Spirit, Resistance and Community Formation in Luke: A Postcolonial Cultural Reading

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About The Book

This work explores the political activity of the Spirit of God in Luke's Gospel. It argues that, in Luke, the Spirit is the driving force in the life and work of Jesus' movement that challenges and subverts the status quo of the empire. A postcolonial and cultural analysis of the selected texts such as Lukan canticles, the passion and resurrection narratives, etc. demonstrates that the spirit empowers counter social formation at the margins and faithful resistance to empire.

About the Author

Rampaukopoing Michui completed his B.D from Eastern Theological College, Jorhat; M.Th. (New Testament) from Federated Faculty for Research in Religion and Culture (FFRRC), Kottayam, Kerala; and D.Th. (New Testament) from United Theological College, Bengaluru. He has served as a youth leader in Jalukie Town Local Baptist Church; and taught at the Bethel Bible College, Guntur as an Assistant Professor of New Testament. Presently, he is serving in the church as the Youth Secretary of ZBCC, Nagaland.

Foreword Dr. Rampau's book "Spirit. Resistance and Community Formation in Luke: A Postcolonial Cultural Reading" is a very systematic and ground-breaking work in the field of Lukan Scholarship and postcolonial studies. The Gospel of Luke documented many Charismatic tendencies in the Early Christian cult in the first century C.E. The identity of the Holy Spirit in Luke is associated with the community of Luke. It can be understood from the contextual and perspectival studies based on parallelism, function and inter-textual references.
Dr. Rampau is a systematic and serious researcher at UTC, Bangalore and I had the privilege to journey with him as his doctoral supervisor. The major strength of the work is the textual and exegetical analysis in the light of postcolonial insights and encounters.
I am delighted to recommend this book for a critical reflective study in the academy and churches for the work of the Kingdom of God. In India there are many researchers and scholars who systematically publish with scholarly contributions to enrich the New Testament research. I am sure Dr. Rampau's work will inspire many to take up the study of Lukan community and scholarship. I wish and pray that Dr. Rampau will publish many books in the near future.

Preface

Postcolonialism has produced a creative site of bible reading-a site of resistance, a site of tracing the story of those whose voice were submerged by the weight of colonial edifice. It not only allows one to challenge and go beyond the 'given meaning of text and interpretation but also allows one to attempt to recover and bring to the fore the voices of the silenced other, who fought the Empire in their time, and to imagine the possibility of a better future. As one who come from a community that once resisted the colonial formation of British Raj and one that continues to struggle to come to term with the legacy of colonial violence, the theme of resistance from the margins in an imperial situation gained impetus in my thought formation as I read the bible from the vantage point of postcolonial subject. It is this interest that I endeavoured to do my doctoral research on the resistant discourses of the margins taking Lukan text and context of Roman Empire.
Thus, this work on the Spirit, Resistance, and Community Formation in Luke's Gospel is a postcolonial cultural reading of selected Lukan texts that emphasise the activity of the Spirit in inspiring protest voices and empowering countercultural actions to the marginalised for counter social formation in the context of empire. This work is therefore, an attempt to underscore the political dimension of the Spirit of God, which has not received adequate attention in the pneumatological debates surrounding Lukan writing. Lukan departure from the Synoptic Gospel portrait of the Holy Spirit shows a turn to the political, in that Luke emphasises the Spirit as a political entity actively breathing life into the community. (The Old Testament and Second Temple traditions, which Luke inherited, show parallel functions of the Spirit of resistance in several charismatic circles). In this work, the selected texts which showed the vivid Spirit's activity in the social formation of the community in Luke's Gospel is analysed in the light of postcolonial insights.

**Contents and Sample Pages**