LITMIR.BIZ

The study of the End Times has been a popular topic for many years, and there are many different positions that are proposed on how to understand the unfolding of God's program. The debate over the End Times has often been heated and has failed to showcase the best that Christian scholarship has to offer. It sometimes seems like everyone wants to get in on the action, and anyone who has an audience can (and has) put together his thoughts and made his opinions known through the printed page. Anyone can publish his views regardless of the level of competency in the original languages, his level of hermeneutic ability, or his understanding of history or theology.
In his book The Apocalypse Code, Hank Hanegraaff declares that his goal is to «put hermeneutical tools into your hands so that you can draw from Scripture what God intends you to understand rather than uncritically accepting end-time models that may well be foreign to the text.» It would be extremely helpful for someone to equip readers to be able to make their way through the maze of views.
What the Bible Really Says? is a point-by-point analysis of the arguments of Hank Hanegraaff concerning end-times prophecy. This book is not an effort to promote one eschatological perspective over another. Rather it is an analysis of Hanegraaff's arguments and claims in order to discover whether or not he has succeeded in putting hermeneutical tools into the hands of his readers, or whether he has simply added his voice and his opinions to the cacophony of claims and counterclaims.

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In the conflicted world that is today's Episcopal Church, the diocese of Pittsburgh stands both as a symbol of dissent and schism to the liberal majority within the American Church and as a beacon of light and hope to conservative Anglicans across the United States.
Set in the unlikely surroundings of America's Rust Belt, Pittsburgh's Episcopalians have over the past half century undergone a dramatic reordering of priorities to embrace a novel–though hardly unprecedented–vision of Anglican confessionalism. Called out of Darkness into Marvelous Light traces the development of an Anglican presence in western Pennsylvania from the missionary activity of the late eighteenth century through the triumphs of post-Civil War Anglo-Catholicism and the first stirrings of the Social Gospel, to the unprecedented religious revival of the 1950s.
Championed by such men as Bishop Austin Pardue and Samuel Moor Shoemaker, the founder of the Pittsburgh Experiment, a prayer-centered spirituality developed in the Pittsburgh diocese and brought a generation of active evangelicals to the region during the 1960s and 1970s. The founding of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in the mid-1970s consolidated the evangelical presence in the diocese and provoked a commitment to spiritual renewal that sat uneasily with many in the wider Episcopal Church.
Grounded in local research, this study seeks to explore the process by which Pittsburgh acquired its present evangelical identity and to reveal the increasingly intricate web of relationships that it now enjoys beyond America's borders.

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This book is a theological/pastoral response to Vatican II's call to develop our cultures as outlined in section 2 of De Ecclesia in Mundo Huius Temporis: The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It provides a historical perspective on the Church with brief outlines of the Church's relations to the Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, and Latino cultures. The author then reviews some of the defects in our present multiculturalism and suggests means for healing and developing our culture in the United States.

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Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies is a seventeen-chapter anthology on biblical studies. It has been crafted as an extended and respectful thank you note to one of the most insightful scholars of biblical studies, David J. A. Clines of Sheffield University in England. He is credited with providing guidance to, and shaping the thought of, two generations of scholars who focus on essential approaches to understanding the Bible, with particular attention given to the Old Testament and allied literature. The anthology is directed toward those readers with pastoral, analytical, ancient intercultural, as well as contemporary cultural perspectives.
Essays address a wide range of topics: the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, prophecy, divination, and magic, the wisdom themes in the Book of Job, the Egyptian influence on New Testament, the issue of non-sexual love between two men during combat conditions, character development in a biblical novella, rhetorical questions and their role in the Psalter, and the ways of God in the world.
By combining these various topics, Probing the Frontier of Biblical Studies has addressed many of the outstanding issues in Old Testament study and ancillary disciplines.

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As numerous scholars have noted, The Revelation was first received orally. Directed not merely to the intellect, its author deliberately employed different literary schemes and devices to evoke the imagination of his audience. In this new study, Joe Lunceford examines the specific use of parody and counterimaging in The Revelation, arguing that this often overlooked device was an essential means by which its author engaged the imagination of his readers and hearers.
In light of the best of recent scholarship on The Revelation, Lunceford examines over thirty uses of this device–most notably the contrasting images of the «evil trinity» of dragon, beast from the sea, and beast from the earth and the Holy Trinity.

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This book constitutes the second volume of a three-volume study of Christian testimonies to divine suffering: God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 2, Evil and Divine Suffering. The larger study focuses its inquiry into the testimonies to divine suffering themselves, seeking to allow the voices that attest to divine suffering to speak freely, then to discover and elucidate the internal logic or rationality of this family of testimonies, rather than defending these attestations against the dominant claims of classical Christian theism that have historically sought to eliminate such language altogether from Christian discourse about the nature and life of God. This second volume of studies proceeds on the basis of the presuppositions of this symbol, those implicit attestations that provide the conditions of possibility for divine suffering-that which constitutes divine vulnerability with respect to creation-as identified and examined in the first volume of this project: an understanding of God through the primary metaphor of love («God is love»); and an understanding of the human as created in the image of God, with a life (though finite) analogous to the divine life-the imago Dei as love. The second volume then investigates the first two divine wounds or modes of divine suffering to which the larger family of testimonies to divine suffering normally attest: (1) divine grief, suffering because of betrayal by the beloved human or human sin; and (2) divine self-sacrifice, suffering for the beloved human in its bondage to sin or misery, to establish the possibility of redemption and reconciliation. Each divine wound, thus, constitutes a response to a creaturely occasion. The suffering in each divine wound also occurs in two stages: a passive stage and an active stage. In divine grief, God suffers because of human sin, betrayal of the divine lover by the beloved human: divine sorrow as the passive stage of divine grief; and divine anguish as the active stage of divine grief. In divine self-sacrifice, God suffers in response to the misery or bondage of the beloved human's infidelity: divine travail (focused on the divine incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth) as the active stage of divine self-sacrifice; and divine agony (focused on divine suffering in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth) as the passive stage of divine self-sacrifice.

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"For Thais, face is a fact," writes Flanders. However, "whether in theology, evangelism, or issues involving sin, salvation, or atonement, Thai Christians and missionaries alike seem either uninterested in or possibly incapable of addressing issues related to face. This glaring incongruity between the value of face for Thais and the lack of intentional engagement within the Thai Christian community is deeply troubling. "Surely, such a lack of careful attention to face is a dangerous posture. Uncritical views of face, furtively attaching to the theology of the Thai church, are potentially detrimental for its life and mission. Such seems to be an unavoidable situation without proper attention to face. Additionally, to ignore face is to run the risk of missing valuable cultural resources, implicit in the Thai experience of face, for the critical task of authentic Thai theological reflection. "This lack of engagement with face raises critical issues with which we must wrestle. How is it that such a central sociocultural issue has not been a more significant part of the Thai Christian vocabulary or experience? How pervasive are these negative attitudes regarding face? What lies behind them? Might this lack of self-conscious engagement with face have any relationship to the persistent Thai perception of Christianity as a foreign, Western religion? How should Christians understand this notion of face and how it relates to the ways we understand and proclaim the gospel?"

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Lamentations is a book that has never had a place of honor at the table of Christian spirituality. This is an unfortunate state of affairs because its challenging poetry has much to offer. This volume explores the how the biblical book of Lamentations may be engaged afresh so that it can function as Holy Scripture for the ekklesia. Four main chapters consider issues in hermeneutics, exegesis, the use of Lamentations in worship, and pastoral reflections. These chapters have been supplemented by seventeen reception history studies written by an international team of Jewish and Christian scholars. These studies introduce a wide range of interpretations and uses of the book of Lamentations from throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity. They include examinations of the use of Lamentations in Isaiah 40-55, the Targum, Rashi, and contemporary Jewish thought, the Patristic period, Calvin, Jewish and Christian worship, music, Rembrandt, and psychological and feminist interpretation. Appendices include new English translations of LXX Lamentations and Targum Lamentations.

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How can one be interested in social justice without participating in public protests? Must one go to jail for one's convictions in order to have integrity and legitimacy? Have academics succumbed to the negative connotations of the ivory tower by remaining in their cubicles, unaware of the social ills that threaten the very core of society? Or, is it possible for individuals who sit comfortably at their desks to have legitimate input into the evils that surround the cities in which we live? These are some of the questions that prompted The Ivory Tower and the Sword. By turning our attention to Francisco Vitoria, Santiago Pinon offers insight into a thought-provoking individual who was deeply concerned with the social injustices that his countrymen were committing. Living in the sixteenth century, Vitoria knew of the torturous practices that his fellow Spaniards had been conducting against the native peoples of the New World. Using the influence of his position as an academic theologian, Vitoria challenged these practices and held the Spanish emperor accountable for failing to intervene on behalf of the native peoples. From Vitoria we learn how to confront social ills from the ivory tower.

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According to the Reformers, preaching is the word of God. As the word of God, preaching is a foundation for the church. It is also vital for the personal growth of a Christian. But Christians are poorly equipped to understand how preaching is the word of God. Some Christians look for preaching that closely reproduces the text in the Bible. Other Christians look for preaching that creates maximal emotional and existential impact. And there is a lot of name-calling with Christians accusing preachers of «not preaching the word.» But what type of preaching is the word of God? The purpose of this book is to equip Christians to understand how preaching can be God speaking. It accomplishes this with a survey of the problem in the history of the church, a detailed overview of key biblical texts, and finally the application of the contemporary philosophical tool of speech act theory.

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