by Marie-Lucile Kubacki
Rome — “Very often, our identity is: ‘I am because you are not.’” For Nicoletta Gatti, a lecturer in biblical studies at the University of Ghana, it is precisely in this contrast — visible today in nationalism, religious polarization and fear of foreigners — that a crucial question arises: how can faith help build a sense of belonging that does not exclude others?
This is the question addressed by “Culture, Bible, Identity: Christian Faith and Interculturality”, a volume recently published by the Catholic Biblical Federation , the result of the international online conference “Culture – Bible – Identity: Intercultural-Biblical Reflections on Christian Identity”, held from January 21 to 23, 2025. The volume is available free of charge online and can be downloaded from the Federation’s website as part of its academic series, “Contextual Readings of the Bible”, launched with this first volume.
The conference was organized by the CBF General Secretariat and the biblical-pastoral association “Verbum Domini”, in collaboration with the University of Ghana and Paris Lodron University, Salzburg. The project brought together scholars from different geographical and cultural contexts to examine the formation of Christian identity in the early communities and its development in today’s contemporary, postcolonial and pluralistic world.
In the preface, Father Jan Stefanów, CBF Secretary General, describes the book as the Federation’s first publication since 2008 and recalls that it brings together contributions presented at the conference. His hope, he writes, is that the volume will inaugurate “a fruitful path of academic-pastoral reflection”, based on a contextualized rereading of the Word of God contained in Scripture.
Stefanów also highlights the international character of the project: biblical texts are reread through African, Asian, European and Latin American perspectives.
A free book, the result of a shared collaboration
The volume’s free availability is a central element of the project. The contributions are not restricted to a circle of specialists or to subscribers to an academic series. The CBF states that its publications are offered online free of charge to the widest possible audience, and that the book can either be read on the website or downloaded.
For Gatti, the volume is the result of collaboration and intellectual friendship. “It is a friendship that continues!” she says in an interview with Fides, adding that she is “only its spokesperson”. The conference was the first event organized by the “Verbum Domini” association, established to provide a coordinating space for biblical scholars wishing to maintain a connection with the Catholic Biblical Federation.
The volume is edited by Gatti and theologian Franz Gmainer-Pranzl, Professor of Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg. It opens with Gatti’s introduction, A Hermeneutic Vision for Inclusive Community, and is divided into two sections: the first focuses on contextual methods and mission; the second on intercultural exegesis.
Among other subjects, the contributions examine the reception of Scripture in African Pentecostal contexts, in India and in Europe, and offer rereadings of biblical passages through different cultural experiences.
In the second section, devoted to intercultural exegesis, eleven scholars reread Scripture from within concrete contexts. To give just a few examples, Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman driven into the desert, becomes a voice for Dalit women in India. The Magi in Matthew’s Gospel, travellers who cross borders, challenge an African Christianity tempted to turn in on itself. The bent-over woman in Luke 13, whom Jesus calls ‘daughter of Abraham’, calls into question traditions that continue to marginalize women today.
Wojciech Szypuła’s concluding remarks bring together the various strands of the discussion. Gatti explains that the project continues an earlier initiative, Salvation in a Crisis-Ridden World: An Intercultural Exegetical Answer , which sought to explore how the Word of God could speak to a world marked by the pandemic and its aftermath.
“We all work in academia, but we are also deeply involved in pastoral ministry,” she says. Hence the need to “build a bridge” between university teaching and research, on the one hand, and communities and pastoral realities, on the other.
The Bible in dialogue among cultures
The central question underpinning this project concerns the relationship between the Christian message and the contexts in which it is received. How did the authors of the New Testament express the faith in worlds shaped by different cultures, from Judaism and Hellenism to the Roman Empire? How did the first evangelizers proclaim the Gospel across cultural boundaries? And what constitutes Christian identity if there is no single cultural form in which it must necessarily be expressed?
“The Bible is increasingly becoming a field for specialists,” Gatti observes in the interview. The risk, she adds, is that exegetical work remains confined to the classroom and fails to engage with the people for whom Scripture is part of everyday life.
The project therefore proposes a twofold movement: to study the text within its original context and to bring it into dialogue with the culture of those who read it today. It is not a matter of mechanically applying an ancient answer to a modern situation, but of allowing the text and the community to question one another.
Gatti speaks of her teaching experience in Ghana, where faith occupies a central place in public life and everyday experience. Yet the presence of religion does not eliminate divisions. She describes a fragmented Christianity and recalls that her classes include Christian, Muslim and Jewish students.
This plurality also challenges the way she reads the Bible.
“I realized that my way of reading Scripture, my way of understanding faith, was a way of seeing things through cultural lenses — for example, through my Christian and Catholic traditions. I realized that this is one perspective. But there are others.”
Reading the texts through other experiences, she adds, can reveal aspects that a single perspective fails to perceive.
“Biblical texts emerge from a dialogue between the culture of origin and the culture of reception,” she says. Intercultural reading, therefore, is not an external addition, but a way of understanding the text and its potential more deeply.
From identity in opposition to communion
The question of identity, at the heart of the volume, is also a public issue. When belonging becomes a weapon, difference is perceived as a threat rather than as a source of enrichment.
Gatti invokes the African principle of Ubuntu: “I am because you are.” In her view, the expression challenges the idea that a person or a community can define itself only by opposing someone else.
“When we look at the other through the lens of fear, the other is immediately turned into an enemy,” she says.
This can lead to dehumanization: dignity and full humanity come to be attributed only to those who belong to one’s own nation, religion or community. It is a dynamic that affects society, but, the biblical scholar warns, it can also enter into the life of the Churches.
Scripture itself, she emphasizes, does not hide the tensions between openness and closure. Some texts express a concern to protect the boundaries of the community; others, through figures such as Ruth and Jonah, place the welcome of a foreigner and mercy towards the enemy at the centre.
These tensions do not authorize us to simplify the biblical text. Rather, they invite us to return to the question of what it means to recognize another person as a human being.
In her conversation with Fides, Gatti identifies four areas that she considers important for the life of the Church as well: truly knowing the culture in which one lives; building communities capable of welcoming others; rereading Scripture while holding together ancient texts and contemporary questions; and refusing to reduce faith to an intellectual exercise.
“The New Testament was born out of friendship,” she says, evoking the image of communities united by bonds capable of attracting and including others.
The first Christian communities, she adds, were not free of conflict. Their lesson is not one of idealized harmony, but rather the possibility of facing divisions openly and working through them by means of dialogue.
“Dialogue is always possible,” Gatti says, pointing to the ability to recognize one another as a concrete space in which relationships can be rebuilt.
It is within this horizon that the book — born from an online encounter among scholars from different countries — seeks to make a contribution beyond the academic sphere: a collection of biblical readings exploring how faith can take shape in different cultures without erasing them.
In her introduction, Gatti hopes that the volume may be both “a mirror and a map”: a mirror of the complexities of our world and a map towards a future in which the promise of belonging may be fulfilled “in every community, in every heart, in every generation”.
It is an invitation addressed not only to specialists, but to anyone, within the Church and beyond, who asks how to live out one’s identity without building it against someone else.
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