Navigating Romans Through Cultures contains eight chapters of critical and contextualized readings of Paul's letter to the Romans by scholars from Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Asia. It provides an interpretive voyage into how the gospel of Paul, as contained in his letter to the Romans, fulfills its original vision of "making known the gospel of Christ in all nations" (Rom 16:26). The challenge of the contributors is to express Paul's gospel in terms of their own cultures. The book is the latest installment in the Romans Through History and Culture series, edited by Daniel Patte and Cristina Grenholm. This journey around the world took no less than four years. Each contributor is familiar with the culture they worked with, since many lived in that culture. Each "travel-log" is not just a report of how we steer the ship (letter to the Romans) through the water of a particular culture (or a sea of cultures for many of us); it is also a life changing critical reflection on our reading and interpretative process.Thus charting a new course involves more than offering new ways of reading Romans; it also involves clarifying the rationales for this new reading, in the light of the contextual, analytical, and hermeneutical frames of Scripture Criticism. In their challenging readings of Romans, the contributors have wrestled with: xan understanding of culture; xthe cultural background and mission of Paul; xcultural and theological conflicts in the letter of Paul to the Romans; xcultural interpretations of Paul; xand navigating equipments in steering Romans through cultures. Contributors include Florin T. Cimpean; Herold O. Weiss; Jonathan A. Draper; Gerald O. West; Mark D. Baker; J. Ross Wagner; James D. G. Dunn; Juan Escarfuller; Elsa Tamez; Monya A. Stubbs; Kathy Ehrensperger; Daniel C. Arichea, Jr; Douglas A. Campbell; Revelation Enriquez Velunt; Troy A. Martin; Brian K. Blount; Charles H. Cosgrove; K.K. Yeo
The apostle Paul was a cross-cultural missionary, a Hellenistic Jew who sought to be "all things to all people" in order to win them to the gospel. In this provocative book Charles Cosgrove, Herold Weiss, and K. K. Yeo bring Paul into conversation with six diverse cultures of today: Argentine/Uruguayan, Anglo-American, Chinese, African American, Native American, and Russian. No other book on the apostle Paul looks at his thought from multiple cultural perspectives in the way that this one does. From the introduction outlining the authors' cultural backgrounds to the conclusion drawing together what they learn from each other, Cross-Cultural Paul orients readers to the hermeneutical struggles and rewards of approaching texts cross-culturally.