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In June of 1910, delegates gathered in Edinburgh for the first World Missionary Conference. One hundred years later, the 2010 Church and Mission in a Multireligious Third Millennium conference sought to reconcile a century of seismic shifts in the worldwide landscape of the church with its ongoing mandate to make disciples of all nations. Arising out of that recent conference, Walk Humbly with the Lord presents a broad, multinational spectrum of contemporary approaches to both theology and missiology. Recognizing that the old Western notion of Christendom which formed the cultural backdrop of Edinburgh 1910 is now long obsolete, the book s twenty-seven forward-thinking contributors respond t...
An increasing number of theologians believe that the Western world has moved from an era of Christendom to an era of post-Christendom. This book goes to the heart of the debate related to this shift, asking, How are we to understand the distinctive identity of the church with special reference to its role in a post-Christendom society? It then presents an analysis of the work of the English Reformed theologian Lesslie Newbigin and the American Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, both of whom reflect on how we should understand this important question. At the end of The Distinctive Identity of the Church, the charge of sectarianism is discussed. It is argued that a missionary God sends th...
This volume is about ecclesiology and ethnography and what really matters in such academic work. How does material from field studies matter in a theological conversation? How does theology, in various forms, matter in analysis and interpretation of field work material? How does method matter? The authors draw on their research experiences and engage in conversations concerning reflexivity, normativity, and representation in qualitative theological work. The role and responsibility of the researcher is addressed from various perspectives in the first part of the book. In the next section the authors discuss ways in which empirical studies are able to disrupt the implicit and explicit normati...
A common basis for the project on which this volume is based is that one cannot understand religion and ethics without paying attention to the different contexts in, and by means of which, these cultural elements are expressed. This approach makes both religion and ethics liquid, and allows us to see them as based on specific contingencies rather than as expressions of some essential features. The changing societal and cultural conditions in late modern Western societies pose new challenges for established religion, theology and ethics: Not only does religion itself appear to be in some kind of crisis, but also many of the established ways of understanding and doing religion, theology and et...
Post-Christendom Studies publishes research on the nature of Christian identity and mission in the contexts of post-Christendom. Post-Christendom refers to places, both now and in the past, where Christianity was once a significant cultural presence, though not necessarily the dominant religion. Sometimes “Christendom” refers to the official link between church and state. The term “post-Christendom” is often associated with the rise of secularization, religious pluralism, and multiculturalism in western countries over the past sixty years. Our use of the term is broader than that however. Egypt for example can be considered a post-Christendom context. It was once a leading center of ...
How can the church navigate the challenges of our secular age? In The Church in a Secular Age, Norwegian and Pentecostal scholar Silje Kvamme Bjørndal takes on three dynamic thinkers, each in their own way, in search for insights to this question. Philosopher Charles Taylor offers the backdrop for the conversation, as Bjørndal carefully sifts out some of his most central tenets for understanding our secular age. Bjørndal then turns to the theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and critically engages his notion of the church as a community set apart from our secular age. By bringing several of Hauerwas’s interlocutors into the conversation, Bjørndal manages to bring out both the acute...
If the origin of the world is not a part of the world, what are the implications for our understanding of ourselves, the world, and its origin? In antiquity, both gentile and Christian authors agreed that the significance of this question could only be maintained by accepting the unbridgeable difference between the world and God. Not even Christology as the most ambitious attempt at developing a model for divine-human communication was allowed to undermine the principle of absolute divine difference. This changed with the modern emphasis on univocity and measurability as the defining aspects of knowledge. From the point of view of a philosophy of absolute difference, this appears as an arbit...
After-Mission touches on on three questions.The first question is about self-perception and identity-formation strategies, and the various views that we have on the Protestants’ relation to their Arab Muslim Middle Eastern context. This will furnish the basis for the ensuing parts, as it will provide the study with coherent and analytical readings of the cultural situation and intellectual views of the Arab Eastern Protestants in their Sitz im Leben from the perspective of the hermeneutic tripod of ‘identity–othering–relationality’. The second question, about the theological dimension, asks what kind of a theological discourse do the Protestants need to develop, and how do they nee...
The Sermon on the Mount never ceases to challenge readers in every generation. New methods and new insights into new surroundings have to be applied to the most influential speech ever given. In this study, Ernst Baasland takes a fresh look at the history of research done on it, both on its broad influence and on the variety of interpretations. The historical questions are seen from new perspectives. Is orality the key to a better understanding? To what extent can we reconstruct a pre-text and the question of authenticity be answered? These questions are seen through historiographical lenses. The author argues in favour of a universal addressee and maintains that the speech contains radical philosophical thinking. The first audience consisted of Jews, and the religiously based understanding of life is conceived within Judaism. However, its ethics of wisdom is developed in a Hellenistic setting and provides a radical philosophy of life.
Many Western initiatives exist for theological development in the majority world, but how often do practitioners from the West pause to examine the role they should play in that endeavor? Missions history and church history have revealed inadequacies of imposing foreign theology on local churches, yet the alternative of withdrawing from local theological development appears equally problematic. If, therefore, the outsider’s role is neither to impose theology nor withdraw from the task, then what is his or her role? Hermeneutical Community addresses this fundamental question and seeks to lay a sound missiological foundation for local theological development.