The role of bicultural people in the missio Dei: Creating a model from bicultural Bible characters

2021 ◽  
pp. 009182962110395
Author(s):  
Hannah Rasmussen

Most models of missions assume a monocultural person encounters another monocultural environment when they begin mission work, but in a globalizing world, more people grow up with sustained engagement in multiple cultural settings before their formal ministry begins. People with mixed and multiple identities include adoptees, immigrants, refugees, children of intercultural marriages, people who schooled in a different setting, and children of diplomats, missionaries, military parents, or international businesspeople. In order to form a model for what characterizes the role of bicultural people in the missio Dei, this article surveys the biblical examples of Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Esther, and Paul. These people encountered multiple cultures before the age of 18, and later ministered in cross-cultural or hybrid settings. Drawing from Scripture, commentaries, and missiological literature, this article finds that bicultural people in the Bible share four characteristics: (1) They identify with more than one culture as a result of circumstances outside their control, lacking full awareness of the missional purposes of cultural adaptation. (2) They experience rejection from at least one culture because they are seen as different. (3) Despite this, they continue to identify with these cultures. (4) Their missional purpose is fully realized when they assume a mediator role that involves communicating between parties and sometimes securing benefits for each side.

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laia Soler Corbella ◽  
Claudia Paretilla Guardi ◽  
Maria Forns i Santacana ◽  
Teresa Kirchner Nebot ◽  
Judit Abad Gil
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-220
Author(s):  
John Ranieri

A major theme in René Girard’s work involves the role of the Bible in exposing the scapegoating practices at the basis of culture. The God of the Bible is understood to be a God who takes the side of victims. The God of the Qur’an is also a defender of victims, an idea that recurs throughout the text in the stories of messengers and prophets. In a number of ways, Jesus is unique among the prophets mentioned in the Qur’an. It is argued here that while the Quranic Jesus is distinctly Islamic, and not a Christian derivative, he functions in the Qur’an in a way analogous to the role Jesus plays in the gospels. In its depiction of Jesus, the Qur’an is acutely aware of mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and the God who comes to the aid of the persecuted. Despite the significant differences between the Christian understanding of Jesus as savior and the way he is understood in the Qur’an, a Girardian interpretation of the Qur’anic Jesus will suggest ways in which Jesus can be a bridge rather than an obstacle in Christian/Muslim dialogue.


Author(s):  
Rosamond C. Rodman

Expanding beyond the text of the Bible, this chapter explores instead a piece of political scripture, namely the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Over the last half-decade, the Second Amendment has come to enjoy the status of a kind of scripture-within-scripture. Vaulted to a much more prominent status than it had held in the first 150 years or so of its existence, and having undergone a remarkable shift in what most Americans think it means, the Second Amendment provides an opportunity to examine the linguistic, racial, and gendered modes by which these changes were effected, paying particular attention to the ways in which white children and white women were conscripted into the role of the masculine, frontier-defending US citizen.


Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote

Scepticism and loyalty represent the poles of van Dale’s career. Two contexts have been mentioned as relevant here: the seventeenth-century attack on magic and superstition, and the circles of friendship that created a contemporary Republic of Letters. This chapter evaluates both contexts, as well as others that may throw light on his relatively neglected attitude to the text of the Bible. It brings into focus two important intellectual episodes: his treatment of the account of the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3–25), and his engagement with Hellenistic sources relating to the text of the Old Testament, especially to the miraculous composition of the Septuagint. These issues brought van Dale to ask questions about God’s Word. The chapter explores the limits of his scepticism, the extent of his scholarship, and the role of friendship and isolation in his development. Finally, it draws attention to his place in contemporary Mennonite debates.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

This chapter shows the unquestionable role of the sign of the cross as the primary sign of divine authority in Carolingian material and manuscript culture, a role partly achieved at the expense of the diminishing symbolic importance of the late antique christograms. It also analyses the appearance of new cruciform devices in the ninth century as well as the adaptation of the early Byzantine tradition of cruciform invocational monograms in Carolingian manuscript culture, as exemplified in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and several other religious manuscripts. The final section examines some Carolingian carmina figurata and, most importantly, Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis, as a window into Carolingian graphicacy and the paramount importance of the sign of the cross as its ultimate organizing principle.


Author(s):  
Xavier Tubau

This chapter sets Erasmus’s ideas on morality and the responsibility of rulers with regard to war in their historical context, showing their coherence and consistency with the rest of his philosophy. First, there is an analysis of Erasmus’s criticisms of the moral and legal justifications of war at the time, which were based on the just war theory elaborated by canon lawyers. This is followed by an examination of his ideas about the moral order in which the ruler should be educated and political power be exercised, with the role of arbitration as the way to resolve conflicts between rulers. As these two closely related questions are developed, the chapter shows that the moral formation of rulers, grounded in Christ’s message and the virtue politics of fifteenth-century Italian humanism, is the keystone of the moral world order that Erasmus proposes for his contemporaries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.


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