The Bible: North vrs. South

I am presently working through an interesting book by Philip Jenkins called "The Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South". One of the primary aims of this book is to illustrate how Christians from the South (Africa, Asia and Latin America) are reading the Bible quite differently than many (but not all) Christians from the North. I offer up this quote as food for thought. Context: Jenkins is arguing that Christians from the South read the Bible more literally.

Several factors contribute to a more literal interpretation of scripture. For one thing, the Bible has found a congenial home among communities who identify with the social and economic realities it portrays, no less than the political environments in which Christians find themselves. For the growing churches of the global South, the Bible speaks to everyday, real-world issues of poverty and debt, famine and urban crisis, racial and gender oppression, state brutality and persecution. The omnipresence of poverty promotes awareness of the transience of life, the dependence of individuals and nations on God, and the distrust of the secular order...Today...Christians of the global North and South differ because of the main threats they perceive in their respective cultures....Euro-American academic theology still focuses 'on European thinkers and post-Enlightenment intellectual issues. Western theologians, liberal and conservative, have been addressing the faith to an age of doubt and secularity, and to the competing salvific claims of secular ideologies'. Global South Christians, in contrast do not live in an age of doubt, but must instead deal with competing claims to faith. Their views are shaped by interaction with their different neighbors and the very different issues they raise...Accordingly, 'the New Christianity will push theologians to address the faith to poverty and social injustice; to political violence, corruption, and the meltdown of law and order; and to Christianity's witness amidst religious plurality.

(Philip Jenkins, "The New Faces of Christianity", 5)