Outline: This book makes available over fifty primary source selections that address various challenges to the Christian faith in the history of Christian apologetics. The compilation represents a broad Christian spectrum, ranging from early writers like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, to Saint Teresa of Avila and Blaise Pascal, to more recent and present-day apologists such as C.S. Lewis, Al…
Outline: In this book we want to get to know Abraham Kuyper in the context of his own time. What was the special character of his time? What was the spirit of the age? There is a definite starting point to be found: Kuyper, like his predecessor, Groen van Prinsterer, always referred to a certain point of departure in characterizing his own time - the formidable events of the French Revoluti…
Outline: Throughout history Christian thinkers have attempted to come to terms with the validity of views of scholars committed to non-Christian views of reality. This book gives twelve case studies of how important Christian thinkers in ancient, medieval and modern times have led the way in relating to non-Christian wisdom. The reader is given a sympathetic insight into the personal struggl…
Outline: The church in America has been willingly taken captive. The captors are American culture and ideals: consumerism, pragmatism, self-sufficiency, individualism, positive thinking, personal prosperity, and nationalism. These are antithetical to the gospel, but we have neverthelss made them part and parcel with it. We are well on our way to a Christless Christianity. The result? The f…
Outline: In this sweeping and highly praised book, historian the author traces the fascinating ways our ideas of happiness have changed through the ages. From ancient Greece, where happiness stood for virtue, to the early Christians who saved it for the afterlife, to the Enlightment ear, which branded it a natural right, its meaning has shifted to accomodate our evolving expectaions of life.
Overview: This book collects the paper presentations and seminar reports by these prominent international Calvin scholars: Heiko A. Oberman, James A. De Jong, James B. Torrance, Wilhelm H. Neuser, Paul E. Rorem, Richard C. Gamble, Richard Horcsik, Cornelis Augustijn, Luke Anderson, Erik A. de Boer, I. John Hesselink, Francis M. Higman, Nobuo Watanabe, Irene Backus, Adrianus D. Pont, Mitsuru Shi…
Outline: It is difficult to imagine our understanding of the New Testament period without Luke's writings. For this reason, the question of Luke's historical reliability has been repeatedly investigated. In this study the author affirms Luke's trustworthiness as a historian. But Luke is more than a historian. He is also a theologian who finds his interpretive key in the great theme of salva…
Outline: Frustrated with the continuing educational crisis of our time, concerned parents, teachers, and students sense that true reform requires more than innovative classroom technology, standardized tests, or skills training. An older tradition - the Great Tradition - of education in the West is waiting to be heard. Since antiquity, the Great Tradition has defined education first and fore…
Outline: To see God is our heart's desire, our final purpose in life. But what does it mean to see God? And exactly how do we see God - with our phsysical eyes or with the mind's eye? In this informed study of the beatific vision, the author focuses on "vision" as a living metaphor and shows how the vision of God is not just a future but a present reality. This book is both a historical …
Outline: On 31 October 1999, exactly 482 years after Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a historic joint declaration on the doctrine of justification. Recent agreements between Lutheran, Reformed, and Episcopal churches have expressed similar commitments. But what do these agreements…
Outline: This book draws on current arhaeological and textual research to trace the spread of Christianity in the first millennium. The editor has assembled a team of expert historians to survey the diverse forms of early Christianity as it spread accross centuries, cultures, and continents.
Outline: This book provides a critical reading of the history of major atonement theories, offering an in-depth analysis of the legal and political contexts within which they arose. The book engages the latest work in atonement theory and serves as a helpful resource for contemporary discussions.
Outline: The history of Israel of the Bible remains one of the most holy contested issues in scholarship of the Hebrew Bible today. One of the clearest voices in the debate is that of the author. In the pages of this volume the author distills years of writing on the history of Israel from its beginnings up to the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem (586 B.C.E.). The author divides …
Outline: How did early Christians remember Jesus - and how did they develop their own Christian identities and communities? In this revelatory book, the author explores how transgression contributed to early Christian identity in the Gospels, Acts, Letters of Paul, and Revelation. Examining Jesus as a friend of sinners, challenger of purity laws, transgressor of conventional masculine values…
Outline: In this book, the author provides a Hebrew Bible textbook admirably suited to college and university courses in religious studies. At one accessible and comprehensive, this book approaches the Bible through the categories of comparative religion, carefully distinguishing the religion of ancient Israel from the religion represented in the Bible and discussing such dimensions of religio…
Outline: The author examines the key events that will bring greater understanding of this fascinating period, in addition to sharpening the reader's perspective on today's church. The author explores the implications of - the Thirty Years' War - the rise of Pietism and the Enlightenment - colonization and revolution in America - the French Revolution - other critical events His examinat…
Outline: This book is the fruit of the author's forty-five years of teaching philosophical subjects. No other survey of the history of Western thought offers the same invigorating blend of expositional clarity, critical insight, and biblical wisdom. The supplemental study questions, bibliographies, links to audio lectures, quotes from influential thinkers, twenty appendices, and indexes glossar…
Outline: This book presents the most consequential ethical writings from the earliest days of Christianity through the late twentieth century. Introductory material for each selection places each piece in its proper historical and social context. Selections include writings by Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Karl Barth, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, Catherine of Si…
Overview: This book is the first chronicle of this quest from its beginnings to the present day. It described the different - yet amazingly similar - Jesuses that have emerged over the past 300 years: Jesus the deist rationalist of the 18th-century English coffee houses; Jesus the Hegelian synthesizer of Judaism and Hellenism of the early 19th century; Jesus the mythologized moralist of David …
Outline: The author here opens up new interpretive questions for historical theology with striking implications for ecumenism, ethics, and spirituality. He writes, "the idea of the divine life in Christ which is present in faith lies at the very center of the theology of the Reformer." He argues that later Lutheran interpretation of this teaching has portrayed justification as more mechanical a…
Outline: England in the twentieth century was in the grips of theological liberalism. It was thought that no modern person could accept the claims of the Bible. Preaching was filled with maudlin platitudes and empty moralizing. Into this dark atmosphere stepped the man known as "the Doctor" D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a physician by training, and he embarked on a promising career in medicine. But…
Overview: Klass Schilder (1890 - 1952), the author of the triology about the suffering of Christ, is remembered both for his courageous stand in opposition to Nazism, which led to his imprisonment three months after the Nazis overran the Netherlands in 1940, and for his role in the church struggle in the Netherlands, which culminated in 1944 with the suspension of scores of office-bearers and t…
Outline: In this book, the author has provided a masterly account of this transition and what it signified for the meaning of Christian theology itself. In the decades preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, American theologians mastered the conceptual languages of republican political thought and commonsense moral reasoning. Because religious thinkers learned to speak these languages so well,…
Overview: This book is an acclaimed and popular introductory guide for theology and history students seeking to understand the cenral ideas of the European Reformation. Based on the author's considerable experience of teaching Reformation studies, this text requires no prior knowledge of Christian theology. The revised third edition: - Includes a new chapter on the thought of the English Refo…
Overview: Bringing the methods of contemporary social and intellectual history to bear on a vast range of archival sources, particularly records of city councils and the clergy, the author has fashioned a comprehensive history of the Reformation in the frontier city of Strasbourg. Most
Outline: This book offers a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to Christian theological writing in Western Europe from, roughly, the end of the French Wars of Religion (1598) to the Congress of Vienna (1815). Over the course of more than forty wide-ranging essays, employing a variety of approaches, the authors examine theology from Bellarmine to Johann Semler. They review the major …
Outline: The author presents a major study of the key elements of John Owen's writings and his theology. Presenting his theology in its historical context, the author explores the significance of Owen's work in ongoing debates on seventeenth-century theology, and examines the contexts within which Owen's theology was formulated and the shape of his mind in relation to the intellectual culture …
Overview: In honor of esteemed scholar Edward A. Dowey Jr., this book covers important aspects of the teaching of John Calvin and other leaders of the Reformed tradition. It looks at the distinct characteristics of Reformed Christianity and examines its foundation and contribution to Christian history and thought. The book includes thoughtful and provocative articles by twenty-one leading sch…
Overview: Religious communities that possess sacred documents define themselves, at least in part, by how they understand and interpret their sacred texts and how those sacred texs inform the community. The author has brought together thirteen outstanding contributors to this book in order to explore recent understanding of the ways in which the early Jewish and Christian communities of faith…
Overview: This book introduces the reader to the most influential theologians of the Christian faith, placing them in their historical context, bringing them to life as people and explaining the key points of their thought.
Overview: This definitive analysis of the theolgy of Martin Luther surveys its development during the crises of Luther's life and then offers a systematic survey by topics. Containing a wealth of quotation from less-known writings by Luther and written in a way that will interest both secular and novice, the author's magisterial volume is the first to evaluate Luther's theology in both ways. …
Overview: What role do religious beliefs play in the construction of scientific theories and how do religion and science interact? The first volume of this book explores these and other questions and addresses the specific roles of metaphysical and religious beliefs in explanation and theory construction in the natural scienes. The contributors survey modes of interaction between religion and…
Overview: In this comprehensive study, the author provides an overview of Christian apologetic approaches and how they differ. He explores the historical and philosophical underpinnings of key figures and major schools of thought, from the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til to the evidentialism of Gary Habermas. Moving beyond theory, the author also covers apologetic application, demons…
Overview: Jonathan Edwards (1703 - 1758) is widely regarded as one of the major thinkers in the Christian tradition and an important and influential figure in American theology. This book is a collection of specially commissioned essays that track his intellectual legacies from the work of his immediate disciples who formed the New Divinity movement in colonial New England, to his impact upon …
Overview: In this sweeping and brilliantly provocative book, eminent sociologist as the author articulates a discruptive and compelling alternative narrative of the course of Western civilization since the Renaissance and the Reformation. Humanism is commonly credited with building Western civilization as we know it - bringing about the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights…