The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Revised Edition)

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Some Questions are Universal.

Where did I come from? What happens when I die? Am I important? Across the world, these questions are answered in a vast range of ways, shaped by our worldview, and our specific cultural context. Cross-cultural workers, seeking to engage people at the point of these questions, can offer a rich dialogue between cultural assumptions and biblical truth, but only if they can reach into the cultural framework underlying a particular context.

The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective explores this cultural framework, tackling different aspects of the “Biblical worldview’s” interaction with both “Western/secular” and a “traditional/animist” worldviews. With topics ranging from the physical and metaphysical perception of the universe, to the significance of names, Loewen unpacks cultural construction in all of it’s layered complexity, allowing us to visualize where the Gospel will interact with people’s beliefs, regardless of their context.

Jacob Loewen, the author of Culture and Human Values, draws on multiple years of experience—across several continents—as a field missionary, anthropologist, linguist, Bible translator, and missions researcher. The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective, originally published in 2000, is Loewen’s culminating work in missionary anthropology and it remains a useful and relevant work today.[/DESCRIPTION] [CREDIT] by: Jacob Loewen (Author) [/CREDIT] [PAGES] 350 [/PAGES] [BINDING] Paperback [/BINDING] [PUBLISHER] William Carey Library [/PUBLISHER] [PUBLISHYEAR] 2000, 2020 [/PUBLISHYEAR][ENDORSEMENT2]

Jacob Loewen is one of the most able and perceptive scholars of our generation when it comes to dealing with the many ways in which Christianity and culture interrelate. He is a missionary with a passion for Christ, an anthropologist, a scholar, a Bible translator/consultant and a communicator committed to speaking and writing with relevance both to scholars and to non-scholars.  These qualifications, plus his wide experience in dealing with the Bible in many cultural contexts, enable him to write both with authority and with helpfulness on the Bible in cross-cultural perspective.

Charles H. Kraft Fuller Theological Seminary, School of World Mission [/ENDORSEMENT2][TOC]

List of Figures and Tables

Publisher’s Foreword

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Part I. The Bible in Cross-cultural Perspective

1. Cross-cultural Perspective

2. Biblical Cultures and The Bible

Part II. The Universe: Physical and Metaphysical

3. The Heavens and The Earth

4. The Afterlife

5. The Old Testament Spirit World

6. The New Testament Spirit World

Part III. God and the Sacred

7. God and Gods in World Cultures

8. The God Concept in The Bible

9. Images of God: Male, Female or Both

10. God Speaks, Prophets Prophesy

11. Spirit Possession and Exorcism: An African View

12. Spirit Possession and Exorcism: Comparison of Views

13. Impersonal Power: Holiness, Taboo, Magic, Divination

Part IV. The Significance of Names

14. The Names of People and Places

15. Some Names for God: A Cultural Tension

16. Cultural Bias in Translating God’s Names

Part V. Some Implications of Cross-Cultural Perspective

17. Culture Change: The Case of Biblical Marriage

18. The Shifting God(s) of Western Christianity

19. Looking at Demon Possession from Within Western Categories

20. The Bible in My Life

Appendixes

Indexes