Multicultural Christology

Christology with a planetary vision, blurring the boundaries and breaking the rhetoric of polarities of domination and exclusion, is the need of the hour. It is only by taking seriously these two dimensions (intercultural and subaltern) that christological articulations can be made intelligible, understandable, and relevant. Intercultural Christology in John's Gospel unravels the intercultural intersections and subaltern dimensions of John's Christology. John's Christology, crossing the boundaries of traditional Messianic categories of Judaism, even while echoing those traditions in an intercultural milieu, and creating a hybrid space of "inter" by blurring the categories of "above" and "below," gives an impetus for developing such new expressions in any given subaltern context. Christological articulation in John has a multidimensional orientation: toward God, world, and life. Therefore, John's Christology could be termed a Christology with a planetary vision. John's Gospel articulates its Christology through an intercultural route from a subaltern negotiating space. The Johannine Messiah is a subaltern Messiah, and the Johannine community is a subaltern community. The evangelist is not the one who collaborated with the colonizers. Therefore, the text cannot be treated as a colonial document, as some of the postcolonial readers do. Rather the evangelist resists and disrupts, even while resonating with the surrounding linguistic and conceptual milieu. Therefore, a hermeneutical framework of intercultural resonance and subaltern subversive rhetoric is a key to unlock the Gospel. Such a hermeneutical approach is a viable option in any subaltern context.

This book explores the multicultural and multilingual dimensions of Jesus' life and ministry in first century Galilee. The study focuses on Jesus' encounters with ethnic minorities in the New Testament and the so-called « Mission Instructions (Luke 10:2-16), which show Jesus as a reconciler of cultures. The author connects the multicultural-multilingual life and ministry of Jesus to the life of Korean immigrants in the North American context. Jesus is presented as the Christ with whom they can identify in the context of their painful marginalisation.

"Updated version of an Orbis classic"--

Intercultural Christology in John's Gospel unravels the intercultural intersections and subaltern dimensions of John's Christology. A hermeneutical framework of intercultural resonance and subaltern subversive rhetoric is a key to unlock the Gospel. Such a hermeneutical approach is a viable option in any subaltern context.

Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, published by Peter Lang since 1975, is nowadays the largest series in the wide field of missiology, intercultural theology, and comparative religion/theology. The present editors decided to celebrate the publication of no less than one hundred and fifty volumes by evaluating and rethinking «intercultural theology». This book is meant to encourage Christian theology to be done more thoroughly, adequately, and effectively in the contemporary global and local setting. On the one hand, the volume offers new insights into the nature of doing biblical studies, church history, and systematic and practical theology as well as comparative theology, in an intercultural way. On the other hand, it argues for accomplishing interdisciplinary studies in the fields of theology and religion.

How should followers of Christ live in a multi-religious world? This book argues that the example of Jesus has something fresh and helpful to say to those who ponder the question. It takes something old--the example of Jesus--to say something new to our pluralist world. Most of the book examines the meetings of Jesus with Gentiles and Samaritans. This is a scholarly but accessible discussion of what it might mean to "have the same attitude of mind that Christ Jesus had" in our contemporary multi-religious world.

In the last century, amazingly, world Christianity's center of gravity has effectively moved from Europe to a point near Timbuktu in Africa. Never in the history of Christianity has there been such a rapid and dramatic shift in where Christians are located in the world. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson explores the consequences of this shift for congregations in North America, specifically for the efforts to build Christian unity in the face of new and challenging divisions. Centers of religious power, money, and theological capital remain entrenched in the global, secularized North while the Christian majority thrives and rapidly grows in the global South. World Christianity's most decisive twenty-first-century challenge, Granberg-Michaelson argues, is to build meaningful bridges between faithful churches in the global North and the spiritually exuberant churches of the global South. Watch the trailer:

Jesus' particular Jewish existence (his human nature) and his universal transcendence (his divine nature) are brought together here in the construction of a Christology that proposes the equality, unity, and full participation of both natures. Using frameworks from multicultural theory, it identifies the processes by which Christologies have historically negotiated difference in the Incarnation, and explains why uniting the two natures of Christ consistently and problematically supplants Jesus' Jewishness. This conceptual framework unites the two natures without sublimating their differences, by proposing a contextual universalism. 'Overlapping membership' offers the means whereby the particular, Jewish, human nature and the universal, divine nature of Jesus Christ engage in an ongoing dialogue and formation in the one person of the Incarnation. This work offers a new way of understanding the two natures of Christ that brings together historical understandings with contemporary contextual Christologies, enabling us to find a way to understand Christ as both truly human and fully divine.