Papers by Arren Bennet Lawrence
An Asian Introduction to the New Testament, 2021
One Gospel, Many Cultures
A postcolonial commentary on the New Testament …, 2007
This approach is applied in reading the text with the autowallas in Chennai, India by the intitia... more This approach is applied in reading the text with the autowallas in Chennai, India by the intitiation of a British Academy Project called ‘Developing Biblical Ethnography,’ headed by Dr. David Chalcraft, LJMU. In this article, the uniqueness of the approach is identified to appreciate the methodology and rightly appropriate it. Reading the Scripture with the ordinary or Biblical Ethnography [1] is a sociological approach to the reading of the Scripture. Sociological readings of the Scripture were done by locating the social world text, and identifying the social aspects of the text from Patristic authors to form critics, tradition critics, socio-rhetorical readers, social-scientific readers and social memory theorists, etc. In addition, contextual readers emphasized the role of the social context of the readers through the methodologies such as liberation hermeneutics, feminist criticism, black theologies, Dalit hermeneutics, post-colonialism, post-western readings, etc. While the r...
This festschrift celebrates the life and ministry of Dr. Ezra Sargunam. Dr. Sargunam had been act... more This festschrift celebrates the life and ministry of Dr. Ezra Sargunam. Dr. Sargunam had been active in the ministry to the poor and the needy. He fought for the rights of the minorities and poor for decades through religious, social and political avenues. Therefore, it is only fitting to write an article about the poor and the needy in a book that celebrates his life. This article will deal with the Messianic imagination of the poor in the Gospel of Luke. Walter Brueggemann notes that while prophecy was seen by many conservatives as a " future-telling " liberals undermine the futuristic aspect to focus on its " social-action " aspect.1 Alternatively, Brueggemann says that " the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture among us. " 2 Brueggemann's prophetic imagination is about identifying the present dominant evil in the society which requires critiquing by the prophet. By the same time, it is about energizing the people with an " alternative " " imaginable " " consciousness, " which would get rid of the present evil.3 Moses identified the evilness of slavery of his time. He imagined an alternative, a free Jewish nation. Towards this end he critiqued his contemporary dominant powers and he energized the people with his prophetic imagination, the " alternative consciousness, " a free nation, and he led the people out of captivity to liberation. Similarly, in the time of " royal consciousness " after Solomon, prophets of Northern and Southern kingdoms rose against their contemporary evil present, and they imagined an alternative reality and spoke about it.4 Therefore, prophetic imagination in the Hebrew Bible is nothing but prophets' imaginations of alternative society when their present realities were unwell or evil. Similarly, Brueggemann identifies that Jesus saw the evilness of his time under the Roman " royal consciousness " and spoke against those evil practices giving an alternative consciousness in his exhortations to bring about alternate realities.5 The exhortations of Jesus then show his " prophetic imaginations " of the alternative society suggested. The poor in the time of Jesus were oppressed both by the Roman empire which created the " royal consciousness " and by the Jewish leaders who were with the " royal consciousness " and oppressed the poor further. Jesus spoke against this evil in the book of Luke and he shared an alternative consciousness, on how the society must be, i.e., how the rich and poor must live. This idea is further explored in this article to discuss Jesus' imagination of the poor. Though this article is based on Brueggemann's idea of " prophetic imagination " the idea of imagination is used much more loosely than Brueggemann. Here, the concept of imagination is also treated in the way of seeing or envisioning of an alternative reality in a time of contemporary evil identified. When a person identified a dominant evil the envisioning of an alternative reality and the propagation of that alternative reality is
"Culture and Faith: Focus on Head Covering and Submission of Women" in Among the People: Essays in Honour of Rev. Dr. P. G. Vargis, 2012
Eisegetical Fallacies" is a phrase I coined to point out some fallacies which frequently occur in... more Eisegetical Fallacies" is a phrase I coined to point out some fallacies which frequently occur in word studies. D. A Carson wrote an interesting book called "Exegetical Fallacies." 1 There, he shows several fallacies which show up in an exegetical process. Part of that book is an excellent article on Word Study Fallacies. However, here, I use eisegetical fallacies consciously to mean that most of the fallacies which I will be mentioning below, does not originate in a basic exegetical framework. In one sense, if an exegete does serious exegesis, these fallacies would not arise and thus if these fallacies were present in an exposition of a passage, it means the work is not exegesis anymore, but eisegesis. 2 Thus, I call this work as eisegetical fallacies.
Drafts by Arren Bennet Lawrence
Characterization is used frequently in Biblical interpretation in recent times. However, it has n... more Characterization is used frequently in Biblical interpretation in recent times. However, it has not gone deeper in categorizing the different methods of characterization apart from showing and telling techniques. In this paper several modes of characterization is explained and applied in the book of John to see the different way Jesus is characterized as the divine.
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Papers by Arren Bennet Lawrence
Drafts by Arren Bennet Lawrence