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Reading the books of the Law, the Pentateuch, in their original context is the crucial prerequisite for reading their citation and use in later interpretation, including the New Testament writings, argues Ben Witherington III. Here, he offers pastors, teachers, and students an accessible commentary on the Pentateuch, as well as a reasoned consideration of how these books were heard and read in early Christianity. By reading "forward and backward," Witherington advances the scholarly discussion of intertextuality and opens a new avenue for biblical theology.

American evangelicals are known for focusing on the family, but the Quiverfull movement intensifies that focus in a significant way. Often called "Quiverfull" due to an emphasis on filling their "quivers" with as many children as possible (Psalm 127:5), such families are distinguishable by their practices of male-only leadership, homeschooling, and prolific childbirth. Their primary aim is "multigenerational faithfulness" - ensuring their descendants maintain Christian faith for many generations. Many believe this focus will lead to the Christianization of America in the centuries to come.Quivering Families is a first of its kind project that employs history, ethnography, and theology to explore the Quiverfull movement in America. The book considers a study of the movement's origins, its major leaders and institutions, and the daily lives of its families. Quivering Families argues that despite the apparent strangeness of their practice, Quiverfull is a thoroughly evangelical and American phenomenon. Far from offering a countercultural vision of the family, Quiverfull represents an intensification of longstanding tendencies. The movement reveals the weakness of evangelical theology of the family and underlines the need for more critical and creative approaches.

In this monumental work, Robert Kolb introduces us to the hundreds of people in Luther's world. Fellow teachers and priests, politicians, artists, printers, and spouses - the work of all of these people were essential to the Reformation, and there is much to be learned from engaging their work.

Many things threaten the faith of youth today, but none more than science. The commitments of science and Christianity seem to be at oddsscience makes truth claims based on experiments and proofs, while religion asks for belief and trust. But Andrew Root demonstrates that, in fact, the two are not incompatible.Root, a renowned expert on adolescent spirituality, shows how science overstates its claims on truth, while faith often understates its own claims. Both faith and science frame the experience and reality of teenagers, and both have something valuable to offer as adolescents develop.Drawing on a fictional account of a youth pastor and the various students he encounters, Root paints a compelling picture of how faith can flourish, even in our scientific age.

The problem of Luther and the Jews has received much attention since World War II. Many consider there to be a direct line leading from Martin Luther's later anti-Jewish recommendations to policies carried out in the Third Reich. This has led contemporary Lutheran Churches worldwide to issue apologies and to distance themselves from Luther's anti-Semitic teachings. It has also led Jews to distance themselves from Luther as a religious figure. The present work revisits Luther's anti-Semitism and seeks to understand the compound factors that informed it. Drawing on contemporary Luther'scholarship, it develops a model, the Luther Model, that brings together multiple factors that help account for what went wrong, as we see it from our contemporary perspective. With that model in place, it engages in an examination of whether these factors, abstracted from the particularity of their historical context, are not also present in contemporary Jewish attitudes to Christians, as well as in broader negative relations between faith communities. By constructing the Luther Model, this work seeks to feature Luther as a teacher and a paradigm for how religion can turn violent and destructive to other religions and to draw the appropriate lessons for interreligious relations today.

In Future Faith: Ten Challenges Reshaping the Practice of Christianity, author Wes Granberg-Michaelson provides a lucid view of how the top ten winds of change blowing through global Christian faith are reshaping the practice of Christianity today. He is uniquely qualified to identify and interpret connection points between global Christian trends and the American church.Drawing on the stories, examples, and personalities of pastors and congregations from throughout the U.S. as well as those from Africa, Asia, Latin America, who are the faces of Christianitys future, Future Faith is designed to inform and empower followers of Jesus to seek new ways of becoming the face of Christ to a rapidly changing world. Leaders and practitioners in church growth, renewal, and planting will be a primary audience for this book. Students of religion from Catholic, evangelical, Pentecostal, and historic Protestant streams will find this book an informative and stimulating resource for pondering together the future of their faith. Small groups engaged in congregational nurture and growth will find in the author a welcome companion for guiding them through the multi-cultural landscape of contemporary faith.

Learning Interreligiously offers a series of about one hundred short pieces, written online between 2008 and 2016. They are meant for a wide range of readers interested in interreligious dialogue, interreligious learning, and the realities of encounters between Hinduism and Christianity, and are rich in insights drawn from teaching, travels in America and India, and the author's research on sacred texts. The author, a Catholic priest who has spent more than forty years learning from Hinduism and observing religion as a plus and minus in today's world, has much to share with readers. Some pieces were prompted by items in the news, some go deeper into traditions and probe the rich Scriptures and practices going back millennia, some seek simply to provoke fresh thinking, and others invite spiritual reflection. The book is divided into several parts so that readers can focus on individual events that made the news or on longer term and more concerted study. Familiar texts such as the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an, and key passages from the New Testament will be considered for their spiritual possibilities. Readers will find much here to learn from and respond to as they too consider religion in today's world. -- From back cover.

This Homebrewed Christianity Guide explores how Christian theology can address our rapidly changing paradigms of human existence. Donna Bowman argues that theology can contribute to our knowledge of the human self as gained through the sciences, that a theological perspective on humanity is useful in contemporary pluralistic and global settings, and that there's theological significance to work and play. She also tackles issues of gender, sexuality, creativity, and human expression--with jokes!It's no longer possible to assign definitive meaning to categories like man and woman, self and society, freedom and determinism, reason and feeling, soul and body by reference to systems of narrative (including biblical narrative) and interpretation in which those ideas are taken for granted. The theology of human personhood begins with irreducible experiences both universal and particular and searches for functional understandings from the whole range of Christian and non-Christian ways of knowing. Plus, jokes!

This book will attempt to explore faith-based responses to unending injustices by embracing the reality of hopelessness. It rejects the pontifications of some salvation history that move the faithful toward an eschatological promise that, when looking back at history, makes sense of all Christian-led brutalities, mayhem, and carnage.

How does one read the signs of the times? What does it mean to resist? How do we engage faithfully in struggle? Dietrich Bonhoeffer has achieved iconic status as one who epitomizes what it means to struggle and resist tyranny and fascism and how one acts in faithful witness as a religious and political commitment. Bonhoeffer's witness and example is more relevant than ever. A testimony to that is a crucial essay penned by Bonhoeffer in 1942; "After Ten Years" is a succinct and sober reflection, and remains one of the best descriptions ever written about what happened to the German people under National Socialism. This volume presents this timely and unique essay in a fresh translation and a penetrating introduction and analysis of the importance of this essay-in Bonhoeffer's time and now in our own.

Young and Strickland analyze the four largest discourses of Jesus in Mark in the context of Greco-Roman rhetoric in an attempt to hear them as a first-century audience would have heard them. Their analysis uncovers how the discourses are constructed; what issues each discourse seeks to treat; how the argumentation, arrangement, and style of each discourse contributes to its overall purpose; and how the discourse fits into the overall narrative context of the Gospel. The authors demonstrate that, contrary to what some historical critics have suggested, first-century audiences of Mark would have found the discourses of Jesus unified, well-integrated, and persuasive. They also show how these speeches of the Markan Jesus contribute to Mark's overall narrative accomplishments.

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Boston College, 2016.

In the last thirty years, books on the Trinity have abounded. There seems to be a fascination with this mysterious topic, especially among systematic theologians. The topic has been mined for many different interests, from liberation theology to feminist interpretations of the Christian heritage and from neo-Reformation theology to interreligious dialogue. This book has no intention of adding to the plethora of treatises on the Trinity. The main question with which it is concerned is what is really scripturally tenable with regard to the Trinity and what is unwarranted theological construction or even speculation. Through this question, Schwarz tries to discern whether the theological assertions made about the Trinity are in line with the biblical base from which they are derived, or whether they have veered off in a more or less questionable direction. What takes shape here is a story: how the doctrine of the Trinity developed over the subsequent centuries from the traces in Scripture to a centralized dogma at the heart of Christian teaching. We witness in this an evolution from proclamation to controversy to speculation. What are we to make of this doctrine? How do we articulate the biblical faith today?

Much of the contemporary discussion of the Jesus tradition has focused on aspects of oral performance, storytelling, and social memory, on the premise that the practice of communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE. Brian J. Wright overturns that premise by examining evidence that demonstrates communal reading events in the first century. Wright disproves the simplistic notion that only a small segment of society in certain urban areas could have been involved in such communal reading events during the first century; rather, communal reading permeated a complex, multifaceted cultural field in which early Christians, Philo, and many others participated. His study thus pushes the academic conversation back by at least a century and raises important new questions regarding the formation of the Jesus tradition, the contours of book culture in early Christianity, and factors shaping the transmission of the text of the New Testament. These fresh insights have the potential to inform historical reconstructions of the nature of the earliest churches as well as the story of canon formation and textual transmission.

If the 1960s were a watershed in American politics, they were no less formative a period in political theology, as figures like Jacques Ellul, Karl Barth, Walter Wink, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and William Stringfellow shed new light on the biblical language of "the powers." In these essays, activist pastor Bill Wylie-Kellermann critically appreciates the legacy of these figures and gives an urgent specificity to the theology of the powers, relating biblical concepts to contemporary struggles for civil rights, clean air, fair housing, safe affordable water, public education, and civic responsibility after the 2016 election, highlighting throughout the vital importance of a community of struggle connected through time and across space. The book's uniqueness lies in its practicality, as biblical and theological analyses arise from, and are addressed to, particular historical moments and given ecclesial and movement struggles. Appendixes present resources for teaching and training people in movement organizing and for thinking through the presence of the powers in our life and ministry.

The title of this book comes from Matthew's Gospel: "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. . . . There will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs." (24:6-8). This locates The End Is Not Yet within popular religious rhetoric about the "end time" and more sophisticated theological discourse on eschatology or Christian hope for a better world premised on faith in God. But is such faith still justified? And if so, how are we to describe and embody it in the life of the world? The framework of the book is the current global historical context with a particular focus on the West, and especially the political and social issues that have been highlighted by the election of Donald Trump. Among these are totalitarianism and democracy, right-wing nationalism, apocalypticism and patriotism, globalization and economic injustice, terrorism and warmongering, and political and prophetic leadership.

Paulos Mar Greogorios: A Reader is a compilation of the selected writings of Paulos Mar Gregorios, a metropolitan of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India and a former President of the World Council of Churches. The book deals with his thought in the areas of ecumenism, orthodox theology, philosophy, interfaith dialogue, and philosophy of science. The book will be of special value to the students of ecumenism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, Indian philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, and holistic education.

No one disputes today that Jesus must be understood as a participant in the currents of Second Temple Judaism. However, his relation to the institution of the synagogue has received much less attention despite the clear depiction in all four Gospels of the synagogue as the site of his activity and the considerable recent scholarship on the place of the synagogue in Jewish life. Reviewing what we now know about actual synagogues in the land of Israel and what we understand of their public role in Jewish life and culture, Jordan J. Ryan shows that Gospel narratives placed in synagogues accurately reflect the ancient synagogue setting, a fact that points toward the historical plausibility of the setting of these narratives and suggests that synagogue research must be a starting point for their interpretation. Further, he argues that the synagogue setting of Jesuss activities reveals that his efforts at the restoration of Israel were intentionally aimed at the synagogue as an institution of public and political life; that is, Jesus sought to bring the kingdom of God into being by persuading local public synagogue assemblies to participate in it. This book marks an important new direction for research.

Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses "antiblackness supremacy" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. Antiblackness supremacy operates as a unique form of oppression: it arises from the enduring association of blackness with slave status and plays a foundational role in processes of racialization and racial hierarchy in the United States. In fact, since non-black people often amass power at the expense of black people, much of "white supremacy" is more accurately described as "antiblackness supremacy.

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Biblical studies and the teaching of biblical studies are clearly changing, though it is less clear what the changes mean and how we should evaluate them. In this book, Susanne Scholz engages some of the issues as she has encountered them in the field over the last twenty years. She casts a feminist, class-critical eye on the politics of pedagogy, in higher education and in wider society alike, decrypting important developments in "the architecture of educational power." She also examines how the increasingly intercultural, interreligious, and diasporic dynamics in society inform the hermeneutical and methodological possibilities for biblical exegesis, whether the topic is rape in ancient Near Eastern legislation or Eve and Adam in the American Christian right's approaches. In bold strokes, Scholz lays out a program for biblical scholarship and pedagogy that connects to current events and ideas, such as the Title IX debate, inclusive language, or film. Taken as a whole, the fourteen chapters demonstrate that the foregrounding of gender, placed into its intersectional contexts, offers intriguing and valuable alternative ways of seeing the world and the Bible's place in it.

Since his death in 2010, there has been continuing and growing interest in the life, vision, and thought of the late Spanish-Indian mystical theologian Raimon Panikkar. This volume offers a descriptive and critical assessment of Panikkar's life and extensive writings about Christ. The chapters by Erik Ranstrom describe the intellectual and ecclesial development of Panikkar amidst his vast corpus, offering a sympathetic but not uncritical evaluation of his legacy and influence. Ranstrom retrieves Panikkar's early Christology as a key to overcoming various impasses in the theology of religions today. Robinson's chapters introduce an ecumenical and Protestant perspective, including Panikkar's reception in Protestant circles. Robinson also compares and contrasts Panikkar with a range of Indian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, writing in India during Panikkar's time there and suggests the possibilities of mutual enrichment. The authors' intention is to provide an accessible journey into the fascinating and intimidating world of Panikkar's thought. The conclusion features an ecumenical dialogue between Ranstrom and Robinson, as both scholars seek to further understand and learn from each other's perspectives on this pioneer of interreligious spirituality and theology.

Discovering reliable information about women in early Christianity is a challenging enterprise. Most people have never heard of Bitalia, Veneranda, Crispina, Petronella, Leta, Sofia the Deacon, and many others even though their catacomb and tomb art suggests their authority was influential and valued by early Christian communities. This book explores visual imagery found on burial artifacts of prominent early Christian women. It carefully situates the tomb art within the cultural context of customary Roman commemorations of the dead. Recent scholarship about Roman portrait sarcophagi and the interpretation of early Christian art is also given significant attention. An in-depth review of women's history in the first four centuries of Christianity provides important context. A fascinating picture emerges of women's authority in the early church, a picture either not available or sadly distorted in the written history. It is often said "a picture is worth a thousand words." The portrait tombs of fourth-century Christian women suggest that they viewed themselves and/or their loved ones viewed them as persons of authority with religious influence.

Martin Luther‘s effort to put God at the very center of human life hinged on five principles: sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, solus Christus, and ecclesia semper reformanda. They formed the basis for a much-needed reformation of the Christian church projected by Luther and others. Besides inspiring an important renewal of Christian life, however, the Reformation also occasioned the breakup of Western Christianity, which in turn justified religious wars, provided an anti-witness to Christian revelation, privatized the faith, and facilitated the secularization of society as a whole. On the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, this book attempts to appropriate, situate, and to some degree reinterpret Luther‘s most precious and enduring insights on the basis of the above five principles, which come to mean that God‘s being and action must always come first. On the basis of Luther‘s writings, the book also attempts to consider how grace reaches out to freedom, faith to reason, Scripture to church tradition, Christ to ministry, church to mediation. God‘s being and action always come first, yet God‘s first gift, creation, and the mediations that derive from it are not undone or rendered irrelevant.

The Protestant Reformation emphasized the centrality of scripture to Christian life; the twentieth-century liturgical movement emphasized the Bible's place at the heart of liturgy. But we have not yet explored the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy, argues Gordon W. Lathrop. He seeks to remedy that lack because it is critical historical scholarship that has shown us the grounding of the text in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. "Saving" and revitalizing images of the past are at the heart of scripture and are the work of the gathered community. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the "shape" of liturgy (Dix and Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer. He lifts up the visual imagery at the Dura Europos house church and elsewhere as a corrective to the supersessionist impulse in much Christian typology. He identifies the liturgical imperative as seriousness about the present rather than an effort to dwell in an imagined past. Saving Images is a call for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.