In contemporary public discourse, the supposedly comprehensive explanatory power of reason is used to justify a thoroughgoing suspicion of religion. In recent decades, the critiques of postmodernism have generated a different kind of suspicion by construing history as a process that is too arbitrary to be narrated–either by modern reason or by religion. In light of these developments, a question arises regarding the appropriate theological respo ...
The Christian Bible is fundamentally a story. Writers, painters, sculptors, artists, and indeed, people of all walks of life live by the telling of their stories. Stories are the most basic mode of human communication. Thus it is vital to ask why Christians and above all Christian theologians so often fail to express their faith in terms of story. The vast majority of the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, consist of stories. Jesus proclaimed and t ...
In an era of religious mass production, so many church models invest their energies toward gathering a crowd, singing songs, and preaching good sermons. Much of the focus is on the shop window. While this is important, it is not enough. Doing church is not enough. Churches that grow disciples don't simply attract a crowd, they provide a strategic theological basis for what they do, and that requires serious thinking about the methodology of ...
The Heterodox Yoder provides a critical rereading of Yoder's corpus through his own conviction that discipleship is, most basically, ethics. Tracing the development of Yoder's theological foundations through to their final role in redefining Jewish-Christian and ecumenical relations, this volume explains why the appropriation and use of the language of politics eventually constrains Yoder's ethical vision to the point that it refr ...
The ambitious and accessible essays collected in this volume were presented by John Howard Yoder during an extensive visit to South America in 1966. Reflecting and also subverting the acknowledged «faddish» attempt to address the revolutionary nature of Christianity, these lectures provide an illuminating snapshot of Yoder's vibrant initial encounter with Latin American Christianity. In these lectures, he thematically addresses the shape of ...
Eden's Bridge: The Marketplace in Creation and Mission explores a biblically based theology of the marketplace implicit in the creation narrative of Genesis 1-2. The thesis validates the calling and ministry of all marketplace Christians. David Doty invites readers to rethink and redirect the purposes of vocation, trade, and profit toward the purposes of God's Kingdom, as they were revealed in the beginning and are to be restored in Ch ...
Christian teaching and modern sensibilities both eschew «nationalism» as an extreme, fanatical form of patriotism, an excessive or disordered form of an otherwise healthy and proper national identity. But what if the problem of nationalism is something much more fundamental? What if nationalism is actually the process leading to national identity in the first place? And what happens when this process entails selectively appropriating and reinter ...
The human race, along with the animals and plants that make up the creation of God, face a difficult future due to the multiple ways that the ecosystem on which they all depend is currently under stress. Temperatures are rising along with the oceans. Rain forests are falling along with the polar ice caps. Questions of the environment are now front and center in any catalog of concerns. Those who are called to preach need to include in t ...
Paul L. Holmer (1916-2004) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota (1946-1960) and Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School (1960-1987). Among his many acomplishments, Holmer was one of the most significant American students of Kierkegaard of his generation. Although written in the 1950s and 1960s, Holmer's theological and philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard challenges much in the cont ...
