The Gospel of Matthew recounts several interactions between Jesus and «marginal» women. The urban, relatively wealthy community to which Matthew writes faces issues relating to a number of internal problems including whether or how it will keep Jesus's inclusive vision to honor rural Israelite and non-Israelite outcast women in its midst. Will the Matthean community be faithful to the social vision of Jesus's unconventional kin group? ...
In Balanced Living: Don't Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness, Robert Knight develops the theme of balance as central to good mental health, to moral and spiritual health, to emotional well-being, and to social functioning. This theme emerges from his more than thirty years of experience as a Christian minister, as a counselor, as a teacher and clinical supervisor of counselors, as well as from experience as a management and human-relati ...
Writing with the pastor and student in mind, Walter Brueggemann provides guidance for interpreting Old Testament texts. He offers both advice for the interpreter as well as examples of working with different sorts of passages: from narratives, prophecies, and Psalms. He also demonstrates how to work thematically, drawing together threads from different traditions. His goal is to work through the rhetoric of these passages to reach toward theolog ...
Prison is a strange land, a land of deep heartache and sadness. Over two million people are serving prison time in America. Millions more are carrying the mark of prison as those who were formerly incarcerated, including large numbers of men and women who have been released on parole. In the midst of such human misery, when «loosened tongues» are freed to sing of God's redemptive love, grief is diminished and the prison loses its power. ...
"To pursue the matter of «revelation in context,» I will address an exceedingly difficult text in the Old Testament, Joshua 11. The reason for taking up this text is to deal with the often asked and troublesome question: What shall we do with all the violence and bloody war that is done in the Old Testament in the name of Yahweh? The question reflects a sense that these texts of violence are at least an embarrassment, are morally repulsive, ...
More than at any time in the past, today's evangelicals struggle to understand what the essence of the Christian faith really is. The basic teachings of Jesus Christ have been lost in many pulpits and have been replaced with feel good doctrines foreign to God's Word. Christians who want to defend their faith must first have a basic understanding of what it is and how to support it with Scriptural proofs. This book assembles the fundame ...
The Gospel of Mark has long been regarded as «The Gospel of Action.» It contains more miracles and supernatural phenomena than Matthew, Luke, or John. In fact, a third of Mark's Gospel is centered on the miraculous deeds of Jesus. Mark is clearly more concerned with what Jesus did than with what He said. From the vision that Jesus experienced at His baptism to the supernatural events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection, Dr. Spell w ...
In this thought-provoking book, born-again Christian Denis O. Lamoureux argues that the God of the Bible created the universe and life through evolution–an ordained, sustained, and design-reflecting natural process. In other words, evolution is not the result of blind chance and our creation is not a mistake. Lamoureux challenges the popular assumption that God disclosed scientific facts in the opening chapters of Scripture thousands of years be ...
As a historical inquiry and synthesis, this intellectual history is the first study to apply the ideal-type or model-building methodology of Otto Hintze (1861-1940) to Western historical thought or to what R. G. Collingwood called «The Idea of History,» for it contains succinct and useful models for seeing and teaching classical, Christian, and modern professional historiography. Religion and the Rise of History is also the first work to sugges ...