This book addresses a growing need in apologetic literature. It is a response to the growing wave of Christian leaders who are rejecting Christianity and becoming some of its most ardent critics, often supported by a plethora of new organizations arising to encourage such people to cut ties to their faith. This is a new challenge from a different breed of critics who are using their instant credibility and insider's knowledge of theology, t ...
Genesis 1-11: A Narrative Theological Commentary combines critical acumen with concern for the theological message of Scripture. It is a commentary in two stages. First, the text is allowed to speak for itself, using a narrative approach. Then, specific Jewish and Christian traditions flowing from the text are identified, and the underlying hermeneutical moves analyzed. ...
Dysfunction. Anyone who has sojourned through congregations or denominations would agree that these are not immune to dysfunction. These holy organizations often eschew the standards upheld by secular organizations. It matters not that those «profane» or «worldly» processes accomplish those organizations' missions and serve humanity well–all within sound ethical boundaries. Consequently, many church organizations deny themselves the best pr ...
The book of Job is the most challenging–and most engaging–of all the books in the Hebrew Scriptures. It challenges one's faith in the essential goodness of God and humanity. In this volume, Rabbis Kravitz and Olitzky provide an original, modern translation and commentary while also inviting classic rabbinic commentators of the past to provide insight to the text. Along with helping the reader to understand the original Hebrew sources, the a ...
This sociological portrait presents how Chinese Christians have coped with life under a hostile regime over a span of different historical periods, and how Christian churches as collective entities have been reshaped by ripples of social change. China's change from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, or from an agrarian society to an urbanizing society, are admittedly significant phenomena worthy of scholarly attention, but rea ...
Unceremoniously dismissed from his lectureship in New Testament, Dr. Edward J. Sutherland uses his forced retirement to struggle through a thicket of end-times issues in a conservative church. Interaction with a defense lawyer induces him to reconsider his inherited eschatology by engaging honestly with the biblical text. He faces conflict within himself, with a crusading dispensationalist, church elders, a newly appointed American pastor, and a ...
No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the br ...
In the contemporary biblical studies climate, proposals regarding the theological interpretation of Scripture are contested, particularly but not only because they privilege, encourage, and foster ecclesial or other forms of normative commitments as part and parcel of the hermeneutical horizon through which scriptural texts are read and understood. Within this context, confessional approaches have been emerging, including some from within the na ...