Christianity Books

The essays in this volume aim to contribute to the newly developing academic subject of biblical spirituality. It is prompted by the belief that, although the Christian tradition has always nurtured an emphasis on spirituality rooted in the Bible and its...

Teaching on the sanctification of Christians using the difficult word perfection has been part of Christian spirituality through the centuries. The Fathers spoke of it and Augustine particularly contributed his penetrating analysis of human motivation in...

The present volume is the first in a five-volume study of church doctrine. The multivolume set will cover the major parts of church doctrine: Canon, God, Creation, Reconciliation, and Redemption. This first volume begins with an introduction on why...

A fresh wind of God's Spirit is blowing on the earth today, and as in times past, God is inviting us to raise our sails and move forward with the power and direction that reflects our commitment to God's will. Some are calling it "a new pentecost," but...

The narrative material of the Bible often presents characters engaged in actions without providing explicit guidance as to how those actions are intended to be evaluated. For example, Gideon lays out a fleece in an attempt to discern God's will, but is...

What is the way of the cross? Why does it create resistance? How do we answer objections to it? The revival of interest in Christ's kingdom and radical discipleship has produced a wave of discussions, but sometimes those discussions are scattered. This...

Do atonement theologies that focus on Jesus' death underwrite human violence? If so, we do well to rethink beliefs that this death is necessary to bring salvation. Focusing on the Bible's salvation story, Instead of Atonement argues for a logic of mercy...

This book seeks to place before a broad audience essays on Jeremiah and the book of Jeremiah. A poem featuring Jeremiah is also included. There are technical essays on text criticism, form criticism, and rhetorical criticism; scholarly articles on the...

Saul was the first king of Israel (1029-1005 BCE). His life was full of drama and tribulations, and ended tragically. The book of Samuel portrays Saul as a colorful personality with excesses--as the classic tragic hero. Moreover, Saul's excellent virtues...

In a wide-ranging meditation on the Cain and Abel narrative, Mark Scarlata draws out theological motifs relevant to Christian discipleship in a modern Western context. Taking his cue from Augustine's City of God, Scarlata brings to light what it means...

Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation helps parents, youth workers, and congregations cultivate purpose and vocation in youth and young adults. Recent findings disclose a pervasive sense of purposelessness that threatens young adults'...

Borrowing from the ancient rabbinic use of midrash as a means of opening Scripture to students, James Lowry has chosen six texts from among those in which he believes Mark deliberately left silences. The author is convinced Mark hoped his readers would...

Terrence Malick's stunning film The Tree of Life is a modern Job story, an exploration of suffering and glory, an honest look at strife within a Texas family in the 1950s. In Shining Glory, Peter J. Leithart examines the biblical and theological motifs...

This book proposes new and comprehensive chiastic structures as well as new unifying themes for the often-neglected New Testament letters of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. In accord with these structures, which organize the oral performance of these letters...

How can people taking diametrically opposing positions on contemporary issues--dividing both religious communities and society--quote the Bible in support of their views? What does it mean to make a claim that the Bible says or teaches something? Why...

First-timeTranslation in English- - - The relationship between Christians and Jews has often been very tense, with misunderstandings of Paul's teachings contributing to the problem. Jacques Ellul's careful exegesis of Romans 9-11 demonstrates how God has...

As the world watched the biggest global epidemic in history evolve, many anticipated that Christians would embrace those who were affected just as Jesus during his time embraced those who were sick and dying. Mostly, the Christian church stood back and...

The Gospels of the Marginalized provides an exciting new study of three of the most maligned figures in the New Testament story of Jesus: Thomas, usually considered the quintessential doubter among the disciples; Mary Magdalene, characterized as a...

The Christ Letter is a conversation partner for pastors and students of the Bible who want to wrestle with the meaning of the biblical text for Christian living today. Scholarly commentaries perform an essential task, but they often leave today's...

-Can an orthodox Christian, committed to the historic faith of the church and the authority of the Bible, be a universalist? -Is it possible to believe that salvation is found only by grace, through faith in Christ, and yet to maintain that in the end...

"Does theology have any relevance to the problem of life and death?" According to John Heywood Thomas the answer is an unequivocal yes. A largely personal expression of this conviction precedes the argument's exposition, which is then stated first of all...

This book attempts a close reading of the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, story by story, with one eye on her use of the Bible, and her view of the Bible in relation to her own work. After introductory chapters on O'Connor's markings in her own Roman...

In A Transformative Reading of the Bible Yung Suk Kim raises critical questions about human transformation in biblical studies. What is transformation? How are we transformed when we read biblical stories? Are all transformative aspects equally valid?...

Telling the Whole Story is both a book about preaching and reading the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. John C. Holbert (PhD in Hebrew Bible) was a longtime teacher of preaching and Hebrew Bible at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist...

Bury the Dead is a collection of personal encounters with death: stories of Alzheimer's, AIDS, cancer, hospice, suicide, murder, systemic violence, genocide, and war. In this book a teenager tenderly washes her mother's body, a community organizer cries...

In 1958, American historian of religion Morton Smith made an astounding discovery in the Mar Saba monastery in Jerusalem. Copied into the back of a seventeenth-century book was a lost letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE) that...

Karl Barth's Christology provides a key to out-narrating the Deus absconditus, which, as Rustin Brian contends, is in fact the god of modernity. Included in this is the rejection of the logical and philosophical systems that allow for the modern...

If worship is God centered,and God is the Trinity, then worship should be Trinity centered.Worshipping Trinity explores the meaning and implications of that simple claim. Written for church leaders, worship leaders, and songwriters, as well as for those...

Humor smiles and chuckles and sometimes laughs so loud in virtually every book of the Bible, so it's remarkable how readers manage to overlook it. It's also unfortunate. Humor graces biblical texts at so many levels that to miss the humor is to miss not...

This ethnographic study focuses on the religious imagery and practices of a sample of Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques in the greater Los Angeles area. As a way of expanding interfaith dialogue, it is framed as a conversation between the largely...

""The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground . . ."" (Gen 2:7). Made of dust, we humans are thoroughly physical beings. We are dusty earthlings. As such, we are also ecological beings, or rather eco-physical beings, firmly embedded in and...

This revised edition of The Family Metaphor in Jesus' Teaching examines the family metaphors for God (Father) and for believers ("children," "brothers") that Jesus chose to use. Jesus not only held up a child as an example of receptivity, but he defended...

What is the role of the church in ministering to the sick? This book argues that it is not what is now called the "healing ministry," with its frequent claims of remarkable cures from physical illness. Little critical attention seems to have been paid to...

In this innovative work, Mowinckel employs the phenomenology of religion to investigate how religion was lived and experienced in ancient Israel and Judah. Using his considerable expertise, he draws important comparisons between the religious practices...

Should women be priests?Should women submit to their husbands?Is premarital sex okay?Inflammatory questions such as these have splintered Christianity and polarized the church. In Sex, Gender, and Christianity, a cadre of seasoned college professors...

Liturgical Elements for Reformed Worship is a series of four liturgical resources: three consisting of liturgical elements for Years A, B, and C, and a fourth, the first such resource to support the implementation of Year D: A Quadrennial Supplement to...

In Building a Community of Interpreters Walter Dickhaut argues that the practice of reading (and, by extension, listening) is no less creative than the practice of writing (and speaking); readers and hearers, just as much as writers and speakers, are...

The church is unsure of itself in the twenty-first century's media culture. Some Christians denounce digital media while others embrace the latest gadgets and apps as soon as they appear. Many of us are stumbling along amidst the tweets, status updates,...

Americans live their lives through institutions: government, businesses, schools, clubs, and houses of worship. But many Americans are wary of the control these groups--especially government and business--exercise over their lives.Flea Market Jesus...

Health is God's original created intent: whole persons, healthy relationships, a thriving environment, and ongoing interaction with himself. In the Bible, human health is body-based, community-based, and deeply integrated in a relationship with God's...

In 1972, Will Campbell published an issue of the Committee of Southern Churchmen's journal, Katallagete, to shed light on the US prison system. None could anticipate how the system would expand exponentially in the next four decades. Today, the US...

What does geography have to do with the incarnation of God and with our spiritual lives as Christians? We will embark on a theological road trip that explores how geographies are at the heart of understanding of God's incarnation in the world. It is no...

Those within the free church tradition have often appealed to the notion of the invisible church to account for the unity of the Body of Christ. A growing number of free church theologians, however, are giving increased attention to the importance of...

Should Christianity's theological face remain largely European and North American in the twenty-first century in the wake of the expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America? The question about the "theological face" of...

The ongoing global financial crisis was not simply the fault of the financial sector. Bankers, households, and governments had all entered a spiral of greed, selfishness, and impatience in pursuit of their respective aims of higher remuneration, greater...

The disunity of the church is a social and theological scandal for it betrays the prayer of Jesus that we "will be one . . . so that the world will believe" (John 17:21). As a Baptist whose academic background focused on the Orthodox Church and whose...

There are forms of knowing that seem either to come from a parting or to require one. Paradigmatically in Genesis, Adam parts from God in order to join in knowledge with his partner, the flesh of his flesh, and the result is a bereft but not unpromising...

Liberating Biblical Study is a unique collaboration of pioneering biblical scholars, social-change activists, and movement-based artists. Well known and unknown, veterans and newcomers, these diverse practitioners of justice engage in a lively and...