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Within these pages a younger generation of Orthodox scholars in America takes up the perennial task of transmitting the meaning of Christianity to a particular time and culture. This collection of twelve essays, as the title Thinking Through Faith implies, is the result of six years of reflective conversation and collaboration regarding core beliefs of the Orthodox faith, tenets that the authors present from fresh perspectives that appeal to reason and spiritual sensibilities alike. Subjects covered include: The Kingdom of God, The Foundations of Noetic Prayer, The Discipline of Theology, Understanding Pastoral Care in the Early Church, Orthodox Theologies of Women and Ordained Ministry, Reading the Lives of the Saints, The Meaning and Place of Death in an Orthodox Ethical Framework, Confession, Desire and Emotions, International Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Proselytism, "Typologies" of Orthopraxy, Byzantine Liturgy as God's Family at Prayer, and the Orthodox Church in the Twentieth-Century.
Gangland Australia details the exploits of an unforgettable cast of villains, crooks and mobsters who have made up the criminal and gangland scene in Australia for over two centuries. In this fully updated and bestselling book, Britain's top true crime author James Morton and barrister and legal broadcaster Susanna Lobez track the rise and fall of Australia's talented contract killers, brothel keepers, club owners, robbers, bikers, standover men, conmen and drug dealers, and also examine the role of police, politicians and lawyers who have helped and hindered the growth of criminal empires. Vivid and explosive, Gangland Australia is compulsive reading.
This volume is a collection of scholarly studies honoring Prof.Dr. David. E. Aune on his 65th birthday. Its title, The New Testament and Early Christian Literature in Greco-Roman Context: Studies in Honor of David E. Aune, reflects Prof. Aune's academic training, interests, and extensive publications. The volume's studies investigate a range of topics within the Pauline correspondence, Gospels, Apocalypse of John, and other early Christian writings with insights drawn from Greco-Roman culture and Hellenistic Judaism. Thus, the studies make use of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, magic, medicine, moral philosophy, iconography, archaeology, religious cults, and social conventions while also utilizing social-historical, social-scientific, literary-critical, and rhetorical-critical methodologies, thereby adding an interdisciplinary dimension to the volume. These groundbreaking studies have been written by prominent international scholars and are published here for the first time.
In 1 Cor 8-10, Paul provides instruction about interactions with idols, and his practical instruction is based on his theology, which was adopted from Hellenistic Judaism and adapted radically in the light of Jesus Christ. Trent A. Rogers shows that understanding Paul's ethical reasoning is helped significantly by understanding how he and his predecessors represent God in their arguments. - back of book.
Early Judaism and early Christianity emerged during the Hellenistic and early Roman imperial era. They were, naturally, confronted with the Hellenistic and the Roman religion. The question therefore arose as to whether Jews or Christians were free to participate in religious activities alien to the religious heritage of their own. In his articles, Karl-Gustav Sandelin presents documentary material showing that this problem was a burning issue within Judaism from the beginning of the Hellenistic period until the end of the first century C.E. Several Jewish individuals converted to the Hellenistic or the Roman religion. Such behavior was also discussed and generally condemned, for example by the Books of Maccabees and authors such as Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. A similar problem is to be found in the New Testament, notably in the letters of Paul, especially in the first letter to the Corinthians and in the Revelation of John.
Paul's letter to the Corinthians provides an exclusive quick look into the social and political life of a young Christian congregation in a Greco-Roman environment during the early decades when Christianity was emerging. The letter provides a range and richness of information regarding the early church that is unparalleled by any other writing in the New Testament. Much effort has gone into reconstructing the Christian church at Corinth; more recently, attention has focused on the Corinthian congregation itself and its influence towards the community of the Roman Empire. The scholarly picture of the Corinthian community throughout the period of modern interpretation has been far from constant. It has been continually altered as interpretative fashions have changed.
Reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences: liberating the past to speak to us in another way. Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for “reason” and Jerusalem for “faith.” And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point—“year one”—that divides time into before and after is equally arbirtrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than ...
The first comprehensive analysis of non-canonical influences—Jewish, non-Jewish, and early Christian—on the formation of the New Testament writings. In Apocryphal Prophets and Athenian Poets: Noncanonical Influences on the New Testament, Gregory R. Lanier presents in one volume an overarching compendium and analysis of over five hundred relevant instances of non-Old-Testament influence on the New Testament across three categories—Jewish, non-Jewish (mostly Greco-Roman), and early Christian (pre-canonical). The abundance of non-canonical influences on the New Testament testifies to the breadth of apostolic cultural engagement and the scope and pace of information exchange in the early Christian circles. This comprehensive work will allow scholars and students to give closer attention to the sheer complexity of the crisscrossing lines of direct and indirect influences on the New Testament Scriptures.
The question of how leadership and authority functioned in the Pauline church remains one of the most polarizing issues in New Testament scholarship today. On the one side are egalitarian and counterimperial readings that stake their interpretation of the liberating gospel upon a depiction of the Pauline church as radically countercultural with regard to leadership and authority. On the other side are authoritarian readings that just as easily conceive of Paul as fully embedded within the cultural conceptions and structures of leadership and authority in vogue across the Greco-Roman world. This study employs social-science criticism to construct a model of ancient patronage conventions and power-exchange dynamics in the Greco-Roman world, and this model is then applied to 1 Corinthians. This study finds that when Paul addresses his own apostolic relationship to the Corinthians, he tends toward reinscribing traditional hierarchies, but that when Paul addresses relationships between participants of the Corinthian assembly, he tends toward overturning them.
Hardening hearts. Blinding eyes. Sending deceitful spirits. Crafting vessels of wrath. Few will deny that certain biblical passages make claims about God that are difficult to accept. But perhaps the most troubling are the verses that describe God as influencing individuals or groups towards wicked behavior for the purpose of condemning them. What are readers to do with these texts? In Vessels of Wrath, Richard M. Blaylock tackles the thorny subject of divine reprobating activity (DRA). Through an exhaustive, biblical-theological study of the Christian canon’s witness, Blaylock argues that the Bible does not present DRA as an insignificant or monolithic concept; instead, the biblical authors showcase both the significance and the complexity of DRA in a variety of ways. The book aims to help readers of the Bible to wrestle with the Scriptures so that they might come to better understand its testimony to this mysterious and awesome divine activity.