This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our ...understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.
Theology has a rich tradition across the African continent, and has taken myriad directions since Christianity first arrived on its shores. This handbook charts both historical developments and ...contemporary issues in the formation and application of theologies across the member countries of the African Union.
Written by a panel of expert international contributors, chapters firstly cover the various methodologies needed to carry out such a survey. Various theological movements and themes are then discussed, as well as biblical and doctrinal issues pertinent to African theology. Subjects addressed include:
Orality and theology
Indigenous religions and theology
Patristics
Pentecostalism
Liberation theology
Black theology
Social justice
Sexuality and theology
Environmental theology
Christology
Eschatology
The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
The Routledge Handbook of African Theology is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the theological landscape of Africa. As such, it will be a hugely useful volume to any scholar interested in African religious dynamics, as well as academics of Theology or Biblical Studies in an African context.
When I attended my first Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting in November of 1987 after having begun seminary teaching earlier that fall, there was no Book of Psalms program unit. Here ...are his words from his volume's "Implications for Further Work": Reading individual psalms via their Sitz im Leben, though useful, speculates on one historical slice of the Psalms and fails to grasp its role in the larger programmatic message as we have shown. ...I would date the end of the dominance of form criticism not to Wilson's 1985 work, but rather to the 1968 SBL presidential address by James Muilenburg, "Form Criticism and Beyond," in which he suggested that form criticism, while it could remain useful, "has outrun its course. Spieckermann wants interpreters to attend to the "individuality of every single psalm," and this is precisely what Muilenburg and Alonso Schökel were advocating.9 As Muilenburg put it, "What I am interested in, above all, is understanding the nature of Hebrew literary composition, in exhibiting the structural patterns that are employed for the fashioning of a literary unit, whether in poetry or prose, and in discerning the many and various devices by which the predications are formulated and ordered into a unified whole.
This essay argues that Jean‐Luc Marion’s theology of nature and grace provides a lens through which to assess his entire project. It considers his thought with attention to the nouvelle théologie ...movement and issues that arise for a contemporary theology of nature and grace—focusing on the question of a shared human ‘nature.’ The article demonstrates how problematic emphases of Marion’s phenomenological account of the self’s givenness mirror a conflation of nature and grace in his explicitly theological work. It then points briefly to what Marion’s project might gain through the intervention of a key insight from Josef Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas. Marion and Pieper engender two versions of apophaticism with divergent approaches to the mystery of our shared human nature. In the light of this, I show how Pieper offers a corrective to Marion’s theology that could make his overall project a better resource for theologians. The analysis results in a constructive proposal for approaching nature and grace through dialogical engagement with the disciplines of phenomenology and theological metaphysics.
Although scholars often assume that Luke and Justin similarly claim the sacred texts of Jews for the non-Jewish church, this book offers a fresh analysis that uncovers significant differences between ...their respective depictions of the relationship between Christ-believers and the Jewish scriptures.