This book investigates stories of Jesus' exorcisms in the Gospel of Mark. The story of Jesus' first public ministry in the synagogue (Mark 1:21-28) and the Beelzebul controversy story (3:20-30) are examined to understand the other acts of exorcism that Jesus performed (5:1-20; 7:24-30; 9:14-32). Both Mark 1:21-28 and 3:20-30 highlight Jesus as a teacher and as an eschatological exorcist. The latter stresses Jesus' own understandin ...
As leaders, our capacity to hear is often muddied by an inability to acknowledge our own insufficiencies and emotions. Jesus knew his God-given purpose and emotional character so deeply that he was able to operate out of these foundations boldly and instinctively. Jesus's infallible Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ) allowed him to focus on a third concept called «Audience Quotient» (AQ): an individual's ability to ...
A common theological critique of intelligent design (ID) centers on the problem of dysteleology. This problem states that because there are clear examples of suboptimal design in biology, life is probably not the product of an engineer-like designer. If it were, then one could argue that the designer is less than fully competent. ID critic Francisco Ayala expresses this critique in the following question: «If functional design manifests an Intel ...
Over the years there have been many treatments of Paul's theology that have focused on what the churches he wrote to were like, and what that might mean for today. However, what Paul says about relationships between churches has been frequently neglected, or only briefly considered. This book analyzes Paul's use of the word «church» as well as family imagery, holiness language, body imagery, and Paul's understanding of imitation a ...
As artists not uncommonly keep sketchbooks, so thinkers often write notebooks. Schubert Ogden is a thinker for whom writing notebooks has been an essential discipline throughout his long career of trying to think as a Christian systematic theologian. By his own confession, constantly writing down his thoughts so he could discover what he wanted to think has always been as necessary to learning how to think theologically as constantly reading in ...
The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details to the well-known stories of Jesus' conception, birth, and escape from the slaughter of innocents perpetrated by Herod the Great. Despite its n ...
God's Saved Israel examines identity in the Pauline corpus in terms of how Paul expresses the new identity in Christ in relation to the identity of ancient Israel. In this study, the way in which Paul uses the terms «Israel,» «Israelite,» and «Judean» is approached on the basis of the way in which these terms were used in the second temple period by both insiders and outsiders, rather than presupposing that Paul used it in a different way. ...
The Doctrine of the Eons: God's Immutable Plan is an account of how God will bring about the salvation and reconciliation of all mankind. Each chapter provides a theological account of how this will be accomplished, including dispelling common myths about God and focusing on the meaning of the word «immutable.» This leads to a discussion of the Hebrew and Greek definitions of «eon» and «eternal,» and we discover that neither the Old nor the ...
In a Christian culture driven by answer-knowing and movement-making, we have largely become addicted to figuring out the way and ensuring that others are walking it as well in order to be counted faithful. An addict to this end herself, Britney Winn Lee is no stranger to the question posed by the lawmaker in the story of the Good Samaritan: «Teacher, what must I do . . . ?» Here, she takes us through her journey of becoming every character in th ...
