Beginning With The Word Cultural Exegesis

In this addition to the critically acclaimed Cultural Exegesis series, a nationally recognized scholar and award-winning author offers a sophisticated theological engagement with the nature of language and literature. Roger Lundin conducts a sustained theological dialogue with imaginative literature and with modern literary and cultural theory, utilizing works of poetry and fiction throughout to prompt the discussion and focus his reflections. The book is marked by a commitment to bring the history of Christian thought, modern theology in particular, into dialogue with literature and modern culture. It is theologically rigorous, widely interdisciplinary in scope, lucidly written, and ecumenical in tone and approach.

In March 1992, a very unusual gathering of biblical scholars from around the world took place on the campus of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Under the auspices of the 'Casassa Conference' (named for Fr Charles Casassa SJ), these scholars came together to discuss papers and interact with each other on the issue of culture and biblical interpretation. Coining the term 'Cultural Exegesis', these scholars and students debated whether the cultural backgrounds and experiences of the readers of the Bible can not only influence conclusions about contemporary theological issues, but even influence the methods and results of historical and literary critical methodologies.

This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible. Professor Young sets the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Graeco-Roman world - the dissemination of books and learning, the way texts were received and read, the function of literature in shaping not only a culture but a moral universe. For the earliest Christians, the adoption of the Jewish scriptures constituted a supersessionary claim in relation to Hellenism as well as Judaism. Yet the debt owed to the practice of exegesis in the grammatical and rhetorical schools is of overriding significance. Methods were philological and deductive, and the usual analysis according to 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' is inadequate to describe questions of reference and issues of religious language. The biblical texts shaped a 'totalizing discourse' which by the fifth century was giving identity, morality and meaning to a new Christian culture.

Everyday theology is the reflective and practical task of living each day as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. In other words, theology is not just for Sundays, and it's not just for professional theologians. Everyday Theology teaches all Christians how to get the theological lay of the land. It enables them to become more conscious of the culture they inhabit every day so that they can understand how it affects them and how they can affect it. If theology is the ministry of the Word to the world, everyday theologians need to know something about that world, and Everyday Theology shows them how to understand their culture make an impact on it. Engaging and full of fresh young voices, this book is the first in the new Cultural Exegesis series.

Drawing upon a range of perspectives from textual and cultural studies, this book synthesizes textual, contextual and audience analysis into an overall picture of meaning making. Using examples ranging from Balzac to blonde jokes, modernist poetry to pop lyrics, the book discusses the factors that contribute to the fomation of meaning: language, media, texts, contexts and readers. In the cultural study of texts - texts, contexts and practices - are equally important, the author argues. Meaning making takes place in the articulation between these different elements. But how can one examine all three areas at the same time? In The Cultural Analysis of Texts, Mikko Lehtonen develops a model to enable just such an approach.

In this wide-ranging collection, Michael Fishbane investigates the complex and diverse relationships between the 'biblical text' and 'exegetical culture.' The author demonstrates the multiple literary dimensions and interpretative strategies that came to form the Hebrew Bible in the context of the ancient Near East, the Dead Sea Scrolls in the context of an emergent biblical-Jewish culture, and the classical rabbinic Midrash in the context of an emergent rabbinic civilization in late antiquity. Within each study, and in the collection as a whole, the author shows a broad range of creative methods, always with a scholarly concern to illuminate the religious ideas of Scripture as it was perceived through diverse hermeneutical lenses and exegetical methodologies. The studies range from the purely literary to the highly analytic, from myth to law, and from studies of symbols to the study of exegetical methods.

The connection between theology and film is a hot topic in the academy and the church. But research and writing on methodology and hermeneutics is lacking. This comprehensive collection identifies the overlooked or undervalued areas in the current discussions of film and theology. Including contributions from the leaders in the field, Reframing Theology and Film helps deepen the conversation while bringing it to a new level of prominence. Professors and students of theology and film, libraries, pastors, and film buffs will benefit from this much-needed resource.

How can a Christian brought up in the metropolis of Sao Paulo speak the gospel clearly to a Buddhist raised in the mountains of Tibet? Every missionary confronts the difficulty of cross-cultural communication. But missionaries from the Third World, Bruce Nicholls says, must understand four cultures--"the Bible's, the Western missionaries' who first brought the gospel, their own, and the people's to whom they take the gospel." Recognizing this, Nicholls proposes that the gospel be contextualized, that is, presented in forms which are characteristic of the culture to which the gospel is taken. The problem is to find the right cultural forms and thus keep the gospel message both clear and biblical. Nicholls deals with tough social, theological and hermeneutical questions and proposes a direction for missions in the future. Bruce J. Nicholls, formerly executive secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship Theological Commission, was a career missionary in India working in theological education and in pastoral ministry with the Church of North India. He was also Editor of the Evangelical Review of Theology for 18 years and is now Editor of the Asia Bible Commentary series.