While taught by Vatican II, the “sense of the faith” (sensus fidei) has had little official impact in the Catholic Church. What would the church look like if it took this conciliar teaching to heart? To address this neglect, John Burkhard locates the historical roots of the teaching and its emergence at Vatican II. It attempts to better understand the “sense of the faith” in the light of other fundamental teachings of the council and challenges the hierarchical church to invite all the faithful to rightfully participate in the prophetic ministry of the whole church, closely allied with Pope Francis’s call for a more synodal church.
The theological implications of the philosophy of history, traced through the works of Buckhardt, Marx, Hegel, Proudhon, Comte, Condorcet, Turgot, Voltaire, Vico, Bossuet, Joachim, Augustine, Orosius and the Bible.
Everyone wants to believe in something beyond or someone bigger than themselves, but nobody wants to be duped. In order to provide answers to people who are seeking the truth, Mark Mittelberg updates for today the classic book by Robert Laidlaw that sold millions, The Reason Why. This short book gives clear, concise reasons why belief in God makes sense.
"Magisterial. . . . A learned, brilliant and enjoyable study."—Géza Vermès, Times Literary Supplement In this exciting book, Paula Fredriksen explains the variety of New Testament images of Jesus by exploring the ways that the new Christian communities interpreted his mission and message in light of the delay of the Kingdom he had preached. This edition includes an introduction reviews the most recent scholarship on Jesus and its implications for both history and theology. "Brilliant and lucidly written, full of original and fascinating insights."—Reginald H. Fuller, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "This is a first-rate work of a first-rate historian."—James D. Tabor, Journal of Religion "Fredriksen confronts her documents—principally the writings of the New Testament—as an archaeologist would an especially rich complex site. With great care she distinguishes the literary images from historical fact. As she does so, she explains the images of Jesus in terms of the strategies and purposes of the writers Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."—Thomas D’Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor
Since its first appearance in 1977, this book continues to be the single most important text for understanding the theology of Johann Baptist Metz, one of the founders of the "new political theology." Metz's thesis is that the crisis that Christianity faces "is not primarily a crisis of its message, but rather a crisis of its subjects and institutions, which have pulled back all too far from the inevitable practical meaning of its message and in so doing have undercut its intelligible power." In response to this problem he offers a definition of a practical fundamental theology and, in the second part of the book, tests it against a number of issues in Christology, ecclesiology, and fundamental theology. In the third and concluding section the book devotes a chapter each to the three basic categories of the new political theology: memory, narrative, and solidarity. It is in recalling the dangerous memory of Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection, telling and retelling the dangerous stories of Jesus and those who follow him, and exercising a mystical-political discipleship of solidarity with those who don't count in our progressive, technological societies (including a solidarity of memory with the dead) that Christianity can recover its political voice without becoming simply a religious paraphrase of political and social processes. Book jacket.
In recent years the Christian faith has been challenged by skeptics, including the New Atheists, who claim that belief in God is simply not reasonable. Here prominent Christian philosopher C. Stephen Evans offers a fresh, contemporary, and nuanced response. He makes the case for belief in a personal God through an exploration of natural "signs," which open our minds to theistic possibilities and foster belief in the Christian revelation. Evans then discusses why God's self-revelation is both authoritative and authentic. This sophisticated yet accessible book provides a clear account of the evidence for Christian faith, concluding that it still makes sense to believe.
Many introductions to biblical studies describe critical approaches, but they do not discuss the theological implications. This timely resource discusses the relationship between historical criticism and Christian theology to encourage evangelical engagement with historical-critical scholarship. Charting a middle course between wholesale rejection and unreflective embrace, the book introduces evangelicals to a way of understanding and using historical-critical scholarship that doesn't compromise Christian orthodoxy. The book covers eight of the most hotly contested areas of debate in biblical studies, helping readers work out how to square historical criticism with their beliefs.
An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was—and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing—was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. Shagan challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. He describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument. Brilliantly illuminating, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.
Apostolicity Then and Now explores apostolicity from its origin to today. Apostolicity is a fundamental mark of the church, referring to Jesus' faith given to, carried on, and taught?unaltered?by a continuous line of apostles. This book primarily focuses on how apostolicity pertains to the church as a whole and views apostolic succession in light of how apostolicity is applicable to the church. Scriptural, historical, theological, and ecumenical contexts provide a thorough study that includes worldviews and their impact on apostolicity. Chapters are "Who Were the Apostles?" ?Why the Early Churches Understood Themselves as Apostolic,? ?Apostolicity in History,? ?Apostolicity and the Theologians,? ?Apostolicity and the Classical and Modern Worldviews,? ?Apostolicity in a Postmodern World,? ?Apostolicity in Ecumenical Dialogue,? and ?Apostolicity in an Ecumenical Church.?
"John Thiel attempts to counter this tendency toward "ecclesiastical fundamentalism" by proposing an interpretive schema for tradition analogous to the four senses of scripture."--BOOK JACKET.
