LITMIR.BIZ

Today much preaching and teaching throws people back upon themselves to earn their relationship with God and to try to achieve by their own efforts the kind of person that they ought to be. In The Claim of Humanity in Christ, Alexandra Radcliff counters the Torrances' critics to show the significance of their controversial understanding of salvation for the interface between systematic and pastoral theology. Radcliff then constructively extends the implications of the Torrances' work to a liberating doctrine of sanctification. The Christian life is conceived as the free and joyful gift of sharing by the Spirit in the Son's intimate communion with the Father whereby we are turned out of ourselves to reflect the reality of who we are in Christ.

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In this collection of inspirational and challenging essays, Methodists from around the globe reflect on the practice of disciple-making in their own contexts. From their own perspectives, they address questions like: What are the challenges you face? What biblical images shape your missional practice? What examples of Christian authenticity inspire your communities? What gifts related to mission and evangelism do you offer the global community of faith?
Churches on every continent have their own stories of struggle and faithfulness. Indeed, each distinct community within any given region has a voice of its own that deserves to be heard. The voices included in this volume belong to women and men alike. Likewise, they resound with the accents of Africa and Asia, Latin and North America, Europe, and Oceania. Each voice is distinct, but all articulate a vision of faith made effective through love.
In a world characterized variously by poverty and violence as well as prosperity and peace, the church must reclaim its central mission «to make disciples of Jesus Christ.» In their effort to articulate a vision of mission and evangelism, the contributors to this volume bear witness to the fact that we can no longer do this work in isolation from one another. To be the ambassadors of the gospel, we need each other and we need to pay attention to the voices that sound different from our own. This volume takes a large step in that vital direction.

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No one is so intimately acquainted with Schleiermacher's Christian Ethics material or with the 1821-1822 first edition of his companion volume, Christian Faith, than Hermann Peiter. The present volume is a collection of Peiter's nineteen essays and thirty reviews. Extensive English summaries are offered for all this material, and an English version for four of the essays. Professor Peiter's summary of this volume reads as follows:
"This book treats of praxis in the Christian life and of Christian responsibility for the world we have in common. The following, however, forms a background for these considerations. Schleiermacher reminds his Christian brethren, who often deck themselves out with alien, borrowed plumes from morals and metaphysics, of their actual theme, that of religion, which he also designates as a kind or mode of faith. Like Luther, he also turns against both the practical misconception that considers faith itself to be a good work and the theoretical misconception that faith is a product of thinking, a theory. Whether a practitioner thinks to give thanks for one's own work or whether a theoretician hopes to find final fulfillment and justification in one's range of metaphysical ideas amounts to the same thing. Faith is the courage to be (Paul Tillich). For Schleiermacher, to want to have speculation (thus, metaphysics) and praxis without religion is the nonsalutary intention of Prometheus, who faintheartedly stole what he could have expected to possess in restful security. If taken seriously, the 'gods'-to use that pagan expression for once-are that nature to which a human being belongs. Each human being is their possession. When one steals what the gods have, one steals oneself, can thank oneself for a robbery. For a gift that is stolen, one cannot possibly be thankful. Only a pure gift awakens true joy. A human being has the chance to receive the gift that one is or is not (in case it is stolen) not from a thief but from religion. Thanks to one's birth, both physical and spiritual, one gains oneself and has oneself. To steal means to take away, to depreciate. In contrast, whoever has oneself from elsewhere is no longer extracted from oneself or from the one to whom one belongs."

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This delightfully multifaceted volume, comprised of thoughtful essays by an esteemed array of cultural critics, probes the intersection of Christian faith and culture to honor the memory of A. J. «Chip» Conyers, a remarkably ecumenical Christian scholar and cultural «warrior» whose premature death in 2004 cut short a remarkable career in teaching and writing. As those who knew him can attest, Conyers lived his life at the intersection of Christian theology and cultural concern with a singular blend of astuteness, gracefulness, and Christian conviction.
This festschrift, as esteemed theologian and Conyers's mentor Jurgen Moltmann indicates in the foreword, is intended to mirror Conyers's own commitment to incisive cultural criticism and theological faithfulness in the mold of the «great tradition.» This is no small achievement even for so venerable a cast of scholars as the contributors to this volume, as Conyers crossed interdisciplinary boundaries–in a day of escalating hyper-specialization–with the greatest of ease. He was comfortable discussing contemporary church life or the christological controversy of the patristic era, Heideggerian hermeneutics or human dignity and the imago Dei, faith and the Enlightenment or the fatherhood of God, Catholic «substance» or Protestant reform.
Yet Conyers always did this through the lens of historic Christian orthodoxy. Though he was a most incisive student of culture, in a most refreshing way he steered clear of being co-opted by the currents of culture. Neither retreating into pious devotionalism nor opting for the theologically unreflective activism that has become so chic in our post-consensus climate, he embodied a theological perspective that blends responsible cultural engagement with eschatological hope.
The reader is sure to encounter the same blend in this festschrift, and to come away both challenged and edified toward fulfilling the message and hope of Conyers' life and work: to faithfully thrive in Babylon.

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Too often the negative characterization of «others» in the biblical text is applied to groups and persons beyond the text whom we wish to define as the Other. Otherness is a synthetic and political social construct that allows us to create and maintain boundaries between «them» and «us.» The other that is too similar to us is most problematic. This book demonstrates how proximate characters are constructed as the Other in the Acts of the Apostles. Charismatics, Jews, and women are proximate others who are constructed as the external and internal Other.

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Through an intimate conversation with the writings of Thomas F. Torrance, Flett articulates a Trinitarian theology of culture. Torrance's work suggests that Christian assumptions in the areas of God, creation, and humanity had an important influence upon the development of Western scientific culture. This book develops each of these areas of Torrance's thought in order to articulate a theology of culture rooted in a Christian understanding of God as triune, creation as contingent, and human persons as stewards created in the image of God. Drawn together, these three areas of Torrance's thought suggest that human culture and cultural plurality ultimately originate in the creative action of a triune God, mediated through the creative activity of the human creature as it engages a contingent created order in its attempts to foster human flourishing and to bear embodied witness to its Creator. The result is not only a unique contribution to the emerging secondary material on Torrance's work, but also a contribution to the field of theology of culture as a systematic locus in its own right.

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Developments in biblical studies, neurosciences, and Christian philosophy of mind force theologians to reconsider the traditional concept of the immortal soul. At the same time, the concept itself tends to create axiological dualism between the body and the soul that in turn may lead to insufficient appreciation of the physical life in this world. A more holistic approach to the ontology of human beings is required. The aim of this study is to analyze the function of the concept of the soul in the dualistic anthropology of John Calvin and to compare it to the holistic anthropology of Karl Barth in order to answer the question of whether the transition from one to the other is possible without the loss of the functions fulfilled by the soul.

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A Fellowship of Baptism is a critical rereading of Karl Barth's ecclesiology, arguing that reading his ecclesiology through the lens of his mature view of baptism best enables one to understand Barth's view of the church. Barth's insistence on believer's baptism is connected to the free-church ecclesiology he develops in the Church Dogmatics. The church, for Barth, is a gathered, concrete community formed by the Holy Spirit. The result of believer's baptism should be a community that is free from cultural and political control so that it can serve the world and witness to it. At the same time, questions are raised about Barth's rejection of the sacramental nature of baptism and the implications this has for ecclesiology. The strengths of believer's baptism and the weakness of his non-sacramental view are both seen in his writings on the church and are brought into conversation with one another. Reading Barth's ecclesiology and doctrine of baptism together helps to show the interdependence of baptism and ecclesiology in Barth as well as in all church teaching and practice.

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This book examines the doctrines of election and atonement in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, taking up Barth's own challenge to his reader to surpass his argument and offer a better typological interpretation of the cultic texts. Barth's radical re-working of Calvin's doctrine of election is one of the most important developments in twentieth-century theology. Christ synthesizes for Barth a particular dialectic: the binary structure of God's Yes of election and God's No of rejection. The book's central question–how can Jesus simultaneously be both the elected and the rejected (CD II/2), acting as both the judge and the judged (CD IV/1)?–is followed by an exploration of the roles of the Holy Spirit and human freedom in God's electing and saving action. Commentators both acknowledge Barth's innovation in this area and identify problems with his approach, but few have offered what David Ford has called a correction «from within» Barth, using Barth's own method. Using the concept of Existenzstellvertretung, this critique of Barth's exegetical justification for the doctrines offers an alternative exegesis that not only provides this much-needed correction, but also immerses the reader in a fresh engagement with Scripture itself.

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Jurgen Moltmann and others contend that Christian theology and the church face a dual crisis–one of relevance and the other of identity. Despite making this pronouncement nearly forty years ago, the church in the West continues to struggle with this crisis. Several proposals have been espoused, from the way of wisdom to the way of ecclesial praxis. Yet, little attention is given in Protestant theological discourse to the role God's beauty plays in bringing theology and ethics together. By neglecting God's beauty for theological discourse, we risk diminishing Christian worship, witness, and wisdom.
God's Beauty-in-Act addresses these issues, in part, by arguing that the redemptive-creative suffering and glorious resurrection of Christ are the nexus of God's being, beauty, and Christian living. God's beauty, understood as the fittingness of the incarnate Son's actions in the Spirit to the Father's will, radiates God's glory and draws perceivers into the dramatic movements of God's triune life. These movements serve as the patterns that shape the imagination, enabling participants to perform their parts creatively and fittingly in God's drama of redemption. In doing so, human beings flourish as they jettison false identities and realities of their own making that are incommensurate with God's purpose found in Christ by the Spirit.

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