Receptive Human Virtues
Receptive Human Virtues

Author: Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-08-26

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0271050594

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This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards’s virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as “virtues” and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards’s human virtues is “receptive” in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards’s God for virtue’s acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God’s assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.

Iconoclastic Sex
Iconoclastic Sex

Author: Henry Walter Spaulding

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2024-03-13

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 172528720X

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Christian sexual ethics operates from a place of privilege when it does not consider those impacted by its moral prescriptions. A large majority of publications on Christian sexual ethics consider choices and images abstracted from lived conditions of the people called to make these decisions. As such, it leaves out many for whom sex is neither welcome nor a choice. As such, these same texts present images of sexual subjects that marginalize those that do not fit. As the book presents, sexuality, both Christian and otherwise, prioritizes a language of purity that strangles the life of those imaged impure. The present book remedies this emphasis through the language of iconoclasm that blasphemes these images and opens theological reflection beyond the boundary of image-based approaches. Utilizing a qualitative study of survivors of trafficking and those who grew up under evangelical purity teachings, Spaulding narrates sexual ethics in light of their testimonies and the theological resources of iconoclasm to articulate a more just and loving sexuality. The new emphasis on sexual ethics not only resists the prescriptions that create the conditions of sex trafficking but the creation of new communities capable of solidarity and mutuality with those caught in the web of trafficking.

Reformed Virtue After Barth
Reformed Virtue After Barth

Author: Kirk J. Nolan

Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corp

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0664260209

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With its focus on the traditions and communities that form us over the course of a lifetime, virtue ethics has richly expanded our understanding of what the Christian life can look like. Yet its emphasis on human virtues and habits of mind and life seems inconsistent with the Reformed tradition's insistence that sin lies at the heart of the human condition. For this reason, virtue ethics seems out of place in Reformed theology, especially in the company of the Reformed tradition's greatest twentieth-century theologian, Karl Barth. In this new addition to the Columbia Series in Reformed Theology, Kirk Nolan argues that Barth's theology actually proves virtue ethics can be compatible with the Reformed tradition. Rather than see virtue as an inevitable and natural process of growth, Barth helps us understand that development in the Christian life comes through a process of repetition and renewal, and that all virtue comes solely as a gift from God. Nolan establishes an important bridge between Reformed moral teaching and the tradition of virtue ethics.

Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues
Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues

Author: Brent Waters

Publisher: Baker Academic

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1493432575

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Every day, we do commonplace things and interact with ordinary people without giving them much thought. This volume offers a theological guide to thinking Christianly about the ordinary nature of everyday life. Leading ethicist Brent Waters shows that the activities and relationships we think of as mundane are actually expressions of love of neighbor that are vitally important to our wellbeing. We live out the Christian gospel in the contexts that define us and in the routine chores, practices, activities, and social settings that give ordinary life meaning. It is in those contexts that we discover what we were created for, to be, and to become.

A Charitable Orthopathy
A Charitable Orthopathy

Author: John W. Morehead

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1532654138

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Evangelicals and other conservative Christians of the twenty-first century face enormous challenges in the pluralistic public square, not least with Muslims and atheists. Contrary to biblical injunctions to “keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:25b) and to love our neighbors as ourselves (e.g., Matt 22:37–40; Luke 10:25–37)—both of which involve not only behavioral but also important affective elements—we often harbor deep-seated antipathies toward atheists and adherents of other religions. While such feelings are at times justified and help us cope with conflict-related tragedies, they are also often baseless, misconstrued, and counterproductive, priming us to avoid religious others, support discriminatory policies against them, and even confront them in verbal or physical ways. The purpose of this volume is to offer an academically informed yet practically oriented collection of essays that challenges and encourages Christians to engage their religious neighbors in a much more loving, compassionate, hopeful, and courageous—indeed, orthopathic—manner, whether in the realm of politics, in debate and conference venues, on the mission field, or in their own homes, schools, churches, and neighborhoods. As such, a set of reflection and discussion questions is included to facilitate individual and/or group study.

Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics
Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics

Author: Elizabeth Agnew Cochran

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-12-28

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0567671364

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The Stoics are known to have been a decisive influence on early Christian moral thought, but the import of this influence for contemporary Christian ethics has been underexplored. Elizabeth Agnew Cochran argues that attention to the Stoics enriches a Christian understanding of the virtues, illuminating precisely how historical Protestant theology gives rise to a distinctive virtue ethic. Through examining the dialogue between Roman Stoic ethics and the work of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, Cochran illuminates key theological convictions that provide a foundation for a contemporary Protestant virtue ethic, consistent with theological beliefs characteristic of the historical Reformed tradition.

The Theology of Jonathan Edwards
The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

Author: Michael J. McClymond

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-05

Total Pages: 774

ISBN-13: 0199791600

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Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory.The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards

Author: Oliver D. Crisp

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2018-02-20

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 146744944X

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Student-friendly intro to one of America’s most fascinating theological minds Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) has long been recognized as one of the preeminent thinkers in the early Enlightenment and a major figure in the history of American Christianity. In this accessible one-volume text, leading Edwards experts Oliver Crisp and Kyle Strobel introduce readers to the fascinating and formidable mind of Jonathan Edwards as they survey key theological and philosophical themes in his thought, including his doctrine of the Trinity, his philosophical theology of God and creation, and his understanding of the atonement and salvation. More than two centuries after his death, theologians and historians alike are finding the larger-than-life Edwards more interesting than ever. Crisp and Strobel’s concise yet comprehensive guide will help students of this influential eighteenth-century revivalist preacher to understand why.

Sabbath Rest as Vocation
Sabbath Rest as Vocation

Author: Autumn Alcott Ridenour

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0567679217

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Autumn Alcott Ridenour offers a Christian theological discussion on the meaning of aging toward death with purpose, identity, and communal significance. Drawing from both explicit claims and constructive interpretations of St. Augustine's and Karl Barth's understanding of death and aging, this volume describes moral virtue as participation in Christ across generations, culminating in preparation for Sabbath rest during the aging stage of life. Addressing the inevitability of aging, the prospect of mortality, the importance of contemplative action and expanding upon the virtues of growing older, Ridenour analyzes how locating moral agency as union with Christ results in virtuous practices for aging individuals and their surrounding communities. By responding with constructive theology to challenges from transhumanist, bioethical and medical arenas, the volume highlights implications not only for virtue ethics, but also for the goals of medicine.

God and the Moral Life
God and the Moral Life

Author: Myriam Renaud

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1351390066

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How do various concepts of God impact the moral life? Is God ultimately required for goodness? In this edited collection, an international panel of contemporary philosophers and theologians offer new avenues of exploration from a theist perspective for these important questions. The book features several approaches to address these questions. Common themes include philosophical and theological conceptions of God with reference to human morality, particular Trinitarian accounts of God and the resultant ethical implications, and how communities are shaped, promoted, and transformed by accounts of God. Bringing together philosophical and theological insights on the relationship between God and our moral lives, this book will be of keen interest to scholars of the philosophy of religion, particularly those looking at ethics, social justice and morality.