The Many Faces of Jesus Christ: Intercultural Christology - Softcover

Kster, Volker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626985146 ISBN 13: 9781626985148

Verlag: Orbis Books (USA), 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The author is taking us on a daring scholarly journey that captures multiple liberating Christological sites around the globe. The work takes us beyond traditional Christological boundaries and brilliantly highlights the ways in which theologians from different parts of the world have critically reflected on who Jesus Christ is in their concrete cultural and sociopolitical contexts of oppression.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Volker Küster is professor of comparative religion and missiology at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.

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RELIGION / Christian Theology / Christology

RELIGION / Christian Theology / Liberation

THE MANY FACES OF JESUS CHRIST

Intercultural Christology

Revised Edition

Volker Küster

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ISBN 978-1-62698-514-8

Cover design: Regina Gelfer

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Introduction to the Revised Edition

After twenty years, my first question is, of course, whether it makes sense to republish this book as is or whether it needs revision. Since the publication of the German original (1999) and the translation for the English-speaking world (2001),1 however, it is not so much the theologians presented and their reception that have changed,2 but rather the contexts themselves. The oeuvre of the “grand old men” portrayed here was already available at the time of the first publication. They had made their contribution, and even if some of them published something afterward,3 this no longer has any effect on the overall picture. However, the second question remains whether their theology still fits into the present time or the respective context. The credo of the contextualization project is that a contextual theology must change when the context changes.4 I have shown how this applies to the exemplary case of South Korean Minjung theology, which I have permanently accompanied with my research since a study visit in Seoul in 1987–1988.

A Look Back

At the same time, in retrospect, the book itself proves to be a product of its time. In my dissertation Theologie im Kontext. Zugleich ein Versuch über die Minjung Theologie (1995), I had turned to the local, but with my third book Die vielen Gesichter Jesu Christi. Christologie interkulturell (1999), the pendulum swung in the direction of the global. This movement can be observed in parallel in the writings of my late Catholic colleague Robert Schreiter. His Constructing Local Theologies (1985) was, at the time I began my doctoral work, one of the few theoretical reflections on the subject matter available to me. Instead of focusing entirely on Minjung theology and its exponents in the Korean context, as I had originally planned, I then decided to contribute to the theory of contextual theology myself. At that time, I came to the conclusion that we must necessarily place an intercultural theology alongside the contextual theologies, which mediates “between” the different contextual concepts. In this respect, it is important to take a step toward its further development by focusing on the case of Christology.

In the meantime, I have further expanded these considerations theoretically and materially with my book Einführung in die interkulturelle Theologie (2011). Contrary to my original conviction that the “query” of other dogmatic topoi would have little chance of success, I have thereby in the third part attempted to collate how the fabric of the generative themes of Christian faith has changed under the influence of contextual theologies.

In 1997, Schreiter published his own reaction to the new awakened universalism, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local.6 In retrospect, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) appears to us as the symbolic manifestation of an epochal turning point, which Schreiter characterized as the end of the bipolar world order, the spread of neoliberal consumer capitalism made possible by it, and the simultaneous compression of the world through the new communication technologies. My own experience sheds light on this. When I lived in Seoul for a year in 1987– 1988—still at the time of the military dictatorship—to study Minjung theology in its own context, I was little prepared for the constant questions about German reunification. I found that Korean Christians, to my great surprise, prayed for the reunification of their divided country in almost every church service. My answer at the time was that I considered the reunification of Germany in my generation to be out of the question. Not only was this met with incomprehension, but it was also proved wrong by history only a year later.

The exploitation of young female Korean workers in the textile industry, from which German clothing discounters also profited, was one of the triggers of the theological discourse of resistance. In the meantime, South Korea, which has long since become a leading industrial nation, outsources production to low-wage countries in Southeast Asia, while benefiting from a growing number of migrant workers with temporary residence permits for the so-called 3D-jobs (dirty, dangerous, and demanding).

Communication with my family and, after my return, with my friends in Korea, was still extremely strenuous at that time; letters took at least two weeks; so, if I answered quickly, I had to wait a month for a response in each case. Telephone calls were expensive, and even a fax machine was not readily available. Today, we rely on fast e-mail communication, and we use zoom, social media, or discount dialing codes to make phone calls to the Third World more cheaply than making calls in our own village at a local landline rate.

The third question finally was whether the intercultural theological developments in Christology should be added in the form of new chapters. In the end, I decided to hold up a mirror to the grand old men with the help of the Christology of Third World women and their diaspora (chapter 13). Otherwise, I have left the body of the book as it is, except for minor editorial adjustments and additions to the literature in the notes. It certainly comes across today as more theological-historical, making it clear that Africa, Asia, and Latin America not only have their own church history “in the continents,”7 but that in developing their own theological dynamics, they also contribute to the global theological discourse.8 Indeed, they have produced “global theological flows” such as liberation theologies.9 The book retains its validity as a snapshot and compendium of the first generation of contextual theologians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The generational change I mentioned in the introduction to the first edition can be seen most strikingly in regard to the women of the second generation. The third and already fourth generation of contextual theologians are much more difficult to distinguish and categorize.10 On the one hand, there is the work of cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Kwok Pui-Lan or R. S. Sugirtharajah, who, in the tradition of C. S. Song and Kosuke Koyama, pursue a postcolonial theology in the academic institutions of the North Atlantic hemisphere. On the other hand, there are a large number of internationally little-known glocal theologians who enjoyed parts of their education in the West but in some cases already in South-South exchange. Even if they write in English, their works are mostly published by local or regional journals and publishers.

The neoconservative myth of the end of liberation theologies and with them of contextual theologies as a whole11 has led, at least in Europe, to their elimination from theological curricula. Since the mid-1990s, hardly anything has been translated into German, Dutch, or French. In the United States, the situation seems more diverse at first glance, but on closer inspection, the discourses turn out to be highly segregated. Kwok Pui-Lan and Jörg Rieger argue that this is deliberately exploited by the system of neoliberal capitalism to divide the opposition, and they call for a “deep solidarity” that can endure diversity.12 Against the trend of global interconnectedness and real-time communication flows, the project of intercultural theology also threatens to fall into provincialism and confessional retribalization, to the detriment of the global narrative and interpretive community of the Christian faith.

Thus, it remains for me to clarify in this introduction how the field of discourse has changed methodologically and in terms of content since then. I will do this under the headings of Other Perspectives, Places, Genders, and Forms, and I will also relate this to my own biography as a researcher, for my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Orbis Books (USA)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626985146
• ISBN 13: 9781626985148
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 263
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Logos Europe; contact@logoseurope.eu; ; Rue Nicolas Possin 9; La Rochelle; 17000; Frankreich