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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.
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.
One view that perennially springs up among biblical scholars is that Paul was the inventor of Christianity, or that Paul introduced the idea of a divine Christ to a church that earlier had simply followed the ethical teaching of a human Jesus. In this book Jerry Sumney responds to that claim by examining how, in reality, Paul drew on what the church already believed and confessed about Jesus. As he explores how Paul's theology relates to that of the broader early church, Sumney identifies where in the Christian tradition distinctive theological claims about Christ, his death, the nature of salvation, and eschatology first seem to appear. Without diminishing significant differences, Sumney describes what common traditions and beliefs various branches of the early church shared and compares them to Paul's thought. Sumney interacts directly with arguments made by those who claim Paul as the inventor of Christianity and approaches the questions raised by that claim in a fresh way.
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.
Whether he is asking about the role of New Testament exegesis among other academic disciplines, the suppression of anger in Pauline writings, or at what point came to designate a written "Gospel," James A. Kelhoffer's patient and careful exegesis provides an intriguing lens through which to view early Christianity. Many struggles of early Christ believers, he finds, reflect intra-ecclesial struggles to establish the legitimacy of a view or a religious leader vis-a-vis competing ideologies or leaders. Those already familiar with Kelhoffer's Miracle and Mission (2000), The Diet of John the Baptist (2005) and Persecution, Persuasion and Power (2010) will find in this volume refreshing insights suggested but not developed in his other books.
In this three-volume set, B.J. Oropeza offers the most thorough examination in recent times on the subject of apostasy in the New Testament. The study examines each book of the New Testament and identifies the emerging Christian community in danger, the nature of apostasy that threatens the congregations, and the consequences of defection. Oropeza compares the various perspectives of the New Testament communities to arrive at the idea that the earliest followers of Christ did not believe and teach alike on the issue.
This book examines the conjunction between migration and biblical texts with a focus on Latinx histories and experiences. Essays reflect upon Latinxs, the Bible, and migration in different ways: some consider how the Bible is used in the midst of, or in response to, Latinx experiences and histories of migration; some use Latinx histories and experiences of migration to examine Biblical texts in both First and Second Testaments; some consider the “Bible” as a phenomenological set of texts that respond to and/or compel migration. Cultural, literary, and postcolonial theories inform the analysis, as does the exploration of how migrant groups themselves scripturalize their biblical and cultural texts.