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What does the evangelical church in Palestine think about the land, the end times, the Holocaust, peace in the Middle East, loving enemies, Christian Zionism, the State of Israel, and the possibilities of a Palestinian state? For the first time ever, Palestinian evangelicals along with evangelicals from the United States and Europe have converged to explore these and other crucial topics. Although Jews, Muslims, and Christians from a variety of traditions have participated in discussions and work regarding Israel and Palestine, this book presents theological, biblical, and political perspectives and arguments from Palestinian evangelicals who are praying, hoping, and working for a just peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.

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Although preachers often question their effectiveness, no task of the church is more important than proclamation. Only the gospel liberates sinners from guilt, despair, and death and grants them freedom, hope, and new life. Few have grasped this truth better than Martin Luther. This volume features contributions by contemporary theologians whose work is shaped by Luther's conviction that God's justification of the ungodly comes through preaching: Gerhard Forde, Oswald Bayer, and their students and friends. Taken from the pages of Lutheran Quarterly, these essays in historical and theological perspective bring the doctrine of justification to bear on contemporary preaching. For Luther, the whole creation has its life out of God's «pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of ours at all!» Luther's insight to center creation around God's justifying work accents the cosmic scope of the doctrine. Justification is at the core of God's creative and saving activity with respect to all that has been, is, and will be. God's justification of the ungodly is the heart of all Christian theology and mission, and inescapably shapes the character of both. Preaching Christ as the justifier of sinners, in contrast to the accusing directives of the law, does nothing other than establish God's deity over and for the world, and brings an end to sinners' own self-deifying quests, re-creating them as fully human, fully free. Theologians and preachers gain their compass, purpose, and courage from this truth.

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This book contains two stories, but the first one is nested in the second one. The first part is Bruno Corduan's short autobiography, which begins with him as a boy in a family of rather limited means growing up in Germany during the Nazi era. Having come to trust Christ at an early age and carrying no illusions about the Nazis or their opposition to biblical Christianity and those who practiced it, one might wonder with what anxieties and uncertainties this boy must be struggling, particularly as he gets old enough to be compelled into military service. The surprising answer is «none» because he knows himself to be guided by God, who will protect him physically as well as spiritually. This unreserved trust becomes palpable in a number of instances that are worthy of being deemed miracles. As Bruno continues his life into adulthood in the new Germany, he never ceases to experience the guidance of God. Having grown up in poverty, we find him decades later as a diplomat for the German government and for NATO, negotiating multimillion dollar contracts, having achieved greater success than anyone could have predicted. Still Bruno never lost sight of who really was in charge of his life. Thus, simultaneous with his official duties, we always find him actively engaged in promoting the work of the Lord. He poured his life into this calling as much as into his professional vocation, serving as pastor, teacher, leader, and even church founder. And thus, we come to the second story. This one is much larger, cosmic in size, and Bruno sees his life as just one small instance thereof. In fact, when he finally consented to write out the story of his life at age eighty-two, he would only do so if he could also include this much larger story, namely the history of how God reached down to earth to establish a relationship with human beings through the life and death of his Son. What is it that makes it possible for someone to lead a life such as Bruno's? It is not human energy. What he insists on throughout his exposition is that neither is it piety or religiosity. It is the work of God who will awaken all people who believe in him from spiritual death and give them a life in which he will demonstrate that he is, indeed, the gracious and sovereign Lord of the universe. In short, the first part of this book is Bruno Corduan's autobiography. The second part is his exposition of the gospel and of Christianity, in which he is always reminding us that our salvation and walk with God are the consequences of God's gracious work, and not of our own religious efforts.

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Given the upcoming five-hundred-year anniversary of Luther's ninety-five theses, it is appropriate to reflect on the impact of Luther's ideas. This collection of essays, which began as conference papers on the literature of Luther, seeks to initiate conversations on the many and varied receptions of the reformer. Most of the essays are interdisciplinary, crossing boundaries between literature, history, and theology. Both Catholic and Protestant voices are well represented. The topics covered are wide-ranging so that for any interested reader several essays will likely strike a chord.

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Acknowledging the Divine Benefactor is a sociorhetorical interpretation of the Second Letter of Peter. Using multiple interpretive perspectives and emphasizing the pictorial dimensions of 2 Peter, Terrance Callan understands the letter as making the following argument: since Jesus Christ has given his followers benefits, including the promise of sharing in divine nature, they need to make a proper return for these benefits by living virtuously; and this in turn will enable them to receive the fulfillment of the promise. The occasion of the letter is that Peter's death is near. He writes so the addressees can remember his teaching after his death. The author expounds this teaching because some people do not await the future fulfillment of Christ's promises and so do not emphasize the need for virtuous living.

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Does Christianity have anything useful or credible to say to the twenty-first century, or is it just a relic of a past era, doomed eventually to die a long and painful death, perhaps to be replaced by the new atheism or another religion? In an original contribution to such debates, The Revelation Worldview is a bold attempt to construct a biblically based Christian worldview that makes sense to postmodern people. It also seeks to make the book of Revelation, one of the most strange and difficult books in the Bible, relevant to issues facing people in the twenty-first century. Jon K. Newton wrestles with the complex notion of worldview, tells the story of the changing Western worldview from its ancient and medieval beginnings through the modern era and into the unpredictable world of postmodernism, and compares the worldview found in Revelation with other worldviews of its day. He then uses Revelation as a source for identifying some basic Christian answers to questions such as: What is real? How do we know anything? How can religious knowledge claims be justified? How can we understand the concept of the human person? How can we make sense of history? And how should we respond to pluralism?

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"Father" is a verb, and fathering is the highest calling of God on men. Man Maker Project is a guide for fathers to intentionally usher their sons into godly manhood.
Now more than ever, the reality of unfinished men confronts us at every turn. Without intentional fathering, a boy's core question–Am I a man?–forever echoes in his soul. Every boy needs to hear his father's clear «yes» in response. While many fathers know they should do something for their maturing sons, they have little idea how to create such an initiatory process.
Man Maker Project offers a practical roadmap that equips fathers to create a unique, modern-day masculine initiation experience for their sons. Rather than a single event or ceremony, fathers can guide their boys through a yearlong process, with the support of a cadre of hand-selected men. This book also challenges fathers to investigate their own stories, as God's mutually redemptive design is for us to be fathered ourselves as we father our sons.
Through this modern-day rites of passage process, fathers fulfill their calling, sons find their footing, and society receives solid men ready to strongly and kindly restore the world.

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A nineteen-year-old chemistry major at Rhodes College is selected to spend the summer after her freshman year doing research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Instead, she finds herself a patient there, fighting a life-threatening form of pediatric cancer and suffering through a year of aggressive chemotherapy and surgery. Refusing to believe what many tell her–that the cancer was all part of «God's plan»–she finds solace in journaling and begins a discussion with her grandfather, a university professor specializing in philosophy of religion. Through her experiences and writing about them, the student discovers that she may be a person of faith after all–just not in the way she expected. Her grandfather has selected and arranged the journal entries and their faith conversation and has commented on them in order to bring out the spiritual dimensions of her experience. He learns from his granddaughter that faith comes more through experience than through ideas. The coauthors hope the book will help other sufferers recognize the presence of a loving God in the midst of pain, uncertainty and death.

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In his writings and his career Gregory of Nyssa assumes many roles. He is a Christian Platonist, a spiritual guide for ascetics and those seeking the vision of God, as well as one of those who shaped the Trinitarian doctrine of God espoused at Constantinople in 381. But he is also a popular preacher and, paradoxically, someone unafraid of deeper speculations regarding the meaning of the Christian ideal. The translations in Part One illustrate these various concerns, but are not a sufficient basis for the thesis of Part Two, one that attempts to answer the question of how to describe the coherence of a thinker far from systematic. One solution is to appeal to Gregory's conviction that after this world all Christians, indeed all humans, will be united in diversity, and that this means that all are now on the one path to their destiny, however much their progress may differ. This answer does not pretend to solve all problems, nor does it rule out other approaches to Gregory's thought. But it locates Gregory's work in the liturgical and sacramental life of the church that includes ordinary as well as elite Christians.

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Grace is supposed to be amazing, but all too often the Christian life can be more about keeping stuffy rules than enjoying a relationship with Christ. The tendency to add works to salvation has been a thorny problem since the gospel was first preached. Legalism–the doctrine of salvation by works–robs the Christian of the grace-filled life. The book of Galatians is like an emancipation proclamation that says, «If the Son has set you free, then you are free at last!» The liberating message of Galatians says believers are free from sin, regulations, and guilt. Free from the need to measure up. Free to be loved by Christ and changed by his grace.
Galatians is a guide for recovering Pharisees, and in Free at Last , Derrick McCarson takes us on a verse-by-verse journey through Paul's bondage-busting manifesto. You may be surprised to learn that Paul's message of grace is still as relevant today as it was centuries ago. While the culture has changed much in those intervening years, mankind's inherent desire for performance-based religion has not. This book is a timely reminder to Christians everywhere that if we aren't living by grace, then we have succumbed to spiritual slavery.

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