LITMIR.BIZ

The Liberative Cross offers a theological grounding of the orthopraxy that calls North American Korean women to live as imago Dei, mirroring the perichoretic fellowship of the triune God in contemporary social relations through living in imitatio crucis and imitatio relationis. In so doing, this book emphasizes three elements. First, an appropriate theology of the cross meets the challenges or concerns of developing reality. Second, it is a feminist theology in the sense that it seeks to retrieve a theology of the cross that is life-giving and liberating for women. Third, it is a social trinitarian approach to the theology of the cross that can reveal the essence of God to be in relation, mutuality, and community in diversity. The constructive work achieved in this book makes a great contribution to pastoral and ecclesial praxis and imagination.

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Death in Second-Century Christian Thought explores how the meaning of death was conceptualized in this crucial period of the history of the church. Through an exploration of some key metaphors and other figures of speech that the early church used to talk about this interesting but difficult topic, the author argues that the early church selected, modified, and utilized existing views on the subject of death in order to offer a distinctively Christian view of death based on what they believed the word of God taught on the subject, particularly in light of the ongoing story of Jesus following his death-his burial and resurrection. In short, the book shows how Christians interacted with the views of death in late antiquity, coming up with their own distinctive view of death.

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Spirituality is a hot topic in today's culture. Spirituality is essentially how one's beliefs and experiences influence the way one lives their life. Such influences for living are of critical importance to one's faith within the Christian community. What role does the Bible play in developing an expressed spirituality among the Christian community? How do one's religious traditions, cultural influences, and personal preferences influence the way Christian spirituality is perceived and expressed? All too often, and at times unintentionally, the foundational truths of the Bible are subordinated to tradition, culture, and personal preference. This book provides a context for understanding Paul's foundational components for Christian spirituality within the book of Galatians while showing how an accurate understanding of these components can and should serve as a corrective lens to various aspects of Christian spirituality as expressed and experienced today.

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On March 11, 2011, from deep within the earth's crust, enormous forces drove tectonic plates toward over another. In the collision, one plate riding over the other displaced massive amounts of water. The displaced water began racing toward the Japanese shoreline, each mile exponentially increasing in its fury. Coming ashore in Japan, the tsunami swept aside everything in its path as if they were small toys.
In sixteenth century Europe, there also was a collision of changing environmental, technological, educational, and political forces. Like the energy created by colliding tectonic plates in 2011, these surging and chaotic waters emerged from within the depths of human experiences and spiritual yearnings. Through the guiding hands of the Holy Spirit, these waters swept up the Reformation movement, emptying it into theological lakes and streams across Europe. Therefore, to understand the Reformation movement, one needs to comprehend these varied forces that moved it into reality. The book further details the resulting contributions of the Reformation movements within Germany, Switzerland, the British Isles, France, and the Netherlands. In conclusion, the author addresses the lasting legacy of the Reformation for contemporary society, and the means for a new congregational and governing body Reformation today.

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In this book, Dr. Matthew Todd looks into the anecdotal reporting of high numbers of Canadian-born Chinese leaving Western Canadian Chinese churches–what is termed the silent exodus. Some of the fastest-growing Canadian churches are Chinese, yet reportedly the highest dropout rates are among Chinese and Asian church adult ministries. This book recommends solutions towards the retention of Canadian-born Chinese adults in Chinese bicultural churches through empowerment. To address retention, the key factors that contribute to a silent exodus are established through qualitative research with participants of diverse church affiliations. Todd examines various models and proposed solutions the Chinese church has used to retain its English-speaking congregants, and gives attention to a theological basis for being inclusive in mission initiatives and for empowerment through passing the leadership baton. Todd makes some recommendations on the new wave of an emerging congregational model that requires negotiation with Chinese church leadership to give power away to English ministry leaders and congregations. He anticipates that this will permit transformational leadership practices that contribute to shalom, community transformation, and lasting congregations.

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What difference does the Spirit make in the life of Jesus and in our lives? Answering that question without doing away with the divine dignity of Christ has been a challenge in the distant and recent past. But this need not be the case. The current work is a contribution to the growing field of Spirit Christology, which seeks to enrich the classic Logos Christology of the ecumenical Councils with a Spirit-oriented trajectory. Sanchez tests the productivity of a Spirit Christology as a theological lens for assessing the main events of Jesus' life and mission, accounts of the atonement, the significance of the incarnation, the concepts of person and relation, and models of the Trinity. Seeing Christ as the privileged locus of the Spirit also has implications for the church's life in the Spirit. Sanchez shows how a Spirit Christology fosters Christian practices such as proclamation, prayer, and sanctification. Among the highlights of this work the reader will note the author's assessment of early church fathers' readings of the place of the Spirit in the anointing of Jesus, a constructive proposal towards the complementarity of Logos and Spirit Christologies, ecumenical engagement with various theological traditions in the East and the West, and the first constructive assessment of the field informed by the Lutheran tradition.

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This book argues that though it is a difficult and delicate task, inculturation is still a requisite demand of a World Church and that without it the church is unrecognizable and unsustainable. The book also suggests that the past failures of inculturation experiments in Africa can be overcome only by critically applying the science of semiotics, which can serve as an antidote to the nature of human knowing and reductionism that characterized earlier attempts to make Christianity African to the African. Drawing from the semiotic works of C. S. Peirce, Clifford Geertz, and Bernard Lonergan, the book shows why semiotics is best suited to an African theology of inculturation and offers ten pinpointed precepts, identified as «Habits,» which underline the attentiveness, reasonableness, and responsibility required in a semiotic approach to a theology of inculturation. The «Habits» are also akin to the imperatives inherent in the notion of catholicity–that catholicity is not identified with uniformity but with reconciled diversity, and also that catholicity demands different forms in different places, times, and cultural settings.

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Vatican II's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) transformed the Catholic view of the Jewish people and the Jewish religious tradition. Asserting that the Church discovers her link to the «stock of Abraham» when «searching her own mystery,» Nostra Aetate intimated that the mystery of Israel is inseparable from the mystery of the Church. As interlocking mysteries, each community requires the other in order to understand itself. In Searching Her Own Mystery, noted Messianic Jewish theologian Mark S. Kinzer argues that the Church has yet to explore adequately the implications of Nostra Aetate for Christian self-understanding. The new Catholic teaching concerning Israel should produce fresh perspectives on the entire range of Christian theology, including Christology, ecclesiology, and the theology of the sacraments. To this end, Kinzer proposes an Israel-ecclesiology rooted in Israel-Christology in which a restored ecclesia ex circumcisione–the «church from the circumcision»–assumes a crucial role as a sacramental sign of the Church's bond with the Jewish people and genealogical-Israel's irrevocable election.

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Did Christ atone for the sins of humanity on the cross? Does God desire all people to be saved and direct his grace toward all people for that purpose? There are some Christians following a deterministic paradigm who believe this is not true. They believe God has predestined some people for heaven and many, or even most, for hell. The rising tide of Calvinism and its «TULIP» theology needs to be respectfully answered.
Grace for All: The Arminian Dynamics of Salvation features a distinguished international panel of scholars to examine this controversy. These writers address issues such as election, free will, grace, and assurance. They make compelling scriptural arguments for the universality of God's grace, contending that Christ atoned for the sins of all people and that God sincerely offers forgiveness for all through Christ.
This book strives to uncover the biblical position on salvation. We hope the reader will enjoy this stimulating series of articles on the Arminian perspective and that it will spur further writing and discussion.
Grace for All: The Arminian Dynamics of Salvation is an updated and revised version of Grace Unlimited, a 1975 collection of scholarly articles assembled by the late Clark H. Pinnock of McMaster Divinity College.

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This book explores the ways in which Balthasar employs and adapts the thought of Sergei Bulgakov with the Trinitarian theology of Thomas Aquinas to form a kenotic Trinitarian theology that is based on the notion of Personhood as a relation of self-donating love. When we look at Balthasar's Trinitarian theology in light of Bulgakov, and particularly as a rereading of Bulgakov in light of a Thomistic Trinitarian theology, we are not only able to more clearly understand the implications of Balthasar's own Trinitarian theology but also to highlight the beauty and relevance of Bulgakov's Trinitarian contribution. This reading of Balthasar's Trinitarian theology, read in light of a Thomistic adjustment of Bulgakov, provides an excellent point of integration for an ethics that takes into account not only individual virtues and perfection but also the social/relational context of human personhood. This ethics is based in a concept of human nature bearing the imago Trinitatis and fulfilling that nature through sacramental participation and ethical extension of Christ's self-offering love.

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