Missions and its role interacting with human culture.
If you missed Part One. you can CLICK HERE. I have been slow in getting to the Incarnation of Christ, but I will delay it a bit longer. Consider a change of perspective. If you were a being visiting an alien world full of... well... aliens, how would you want to present yourself. You have …
Continue reading Reflections on Sci-fi Aliens and the Incarnation (Part Two)
"Ready for Harvest," a Christian Youtube channel did a community poll regarding the following statement, ""It was necessary for Jesus to become man because without becoming man He could not overcome sin in the flesh and thereby gain victory over Satan." I am not sure if this is a direct quote from somewhere--- on a …
Continue reading Reflections on Sci-fi Aliens and the Incarnation (Part One)
A friend of mine put this thought on his FB page: "A nation dies when its people are taught to hate their own history, heritage and culture." My first thing was to react pretty negatively to this. After all, I was raised in a setting of American Exceptionalism, with a bit of xenophobia mixed in. …
Continue reading How Should a Missionary Feel About His/Her Own Culture?
Maybe I am a bit slow on things... but in the past I thought of Contextual Theology in very simple terms. Since I agree with Bevans and Vaughn and others that "All Theology is Contextual" I would argue that there are two types of Contextual Theology --- Good Contextual Theology and Bad Contextual Theology. This …
Continue reading Is There More Than One Type of Contextual Theologian
Yes, I know this is an odd question. However it relates to a question I got in class. I was sharing with my class how my home church does "Trick or Trunk" on the Sunday afternoon before Halloween. Our church had around 2000 attendees making it (for our size church) wildly successful. One students was …
I have long struggled with the terms Over-contextualization, Under-contextualization, and Non-contextualization. Paul Hiebert (using terms "uncritical contextualization" and "non-contextualization) stated that the danger of the former is syncretism (unhealthy degradation of essential aspects of the Christian faith by non-Christian beliefs within the recipients' culture) while for the latter, the concern is a "foreign gospel" of …
Okay, the short answer I am giving to this question is "I don't know." But now I will give the longer answer. Good I believe there are evidences that Paul was a good contextualizer of the faith. In this, I am specifically focusing on Paul as a Hellenistic Jew reaching across to Hellenistic Gentiles. One …
Continue reading Was St. Paul a Good Contextualizer of the Faith?
The beginning Bible storyer may be tempted to take one of the existing popular model sets of Bible Storying lessons, translate the story lessons verbatim, and begin using them. While this may serve to produce some quick, though limited results, it must be realized that each story lesson model must be crafted for addressing worldview …
Continuing from Part One, if Jesus can be thought of as an (or "the") Internationalizer of the Jewish Faith, then he was not trying to destroy the Jewish Faith, or replace the Jewish Faith, but transform it. As noted in the last post, the Jewish faith was what is sometimes called an "Ethnic Religion." This …
Continue reading Jesus, Internationalizer of the Jewish Faith— Part 2
In recent decades there has been the rediscovery of a truth so self-obvious that it is strange that it was ignored. Jesus was a Jew in lineage, culture, and faith If you say, "Well of course he was," that is good. But the implications are a bit more profound than what it first appears. Embracing …
Continue reading Jesus, Internationalizer of the Jewish Faith– Part 1