Is there a way to experience prophetic ministry in a God-honoring way—without all the mess and confusion? Prophetic ministry is the Holy Spirit's gift to the Church. Yet this gift has been abused, confused, and misused, making it difficult for today's Church leaders to embrace. With biblically sound delivery, Darin Slack offers a compelling perspective based on his thirty years of experience in prophetic ministry. He challenges indifference and complacency, while discouraging doctrinal disorder in the administration of the gift. Slack provides a powerful and much needed balance that will allow Church leaders to see the great potential for blessing in the prophetic while reducing the risk. Through Scripture, Slack offers leaders, from all doctrinal backgrounds, a faith-building process for realizing prophecy that leads to Church edification. (1 Cor. 14:3) This book is a must-have for every pastor or Church leader who desires to scripturally understand and implement prophetic ministry.
This book is a call for preachers to learn the importance of keeping their eyes on the vision of Jesus and biblical prophets when preaching - that of doing justice, caring for others, and being equitable. The book attempts to make a biblical argument for the importance and the content of prophetic preaching, and argues that the issue is not preaching from a text taken from the prophetic corpus but preaching on the themes that echoed over and over from the biblical prophets themselves.
Naturally occurring DMT may produce prophecy-like states of consciousness and thus represent a bridge between biology and religious experience • Reveals the striking similarities between the visions of the Hebrew prophets and the DMT state described by Strassman’s research volunteers • Explains how prophetic and psychedelic states may share biological mechanisms • Presents a new top-down “theoneurological” model of spiritual experience After completing his groundbreaking research chronicled in DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Rick Strassman was left with one fundamental question: What does it mean that DMT, a simple chemical naturally found in all of our bodies, instantaneously opens us to an interactive spirit world that feels more real than our own world? When his decades of clinical psychiatric research and Buddhist practice were unable to provide answers to this question, Strassman began searching for a more resonant spiritual model. He found that the visions of the Hebrew prophets--such as Ezekiel, Moses, Adam, and Daniel--were strikingly similar to those of the volunteers in his DMT studies. Carefully examining the concept of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, he characterizes a “prophetic state of consciousness” and explains how it may share biological and metaphysical mechanisms with the DMT effect. Examining medieval commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, Strassman reveals how Jewish metaphysics provides a top-down model for both the prophetic and DMT states, a model he calls “theoneurology.” Theoneurology bridges biology and spirituality by proposing that the Divine communicates with us using the brain, and DMT--whether naturally produced or ingested--is a critical factor in such visionary experience. This model provides a counterpoint to “neurotheology,” which proposes that altered brain function simply generates the impression of a Divine-human encounter. Theoneurology addresses issues critical to the full flowering of the psychedelic drug experience. Perhaps even more important, it points the way to a renewal of classical prophetic consciousness, the soul of Hebrew Bible prophecy, as well as unexpected directions for the evolution of contemporary spiritual practice.
“This festschrift honors one of the most important Old Testament scholars in the modern Mennonite tradition, and the essays produced by colleagues and former students reflect Janzen's influence and productivity as both a scholar and a teacher.” —Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Loyola Marymount University
The primary purpose of Prophetic Liturgy is to inquire into the prophetic dimension of the liturgy. Some questions addressed in the book are: How can a liturgy be prophetic? How can liturgy form and transform individuals and communities? In which sense does the liturgy facilitate a living participation in socio-political-economic life? How does the sacramental practice challenge the church to mediate God's gifts of grace, love, justice, and mercy to the world? Possible answers for these questions begin to emerge as we develop an understanding of religious praxis as an active and dynamic prophetic action, in which the community of faith claims its identity, promotes an engaged faithful Christian life, and affirms the sacramental life of the church as a source of formation and inspiration for prophetic praxis, mediating God's gift for the life of the world. There is risk in presenting an option for prophetic praxis, in that it may go beyond the comfort zone of a community and engender spiritual and political alienation. The most challenging ethical hope of this book is to provide the worshiping community with prophetic awareness of socio-economic injustice, while at the same time preserving the community's historical-cultural identity, its religious values, and its sacramental spirituality.
In Unspoiled Endings, Christopher T. Holmes seeks to address two general but ultimately inadequate approaches to the book of Revelation. On the one hand, some obsess about decoding its symbolic language and providing a proper timetable for understanding the end times. On the other hand, many simply disregard or neglect Revelation altogether because of its strange or unsettling contents. Unspoiled Endings offers a historical, literary, and theological reading that offers an alternative to both tendencies and explains how and why Revelation relates to the life of faith. It serves as a corrective to those whose understanding of Revelation has been shaped more by the Left Behind series than by the book itself, and as an invitation to those who otherwise would never think to read or study the book. Each chapter presents a feature or characteristic of Revelation that contemporary readers can "reclaim" to make Revelation a more relevant and invigorating resource for contemporary Christians.
