Description
The field of the theology of mission has developed variously across Christian traditions in the last century, and pentecostal scholars and missiologists have made their share of contributions to this area. The Missiological Spirit brings the insights of Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong to the discussion. It delineates the major features of what will be argued as central to a viable vision and praxis for Christian mission in a post-modern, post-Christendom, post-Enlightenment, post-Western, and post-colonial world. What emerges will be a distinctively pentecostally and evangelically informed missiological theology, one rooted in the Christian salvation-history narrative of Incarnation and Pentecost that is yet open to the world in its many and various cultural, ethnic, religious, and disciplinary discourses and realities.
The argument unfolds through dialogical engagements with the work of others, concrete case studies, and systematic theological reflection. Yong’s pneumatological and missiological imagination proffers a model for Christian theology of mission suitable for the twenty-first-century global and pluralistic context, even as it exemplifies how a missiological understanding of theology itself unfolds amidst engagements with contemporary ecclesial practices and academic/theological impulses.
About the Author
Amos Yong is Professor of Theology and Mission and the Director of the Center for Missiological Research at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is the author and editor of more than two dozen books, including Hospitality and the Other (2008). The Missiological Spirit is a companion to his The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method in the Third Millennium (James Clarkeand Co Ltd, 2015).
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I – Reluctant Missiology: Indirect Missiological Reflection
1. Going Where the Spirit Goes …: Engaging the Spirit(s) in J.C. Ma’s Pneumatological Missiology
2. “As the Spirit Gives Utterance …”: Pentecost, Intra-Christian Ecumenism, and the Wider Oekumene
3. A P(new)matological Paradigm for Christian Mission in a Religiously Plural World
Part II – Pentecostal Missiology: Pragmatic Mission Theology
4. The Spirit of Hospitality: Pentecostal Perspectives toward a Performative Theology of Interreligious Encounter
5. Missiology and the Interreligious Encounter (with Tony Richie)
6. From Demonization to Kin-domization: The Witness of the Spirit and the Renewal of Missions in a Pluralistic World
Part III – North American Missiology: Theology of Mission Post-Christendom
7. The Missiology of Jamestown 1607-2007 and Beyond: Toward a Postcolonial Theology of Mission in North America
8. The Buddhist-Christian Encounter in the USA: Reflections on Christian Practices
9. The Church and Mission Theology in a Post-Constantinian Era: Soundings from the Anglo-American Frontier
Part IV – Systematic Missiology: Notes for a Christian Missiological Theology
10. Primed for the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Missio Spiritus
11. Christological Constants in Shifting Contexts: Jesus Christ and the Missio Spiritus in a Pluralistic World
12. God, Christ, Spirit: Christian Pluralism and Evangelical Mission in the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion – Christian Mission Theology: Toward a Pneumato-Missiological Praxis for the Third Millennium
Bibliography
Scripture Index
Subject Index
Endorsements and Reviews
Combining twelve brilliant essays, Yong demonstrates the value of a pneumatological approach to mission in the world. His erudite scholarship is tempered with practical on-the-ground application, making this both a stimulating missiological treatise and a practical handbook for joining God’s mission in a globalising world of cultural complexity and religious pluralism. My anthropological heart was strangely warmed by Yong’s cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding of mission in a pluralistic world.
Darrell Whiteman, editor of Missiology
Yong likes to work backwards: from missiology back to theology; from current context back to scripture; from Acts 28 back to Acts 2; from Holy Spirit back to the Son and the Father. The result is a surprisingly forward-facing theological adventure with which non-Pentecostalists can profitably engage.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee, Church Times, 13 May 2016
