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This book is the follow-up volume to Pentecostalism and Christian Unity: Ecumenical Documents and Critical Assessments. The first volume documented the history and ecumenical engagement of Pentecostals during the twentieth century. This new collection traces the ecumenical developments, narratives, and conversations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The ecumenical community and Pentecostals have consistently lamented the absence of a comprehensive gathering of resources for both groups. This particular volume provides two significant assets in this regard: (1) documentation of new and emerging conversations that have not yet produced official reports, and (2) official reports from continuing conversations. The book begins with an overview of a century of Pentecostal participation in Christian unity. Part One contains ecumenical narratives on the Joint Consultative Group of Pentecostals and the World Council of Churches, Lutherans and Pentecostals, the Global Christian Forum, and Christian Churches Together in the USA. Part Two contains the extensive reports from the official dialogue of Pentecostals with the Roman Catholic Church, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Oneness-Trinitarian Pentecostal dialogue. This collection presents an invaluable resource for teachers, scholars, and pastors interested in engaging the global Christian arena from the worldwide and ecumenical perspectives of Pentecostalism.

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When he was a student at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend expressing his great admiration of and enthusiasm for the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly The House of the Seven Gables and Transformation (British title of The Marble Faun). This study examines the parallels between these two kindred spirits and their works, focusing on their similar worldviews, their personal backgrounds and lifestyles, and the «Ultimates» they both pondered. It discusses common themes in their works, such as myth, scientism, and «the great power of blackness.» Their respective attitudes toward these issues and others, such as faith, repentance, heaven and hell, confession, church attendance, the clergy, and Puritanism are strikingly similar. Considerable attention is given to «companion pieces» of the two writers, with discussion of the so-called «Fortunate Fall» in The Marble Faun and Perelandra, veil imagery in «The Minister's Black Veil,» The Blithedale Romance, and Till We Have Faces, influence of Bunyan's allegory on The Pilgrim's Regress and «The Celestial Railroad,» and multiform love in The Four Loves and The House of the Seven Gables. Examination of such affinities between these two writers and their works provides mutual illumination and enhanced appreciation of each.

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Healing the Divide is a bold call to understand Jesus according to the earliest lineage of Christian Mystics–a call to transform our dualistic minds and heal a divided Church.
This book is a must-read if you find yourself
–frustrated by the fundamentalist and new age polarization of twenty-first-century Christianity; –bewildered by religious pluralism; –searching for Christianity's elusive mystic core.
Twenty-first century Christianity is in crisis, careening toward fundamentalism on the one hand and a rootless new age Christianity on the other. Twenty-first century Christianity is also reeling from the maze of religious pluralism. Smith addresses and tempers these extremes by passionately and succinctly revealing Jesus as understood by the Alexandrian mystics. The Alexandrian mystics are the most long standing lineage of early Christian mystics. Their perspective on Jesus celebrates creative tensions, tempers extremes, and reveals Christian mysticism's definitive core.

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As the Bride of Christ, the body of Christian believers has been called to serve Him. One aspect of this calling is that we are God's instrument to change the world. This book addresses the question of how Christians should go about facilitating that calling.
Politics is the process through which some people attempt to prevail over others for the control of government. Is that what Christ wants for his holy people, or is the lure of politics an attempt to bring us into Satan's world?
Christianity and Politics presents a logically developed analysis of this question using the Bible, history, and modern theories of economics and political science. Christians from all political and theological backgrounds are likely to find that this book changes their thinking about the church and political involvement.

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Rereading the Biblical Text: Searching for Meaning and Understanding deals with problems scholars face in translating Hebrew words and sentences into contemporary English. Modern readers have many choices when selecting a translation of the Bible for personal use. Translators seek to convey to today's readers the message the biblical writers tried to communicate to their original readers. At times, however, what the original authors tried to convey to their audience was not clear. Claude Mariottini has selected several difficult passages from the Old Testament and compared how different translations have dealt with these difficult texts. Pastors, seminary students, and serious students of the Bible will be challenged to reread the biblical text and understand the message of the biblical writers in a new perspective.

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What is God doing about a world marked by conflict and division? What about a world in which our technologies promise great good but also threaten our existence? What is God doing in a world where the demands for accumulation and acquisition create division and despair? Can Christians hope to be of positive influence in a world that does not always support, reflect, or even understand Christian commitments?
Christian ethics often raises such questions as these, and the possible answers vary widely. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians is a tremendous resource for exploring a faithful response to perhaps the toughest question of all: what is God doing about evil? The role of Christian ethics is to take seriously the challenge that, whatever God is doing, God calls us to participate in a distinctive task that embraces our own commitments and labors within the divine purpose. Ephesians says that God has taken the initiative to pursue that purpose and, remarkably, offers that we ourselves are part of the answer to the question, what is God doing about evil?

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Results May Vary addresses the unspoken assumptions and unquestioned expectations about what it means to be a Christian woman in a complex world. Far from offering a simple checklist or selling advice, this collection of essays weaves together a rich variety of voices–from women of different ages, backgrounds, professions, disciplines, and life choices–speaking honestly about the unexpected yet grace-infused twists and turns of life that exude the faithfulness of God in every unanticipated detail. For young women in their twenties and thirties tackling post-college life, Results May Vary offers the wry and diverse stories of real women grappling with real-world issues like friendship, health, money, ambition, vocation, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and spiritual life.

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The book is about showing different ways of doing ethics, highlighting a kind of methodological pluralism. This book attempts to relate the difference in methodology and perspective to difference in identity, focal point of analysis, or projects of persuasion. Difference matters ultimately because pluralism matters. This book is a tutorial in ethical analysis and reasoning. Seminarians and graduate students will be brought into the finer points of ethical analysis, of mastering the ins and outs of ethical methodology, by immersing themselves in critical social-ethical analyses of prominent scholars in the American academy. Students will be guided toward how to develop their own voice in social issues, hone their capability in social analysis, and critically engage the social sciences, history, philosophy, and literature as they embark on ethical analyses. There is no single way of teaching the methodology of social ethics and no single theory of ethics that satisfies all; therefore ethics and its methodology are better understood by enabling students to view the field through multiple «windows.» Simultaneously they will learn to view social reality from different perspectives. The seven chapters of this book explore the different ways American ethicists have interrogated their nation's moral systems or crafted methods for understanding them.

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Coena Mystica contains the never-before-reprinted text of John Williamson Nevin's response to Charles Hodge's devastating critiques of his 1846 magnum opus, The Mystical Presence. Initially appearing in twelve issues of the little-known Weekly Messenger of the German Reformed Church and almost entirely neglected by historians since, Nevin's response included the full text of Hodge's article, with his rejoinders interspersed every few pages. These articles, in addition to providing a lively and illuminating debate on the roots of Reformed eucharistic theology, take the disputants into such fields as the nature of the church, the development of doctrine, the person and work of Christ, and the merits of German idealism. The quality of the historical argument and theological acumen here displayed makes this exchange one of the landmark theological controversies of the nineteenth century, a gift to historians of the period, students of Reformed theology, and anyone seeking to better understand the contentious legacy of the Protestant Reformation. The present critical edition carefully preserves the original text, while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to orient the modern reader and facilitate further scholarship.
The Mercersburg Theology Study Series is an attempt to make available for the first time, in attractive, readable, and scholarly modern editions, the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multi-year project, this aims to make an important contribution to the scholarly community and to the broader reading public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European, Reformed and Catholic theology.

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Kierkegaard was a prophet who critiqued «Christendom,» the perversion of authentic, New Testament Christianity into the institutionalized, materialistic, triumphalist, and flabby religion of modernism. Emergent Christianity is attempting to carve out a more authentic way of being Christian and doing church within–and beyond–the ineffectual, institutionalized church of modernity. In many ways, Kierkegaard's critiques, concerns, and goals overlap with emergent Christianity and the emerging church. For the first time, this book brings Kierkegaard into a dialogue with various postmodern forms of Christianity, on topics like revelation and the Bible, the atonement and moralism, and the church as an «apologetic of witness.» In conversation with postmodern philosophers, contemporary theologians, and emergent leaders, Kierkegaard is offered as a prophetic voice for those who are carving out an alternative expression of the New Testament today and attempting to follow Christ through works of love.

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