Navigating Romans Through Cultures contains eight chapters of critical and contextualized readings of Paul’s letter to the Romans by scholars from Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Asia. It provides an interpretive voyage into how the gospel of Paul, as contained in his letter to the Romans, fulfills its original vision of “making known the gospel of Christ in all nations” (Rom 16:26). The challenge of the contributors is to express Paul’s gospel in terms of their own cultures.
This journey around the world took no less than four years. Each contributor is familiar with the culture they worked with, since many lived in that culture. Each “travel-log” is not just a report of how we steer the ship (letter to the Romans) through the water of a particular culture (or a sea of cultures for many of us); it is also a life changing critical reflection on our reading and interpretative process. Thus charting a new course involves more than offering new ways of reading Romans; it also involves clarifying the rationales for this new reading, in the light of the contextual, analytical, and hermeneutical frames of Scripture Criticism.
In their challenging readings of Romans, the contributors have wrestled with: an understanding of culture; the cultural background and mission of Paul; cultural and theological conflicts in the letter of Paul to the Romans; cultural interpretations of Paul; and navigating equipments in steering Romans through cultures.
