To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge

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Summary: To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledg
Review: Perceiving the western crisis of knowledge and its impact on the mission of Christian Church, this collection of essays, the result of an engaged discussion over several years, uncovers the fundamental issues of the epistemological shift and its implication for Christian communication. The book has two parts: the first part deals with diagnosing the epistemological predicament of the contemporary west, as it is discussed by Anglo-American, French, and German philosophers.

The second and the major part of the book that comes under the title, ¡°The Epistemological Predicament and Missiology¡± is a missiological discussion between a group of Christian philosophers such as Philip Clayton and Nancey Murphy and missiologists including J. Andrew Kirk and Bert Hoedemaker. The uniqueness and the importance of the book is its interaction between philosophy and missiology, covering the themes that must engage Christian theology and mission in a postmodern context. These themes include theological method and the justification of beliefs, the question of the character of Christian truth, the relation of belief and action, and intercultural communication. The book creatively illuminates the intellectual and cultural issues involved for both philosophy and missiology as both are needed in theologizing in mission in postmodernity. The value of this book is, above all, that it offers both the hard core of theory and practical implications for theology and Christian mission in postmodernity.