+ Ahmi Lee, assistant professor of preaching, preaches on Revelation 2:1-7, the human tendency to forget our loving commitment to Christ, and the daily diligent actions that restore new energy to our struggle for intimacy with God.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on April 13, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post Clinging to our Love for Christ | Ahmi Lee appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“Single people reflect the trinitarian nature of God in a unique way. As single people who are not committed to a dyadic/marital relationship with one other human being, we are free to invest in communities of people.”

+ Social psychologist Christena Cleveland in an essay on singleness. She gave plenary lectures on a theology of singleness at Singleness: Theology, Spirituality, and Practice, a conference at Fuller Arizona that considered what scripture says about the single life and how to embrace and celebrate singleness in all its dimensions.

The post Singleness: Theology, Spirituality, and Practice appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“We don’t have to please God in any other way than to be brutally honest; that is the root not only to a relationship with God but the root to a great song . . . or any work of art of merit.” —Bono

+ On the first year anniversary of FULLER studio, we reflect on our inaugural conversation on the Psalms between author Eugene Peterson and musician Bono. In celebration, we are pleased to offer five new, exclusive videos from an additional interview conducted subsequently in New York. It was Bono, reflecting on his earlier conversation with Peterson in Montana, who requested more time to express how much the Psalms have influenced him. Below, Fuller Texas professor of theology and culture David O. Taylor interviews Bono in the gallery space of Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts Director Makoto Fujimura. Photography by John Harrison. Special thanks to David Taylor, Brehm Texas, and Fourth Line Films for their vision for this project. Watch the documentary Bono & Eugene Peterson on THE PSALMS.

“Psalm 82 Is a Good Start”

“Where the Song Is Singing Me”

“Be Brutally Honest”

“All Art Is Prophetic”

“Where Death Died”

+ Mako Fujimura (pictured left) talking with Bono. Interested in learning more about the Psalms? Peruse additional resources curated by David Taylor. We also invite you to listen to a playlist of modern psalms curated by FULLER studio editors:

The post Bono & David Taylor: Beyond the Psalms appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Mary Ellen Azada, executive director of call discernment, preaches on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), unfulfilled hope, Richard Rohr’s insights on pain and the ego, and the Easter path through suffering and prayer into an embodied faith in the risen Christ.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on April 19, 2017.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post The Transformative Journey of Suffering | Mary Ellen Azada appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Joel Green, provost and dean of the School of Theology, preaches on the crippled woman in Luke 13:10-17, the tendency for religious institutions to ostracize people who don’t fit in, and the need to allow Christ to disrupt what we think is normal for the sake of creating a healing community.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on April 20, 2016.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post The Gift of Christ’s Disruption | Joel Green appeared first on Fuller Studio.

“Integration is a relational process. It’s people who either participate or resist integration. Collaboration across disciplines is a lot more complicated than maybe is commonly acknowledged, but it’s been intriguing to see what it means to work with people who have expertise and specialization that I don’t who can speak from their strengths in their discipline and allow me to speak from mine.”

+ Steven Sandage, the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Professor of Psychology of Religion and Theology at Boston University, introduces a relational model to the integration of psychology and theology and applies it to theories of spirituality, power, differentiation, and more. Sandage spoke at the 2017 Fuller Symposium on the Integration of Psychology and Theology, an annual lectureship hosted by Fuller’s School of Psychology. Watch highlights from the event above, and learn more about the lectures and responses below.

“In some Christian circles and mission circles, disorientation is often seen as a threat in the spiritual life. I’ve come not to see it as a threat, but the threat is lying in the lack of reorientation. . . . this cycle regarding our relationship with God is especially important for mission practitioners who have to nurture their relationship with God in many different contexts.”

+ Evelyne Reisacher, associate professor of Islamic studies and intercultural relations, applies Steven Sandage’s model to missional contexts and reflects on cross-cultural work, interfaith dialogue, and more. Watch Sandage’s first lecture and her response here:

“As humans we are created to long for and be in relationship. Our trinitarian God who created us in his image has instilled in us a desire to belong to one another and to live interdependently. Belonging gives us security, and it serves as a secure base from which we can live into our imaginations and flourish without fear.”

+ Miyoung Yoon Hammer, associate professor of marital and family therapy, on a Christian response to a culture of narcissism. Watch Sandage’s second lecture and her response here:

“The Trinity seems to suggest . . . a dynamic that human beings might seek to resemble socially and psychologically. It is an integrity through difference rather than a competitive drive to overwhelm difference in pursuit of the perceived comforts of sameness, which is a spurious unity or integrity, but a patience with difference that feeds integrity by mutuality.”

+ Tommy Givens, assistant professor of New Testament studies, on trinitarian theologies that oppress others, theology’s task of dismantling “romanticized notions of God,” and the possibility of hope in the midst of trauma. Watch Sandage’s third lecture and his response here:

+ All content on this page is drawn from the 2017 Fuller Symposium on the Integration of Psychology and Theology. Commonly known as the Integration Symposium, this annual lectureship hosted by Fuller’s School of Psychology features a nationally recognized scholar focusing on a single integrative issue. Listen to all of the 2017 integration lectures and responses here:

The post FULLER dialogues: Relational Integration appeared first on Fuller Studio.

When Jessica ChenFeng (MFT ’07) arrived at Fuller as one of only a handful of Asian Americans in her Marriage and Family Therapy cohort, she noticed that she never felt at ease in spaces where she was the only Asian person. “I was my fullest self with people I was comfortable with culturally, and I didn’t like that,” she recalls. She grew up in a Taiwanese American family and a mostly Asian community, and didn’t realize how embedded she was in her own culture and context until she was diving into marriage and family therapy, a primarily white-dominated field.

She noticed that her Asian identity was rarely addressed, and she didn’t learn how to practice therapy out of her own cultural identity. “A lot of the theories are written by white men, and the way marriage and family therapy is practiced is also from a Eurocentric ideology,” she explains, and then jokes, “I was a really good pretend white therapist, and I didn’t know it.”

Before coming to Fuller, Jessica says she had never been exposed to Christianity outside of a Taiwanese context. “I didn’t have a conscious awareness of how culture and faith come together, but I remember experiencing a lot of grace at Fuller,” she says. She also experienced professors modeling humility and curiosity. Jessica recalls Old Testament professor John Goldingay, while answering a student’s question in a Bible course, saying, “The more and more I study it, the less I understand it.” That was revolutionary for Jessica. “It was so refreshing to me,” she says, “because it connected to this thing in me that knew there must be a humility or not-knowing about God—how can we presume that what we know is always right?”

Jessica’s willingness to be humble led her to want to learn about others’ worldviews and how they came to construct them. But first, she needed to learn about her own. While working on her PhD at Loma Linda University, Jessica came across literature on the “intersectionality of social identity,” and, she says, “it clicked immediately. It gave words and language to my life experience.” She focused her doctoral work on social location—how one’s gender, culture, race, and class, among other factors, all play a part in one’s understanding of and interaction with the world. Jessica began to develop a “critical consciousness,” which helped her when she encountered discrimination in her own life or misunderstandings based on stereotyping. “When things like that happen to me now, I have a different lens,” she says. “It doesn’t disempower me. I’m conscious of why that happens, and I have places where I can process that, so I don’t have to react. It doesn’t take away from me anymore.”

One arena Jessica mentions that highlighted the effects of social location, both for herself and others, was last year’s US presidential race. She observed that, whatever candidate they supported, many found themselves interacting online in social media echo chambers, attending churches that reinforced their opinions, and socializing with friends whose beliefs matched their own.

“What hurt the most and felt personally threatening,” says Jessica, “were the people we assumed were ‘like us’—family members, people who share similar social identities to ours—who we began to perceive as ‘the other.’” Yet understanding the perspectives of those “others,” she insists, must start with understanding our own: critically examining ourselves and the influences that have built our own identity and belief system.

Jessica tells of one family member—another Taiwanese American Christian woman—whose experience and political response illustrate both the complexities and constraints of cultural embeddedness. “She has many identities,” Jessica describes: “one being marginalized as an Asian woman who had to immigrate to the United States and learn English, and at the same time feeling that she and her family worked hard to get an education and citizenship in legal ways.” The news articles this family member reads and the people who inform her thinking, Jessica perceives, all reinforce her particular beliefs. “She is genuinely living out her strongest convictions, but has no access to those with other worldviews that might influence her own.” It’s a too-common situation, says Jessica, in which insulation from one another’s stories can perpetuate disconnection.

For Jessica, curiosity about others’ stories is one of the key pieces in becoming conscious of one’s own context and thus free to reach across the divide to the “other.” She shares about how one of her closest friends, who is white, Christian, and identifies as queer, is very different from her yet one of her most trusted friends—a person she feels really “gets” her. Such trust and closeness came “after years of diving deep into our relationship,” says Jessica, and working to understand each other’s experiences and contexts. “I grew up in a conservative Christian environment, thinking certain things about gay people, and my friend didn’t always understand my Asian experience, so we’ve talked a lot about it,” says Jessica. “And that’s the depth of our connection.” It’s a connection Jessica feels is deeper than one that grows from simply sharing the same cultural background, because “having the same experiences doesn’t mean we’re connecting at this deeper level where healing happening.”

On a larger scale, Jessica helps her students learn to engage in this kind of consciousness and connecting in the diversity class she regularly teaches as assistant professor in the marriage and family therapy program at California State University, Northridge. In classes like this one, Jessica explains, the goal used to be spoken of in terms of “cultural competence.” But now, more people are becoming aware that one cannot be “competent” in other cultures because those cultures are always changing. “Traditionally, cultural competence was based on a tourism model,” she says, with lessons that tended to box up other cultures: “These are Asian Americans, these are black Americans, these are what Latinos are like.” Because cultures are alive and ever changing, Jessica says her goal is to teach her students “cultural humility” instead of cultural competence. “That term indicates that I can never be ‘competent’ in fully understanding any cultural person, even myself—that I’m always growing,” she says.

This includes coming to terms with one’s own story of marginalization, oppression, and privilege. It’s usually most difficult for students to talk about the parts of their identity that are identified as privileged, Jessica notes. “People feel guilty about it, or ashamed, because for some reason our culture has socialized us to believe white privilege is a terrible thing,” she says. “Most people are more ready to talk about their oppressed identities, but we can often get stuck there.” To help get unstuck from the “dehumanizing language” of oppression and privilege, as Jessica believes it to be, she first focuses on historical context—why and how the social hierarchies in America came to be. “Why was ‘the other’ so bad? Every immigrant group, all of our xenophobia, all of our history—that’s the same story,” Jessica says. By embedding privilege and oppression in historical context, she helps her students to stop personalizing it, going from “I’m bad” to “No, our history makes it so that we had no other way to live in this societal structure.”

Teaching the diversity class over the years, Jessica has noticed that as she walks alongside her students through their shared “consciousness-raising,” she watches them first emerge out of an “ignorance is bliss” state. As they start to understand other people’s behaviors and their own, sometimes it feels more frustrating. “A lot of people, for a season, become angry; they’re discouraged, they feel hopeless about their experience,” explains Jessica. “But if you persist in it, I believe that you do connect more with yourself, you understand the world better, you build coping mechanisms, you learn how to be empowered.”

Today, in a climate that too often feels divided, Jessica believes the challenge we are faced with is answering the question, “What does it mean to be in community and to be in unity as the body of Christ?”

“We have to advocate for processes that allow for everyone to be heard and to emphasize that trying to make people arrive at a conclusion of “X” or “Y” is not necessarily the primary agenda,” says Jessica. “I think for a lot of people, this is scary and risky because it’s so personal.”

“A million little pieces” go into shaping our unique story, perspectives, and worldview, says Jessica. If we want our relationships with others to be both meaningful and authentic, we need to deconstruct and understand those pieces. Taking a clear-eyed look at that embedded identity in ourselves, Jessica believes, will help us be more open to the complexities of the “other”—and cultivate the cultural humility that can bridge divides.

The post Cultivating Cultural Humility appeared first on Fuller Studio.

From 1999 to 2009 I taught theology and missiology in the Horn of Africa, first in Asmara, Eritrea, and then in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.¹ As a teacher in those contexts, I regularly observed students struggling with Western modes of biblical interpretation. They were often unfamiliar with and disinterested in abstract and rationalistic hermeneutical concepts and methodologies. Western hermeneutics did not offer helpful interpretive practices for these students, especially for the local churches they served. Furthermore, such sophisticated hermeneutical approaches led these students to ignore their own ways of reading the texts, neglecting practices that had been passed on in their historical and cultural contexts.

With this recognition, I began to encourage my students to understand the importance of constructing their own theologies in and for their historical and cultural contexts, rather than simply and passively accepting perspectives developed in different contexts. In particular, I worked diligently with my students in Addis Ababa to discover culturally relevant ways of reading the Bible in the Ethiopian context. Fortunately, there was a time-honored church tradition in Ethiopia: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC). It has developed and maintained its own ecclesiastical tradition in the Ethiopian context for almost as long as the history of the Christian church. Significantly, the EOTC has its own distinctive way of reading the Bible, which has been shaped and developed in the context of Ethiopia’s long history.

At that time, I had opportunities for fellowship with the teachers of the Theological College of the Holy Trinity, an Orthodox seminary in Addis Ababa. I visited the school and spoke with theology teachers there. They were happy about my interest in the EOTC and the theology of the church, and they graciously helped me in my research on the history and practices of interpretation in the EOTC. This interaction enriched and transformed my own theological perspective, especially in the area of biblical interpretation. I came to affirm the contextual nature of biblical interpretation and the significance of tradition and context.

THE CONTEXTUAL NATURE OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

Biblical interpretation is inherently contextual. People in a particular context have a specific way of reading, hearing, and understanding biblical texts. In what follows, I will summarize several factors involved in the contextual nature of biblical interpretation.

Social Location

Fernando F. Segovia has noted two important and closely related developments in biblical criticism at the end of the 20th century. The first is the emerging recognition of the critical place of standpoint or perspective in biblical interpretation. The second is the increasing diversity of biblical interpretation that has derived from new perspectives and standpoints around the globe.² I would argue that these interpretive developments are primarily concerned with the contextual nature of biblical interpretation.

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the social location of the reader and its impact on the reading of texts. Consequently, social location has been privileged as a primary factor that determines people’s understanding of the biblical texts. As C. René Padilla asserts, “For each of us, the process of arriving at the meaning of Scripture is not only highly shaped by who we are as individuals but also by various social forces, patterns and ideals of our particular culture and our particular historical situation.”³ People’s social location provides the perspective from and in which they see and understand the biblical texts.

In this discussion, I am referring to social location inclusively, incorporating both the location of a society and an individual’s position in the society. Corporately, social location includes the overall sociocultural and historical context of a society. Individually, social location may include “personal history, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, place of residence, education, occupation, political perspective, economic status, religious views or commitments, and so forth.”⁴ All of these factors shape communal and individual human identities and influence our interpretive practices.

This perspective on social location is important because it recognizes communal and individual dimensions as significant factors. As Michael Barram asserts, “Every interpretation comes from a ‘place’ to the extent that no interpreter can fully avoid the influence of [his or her social location]. . . . As we read the biblical text, therefore, what we see, hear, and value is inevitably colored by our own situations, experiences, characteristics, and presuppositions.”⁵

Segovia also emphasizes the role of flesh-and-blood readers and their social location in the reading and interpretation of the Bible. He argues, “All such readers are themselves regarded as variously positioned and engaged in their own respective social locations. Thus, different real readers use different strategies and models in different ways, at different times, and with different results (different readings and interpretations) in the light of their different and highly complex social locations.”⁶ In actuality, there is a multitude of voices reading and interpreting the Bible from different parts of the world.

“For many years, I have made listening to Scripture one of my spiritual and academic disciplines. I find that when I listen to Scripture being read, I hear things I have missed through ordinary reading. During the last five years I worked on a commentary on Ephesians (now published in Zondervan’s Story of God series). In addition to spending countless hours reading the text of Ephesians with my eyes, I also listened to a recording of this letter at least one hundred times. As I did this, the language of Ephesians became alive in new ways. I heard words differently and discovered connections between passages that I had missed. Now, with my commentary finished, I still devote time each week to listening to the reading of Scripture. This is a central practice in my devotional life.”

+ Mark D. Roberts is executive director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Seminary. Subscribe to his e-devotional for leaders at depree.org.

Church as the Interpretive Community

Hearing and reading the Bible is an inherently communal event. As Justin S. Ukpong states, “The readings are mediated through a particular conceptual frame of reference derived from the worldview and the sociocultural context of a particular cultural community. This differs from community to community. It informs and shapes the exegetical methodology and the reading practice and acts as a grid for making meaning of the text.”⁷ Each and every culture has its own way of hearing or reading and understanding a text. Practically, in many cultures, reading or hearing the biblical texts is primarily performed in the context of community instead of by an isolated individual reader.

The faith community, in particular, fulfills the role of the hermeneutical community in the process of interpreting biblical texts. As Scott Swain appropriately notes, “Reading is a communal enterprise for the same reasons that Christianity is a communal enterprise.”⁸ God has charged the church to “obediently guard, discern, proclaim and interpret the word of God.”⁹ As God’s people, the church is the intended addressee of the Bible. First, the biblical texts were written and read in the context of the community of God’s people. As Joel B. Green notes, “The biblical materials have their genesis and formation within the community of God’s people. They speak most clearly and effectively from within and to communities of believers.”¹⁰

In addition, the Bible addresses the contemporary church. God speaks to the church through the biblical texts; the immediacy of the Bible is experienced by the community of faith. Therefore, interpretation of the Bible is, primarily, the task of the church. Green asserts, “The best interpreters are those actively engaged in communities of biblical interpretation. . . . No interpretive tool, no advanced training, can substitute for active participation in a community concerned with the reading and performance of Scripture.”¹¹

Thus, the church is the primary context for biblical interpretation. Importantly, local churches all over the globe are the hermeneutical community, as these reflect ethnic and long-term theological traditions. They are located in particular historical and cultural contexts. Each faith community reads or hears and understands the biblical texts and generates practices in their particular contexts.

Local Interpretations for the Global Church

Thus far, I have come from different perspectives to a singular argument that every interpretation of the Bible is contextual. All biblical interpretation is carried out by faith communities located in particular contexts. We interpret the biblical texts from our particular locations.

Accordingly, there are many different readings of the biblical texts among peoples in the world. As William A. Dyrness notes, “Just as history has been replaced by histories, theology now has been replaced by theologies. Each group, from its own perspective, is reading the biblical text and finding its own place in the story of Scripture.”¹² Thus, the task of contextual biblical interpretation involves exploring and describing different ways people read biblical texts in their particular historical and cultural contexts.

It is important to recognize that the contextual nature of biblical interpretation is not an obstacle. Rather, it is a valuable asset for the biblical interpretation of the Christian church. As Ukpong rightly points out, any given reading appropriates only “a certain aspect or certain aspects of a text.”¹³ No one way of reading the Bible can claim to appropriate the totality of understanding the biblical texts. A text has multiple aspects, dimensions, and perspectives, which no single reading can totally grasp. Therefore, “the more perspectival readings of a text we are aware of, the more dimensions of the text are disclosed to us, and the better we can appreciate it.”¹⁴

In this respect, each local interpretation of the Bible in its historical and cultural context can make a unique contribution to a more holistic understanding of the Bible for the church of God. Christians can learn from each other’s interpretation of God’s Word. We are being transformed by the Word of God, and we proclaim the Word of God to the world. In this way, we build up the body of Christ for the glory of God. I would argue that this is the way that the church hears or reads, understands, and practices the Bible. As Green asserts, if “the church is one, holy, apostolic, and catholic,” as in the traditional confession of the church, “there is only one church, global and historical,”¹⁵ with the local churches as its contextual manifestations. This ecclesial unity validates local interpretations for the global church.

THE EOTC’S READING OF ISAIAH 53:8

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC)¹⁶ provides a compelling historical example of contextual reading of the Bible, which has been shaped and developed under the substantial influence of the EOTC’s tradition in the historical and cultural context of Ethiopia. The biblical interpretation of the EOTC is most practically revealed in the preaching of the EOTC. As an example, I will analyze a sermon on Isaiah 53:8 given by a priest of the EOTC in a local church. The sermon centered on Isaiah 53:8 but referred to other biblical passages, which is frequently true of sermons of the EOTC. I will give an abstract of the sermon—which was titled “Who can speak of his descendants?”—followed by a discussion of the major interpretive characteristics the sermon reveals.

Abstract

“Who can speak of his descendants?” (Isa 53:8) is a word of proclamation regarding Jesus Christ. In Isaiah 53, the prophet Isaiah prophesied about the Messiah, including his nature, emptiness, suffering, and death. In 2 Corinthians 8:9, Paul writes that Jesus’ sacrifice is all for our sake. After his resurrection, Jesus returned to his glory. Now he reigns in all his power and authority. Jesus Christ is not a man, nor a prophet, nor a mediator. John 1:1–3 declares that he was the Word, who was with God and was God. He was with God. He created the world. He was God. This Word dramatically became flesh. He became man through the Virgin Mary. The prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 was fulfilled in Matthew 1:21.

Isaiah 53 is also significant in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–38). He was the financial minister of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, who went to Jerusalem to worship God. On the way back to Ethiopia, he was reading Isaiah 53. Philip explained to him the meaning of the passage and he received Jesus Christ. He was then baptized. He was the very next person to be baptized after the baptism of Jesus’ disciples. Thus, Ethiopia was the first country to receive baptism and to read the Bible. Ethiopia took the first initiative to seek God. Later, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church became the Tewahido church and, therefore, the true church. In this way, Ethiopia laid the foundation for Christianity.

Major Characteristics

The preacher interprets the biblical passage as having two historical references: the first is Jesus Christ and the second is the event regarding the Ethiopian eunuch. The prophecy and fulfillment schema is employed as the key interpretive approach. In this way, the preacher highlights both the salvation of Jesus Christ and the historical significance of the EOTC.

This sermon reveals four major characteristics of biblical interpretation in the EOTC. First, it is Christ-centered. Second, it employs a prophecy and fulfillment schema. Third, it seeks to connect the biblical text with the Ethiopian context. Fourth, it places an emphasis on the practice of faith.

Christ-Centered Interpretation

Christ is the center in the preacher’s sermon, and the text is christologically interpreted. He states, “‘Who can speak of his descendants?’ This verse is the word which exclaims on Jesus Christ.” He continues, “This was delivered by the prophet Isaiah. He lived in 700 BC. However, he spoke about Jesus, his very nature, suffering, death, emptiness, and so on, in Isaiah 53.” Then the preacher seeks the specific implications of the text in the New Testament. He states, “‘Who can speak of his descendants?’ The story is about Jesus Christ. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 8:9, tells us that Jesus’ submissions are all for our sake. The rich Christ became poor for us. The Lord sat on a donkey. He was buried in a human tomb. In order to make us free, he received suffering which we were supposed to take. Then he returned to his glory. Now he is in all his power and authority.”

This preaching demonstrates the traditional view of the EOTC on Christ. For example, the preacher states, “He is not the one who many people assume him to be. He is not man. He is not prophet. He is not mediator. Then who is Jesus? In order to know him we need to listen to John’s teaching. According to John 1:1–3, he was the Word. He was in the beginning. He was with God. He created the world. He was God. This Word dramatically became flesh. He became man. So who is Jesus? Jesus was the Word. What happened to him? He became man. How did he become man? Through the Virgin Mary. This was prophesied by the prophet Isaiah. Glory be to his mighty name!” This demonstrates that the EOTC reflects the traditional teachings on Christ of the early church.

Prophecy and Fulfillment in Christ Schema

The preacher’s interpretation of the biblical text follows the traditional prophecy and fulfillment schema between the Old and New Testaments, wherein Old Testament prophecies are accomplished in the New Testament. He states, “Isaiah 7:14 says, ‘Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’ Matthew 1:21 says, ‘She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.’ Isaiah said that ‘She will be with child and will give birth to a son.’ And the gospel writer said that she gave birth to a son, and named him Jesus. The prophecy was fulfilled.”

Seeking the Ethiopian Connection

In this sermon, the text is interpreted in light of a special Ethiopian connection. For the preacher, the verse refers to the circumstances of the Ethiopian eunuch. He asserts, “Especially, the verse ‘Who can speak of his descendants?’ talks about an Ethiopian person. This verse refers to a particular situation he was in. He was the Ethiopian eunuch. . . . Let me read you the verse which records this truth in the book of Acts 8:26–38. The Ethiopian eunuch, whose name was Barosh, was the head of finances as ordained by Candace, queen of Ethiopia. . . . The man was reading Isaiah 53. Then he was baptized by Philip.”

“Reading or listening to Scripture reveals new dimensions of God’s character and his purposes and motivates me to live more fully according to his word. It is like a daily blood transfusion where the Holy Spirit renews and refreshes me.”

+ Alexis D. Abernethy is professor of psychology at Fuller’s School of Psychology, with research interests that have focused on the intersection of spirituality and health.

The preacher then seeks the implications of this event for the contemporary Ethiopian context: “Jesus told his disciples to get baptized after his baptism. The Ethiopian eunuch was the very next one who was baptized after that . . . The Ethiopian Orthodox Church shared his baptism early before . . . Therefore, Ethiopia was the first country to receive the baptism. Ethiopia laid the foundation of Christianity. . . . This country still lives by faith and will stay forever and ever. Amen!”

The preacher continues, “He accepted Jesus Christ before the Apostle Paul came to Christ. He knew Jesus before the Roman Empire and Greece. Praise be to his holy name! Through this man Christianity came to Ethiopia. Then later the Ethiopian Orthodox Church became the true church and Tewahido church. This is the way our faith came. This is our religion. . . . I am telling you that Ethiopia became the first Bible-reading country. I am telling you that Ethiopia took the first initiative to seek God.”

Emphasis on the Practice of Faith

Throughout his sermon, the preacher is concerned with the faith and life of contemporary believers. He consistently repeats the phrase, “Who can speak of his descendants?” and applies it to contemporary Christians.

“This verse is the Word, which exclaims on Jesus Christ. Among the generations, God saved those who spoke of him. However, those who did not speak of him perished. Even today, those of us who speak of him will be saved, but those of us who do not speak of him will [perish]. Nevertheless, the will of God is to save all. May God help us to speak of him and be saved!”

He continues to advocate for the traditional Christology of the EOTC, while bringing this Christology into the contemporary context. He states, “Today many believe that Jesus is man, prophet, and intercessor. They do not know him yet. They seem to worship him but they are not with him.” He repeats

this affirmation and adds an exhortation for his own generation: “Today many people say that Jesus is prophet, man, and mediator as the Pharisees say. We know Jesus by his teaching, not by the teaching of Pharisees. He is God the Creator. We do not doubt him as Philip did. We believe in Jesus as written in the Bible, not by assumption. . . . As the disciples were with Jesus, they did not know him. It obviously happens today in our generation. May God give a chance of repentance for those who went away from his presence!”

The central message of this sermon is the person and salvific work of Jesus Christ. The preacher employs a christological interpretation of the Old Testament text in Isaiah. The preacher also interprets the text as having another historical reference: the event regarding the Ethiopian eunuch. The preacher in this sermon seeks to highlight the salvation of Jesus Christ as well as the historical significance of the EOTC.

CONCLUSION

This particular sermon demonstrates the significant influence of tradition and context in biblical interpretation. The EOTC provides a compelling historical example of biblical understanding that has been shaped under the substantial influence of the EOTC’s tradition in the historical and cultural context of Ethiopia. Just as significantly, it helps to enrich our own understanding of God’s truth in the Bible.

ENDNOTES

1. This article is an extract from my book, An Ethiopian Reading of the Bible: Biblical Interpretation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005).
2. Fernando F. Segovia, “Culture Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism: Ideological Criticism as Mode of Discourse,” in Reading from This Place, vol. 2: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), ix.
3. C. René Padilla, “The Interpreted Word: Reflections on Contextual Hermeneutics,” Themelios 7 (1981): 18.
4. Michael Barram, “The Bible, Mission, and Social Location: Toward a Missional Hermeneutic,” Interpretation 43 (2007): 44.
5. Ibid.
6. Segovia, “Culture Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism,” 7.
7. Justin S. Ukpong, “What is Contextualization?” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 43 (1987): 27.
8. Scott Swain, “A Ruled Reading Reformed: The Role of the Church’s Confession in Biblical Interpretation,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 14 (2012): 180.
9. Ibid., 182.
10. Joel B. Green, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 66.
11. Ibid., 66–67.
12. William A. Dyrness, The Earth Is God’s: A Theology of American Culture (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997), 8–9. 13. Justin S. Ukpong, “Inculturation Hermeneutics: An African Approach to Biblical Interpretation,” in The Bible in a World Context, ed. Walter Dietrich and Ulrich Luz (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 26.
14. Ibid.
15. Joel B. Green, Practicing Theological Interpretation: Engaging Biblical Texts for Faith and Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 16.
16. The word tewahido in Ge’ez means “being made one” or “unified.” Traditionally Oriental Orthodox churches, which rejected the Chalcedon formula, have been known as “monophysite,” which means “one nature.” However, the EOTC rejects the term in favor of “miaphysite,” since “mia” stands for a composite unity, unlike “mono,” standing for an elemental unity. This doctrinal confession of Christ is clearly expressed in the name of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. See Aymro Wondmagegnehu and Joachim Motovu, eds., The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Addis Ababa: The Ethiopian Orthodox Mission, 1970), 98.

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My first experience with actor Sally Struthers was late on a Saturday night during my junior high school years. I had connived my parents into letting me finish watching a TV program well past my usual bedtime. The moment the credits rolled, the extended-format commercial started.

I was instantly transfixed. There she was, this white woman who was presented as a celebrity (I was too young to have watched her in the TV series All in the Family), sitting on the stoop of a hut somewhere in Africa. She was surrounded by black children—some arranged on her lap, others nearby with anxious and desperate looks in their eyes. My heart was broken for these poor African children, and I badly wanted to do something to help through the organization she was promoting. But knowing that I had no money of my own as a 13-year-old, I shut the TV off and went to bed, eager to escape Ms. Struthers’s pleas.

Through today’s ready accessibility of social media, all generations are confronted by the suffering of children well beyond the confines of late-late-night infomercials. In between all of the toddler videos, birthday wishes, and political rants dragging through my Facebook feed daily, I can count on at least one or two promotional advertisements for ministry organizations that feature children. And when a major crisis hits—an earthquake strikes, a war breaks out, an exposé gets released—the stories multiply. Even more, the problems of food insecurity that Ms. Struthers was trying to address seem to pale in comparison to the depths of abuse and exploitation of children that many of these headlines present. So the important question quickly becomes, What should a responsible Christian adult do with all of this graphic suffering of children, especially when it appears so frequently in the intimacy of our personal screens?

In the privileged West, we must be willing to allow difficult news to permeate the membranes of our personal and communal bubbles. Part of God’s identity is father to the fatherless (Ps. 68:5), and as fellow children of God, we must recognize that even children who suffer far away are part of our extended family. We have a God-given responsibility to them, even if their needs are not as immediately evident to us as the children with whom we personally interact. So it’s not really an option to simply ignore their pain as I did that night.

COMPLICATED NEEDS DESERVE CAREFUL RESPONSES

Of course, as an American Christian, I would love to immediately board a plane and try to fix the problems myself. But as a teacher who has studied Christian mission with children at risk for the past couple of decades, I know that those kinds of solutions normally end up being more about satisfying the goer than effecting lasting change. Those children we see in snippets and images on our computers have real lives that take more than a quick fix. Lasting solutions require addressing complex and robust cultural systems that are structured to prioritize adult survival over the vulnerability of children in the midst of extreme hardships like ethnic violence and/or extreme poverty. Even if we think we’ve changed the situation for a single child, it is surprising how quickly a powerful social structure can snap back into place once a temporary foreign intervention ends. Instead, the kind of child-focused strategies I propose are slower, more critically reflective, and emphasize strengthening local relational networks to sustain a child long term. They’re the kind of solutions that my teenage middle-of-the-night self never could have fathomed, let alone imagined I would someday be advocating for.

So if hopping on a plane isn’t the answer, we are left to sift through the cries for help and then rely on organizations that are already on the ground and have earned good reputations for addressing local needs in these distant places.

But how should we decide what causes are worth our consideration? This is most certainly a matter for prayer—real prayer. Not I’ll-pray-about-it-if-I-remember-but-I-probably-won’t prayer, but genuine, intentional prayer. In fact, interceding with God as a response to headlines is an incredible first step. As I pray, though, I find it valuable to remain sensitive to those causes that seem to raise the most distress in me. Often these are causes that connect with aspects of my own personal experience. When those connections happen, I know it’s worth the effort to dig a little deeper.

TAKING CHILDREN’S FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS SERIOUSLY

At this point Christians often wonder which causes and organizations are worthy of support. Ultimately that question is much larger than the scope of this article, but my most strategic advice is to search for the ones that take a child’s relationships seriously.

Thinking again about that early experience with Ms. Struthers, it’s probably not by accident that the organization she was promoting chose to use an image of their celebrity sponsor with children on her lap as the center of their fundraising strategy. It strongly evokes the Gospel narratives of Matthew 19:13–15 and Mark 10:13–16, in which children were being blessed by Jesus. But while there may be superficial similarities between these texts and that infomercial, the contrast between the two pictures is profound. Among many other differences, the biblical accounts describe the children as being brought by their parents. In contrast, the Struthers commercial did not leave any room for adults other than herself. This is telling, since sociologists who study imagery around children (there is a surprising amount of literature on this) suggest that when adults are absent in images of suffering children, the unstated implication of that image is that their parents are somehow inattentive or absent. As a result, these images invite viewing adults to see themselves as momentary surrogate parents, and to exercise maternal protectiveness as a way of creating connections between the ideas of children they evoke and the would-be donor. But the presence of parents in the Gospel accounts reminds us that Jesus was working within existing family structures. He was not inserting himself as a surrogate parent for these children (although the idea of how Jesus would have served as a father is a provocative one). Rather, he received the children from their parents, blessed them, and then returned them.

Understanding this example of Jesus is key to understanding effective work, because good work with children sees changing children’s family structures only as a last resort. The most effective efforts first try to understand the existing relational worlds of the children they serve, and then take steps to strengthen those relationships. These kinds of approaches have the advantage of building on the resources a child already has, and minimize the amount of upheaval they might otherwise experience through more radical interventions. So rather than rounding up orphaned children and sending them to a group home several villages away, an important measure of the effectiveness of an organization’s work can come from finding out how much work is done to support parents so that families can stay intact, or to explore extended family networks to find alternative care options if parents are no longer around or capable of offering nurturing care.

Finding out this kind of information about the actual strategies employed by an aid organization takes more effort than scrolling through a news feed. But depending on the transparency of an organization’s website, it can be easier to identify these kinds of ministry priorities than you might expect. Even better, the most reliable way to identify worthy ministries is to work through your own relational networks. Who do you know who might know something about the problem that you are learning about? Perhaps they know someone who knows someone who is addressing the concern in viable and thoughtful ways. Working through your networks can take time, but the benefit is that you are immediately solving one of the inherent problems of much of our giving today: you can never ultimately be sure what has taken place, and how your contribution has been used.

If you find your relational connections don’t extend far enough to help you make informed decisions, perhaps the best strategy is to be guided by what you can learn from Internet research, followed by seeking to establish deeper relationships with an organization as part of your support over time. This will likely take special effort since many donation opportunities are designed to be essentially anonymous—allowing givers to contribute funds without the hassle of having a real relationship. These no-fuss arrangements are solely monetary because this is what Western Christians tend to want. However, I’m advocating for something a little messier. Even if you’re not a major donor (or a financial donor at all), many organizations will welcome the occasional phone call or email check-in from a concerned partner who wants to know more.

Some community-focused child sponsorship organizations show that they know this well. A few even facilitate donor visits with sponsored children so that a supporter can make a more personal connection with a child and their family. But even if these special kinds of opportunities are unavailable, I always urge donors to find ways of making meaningful connections with the people who are doing direct work with children. The most well-known Christian child development agencies have legitimately earned their sterling reputations through decades of achieving effective results with children within the contexts of their families and communities, and child sponsorship is just one part of what they do. So you are wise to do your own research and establish enough of a connection to feel well informed about what is actually happening in face-to-face work with children.

FROM REACTIONS TO RELATIONSHIPS

The next time you encounter a troubling account of a young person’s extraordinary needs, I hope you will take these recommendations to heart. First, pray, asking God to guide what you should do next, remaining sensitive to those needs that you find the most distressing. Second, do your best research and relational networking to find the groups that are focused on respecting and enhancing the relationships that already exist in a child’s life, rather than applying artificial solutions that may not last or might even hurt a child in the long run. Third, ask questions and work to develop or enhance your relationships with those groups you find to be doing the most promising work. In the process, you just might discover a new dimension of your relationship with the Father of the fatherless.

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+ In this episode of “Conversing,” author and teacher Dave Evans applies the discipline of design to the search for a meaningful life. He and Dr. Labberton consider the “collaborative process” of following God’s will, the role of humility in solving problems, and practical tools for anyone reflecting on their own vocation.

Evans is an adjunct lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford University, a management consultant, and cofounder of Electronic Arts. A coauthor of the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, he writes and lectures widely on design principles and vocation.

The post Dave Evans on Designing a Life of Faith appeared first on Fuller Studio.

+ Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Seminary, preaches on Paul’s theology of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5:11–15, discussing a frame for reality that’s large enough for God’s grace beyond our own ability and a hope that is “greater than our own lives.”

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 3, 2017.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

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Psalms 7-8; Isaiah 24-32; Matthew 5-7

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Psalms 4–6; Isaiah 11–23; Matthew 3–4

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Psalms 1–3; Isaiah 1–10; Matthew 1–2

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When Brooke Istook (MAICS ’10) completed college with a degree in information technology, she had a gnawing sense she had prepared for a field she didn’t want to enter. With equal parts anxiety and resignation, she walked across the graduation stage and began wandering toward a vocation she couldn’t yet name—a ten-year process that would be much messier than the spreadsheets and systems she had studied.

That process began when she found work as a technology consultant—a job that gave Brooke the flexibility and freetime to volunteer in areas that felt more enlivening to her. “By volunteering I could figure out the landscape,” she remembers. “I knew I wanted to have a career transition, but I didn’t know what it was.” Whether it was Bible studies with the homeless in Los Angeles or development work in Ethiopia, when Brooke wasn’t in front of a computer screen she was helping others. “There was always this piece of me that wanted to do meaningful work and not just affect profit and the bottom line,” she says.

Brooke decided to bring this desire and her vocational uncertainty to Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies, a place where she could take steps toward a vocation she couldn’t yet envision. One class in particular, David Scott’s Children at Risk course, put her passions into sharp relief. “We had a project in the class where we surveyed specific risks children around the world face,” she remembers. “I was going through material about different categories of risk for children globally, and the sexual abuse and trafficking section really broke my heart.” She was haunted by the data, especially the low rates for rehabilitation, and began to use assignments in other classes to research the subject. “I centered all of my work around women’s and children’s issues from that day forward,” she says. “My time at Fuller really helped me clarify and focus on this issue I was passionate about.”

With that newfound clarity, Brooke graduated a second time and began looking for work—just as positions in the nonprofit sector were at a historic low. “I was searching, searching, searching, and nothing was working,” she remembers. “I was getting nowhere fast despite my best efforts.” Confused and disheartened, she found work again in the technology sector she had tried to leave, and it felt like one more step away from the career path she thought she was preparing for. It wasn’t the only surprise: Brooke and her husband discovered they were going to have a baby.

During pregnancy, Brooke was finally forced to slow down the volunteering and work ethic she had grown accustomed to. “In nonprofit work, the currency isn’t money—it can quickly become who’s doing the most,” she says, “and that can get complicated.” The life she was trying to build from her own ambition seemed small compared to the new life in her arms, and she could feel her momentum begin to shift. “I wasn’t focused on my work anymore,” she says. “I began to realize that I was trying to fill a hole, and I had to let go.” Just when Brooke finally let go, the phone rang.

A friend and former coworker in tech consulting was on the other line with details about a nonprofit looking for staff, and she wanted to connect Brooke with the CEO. A few conversations later, Brooke was hired as the director of strategy and operations for Thorn, a nonprofit organization that uses the latest technology to fight child pornography and child sex trafficking on the Internet. Rather than leaving one career for another, Brooke discovered work that needed both her passion and the work experience she had tried to leave behind. “For so long I regretted going down the technical career path, and I couldn’t make sense of it,” she says. “I had given up, but every piece of it has come back around at Thorn.”

In the past, these crimes against children weren’t so easy to access—they required driving to dangerous areas of town or sending illicit mail, but now the anonymity of the Internet creates new digital space where predators can find victims and other abusers with the click of a button. It’s this dangerous blend of technology and predatory behavior that Brooke now works to address. “If we can find victims faster, deter potential offenders, and make platforms as safe as possible,” she says, “we’re squeezing the access points and hopefully making a difference.”

Still, the reality of Thorn’s work can take its toll, and one glimpse of a chat room transcript can remind staff members of the disturbing darkness beyond the screen. It’s what psychologists call “vicarious trauma,” and the emotional impact can easily tempt them to stop their work. “If you haven’t been taking care of yourself, you hit a rough patch,” Brooke says. “You don’t know what will trigger employees, and I’ve definitely cried on some days.” To keep their work sustainable, Brooke helped Thorn develop a group counseling program and therapy for the employees, a solution that came from her own years of navigating burnout.

With the right emotional support in place, the team can focus on collaborating with others to develop new tools. “Predators are always going to be using the latest technologies to their advantage, so we need to be just as nimble,” she says. Partnering with law enforcement and information technology experts, Brooke helped develop “Spotlight,” a high-powered search engine that identifies potential victims more quickly in order to get them the support they need. Her team has worked with national technology companies to circulate policies and safety standards for digital platforms to incorporate into their code. They recently hosted a hack-a-thon with engineers from Silicon Valley to explore new inventions to protect children. “Some of what we’re doing is asking questions: What would really change things? Can we do that technically and legally? Who should get on board?” she says. “We have a great ecosystem of support and partnerships to make it happen.”

The work is a natural fit, and as she looks back, Brooke sees that working at Thorn is something her own strategizing could not have anticipated. Every day, she brings her passions to analyzing spreadsheets and organizing project plans, systems she has now learned to hold with open hands. “We can strategize, we can try to make plans, but at the end of the day, real change is through relationships, through consistency, through those everyday moments.” It’s a hard-won conviction she carries with her into a rapidly shifting digital landscape, grateful for wherever each step leads.

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+ Daniel D. Lee, director of the Center for Asian American Theology and Ministry, preaches on identity politics in Exodus 5:11–15, reflecting on Moses’ ambivalence as an Egyptian, navigating Asian American cultural life, and how the gospel reveals a God who turns his face toward our whole embodied selves.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary Chapel on May 10, 2017.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

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+ Pamela Ebstyne King, Peter L. Benson Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Science, uses research from developmental psychology to show how relationships strengthen the process of identity formation.

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+ Jennifer Guerra, MDiv student, preaches a bilingual sermon on reconciliation in Ephesians 11:22, reflecting on the call to live in tension with cultural and social difference, the need to to follow the resurrected Christ who is our peace, and the social cost of choosing unity in a culture that seeks to divide.

This audio is a recording from Fuller’s All-Seminary chapel on May 17, 2017.

Music at the beginning and end of this audio stream is taken from a recent album entitled REVERE I RESTORE, created and recorded by members of the Fuller community under the leadership of Ed Willmington, director of the Fred Bock Institute of Music at Fuller’s Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

The post El es mi Paz | Jennifer Guerra appeared first on Fuller Studio.

From 2008 to 2015, our family lived six months out of each year in Mwanza, Tanzania, the second largest city in the country, nestled on the southern shores of Lake Victoria. We began spending half the year in Mwanza because my wife, Jen, is an infectious diseases physician-scientist who does clinical medical research on the inter- action of a freshwater parasitic infection called schistosomiasis and the HIV virus. Jen holds dual appointments at Weill Cornell Medical College in the United States and its partner institution, Bugando Medical Centre, in Tanzania. Although now with school- aged children we are no longer able to split our time between Pasadena and Mwanza, our family still spends the summer months in northwest Tanzania.

As a New Testament scholar my initial experience in cross-cultural hermeneutics, therefore, came not because of an intentional pursuit on my part, but because I happened to marry someone committed to the field of global health, someone who has lovingly dragged me halfway across the world during sabbaticals and paternity leaves and summer breaks. Yet the experience of reading, teaching, and preaching the Bible in Tanzania has been immensely formational for my own vocation as a seminary professor. In attempting to connect with the local context in Mwanza, I have regularly volunteered as a teacher at St. Paul College, a Pentecostal Bible college and one of the few schools in Tanzania at which pastors and church leaders can receive high-quality theological education. The relationships formed with the leaders and students at St. Paul College, along with my learning in the classroom, have deeply enriched my own understanding of the Bible, my Christian praxis, and even my scholarly research agenda. In this essay I would like to describe one research project, rooted in a commitment to and the experience of cross-cultural hermeneutics, that I would never have imagined when I was getting my PhD in New Testament—but that has generated some of the most rewarding, personally instructive, and, I hope, impactful work of my career to this point.

READING GALATIANS?

It started in the fall of 2009. While we were living in Mwanza, Jen returned from an international conference that focused on emerging strategies for HIV prevention. She mentioned something completely novel to me at the time, namely, that the practice of male circumcision has the potential to save millions of lives by preventing new HIV infections. In the early- to mid-2000s, several large randomized, controlled trials of male circumcision (MC) conducted in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda had shown an approximately 60 percent reduction in HIV incidence among circumcised heterosexual men.¹ The protective effect of MC is thought to occur because of high concentrations of cells that are susceptible to HIV infection in the foreskin. As a result of these studies, in 2007 the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that MC “should be considered an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention in countries and regions with heterosexual epidemics, high HIV and low MC prevalence.”²

I vividly remember wondering the next morning, as I was out for a morning run on a dirt trail above our apartment on Bugando Hill, “What does it mean to read Paul’s letter to the Galatians in a context in which male circumcision might actually save lives?” As a New Testament scholar, I reflected on the apostle’s passionate and uncompromising opposition to the adoption of male circumcision among non-Jews in Galatia who had come to believe in the gospel of God’s grace through Jesus the Messiah. Paul penned the letter in response to the arrival in Galatia of certain Jewish-Christian teachers who had a very different understanding of the gospel than Paul—or who preached a completely different gospel, as Paul angrily puts it (1:6). These teachers were advocating Torah-observance as a means of Gentile inclusion in the community of God’s people, the descendants of Abraham (3:29). And while Paul’s opponents probably encouraged Gentile believers in Jesus to follow the entire law of Moses (cf. 4:10), it is the requirement of male circumcision as a sign of identity among the people of Abraham that particularly provokes Paul’s ire (cf. 3:1; 5:2–4, 10–12; 6:12–13). So strident is Paul in his opposition to circumcision for Gentile believers that he caustically wishes that those advocating male circumcision would castrate themselves (5:12)!

But on the morning of my run in 2009 I had absolutely no idea what a faithful interpretation of Galatians might look like in the Mwanza region of northwest Tanzania, a region that fits the WHO’s recommendation for MC to prevent HIV infections. I had read enough in the fields of missiology and cultural hermeneutics to know that the answer to my question surely could not come from me, a cultural outsider. So I asked several of the leaders at St. Paul College for their thoughts on the issue. News of the public health benefits of MC was as novel to them as it was to me, and my friends told me that the practice of MC was never discussed in churches. We later learned that studies in the early 2000s had shown that rates of MC in the Mwanza region were 18 percent for Christians.3 One major reason for this low rate of practice is because the dominant tribe in the region of Mwanza, the Sukuma, is traditionally non-circumcising, has no rituals of circumcision, and in the past has often espoused pejorative views of the practice. Another factor is that the procedure is not widely available at regional hospitals and healthcare centers, and it is frequently prohibitively expensive (approximately $20–25 USD) when it is offered. Finally, in a cultural context in which religion is a defining feature of many aspects of everyday life, the practice of MC in the region is deeply influenced by religious identity. One study indicated that among Muslim adolescent males in the Mwanza region 61 percent were circumcised, compared with 18 percent of Christians.⁴

“Reading Scripture is one of the primary ways we resist conforming to this world and instead are transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2). Scripture reshapes and reorients our perspectives, attitudes, and values in light of who God is and what God has done for us so that the way we live reflects our truest worship to God.”
+ Ahmi Lee is assistant professor of preaching at Fuller Seminary. She brings a rich multicultural background to her research and teaching.

Yet the leaders at St. Paul College had experienced—in ways that I have still only glimpsed—the tremendous pain and suffering that the HIV/AIDS crisis has brought to their communities. They were eager, there- fore, to think creatively about ways in which Christian churches might address the moral and healthcare crisis of the HIV epidemic.

As a result of these initial conversations with our Tanzanian friends, Jen and I applied for and received a collaborative research grant from the Association of Theological Schools for a project entitled “‘New Creation Is Everything’: Christian Identity, Male Circumcision, and HIV/AIDS in Northwest Tanzania.” We gathered a team of leaders from the college—Lucas Fuunay, Mary Fuunay, Mary Mbago, and Agrey Mwakisole—and the six of us worked together every step of the way to design and implement the project.⁵

Our goal for this collaborative research project—located at the intersection of the fields of biblical hermeneutics, theological education, qualitative medical research, and public health—was to develop resources that might equip pastors and church leaders in Mwanza to address the public health benefits of MC from a theologically and medically informed perspective. Influenced by the writings of South African biblical scholar Gerald West, we were committed to developing a dialogical hermeneutical approach that fostered a mutually informative exchange between ordinary, untrained readers and the trained members of our study team.⁶ We also believed it was important to map local perceptions of MC among Christians before working to develop any resources for these communities. In order to assess these perceptions, we gathered ten single-gender focus groups at local Protestant churches for discussions that lasted between one and two hours. The groups were divided evenly between men and women, as well as urban and rural settings. Focus group questions centered on perceptions of MC, the role of religion, tribal identity, and gender in making decisions about MC, and the nature of the Bible’s teaching about MC. Sessions concluded with a contextual Bible study of Galatians 5, based in part on a method of study pioneered by Gerald West and others at the Ujamaa Center in South Africa.⁷

Our focus group study was instructive in many ways.⁸ It verified that tribal identity and religious identity were the primary determinants of MC. Specifically, Christians in the Mwanza region frequently reported perceiving MC as a Muslim practice that should therefore be avoided by followers of Jesus. As one urban female participant succinctly framed the issue, “Even if we say many ethnic groups . . . don’t circumcise, you will find . . . the Muslims in those ethnic groups have been circumcised but the Christians have not been circumcised.” The distinction between Christians and Muslims vis-à-vis the practice of MC was occasionally framed in theological terms, as was seen in the comments of two participants:

“In the Christian churches we teach people mainly about the spiritual life alone, but the body we leave behind” [semi-urban female].

“[The Christian] is concerned with spiritual matters rather than with physical matters. That does not apply to the Muslim. The Muslim is very much concerned with physical matters and he talks more about issues of cleanliness rather than stressing spiritual issues . . . when his body is clean that is when he is noticed by God. It is not like that for a Christian, he says God deals with the heart” [semi-urban male].

Moreover, participants in the focus groups frequently indicated that MC was perceived as a practice for the sexually promiscuous, or as unnecessary since they were taught in their churches to focus on “circumcision of the heart.” One semi-urban male reflected this view clearly: “Our goal is not to enhance promiscuity; our goal is . . . to build our youth in good Christian faith and to live in it and to be patient to get your partner. For us it is meaningless that it [MC] reduces [HIV trans- mission] because we do not teach our children to be promiscuous.” Only one out of 67 participants had ever heard MC discussed at church, but nearly all Christian parishioners were eager for their churches to address MC and the vast majority felt that MC could be consistent with their faith.

On the basis of our focus group research, our study team developed a contextually appropriate theological curriculum (in Kiswahili) designed to educate pastors and church leaders to guide their congregations in discussions of Christian identity and MC as a public health issue. Our curriculum addressed many of the obstacles that might limit Christian support for the practice, including beliefs that Christians should focus on “spiritual circumcision,” concerns about promoting sexual immorality, and confusion about whether the Bible supports or disallows the practice of MC for believers.

As part of our curriculum, our team offered a reading of Galatians that could be employed by Tanzanian church leaders and theological educators to promote the very practice that Paul so strongly opposes. Our reading of Galatians is contextualized in light of MC as an effective HIV/AIDS intervention in East Africa and is rooted in the apocalyptic nature of the epistle. Paul’s opponents (and perhaps Paul himself at an earlier point in his life; see Gal 5:11) were advocating circumcision as a means of Gentile entry into the family of Abraham, a religious position indicative of a worldview in which Torah is central and the cosmos is defined and divided according to the antinomy of circumcision and non-circumcision, Jew and Gentile.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is an attempt to explode that particular binary cosmology.⁹ Following Paul’s experience of the revelation of God’s son (1:16), the old world—with its antinomies between Jew/Gentile, circumcision/uncircumcision, law/not-law—was obliterated by the cross of Jesus Christ. This leads Paul to declare twice in Galatians that the antinomy of circumcision and uncircumcision has ceased its world-defining role. In 6:14, for example, Paul explains that in light of the cross of Christ, the old way of structuring the cosmos and human social relations within it, through the governing binary of circumcision/uncircumcision, has been crucified to Paul—and Paul to this cosmos (cf. 5:6). In Paul’s apocalyptic perspective, there- fore, Christ-believers in Galatia must not submit to the rite of circumcision because the practice, in that particular context, denies the invasive, world-shattering power of the gospel and reflects a cosmology characteristic of “the present evil age” (1:4) rather than the new creation effected in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Given this apocalyptic reading of Galatians, an appropriate Christian embodiment of Paul’s message in Tanzania in light of the realities of the HIV/AIDS crisis would, it seemed to us, encourage the very practice that Paul discourages, while also standing with Paul in his apocalyptic view of the world. Apocalyptic eschatology has fundamentally to do with the conviction that in the present time God has inaugurated a liberating war against the powers that have enslaved humanity and set the world in op- position to God—powers that Paul elsewhere identifies as sin and death (see esp. Rom 5–7). In the context of the Galatian controversy, Paul presents circumcision as problematic in part because the law that prescribed the practice was itself involved in the enslavement of humanity (3:23–25; 4:3–5, 21; 5:18). Since “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision” is anything, an insistence that uncircumcision is mandated for Christians as a faithful interpretation of Paul falls victim to the same cosmological binary that Paul works so hard to challenge in Galatians.

Thus, we suggested that, from a theological perspective informed by Paul, circumcision as an identity marker for God’s people or a means of defining the world is not a viable option for those who read Galatians as Christian Scripture. Yet that conclusion paves the way for a consideration of the role that advocacy of the practice of MC might play in a robust theology of embodied existence. Elsewhere in the curriculum we suggested that God’s care for the health and wholeness of the physical body is an integral part of the New Testament’s witness (see, e.g., Jesus’ ministry in the Gospels of healing the sick, lame, blind, etc.; John 7:23; 1 Cor 6:13–14, 19–20; 7:34; 15:1–58; 2 Cor 7:1; Eph 5:29–30; 1 Thess 5:23). Therefore, to the extent that male circumcision offers numerous health benefits to Tanzanian Christians (not limited to HIV prevention, but also including the prevention of infant urinary tract infections and some types of cancer, as well as the reduction of other sexually transmitted infections), the practice can be supported not as a badge of identity for male inclusion within the local church, but as a public health intervention that has the potential significantly to diminish the loss of life, dignity, and power associated with the HIV epidemic.

PHASE TWO: ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION

In July of 2014, we held an all-day educational seminar for over 200 male and female church leaders in the Mwanza region. So enthusiastic was the response to the teaching that, toward the end of the session, the group erupted in laughter and applause when one pastor stood up and loudly proclaimed, “We are ready! Let us line up to be circumcised today!”

Unfortunately, at the time of the seminar we did not have the funding or the approval to do anything more than encourage these pastors and church leaders to bring the information back to their congregations. But just a few months later, two significant developments allowed us to take an encouraging next step in the work we had started. First, Jen, Agrey Mwakisole (one of the initial study team leaders and later a DMiss student in Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies), Samuel Kalluvya, and I were awarded a Grand Challenges Grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a project entitled “From Obstacles to Opportunities for Male Circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa.” The goal of this project was to assess whether harnessing the influence of churches, including making use of the curriculum our team had developed, would increase uptake of MC in the Mwanza region. Given recent estimates that every 5–15 male circumcisions prevent one HIV infection, increasing male circumcision rates nationwide in Tanzania from about 30 percent to 50 percent could prevent approximately 200,000 HIV infections in Tanzania alone. Second, it so happened that just as we were awarded the Gates grant, the Tanzanian Ministry of Health announced a plan to offer free circumcision to men throughout the Mwanza region. The physician charged with overseeing this government-backed circumcision outreach campaign was a colleague and friend of Jen’s at Bugando Hospital, so our team was able to partner with the government’s campaign, which allowed us to conduct a large, cluster randomized trial involving 56,000 men in 16 villages who were circumcised during the campaign.

The governmental MC campaign brought a team of clinicians to perform free male circumcisions in two to three villages at a time. The campaign provided male circumcision and voluntary HIV counseling and testing to between 100 and 200 men per day, and typically remained in a village for three to six weeks until demand for circumcision decreased. Our project aimed to assess the effectiveness of working with local church leaders to promote the practice of MC among Christians. Eight villages received the standard MC outreach activities provided by the Tanzanian Ministry of Health, and eight villages were randomly assigned to receive additional education for local church leaders based on the curriculum that our team had earlier developed. The primary outcome for the study was the percentage of males in a village who were circumcised. Secondary outcomes were the reasons that males cited for seeking circumcision and religious leaders’ perspectives on circumcision. Crucial to the success of the project at this stage was Mwakisole’s tireless and effective work to partner with local pastors and church leaders in villages that received the supplementary education.

Our findings were exciting and highly significant.¹⁰ In the villages that received the additional education provided by Mwakisole and his team, 52.8 percent of males were circumcised (30,889/58,536). In the control villages that simply received the standard Ministry of Health outreach, 29.5 percent of males were circumcised (25,484/86,492, odds ratio 3.2 [95 percent confidence interval, 1.4–7.3], p=0.006). In intervention villages, 32.4 percent of men indicated that they sought circumcision because of discussions in their churches, compared with 0.7 percent in control villages (p<0.001). In focus group interviews after the completion of the campaign in their villages, church leaders in intervention villages reported feeling empowered to discuss male circumcision with their congregations. This sentiment was summarized poignantly by one female leader, “What I ask is that Christian religious leaders should teach a society to uptake male circumcision.” Our study showed that equipping and empowering Tanzanian church leaders to address medical issues with their congregations has the potential to make a significant positive impact on participation in public health interventions. We believe that drawing on the power of religious leaders to promote healthy behavior among their congregants is an innovative concept for health promotion throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

CONCLUSION

By the end of our project—or at least the most recent iteration of it, as we are continuing to explore ways to build upon our previous work—we had come a long way from the question, “What does it mean to read Paul’s letter to the Galatians in a context in which male circumcision might actually save lives?” Or perhaps we realized that what seemed like a reasonably simple query could not adequately be answered without careful attention to a cluster of related issues such as cultural hermeneutics, ecclesiastical practices, Christian identity in a pluralistic setting, strategies for the promotion of public health measures, qualitative research methods, and the relationship between theology and medicine. I have certainly come to see that reading Scripture in a cross-cultural setting can be an immensely challenging yet deeply rewarding experience.

And biblical interpretation can be an extremely important aspect of public health policy in sub-Saharan Africa. Without specific appeal to Paul’s theology, Musa Dube, one of the leading prophetic voices working to encourage the church in Africa and worldwide to confront the reality of the HIV/AIDS crisis, has referred to “the HIV & AIDS apocalypse,” suggesting that the disease “functions like an apocalyptic text, vividly revealing all the current social injustices, and exposing the perpetrators and the plight of the oppressed.”¹¹ According to Dube, HIV/AIDS is an “apocalyptic text” in that it calls for hope in and work toward a better world and that it unveils the poverty, injustice, and racism that figure in the spread of the epidemic. Our team has suggested that Galatians is an apocalyptic text of life that has an important role to play in the battle against this “apocalyptic text” of death. We ought to do all we can to restore dignity to those living with HIV/AIDS and also to prevent the spread of the disease to more people worldwide, all of whom are created in God’s image. As the apostle Paul himself says at the conclusion of his letter to the Galatians, “So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith” (Gal 6:10).

ENDNOTES

1. R. C. Bailey et al., “Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention in Young Men in Kisumu, Kenya: A Randomised Controlled Trial,” Lancet 369 (2007): 643–56; R. H. Gray et al., “Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention in Men in Rakai, Uganda: A Randomised Trial,” Lancet 369 (2007): 657–66; B. Auvert et al., “Randomized, Controlled Intervention Trial of Male Circumcision for Reduction of HIV Infection Risk: The ANRS 1265 Trial,” PLoS Medicine 2 (2005): e298.
2. See the statement at http://libdoc.who.int/publica- tions/2007/9789241595988_eng.pdf.
3. H. A. Weiss et al., “Circumcision among Adolescent Boys in Rural Northwestern Tanzania,” Tropical Medicine & Inter- national Health 13 (2008): 1054–61.
4. Ibid.
5. Because of travel and leadership commitments, the prin- cipal of St. Paul College, Rev. Primus Ngeiyamu, was unable to join the study team, but he offered invaluable insight throughout the process.
6. See, e.g., Gerald O. West, Academy of the Poor: Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).
7. Resources are available at http://ujamaa.ukzn.ac.za/Home- page.aspx.
8. The results of this study were published in J. A. Downs et al., “‘The Body We Leave Behind’: A Qualitative Study of Obstacles and Opportunities for Increasing Uptake of Male Circumcision among Tanzanian Christians,” BMJ Open HIV/ AIDS 3 (2013): e002802.
9. Readers may note the influence of J. Louis Martyn on our reading of Galatians; see his Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997) and Galatians (AB 33A; New York: Doubleday, 1997).
10. The results of this study were published in J. A. Downs et al., “Educating Religious Leaders to Promote Uptake of Male Circumcision in Tanzania: a Cluster Randomised Trial,” Lancet 389 (2017): 1124–1132.
11. Musa Dube, The HIV & AIDS Bible: Selected Essays (Scran- ton and London: University of Scranton Press, 2008), 102.

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+ Ted Cosse, executive director of Fuller Psychological and Family Services and assistant professor of clinical psychology, reflects on self-awareness and the slow and difficult process of becoming more aware of pain, weakness, suffering, and ultimately joy.

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