Missional Economics: Biblical Justice and Christian Formation

by Michael Barram

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2018

Overview

American Christians today, says Michael Barram, have a significant blind spot when it comes to economic matters in the Bible. In this book Barram reads biblical texts related to matters of money, wealth, and poverty through a missional lens, showing how they function to transform our economic reasoning.

Barram searches for insight into God’s purposes for economic justice by exploring what it might look like to think and act in life-giving ways in the face of contemporary economic orthodoxies. The Bible repeatedly tells us how to treat the poor and marginalized, Barram says, and faithful Christians cannot but reflect carefully and concretely on such concerns.

Written in an accessible style, this biblically rooted study reflects years of research and teaching on social and economic justice in the Bible and will prove useful for lay readers, preachers, teachers, students, and scholars.

Key Features

• Seeks to solve the blind spot of American believers in terms of mission, wealth and poverty
• Exegetes key biblical texts to develop a biblical theology of economics
• Places wealth and economics under a missional lens

Contents

• Transformation for Life
• Biblical Formation in Missional Perspective
• Jesus’s Mission and Divine Blessing
• The Exodus: The God of Liberation Provides a Way Out
• Economic Formation in the Decalogue
• Economic Formation in the Covenantal Legal Codes
• Prophetic Formation for Economic Reasoning
• Creation and Its Discontents
• The Kingdom’s Economy of Abundance
• Formation for Economic Reasoning in Matthew
• Kingdom Reversals and Economic Reasoning in Luke
• Economic Reasoning and Faith in the Context of Divine Abundance
• Missional Hermeneutics, Transformed Reasoning, and Choosing Life

Praise for the Print Edition

In this uncommonly urgent book Michael Barram aims at nothing less than a shift of lens through which we read Scripture. . . . Barram’s compelling study is a wake-up call and a summons away from the pseudo-gospel of self-indulgence at the expense of the more vulnerable in the neighborhood.

—Walter Brueggemann, from the foreword

Product Details

• Title: Missional Economics: Biblical Justice and Christian Formation
• Author: Michael Barram
• Series: The Gospel and Our Culture Series
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2018
• Logos Release Date: 2019
• Pages: 281
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Economics › Religious aspects--Christianity; Economics › Biblical teaching; Missions; United States › Economic aspects
• ISBNs: 9780802875075, 0802875076
• Resource ID: LLS:MSSNLCNMCSFRMTN
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T01:39:01Z

About Michael Barram

Michael Barram is professor of theology and religious studies at Saint Mary's College of California. A leading scholar of missional hermeneutics, he is also the author of Mission and Moral Reflection in Paul.