Böcker utgivna av Augsburg Fortress Publishers

Even as theologians have become more critical of classic theories of atonement, biblical scholars have continued to rely upon such theories as a basis for interpreting Paul's teaching regarding salvation and the cross. In this vital volume, Brondos looks to the recent advances in New Testament scholarship to argue for an alternative understanding of Paul's doctrine of salvation and the cross.Paul, says Brondos, understood Jesus' death primarily as the consequence of his mission: to serve as God's instrument to bring about the long-awaited redemption of Israel, in which Gentiles throughout the world would also be included. For Paul, Jesus' death is salvific not because it satisfies some necessary condition for human salvation, as most doctrines of the atonement have traditionally maintained, nor because it effects some change in the situation of human beings or the world in general. Rather, Jesus' God responded to Jesus' faithfulness unto death by raising him, thereby ensuring that all the divine promises of salvation would be fulfilled through him.Jesus' death forms part of an overarching story culminating in the redemption of Israel and the world. It is this story, and in particular what preceded and followed Jesus' death on the cross, that makes that death redemptive for Paul.

Theologian Ian McFarland claims that Christians have mainly misappropriated the "image of God" language for 2000 years and thereby missed a rich resource for our knowledge of God. Rather than referring to some germinal divine element in humans, such as reason, McFarland claims that the image of God in us tells us something about God and how we know God. It tells us that God, though not identical with us, communicates Godself to us in creative love, in a way that offers precious clues about God's transcendence, immanence, triune life, self-disclosure, incarnation, and intentions for human life. McFarland's careful and exacting work builds from this kernel a powerful Christian vision of God's life and our own destiny in Christ.

Scientist and theologian Sjoerd Bonting offers a new overarching framework for thinking about issues in religion and science. He looks at the creation controversy itself, including biblical perspectives, tradtional doctrines, and the particular potential contribution of chaos theory. Finally, Bonting extends this perspective, a combination of chaos theory and chaos theology he calls "double-chaos," into a framework that addresses traditional questions about evil, divine agency, soteriology, the understanding of disease, possible extraterrestrial life, and the future.

The essence of spirituality is loving God, says Powell. The Bible, the Talmud, and the Qu'ran all direct their followers not merely to believe in God, to trust God, to obey God, and to serve God but to love God. Can we learn to love God?In this biblical spirituality for today, Powell's earnest plea is for Christians to revisit their faith not by blazing in religious enthusiasm but by harboring a steadier flame and deeper commitment. Living at the poetic heart of faith, he argues, entails seeing the coordinates of religious life in a new way. Powell espouses the old-fashioned idea of piety. Drawing on his wide knowledge of the Bible and Christian tradition, as well as insights from his own journey, he shows how simple religious practices move us beyond the old certitudes of a nave and youthful faith into the less certain but more bracing terrain of a second navet, a closer walk with Jesus.

Ellis and Murphy show how contemporary sciences actually support a religiously based ethic of nonviolence, not by appealing to the Enlightment's mechanismic Creator God or revelation's Father God but by discerning the transcendent ground in the laws of nature, the emergence of intelligent freedom, and the echoes of "knoetic" self-giving in cosmology and biology.

In this important work, Child's thesis is that a canonical approach to the scriptures of the Old Testament opens up new possibilities for exploring the theological dimensions of the biblical text.

As the Christian movement nears the end of its second millennium, it faces a crisis that could not have been anticipated at the close of the first thousand yearsor, indeed, by most of our own great-grandparents. Since the most conspicuous dimensions of the waning of Christendom have to do with material decline (the decline in church membership and active attendance of Sunday services, the decline in financial and physical prosperity, the decline of influence in high places), such analyses as there are usually belabor the obvious: something drastic is happening to the churches! "Throughout most of its long history, Christianity has not required of its adherents that they should think the faith. The historical accident of its political and cultural establishment 15 centuries ago ensured that a thinking faith would be purely optional for members of the church. "But thought-less faith, which has always been a contradiction in terms, is today a stage on the road to the extinction, not only of Christianity itself, but of whatever the architects of our civilization meant by 'Humanity.' Only a thinking faith can survive. Only a thinking faith can help the world survive! "- from the Preface