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Navigating Complexity in Our World : Public Theologies for Everyday Life Editors: Gregg Okesson and Amanda Allen

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Navigating Complexity in Our World : Public Theologies for Everyday Life Editors: Gregg Okesson and Amanda Allen !"#$%"&$'% ()*+,-.$&/ 0' )12 3)2,4 516,$7 89-),)%$-: ;)2 <#-2/4"/ =$;- Editors Gregg Okesson and Amanda Allen First Fruits Press Wilmore, Kentucky c2021 ISBN: 9781648170126 Navigating complexity in our world : public theologies for everyday life Editors: Gregg Okesson and Amanda Allen.. Published in the U.S.A. by First Fruits Press, ©2020. Digital version at https://place.asburyseminary.edu/academicbooks/37/ First Fruits Press is a digital imprint of the Asbury Theological Seminary, B.L. Fisher Library. Asbury Theological Seminary is the legal owner of the material previously published by the Pentecostal Publishing Co. and reserves the right to release new editions of this material as well as new material produced by Asbury Theological Seminary. Its publications are available for noncommercial and educational uses, such as research, teaching and private study. First Fruits Press has licensed the digital version of this work under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/. For all other uses, contact: First Fruits Press B.L. Fisher Library Asbury Theological Seminary 204 N. Lexington Ave. Wilmore, KY 40390 http://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruits Navigating complexity in our world : public theologies for everyday life [electronic resource] / ǂc editors, Gregg Okesson and Amanda Allen.. – Wilmore, Kentucky : First Fruits Press, ©2020. 1 online resource (285 p. : port.) : digital. ISBN: 9781648170119 (paperback) ISBN: 9781648170126 (uPDF) ISBN: 9781648170133 (Mobi) OCLC: 1200760636 1. Public theology. 2. Christianity and culture. I. Title. II. Okesson, Gregg A., editor. III. Allen, Amanda L, editor. BT83.63.N39 2020eb 230 Cover design by Amanda Kessinger asburyseminary.edu 800 .2ASBURY 204 North Lexington Avenue Wilmore, Kentucky 40390 First Fruits Press Te Academic Open Press of Asbury Teological Seminary 204 N. Lexington Ave., Wilmore, KY 40390 859-858-2236 [email protected] asbury.to/frstfruits TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Gregg Okesson ............................................................... 1 Chapter 1: A Public !eology for Privacy in the Technological Age ......................................................... 13 Jacob E. Tenney Chapter 2: From Heaven to the Food Desert: How the Incarnation Speaks to Issues of Poverty and Obesity in the United States ............................................................... 45 Sadie V. Sasser Chapter 3: Food as Other: !e Manifestation of Hospitality in Food and Place During the Global Age ...................................... 69 Graham Hoppstock-Mattson Chapter 4: !e Pursuit of Public !eology toward Women Under Confucian Society ............................................................... 99 Kyeo Re Lee Chapter 5: Love !y Ecological Neighbor: Christian Love as the Healing Balm for Our Broken World ............. ....................... 123 Benjamin D. Foss Chapter 6: Who Owns the Land? Zimbabwean Traditional Leaders’ Use of African Traditional Customs and Religion Contrasted with Biblical Approaches ................................... 151 Dwight S. M. Mutonono i Chapter 7: A !eological Response to Growing “Vaccine Hesitancy” in American Evangelical Churches .................................... 185 Samuel J. Hood Chapter 8: “I Was Suicidal and You Welcomed Me”: Framing Suicide Prevention in Mongolia !rough the Lens of Christian Hospitality ....................................................................... 205 Michael S. Bennett Chapter 9: Toward a Public Ecclesiology for the Evangelical Church: Embodying Our Biblical Identity ................................... 243 Michael Schlatt Conclusion: Amanda Allen ............................................................ 273 ii Introduction Gregg Okesson !is book began, at least in seminal form, back in May 2010. I was sitting in my o"ce at Kijabe Hospital, Kenya, when I received an email letting me know I was accepted as a new faculty member at Asbury !eological Seminary, USA. I had been teaching at a theological institution in Kenya for nearly a decade. My African seminary posted me to Kijabe hospital in order to help integrate theology within a medical curriculum. While in the West this might appear a curious union; there it made complete sense. In Africa (and elsewhere around the world) health represents a signi#cant theological category due in large part to the larger cosmology found on the continent, with more $uid interaction between spiritual and material realities. "Health" involves negotiating the di%erent ways people become sick as well as how they appropriate resources within the spiritual realm for becoming healthy. Furthermore, health is not just vertical in terms of how people relate to the divine, but also horizontal. People are sick together; they also heal together. Working at the hospital allowed me to engage health as a rich, multifaceted theological concept. I had been moving theologically in “public” directions for years, led #rst by living in a rural Tanzanian village for two years, then subsequently teaching theology at the African theological institution for almost a decade. At our seminary, students would naturally bring public realities into the classroom. !ey wrestled with topics such as poverty and tribalism and politics. Our theological institution had a farm in the middle of campus. In addition to crops, we raised cows, chickens, and #sh. !is was not merely for economic reasons. It was central to how we taught theology and trained leaders. John Mbiti asks something similar of Western education: “Will theological education in the West 1 2 ever get out into the streets without an umbrella, get wet and hear the birds singing? … Much theological activity is taking place on the ground and in the streets, in the #elds where people are, where the church is.”1 My o"ce at Kijabe hospital, as I recall it, was six foot by six foot, located outside the hospital morgue. Family members would congregate at various times of the day to receive the bodies of loved ones. Sometimes they would wail uncontrollably. Other times churches would join them and sing beautiful songs of worship. !e sound of ambulances echoed regularly across the hills of the Great Ri& Valley, while the stench of decaying bodies wa&ed into my study on a hot day. !e location of my o"ce was a sobering reminder of frailty and death; as well as a wonderful venue for contemplating intersections of doxology and life. I was sitting in my o"ce when I received the email from Asbury. !e following day I was sitting in the same o"ce when the dean asked me to send him the syllabus for a new course proposal. He gave me three days to submit the syllabus (which subsequently needed to get approved by di%erent committees). My new faculty position related to teaching international development. As a theologian and missiologist, I wanted to help future pastors, missionaries, and church leaders not only think about such topics as health, land, economics, and justice in global spaces but more importantly connect theology with everyday realities such as disease, deforestation, poverty, and the marginalization of people. As I sat at my desk and watched people outside my door wrestle with death, while listening to choir groups sing songs of doxology and hope in the face of loss, the new course took shape in my mind. I have now been teaching the course for almost a decade. Like most courses it has morphed over time. It is called, “Public !eology for Global Development” and introduces students to the complex realities of poverty, injustice, disease, environmental decay, migration, globalization, and wayward forms of politics humans experience in the world. !e goal of the course is to enable students to enter into these convoluted global realities through the rich resources of theology. !e course is missiological in the sense of foregrounding the centrality of 1 John Mbiti, “When the Bull is in a Strange Land, It Does Not Bellow,” In God and Globalization: Christ and the Dominions of Civilization, Max L. Stackhouse and Diane B. Obenchain (eds.) (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2002), 170. Introduction | 3 the gospel of Jesus Christ; along with highlighting the importance of the church as the “hermeneutic of the gospel;”2 while grappling with the socioreligious complexity of highly dynamic, global spaces. !is past academic year I had an exceptional group of students in this course. Half of them were PhD students while the other half were enrolled in MA or MDiv degrees. We had students from throughout the U.S, along with the countries of Kenya, Nigeria, Taiwan, Zimbabwe, and India. Amanda Allen, one of my doctoral students, served as the teaching intern for the course and we decided, based upon the exceptional quality of the #nal papers submitted for the course, to ask the students to revise the papers for publishing in this edited volume. !e nine chapters included in this volume represent well the breadth of issues covered in this course, as well as the thoughtful, nuanced theological engagement of the individual students. What is Public >eology? !e course itself and the chapters found in this volume represent examples of public theology. !ere is no de#nite de#nition for public theology.3 !e phrase itself was #rst coined by Martin Marty in the 1970s within the context of discussion regarding civil religion. In the ensuing years a number of theologians and Christian ethicists employed the term to grapple with Christian faith in the context
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