Религия: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Религия: прочееThe Authenticity of the Second Letter to the Thessalonians
Scholars continue to debate whether Second Thessalonians was written by Paul or by pseudonym. The position that the letter is a late imitation is largely based on the comparison of the parallel expressions of two epistles to the Thessalonians. There are more words and phrases that are shared between these two letters than there are in any other two New Testament letters. William Wrede's study is the ultimate source of scholarly perception of these parallels. Not only does Wrede locate some exact parallels, he also finds definite words, verses, and related passages that precisely mirror and reflect their counterparts in First Thessalonians. Scholars who conclude that Second Thessalonians is pseudonymous owe much of that conclusion to Wrede's work.
Wrede's order of the Greek parallels has been reproduced with his original annotations in this translation.
Divine Presence
"The glory of the LORD," a phrase used over one hundred times in the Bible, describes God's greatness and transcendence. This complex theological concept exhibits several natural elements which describe a theophany, a personification of God in the forces of nature. Thus, a theophany–the appearance of God in a visible form–is the physical manifestation of the divine presence most frequently associated with a storm. Of all the biblical accounts that illustrate the glory of the LORD, the narrative of Moses' encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Horeb) contains nineteen of the twenty-one elements that reveal the glory of the LORD: mountains, sacred numbers, God's voice, people's (person's) response, cloud, water, thunder, lightning, trumpet blast, smoke, fire, earthquake, terms of the event (covenant), sign, transformation of witnesses, altar, feast (meal), wind, light and darkness, jewels (precious stones), and dreams. Each element is examined closely using biblical texts that best illustrate it.
Ted Allen Studebaker
Ted Studebaker, a true peace hero, worked for peace through nonviolence. By doing so, he left a peacemaking legacy that continues to impact mankind through the ages. He was a volunteer agriculturalist in the highlands of Vietnam during the war. As he began his third year of work, he married the love of his life, Pakdy, a Chinese coworker. One week after their marriage, Vietnamese forces, opposing the Americans, entered their house where they killed him.
Ted was fully prepared and armed with confidence for the work that God had set before him. He was totally committed to give of himself without reservation. Ted gratefully acknowledged his government's position of accepting alternative service to serve mankind as opposed to military service. He wrote to his draft board, «I don't feel unpatriotic or disloyal to my country. However, I do think there are certain rights, beliefs, and values to which one should be more devoted to than his country if he has arrived at them through conscientious thought, learning and experience.» Ted was aware of the opposition he would face for his peacemaking stand, yet he was true to his beliefs. In doing so, he remains an enduring force for peace.
Grace
Grace Woodbridge Roys suffered from bi-polar disease before it was well understood. Her daughter feared that her children would also suffer mental illness. This annotation of Grace's diary opens the early 1900s missionary world in China and the personality of Grace to the reader. In December 1910 Grace married Harvey Curtis Roys, who was teaching physics at Kiang Nan government school in Nanking, under the sponsorship of the YMCA. Grace had had a mental breakdown weeks earlier when her missionary father forbade the marriage. The diary records their early married life, the births of their first two children, their social life with other missionaries in China, many of whom made major contributions to Nanking life and education: medical doctors and nurses, theology professors, agricultural innovators, and founders of universities, hospitals, nursing schools, and schools for young Chinese women and men. Included is their experience evacuating during the Sun Yat-sen Revolution of 1911. Well-known missionaries of that time came to tea and taught at the Hillcrest School that the mothers began for foreign children. The Nanyang Exposition took place in 1910, too, as China was in the throes of entering the modern era, with trains, electricity, telegraphs, and a new interest in democracy.
Social Science and the Christian Scriptures, Volume 1
Sociologist Anthony Blasi analyzes early Christianity using multiple social scientific theories, including those of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz, and contemporary theorists. He investigates the canonical New Testament books as representative of early Christianity, a sample based on usage, and he takes the books in the chronological order in which they were written. The result is a series of «stills» that depict the movement at different stages in its development. His approaches, often neglected in New Testament studies, include such sociological subfields as sect theory, the routinization of charisma, conflict, stratification theory, stigma, the sociology of knowledge, new religions, the sociology of secrecy, marginality, liminality, syncretism, the social role of intellectuals, the poor person as a type, the sick role, degradation ceremonies, populism, the sociology of migration, the sociology of time, mergers, the sociology of law, and the sociology of written communication. Needing to treat the New Testament text as social data, Blasi uses his background in biblical studies and a review of a vast literature to establish the chronology of the compositions of the New Testament books and to present the «data» in a new translation that is accessible to non-specialists.
The Vulgarization of Christ’s Church
This book seeks to clarify and demonstrate the incalculable and injurious influence that progressive education has had and is having upon preaching, thinking Christianly, and the local church. Progressive education began at the turn of the twentieth century, replacing classical education with what is purportedly a science-based education, which necessarily results in scientism. This seismic shift in public education has not only affected what we learn but how we think. In order to enable the church to detect progressivism's deleterious sway and protect herself by being equipped with the progressive revelation of God, and thereby counter the influence of progressive education of man, I seek to highlight some of the underlying intolerable essentials of progressive education. In the companion book to this one, The Equipping Church: Somewhere Between Fundamentalism and Fluff, I explain the biblical model for the local church and how to build such a church.
The Eucharist as a Countercultural Liturgy
Since its institution, the Eucharist has been celebrated in all churches regardless of denominational differences. Yet its importance should not be just confined to the Christian communities; it can have transformational power in the cultural milieu. In this book, Yik-Pui Au argues that the Eucharist can be a countercultural liturgy that upholds the identity and values of Christianity by countering cultural currents that are contrary to the Christian faith. Au takes an interdisciplinary approach comprised of church history, ritual theory, and theology of culture to examine systematically the countercultural functions of the Eucharist interpreted by three modern theologians, Henri de Lubac, John Zizioulas, and Miroslav Volf, representing the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions respectively. The comparative evaluation of this cross-tradition analysis supports Au's argument that even though culture is complex and changing, the countercultural function of the Eucharist remains valid. Despite its complexity, culture can be transformed by the Eucharist and it can also challenge and renew our understanding of the Eucharist. She suggests that due to its richness, the countercultural function of the Eucharist cannot be exhausted by one tradition. It is the task of theologians to help the church continually venture to explore and vivify this function ecumenically.
The Perception of Christianity as a Rational Religion in Singapore
This book evaluates the common criticism that Christianity in Asia is westernized. Since the 1980s, Asian evangelical theologians and missiologists argue that the intrusion of Western theology is responsible for the Western and, hence, alien expressions of Christianity in Asia. Yet, in Singapore, the number of Christians has increased over the last few decades. Empirical evidence demonstrates that younger Chinese Singaporeans convert from Buddhism or Taoism to Christianity partly because they perceive it as a «rational» religion over Buddhism or Taoism, which are viewed as «irrational» or «superstitious.» Not only do many converts favor Christianity as a rational religion, but they do not regard Christianity as a Western religion at the point of their conversion. What accounts for those recent developments? This study explores the processes of modernization and globalization as important factors, impacting religious change in Singapore. Personal, contextual, and structural elements actually influence one's religion of choice. In facilitating effective mission, one must qualify the use of the categories, «Asian» and «Western,» because religious and cultural boundaries overlap. What matters most in missiology is discerning how the gospel of Jesus Christ engages the self-understanding and lived realities of ethnic and religious others in diverse cultural settings.
Comparative Characterization in the Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount contains many comparisons. In this book, the functions of these comparisons are studied by the methodology called comparative characterization. Characterization is the way a character is characterized in a narrative. Comparative characterization is the characterization of a character using comparisons. In comparative characterization, another character is used as a foil to bring out a characteristic trait of a concerned character. Jesus characterized the ideal disciple in the Sermon on the Mount with many descriptions and imperatives. To characterize the ideal disciple Jesus used many comparisons and highlighted the characteristic features that embody the ideal disciple.
The many comparisons used in the Sermon on the Mount are identified in this study through comparative characterization. In addition, the teleological purpose of the comparisons, which is to play as foil to the characterization of the ideal disciple, is identified and highlighted. Thus, this study identifies Jesus' characterization of the ideal disciple and his complex portrayal of the ideal disciple with the many uses of comparisons in the descriptions and imperatives of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Religion in the Anthropocene
This book charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious stwhatudies, theology, social science, history and philosophy, and can be broadly termed the environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this.
Will the Anthropocene have good or bad ethical outcomes? Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, which shores up many religious approaches to environmental ethics? Or is the Anthropocene a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Do theological traditions, such as Christology, reinforce negative aspects of the Anthropocene? Not all contributors in this volume agree with the answers to these different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.