The Continuing Conversion of the Church
The Continuing Conversion of the Church

Author: Darrell L. Guder

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2000-03-20

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780802847034

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Western society is now a very different, very difficult mission field. In such a situation, the mission of evangelism cannot succeed with an attitude of "business as usual." This volume builds a theology of evangelism that has its focus on the church itself. Darrell Guder shows that the church's missionary calling requires that the theology and practice of evangelism be fundamentally rethought and redirected, focused on the continuing evangelization of the church so that it can carry out its witness faithfully in today's world. In Part 1 Guder explores how, under the influence of reductionism and individualism, the church has historically moved away from a biblical theology of evangelism. Part 2 presents contemporary challenges to the church's evangelical ministry, especially those challenges that illustrate the church's need for continuing conversion. Part 3 discusses what a truly missional theology would mean for the church, including sweeping changes in its institutional structures and practices. Written for teachers, church leaders, and students of evangelism, this volume is vital reading for everyone engaged in mission work.

The Road from Damascus
The Road from Damascus

Author: Richard N. Longenecker

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2002-01-10

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1579108644

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Conversion is intrinsic to the Christian Religion. The most remarkable conversion recorded in the New Testament is that of Paul, and most Christians consider Christ's encounter with Paul to be a prototype of Christian conversion generally. This collection of eleven essays give Paul's conversion a firmer rootage in the biblical materials while also emphasizing personal application. The contributors examine the nature of Paul's Damascus Road experience and the impact of that experience on his thought and ministry, and explore how Paul's experience functions as a paradigm for Christian thought and action today.

Let's Get Biblical!
Let's Get Biblical!

Author: Tovia Singer

Publisher:

Published: 2014-03-31

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780996091329

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Explore the Jewish and Christian Scriptures with the world renowned Bible scholar and expert on Jewish evangelism, Rabbi Tovia Singer. This new two-volume work, Let's Get Biblical! Why Doesn't Judaism Accept the Christian Messiah?, takes the reader on an eye-opening journey through timeless passages in Tanach, and answers a pressing question: Why doesn't Judaism accept the Christian messiah? Are the teachings conveyed in the New Testament compatible with ageless prophecies in the Jewish Scriptures? Rabbi Singer's fascinating new work clearly illustrates why the core doctrines of the Church are utterly incompatible with the cornerstone principles expressed by the Prophets of Israel, and are opposed by the most cherished tenets conveyed in the Jewish Scriptures. Moreover, this book demonstrates how the Church systematically and deliberately altered the Jewish Scriptures in order to persuade potential converts that Jesus is the promised Jewish messiah. To accomplish this feat, Christian "translators" manipulated, misquoted, mistranslated, and even fabricated verses in the Hebrew Scriptures so that these texts appear to be speaking about Jesus. This exhaustive book probes and illuminates this thought-provoking subject. Tragically, over the past two millennia, the church's faithful have been completely oblivious to this Bible-tampering because virtually no Christian can read or understand the Hebrew Scriptures in its original language. Since time immemorial, earnest parishioners blindly and utterly depended upon manmade Christian "translations" of the "Old Testament" in order to understand the "Word of God." Understandably, churchgoers are deeply puzzled by the Jewish rejection of their religion's claims. They wonder aloud why Jewish people, who are reared since childhood in the Holy Tongue, and are the bearers and protectors of the sacred Oracles of God, do not accept Jesus as their messiah. How can such an extraordinary people dismiss such an extraordinary claim? Are they just plain stubborn? Let's Get Biblical thoroughly answers these nagging, age-old questions.

Baptist Foundations
Baptist Foundations

Author: Mark Dever

Publisher: B&H Publishing Group

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1433681048

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In this volume, representatives of several North American Baptist seminaries and a Baptist university make the exegetical and theological case for a Baptist polity. Right polity, they argue, is congregationalism, elder leadership, diaconal service, regenerate church membership, church discipline, and a Baptist approach to the ordinances.

Confessions of the Shtetl
Confessions of the Shtetl

Author: Ellie R. Schainker

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1503600246

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Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire
Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire

Author: Selim Deringil

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1139510487

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In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their 'denationalization'. The book tells the story of the struggle between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers and a multitude of evangelical organizations, shedding light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two.

Salvation Is from the Jews
Salvation Is from the Jews

Author: Roy H. Schoeman

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1642290777

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The book traces the role of Judaism and the Jewish people in God's plan for the salvation of mankind, from Abraham through the Second Coming, as revealed by the Catholic faith and by a thoughtful examination of history. It will give Christians a deeper understanding of Judaism, both as a religion in itself and as a central component of Christian salvation. To Jews it reveals the incomprehensible importance, nobility and glory that Judaism most truly has. It examines the unique and central role Judaism plays in the destiny of the world. It documents that throughout history attacks on Jews and Judaism have been rooted not in Christianity, but in the most anti-Christian of forces. Areas addressed include: the Messianic prophecies in Jewish scripture; the anti-Christian roots of Nazi anti-Semitism; the links between Nazism and Arab anti-Semitism; the theological insights of major Jewish converts; and the role of the Jews in the Second Coming. "Perplexed by controversies new and old about the destiny of the Jewish people? Read this book by a Jew who became a Catholic for a well-written, provocative, ground-breaking account. Some of the answers most have never heard before." Ronda Chervin, Ph.D., Hebrew-Catholic