Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 29:1 (NA 2024)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

DBSJ 29 (2024) p. 117

Book Reviews

Contextualization and the Old Testament: Between Asian and Western Perspectives, by Jerry Hwang. Carlisle, UK: Langham Global Library, 2022. 264 pp. $24.00.

At a recent academic conference, a seasoned Old Testament scholar opined that most of the future advances in Old Testament scholarship will be driven by majority world scholars whose culturally attuned sensitivity to the text will allow them to see features missed by Western scholars. Jerry Hwang’s collection of essays appears to give hands and feet to this observation, providing a series of thought-provoking and insightful essays arising from a careful study of the Old Testament. Hwang is an Old Testament professor at Singapore Bible College, where he has taught since 2010. He completed his doctoral work in the U.S. at Wheaton College, so he is uniquely qualified to speak to Western and Eastern perspectives. This book contains mostly original material, along with a few essays that Hwang has reworked from other publications for the present volume.

The book comprises nine chapters, two of which serve as the introduction and conclusion. These frame seven chapters that explore divergent themes such as Bible translation, terminology questions, covenant and kinship, honor/shame concepts, aniconism, and creation/pantheism. The introduction surveys questions relating to how Western missionaries and scholars have approached the biblical text vis-à-vis how Eastern Christians have done so. The tension is illustrated in a half-joke Hwang relates whereby missionaries have drily observed that when Westerners apply the text it is contextualization but when native Christians do it is syncretism. This Western-centric mindset has created an unwelcome tethering of Christianity and imperialism that has led in many quarters to a presentation of the gospel laden with Western cultural assumptions. Hwang seeks to untangle some of these ligatures by approaching the text afresh through an Eastern lens that is at once closer to the culture of the ancient world and at the same time capable of elaborating on themes latent in the text but often overlooked by Western scholarship and church practice. His thesis is that the Old Testament itself constitutes an act of contextualization in the ancient world, providing a precedent and paradigm for training modern Christians to faithfully understand and live out the Scriptures in their own Far Eastern contexts (15).

Following the introductory chapter, chapter 2 looks at issues related to Bible translation and linguistics. He notes that Bible translation is the first act of contextual theology. Due to the heritage of missionary translations, many cultures in the majority world possess hastily produced

DBSJ 29 (2024) p. 118

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