In 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist Government became the ruling party in South Africa and instituted the brutal system known as apartheid. To maintain their power, Afrikaners drew on Christian scripture and traditions to create self-justifying religious narratives that supported their oppressive ideologies, prohibiting inclusion and suppressing pluralism. In time these Afrikaner-Christian narratives began to unravel as counter-narratives within the Christian tradition influenced the Black church...
Divino Companero explores the necessary foundations for constructing a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology. Although traditionally Pentecostal Christologies have been anchored in a two-nature Chalcedonian model, Alfaro proposes that Spirit-Christology is a more suitable paradigm for a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology, provided it is grounded in the experience, faith, and worship of its community and oriented toward liberative praxis. After reviewing the christological reflection of early...
Where did Paul find leaders for his new churches? How did he instruct and develop them? What processes took place to stabilize the churches and institute their new leadership? This book carves a fresh trail in leadership studies by looking at leadership development from a group-dynamic, social identity perspective. Paul engages the cultural leadership patterns of his key local leaders, publicly affirming, correcting, and improving those patterns to conform to a Christlike pattern of sacrificial...
C. S. Lewis was concerned about an aspect of the problem of evil he called subjectivism: the tendency of one's perspective to move towards self-referentialism and utilitarianism. In C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil, Jerry Root provides a holistic reading of Lewis by walking the reader through all of Lewis's published work as he argues Lewis's case against subjectivism. Furthermore, the book reveals that Lewis consistently employed fiction to make his case, as virtually all of his...
". . . that you may become partakers in the divine nature" 2 Peter 1:4 "The theme of deification intimately touches on human identity and the actualization of humanity's ultimate purpose. It is predominantly an anthropological and soteriological expression of Christian theology. At the same time, it testifies to the identity of a Christian God, divine universal design, and God's economy, where the trinitarian and christological apprehension receives the central place....
What does it mean to be created in the image of God? How can the existence of evil be explained if we believe in a good and loving God? What is the precise meaning of the notion of original sin? How can God transfer the guilt of humanity to one innocent individual, or should we rather dispense with the notion of penal satisfaction? The first part of Created in the Image of God grapples in a concise manner with these and other elusive and controversial theological and anthropological issues. The...
Since the publication of Sang Hyun Lee's revolutionary commentary, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, scholars have considered the possibilities of understanding Jonathan Edwards's thought in terms of dispositional laws, forces, and habits. While some scholars reject the notion of a dispositional ontology in Edwards, others have taken the concept of disposition in his thought beyond the usage the Northampton minister ever indicated, especially with respect to...
The Practice of the Body of Christ begins a conversation between «apocalyptic» interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in «virtue ethics.» It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the...
When asked about his work for social change, one Presbyterian elder and activist sighed, «You always have the feeling that you're attacking an iceberg with an ice pick. . . . But still, some people do listen, and it does some good. As they say, even glaciers move every now and then.» The work for social change is long, arduous, and yields only the smallest of results. What sustains religious social activists while they chip away at social change? This book examines the practice of social...
A strong critique of traditional atonement theology is found in the work of many contemporary feminist theologians. This approach, in large part, is related to the notion of women's experience–a category that is used widely within feminist theology. But what is women's experience and how does it affect feminist theology, particularly views on the atonement? The category of women's experience is pivotal to feminist theology, yet its use may lead to models of atonement that place...
The eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards has become popular again in contemporary theological discussion. Central to Edwards' theology is his concept of beauty. Delattre wrote the standard work on this topic half a century ago. However, Delattre approaches Edwards mainly as a philosopher, and he does not address how Edwards employs the concept of beauty to explain and defend traditional Reformed doctrines. Recent writings by McClymond, Holmes, and others have shown that...