A modern theological concept that expresses a principle of Christian mission implicit in Ignatian* spirituality*–namely, that the gospel* needs to be presented to any given culture in terms intelligible to that culture and allowed to grow up in the “soil” of that culture; God is already present and active there (“God’s action is antecedent to ours”–Jesuit General Congregation 34 (1995), “Our Mission and Culture”).
Thus in the first century St. Paul fought against the imposition of Jewish practices on non-Jewish Christians. And in the 16th and 17th centuries, Jesuits like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) fought to retain elements of Chinese and Indian culture in presenting a deEuropeanized Christianity to those people, only to have their approach condemned by the Church in the 18th.
Ideally, the gospel* and a culture mutually interact, and in the process the gospel embraces some elements of the culture while offering a critique of others.
