Dec

11

2011

Jesus and Gentiles: Introduction

As I noted in an earlier post (The Call seen through Muslim eyes), regardless of whether we like it or not, the world in which we live is religiously plural. Though this has always been the case, it is now closer to home than ever before: our Western culture was once largely monochrome, consisting almost exclusively of Christians (or, at least, it was nominally Christian), but today we dwell alongside Hindus, Muslims, New Agers, Buddhists. It is no longer possible for us to hide behind the walls of the church and deny the fact that our world is religiously plural. Rather, we need to discover ways to engage within our world that are contextually appropriate yet biblically faithful; there is an urgent need to turn to the Scriptures from our contemporary context in order to discover what Scripture has to say to us today. In other words, if we are to deliberately bring the world in which we dwell to the world of Scripture, perhaps we will discover that Scripture can speak to us afresh in ways generations before us did not hear.

There are many Christian thinkers who have wrestled with how Christians today should relate to people of other faiths and many of these thinkers have approached the Bible for answers. However, strangely, very few (in fact, almost none!) have considered that Jesus himself interacted with peoples of other faiths, with Gentiles and Samaritans. It is about time that we turn to Jesus for a model of how we should relate to the Gentiles and Samaritans of our world. Jesus is our supreme example of what the human life can and should be. It is only fitting that we see in him a model of how God would have us relate to the 'outsiders' of our world, including Muslims, Hindus, Pagans, "Samaritans."

For this reason, we are going to start a series of posts looking to the Gospels to discover how Jesus himself related to Gentiles and Samaritans, to pagans and 'outsiders,' and consider the implications Jesus' example has for us today. Given that we are currently reflecting on Jesus' birth during this Advent/Christmas season, it is only fitting that we start by considering Gentiles in the Christmas story; I'll post about that in a couple of days. Until then, share this page with your mission minded friends and tell them to follow this series. Many Advent blessings!

Ensure you don't miss future posts about Jesus encountering Gentiles by filling out your email address in the left column (or by following on Facebook or Twitter).

Bob Robinson's upcoming Jesus and the Religions, to be released by Cascade around March next year, will be the first detailed exposition of Jesus' encounters with Gentiles and Samaritans which seeks to draw out the missional implications for Christians living in today's religiously plural world.