LITMIR.BIZ

Hebrews is a powerful meditation on the gospel. It is a sixty-minute sermon delivered to a worshiping congregation. The spiraling impact of theological exposition and pastoral exhortation is impressive. Hebrews weans us away from our preoccupation with the start of the Christian life and focuses our attention on the perseverance of faith. Life is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Faithfulness to the end affirms faith from the beginning. If we let the word of God have its way with us, Hebrews will deepen our faith in Christ and strengthen our faithfulness. Like Jesus in the Gospels, Hebrews sees the fundamental difference between apostasy and faithfulness as the difference between a religion about God and a Christ-centered relationship with God. Any form of Christianity that competes like other religions for the attention of its adherents through its rituals, practices, pastors, traditions, and sacred spaces, has fallen back into an obsolete and worldly strategy. The pastor calls for a decisive end to religion, even the best religion ever conceived. The flow of reasoned argument for Christ and against religion, along with the pulsating emotional intensity of ultimate issues laid bare, and heart-felt warnings against complacency and unbelief, deliver a powerful and timely message.

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Almost 75 percent of the Old Testament is made up of poetic passages, yet for many readers (lay Christians, even seminary students and pastors), biblical poetic passages remain the greatest challenge. Being unfamiliar with poetry in general and biblical poetry in particular, their reading and preaching are limited to selected poetic passages. This in turn limits their understanding of God's word. To help readers overcome these problems, the first four chapters of this book aim to get them familiarized with the literary techniques of biblical poets. To demonstrate how the techniques work to bring across the biblical theological message, the last three chapters offer poetic analyses of three passages of different kinds. In the process, we hope to draw attention to the beauty of the Hebrew poetic art and to the creative skill of biblical poets' versification. The ultimate aim, however, is to help readers discover the rich message of the Bible.

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In Spirit-filled Protestantism, Luther Oconer shows how holiness- and Pentecost-themed revival meetings called culto Pentecostal helped form the development of Methodism in the Philippines. He focuses on these revival meetings, their theological content, and the spiritual culture they helped perpetuate. The resulting narrative provides a rich rendering of both male and female American Methodist missionaries, their Filipino counterparts, and their followers that both celebrates and critiques them. Oconer also offers a unique perspective on Philippine Protestantism, which has often been dismissed for being too intellectual and formal. He defies the stereotype by demonstrating how culto Pentecostal revivals, with their emphasis on holiness and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, made Methodism the most innovative and successful of all Protestant denominations in the country prior to the Second World War. Accordingly, Oconer's treatment explains why Methodism provided a fertile seedbed for the emergence of the Manila Healing Revival and, consequently, the rise of Pentecostalism in the Philippines in the 1950s. A long-awaited volume on the history of Methodism in the Philippines, Spirit-filled Protestantism allows us to discern why Pentecostal impulses continue to shape Filipino Methodist identity in the twenty-first century.

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From its humble beginnings in the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventism has remarkably grown to become one of America's largest, home-grown faiths, numbering nearly nineteen million members worldwide. Yet Adventism harbors dark secrets within its history. This is the true story of how one Adventist pastor, and university and seminary professor discovered these dark secrets and learned through painful, personal experience that neither the denomination nor its doctrine could be trusted. As his odyssey takes him from pastoral assignments in rural and urban congregations and finally into teaching religion at an Adventist university, he suddenly finds himself caught up in the maelstrom of a church's greatest theological crisis. For him, the denomination's theology and practice agonizingly unravel, forcing him to choose between loyalty to his church, his vocation, and his personal integrity. Rich in anecdotes and personal experiences, Out of Adventism guides readers interested in religious history, cults, and sects through the ins and outs of a religious community in crisis. Along the way, the reader not only gets an insider's view of Adventism, but also discovers a careful critique of the peculiar teachings of Seventh-day Adventism.

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Karl Barth was one of the most important Christian theologians of the twentieth century, but his political views have often not been taken sufficiently into account. Beginning with a representative early essay by Karl Barth, this volume proceeds with essays by Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Helmut Gollwitzer, Hermann Diem, Dieter Schellong, Joseph Bettis, and George Hunsinger. These contributions engage both the relationship of Barth's theology to his socialist politics as well as Marquardt's analysis. This new edition expands upon the earlier one by adding three new essays by Hunsinger on Barth's theology and its relevance for human rights, liberation theology, and the theories of Rene Girard on violence and scapegoating. Hunsinger has extended the discussion as well as deepened our insight into how theology can speak meaningfully about fundamental issues of human need.

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To what extent are the children of Holocaust perpetrators to feel remorseful or responsible for their parents' wrongdoing? Is the yearning by those offspring of Nazi sympathizers for forgiveness justified, or should they separate themselves from their parents or relatives and ignore the history?

Such dilemmas have gnawed at theologian Martin Rumscheidt ever since, at age eighteen, he discovered his father's complicity in using Jewish slave labor at his workplace, IG Farben. He has written and spoken extensively about his journey in search of what he calls a theology of mourning that would preserve his concept of the reality of God and still recognize the reality–at times grim reality–of life.

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How should Christians respond to war? This age-old question has become more pressing given Western governments' recent overseas military interventions and the rise of extremist Islamist jihadism. Grounded in conservative evangelical theology, this book argues the historic church position that it is inadmissible for Christians to use violence or take part in war. It shows how the church's propensity to support the «just wars,» crusades, rebellions, or «humanitarian interventions» of its host nations over time has been disastrous for the reputation of the gospel. Instead, the church's response to war is simply to be the church, by preaching the gospel and making peace in the love and power of God. The book considers challenges to this argument for «gospel peace.» What about warfare in the Old Testament and military metaphors in the New? What of church history? And how do we deal with tyrants like Hitler and terrorists like Islamic State? Charting a path between just war theory and liberal pacifism, numerous inspiring examples from the worldwide church are used to demonstrate effective and authentically Christian responses to violence. The author argues that as Christians increasingly drop their unbiblical addiction to war, we may be entering one of the most exciting periods of church history.

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Jesus Christ is the most famous person in human history. His favorite name for himself was «the Son of Man» or the «the Human One.» Rarely did his followers call him that, but it must have had great significance for him. This book describes why this name was so important and what it means for us now. Along with this favorite name, this book shows how Jesus Christ fulfills human longing, but at the same time is resisted by his own followers to this day. Nevertheless, his call to follow him has sounded down the centuries and been heeded by millions. The book leads to an exploration of the Way that is found in Jesus Christ, who called himself «the Human One.»

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How does one read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture? This question, voiced in both academic and ecclesial settings, invites a reflection on how to take these texts with both hermeneutical alertness and sustained imaginative seriousness. While scholars have recently engaged in robust discussion about theological hermeneutics, there have been relatively few worked examples with particular Old Testament texts. This book seeks to meet this need by providing a close reading of Isaiah 14:3-23, a text with a complex amalgam of textual, historical-critical, history-of-reception, and theological issues.

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Research on «following Jesus» has mostly been done in terms of what Jesus' followers ought to do. In this unprecedented study, Kim presents «following Jesus» in John's Gospel through the perspective of what Jesus does for his followers. «Following Jesus» is a journey towards the place where Jesus leads his followers, that is, to a relationship with the Father. It is ultimately participating in the Son's communion with the Father. Jesus, who was in the bosom of the Father, descended from him and ascends to him, taking his followers with him, so that they may be with him where he is with the Father in glory and love. Kim develops this thesis by examining the term akolouthein («to follow») and correlated motifs in John's Gospel.

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