Pietists and contextualists: the Indian solution

Christian Century, Jan 20, 1993 by Max L. Stackhouse

Of course, these benefits are byproducts, not the core purposes of these groups. Their chief focus is on helping people develop a personal and saving relationship to Jesus Christ and to live in peace with their neighbors by cultivating an obedience to universal principles of moral law. While no Christian disagrees with these efforts, some Catholic, Orthodox, liberationist and ecumenical Christians tend to reject these emphases because they fail to evoke direct social action in the more usual sense.

In any case, it is interesting that many of the contextual thinkers of the past several decades do not seem to be interested in the social impact of these developments. Some Indian contextualists probably don't acknowledge them because they have abandoned religion as a central category of social analysis, just as they have abandoned the church as a center of institutional interest. But religion does continue to chart the deep course of culture, even if not in the directions the older generation of contextualists wanted.