Evangelical Review of Theology 47, 4 (November 2023)

The latest Evangelical Review of Theology is now online and available in its entirety as a pdf here.

Introduction: Thank You!

Godfrey Yogarajah

Praying for the Persecuted: IDOP

Anna E. Hampton

Towards a Theology of Risk for the 21st Century

Risk is not always right! As threats against Christians intensify in many parts of the world, we must gain deeper understanding of when God is calling us into risky situations and be spiritually and emotionally prepared for the possible results. This article by an experienced risk consultant dispels common myths and offers a mature theological perspective.

Wanjiku M. Kihuha and Joshua Robert Barron

Introducing the Africa Society of Evangelical Theology

Is African Christianity theologically shallow? It is not, thanks in part to the Africa Society of Evangelical Theology. In this article, two ASET leaders describe the organization’s vision and accomplishments and encourage theologians everywhere to engage with the exciting work emerging from Africa.

Jeffrey S. Krohn

The ‘Third Mention’ of Apostles and Prophets: Ephesians 4:11 in Light of 2:20 and 3:5

Many Christian leaders (including Joseph Mattera in our May 2023 issue) see a role for apostles and prophets in the contemporary church. This article examines, with illustrative references to African interpreters and popular current practices, whether Paul’s references to ‘apostles and prophets’ in Ephesians support such an understanding.

Joshua Robert Barron

Is the Prosperity Gospel the Gospel? The Prosperity and Productivity Gospels in African Christianity

We know that some versions of the Prosperity Gospel are off the rails, as this article colourfully documents. But the article goes on to commend the positive impact of some African variants that often go unnoticed.

Amanda Jackson

Women in the Church Today

Disagreements over the appropriateness of female pastors often obscure the much broader agreement that women have important gifts that should be deployed for the kingdom of God. Yet those gifts are often overlooked. In this article, the WEA’s Senior Advisor on Diversity and former Director of its Women’s Commission lays out a pathway towards greater engagement of women for the benefit of all.

Thomas K. Johnson

Adam and Eve, Where Are You? A Missionary Philosophy of God’s Questions for Humanity

People who do not know God often believe illogical things about the world, either because they have not thought about the issues seriously, uncritically accept views from the culture around them, or are subconsciously hiding from God’s truth. Based on his many years of teaching in a secular context, the WEA’s senior theological advisor suggests 10 questions that we can use to help people question their assumptions and become open to God’s answers.

Evert Van de Poll

Protestantism, Early Baptists and the Emergence of Human Rights

The development of modern understandings of human rights is widely attributed to Enlightenment thinkers, but Christians had constructed similar arguments even earlier. This article traces that history with primary reference to three early Baptists whose worldviews were shaped by the intolerance they experienced.

Timoteo D. Gener

James McClendon’s Theology of Culture and Its Implications for Cultural Engagement

In this essay, a leading Filipino theologian reviews the work of James McClendon, including his interaction with Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr and others, as a means of shedding light on the church’s opportunities for cultural transformation. Specific applications to the Philippine setting provide a model for applications in other contexts.

Book Review

Evangelical Review of Theology 46, 3 (August 2022)

The latest Evangelical Review of Theology, published by The World Evangelical Alliance, is now online and available in its entirety as a pdf here.

Editor’s Introduction

Rupen Das

What the Majority World Is Saying about Mission Today

With the centre of global Christianity shifting to the Majority World, what do church and mission leaders in the Global South think mission should be about today? This article describes the situation through the eyes of some prominent mission leaders from across the globe.

Emmanuel Oumarou

A Strategy for Christian Missions in Primary Oral Cultures

Nearly one-quarter of all people on earth today are illiterate or rely primarily on oral communication. Standard, text-dependent outreach and discipling methods do not work with these communities. This article, based on considerable first-hand experience as well as academic study, describes the distinctive thinking modes of oral cultures and how to reach them effectively.

Daniel Wiley

Moving Beyond the Bounds: A Response to the Segregationist Interpretation of Acts 17:26

Conflicts over Bible interpretation frequently threaten to undermine the evangelical worldview, as sceptics claim, ‘You can make the Bible say anything you want.’ This article resolves a classic conflict that arose when people holding opposite views on racial segregation used the same Bible verse to defend their positions. It provides an excellent illustration of what can happen when we let cultural convictions guide our biblical studies rather than the reverse.

Ron Lindo, Jr.

From Blackpain to Much Gain: A Biblical Reflection on Dealing with Racial Injustice

We are all called to oppose racism, but reconciliation requires both change by the oppressors and victims’ ability to move beyond bitter focus on their victimization. This article finds, in the exodus story and in Deuteronomy, a pattern by which God uses remembrances of past injustices to spur us towards providing justice for all.

Anna Droll

Toward Healing the Cataract of Racial Segregation: Spaces and Places for Spiritual Formation

Notions of race which promote segregation constitute a present-day cataract that distorts the vision for true spiritual formation in the church. The remedy, as presented in this article, is a theology of belonging which contradicts racial segregation by promoting spaces and places where biblical intimacy can be enacted.

Dennis P. Petri

Political Advice from Three Great Christian Political Philosophers

In this essay, one of the world’s leading advocates for religious freedom shares what he has learned from three of modern history’s greatest Christian political philosophers: 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, Dutch lawyer and statesman Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, and British apologist C.S. Lewis. The article offers practical principles with plenty of application.

Leah Farish

By the Same Token: How Communion Can Heal Communities

Every Christian practice, even those that have been long forgotten, had a purpose. This article looks at the historical practice of requiring tokens for admission to communion, encouraging us to recapture the individual and communal benefits of taking communion seriously.

Geoffrey Butler

Building Bridges: Luther, the Lord’s Supper and the Ethiopian Church

Luther and other Reformers, especially Zwingli, had passionate disagreements over the theology of the Lord’s Supper. Surprisingly, Luther seemed to have more in common on this topic with an Ethiopian Christian who visited him in 1534. This article places that interaction in its historical context, suggesting that Ethiopian Christianity in that time period had significant theological similarities with and may even have influenced the European Reformation.

Bruce Barron

Itching Ears and Willing Learners: Balancing the Clarity and Complexity of Scripture

The popularity of the ‘prosperity gospel’, despite its tendencies toward simplistic and unbalanced theology, epitomizes one of the biggest problems in contemporary Christianity: how to provide adequately trained leaders for the global Christian movement, especially in the Majority World. This essay explores reasons why the problem exists, summarizes the contours of what all Christian leaders need to know, and identifies the Re-Forma organization cofounded by Manfred Kohl as a strategic solution.

High-Level Religion Forum Planned Alongside G20’s 2022 Meeting

Book Reviews

Crucible 11, 1 (March 2020)

The latest issue of Crucible, published by the Australian Evangelical Alliance, is now available online here, with the below articles (abstracts included, where available).

The Cauldron: peer reviewed articles

Peter A. Frith

Hitting the wall: Clergy Encountering the Emotional System in their First Parish

This paper summarises a research project which explored the lived experiences of Anglican clergy as they encountered their church’s emotional system in their first incumbency. Eleven vicars from three Australian dioceses were asked, in a phenomenological study, to describe the main challenges they faced as they led a congregation for the first time. All the participants identified the uncooperative and uncivil behaviour of influential church members as their chief concern. They also disclosed their own stress responses to the behaviour they encountered. These were distilled into five core themes: shock, inadequacy, alienation, relinquishment and hopelessness. Insights from Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory were introduced in the analysis phase in order to extract the emotional and systemic dimensions of the data. The study concluded that more highly differentiated clergy achieved lasting, systemic change even though they encountered the most intense conflict. Moderately differentiated clergy achieved temporary change while lower differentiated clergy, who faced the least intense conflict, were changed by the system. The findings in this study are applicable to church authorities, theological training institutions, clergy formation curricula, and aspirants to the pastorate in that they confirm that the emotional system constitutes a major challenge faced by modern church leaders.

Abraham Wu

Eating out in the Open: The Centrifugal, Missional Significance of the Eucharist

Throughout Scripture, and in the history of the Church, the Eucharist has been strongly associated with the Kingdom of God and the Missio Dei. This seems to be in stark contrast to how the Eucharist is often, in modern, Western Christianity, associated with rigid institutionalism, ecclesial division, and theological question – such as those around the nature of Christ’s presence. While these are important questions and issues for the Church, this paper argues that they fail to capture the inherent meaning of the Eucharist, which acts as the sign and sacrament of the Kingdom. Indeed, this paper explores how the Eucharist is not merely centripetal but also a centrifugal force that holds the key to the Church’s missional renewal. By exploring how the Eucharist reveals the Church’s identity as a missional community, how it initiates and challenges the Church’s mission of hospitality, and how it catalyses a sacramental approach to creation care and stewardship, this paper seeks to offer an integrative, sacramental approach to the Church’s mission that reclaims the Eucharist’s central place in ecclesiology and missiology.

Paul Kolawole Oladotun

God Will Supply All Your Needs According to His Glorious Riches: The Problem of Extreme Materialism among Nigerian Pastors

Over the years, the church in Nigeria has been God’s agent, turning the heart of a people to God. But recent activities in the church today betray the expected role of this agency in different parts of the world; to the point that many see Christianity as the root cause of major problems in society. In the past, churches in Nigeria stood up against immorality, corruption in moral defiance of societal norms. The reverse is the case today. Contemporary pastors in Nigeria are aids for committing modern-day fraud because of extreme materialism. Some ministers of God in Nigeria today have turned the church to money making venture. It is disheartening that in the recent time, many pastors’ measure success in the ministry by the size of congregations, numbers of houses as well as cars owned, and many more. The Nigerian pastorate has replaced the goal of faithfulness in the work of God with material, temporal things. In Nigeria, the church is seen as a means of filling one’s own pockets using various illegal and unbiblical means. As a result, this paper engages the vice ravaging Nigeria pastorate via the biblical lens of I Corinthians 9:13. In view of this, material things are not bad in themselves but ‘extreme materialism’ and the ‘lust’ attitude which has enslaved the contemporary Nigeria pastorate must be addressed through a correct re-definition of Call to ministry as well as a deeper level of faith on the path of the so called ‘pastors’.

The Test-tube: ministry resources

Barbara Kathleen Welch

Existential Shame: A Liturgical Approach to Soul Care of the Victims of Child abuse

This article offers suggested ways to help create safer worship environments for those who have been wounded in mind, body and spirit from child abuse. Most often Existential Shame distorts his/her faith; and his/her basic trust has been distorted or even aborted through child abuse. Pastors may offer safer worship opportunities through safer liturgies and rituals. Sensory liturgies may contribute to the healing process of the Limbic System/the emotional brain through the process of neuroplasticity because positive worship experiences help to create new neural pathways and connections in the Limbic System.

Ben Chenoweth

Doing Biblical Exegesis by Distance Well

This article suggests how theological educators may improve student learning in the area of biblical exegesis in on-line mode. It suggests a way forward would be to encourage student-to-student interaction on the biblical text itself, utilising exegetical worksheets to focus the discussion, while at the same time providing students with sample exegesis material. In that way the educator would be modelling what is expected. Assessment, too, should be focused on the real-world uses of biblical exegesis.

Didache 17, 1 (2017)

The latest issue of Didache (sponsored by the International Board of Education of the Church of the Nazarene) is now available, the various essays addressing broad concerns in theological education.

As the Editorial notes:

‘This current edition reflects a range of writing, new and old, that encompasses those areas of engagement for the sake of higher education. The edition begins with explorations into one of the primary theological challenges in our global society, prosperity theology; a challenge often overlooked by our tradition. However, the journal also celebrates theological responses by students based on social justice and missional engagement. The edition then addresses the role of theological education, primarily through seasoned educators and theologians. Finally, the journal concludes with two essays that embody the overall flow of this volume, offering new and mature visions of theological education that may well embody the promise and wisdom of our collective future.

The below essays are available from here:

Dean G. Blevins

Introduction

Dorothy Bullón

Are We Being Blessed, Prosperous and in Victory?

Dorothy Bullón

Estamis Bendecidos, Prosperados y en Victoria?

Kirsten Jeffery

Love, Power, and Suffering: Salvation in Ghanaian Pentecostalism and Romans 8:35-39

Jason Phelps

Understanding the Wealth and Poverty Gap: A Peek through the Lens of Jubilee-Sabbath

Tami Lundgren

Missional Theology: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Daryll Gordon Stanton

Christ-Centered Higher Education Strategies in Africa

Dean G. Blevins

Castles of Sand or Heaven on Earth: Discipleship for the 21st Century

David Wesley

The Implications of Wesleyan Intercultural Studies in a ‘Flat World’: Toward a Missiology of Learners, Partners, and Servants

Henry W. Spaulding II

Naming the Whirlwind: Preliminary Thoughts on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy

Ryan K. Giffin

Midwifery, Scaffolding, and Hospitality; The Value of Controlling Metaphors for the Ministry of Teaching

Roger L. Hahn

To Boldly Go Where the Church Has Gone Before

9Marks Journal 11, 1 (January-February 2014) on the Prosperity Gospel

The latest issue of the 9Marks Journal, available here as a pdf, is devoted to the prosperity gospel.

In the Editorial, Jonathan Leeman writes:

‘Here’s a prediction: as Western culture increasingly turns against Christianity, the prosperity gospel will keep growing, at least for a time...

‘The goal of this Journal is to increase awareness and educate evangelicals concerning the prosperity gospel for the sake of diagnosis and prevention. As a couple of the articles will suggest, this globally-popular American export exists on a spectrum between soft and hard, more evangelical and less. Indeed, you and I can probably find some of it in our own hearts, as one piece observes. This issue concludes with a meditation on biblical theology, because it’s in the storyline of Scripture that we find the real antidote to all proof-texting reductionist gospels. The Bible is all about the glory of God in the face of Christ. Beholding him is the pathway to the truly blessed life.’