Running Head: READING REPORT 1

Reading Report
Name
Institution
READING REPORT 2

Hiebert, Paul. Anthropological Insights for Missionaries

Introduction

The author of this book Paul G. Hiebert has been a professor of South Asian studies and
anthropology since 1977 at Fuller Theological Seminary. He was born in India as a missionary
family, gave services as a missionary for six years, and serves as an anthropologist at
government institutes for eleven universities. For Paul, anthropology and missions were always
to be correlated even though, as he recognized in 1978, anthropology and missions often
resembled like a stepbrother such as raised in a similar setting, sharing, arguing over the space,
quarrelling the same issues, and common parenting (Priest, 2009). The unclosing missionary of
Paul led him to be potentially the leading missiological anthropologist in the world. He spent his
lifetime trying to significantly bring together the mission, theology, and anthropology. In this
report, we will elaborate on the development of Paul's missionary anthropology and consider the
on-going impact of his famous book Anthropological Insights for Missionaries. He served
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1990, guiding its intercultural studies of the PhD program
to get prominence nationally. He stayed there till his last day of life at the age of 74 in March
2007.

Refection/Interaction

Paul's book consists of three sections, and all sections emphasize us to know the diversity of
cultures to effectively convey the Word of God to human beings who live in different situations
of cultures. In the first section, Paul stated the missions need to be supported by general theories,
especially anthropology, to know the different cultures and people. In the second section, he
defines the cultural assumptions of missionaries of the west to compare the world view and
culture systems between other continents and western. Last but not the least, in the third section,
Paul Hiebert reveals to the reader how to cope with cultures in the world to convey the gospel.
Most importantly, the emphasized word is conveying procedures are critical contextualization.

It is very difficult to understand and know the other's culture and to efficiently convey the Word
of God into the context of a different culture. After reading this book of Paul, Dr Van Engen
continuously mentioned that he was conscious of the truth that mission is the spirit of
Christianity because to convey the word of God in a cross-cultural context so, regarding this
purpose all interdisciplinary school of thoughts should help the mission. This implies that
without the enlightenment of God, this mission cannot be completed, because the mission is
God's job, not ours.

There is no suspicion that Paul's book was famous and successful in its era. Although others had
penned on different aspects of missiological anthropology, one can easily obtain a case that
Paul's was the most accessible and practical to them. As a ruler of his anthropology discipline, he
was able to process a massive quantity of information and knowledge without getting astray on
providing too much or rabbit trails. All around, he kept balanced stress between culture and the
word of God while grasping to the hallmarks of the Evangelical of the authority of gospel and
the necessity of the word of God witnessed (Tanner, 2007). But the question is, there is still any
place for Paul's book in the 21st century?
READING REPORT 3

In one way that Paul's book has declined in significance relates to readers. Paul's book
Anthropological Insights for Missionaries was largely penned for missionaries of the western.
Though Paul accepts that the massive swift growth in the force of missionary comes from the
supposed two-thirds world, Paul admitted that his book is inclined toward western readers or
audience, because this work of Paul will be largely used in the west. There is not a thing
inherently bad or wrong in this motion and he believes that examine the principles apply fairly to
the missionaries of the two-thirds world and also stated that the reader required only the
perspective of local example to switch the western ones that are specified. However, his might be
the only partiality so.

Possibly one of the biggest things that working against Paul is the truth that he penned about the
culture which never stays static. This is one of the biggest critiques that current missiologists
introduce to the writing of current anthropology. Another anthropologist argues that during the
period between 1980 to 1990, anthropology changed, but on the other hand, missiology did not
change (Rynkiewich, 2012). Anthropology learned some new understanding while missiology
looked satisfies with what it gained already. Missionaries learned from anthropology how to deal
with restricted realities of cultures and rely upon the queries like how missionary can learn
culture and languages in a setting, normally a village, and then design the Word of God in a way
that person from culture and language would understand it who was seated across the table? We
can certainly see these inclinations in Paul's work.

To that, where does that leave readers concerning Paul? Is Paul's book being so old that this book
by a human celebrated as the world's leading anthropological missiology arguably, is no more
worth reading? Of course not, along with discipline, understanding and acknowledging the roots
and past knowledge is very crucial to understand the knowledge of present time. Paul's book is
one of those books that any significant disciple of missiology requires to master. Exclude writing
like this book, the enterprise of a missionary might be desolately in back of the times rather than
only coping to carry on with the changes of postmodern of the last three decades. But there is a
larger cause that Paul remains well-grounded today is that postmodern and modern anthropology
are not or/either but and/both (Stallard, 2020).

What is required is not the withdrawal of the tools of culture from the 20th century, but instead
supplementation and adaptation. If students use Paul's book of insights of anthropology for the
missionaries as an unattached text, students will give services to missiology that consists of
outdated anthropology which is advocated potential missionaries for a whole world that no more
presents. On the other hand, if students use Paul's book as one of many mechanisms, making sure
to addition Paul with the topics of urbanization, globalization, and cultural identity, Paul's book
remains as a strength rather than being a critic. It is, might be, an allegation regarding
missiologists that they are not continued to obtain postmodern and updated works that describe
the culture and its links to bureau through compelling, practical prose and readable. Then again,
it perhaps evidences to a modest scholar who used their work so skillfully in the aid to the
mission of gospel that Paul's remains one of the best world's missiological anthropologists and
his work which is more than three decades old continuous to effect nation servants to be a
disciple of people as well as a disciple of the gospel.
READING REPORT 4

References

Rynkiewich, M. (2012). Soul, self, and society: A postmodern anthropology for mission in a
postcolonial world. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Tanner, K. (2007). Cultural theory. In The Oxford handbook of systematic theology.

Priest, R. J. (2009). Paul G. Hiebert: A Life Remembered.”. Trinity Journal, 30(2), 171-75.

Stallard, S. C. (2020). The Development of Multicultural Teams in the Book of Acts: A Model
with Application to Urban North America (Doctoral dissertation, Southeastern Baptist
Theological Seminary).

Barnes, P. W. (2011). Missiology Meets Cultural Anthropology: The Life and Legacy of Paul G.
Hiebert.

Frykenberg, R. E. (2007). Paul G. Hiebert 1932-2007. International Bulletin of Missionary

Research, 31(3), 128-130.