At the same time, that history of special revelation is organic in character. The Bible is not merely a heterogeneous collection of oods [sic] and ends, nor a symposium of biblical theologies. Biblical theology seeks to do justice both to the diversity of the divine testimony within the diversity of human settings and to the underlying unity of that testimony. It studies the data of revelation given in each period of cultural history in terms of the stage to which God’s self-revelation progressed at that particular time and place. But this unifying element is always the end point of the process, not the process itself. Its wisdom is always defined in terms of the administration of the mystery hidden in ages past, revealed in Christ, made known among all the world’s cultures, and consummated at his return (Eph. 3:8-10; Rom. 16:25-26; Col. 1:25-27). (Eternal Word and Changing Worlds, pp. 225-26).

The effect of this process on the Western churches is similarly destructive of missions. Seeing theology as an essentializing science and the creeds as the product of that kind of theological reflection inhibits us as well from facing up to our own contemporary missiological task and its risk. We assign all the problem of contextualization to distant, exotic places and worry about how others will avoid syncretism with this view of theology. We assume that such risks and such challenges are absent, or at least less pressing, in the West. We let our theologizing slip into a naive sort of idealistic pride in “our” model. We become less aware of the rosy presuppositional glasses with which we look at our rosy theological world. And our theology loses its evangelistic edge.

[M]Issiology’s task…becomes that of a gadfly in the house of theology. (p. 223)