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Paul did not write a systematic theology or specific church doctrines when he wrote Romans. His audience was Roman Christians, and his last will was to preach the gospel to all, especially gentiles in Spain. Through this letter, Paul wants to pave the way for a visit to Rome and expects their support on his mission trip to Spain. The question is this: What kind of the gospel does he want to share with them? Traditionally, the letter has been read from the perspective of forensic salvation that an individual justification occurs once and for all by faith in Christ. This view remains with the so-called New Perspective on Paul, and Christ's faithfulness has not been explored. Rereading the letter with a renewed concept of the good news in the letter, this book challenges the traditional reading of Romans and explores Paul's threefold gospel that features the gospel that is God-centered, Christ-exemplified, and Christian-imitated. His main concern is how gentiles can become children of God, as well as how Jews may live faithfully in Christ. In Romans, the good news is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith. It is not a set of knowledge about God or Jesus. Paul is eager to share this gospel of faith with the Roman Christians and to correct some misunderstandings about him, since his gospel is viewed as anti-Jewish or antinomian.

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In the minds of some, universal salvation is a heretical idea that was imported into Christianity from pagan philosophies by Origen (c.185-253/4). Ilaria Ramelli argues that this picture is completely mistaken. She maintains that Christian theologians were the first people to proclaim that all will be saved and that their reasons for doing so were rooted in their faith in Christ. She demonstrates that, in fact, the idea of the final restoration of all creation (apokatastasis) was grounded upon the teachings of the Bible and the church's beliefs about Jesus' total triumph over sin, death, and evil through his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Ramelli traces the Christian roots of Origen's teaching on apokatastasis. She argues that he was drawing on texts from Scripture and from various Christians who preceded him, theologians such as Bardaisan, Irenaeus, and Clement. She outlines Origen's often-misunderstood theology in some detail and then follows the legacy of his Christian universalism through the centuries that followed. We are treated to explorations of Origenian universal salvation in a host of Christian disciples, including Athanasius, Didymus the Blind, the Cappadocian fathers, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, and Julian of Norwich.

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Midwifing–A Womanist Approach to Pastoral Counseling: Investigating the Fractured Self, Slavery, Violence, and the Black Woman, is an investigation of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the impact of slavery, violence, racism, sexism, classism, and other isms on the self of the Black woman. This examination of the complexity of pain speaks to the multidimensional reality of some Black women and the necessity for a therapeutic technique that invites the fullness of the Black woman's historical narrative. Dr. Thurmond-Malone's work exposes hidden pain in a safe and sacred space that speaks to the deep-rooted anguish experienced through generations of Black women and invites her readers to understand the necessity for a rebirthing to occur. This work also empowers women of African descent to become unarmored through the naming, claiming, and reauthoring of their story, and empowers therapists to become midwives adept at empathizing with the intense pain carried by some Black women. Lastly, the book provides clinicians with insight into how to become midwives capable of holding the accounts of Black women while illustrating the author's approach as a method of interdependence, communal, and cultural competency. Taking an analytical look at the counselee's past then births hope for their future as a whole and transformative self.

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There are well over one hundred different views of the nature of human existence; though the Bible may rule out many of these, there still remains a large number that are all compatible with Scripture. The Bible never explicitly defines the nature of the soul or spirit, which is actually quite puzzling or even ironic, given that one major aim of Scripture is spiritual development and ultimate questions about the soul. In fact, Judeo-Christian thinking on those questions has been evolving over the course of four thousand years. This book documents that evolution as a man named Abram left Babylon four thousand years ago, journeying through the lands and the philosophies of civilizations preceding him by many more thousands of years, while he and his descendants (both physical and spiritual) unpacked their understanding of our inner being–the human soul–and the afterlife. That journey is followed to the present day, and examines how a critically thinking Christian can embrace a theology of the human soul that is fully compatible with modern scientific findings, including explanations for consciousness, mind, and soul.

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I Was a Stranger will help you build empathy for the strangers and foreigners among you. Through personal experience and through the narratives of people who have moved to a foreign country for a variety of reasons, Jodi Mullen Fondell offers encouragement for churches desiring to be a place of welcome and embrace for those who often find themselves rejected by the broader society. Packed with tips on how to help your church navigate the road toward greater openness, this book offers advice on how to avoid the pitfalls that prevent churches from truly welcoming and embracing the stranger among them. Rev. Fondell gently guides readers in examining their own experiences of alienation in order to understand the profound disorientation that being a stranger in a strange land entails. This identification with the pain of being an outsider, she asserts, can move, motivate, and mobilize the church to live out God's calling to welcome in the stranger. As the body of Christ embraces the members we are tempted to exclude, a new level of joy and a taste of heaven await our congregations. Includes a small-group Bible-study guide for communities ready to grow in ministry and hospitality.

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What does the white evangelical want? In our moment of crisis and rage, this question is everywhere. Scholars ask from where its desires emerged, pundits divine its political future, and the public asks how we lapsed into social chaos. For their part, white evangelicals feel misunderstood while failing to see the direction of their ambitions. We must interrogate its aims not only through its past or current trends but also through the various fantasies by which it rejects and enlivens reality. Against traces five zones of opposition: future, knowledge, sexuality, reality, and society. If climate change is the greatest threat civilization has ever faced, then a faith aiding collapse must face analysis. If it swims in assured forgiveness, it feels no shame for its sins against humanity. If it wants a king, it threatens democracy. If it veils xenophobia, it shall be ever more cruel. In a critical and accessible history of odd ideas, DeLay chronicles the past and sketches its troubling future. It might die, but what's certain is that a faith built on nostalgia and supremacy won't moderate. We live in dangerous times, so let us consider its justifications, turmoil, appetite, and catastrophe.

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A Life Lived and Laid Down for Friends reflects on the iconoclastic life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. From the «riches in the rags» story of the nativity to his compassion-moved sacrifice to save his disciples, this book reflects on Jesus as first and foremost a spiritual teacher who embodied compassion. Pastor and author Don Erickson shows how the humility embodied by society's most vulnerable was, for Jesus, the benchmark for inclusion in God's kingdom. The book also looks at Jesus' approach to religious pluralism, a reality he experienced in ancient Palestine under Roman rule. It was an approach that evidenced Jesus pointing to expressions of compassion, rather than to mere faith. In addition, the book examines the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, offering a view that both asserts the centrality of the passion and bases it in historical context that avoids universalizing the story away. The crucifixion itself is shown to be a portrait of embodied, representative compassion that is salvific in its reach. Inspired by the powerful teachings of liberation theology, as well as a Buddhist-influenced approach to the Gospels, A Life Lived and Laid Down for Friends gives a fresh, poignant portrait of Jesus that defies Trump-America's resistance to Jesus' radically compassionate life and teaching.

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In Youth Ministry and Theology Shorthand, David Bailey explores the dialogue between practice and theological education through the lens of youth ministry. This qualitative study illuminates how youth ministers talk about their work amongst young people. Through the slowing down of the youth ministry process it is discovered that youth ministers speak in theological shorthand. Theological shorthand is a paradox: it is both meaningful–it fuels long-term sacrificial service amongst young people–and it is problematic, as it risks untethering youth ministry from the wider narrative of the Christian story. The book will appeal to youth ministers, clergy, academics, graduate and post-graduate students, but also informed volunteers involved in youth ministry. Through the discipline of practical theology, it correlates the voices of the youth ministers, a set of materials used to deepen faith, and contemporary expressions of sung worship. These are then brought into conversation and explored via different aspects of Trinitarian theology to deepen the theological grammar within contemporary youth ministry and to help develop theological literacy.

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Civilization is often equated with the story of human advancement and progress. Yet it is also the story of human oppression, exploitation, war, and empire. In our own time, modern global civilization has brought us to the brink of planetary destruction. By offering an understanding of our past, this book aims to provide a stimulus to considering a different future. Our Shadowed World considers how we have been brought to this point. It describes how the fragmented and conflicted state of humanity has «progressed» from the earliest city-states to the devastation of world war and holocaust–how civilization has brought its own form of savagery.
What beliefs have underlain and motivated human action? How have humans tried to understand their world? Driven by the relentless quest for power, by greed, and by extreme beliefs, the human enterprise today has placed the very idea of civilization under threat, the subject of radical questioning. Despite a new ecological awareness dedicated to saving the planet from civilization's carelessness, and a preoccupation with the nature of apocalyptic thinking, a question mark looms over the very survival of humanity in its present state–a question mark that now overshadows the world.

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The book is a commentary on preaching from the book of Revelation. Working through the book of Revelation verse by verse, the commentary seeks to help the preacher recognize what the book (with its apocalyptic theology) invited people in antiquity to believe and do. . . . The book of Revelation communicates through a series of word-pictures. Allen explains each word-picture in light of its ancient setting. The commentary brings the viewpoint of the book of Revelation into conversation (through mutual critical correlation) with contemporary theology, especially process thought. The work aims to help the preacher to help the congregation identify what they can genuinely believe and confidently do. Believing that the best preaching arises from the local context, the volume does not include full sermons, but, rather, seeks to raise issues and questions that might be thought-provoking.

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