Conn on “the evangelical’s perception of theology as some sort of comprehensively universal science”
Theology become functionally the queen of the sciences, the watchdog of the academic world, the ultimate universal. Combined with Western ethnocentrism, it produces the tacit assumption ‘that the Christian faith is already fully and properly indigenized in the West” [David J. Bloesch, "Theological Education Missionary Perspective," Missiology 10 (January 1982): 16-17]. Our credal formulations, structured to respond to a sixteenth-century cultural setting and its problems, lose their historical character as contextual confessions of faith and become cultural universals, having comprehensive validity in all items and settings. The possibility of new doctrinal developments for the Reformed churches of Japan or Mexico is frozen into a time warp that gnosticizes the particularity of time and culture. The Reformation is completed, and we in the West wait for the churches of the Third World to accept as their statements of faith those shaped by a corpus Christianum by a Western church three centuries ago. (EWCW, p.221)
