The New Testament 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.

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.

14th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year, Cross-Cultural Category From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a crosscultural book. Scripture is full of narratives of God's people crossing cultures in pursuit of God's mission. Biblical texts shed light on mission dynamics: Sarah and Hagar functioning in an honor-shame culture, Moses as a multicultural leader, Ruth as a crosscultural conversion, David and Uriah illustrating power distance, the queen of Sheba as an international truth-seeker, Daniel as a transnational student, Paul in Athens as a model of contextualization, and much more. Missionary and missions professor Marvin Newell provides a biblical theology of culture and mission, mining the depths of Scripture to tease out missiological insights and crosscultural perspectives. Unlike other such books that are organized topically, this text is organized canonically, revealing how the whole of Scripture speaks to contemporary mission realities. Comprehensive in scope, filled with biblical insight and missional expertise, this book is an essential resource for students and practitioners of crosscultural ministry and mission.

Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.