Naming the Idea Before Ratifying It

The word inculturation is younger than the practice it names, and tracing when it hardened into official vocabulary is itself informative. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit superior general, is usually credited with popularising the specific term inculturation in a 1978 letter to the Society of Jesus, proposing it as a translation nearer to "incarnation" than the older missiological word "adaptation" allowed. Paul VI's 1975 exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi had already argued for evangelisation reaching a culture's own criteria of judgement and values without the word itself. John Paul II then used inculturation repeatedly and gave it magisterial weight, including in Redemptoris Missio in 1990.

Protestant missiology arrived at a related idea by a different route and a different name. "Contextualization" is generally traced to a 1972 report of the Theological Education Fund on training for ministry, and it was developed partly as a corrective within Protestant circles wary of a term so closely associated with Catholic magisterial usage. The two words are now often treated as near-equivalents, though contextualization's Protestant origin carries a stronger emphasis on the local church's own theological agency and a lighter one on institutional ratification from a centre.

Orthodoxy rarely uses either word, not from indifference to the question but because its own account of liturgical translation, running back to Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs, treats vernacular and local liturgical form as an ordinary consequence of autocephaly rather than a distinct theological project needing its own name.