LITMIR.BIZ

Despite his prominent role in the formation of Christian thought, John Scottus Eriugena still remains an enigmatic figure whose background and potential arouse a great deal of scholarly interest. This is true especially today, when faith seeks to regenerate: his honesty and profundity encourage us in our search for the authentic teaching of Christ. As a theologian who strongly believes in human dignity as equal to that of the imago dei, Eriugena helps us meet Christ again and follow him towards a new horizon of being. What makes Eriugena's theology unique is his innovative approach to theological thinking, which is to be properly understood, as argued in this book, in terms of the paradigmatic shift from metaphysics to dialectic. The way we think, while trying to adopt and follow the truth of revelation so as to get freed from the world of finite things, cannot actually dispense with a dialectical treatment of contradiction. And Eriugena is explicit about this, which allows him to win a reputation as the «Hegel of the ninth century» and to make us look at our faith anew in coherence with such pivotal ideas as the divine unity, right reason, and return to the reality of creation.

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God has an epic plan for the flourishing of all people and places. Want to join in? Partnering with God will help you find your place in that quest as we join in building God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Mission is no spectator sport, and God invites our participation in the millennia old story of the missio Dei. Lynette Edge and Gregory Morgan have lived and taught mission within The Salvation Army for many years. In these pages, they offer a missiological framework and practice in the West today from a Salvation Army perspective. You will be challenged in these pages to think and live missionally. We are called to join a profound partnership with God to bring about the world as it was intended to be. Are you in?

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There has been heightened interest and prolific publication by missiologists about contextualization since the term was first coined in 1972. There has been ongoing debate, particularly amongst evangelicals themselves regarding which of these meanings, methods, and models of contextualization are acceptable to use. Much of the debate has been carried out by academics and practitioners whose observations and conclusions have been largely shaped by the social sciences and practical theology. In contrast, the disciplines of biblical studies and Christian thought have not featured significantly in the debate. The purpose of this research is to establish that biblical studies and Christian thought in general (and Scripture and the church fathers in particular) have an essential contribution to make in the contextualization debate and should form part of an evangelical approach to contextualization of the gospel alongside the social sciences and practical theology. Following a review of the literature on contextualization over the past forty years, the research examines the book of Acts as representative of Scripture, and the work of John Chrysostom as a representative church father. Contextual principles that are consistent with an evangelical approach to contextualization of the gospel are drawn from each work, establishing the value of biblical studies and Christian thought in contextualization.

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Does the Messiah have to die to pay for his people's sins? Is the cross of Jesus an atoning sacrifice? In recent decades a burgeoning number of theologians have answered the aforementioned questions in the negative. In fact some, like Rene Girard, have gone so far as to assert that seeing the cross as an atoning sacrifice undermines the very essence of the New Testament Gospels. While Girard and others following in a similar vein have offered provocative alterations to soteriology that no longer need Jesus's death to acquire forgiveness from God, does a bloodless atonement have biblical support? Does a nonviolent understanding of the atonement harmonize with the Gospels? This particular volume answers these questions with a fresh look at the Synoptic portraits of the Last Supper accounts. In them Jesus expounds upon the significance of his death by using the Passover symbols of bread and wine. More importantly, in these passages in the Gospels we find the fullest articulation of how Jesus's death benefits his followers. Holding a wealth of dense theological riches, these passages provide theological parameters that can inform contemporary soteriological development, especially that which appeals to the New Testament for its basis. Conversant with both biblical studies and contemporary theology, the work seeks to bring the best of both fields into conversation in productive new ways.

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The Holy Spirit and the Lake of Fire! What does the Spirit have to do with God's final judgment? The Holy Spirit and God's judgment upon sin are not two topics that are often connected, but to understand the full work of the Spirit, they need to be. It is not enough to view judgment as the work of just the Father and the Son, but in full Trinitarian fashion, it must be understood as the work of all three persons of the Trinity. In The Spirit and the Lake of Fire Rustin Umstattd establishes the Spirit's role in judgment by connecting several symbols that are used for both the Spirit and judgment, such as fire, God's breath, and God's arm. Furthermore, by examining Augustine's position that the Spirit is the mutual-love of the Father and the Son, and Luther's position that God's wrath is the underside of his love, Umstattd demonstrates how one comes to the conclusion that the Spirit is operative in God's judgment upon sin.

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What if the whole «God delusion» approach is a neo-colonial imposition at the linguistic and philosophical level? Could it lead to unmitigated disasters in intercultural communication and development work? This paradigm-challenging book points to the necessity, in light of contemporary impasse in intercultural understanding, of God's involvement in the encounter between the West and the majority world, especially Africa. Failure to account for God, the cradle of imagination operative in human hearts and minds has resulted in a black hole that deeply troubles intercultural engagement between the West and others. While drawing on his personal long-term field experience in Africa, the author cites contemporary scholarly Western literature on philosophy, anthropology, «religion,» and beyond. Ironically, the West, which values dualism, instead of seeking to share it with majority world people, wrongly presupposes its universality. A proactive compliance to the countering of «racism» and to the demotion of impacts of human imagination on understanding contribute to this. Effective education must be from known to unknown, this text emphasizes. Enabling African people to build understanding on their own epistemological foundations might be more important than exporting of pre-packaged languages and educational systems from the West.

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A child of China missionary parents, Keith Clements looks back on a life rich in diverse experiences in many parts of the world as pastor, theologian, writer, and servant of the ecumenical movement. In so doing he finds hope «for the creation of true community in the world, of people among themselves, with God, and with creation. That is what the gospel of Christ is all about, what the church is about, and indeed what God who lives and loves as three-in-one is all about.» He recalls instances of grace in which–even amid conflict and tragedy–people, churches, and communities discover the possibilities of new life together. It is both a very human story of personal faith, and an insider's account of ecumenical Christianity's quest for a more visibly united church and a world of peace and justice. Famous influences like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and present-day leaders such as Desmond Tutu figure prominently; but so do so-called ordinary people he has met over the years, whether in an English village, in communist East Germany, or in a South African squatter camp, who have shown by the way they live that another world–and another kind of church–is possible.

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How do pastors live their spiritual lives, both as private persons and as professionals? How can their spirituality be characterized and understood? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Norwegian clergy as well as literature from the fields of Christian spirituality, practical theology, congregational studies, and the sociology of religion, this book offers a nuanced understanding of clergy spirituality. Tone Stangeland Kaufman identifies three locations and sources of spiritual nurture for pastors: the ministry itself (vocational spirituality), daily life (everyday spirituality), and spiritual practices located at the margins of daily life (intentional spirituality). The participants in this study engage in classic Christian practices, yet approach them in a subjective and new way that also potentially revitalizes their spiritual lives. Hence, the author makes the case that their spirituality can aptly be described as «a new old spirituality.» The book also seeks to nuance Paul Heelas's and Linda Woodhead's Spiritual Revolution claim, and thus engages in the broader spirituality vs. religion discourse. A New Old Spirituality is an exciting example of how qualitative empirical research can be used in creative ways to make a practical theological argument. It is a book for scholars, students, and practitioners.

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Matthew Farlow traces the thoughts of Balthasar and Barth so as to enter into theological truth of God's Being-in-Act. This exploration embarks on a journey into the reality of our Triune God who has engaged his creation so as to elicit fellow actors. God seeking out humanity is God with us, a truth that not only informs our theological endeavors, but invites us into the dramatic performance of reconciliation. As Farlow illumines, God is an acting God who seeks fellow participants in his ongoing drama of salvation. Through the dramatizing of theology, the church and her theologians come to realize God's threefold movement–revelation, invitation and reconciliation. It is a unified act that startles humanity, and thus theology, out of its «spectator's seat,» so as to drag it onto the world's stage. As Farlow discusses, it is through the dramatizing of theology that we find ourselves best equipped to participate faithfully in the role of a lifetime.

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Above all else that the sixteenth-century German Reformer was known for, Martin Luther was a Doctor of the Holy Scriptures. One of the most characteristic features of Luther's approach to Scripture was his resolved christological interpretation of the Bible. Many of the Reformer's interpreters have looked back upon Luther's «Christ-centered» exposition of the Scriptures with sentimentality but have often labeled it as «Christianization,» particularly in regards to Luther's approach of the Old Testament, dismissing his relevance for today's faithful readers of God's Word. This study revisits this assessment of Luther's christological interpretation of Scripture by way of critical analysis of the Reformer's «prefaces to the Bible» that he wrote for his translation of the Scriptures into the German vernacular. This work contends that Luther foremost believes Jesus Christ to be the sensus literalis of Scripture on the basis of the Bible's messianic promise, not enforcing a dogmatic principle onto the scriptural text and its biblical authors that would be otherwise foreign to them. This study asserts that Luther's exegesis of the Bible's «letter» (i.e., his engagement with the biblical text) is primarily responsible for his conviction that Christ is Holy Scripture's literal sense.

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