Reclaiming Mission as Constructive Theology offers a compelling case for the need to integrate God's mission and missional church conversation with a public and post-colonial study of World Christianity. Driven by a commitment to publicly engaged theology that takes seriously the reality of Global Christianity, Paul Chung presents a vital new model for understanding the mission of God as a dynamic word-event. This is argued in conversation with contemporary missional theology and analysis of the development of Global Christianity, and as such brings important transcultural issues to bear on contemporary American conversations about the missional church. All of this serves to innovatively stimulate this missional church conversation and more directly address the various questions that arise in pursuing mission in a multiculuralized American society.

The theology of Karl Barth has often been a productive dialogue partner for evangelical theology, but for too long the dialogue has been dominated by questions of orthodoxy. Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology contributes to the conversation through a creative reconfiguration of both partners in the conversation, neither of whom can be rightly understood as preservers of Protestant orthodoxy. Rather, American evangelicalism is identified with the revivalist forms of Protestantism that arose in the post-Reformation era, while Barth is revisited as a theologian attuned both to divine and human agency. In the ensuing conversation, questions of orthodoxy are not eliminated but subordinated to a concern for the life of God and God's people. By offering an alternative to the dominant constraints, this book opens up new avenues for fruitful conversation on Barth and the future of evangelical theology.

Hermeneutical Theology and the Imperative of Public Ethics is a groundbreaking attempt to present constructive missional theology in an integrative and interdisciplinary framework as it provocatively utilizes and contextualizes Reformation theology and hermeneutics concerning ethical theology embedded within the wider horizon of World Christianity. Mission as constructive theology is explored and refined in an hermeneutical and interdisciplinary fashion, underlying a new horizon of postcolonial theology and mission in light of God's act of speech. Missional church founded up God's grace of justification and Christ's diakonia of reconciliation becomes ethically oriented public church as it is engaged in mutireligious diversity of people's lives and lifeworld in the postcolonial context of World Christianity.

Did the Reformers lack a vision for missions? In Sixteenth-Century Mission, a diverse cast of contributors explores the wide-reaching practice and theology of mission during this era. Rather than a century bereft of cross-cultural outreach, we find both Reformers and Roman Catholics preaching the gospel and establishing the church in all the world. This overlooked yet rich history reveals themes and insights relevant to the practice of mission today.

During the past 50 years, theological libraries have confronted secularisation and religious pluralism, along with revolutionary technological developments that brought not only significant challenges but also unexpected opportunities to adopt new instruments for the transfer of knowledge through the automation and computerisation of libraries. This book shows how European theological libraries tackled these challenges; how they survived by redefining their task, by participating in the renewal of scholarly librarianship, and by networking internationally. Since 1972, BETH, the Association of European Theological Libraries, has stimulated this process by enabling contacts among a growing number of national library associations all over Europe.

This book presents a heuristic and critical study of comparative theology in engagement with phenomenological methodology and sociological inquiry. It elucidates a postcolonial study of religion in the context of multiple modernities.

In this book, Sarosh Koshy strives to go beyond the mission model of Christianity that emerged alongside and within the colonial enterprise and ethos since the sixteenth century. Rather than denounce the inheritance of the mission movement that transformed both the church and world in innumerable ways, it is a simultaneous expression of appreciation for this precious heritage, and an attempt to do justice by it through a yearning quest for relevant paradigms of Christian engagement.Indeed, there is an intense tension within this book, and in fact a twin tension at that. The tension is between those seeking to keep the current mission paradigm alive out of habit or as a self-serving device, thus corrupting and withering away a bequeathal that essentially set free the voluntary/independent spirit of Christian individuals and their intentional collectives from both the ecclesiastical and political authorities. On the other side are those who enlist mission both as a subsequent activity and as a basis to pursue innocuous, and at times apparently heroic options that would seemingly satisfy a supposed missional mandatory. This work enlists postcolonial and poststructuralist resources pedagogically, to teach of mission, missiology, World Christianity, and intercultural theology.

The culmination of Kärkkäinen's multivolume magnum opus This fifth and final volume of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's ambitious five-volume systematic theology develops a constructive Christian eschatology and ecclesiology in dialogue with the Christian tradition, with contemporary theology in all its global and contextual diversity, and with other major living faiths—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Part One of the book Kärkkäinen discusses eschatology in the contexts of world faiths and natural sciences, including physical, cosmological, and neuroscientific theories. In Part Two, on ecclesiology, he adopts a deeply ecumenical approach. His proposal for greater Christian unity includes the various dimensions of the church's missional existence and a robust dialogical witness to other faith communities.

Stepping Up to the Cold War Challenge: The Norwegian-American Lutheran Experience in 1950s Japan describes the events that led to the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC), an American Christian denomination, to respond to General MacArthur’s call for missionaries. This Church did not initially respond, but did so in 1949 only after their missionaries had been expelled from China due to the victory of communist forces on the mainland. Because they feared Japan would also succumb to communism in less than ten years, the missionaries evaded ecumenical cooperation and social welfare projects to focus on evangelism and establishing congregations. Many of the ELC missionaries were children and grandchildren of Norwegian immigrants who had settled as farmers on the North American Great Plains. Based on interview transcripts and other primary sources, this book intimately describes the personal struggles of individuals responding to the call to be a missionary, adjusting to life in Japan, learning Japanese, raising a family, and engaging in mission work. As the Cold War threat diminished and independence movements elsewhere were ending colonialism, missionaries were compelled to change methods and attitudes. The 1950s was a time when missionaries went out much in the same manner that they did in the nineteenth century. Through the voices of the missionaries and their Japanese coworkers, the book documents how many of the traditional missionary assumptions begin to be questioned.

This book integrates history, theology, and art and analyzes the Jesuits’ cross-cultural mission in late imperial China. Readers will find a rich collection of resources from historical sites, museums, manuscripts, and archival materials, including previous unpublished works of art. The production and circulation of art from different historical periods and categories show the artistic, theological, and missional values of Christian art. It highlights European Jesuits, Asian Christians, transnationalism, and gives voice to Chinese Christian women and their patronage of art in the seventeenth century. It offers a rare systematic study of the relation between art and mission history.