Contextualising theology

Unlike other major world religions like Islam, Christianity has looked very different over the centuries, and looks very different in different countries today. This is just as it should be because while the Bible demands adherence to some basic truths, it allows different cultural expression of these truths. One author* has had a go at condensing the fundamentals of Christianity, and in such a way that even the truths themselves (and their application) could then be differently expressed in different contexts. This is his proposal:

(1) The worship of the God of Israel. This not only defines the nature of God; the One, the Creator and the Judge, the One who does right and before whom humanity falls down; it marks the historical particularity of Christian faith. And it links Christians - usually Gentiles - with the history of a people quite different from their own. It gives them a point of reference outside themselves and their society.
(2) The ultimate significance of Jesus of Nazareth. This is perhaps the test which above all marks out historic Christianity from the various movements along its fringes, as well as from other world faiths which accord recognition to the Christ. Once again, it would be pointless to try to encapsulate this ultimacy forever in any one credal formula. . . . Each culture has its ultimate, and Christ is the ultimate in everyone's vocabulary.
(3) That God is active where believers are.
(4) That believers constitute a people of God transending time and space.

He also adds "a small body of institutions which have continued from century to century. The most obvious of these have been the reading of a common body of scriptures and the special use of bread and wine and water."

What do you think?

*A Walls, The missionary movement in Christian history: Studies in the transmission of faith (NY: Orbis, 1996), 23-24.