Our understanding of Christian faith in the 21st century needs to be constantly renegotiated, adapted to ever-changing contexts and aligned to the rich biblical interpretations and theological imagination that global processes of exchange are bringing about. Against this backdrop, exploring the potential of postcolonial studies for theological thinking promises to be a rewarding task. Indeed, the articles in this volume demonstrate this potential, each for its own area, and thus contribute to the field of ‘postcolonial theologies’, a body of literature that in the German-speaking context has begun to grow only recently. The increasing interest in postcolonial approaches in German theological circles hardly comes as a surprise: after the arrival of refugees in unprecedented numbers in Germany in 2015, the need for deeper reflection on such topics as identity, belonging, difference, solidarity etc. became apparent. It was under these circumstances that in the summer semester of 2016 the project from which this volume emerged took shape at the Institute of Protestant Theology at the University of Oldenburg: faculty from all theological branches commonly addressed the topic of ‘the other’ in their seminars and explored it from a decidedly postcolonial perspective. At the end of the semester, this teaching project led to a conference in which not only faculty but also students and invited international experts presented the fruits of their engagement with postcolonial theories in the field of theology.1 The contributions to this conference are now made available in the present volume. To make the gist of the German contributions accessible also for a wider audience, an English abstract is provided at the beginning of each of those articles and vice versa a German abstract at the beginning of each English article. For an overview of the whole volume, some major threads of argument are drawn together in an English summary in the following section.
We would like to thank the publishers of the “STAR” series, Mandy Robbins and Jan Willem van Henten, for their friendly and unbureaucratic reception of the volume and the Brill publishing house, in particular Ingrid Heijckers-Velt and Gert Jager, for the outstanding support. Furthermore, we would like to gratefully thank Dr. Matthias R. Hoffmann (Munich and Kiel) for the thorough correction and linguistic revision of the English contributions.
We dedicate this anthology to the memory of Klaus Alois Baier (1941–2017). The great ecumenist und intercultural theologian worked tirelessly, inspiredly and inspiringly until his passing away as a professor at the Institute for Protestant Theology and Religious Education at the University of Oldenburg.
Britta Konz
Bernhard Ortmann
Christian Wetz
Further information on the conference: www.uni-oldenburg.de/andere_tagung (in German).