The religion of Jesus or the religion about Jesus? The cross as Christ's atoning sacrifice or as a courageous, prophetic martyrdom? With a pastoral/prophetic voice and insights derived from a lifetime in parish ministry and theological education, Meeting Jesus the Christ Again encourages the reader to rethink these and other hotly disputed issues of Christian faith. Taking a big-picture perspective and seeking common ground, Chesnut points ...
The theology of the Laestadian Lutherans is simply set forth here, accessible to the lay reader. Contemporary issues are dealt with, and Scripture is cited to help us all keep discerning a path forward to help our neighbors. Love, sin, grace, images, translation, characters from the Bible, interpretation issues, and many other topics are covered in this brief but comprehensive volume. The reader is challenged in this collection of short essays b ...
How does God manage his entire creation? Has he had a plan, a theme, a metanarrative or something else which he follows that gives a unity to all of his efforts? Shepherds describes the relationship between the Creator and his creation, a relationship that is structurally integrated by the very core of who God is. There is a design within creation that radiates from his personal, unique being. What God created and how he manages it is a ...
Christian theology presents an overly simplistic portrayal of the mind and nature of man, his needs, his longings, his beliefs and his aspirations for God. A psychoanalytic protest theology aims at bringing psychoanalytic complexity regarding the mind to theology. Organized Christianity has failed to account for how the unconscious influences interpretations of Scripture and also how application of Scripture to lived life can be damaging if comp ...
Whether man has free will continues to be a hot topic among Bible teachers and theologians. After defining the issues involved, from both a worldview and a biblical standpoint, this work devotes three chapters to exploring the single-volume treatments against free will by the great theologians Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. The author then responds to the major issues involved in their objections to free will: foreknowledge and necessity, human de ...
He has captured the imagination of people around the world, including those who thought they were «done with» Christianity. In ways no one could have expected and no one predicted, Pope Francis has become a living example of what it might mean to be a Christian in our time and place. The modern world was not ready for Pope Francis, but as has been demonstrated–in his travels to the United States and around the world, in his calls for mercy and d ...
Society did not always exist. The emergence of disciplinary sociology in the nineteenth century was made possible because of a rethinking of society. With modernity, society suddenly became a thing that acted upon reality in a way that could be understood separately from the individual and the state. Although our modern conception of society is most commonly attributed to Montesquieu, many have suggested that it was actually an Italian ...
God's Shining Forth offers a theological presentation of divine light in which the leading motif is the doctrine of the Trinity. More precisely, this study is organized around a double trinitarian theme: God is light in himself, and from himself God is radiant in relation to human creatures. This double affirmation is expounded by considering its extensions in the work of God's grace, in ecclesiology, and in the nature of theological i ...
Close our eyes and most of us can recite the Lord's Prayer by heart. It is as familiar as childhood memories. In some church traditions, we say the prayer together nearly every week, as a community standing before God. We call on those so familiar words and the comfort and direction they offer. The comfort that God is holy, that his kingdom is coming, that he provides just enough, and that he can protect us from ourselves and from evil. The ...
