How can one escape God's wrath and gain eternal life? On this crucial theological question, Paul differs from other members of the second-Temple Jewish community. Their soteriology is synergistic: for them, though eschatological salvation is due to God's merciful removal of human guilt, obedience to the Law is also indispensable. The divine and the human co-operate. Paul however believes that under such a scheme anything less than perfect obedience to the Law is futile. In consequence, if there is to be salvation for sinful humans, it must be a salvation independent of all human effort and...
How can one escape God's wrath and gain eternal life? On this crucial theological question, Paul differs from other members of the second-Temple Jewis...
Synopsis: The God of classical Christian faith is radically transcendent--utterly beyond understanding and words. So if God is to be known it must be in the luminous darkness of unknowing. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources--biblical, patristic, and medieval--Barry D. Smith identifies and explores seven ways of expressing the otherness of God in classical Christian thinking. By allowing historical theologians to speak for themselves, he shows how an aversion to ontotheology long precedes postmodernism. The book first lays out the Old Testament and New Testament foundations for...
Synopsis: The God of classical Christian faith is radically transcendent--utterly beyond understanding and words. So if God is to be known it must be ...
About the Contributor(s): Barry D. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Crandall University in New Brunswick, Canada. He is the author of The Indescribable God: Divine Otherness in Christian Theology (2012) and What Must We Do to Be Saved? Paul Parts Company with His Jewish Heritage (2007).
About the Contributor(s): Barry D. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Crandall University in New Brunswick, Canada. He is the a...
Barry D. Smith studies the salvation-historical meaning of Jesus' death (commonly known as the atonement) in the New Testament. Smith works his way through the four theories of the doctrine of the atonement that have emerged in the history of Christian theology: moral influence, governmental, satisfaction and Christus victor theories.
Smith works from the premise that, for a theory of the atonement to be successful, no biblical data may be omitted or distorted, and the generalized concepts used to comprehend the biblical data must be easily seen as implicit in the data. From this...
Barry D. Smith studies the salvation-historical meaning of Jesus' death (commonly known as the atonement) in the New Testament. Smith works his way...
