Missional Church, Public Theology, World Christianity Series

Scholars from the United States, Latin America, and Oceania reflect in this volume on the importance of contextual theology for our twenty-first century. Contextual theology offers fresh voices from every culture, and not just from the West. It calls for new ways of doing theology that embrace cultural values, but at the same time challenges them to the core. And it opens up new and fresh topics out of which and about which people can theologize. If the church is to be faithful to its mission, it needs to provide a feast at which all can be nourished.

The Vitality of Liberation Theology argues for the ongoing necessity of a liberating theology in a world of endemic poverty and economic globalization. Although some have declared liberation theology's demise, or even its death, Nessan articulates the imperative and logic of it for a new generation. Latin American liberation theology burst forth as the most original and compelling theological movement from the developing world in the modern period. The story of the emergence and proliferation of liberation theology, as well as the opposition to this movement both within and without Latin America, is one of the most significant and lasting developments in Christianity since the last third of the twentieth century. Together with other forms of liberating theology from contexts of oppression in diverse parts of the world (anti-apartheid theology in South Africa and Namibia, Minjung theology in Korea, Dalit theology in India, or Palestinian liberation theology), Latin American liberation theology takes a prophetic stand against the hegemony of the status quo and joins league with other subaltern peoples in the cause of freedom from all forms of subjugation and oppression. The dawn of Latin American liberation theology inaugurated a new era in the global theological landscape.

Hermeneutical Theology and the Imperative of Public Ethics is a groundbreaking attempt to present constructive missional theology in an integrative and interdisciplinary framework as it provocatively utilizes and contextualizes Reformation theology and hermeneutics concerning ethical theology embedded within the wider horizon of World Christianity. Mission as constructive theology is explored and refined in an hermeneutical and interdisciplinary fashion, underlying a new horizon of postcolonial theology and mission in light of God's act of speech. Missional church founded up God's grace of justification and Christ's diakonia of reconciliation becomes ethically oriented public church as it is engaged in mutireligious diversity of people's lives and lifeworld in the postcolonial context of World Christianity.

Colonial missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, arrived in India with the grandiose vision of converting the pagans because, like St. Peter (Acts 4:12) and most of the church fathers, they honestly believed that there is no salvation outside the church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus). At the end of the "great Protestant century," however, Christians made up less than 3 percent of the population in India, and the hope of the missionary was nearly shattered. But if one looks at mission in India qualitatively rather than quantitatively, one sees a number of positive outcomes. Missionaries in India, particularly Protestant missionaries espousing the social gospel, in collaboration with a few British evangelical administrators, dared to challenge numerous social evils and even began to eradicate them. The scientific and liberal English education began to enlighten and transform the Indian mindset. Converts belonging to the upper caste, although small in number, laid the foundation stone of Indian theology and an inculturated church using Indian genius. The end of colonialism in India coincided with the painful death of colonial mission theology. Now, the power of the Word of God, extricated from political power, is slowly and peacefully gaining ground, like the mustard seed of the parable. A paradigm shift from the ecclesio-centric mission to missio Dei offers reason for further optimism. In short, the future of mission in India is as bright as the kingdom of God. In today's new context, theologians, despite objections from some quarters, are struggling to discover the Asian face of Jesus, disfigured by the Greco-Roman Church. And the missionary is challenged to become a living Bible that, undoubtedly, everyone will read.

The problem of the barbarous excess of human suffering is becoming the main question of global Christianity. In an intercultural, globalizing world, how do we envision the wounds of sin and God's saving work of healing, liberation, and redemption? Salvation for the Sinned-Against attempts to address these questions and to suggest a renewed understanding of God's salvation for the victims of sin within the intercultural and globalizing context of the twenty-first century. It offers a thorough treatment of Edward Schillebeeckx, intercultural hermeneutics, and the Korean concept of han, and brings them into dialogue with the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et spes. This book is the first in-depth study of han from a Roman Catholic perspective and the first to attempt to integrate han into Roman Catholic theology in order to begin to envision salvation for the sinned-against creature. Its insights into the experience and message of salvation for the sinned-against (as well as the perpetrators) speak not only to the ecclesial sphere but to the public sphere and beyond. Although written from a Western, North American social location, this is a book that can be useful far beyond this context.

What are Christian women thinking about mission? How do they do mission? What informs their knowledge and action as they address issues in a complex world where religious proselytizing has become suspect? This empirical study explores those questions, finding congruence among women from diverse backgrounds and cultural contexts. Women in mission face common identity issues, utilize art and beauty in their work, and develop character as they overcome obstacles in their cultural and denominational settings. Through nearly one hundred interviews of women in Europe, Asia, Brazil, and the United States, a study of women's theologies of mission, lectures, and countless conversations with women around the globe, this study finds common themes among contemporary women doing Christian mission. This book fills a lacuna in mission studies that professors, pastors, and church women and men will find informative and refreshing.

In this book David Everett examines how Church has changed throughout a modern/postmodern context. Everett explores how social gospel dimensions and prophetic radicalism have diminished in a way that it might reestablish itself as a pillar in the community through a retrieval of its prophetic voice and social gospel roots so that it to might be missional-minded and civically-engage. Everett anticipates that this perspective will assist the Black Church in the reclamation of its heritage by confirming its purpose and affirming its position within the missional context that God has placed it.

Wilhelm Loehe is one of the most significant nineteenth-century figures for North American church life and mission, whose influence continues into the present. Loehe is unique for joining together aspects of the Christian life often held to be antithetical: worship and mission, orthodoxy and pietism, evangelical proclamation and diakonia, and theological imagination and practical skill in administration. Already in the nineteenth century Loehe contributed a vital principle for advancing ecumenical understanding: the idea of "open questions." When the church confesses core teachings as one, there does not need to be agreement on all secondary matters in order to live together in church fellowship. This book explores Loehe's historical activity as a pastor, as a supporter of mission in North America, as an organizer (together with Friedrich Bauer) of theological education in North America, and as a founder of deaconess institutions in Neuendettelsau, Germany, that still exist today. The central themes represented by Loehe not only constitute a matrix that has significance for the church and its mission today but also constitute an agenda for the church of the future.

The world has shrunk in the processes of globalization, and the old ways of actively ignoring plurality in theology are no longer viable. Contextual differences between different Christian traditions and theologies are highly visible due to improved communications and migration. These differences also witness that this plurality has existed since the very beginning of Christianity. Religious studies demonstrate that no religion is pure and hermetically sealed from others, but they all are syncretistic in the sense of giving and taking. In the world of religions, where boundaries are porous and the internal plurality of Christianity is vast, there is a temptation either to reject the plurality in a fideistic manner or succumb to relativism. The first solution is intellectually hard to defend, and relativism is often seen as detrimental to Christian identity. This book proposes a way of recognizing the contextual and syncretistic dimensions of pluralism while not surrendering to relativism. Christian identity and tradition can be affirmed while staying open to the challenges of pluralism.

This book offers a critical analysis of the use of language in mission studies. Language and Christian missionary activity intersect in complicated ways to objectify the other in cross-cultural situations. Rethinking missiological language is both urgent and necessary to subvert narratives that continue to fetishize the other as cultural stereotypes. The project takes a step forward to reconceptualize otherness as gift, and such an affirmation should create a pathway for human flourishing and furthermore, open new avenues for missiological exploration to address issues arising from a world dominated by bigoted discourses, lies, and hate speech.