A handful of Messianic Jews, moving beyond the defenses of their somewhat separate society to attack the intellectual bastions of majority culture, refused to contextualize their message by clothing it in the categories the world held ready. Instead, they seized the categories, hammered them into other shapes, and turned the cosmology on its head, with Jesus both at the bottom, crucified as a common criminal, and at the top, preexistent Son and creator, and the church his instrument in today's battle.

John Howard Yoder, "But We Do See Jesus: The Particularity of Incarnation and the Universality of Truth." The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel, 54.

Later (p. 68), in a different essay, Yoder observes that it seems too early to tell whether the whole "contextualization" trend in conservative evangelicalism will be helpful or not, based on the observation that it hasn't been at work long enough for us to see whether it will develop some criteria to discern the line between a faithful "contextualization" and a heretical one. Though it is unclear what year this particular essay was originally written, the collection was first published in 1984. I'm curious, now that at least 25 years has passed since this sidebar-esque comment (and now that I have at least as many liberal or progressive friends that would defend contextualization as I have conservative friends who continue to talk about missions in terms of contextualization), whether or not any of the proponents of contextualization has developed such a set of criteria?