The Bible In Cross Cultural Perspective

The Bible is not a Western book, and the world of the New Testament is not our world. The New Testament world was preindustrial, Mediterranean, and populated mostly by nonliterate peasants who depended on hearing these writings read aloud. Only a few of the literate elite were part of the Jesus movement, and they knew nothing of either modernity or the Western culture we inhabit today. This means that for all North Americans, reading the New Testament is always an exercise in cross-cultural communication. Travelers, diplomats, and exchange students take great pains to bridge the cultural gaps that cloud mutual understanding. But North American readers habitually suspend cross-cultural awareness when encountering the Bible. The result is that we unwittingly project our own cultural understandings onto the pages of the New Testament. Rohrbaugh argues that to whatever degree we can bridge cultural gaps between ourselves and New Testament writers, we learn to value their intentions rather than the meanings we create from their words. Rohrbaugh's insightful interpretations of Gospel passages go a long way toward helping to span distances between the New Testament world and the present.

Some Questions are Universal. Where did I come from? What happens when I die? Am I important? Across the world, these questions are answered in a vast range of ways, shaped by our worldview, and our specific cultural context. Cross-cultural workers, seeking to engage people at the point of these questions, can offer a rich dialogue between cultural assumptions and biblical truth, but only if they can reach into the cultural framework underlying a particular context. The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective explores this cultural framework, tackling different aspects of the “Biblical worldview’s” interaction with both “Western/secular” and a “traditional/animist” worldviews. With topics ranging from the physical and metaphysical perception of the universe, to the significance of names, Loewen unpacks cultural construction in all of it’s layered complexity, allowing us to visualize where the Gospel will interact with people’s beliefs, regardless of their context. Jacob Loewen, the author of Culture and Human Values, draws on multiple years of experience—across several continents—as a field missionary, anthropologist, linguist, Bible translator, and missions researcher. The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective, originally published in 2000, is Loewen’s culminating work in missionary anthropology and it remains a useful and relevant work today.

"This new edition includes reflections on themes that have emerged since the book's initial publication in 1979. It takes on squarely the task of helping both outsiders and insiders understand the hidden language of culture and learning how culture affects a people's appropriation of the person and message of Jesus Christ."--BOOK JACKET.

The refugee that has come to your church, the pastor of the immigrant church in your town, and you yourself all come before the same Bible, even the same verse, and walk away with completely different understandings and applications. In an increasingly globalized and multicultural world, how can we learn to see beyond our own cultural influences, understand those of others, and learn from each other in order to better understand and apply the word of God? How do we stay faithful to the text when our contemporary cultural perspective is so different from the original author’s? This book will enable you to understand the common pitfalls and dangers related to cross-cultural hermeneutics while also equipping you with principles and real-life examples for how to interpret Scripture in such situations. Additionally, given the fact that our world is increasingly digitized and people are less and less likely to read, we will consider the issue of oral hermeneutics and how those who can’t read or choose not to read can interpret Scripture faithfully.

An Exciting In-Depth Bible-Study Program 'Introducing the Cultural Context of the Old Testament' is an invitation to learn the Mediterranean culture of our ancestors in the faith in order to understand the Bible. This excellent Bible-study workbook for adults concentrates on Wisdom literature and guides readers through cross-cultural interpretation as it contrasts middle-class United States cultural values with those of the Mediterranean world.

Preliminary Material /Martien E. Brinkman and Dirk van Keulen --Introduction /Martien Brinkman and Dirk van Keulen --Pela as Inclusive Socio-Cosmic System in the Central Moluccas /Simon Ririhena --Pela as Inclusive Socio-Cosmic System in the Central Moluccas Comments on Simon Ririhena's Paper /Dirk Smit --African Theology as a Challenge for Western Theology /Kwame Bediako --African Theology as a Challenge for Western Theology /Mechteld Jansen --Liminality and Worship in the Korean American Context /Sang Hyun Lee --Liminality and Worship in the Korean American Context /Verry Patty --Christians in the Clash of Civilizations /Abraham van de Beek --Christians in the Clash of Civilizations Comments on Abraham van de Beek's Paper /James Kombo --Contextual Theology, Tradition and Heresy --'No other motives would give us the right' /Dirk Smit --'No other motives would give us the right' /Sjaak van't Kruis --Christian Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective /Theo Witvliet --Christian Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective Comments on Theo Witvliet's Paper /Christiaan Mostert --The Catholicity of the Church and the Universality of Theology /Christiaan Mostert --The Catholicity of the Church and the Universality of Theology Comments on Christiaan Mostert's Paper /Kwame Bediako --Contextualization as Inculturation: The Experience of the African Theological Situation /James Kombo --Contextualization as Inculturation Comments on James Kombo's Paper /Bert de Leede --List of Contributors /Martien E. Brinkman and Dirk van Keulen --Index of Names /Martien E. Brinkman and Dirk van Keulen.