Limits of Bible Contextualization

I honestly do not know what the limits of contextualization should be, but what I do know is that Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ was so very adamant about Judaism that he killed Christians while apparently thinking that he was doing God a service. We thus also see the blood of Christ in the hands of the Romans that tortured him, but we do not see it in the Jews that left the torture up to someone else. What I am saying is that God appears to work salvation in those that are either hot or cold like the Romans, but everyone else he spits out of his mouth (note Revelation 3:15-16) like the Jewish leaders of his day. Contextualization should thus not be like fabricated systematic theology that produces lots of lukewarm agnostic like people that think that they believe in Jesus when what they really believe in is just an ideal vision of a nice guy that no one real could ever satisfy (not even God).

Many churches today believe in feeding milk before meat, but in doing this they only contextualize their message to the extent that they feed all the babies in the congregation milk every Sunday week after week and year after year until the people in the congregation are so malnourished that their spiritual formation is like a permanent infant without the capacity to ever develop into anything greater than a little person without the capacity to every be a fully functional big person.

Consider the contextualization methods employed by Jesus Christ as follows, "Jesus said to them, 'I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.'" - John 6:53 (NIV) After reviewing what Jesus has to say carefully, we learn that he has no intention of performing any contextualization at all for the most part. Of course then again Jesus is God, but perhaps we could ask ourselves what level of contextualization that Jesus performed in being related to man through the incarnation. The point is that although Paul was readily available with the milk (most ministers today are even far more available with the milk), Jesus however would just suddenly jump to dishing out the blood in ways that starkly shocked people.

The bigger question in dealing with contextualization is what the will of God is for making his message understandable to people that are perishing. Does he want people to see so that they cannot see and hear so that they cannot hear (Matthew 13:13-15), or does he want everyone to be presented the message in a way that they will all understand. The fact that Paul the Apostle of Christ identified that he went so far as to use trickery (2 Corinthians 12:16) tells us that he was open to using whatever methods possible to gain an audience just as long as the lord was exalted in the process.