Eatwot

[Crumpy]

The Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians is a group (it’s real, just google it) that communicates the Christian theology that is emerging in the third world.

I read about this in an old issue of The Bible Today, September, 1994.

The thrust of the whole thing seems to be, that our interpretation of scripture depends not only on what the good book says, but all of the social and cultural baggage that we all bring to the table when we go into scripture.

When “Reading the Bible in Context” whichh was written back then by John Levison and Priscilla Pope-Levison, the picture seemed to be emerging that Asia, Africa, and South America had theologians with different understanding of Christ and Christianity.

By strange coincidence, this was in a stack of religious books in my garage, among which was an old volume titled “The De-Romanization of the American Catholic Church.”

Even the title of that much older book attests to the same idea, that scripture and religion are packaged and un-packaged differently around the globe.

Anybody following the trends in this stuff?

 

[puzzleannie]

another book with similar focus that was used as a college text in a course I took in the 80s is The Gospel is Not Western. it basically inverts the meaning of inculturation to mean, change the message of the gospel to conform with the cultural norms of a society, rather than its true meaning, transform the culture by proclaiming the true message of the gospel, recognizing and affirming that which contains the good and true in the culture, and reforming that which contradicts the gospel. there are also a number of texts based on the Afrocentric history model which challenge the traditional view of the history of the compilation of both the OT and NT.

 

[mercygate]

another book with similar focus that was used as a college text in a course I took in the 80s is The Gospel is Not Western. it basically inverts the meaning of inculturation to mean, change the message of the gospel to conform with the cultural norms of a society, rather than its true meaning, transform the culture by proclaiming the true message of the gospel, recognizing and affirming that which contains the good and true in the culture, and reforming that which contradicts the gospel. there are also a number of texts based on the Afrocentric history model which challenge the traditional view of the history of the compilation of both the OT and NT.

Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy subversivly defines “inculturation” as the transformation of cultures by the Gospel rather than the transformation of the Gospel by the culture.

The nerve!