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. Charting a new course thus 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.
