. There is not one Christian interpretation of Jesus; there are many different ones, shaped by different cultures.”

I find this quote by Lesslie Newbigin, from his book The Open Secret, to be a great and apropos description of what we find in our exploration of The Theology of the Pain of God by Kazoh Kitamori. Kitamori’s thoughts are definitely shaped by the Japanese culture, but yet can be applied to the universal church theological thought process.

One of the things that I find most intriguing and unique about Kitamori’s book are the five prefaces. Kitamori wrote his book during what he calls the “recklessly torn situations of WWII” and it was first published in Japanese in 1946. It was translated and published in English in 1965 and was subsequently translated into German (1972), Spanish (1975), Italian (1975) and Korean (1987). The prefaces illuminate that the author is seeing and experiencing his book and the theme of his book come to life in other countries and other languages in a surprising way. While his book has “Japanese characteristics”, as he would say, his book also has impact on the Western world. In fact, Kitamori’s book was one, if not the first, of theological Japanese books to be introduced into the English speaking world.

As can be seen from the title, Kitamori’s focus of his writing is on the “theology of the pain of God” or what he also calls “the theology of love rooted in the pain of God”. He informs us that the primary theme of his book is to “behold the pain of God, since the theology of the pain of God is literally concerned with his pain”. He also asserts that the theology of the pain o...

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...nefit to study more theology in the context or contextualization of other cultures other than my own. I feel that it will not only enrich my understanding of Scripture but assist me, as Kitamori says, in “ the recovery of wonder” and to see “the pronouncement of the gospel afresh in order to make this wonder vivid again”. At the conclusion of his book, Kitamori says that his “prayer day and night is that the gospel of love rooted in the pain of God may become real to all men”. Maybe we should all have this same profound prayer.

Works Cited

Bauckham, Richard. Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003.

Kitamori, Kazoh. Theology of the Pain of God. Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1995.