Böcker av Carl E. Braaten

Clara Agnes Braaten kept a diary from the year she married the author's father, Torstein Folkvard Braaten, in 1922 until she was ninety-four-years old.Three weeks after they were married, they departed Minneapolis by train for New York City to board the Stavangerfjord, a fine Norwegian ocean libber, to cross the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Bergen, Norway.The author's father had accepted a call from the Foreign Mission Board of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America to become a missionary to Madagascar. The couple decided to visit Norway on their way to Paris, France, where they were to spend one year learning the French language. In this book, the author draws on his mother's diaries to highlight why his parents obeyed the Great Commission and how they lived it every day in Madagascar. The book includes excerpts selected from his mother's diary as well as a brief narrative of what the author remembers about growing up in Madagascar.Whether you're interested in missionary life, the Lutheran Church, the history of Madagascar, or genealogy, you'll enjoy Living the Great Commission in Madagascar.

Pluralism as such is not the enemy of the gospel. Preaching the Christian message will always encounter a world with many religions, world-views, ideologies, and lifestyles. The earliest generation of Christians found themselves in a pluralistic situation. They were witnessing to Jews as well as to Greeks and Romans in the great melting pot of Hellenistic culture. Religious pluralism does pose a threat when it becomes an ideological dogma that asserts that all religions are equally valid and lead to the same goal.

With increasing awareness of the permanence of religious pluralism and increasing acceptance of other religions as valid ways to God, some theologians have argued that Christianity needs to abandon its traditional, biblical claim that Jesus is the unique, normative, decisive and final self-revelation of God and the salvation of the world. Braaten's response is an unequivocal reassertion of the exclusive claim of the gospel. To do so, he surveys the range of current options and dives into questions of the uniqueness of Christ, the absoluteness of Christianity, and the universality of salvation. Working with concepts of justification, eschatology, and Trinity, Braaten affirms that the gospel relativizes other religions. The gospel, however, also relativizes Christianity. Thus Christianity's strong claims for Christ need to be tempered by acknowledging that Christians do not know beforehand the final outcome of God's unfolding plan for the world. Although not all will agree, this book is an important call to Christian conscience from a theologian who sees Christian theology teetering on the brink of confusion.