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If you feel caught between the traditional church and the emerging church, read Jim Belcher. He paints a picture of an alternate, "deep" church--a missional church committed to both tradition and contemporary culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also adhering to creeds and confessions.
"You look like hell," gasped a woman on TV to a disheveled man. What did she mean? What did she think hell looked like? What did the term hell contribute to her portrait? This is an example of the widespread trivializing of a once-powerful term to depict eternal damnation to mere minutia. Why does God damn the wicked to eternal punishment? Or does He? How is His judgment just? Why and how do theologians strive to modify the results of his judgment? How are we to evaluate views of hell that either soften or deny it? The doctrine of punishment of the unredeemed after death originates in the Old Testament, is developed in the intertestamental Jewish literature, and culminates in the divinely au...
Paul Helm is a distinguished philosopher, with particular interests in the philosophy of religion. His work covers some of the most important aspects of the field as it has developed in the last thirty years with particular contributions to metaphysics, religious epistemology, and philosophical theology. In celebration of Helm’s life’s work, Reason in the Service of Faith brings together a range of his essays which reflect these central concerns of his thought. Over thirty of Helm's selected essays and four unpublished articles are gathered into five parts: Metaphilosophical Issues; Action, Change, and Personal Identity; Epistemology; God; and Creation, Providence, and Prayer. The volume is prefaced with a short editorial introduction, and ends with an extensive bibliography of Helm’s published works. Demonstrating the important connection between Helm’s theological and philosophical interests across his body of work, this collection is a remarkable resource for scholars of religion, philosophy, and theology.
The doctrine of creation is obviously one of the first things, but it is also one of the last things since the world to come is also, by definition, creation. The simple truth that it is so is incontestable since neither the world to come nor those whose dwelling it is built to be are God. But the way in which this is so is the subject of a long, long debate in Christendom, with the question of whether and in what degree the life to come is continuous with this one. How common is the “thing” in “first thing” and “last thing”? Our answer to this question conditions our answer to many others: the relationship of philosophy to theology, of the church to the saeculum, of the kingdom of Christ to the visible church. This volume brings together the careful investigations of established and emerging historians and theologians, exploring how these questions have been addressed at different points in Christian history, and what they mean for us today. Includes contributions from James Bratt, E.J. Hutchinson, Matthew Tuininga, Andrew Fulford, Laurence O'Donnell, Benjamin Miller, Brian Auten, and Joseph Minich.
The connection between Christian ethics and liturgy has been on the research agenda for some decades now. Liturgy and Ethics addresses this issue departing from the particularity of the Reformed tradition and its potential for contributing to the discussion. The volume offers in-depth studies of how to understand God’s acting in worship, the centrality of justice, and the formative meaning of the liturgy, and relates these reflections to various moral issues and contemporary liturgical practices. In combining a specific theological approach with a broad disciplinary treatment of the topics this volume aims to push forward the scholarly discussion on liturgy and ethics in significant ways.
A close conceptual analysis of Herman Bavinck’s (1854-1921) four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, this book explores what is broadly understood as the central motif of his work, the “organic” relationship between nature and grace, and highlights an overlooked aspect to this motif. Bavinck’s view of nature and grace is not only rooted in his Trinitarian theology, but, more importantly, in his covenant theology. Exploring Bavinck’s link between the doctrine of the imago Dei to an eschatology uniquely provided by Reformed covenant theology, this book serves to illumine the rationale behind his signature dogma that “grace restores and perfects nature.” Given the link between the nature/grace motif and covenant theology, this book raises the question whether the one can stand without the other.
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Making the presence of God known in the world goes to the very heart of the church's purpose. Yet it is a formidable challenge. How can the church make the presence and glory of God a reality in a world that both denies God and hates the church? By the church bearing the image of Jesus Christ in the world through word and deed for, as the unknown author of Hebrews declares, Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being (Hebrews 1:3). It is not the primary purpose of the church to specialize in economic, social, or political issues but rather to proclaim the good news of what God has accomplished in and through Jesus Christ. When the church quits proclaiming C...
To survey harsh criticisms against Brian Douglas McLaren (1956‒), readers gain the inaccurate impression that he is a heretical relativist who denies objective truth and logic. While McLaren’s inflammatory and provocative writing style is partly to blame, this study also suspects that his critics base much of their analyses on only small portions of his overall corpus. The result becomes a caricature of McLaren’s actual philosophy of religion. What is argued in this book is that McLaren’s philosophy of religion suggests a faith-based intersubjective relationship with the divine ought to result in an existential appropriation of Christ’s religio-ethical teachings. When subjectively ...
Leading Southern Baptist and Evangelical scholars (R. Albert Mohler Jr., Ed Stetzer, Timothy George, etc.) discuss the most significant challenges within denominationalism and evangelicalism.