Description: ""Who do you say that I am"" (Mark 8:29) is the question of Christology. By asking this question, Jesus invites his followers to interpret him from within their own contexts-history, experience, and social location. Therefore, all responses to Jesus's invitation are contextual. But for too long, many theologians particularly in the West have continued to see Christology as a universal endeavor that is devoid of any contextual influences. This understanding of Christology undermines Jesus's expectations from us to imagine and appropriate him from within our own contexts. In...

Description: Despite the voluminous and ever-growing scholarly literature on Karl Barth, penetrating accounts of his theological method are lacking. In an attempt to fill this lacuna, Todd Pokrifka provides an analysis of Barth's theological method as it appears in his treatment of three divine perfections--unity, constancy, and eternity--in Church Dogmatics, II/1, chapter VI. In order to discern the method by which Barth reaches his doctrinal conclusions, Pokrifka examines the respective roles of Scripture, tradition, and reason--the ""threefold cord""--in this portion of the Church...

Description: The Christian faith has always stood in a place of tension between its transcendent nature and the surrounding culture. On the one hand, Christian faith claims to originate in the revelation of God, which transforms culture itself. On the other hand, all such revelation is inevitably received and interpreted by humans in concrete situations. It is no exaggeration to say that two millennia of church history have continually demonstrated the struggle between Christian faith and culture. In an effort to address this struggle, this book explores relevant issues pertinent to the...

Description: Spirit and Nature is a collection of essays exploring how the resources of Christian spirituality can inform the practice of a more ecologically sustainable faith. Our current ecological situation calls for people of religious faith to reexamine the way they envision the practice of spirituality. As environmental ethicists have called us to reconsider the human-Earth relationship so that the planet is not seen as simply an endless supply of resources to fill human wants and needs, so these essays call us to reconsider spiritual practice as it relates to Earth's ecology. Rather...

Description: Recent studies have increasingly downplayed, and in a few cases even wholly denied, the influence of Martin Luther's theology of Law and Gospel on early English evangelicals such as William Tyndale. The impact of a late medieval Augustinian renaissance, Erasmian Humanism, the Reformed tradition, and Lollardy have all but eclipsed the more central role once attributed to Luther. Whiting reexamines these claims with a thorough reevaluation of Luther's theology of Law and Gospel in its historical context spanning twenty-five years, something entirely lacking in all previous studies....

Description: The Ecclesial Base Communities (CEBs) emerged in the wake of Latin American liberation theology and are often referred to as ""the Church of the Poor."" This book, however, addresses whether or not CEBs are indeed the Church of the Poor today. It is an open question now if Pentecostalism has in fact become the new church of the poor. To answer this question Philip Wingeier-Rayo conducted a one-year ethnographic study of both movements in a marginalized barrio in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Using the anthropological method of participant-observer, the author studied a Roman Catholic...

Description: Groans of the Spirit constitutes a rousing challenge to mainline churches and their practice of preaching. In this inventive work, Timothy Slemmons calls preachers beyond the formalism of the New Homiletic, and beyond the ethical proposals that have arisen in the frustrated struggle to transcend it, and toward what the author calls a ""penitential"" (reformed) homiletic. This new homiletical proposal is distinctive in that it faithfully adheres to the Christological content of preaching, finds its inspiration in the promise of the real presence of Christ, and trusts in the...

Description: ""That the God of Israel makes doers of us through the Torah is, in my view, the most beautiful thing we can thank him for: Every lethargy, every melancholy, indifference and moroseness is ended . . . Wherever the Torah claims us as doers, it confronts the nihilism that exclaims: There's nothing I can do. The Torah opposes anti-revolutionary laziness"" (F.-W. Marquardt). This anthology contains a selection of essays by Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (1928-2002), former professor of systematic theology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. As a student of Karl Barth in the...

Description: 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...

Description: 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...