John G. Flett is Professor of Intercultural Theology and Missiology at Pilgrim Theological College, a Uniting Church in Australia college within the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. He is also außerplanmäßiger Professor at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal, Stellvertretender Institutsleiter am Institut für Interkulturelle Theologie und Interreligiöse Studien, Wuppertal, Germany, co-editor of the book series Beiträge zur Missionswissenschaft / Interkulturellen Theologie, LIT Verlag, and contributing editor to the International Bulletin of Mission Research.
Critical readings of “religion” and of “world Christianity” have opened greater possibilities for appreciating the nature and forms of contextual embodiments of belief systems. This includes methodological shifts in identifying authorities and voices, theological texts (including, art, poetry, dance, architecture), embodied forms (liturgies, structures, practices), and the ends of theology, including mission, the transmission of the faith across cultures and times. This aids the process of decolonising western approaches because it opens the discussion to include Indigenous religions and cultural heritage and shifts the interrogation of ideas like salvation or syncretism by refusing the hard and binary borders imposed by the category of religion. In short, whereas colonial approaches to religion and theology ignored the culture, history, religion, and contextual and embodied forms of faith in Oceania, these new developments are better able to hear and engage with what is already occurring in this region in terms of both the lived experience and the theoretical formulations.
Flett’s publications have explored such ranging topics as intercultural hermeneutics, postcolonial theologies and religious studies, migrant Christianity, multiculturalism, secularisation, contextual theologies and methods, religion and theology in Oceania, ecumenical accounts of difference and unity (including such things as cartography, narratives of arrival, ancestors). He has lived and taught in the USA, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, the DRC, Romania, France, the Netherlands, PNG, and Australia.
His PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary was a ground-breaking examination of the history and theology of missio Dei and was published as The Witness of God (Eerdmans, 2010). His Habilitationschrift, undertaken at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal, developed a critical account the church’s apostolicity, understanding the embodiment of the faith in cultural difference as fundamental to the continuity of the faith through time. This appeared as Apostolicity: The Ecumenical Question in World Christian Perspective (IVP Academic, 2016) and was recognised as one of the IBMR’s Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, World Christianity, and Intercultural Theology of 2016. His most recent work (2020) with Henning Wrogemann, titled Questions of Context: Reading a Century of German Mission Theology, examined the range of ideas that underly the theories of contextualisation and the related consequences for local embodiments of the faith. This was his third book to be named as one of the IMBR Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology and World Christianity for 2020. His current book length projects include the T&T Clark Handbook on Intercultural Theology and Mission Studies (with Dorottya Nagy), and a critical edition of the life and works of J. C. Hoekendijk (Brill).
His publications can be found here
