Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 1988) is one of the most significant and challenging of 20 th century theologians. His work remains highly influential within the Catholic Church; yet much of it is influenced by his encounter with and study of the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth. His writings, particularly the trilogy beginning with The Glory of the Lord, then the Theo- Drama and concluding …
Codex Bezae is a manuscript that has generally managed to provoke strong emotions. Bentley, with the Cantabrigian fervour which has not escaped the notice of Ernst Bammel, called it 'our Beza's'. Its script has been called crude, its spelling and accuracy lamentable. The scribe has been seen as a person with too much ink in his well, the transmitter - indeed the creator - of a text which he has…
Paul has provoked people as much in the twentieth century as he did in the first. Then, they sometimes threw stones at him; now, they tend to throw words. Some people still regard Paul as a pestilent and dangerous fellow. Others still think him the greatest teacher of Christianity after the Master himself This spectrum of opinion is well represented in the scholarly literature as well as the po…
Titus Flavius Clemens (c. 150–215), better known as Clement of Alexandria, remains a puzzling figure in the history of the Christian Church. Little can be confirmed about the setting in which he operated, and the controversy concerning the nature and purpose of his writings still attracts scholarly debate. Evidence surrounding the so-called ‘catechetical school’ at Alexandria is hard to c…
On the whole, the disappearance of Hell was a great relief, though it brought new problems.
A chronicle of the evangelical life, witten by a born-again Christian and former "60 Minutes" producer, seeks to bridge the gaps between believers and non-believers.
Thoroughly exploring the history of the conflict between Christians and Jews from medieval to modern times, this wide-ranging volume includes newly uncovered material from the recently opened post-Soviet archives. Anna Sapir Abulafia delineates controversial issues of inter-faith confrontation, and a number of eminent scholars from around the globe discuss openly and objectively the dynamics of…
This book argues from Scripture that godly fear is the opposite of being afraid of God or his punishment as if he were a tyrant. Instead, it is the intensity of the saints' love for, delight in, and enjoyment of all that God is.
Book covers and dust jackets frequently include endorsements by individuals who have read an advance copy of a volume. Often an endorsement will say to potential purchasers of the book that if they are able to read only one book on the subject with which the book is concerned, this is the book they should read. I was asked to write this foreword before I had received an advance copy of J. Harol…
An exploration of the relationship between the rise and development of a mystical element in Islam, known as Sufism, and the mysticism that was already to be found within the Christian Church of the Near and Middle East.
Christians are taught in their churches and schools that prayer is the most powerful way to experience God. But few receive instruction or guidance in how to make prayer genuinely meaningful. In Prayer, renowned pastor Timothy Keller delves into the many facest of this everyday act
An important new book on how we can still believe in a God of love and confront the problem of evil in the world. Probably the most important book on the subject since John Hick's book Evil and the God of Love.̀ & ; Evil is a strong word that people now employ fairly rarely. Many people believe these days that God is omnipotent, omniscient and good and that what we deem to be bad or evil in th…
The papers in this volume, written by specialists in several disciplines, explore the parameters and significance of magic in Byzantine society, from the fourth century to after the empire's fall. The authors address a wide variety of questions, some of which are common to all historical research into magic, and some of which are peculiar to the Byzantine context." "Among the topics discussed a…
Demonstrates how God calls all individuals to express meaning and purpose through a career, sharing spiritual insights into finding relevance in cutthroat professional environments and staying true to Christian values in spite of competition.
A central figure in the reconception of early Christian history over the last three decades, Wayne A. Meeks offers here a selection of his most influential writings on the New Testament and early Christianity. His essays illustrate recent changes in our thinking about the early Christian movement and pose provocative questions regarding the history of this period.Meeks explores a fascinating ra…
Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide was prepared to assist Christian leaders in their day-to-day counseling ministry. The first four chapters of Christian Counseling are designed to give an overview of counseling and may be read consecutively. The remaining twenty-seven chapters deal with specific problems, and since each chapter stands alone, they can be read in any order. Each chapter…
Can it be justifiable to commit oneself 'by faith' to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? In Believing by Faith, John Bishop defends a version of fideism inspired by William James's 1896 lecture 'The Will to Believe'. By critiquing both 'isolationist' (Wittgensteinian) and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief, Bishop argues that an…
This book aspires to answer a relatively simple question: How did we get from John F. Kennedy’s eloquent speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he urged voters effectively to bracket a candidate’s faith out of their considerations when they entered the voting booth, to George W. Bush’s declaration on the eve of the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was hi…
As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism and immigration, Olivier Roy interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's 'Christian values'? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, Roy challenges the significance of secular…
This volume explores the legacy of the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper for contemporary Christian ecotheology. A crucial problem in ecotheology is how to do justice to both creation and salvation as acts of God, given the impact of the environmental crisis and the concern for creation (as creatura). Can Kuyper help one in this regard, given his controversial legasy, especially in …
Richard Swinburne analyses the purposes of practising a religion, and argues that religious faith requires belief that a particular creed provides the rationale for supposing that these purposes will be achieved.
Is the Christian church in Europe doomed to collapse under the weight of globalization, Western secularism, and a flood of Muslim immigrants? Is Europe on the brink of becoming "Eurabia"?Though many pundits are predicting just such a scenario, God's Continent reveals the flaws in these arguments and offers a much more measured assessment of Europe's religious future. While frankly acknowledging…
In this wide-ranging book that moves from Greek drama to modern poetry, David Brown explores the ways in which the poetry and drama of the past were rooted in religious questions. He posits that their creative potential needs to be rediscovered to bring present-day worship and experience of God alive.
Karl Barth was, without doubt, one of the most significant religious thinkers of modern times. His radical affirmation of the revealed truth of Christianity changed the course of Christian theology in the twentieth century and is a source of inspiration for countless believers. Pope Pius XII declared that there had been nothing like Karl Barth's later thought since Thomas Aquinas. God Here and …
"In this masterful, stylish, and authoritative book, Michael Burleigh gives us an epic history of the battles over religion in modern Europe, examining the complex and often lethal ways in which politics and religion have interacted and influenced each other over the last two centuries. From the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Earthly Powers is a unique…
In Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture, Stanley Porter and Andrew Pitts assemble an international team of scholars whose work has focused on reconstructing the social matrix for earliest Christianity through the use of Greco-Roman materials and literary forms.
When I was a boy growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, my father was away from home about two-thirds of every year. And while he preached across the country, we prayed--my mother and my older sister and I. What I learned in those days was that my mother was omni-competent.
Augustine’s Hippo Regius5 was the center of the universe for some who lived there and the back of beyond for many who visited. A port city on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, where the river Seybouse came down from the mountains to the sea, it stood a distant second to Carthage in commerce and prestige. Augustine hadn’t lived there all his life.
We are approaching the day when advances in biotechnology will allow parents to "design" a baby with the traits they want. The continuing debate over possibilities of genetic engineering has ben spirited, but so far largely confined to the realms of bioethics and public policy. Design and Destiny approaches the question in religious terms, discussing human germline modification (the generic mod…
Like any other discipline, apologetics lacks a uniform definition. The standard that’s largely been adopted is “the defense of the faith,” but overlapping definitions abound. Apologetics has been defined as “that branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide a rational justification for the truth claims of the Christian faith,” “developing one’s authentic self so as to prese…
Beginning with an account of how Christian theology is called upon to read the signs of the time, Cities of God traces the shift in urban culture in North America and Western Europe that took place in the 1970s. The modern sites of eternal aspiration and hope became the postmodern cities of eternal desires. The old, modern theological responses to the city become unbelievable and inadequate, ne…
Presents an exploration of how a sense of being 'a Christian', or of 'Christian identity', was shaped within the setting of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world. This book shows that there were similarities and differences in the ways Jews and others were thinking about themselves, and asks what made early Christianity distinctive.
This volume includes three classic works by John Owen on sin, temptation, and repentance in the Christian life. Editors Justin Taylor and Kelly Kapic have made this difficult-to-read Puritan accessible for the modern reader without sacrificing the wonderful content of Owen's work.
God is Infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence…
Before we can define “Judaism” for the purpose of our study of the New Testament, we had best say what we mean by any religion, the genus of which Judaism forms a species (and, we shall argue, with earliest Christianity as a subspecies of that same species of religion). Defining religion comes before defining a particular religion, just as defining a particular religion takes priority over …
Christians should use and develop their minds. The mental faculties of the human mind—the power to think, to discover, to wonder, and to imagine—are precious gifts of God. The Christian who pursues knowledge, seeks education, and explores even the most “secular” subjects is fulfilling a Christian vocation that is pleasing to God and of great importance to the Church. The Bible, by prece…
Does God play games with his kids? Of course, He does! I totally believe this and that is why the volume switch is on His end and not yours! Up and down the volume level goes. Real time experience goes something like this: real loud to deafening soft. And seemingly not much between! Zooming in and out with His telescopic lens, the Holy Spirit creates close encounters and yes, far away ones. He …
What has theology to do with economics? They are both sciences of human action but have traditionally been treated as very separate and isolated disciplines. Divine Economy is the first book to directly address the need for an active dialogue between the two.
The works translated here deal with two major themes in the thinking of St Augustine (354-430): free will and divine grace. On the one hand, free will enables human beings to make their own choices; on the other hand, God's grace is required for these choices to be efficacious. 'On the Free Choice of the Will', 'On Grace and Free Choice', 'On Reprimand and Grace' and 'On the Gift of Perseveranc…
By championing the ideals of independence, evangelism, and conservatism, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has grown into the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The Convention's mass democratic form of church government, its influential annual meetings, and its sheer size have made it a barometer for Southern political and cultural shift. Its most recent shift has been starboar…
The nineteenth century was one of the most diverse and creative periods in the history of Christian theology. Its problems, challenges, and developments continue to be assimilated by theologians today, while its great thinkers – G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, et al. – are the subject of intensive international scholarship.
For nineteenth century scholars the Holy Land was not just a region of the globe - it was an idea, an intellectual and moral space charged with the heat of debate between those trying to understand the religious, social and scientific upheavals of the time. Edwin Aiken explores the various ways in which geographical knowledge was used in these debates. In particular he shows how religious write…
In this work Jenkins takes a closer look at Christianity in the global South, revealing what it is like, and what it means for the future. The faith of the South, Jenkins finds, is first and foremost a biblical faith. Indeed, in the global South, many Christians identify powerfully with the world portrayed in the New Testament.
At least two well-developed bodies of literature have emerged on practical questions relating to death, one the concern of psychology, the other the concern of ethics. These flow from two basic questions: how can we live well in the face of death? and when, if ever, is it legitimate deliberately to bring human life to an end? Related to both of these is a third question that seems to press eve…
This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers’ pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings …
This book was conceived in an unusual setting. The year was 1976. I had just arrived with my family in Aixen-Provence, France, where I was to spend a sabbatical year teaching at the university. We had rented a house for the year from Michel Vovelle, a well-known French historian who was just packing up to leave for a sabbatical year of his own at Princeton. The lease was for a certain rent, qui…
Augustine’s philosophy of life involves reviewing one’s past and exercises for self-improvement. Centuries after Plato and before Freud he invented a “spiritual exercise” in which every man and woman is able, through memory, to reconstruct and reinterpret life’s aims. Brian Stock examines Augustine’s unique way of blending literary and philosophical themes. He proposes a new interpr…
Unless you were a personal friend of C. S. Lewis, or one of his many correspondents, you are probably not aware that he went by “Jack” to his friends, a name he landed on as a child and decided it suited him better than his given one (Clive Staples Lewis). So at the end of most of his letters, you encountered “Yours, Jack.” This book is intended to extend that personal relationship to y…
This book started life as the final chapter of Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), the second volume in the series Christian Origins and the Question of God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God (1992). The present work now forms the third volume in the series. This is a departure from the original plan, and since people often ask me what is going on some explan…