Professor Bosch begins with an analysis of the postmodern world, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and Christian faith in a postmodern age. He then sketches contours of a missiology of Western culture, including considerations of mission as social ethics, mission and the Third World, and God-talk in an Age of Reason.
| ||||||||||||
Book Description
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Challeng of the post-everything age,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Believing in the Future (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) (Paperback)
There is a neat little series of books published by Eerdmans in the US and Gracewing in the UK, that I have appreciated a number of their titles over the last couple of years. It is the "Christian Mission and Modern Culture" series edited by three of the leading English-speaking missiologists of our time. I would commend these books to you. They are all around 60 pages long and are extended essays pertaining to a particularly relevant missiological theme. The other day, flying cross-country, I was able to both read and digest "Believing in the Future" by David J. Bosch.Bosch was one of the leading missiological thinkers of our time. A South African, he was tragically killed in a car accident in 1992 soon after writing this essay - which was then published several years later. It is an attempt to formulate the parameters of missiological theology for the West. It is both bold and very accessible. I would commend it to all who are eager that tomorrow's church speak the Gospel boldly and effectively into tomorrow's world. It also can serve as an introduction to Bosch's major missiological work, published a year before his death, "Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission" (Orbis, Maryknoll, NY, 1991). In that major work David Bosch makes demands upon his readers, but it is well worth the effort. When I read a book I debate with it. The richer the conversation we have, the more scribblings, jottings, and underlinings a book will gather. My copy of "Believing in the Future" is now heavily annotated. Bosch's thesis is that we live in the "post" everything era. He writes, "We truly have entered into an epoch fundamentally at variance with anything we have experienced to date" (page 1). He points out that the Western church and its theology is deeply embedded in theological and ecclesiological paradigms that mute its ability to be what it should be, a missionary people taking the message of the Kingdom to ! a waiting world. In an interesting observation he suggests that "it (is) impossible to distinguish between African THEOLOGY and African MISSIOLOGY... African theology (is), to a significant extent, missiological through and through" (page 27). This is true of most Two-Thirds World theologies. Meanwhile, Western churches have, for good reasons and bad, "operated on a basis of symbiosis between church and society and in which there were, officially, no nonbelievers" (page 28). The implications of this have been further reaching than most of us are prepared to imagine. While the time when this was the norm is passing, we still tend to function from this theological and ideological base. This little book provides a missiologist's overview of postmodernity and its influence upon our culture, and he illustrates how the church is going to have to reshape itself if it is to be missionary as far as the West is concerned. He is critical of much of our church growth oriented thinking. "Mission," he tells us very firmly, "Is more and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God" (page 33). The implications of this are mind stretching, and will stretch us all as we seek to live this out in the years ahead. Bosch's words should not make most of us Westerners feel very comfortable, but he does not leave us without hope and clues as to how we might proceed. He does not promise his readers success, indeed, on the last couple of pages he tells us that the charter for missiological praxis and reflection is not merely the Great Commission in St. Matthew 28. He suggests that we also take note of St. Matthew 10: "Be on your guard... they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you... On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses... It will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you" (Matthew 10.17-20). This is the most forceful way that I can i! magine of telling us that the age of Christendom is over and a new and very different kind of world is being born. There is no way that faithful Christians in the West can be satisfied with our present modus vivendi. As we move away from it Bosch is telling us that we cannot expect to be encumbered by so much of the baggage that in the past has given us respectability, but which has muted the power of the Gospel message. Perhaps it is significant that in that same Chapter 10 of Matthew, Jesus also tells his disciples, as they go out into the towns and villages of Israel, that they should heal and cleanse as well as preach - and that they should not allow themselves the luxury of extra money, excessive clothing, and other excess baggage. "Whatever the future might be, our missionary task will remain. Let us prepare ourselves for it" (Page 61).
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Musings on cultural evolutions,
By
This review is from: Believing in the Future (Christian mission and modern culture) (Print on Demand (Paperback))
Bosch's tight little 60 page book could best be seen as a series of essays that are thematically tied but not altogether systematic. This may be because their posthumous publication meant they were free from a round of editing that they might have otherwise faced. So much the better. The book invites the reader to think through the cultural evolutions facing the Christian Church in a way that is not systematic but searching.
Bosch begins by softening some of his former critique of Enlightenment rationalism, although he clearly still sees it as limiting modern discussion to philosophically unreasonable biases. However, he states that he will not embrace postmodernity to the extent that requires a complete relativism (though most of his rationale here is attributed to the works of cited authors without thorough explanation). He then moves into a discussion of mission in the West and in the Third World and the differences between the two, which rolls around to a discussion of the emergence of intellectually palatable religiosity. This leads to his conclusion that humanity is innately religious, and the Christian's mission is not so much to rationally convince a culture of the verifiability of his beliefs, but only to declare that there is one God. "Faith can only be 'caught,' not taught," he concludes (51). His title entitled "Conclusion" seems not to conclude the former work but an entirely different one, arguing that missiology in the West must be ecological, countercultural, ecumenical, contextualized, a ministry of the laity, and a ministry of community. While thoughtful, it seems misplaced at the end of this book Bosch's one shortcoming is a penchant for over-generalization, grouping large philosophical movements into single, identifiable values that are not necessarily nuanced. Clearly, there are leaps in his thinking here which are not spelled out, but as a primer to the study of the postmodern evolution of the Church, this is a good little book. James W. Miller is the author of God Scent
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
