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Resistance against unjust (wicked) cultures and imperial powers is at the heart of scripture. In many cases, the resistance is waged against external systems or the misappropriation of scriptural texts and traditions. In some cases, however, scripture resists oppressive cultures and powers that it also requires, certifies and protects. At other times, and in different settings, the minders of scripture speak against the abusive cultures and power systems that they inherited and whose benefits they milk.
Scripture and Resistance contains reflections by authors from East, West, South, and North - on resistance and the Christian scriptures regarding a rainbow of concerns: the colonial legacies of the Bible; the people (especially native and indigenous people) who were subjugated and minoritized for the sake of the Bible; the courage for resistance among ordinary and normal people, and the opportunities that arise from their realities and struggles; the imperializing tendencies that lurk behind so-called traditional biblical scholarship; the strategies of and energies in post- and de-colonial criticisms; the Bible as a profitable product, and a site of struggle; and the multiple views or perspectives in the Bible about empire and resistance. In other words, the contributors, as a collective, affirm that the Bible contains (pun intended) resistance.
List of contents
Foreword
Collin Cowan
Preface
1.Negotiating, with Scripture and Resistance
Jione Havea
DARE TO REREAD
2.Ephphatha! DARE to be Opened! Scripture, its Civil War and Shakenness
Graham J. Adams
3.The People against the Empire: Biblical Understandings
Néstor Miguez
4.The Text Collectors: White Dutch Biblical Appropriation
Janneke Stegeman
5.Gemma Augustea, Imperial Paradox, and the Matthean Resistance
Raj Nadella
6.Cornelius the Centurion meets the Ethiopian Eunuch, in a Jeepney
Revelation Enriques Velunta
7.The Oppressor has Ceased
Rogelio Dario Barolin
DARE TO RESIST
8.A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians: For Resisting the Postcolonial Empire
Jin Young Choi
9.Using the Bible to Resist Empire in the Caribbean's Jamaica
Stephen C.A. Jennings
10."Love Your Neighbor as Yourself": A Call to Resist and Transform Economic Empire
Cynthia Moe-Lobeda
11.The Bible: Globalized Commodity in the New Strategies of Neocolonialism
Nancy Cardoso Pereira
12.Scripture as a Site of Struggle: Literary and Socio-historical Resources for Prophetic Theology in Post-colonial, Post-apartheid (Neo-colonial?) South Africa
Gerald O. West
13.Views, Voices, and Choices: Reading Readers of Luke-Acts and Empire
Tat-siong Benny Liew
About the author
Jione Havea is a native Methodist pastor from Tonga, and research fellow at Trinity Theological College (Aotearora, New Zealand) and the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre of Charles Sturt University (Australia).
