Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Christian Theology - Christology

Should the dissimilarity between Jesus and early Christianity or between Jesus and Judaism be the central criteria for the historical Jesus? Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter argue that the criterion of dissimilarity does not do justice to the single most important result of more than two-hundred years of Jesus research: that the historical Jesus belongs to both Judaism and Christianity. The two authors propose a criterion of historical plausibility so that historical phenomenon under question can be considered authentic so long as it can be plausibly understood in its Jewish context and...

How can the various pieces of what you believe about Christ fit together coherently? This is the basic question of Christology and this introduction to Christology traces the broad outlines and nuances laid out by the father of modern theology--Friedrich Schleiermacher. In straightforward language, Catherine Kelsey moves back and forth between the groundbreaking thought of Schleiermacher and a series of helpful exercises which enable readers to spell out their own responses to the central question of Christian theology. This book offers a truly unique approach to Christology.

In Pastoral Care in the Classical Tradition, Andrew Purves argued that pastoral care and theology has long ignored Scripture and Christian doctrine, and pastoral practice has become secularized in both method and goal, the fiefdom of psychology and the social sciences. He builds further on this idea here, presenting a christological basis for ministry and pastoral theology.

In From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, Maurice Casey suggests a new theory as to why New Testament Christology developed as it did. In making his argument, Casey pays particular attention to the culture of Jesus and the earliest Christians.

Building on Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama, this volume is part two of a three-part project surveying essential topics of Christian theology through the lens of covenant. In Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology, Michael Horton explores the topics that are generally grouped under the doctrines of God, humanity, and Christology. Rather than attempt a general systematic theology, Horton revisits these topics at the places where covenant and eschatology offer the most promising insight and where there is the most contemporary interest and debate.

In this series of reflections on the mystery of Jesus and the questions that surround him, noted New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks redirects the course of the Jesus debates. Insisting that we cease focusing on who the historical Jesus was and ask instead, who is Christ? Meeks demonstrates with electric and lucid prose that Jesus is not a permanent artifact whose precise nature can be traced back through history but, rather, a figure whose identity continues to emerge as contemporary persons engage him in their daily lives.

According to renowned biblical scholar Rudolf Schnackenburg, a truly historical portrait of Jesus is unattainable because the primary sources written about Jesus were not historical records as such. What is attainable, however, is a faith interpretation of Jesus' life and works, gleaned from the writings of those closest to the life of Christ: the four Gospels. Thus, Schnackenburg provides a full faith interpretation of Jesus as each Gospel community portrayed him. A surprising number of commonalities about Jesus are revealed, and a fully recognizable portrait of Jesus emerges.

In this groundbreaking work, John Hick refutes the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Hick, Jesus did not teach what was to become the orthodox understanding of him: that he was God incarnate who became human to die for the sins of the world. Further, the traditional dogma of Jesus' two natures--human and divine--cannot be explained satisfactorily, and worse, it has been used to justify great human evils. Thus, the divine incarnation, he explains, is best understood metaphorically. Nevertheless, he concludes that Christians can still understand Jesus as...

Theologies have often pointed to the cross as a place of suffering and sacrifice, while feminist critiques have frequently argued against interpretations of the cross as patriarchal valorizing of suffering. Wonhee Anne Joh points toward a new interpretation of the cross as a place of love, where God and humanity come together in a surprising way. Interpreting the cross as performing a double gesture that has a subversive effect, Joh argues that the cross works simultaneously to pay homage to and to menace complex oppressive powers. Utilizing the Korean concept of jeong, Joh...

Challenging our expectations and forcing us to look anew at our reality, Erik Kolbell demonstrates how the eight pillars of the Beatitudes--meekness, empathy, righteousness, peace, persecution, purity, poverty, and simplicity--are still valuable codes of conduct for our individual and collective lives. In this engaging book, he masterfully shows the timeless value in these poetic and paradoxical words from Jesus and how they offer relief and direction in our all-too-confusing world.

Here, M. Eugene Boring traces the role that early Christian prophets played in the transmission of sayings of Jesus and in the way these sayings were taken up into the canonical Gospels. He also examines Jesus' sayings to uncover the imprint that any might bear of having been handed on by early Christian prophets. Convincingly, he shows that early Christian prophets re-presented authentic sayings of Jesus, or modified Jesus' sayings, or even uttered new sayings in the name of the exalted Jesus. Clearly written and closely reasoned, this book sheds light on a much neglected area of Gospel...

What did "Son of God," "Messiah," and "Lord," mean to the first Christians when they used these words to describe their beliefs about Jesus? In this book Margaret Barker explores the possibility that, in the expectations and traditions of first-century Palestine, these titles belonged together, and that the first Christians fit Jesus' identity into an existing pattern of belief. She claims that pre-Christian Judaism was not monotheistic and that the roots of Christian Trinitarian theology lie in a pre-Christian Palestinian belief about angels--a belief derived from the ancient religion of...

Recent years have seen an explosion of talk about the historical Jesus from scholarly settings as well as media outlets (including sensational TV documentaries and national magazines). How is the student of the Bible to assess these various claims about Jesus? And what difference does knowledge of his time and place make for Christian faith, theological thinking, and historical research? James Charlesworth presents the solid results of modern study into the life and times of Jesus, especially regarding the role of the Essenes, the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the nature of...

Living in the cultural borderlands, an important aspect of the Hispanic experience is the languages used: Spanish and English. Pedraja examines how the way Hispanics speak about Jesus and God in Spanish creates different theological imagery than speaking in English does. All languages...