LITMIR.BIZ

Have you ever puzzled over a strange word in the Bible, a hymn, or a prayer book, or wanted to explore a familiar term more fully? In either case, this book can serve you on your quest for deeper understanding. Here you will find essays on topics from «apocalypse» to «worship,» as well as narratives and insights by the author. Words matter for Christians, because they are the tools used in our journey with God.

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As biblical hermeneutics moves increasingly toward the inclusion of vernacular approaches to the text–understandings of the Bible based on culture, context, and human experience–many communities of faith around the world are contributing their voices to the conversation of global Christianity. This volume explores reading methods and text interpretations of believers in South Africa, the Caribbean, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, India, Kenya, Fiji, Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Nigeria–revealing the ways various faith communities read the Bible contextually. Essays in this volume also illustrate the impact of the biblical text in people's lives–on their understandings of oppression, identity, the plight of refugees, decline and loss, the relationship between church and society, imperialism, homelessness, restorative justice, bodily experiences of the Holy Spirit, and time and the future. Together, these writings provide an in-depth sense of how global Christians read the Bible through the lens of their own tradition or culture, as well as how the Bible informs all aspects of their lives as they read the world biblically.

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In light of Martin Heidegger's contextualized influence upon them, John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner engage in theologies that, in their respective tasks and scopes, venture into existential theology, following Heideggerian pathmarks toward the primordiality of being on the way to unconcealment, or «aletheia.» By way of each pathmark, each existential theologian assumes a specific theological stance that utilizes a decidedly existential lens. While the former certainly grounds them fundamentally in a kind of theology, the latter, by way of Heideggerian influences, allows them to venture beyond any traditional theological framework with the use of philosophical suppositions and propositions. In an effort at explaining the relationship between humanity's «being» and God's «Being,» each existential theologian examines what it means to be human, not strictly in terms of theology, but as it is tied inextricably to an understanding of the philosophy of existence: the concept of what being is.

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The famous theologian Karl Barth is known for his admonition that Christians should evaluate major news events in the light of the Bible rather than vice versa. This book reviews attempts at implementing Barth's principle in more than a hundred responses to newspaper editorial opinions over a decades-spanning period. In this exercise, five major theological themes frame the moral engagement of ten newsworthy subject categories. The analysis demonstrates how a biblically-based moral framing can define a center-left politically partisan stance as a guide or challenge to civil public dialogue. A weakness of this venue is that space limitations of newspaper editorial pages allow little potential for achieving what Barth probably had in mind for an effective Christian witness. A different venue is therefore needed. Numerous barriers inhibit such dialogue within Christian congregations, including the stagnating polarization in US politics that has a parallel in most religious traditions. One can hope that the major role for a biblical witness to American culture has not become limited to that partial calling of the Old Testament prophets: warning of the negative historical judgments that risk coming to any society that fails to adequately attempt living out a reverential fear of God.

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God came to earth as an illegitimate child. Mary, his mother, was a human being, not a porcelain figure in a nativity scene with a halo. She was a young teenage Mediterranean woman who wanted to save herself for marriage. Then an angel told her she'd become pregnant by the Holy Spirit. This book intends to dismantle the fictitious Mary made in the image of religion. Rather, the human Mary of the Scriptures who gave God a body is the subject of this book. Mary was the mother of God, not the mother of the church. She is blessed without being divine, an ordinary girl who obeyed God and supernaturally delivered the Savior of the world. It is only a human Mary who can be accessible to the church as a model disciple of her son, Jesus Christ.

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Wildflowers and the Call to the Altar is a fascinating story of the history of the St. Francis Altar Society, embedded within the tri-cultural nexus of Santa Fe, New Mexico. For close to a hundred years, the society responded to the call that the church, established in 1610, required a formal Altar Society to care for the sanctuary needs, yet also to address the personal sanctification of the members. Since its inception, the society has served the altar of the church and extended its vision to «the altar of the world» through works of social justice, which are more urgent than ever, along with the care of the altar and the laundry. There is room for the holiness and fidelity of women to serve the church. Under the mantle of humility, and the commitment to mission, the women of the St. Francis Altar Society have persisted like the women at the foot of the cross. They have embraced the call to ministry and discipleship extended to all in the Gospels. Service to the altar extends into the world, where the reality of the love of Christ intersects with everyday life.

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This book follows the journey of ten churches who underwent church consultancies, and explores in depth both the consultancy and its outcomes. Pre-consultancy and post-consultancy «snapshots,» four to five years apart, of vitality indicators and attendance figures (using National Church Life Survey and other data) are used to compare these with churches that have not undertaken church consultancies. Theologies of church consultancy, church health, and church growth are also developed and examined, intersecting with a wide body of literature, including contemporary ecclesiologies. Consultancy outcomes are examined in detail. This includes interviews with pastors of some of those churches, reflecting on their perceptions of whether and how the church consultancy impacted the health and growth of their church. Conclusions are drawn about the efficacy of church consultancy in influencing the health and growth of churches, as well as contexts for the best use of church consultancy. This is a significant book for denominational leaders, theological lecturers, pastors, and church leaders as they encounter lack of health in churches and seek ways forward for greater health and impact in their local communities.

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From 1949 to 1989, Germany was divided into West and East Germany. While West Germany became an ally of Western democracies, East Germany was allied with the Soviet Union and was governed by Marxist Communism. What was it like to be the church in East Germany? Hanfried Muller was a professor of theology and a committed Marxist. Johannes Hamel was a pastor who tried to minister in this environment. How did the two differ? This book examines the contrast between the two men and the struggle many pastors and Christians endured as they lived and worked in a hostile environment. Furthermore, it raises the question of how Christians everywhere deal with the issue of the relationship between church and state and what the Christian's responsibility is in that relationship.

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The story of Paul's visit to the city of Athens with its speech delivered before the Areopagus council is one of the best-known and most-celebrated passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Being the only complete example of an apostolic address to «pure pagans» recorded, it has consistently attracted the attention of historians, biblical scholars, theologians, missionaries, apologists, artists, and believers over the centuries. Interpretations of the pericope are many and variegated, with opinions ranging from deeming the speech to be a foreign body in the New Testament to acclaiming it as the ideal model of translation of the Christian kerygma into a foreign idiom. At the heart of the debate is whether the various parts of the speech must be understood as Hellenistic or biblical in nature–or both. Paul Against the Idols defends and develops an integrated contextual study of the episode. Reading the story in its Lukan theological, intertextual, narrative, linguistic, and historical context enables an interpretation that accounts for its apparent ambivalence. This book thus contributes to the ongoing hermeneutical and exegetical scholarly discussions surrounding this locus classicus and suggests ways in which it can contribute to a Christian theology of religions and missiology.

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How many ways can your church's worship equip the congregation for its mission? Worship changes through the seasons, from Christmas, through Lent and Easter, and beyond. The way worship relates to your church's mission should change, too. This book explores those seasonal changes by examining both worship and mission as aspects of union with Christ. Just as we are to follow Christ through the various stages of his life and work in worship during the church year, we can follow him in our mission through these same stages of his life and work.

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