International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38:3 (July 2014)

The latest issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research carries the feature articles noted below addressing the issue of ‘Cultural Disorientation and Understanding the Missional God’.

Nelson Jennings

Cultural Disorientation and Understanding the Missional God

George F. Sabra

Christian Mission in the Wake of the Arab Spring

John Roxborogh

Missiology after “Mission”?

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Salvaging C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy for Mission and Cultural Awareness

David W. Scott

The Geographic Imagination and the Expansion of Methodist Missions in Southeast Asia

Kazue Mino

Campbell N. Moody’s Reflections on the Christian Mission

Mary Motte

My Pilgrimage in Mission

Emma Wild-Wood

A Biography of Apolo Kivebulaya

Ian Welch

Caroline Phebe Tenney Keith—Episcopal Church Missionary and Letter Writer in Shanghai

Currents in Biblical Research 12, 3 (June 2014)

The latest Currents in Biblical Research recently arrived; abstracts of the main articles are as below.

Brad E. Kelle

The Phenomenon of Israelite Prophecy in Contemporary Scholarship

In the mid-twentieth century, the classic historical-critical approach to the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic books gave way to the study of Israelite prophecy as part of a social phenomenon known throughout the ancient Near East. Since the 1980s, research on the phenomenon of Israelite prophecy has been marked by two main paradigms. The first extends the basic phenomenological approach and identifies Israelite prophecy as a socio-historical phenomenon shared across various ancient cultures. Prophecy was a form of intermediation between the divine and human, and a sub-type of the larger religious practice of (non-technical) divination. The second paradigm questions the usefulness of the biblical texts for reconstructing the ancient realities of prophecy and suggests that Israelite prophecy was a literary phenomenon that emerged among scribes in postexilic Yehud. Within these paradigms, present research offers new insights on lines of inquiry, such as the relationship between prophecy and psychology, prophets in the Second Temple period, and female prophets and prophecy. Overall, scholarship reflects a sharpening distinction between ‘ancient Hebrew prophecy’ as a socio-historical phenomenon and ‘biblical prophecy’ as a literary/scribal phenomenon, and generally approaches Israelite prophecy not as a single phenomenon but as a set of related phenomena.

Graham H. Twelftree

The Miraculous in the New Testament: Current Research and Issues

Defining the miraculous, the adequacy of the Western mindset to comprehend human experience, and the ability of the historian to establish the occurrence of a miracle, are issues threaded through study of the miraculous. Current work draws attention to our lack of understanding of the miraculous in the period. So far, research on Jesus has not explained his interest in miracles, their meaning, or how they relate to his other work and self-perception. Also, the nature miracles remain a problem, and a critical study of Jesus remains to be written that takes full account of the evidence of his miracles. More work needs to be done on Paul’s understanding of the miraculous. Further, despite studies on individual stories, insufficient work has been done on the miraculous from the perspective of the Gospel writers. Finally, how far early Christianity can be understood without due regard for the miraculous is open to question.

Angela Standhartinger

Recent Scholarship on Joseph and Aseneth (1988-2013)

This article provides a survey of the last 25 years of research on Joseph and Aseneth, a Jewish Greek novel probably written between the first century BCE and the second century CE. This romance expands on Gen. 41.45 to narrate how Joseph and Aseneth met and later married under the auspices of Pharaoh, after Aseneth had turned away from her Egyptian gods to the God of Israel and was visited by an angel with whom she shares a honeycomb. Later in the story she is introduced to Jacob and Levi, repels the attack of a rival lover, the son of Pharaoh, who then dies, so that Joseph inherits his throne and rules in Egypt for 48 years. The principle [sic] topics covered in this review are recent textual editions of this writing preserved in 91 manuscripts in seven languages, the no-less disputed purpose and provenance of the romance, its date and place of origin, and its genre. Gender issues and other major themes of research and an extended pre-modern history of interpretation will also be discussed.

Good Sport

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

The last few weeks haven’t gone well for fans of the England football team. Even those of us who went into the World Cup with fairly low expectations can’t help feeling disappointed. Still, at least there was an opportunity to salvage some national pride with the cricket. Alas no, as it turned out. Anyway, there’s always the tennis. Well, we shall see. And if not, the Commonwealth Games start next month.

High profile though these tournaments are, they represent a mere fraction of the global phenomenon which is sport. For every type of sport and sporting event covered on the back pages of our newspapers, there are dozens more – each with their participants, aficionados, and spectators. Sport has the capacity, it seems, to embrace the leisure-seeking novice as well as the high-profile professional and everything in between. How might we account for its popularity?

Two recent books – Lincoln Harvey’s A Brief Theology of Sport and Robert Ellis’ The Games People Play – shed helpful theological light. Both review the troublesome history the church has had with sport, where it has either been rejected (understandable, perhaps, in contexts where sport was bound up with pagan rituals) or been harnessed to the church’s own agenda – whether using jousting to prepare knights for the Crusades, or extolling the virtues of a ‘muscular’ Christianity.

Both books take their cue from creation. For Ellis, we play because we’re made in the image of the powerful, playful Creator, such that sports can provide ‘signals of transcendence’ in a secularised world. For Harvey too, sport is a type of play, an expression of freedom, an ‘unnecessary-yet-meaningful activity’. As such, it reflects God’s creation, the ‘unnecessary-yet-meaningful reality of being freely loved into existence in Jesus Christ’. Or in lay terms, ‘sport has everything to do with our deepest identity’!

That sport is woven into the very fabric of our created being helps us appreciate its popularity. It also enables us to understand how easily it can become an arena for idolatry, disfigured through politicisation, commodification and narcissism – though this potential for corruption doesn’t make sport inherently evil. Sport is sometimes seen as a vehicle to a ‘larger’ purpose such as evangelism. Yet, while it may open up such opportunities, like other contexts do, Christians are in a position to celebrate it as a good in its own right and see it as a significant factor in human flourishing from the hands of a gracious God.

Theology of Work Bible Commentary

Having recently posted about the Theology of Work Project, I thought I’d link to a post which reports on the Theology of Work Bible Commentary, focusing on work in the Bible.

Having read quite a bit of this online already, I have some lingering questions as to whether biblical texts are sometimes made do too much in a bid to say something, anything, about work. Overall, though, that shouldn’t detract from what is a hugely significant project, one which will doubtless be a very useful resource if used wisely.

Hendrickson will be publishing a hard copy, but a free online version will also continue to be available, supplemented by videos, audios, chats, tags, and search tools.

Journal of Missional Practice (Spring/Summer 2014)

The Journal of Missional Practice is published online by The Missional Network.

The Spring/Summer 2014 edition – devoted to ‘Context and Community’ – has just been posted, containing the following keynotes and articles:

Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens and Dwight J Friesen 

Dislocated: Naming the Crisis We All Create

This chapter, the first in the book The New Parish, explains how we lost our capacity to be the ‘local church’ – a body of Christians learning to share life faithfully together in, with and for a particular place. The second, living above place, develops from the habits and structures which conceal how our actions impact each other. Proximity in the new parish however reconnects us within our shared contexts, people and land, in all our diversity. Unlike the old idea of parish, this connection welcomes partnerships and collaboration. For any church this on-the-ground reality is a dare to faith and an invitation to participate with the Triune God in community transformation.

Lord Maurice Glasman

Faith in the Public Square

Lord Glasman begins by organizing his thoughts around three key TMN concepts. Discerning our common good takes relationship and time. It has to be located in and with in our local communities. Forming happens inside a shared imaginative space that has been shaped by a tradition – in this case Christianity. A Christian imagination affords high value to reciprocity and responsibility, to vocation and worthwhile work done well. Working together towards the common good requires the risk of joining across all ideological divides because meeting the challenges of dispossession, wage disparity and usury will require many disparate groups participating together in the public square. The church has traditionally protected this space, a place for the politics of the common good, and a place where there is room for love in the mundane details of life. It is this re-inhabiting of the common space in the local, where the church needs to express its life and faith.

Jamie Wilson

Together at God’s Table: How Practicing Hospitality Shapes Our Imagination

In the missional conversation, there has been a lot of talk about the need for a new imagination in the church but less attention to how imagination is actually formed and how we might get there.  This paper will examine the bodily formation of imagination and will suggest that Jesus was on to something vital when he sent his disciples two by two to be hosted by Samaritans. He was inviting them into the habits and routines of a stranger and stripping them of all cultural capital.  At a time when skepticism of the church is massive and well grounded, Luke 10 offers an urgently need needed doorway from anxiety to engagement. Re-visioning the agency of God and re-discovering an authentic encounter between the Gospel and our culture may require a radical dislocation from the comforts of home.

Catalyst Articles (June 2014)

Catalyst, the ‘online newsletter for United Methodist seminarians, pastors, and other Christian leaders’, has posted some new articles online:

Robert D. Lupton

Referring Jesus

Providing free food, clothing, and shelter is an emergency response to a crisis situation. The Red Cross does that well. But the poor we see in our food lines and clothes closets are there because of chronic poverty situations. The right response to chronic poverty is development.

D. Brent Laytham

Technological Messiah? Revisiting the Promised Revolution

Each new technological ‘revolution’ tempts us to think and act as if machines are suitable analogs to, and thus appropriate substitutes for, human persons.

Wendy J. Deichmann

The Ministry of Order

The movement of disorder in The United Methodist Church has escalated to the point that serious discussions are taking place around the possibility that the denomination itself will fragment, split, or dissolve.

Randy Maddox

How John Wesley Read the Bible

Wesley claimed to be ‘a man of one book’. How did that work itself out in his practices?

Amy Wagner

Words Come to Life

The Bible in Mission

Pauline Hoggarth, Fergus Macdonald, Bill Mitchell and Knud Jørgensen (eds.), Bible in Mission, Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2013).

The team at Scripture Engagement make notice of the free availability of the above collection of essays as a pdf here. This is well worth checking out by all those interested in the nexus of relationships between Scripture, hermeneutics, mission, and the global church.

Like others in the ‘Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series’, the volume flowed out of the discussions at the Edinburgh 2010 conference. I bought it when it came out; it felt, at the time, like an expensive but important purchase. Hopefully the free availability of the book online will give it a much wider readership.

Here’s an outline of the contents:

Introduction

Editorial Introduction: The Bible in Mission

The Bible in Mission – and the Surprising Ways of God (Ole Christian Kvarme)

The Bible as Text for Mission (Tim Carriker)

Section 1: The Bible in Mission in the World and in the Church

The World

The Bible in Mission: The Modern/Postmodern Western Context (Richard Bauckham)

The Bible in Mission in the Islamic Context (Kenneth Thomas)

The Bible in Christian Mission among the Hindus (Lalsangkima Pachuau)

Children, Mission and the Bible: A Global Perspective (Wendy Strachan)

The Church

The Bible in Mission: Evangelical/Pentecostal View (Antonia Leonora van der Meer)

Bible Hermeneutics in Mission – A Western Protestant Perspective (Michael Kisskalt)

Orthodox Perspectives on Bible and Mission (Simon Crisp)

‘Ignorantia Scripturae ignorantia Christi est’ (Thomas P. Osborne)

Section 2: Case Studies

Africa

Baku Bible Translation and Oral Biblical Narrative Performance (Dan Fitzgerald)

The UBS HIV Good Samaritan Program (David Hammond and Immanuel Kofi Agamah)

The Bible and the Poor (Gerald West)

The Bible and Care of Creation (Allison Howell)

Asia–Pacific

‘Text of Life’ and ‘Text for Life’: The Bible as the Living and Life-Giving Word of God for the Dalits (Peniel J. Rufus Rajkumar)

Bible Missions in China (Pamela Wan-Yen Choo)

The Impact and Role of The Bible in Big Flowery Miao Community (Suee Yan Yu)

Bible Engagement among Australian Young People (Philip Hughes)

Latin America

The Bible and Children in Mission (Edseio Sanchez Cetina)

Bible Translation, the Quechua People and Protestant Church Growth in the Andes (Bill Mitchell)

The Bible in Mission: Women Facing the Word (Elsa Tamez)

West

Biblical Advocacy – Advocating the Bible in an Alien Culture (David Spriggs and Sue Coyne)

Scripture Engagement and Living Life as a Message (Steve Bird)

Reading the Bible with Today’s Jephthahs: Scripture and Mission at Tierra Nueva (Bob Ekblad)

Lessons Learned from the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey (Nancy Scammacca Lewis)

Glazed Eyes and Disbelief (Adrian Blenkinsop and Naomi Swindon)

Information Management and Delivery of the Bible (Paul Soukup)

Conclusion

The Bible as the Core of Mission: ‘...for the Bible tells me so’ (Knud Jørgensen)