Some Questions are Universal

Where did I come from? What happens when I die? Am I important? Across the world, these questions are answered in a vast range of ways, shaped by our worldview, and our specific cultural context. Cross-cultural workers, seeking to engage people at the point of these questions, can offer a rich dialogue between cultural assumptions and biblical truth, but only if they can reach into the cultural framework underlying a particular context.

The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective explores this cultural framework, tackling different aspects of the “Biblical worldview’s” interaction with both “Western/secular” and a “traditional/animist” worldviews. With topics ranging from the physical and metaphysical perception of the universe, to the significance of names, Loewen unpacks cultural construction in all of it’s layered complexity, allowing us to visualize where the Gospel will interact with people’s beliefs, regardless of their context.

Jacob Loewen, the author of Culture and Human Values, draws on multiple years of experience—across several continents—as a field missionary, anthropologist, linguist, bible translator, and missions researcher. The Bible in Cross-Cultural Perspective, originally published in 2000, is Loewen’s culminating work in missionary anthropology and it remains a useful and relevant work today.