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Part of 'Risen Hope' church history series
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Christian communities today face enormous challenges in the new contexts and teachings that try to redefine what churches should be. Christians look to the New Testament for a pattern for the church, but the New Testament does not present a totally uniform picture of the structure, leadership, and sacraments practiced by first-century congregations. There was a unity of the Christian communities centered on the teaching that Jesus is the Christ, whom God has raised from the dead and has enthroned as Lord, yet not every assembly did exactly the same thing and saw themselves in exactly the same way. Rather, in the New Testament we find a collage of rich theological insights into what it means to be the church. When leaders of today see this diversity, they can look for New Testament ecclesiologies that are most relevant to the social and cultural context in which their community lives. This volume of essays, written with the latest scholarship, highlights the uniqueness of individual ecclesiologies of the various New Testament documents and their core unifying themes.
Part of new 'Risen Hope' church history series
Enlarged print edition now available! Tom Wright's guide to Luke, which includes a wealth of information and background detail, provides real insights for our understanding of the story of Jesus and its implications for the reader. His clear style is accessible for new readers of the Bible, as well as to those who are further on. His exciting new translation of the biblical text brings to life, passage by passage, the immediacy and drama of Luke's Gospel. Tom Wright has undertaken a tremendous task: to provide guides to all the books of the New Testament, and to include in them his own translation of the entire text. Each short passage is followed by a highly readable discussion with background information, useful explanations and suggestions, and thoughts as to how the text can be relevant to our lives today. A glossary is included at the back of the book. The series is suitable for group study, personal study, or daily devotions.
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Luke's christology is carefully designed. Luke portrays the exalted Jesus as God's co-equal by the kinds of things he does and says from heaven. Through the Holy Spirit, the divine name and personal manifestations, Jesus behaves toward people in Luke-Acts as does Yahweh in the Old Testament. His power and knowledge are supreme. Jesus sovereignly reigns over Israel, the church, the powers of darkness and the world. Luke deepens this portrait by depicting Jesus as deity who by nature behaves as servant: the earthly Jesus acted among his people as one who serves; the exalted Jesus continues serving his people by strengthening and encouraging them in their witness of him to the world. That the believers in Acts resemble the way Jesus behaved in the Gospel means that they too are now imaging some of his servant-like character in their witness of him.
Christians chronically and desperately need prophecy, says award winning biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson. In this and every age, the church needs the bold proclamation of God's transforming vision to challenge its very human tendency toward expediency and self interest -- to jolt it into new insight and energy. For Johnson, the New Testament books Luke and Acts provide that much-needed jolt to conventional wisdom. To read Luke-Acts as a literary unit, he says, is to uncover a startling prophetic vision of Jesus and the church -- one that imagines a reality very different from the one humans would construct on their own. Johnson identifies in Luke's writings an ongoing call for today's church, grounded in the prophetic ministry of Jesus Christ, to embody and enact God's vision for the world--from publisher's website.