One in a series of "President's Perspectives" in which Dr. Richard J. Mouw discusses Fuller's core values.

One of my favorite books about the relation of the gospel to cultural realities is Kosuke Koyama’s delightfully titled Water Buffalo Theology. There, the late Japanese-American theologian reflected on his experience of being sent, early in his career, by his Japanese church as a missionary to northern Thailand.

Koyama had spent most of his life up to that point in urban settings, and suddenly he found himself in a place of many rice paddies. As he rode around the countryside on his motor scooter, he reported, he saw people whose lives involved many days of standing in shallow water alongside water buffalo; then these days were followed by a period in which they had to find some way of staying dry during the onlaught of monsoon rains.

Koyama decided to read the Bible as if he were standing alongside a water buffalo in a rice paddy. In doing so, passages and images leaped out at him that he had never really thought about before. He discovered that there is much in the Bible about water. God rules from a place above the rains and the floods. God stays dry! These themes came to loom large in his presentation of the gospel to the people of that region.

At the end of his book, Koyama generalized on the method he had been using in his efforts to understand what the Bible has to say to the culture of northern Thailand. Missionaries, he said, must find a place where they are “sandwiched between” the Bible and the culture to which God has called them. They must then engage in a two-way exegesis, working at two interpretive exercises: they have to interpret the questions and answers of the culture in which they find themselves, and then they must bring those questions and answers to the Bible, in order to interpret anew what God has to say about such matters.

Koyama was getting at something that was often ignored in the past by the church in its efforts to “get the message out.” I read one account of missionaries in the nineteenth century who tried to evangelize tribal villagers whose language the missionaries had done very little to master. They would present some basic biblical truths as best they could, and if the folks in that tribe did not respond positively, they simply moved on to another village. They had no way of knowing whether they had even succeeded in communicating about what they wanted the villagers to understand. And they certainly had not probed more deeply into the concerns and questions that dominated those villagers’ lives. They paid little attention to the culture of the folks they were trying to reach.

“Culture” as we understand it here is not simply the sort of thing we associate with “cultured” people—the folks who appreciate opera and quote Shakespeare. The word culture has the same root as cultivate. Thus, agricul-ture is the cultivation of the agros, Greek for “field”; horticulture is the cultivation of plants; and so on. When we use the word culture to apply to human realities, we are referring to the ways in which we human beings cultivate patterns and processes that give meaning to our collective interactions, as well as the things that we “grow” as a result of those interactions. Culture is the basic “stuff” of collective human life: language, entertainment, economic transactions, rituals, the patterns of family life, and much more. All of this is what shapes our daily lives—and the lives of people whom we want to reach with the gospel.

Fuller’s School of World Mission—now the School of Intercultural Studies—was founded in 1965 to equip the church with cultural understanding. The founders knew that an effective presentation of the gospel had to draw upon the resources of language study, the investigation of cultural practices, an understanding of the teachings of other religions, and much more. These insights have now spread throughout all of Fuller’s programs, so that our other two schools—Theology and Psychology—are also working diligently to understand the cultural contexts in which the graduates of our programs will be serving.

We regularly offer theology-and-film courses that bring faculty and students to major film festivals. (You can read about one of those involvements in this issue.) They frequently report to me that when people at those gatherings find out that they are from Fuller, they ask, “What are folks from a seminary doing here?” The answer our faculty and students give to such a question is that we see the study of film as an important part of theological education.

Thinking theologically about film festivals is not very different from reflecting on the culture of the water buffalo. The entertainment industry is something like a very large rice paddy. What comes from that rice paddy influences all of us—and not only those of us who live in North America, but people all over the world. A year or so ago, visiting with a Singaporean-Chinese family, I asked the 15-year-old daughter whether her friends at school would know who Hannah Montana is; she answered with an expression that would have had made Homer Simpson proud: “Doh!” 

The familiar Christmas carol puts it well in speaking about the Savior’s birth at Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” The “all the years” part of that is extremely important. As he stood “sandwiched between” the Bible and the day-to-day realities of rural Thailand, Kosuke Koyama was exegeting the hopes and fears of the people who worked alongside water buffalo in rice paddies. We too must do that exegeting, including the study of the busy high-tech culture in which many of us find ourselves. Beneath the canned laughter of the situation comedy, or the rantings of the tweets and blogs that appear on the Internet, or the economic and relational worries that keep people awake at night—just beneath the surface of all of this are enduring hopes and fears that we must understand and address if we are to bring the gospel to people who are immersed in the daily life of our own culture.

In the kind of teaching, learning, and research that takes place at Fuller Seminary, we can engage in this disciplined exegesis of hopes and fears. In doing this, we are uniquely equipped at Fuller to draw upon not only the best of biblical scholarship, systematic theology, and church history, but also upon the resources of psychology and intercultural studies.

And so, in addition to all of the other things that seminaries typically do in their educational offerings, we show up at film festivals, we sponsor guest lectures by business leaders, we study the patterns of marriage and family relations—and we send our graduates to the nations of the earth to bring the Good News of salvation. We do all of this because we care about culture. More importantly, we do it because we care about human beings who are shaped by the cultures in which they live. And most importantly, we do it because we have heard the call of the Savior who came into the world—a world characterized by many hopes and fears—so that the people whom he came to rescue from sin “might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).