Starting with the end, a storytelling tour from honoree Stephen Bevans, SVD, we discern the insightful developments of his pioneering work. With humility and good humor, Bevans invites us into the nuances of difference—the warmth of the sun as a beautiful metaphor and its opposite reception as “dangerous and even destructive” by an Indian friend. This experience from his student days sets the stage for doing theology in ways consciously incarnated in diverse contexts and illuminates the threefold organization of the book: Christian mission “coming into existence for the sake of the reign of God”; contextual theology “called to incarnate itself in every nation, [and] every culture in the world”; and prophetic dialogue, the necessary “practice and spirit” of any effort to engage in mission.
As a textbook, each chapter is authored by an expert. Part 1, on mission, begins with the biblical impetus viewed through the insights of survival and resistance of Vietnamese Christians. Next is a historical glimpse at Catholic mission theology moving through the categories of ferment, crisis, rebirth, and emerging trends evident through major church documents. The chapter on Orthodox theology is a theological reflection highlighting insights into Trinitarian centeredness, ecclesial inclusiveness, pneumatology, and the synthesis of liberation and reconciliation. The chapter on Protestant theology, by coeditor Dale T. Irvin, clarifies the significance of mission for a movement centered on the encounter with Jesus Christ and now includes interreligious and social justice concerns. Concluding this section is a chapter dedicated to unpacking “the staggering numerical growth of the global Pentecostal missionary movement” and conveying the challenges posed by questions of interfaith dialogue, suffering, identity, and ecumenism.
Part 2 begins with an exploration of contextual theology in its historical development and includes a look at postcolonial contexts, the theologies of liberation, Bevans’ six models, and the troubling rise of populism. Next is a look back at modernity's focus on subjectivity, challenging Christian faith to understand itself as a community actively living in the kingdom, and oriented expansively toward global concerns. The chapter that follows is troubling in its treatment of racism's entanglement in the missionary enterprise written about communities of color and not by them. Next, coeditor Peter C. Phan takes on world Christianity, emphasizing that all theologies are contextual. Flipping the model, he looks to how Christianity, as lived on a global scale, affects theological reflection and provides new insights into categories such as God.
Part 3, on prophetic dialogue, includes the only two chapters by women in this fourteen-chapter volume and begins with a look at Liberation theology from Latin America to Asian perspectives as a series of “ruptures within the rupture.” The next chapter focuses on contextual theology as the interaction of religious tradition with culture, highlighting the poles of experience and religious tradition as mutually illuminating and shaping each other. Following is a chapter reversing the Anselmian definition of faith seeking understanding and looking at the intriguing idea of “experience seeking faith” to propose an interreligious theology based on trust, inquiry, and friendship. The chapter that follows looks at ecclesiology as lived, oriented toward the reign of God, and seen through its marks of one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic as incarnated in a post–Vatican II world.
The volume is insightful, informative, and intriguing, but it exposes the limits of well-intentioned human work by failing to adequately address the present moment. In its neglect of key theological contexts that should have been represented among its authors, namely Black and Latinx theologians, the book disregards its own arguments. There is also surprisingly scant representation of women and laity among its writers, a vestige of a church/scholarly structure that resists change. Because the book maintains that there is dynamic development in the theological enterprise, one can only hope that such lapses will become the stuff of history. Theological projects must better exemplify the diversity of scholarship and its trustworthiness precisely because it is embodied and particular, something the book does not represent but cogently argues.
