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Fortress Presss Foundations for Learning series prepares students for academic success through compelling resources that kick-start their educational journey into professional Christian ministry.In Exploring Theology, Elaine A. Robinson introduces readers to the study of theology as a central task of all Christians and one that deserves careful and consistent attention. Following a lively examination of what theology is and how we do it, Robinson provides a basic map of the major doctrines of the faith and asks readers to consider their own beliefs at this important point in their journey. She invites readers to think of theology as a stream into which we enter and which carries us deeper into the vast ocean which is the fullness of God.Designed for those who are beginning a more serious study of theology, Exploring Theology helps readers navigate what might, at first glance, appear as a confusing or abstract subject. Navigational aids include an introduction to theological vocabulary, the sources and methods of theology, and tips for reading primary sources as a spiritual discipline. As a result of this journey, readers will be excited to delve more deeply into theology and will recognize the many ways that theology shapes how we live out the Christian faith in the world.

Fortress Presss Foundations for Learning series prepares students for academic success through compelling resources that kick-start their educational journey into professional Christian ministry.In Exploring Church History, Derek Cooper invites readers to consider the purpose and significance of church history in the lives of individuals and communities today. Rather than offering an exploration of bygone eras and outdated events, Cooper brings history to life by emphasizing how past events, individuals, and movements shape how we understand the world around us.Exploring Church History is divided into three convenient sections. While the first and second sections explain why and what we study in church history, the last section teaches readers how to study church history. The combined effect of the book is to present a clear and accessible introduction to the field of church history.

Increasingly, scholars recognize that prophetic traditions, expressions, and experiences stand at the heart of most religions in the ancient Mediterranean world. This is no less true for the world of Judaism and Jesus. Ben Witherington III offers an extensive, cross-cultural survey of the broader expressions of prophecy in its ancient Mediterranean context, beginning with Mari, moving to biblical figures not often regarded as prophetsBalaam, Deborah, Moses, and Aaronand to the apocalyptic seer in postexilic prophecy, showing that no single pattern describes all prophetic figures. The consequence is that different aspects of Jesus' activity touch upon prophetic predecessors: his miracles, on Elijah and Elisha; his self-understanding as the Son of Man, on Daniel and 1 Enoch; his warnings of woe and judgment, on the "writing prophets" in Judean tradition; and his messianic entry into Jerusalem, on Zechariah 9. Witherington also surveys the phenomenon of apocalyptic prophecy in early Christianity, including Paul, Revelation, the Didache, Hermas, and the Montanist movement. Jesus the Seer is a worthy complement to Witheringtons other volume on Jesus, Jesus the Sage (Fortress Press, 2000).

The ground of higher education is shifting, but learning ecosystems around the world have much more space than MOOCs and trendy online platforms can fill, and Loewen shows how professors have an indisputable pedagogical edge that gives them a crucial role to play in higher education. By adopting the collaborative pedagogical process in this book, professors can create effective social learning experiences that connect students to peers and professional colleagues in real time.Loewen moves beyond surface questions about technology in the classroom to a problem best addressed by educators in bricks-and-mortar institutions: if students are social learners, how do we teach in a way that promotes actual dialogue for learning? Designing learning experiences that develop intercultural competencies puts the test to students social inclinations, and engagement with course material increases when its used to dig deeper into the specificities of their identity and social location. Loewens approach to interinstitutional collaborative teaching will be explored with examples and working templates for collaborative design of effective social learning experiences. This is done by collaborative dialogue with G. Brooke Lester and Christopher Duncanson-Hales. As a group, Loewen, Lester, and Duncanson-Hales create a text that extends pedagogical innovation in inspiring but practical ways.

It is a commonplace today that Paul was a Jew of the Hellenistic Diaspora, but how does that observation help us to understand his thinking, his self-identification, and his practice? Ronald Charles applies the insights of contemporary diaspora studies to address much-debated questions about Pauls identity as a diaspora Jew, his complicated relationship with a highly symbolized homeland, the motives of his daily work, and the ambivalence of his rhetoric.Charles argues for understanding a number of important aspects of Pauls identity and work, including the ways his interactions with others were conditioned, by his diaspora space, his self-understanding, and his experience among the nations. Diaspora space is a key concept that allows Charles to show how Pauls travels and the collection project in particular can be read as a transcultural narrative. Understanding the dynamics of diaspora also allows Charles to bring new light to the conflict at Antioch (Galatians 12), Pauls relationships with the Gentiles in Galatia, and the fraught relationship with leaders in Jerusalem.

There has been a distinct tendency in modern scholarship to underestimate Luthers teaching on love by overemphasizing his teaching on justification. Calling this tendency into question, Sun-young Kim advances the thesis that Luthers teaching on faith and love operates as the overriding thematic pair in the dynamics of Christ and the lawstructurally and conceptually undergirding the 1535 Galatians commentary. The research situates itself in the landscape of Luther scholarship via a special attention to Finnish Luther scholars and scholarship. Luther on Faith and Love argues that in the discussion of proper righteousness and holiness, Luthers redefined love emerges in harmony with faith. His views on Christian freedom, the Christ-given law of love, the twofold way of fulfilling the law, and his Christological premises demonstrate the logical rationale for reintroducing love. This love, designated as a fruit of faith, is incarnated in three major relations: love toward God, toward others, and toward self.

Pope Francis has stated that his own vocation as a Christian came to him as an awareness that God is ahead of us, that God thinks about us and looks after us before we even realize it. This is the essence of grace, a love story that begins with God. The present book is an introduction and exploration of that storyof the Christian life as not about humans looking for God but God seeking us out.The story that unfolds demonstrates that grace is not something secondary or superficial but primary and constitutive, from crucial beginnings in election and creation to the divine actions of justification and renewal, fostering a life of virtue and obedience. Within this context, the book explores the issues of the relationship of grace and freedom, the dynamics of justification, the true meaning of merit, life as a son or daughter of God, the action of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments and the Church, the role of the ascetical life, and the eschatological horizon of the life of grace. In an accessible account, the author narrates the doctrine of grace as directed toward and explained by the fact that God has destined humans to spend eternity in communion with the Triune creator.

Pastoral leadership has always been challenging, but clergy and parish leaders today face unprecedented challenges, many of which simply didn't exist a generation ago. The author offers an introduction to the new context in which we lead, and the personal and congregational strategies that will offer a way forward.

Modern interpreters typically attach revolutionary significance to Luthers Christology on account of its unprecedented endorsement of Gods ontological vulnerability. This passibilist reading of Luthers theology has sourced a long channel of speculative theology and philosophy, from Hegel to Moltmann, which regards Luther as an ally against antique, philosophical assumptions, which are supposed to occlude the genuine immanence of God to history and experience. David J. Luy challenges this history of reception and rejects the interpretation of Luthers Christology upon which it is founded. Dominus Mortis creates the conditions necessary for an alternative appropriation of Luthers christological legacy.By re-specifying certain key aspects of Luthers christological commitments, Luy provides a careful reassessment of how Luthers theology can make a contribution within ongoing attempts to adequately conceptualize divine immanence. Luther is demonstrated as a theologian who creatively appropriates the patristic and medieval theological tradition and whose constructive enterprise is significant for the ways that it disrupts widely held assumptions about the doctrine of divine impassibility, the transcendence of God, dogmatic development, and the relationship of God to suffering.

This book argues that Christian nonviolence is both formed by and forms ecclesial life, creating an inextricable relationship between church commitment and resistance to war. Examining the work of John Howard Yoder, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, and Robert McAfee Brown, this book explores how each thinkers advocacy for nonviolent resistance depends deeply upon the ecclesiology out of which it comes. These forms comprise four strands of a comprehensive Christian approach to a nonviolent witness rooted in ecclesial life.Because each of these figures'' ecclesiology implicates a different mode of resistance to war and a different relation between ecclesiology and resistance to war, the volume argues that any account of an ecclesially-informed resistance to war must be open to a multitude of approaches, not as pragmatic concessions, but as a foretaste of ecumenical unity. Insofar as the pursuit of peace in the world can be seen as a church bearing out the work of the Spirit, the approach of other ecclesial traditions can be seen not as competitors but as common works of the Spirit, which other traditions may learn from and be challenged by.

The question of the Christian Zionism - the religious and political support of the state of Israel - is fiercely debated within theology and the church. This volume includes essays from Christian scholars around the globe, as well as Jewish and Palestinian contributors to provide interfaith contextual dialogue.

Although healing constitutes both a major theme of biblical literature and a significant practice of biblical communities, healing themes and experiences are not always conspicuous in presentations of biblical theology. Walter T. Wilson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the healing narratives in the Gospel of Matthew, combining the familiar methods of form, redaction, and narrative criticisms with insights culled from medical anthropology, feminist theory, disability studies, and ancient archaeology. His focus is the New Testament''s longest and most systematic account of healing, Matthew chapters 8 and 9, which he investigates by situating the text within a broad range of ancient healing traditions. The close exegetical readings of each healing narrative culminate in a final synthesis that pulls together what can be said about Matthew''s understanding of healing, how Matthew''s narratives of healing expose the distinctive priorities of the evangelist, and how these priorities relate to the theology of the Gospel as a whole.

The "Great Whore" of the Book of Revelationthe hostile symbolization used to illustrate the authors critique of empirehas attracted considerable attention in Revelation scholarship. Feminist scholar Tina Pippin criticizes the use of gendered metaphors "Babylon" as a tortured womanwhich she asserts reflect an inescapably androcentric, even misogynistic, perspective. Alternatively, Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza understands Johns rhetoric and imagery not simply in gendered terms, but in political terms as well, observing that "Babylon" relies on conventionally coded feminine language for a city.Shanell T. Smith seeks to dismantle the either/or dichotomy within the Great Whore debate by bringing the categories of race/ethnicity and class to bear on Johns metaphors. Her socio-cultural context impels her to be sensitive to such categories, and, therefore, leads her to hold the two elements, "woman" and "city," in tension, rather than privileging one over the other. Using postcolonial womanist interpretation of the woman Babylon, Smith highlights the simultaneous duality of her characterizationher depiction as both a female brothel slaveandas an empress or imperial city. Most remarkably, however, Smiths reading also sheds light on her own ambivalent characterization as both a victim and participant in empire.

Theologians and philosophers are turning again to questions of the meaning, or non-meaning, of the natural world for human self-understanding. Brian R. Doak observes that the book of Job, more than any other book in the Bible, uses metaphors drawn from the natural world, especially of plants and animals, as raw material for thinking about human suffering. Doak argues that Job should be viewed as an anthropological ground zero for the traumatic definition of the post-exilic human self in ancient Israel. Furthermore, the battered shape of the Joban experience should provide a starting point for reconfiguring our thinking about natural theology as a category of intellectual history in the ancient world.Doak examines how the development of the human subject is portrayed in the biblical text in either radical continuity or discontinuity with plants and animals. Consider Leviathan explores the text at the intersection of anthropology, theology, and ecology, opening up new possibilities for charting the view of nature in the Hebrew Bible.

Offers an historical account of theology''s modern institutional origins in the United Kingdom. This book explores how Oxford theology, from the beginnings of the Tractarian movement until the end of the Second World War, both influenced and responded to the reform of the university.

This first of two volumes on ancient Galilee provides general surveys of modern studies of Galilee and of Galilean history followed by specialized studies on taxation, ethnicity, religious practices, road system, trade and markets, education, health, village life, houses, and the urban-rural ivide. The volume draws on the expertise of archaeologists, historians, biblical scholars, and social-science interpreters; Christians, Jews, and secular scholars; North Americans, Europeans, and Israelis; and those who have devoted a significant amount of time and energy in this research, especially those who have excavated in Galilee for many years. A key goal of this volume and its companion volume devoted to the archaeological record of towns and villages is to make this information easily accessible to New Testament scholars and Mishnah scholars not familiar with these materials while also usable to the average interested reader. Includes several images, figures, charts, and maps.

Latin American Christianity is too often presented as a unified story appended to the end of larger western narratives. And yet the stories of Christianity in Latin America are as varied and diverse as the lands and the peoples who live there. This book intends to help students and scholars understand the histories of Latin American Christianity.

The identification of God with beauty is one of the most aesthetically rich notions within Christian thought. However, this claim is often at risk of becoming untethered from core Christian theological confessions. To avoid a theological account of beauty becoming a mere projection of our wildest desires, it must be reined in by dogmatics. To make this case, this book employs the thought of Robert W. Jenson to construct a dogmatic aesthetics. Jensons whole theological program is directed by exploring the systematic potential of the core doctrines of the faith that finally opens out into a vast vision of the beauty of God and creatures:God is a great fugue . . . the rest is music. Taking Jensons cue, the account of beauty presented in this book is propelled by a core conviction of Jensons theology: the sole analogue between God and creatures is not being or any other metaphysical concept, but Jesus Christ.

For far too long, Lauri Thurn argues, the parables of Jesus have been read either as allegories encoding Christian theologyincluding the theological message of one or another Gospel writeror as tantalizing clues to the authentic voice of Jesus. Thurn proposes instead to read the parables "unplugged" from any assumptions beyond those given in the narrative situation in the text, on the common-sense premise that the very form of the parable works to propose a (sometimes startling) resolution to a particular problem. Thurn applies his method to the parables in Luke with some surprising results involving the Evangelists overall narrative purposes and the discrete purposes of individual parables in supporting the authority of Jesus, proclaiming God''s love, exhorting steadfastness, and so on. Eschatological and allegorical readings are equally unlikely, according to Thurn''s results. This study is sure to spark learned discussion among scholars, preachers, and students for years to come.

What is Hip-Hop, and how does it impact the Black Church? How do Black Churches think about Hip-Hop? How does it integrate Hip-Hop? How do these different, yet deeply interrelated communities think about the key topics of modern life-be it gender, sex, race, or globalization? This book deals with these questions.

Draws together the strengths of two exegetical approaches to the Gospel of John. Part of the Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries series, this book takes a broad thematic approach to the Gospel while at the same time giving exegetical and homiletical insights about individual pericopes.

The Fortress Commentary on the New Testament presents a balanced synthesis of current scholarship. The contributors bring a rich diversity of perspectives to the task of connecting solid historical critical analysis of Scripture with sensitivity to theological, cultural, and interpretive issues arising in our encounter with the text.The volume includes introductory articles, section introductions, and individual book articles that explore key sense units through three lenses: The Text in Its Ancient Context; The Text in the Interpretive Tradition; and The Text in Contemporary Discussion.Comprehensive and useful for preaching, teaching, and research.

In this provocative study, Joseph A. Marchal argues that biblical interpretation, but most especially Pauline studies, must engage the full range of critical challenges brought by feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and Roman imperial studies. A feminist, postcolonial analysis requires negotiating the gaps, overlaps, and tensions between these three "strands" by adopting an explicitly multi-axial focus and an interdisciplinary methodology. Using Philippians as a test case, the analysis covers issues of both ancient and contemporary import: from imitation and authority to travel and contact. As a result, Marchal provides strikingly new perspectives on Paul's letters and fresh challenges to the paradigms of Pauline interpretation.

Drawing from a career of pioneering scholarship, Schssler Fiorenza situates the critical feminist theory that has characterized her work in the praxis of liberation. These pathbreaking essays challenge academic and ecclesiastical theologians to embrace critical theory and the analysis of overlapping oppressions in their work. Transforming Vision seeks to free theology from the disciplinary constraints that allow acquiescence to and perpetuation of oppression.

Sameer Yadavs central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of Gods availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem.The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception.

Vital to an agrarian communitys survival, threshing floors are also depicted in the Hebrew Bible as sites for mourning rites, divination rituals, cultic processions, and sacrifices. Jaime L. Waters examines these sacred functions and the various personnel active in the use and operation of the sites and shows that they were sacred spaces connected to Yahweh, under his control and subject to his power to bless, curse, and save, providing Israel a special ritual access to Yahw