A Scholastic Miscellany


Book Description

This is collection of Christian treatises written prior to the end of the sixteenth century.




Theology in Transposition


Book Description

T. F. Torrance was one of the most significant English-language theologians of the 20th century known extensively for his curatorship of the English translation of Barth's Church Dogmatics but also for his own prodigious theological scholarship. The complexity and astonishing breadth of Torrance's output, however, have made assessment and appropriation markedly difficult. This volume seeks to rectify that lack of assessment through careful exposition of the vital centers and interconnections within Torrance's theology alongside constructive appraisal and critique of his contributions to contemporary theology.




Receiver, Bearer, and Giver of God’s Spirit


Book Description

What difference does the Spirit make in the life of Jesus and in our lives? Answering that question without doing away with the divine dignity of Christ has been a challenge in the distant and recent past. But this need not be the case. The current work is a contribution to the growing field of Spirit Christology, which seeks to enrich the classic Logos Christology of the ecumenical Councils with a Spirit-oriented trajectory. Sanchez tests the productivity of a Spirit Christology as a theological lens for assessing the main events of Jesus' life and mission, accounts of the atonement, the significance of the incarnation, the concepts of person and relation, and models of the Trinity. Seeing Christ as the privileged locus of the Spirit also has implications for the church's life in the Spirit. Sanchez shows how a Spirit Christology fosters Christian practices such as proclamation, prayer, and sanctification. Among the highlights of this work the reader will note the author's assessment of early church fathers' readings of the place of the Spirit in the anointing of Jesus, a constructive proposal towards the complementarity of Logos and Spirit Christologies, ecumenical engagement with various theological traditions in the East and the West, and the first constructive assessment of the field informed by the Lutheran tradition.




The Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement


Book Description

The American moral governmental theory of the atonement (MGT) was arguably the most contextualized doctrine of atonement in the history of the Protestant tradition. Hewn from the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and engineered to address the theological, political, philosophical, moral, and even economic milieu in the early republic, MGT became the doctrinal centerpiece of “the first indigenous American school of Calvinism.” As a result, it stands as a kind of theological time capsule to the people and principles that shaped the tumultuous period between the first Great Awakening and the Civil War when it flourished in America. For over a century in the Anglo-American world, the doctrine of atonement was under heavy construction in the broader Reformed community. By endowing new meaning to old theological terms like imputation, substitution, justice, punishment, and even atonement, MGT represents a theological watermark of sorts in Reformed dogmatics, defining its limits, testing its boundaries, and demanding a level of precision from today’s theologians. This book offers a contextualization, distillation, and conversation with this Edwardsean doctrine of atonement.




Anselm's Proslogion


Book Description




Hear the Ancient Wisdom


Book Description

There is a hunger in the modern world for spirituality. One vast resource of spiritual wisdom comes from the pre-Reformation church--from the martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity, through the long tradition of monasticism, to the medieval Christian mystics. These are the deep wells of Christian reflection from persons such as John Chrysostom, Augustine, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich, to mention just a few. The spiritual insights of over seventy men and women of pre-Reformation Christianity are found in these pages. From these figures we can learn more about the practices of prayer and contemplation, a life of following Christ, the relevance of community, the challenge of asceticism, the movement of withdrawal and engagement, the love of God for God's own sake, living the gospel, sacrificing for the kingdom of God, the longing for union with God, the practices of justice, and a life of prophetic witness. For us, so embedded and shaped by the modern world, this ancient wisdom will come as refreshing water and as a breath of fresh air, with the wings of the Spirit and whispers of angels.




William Blake and the Productions of Time


Book Description

Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.




Milton and the Idea of the Fall


Book Description

In Paradise Lost (1667), Milton produced the most magnificent poetic account ever written of the biblical Fall of man. In this wide-ranging study, William Poole presents a comprehensive analysis of the origin, evolution, and contemporary discussion of the Fall, and the way seventeenth-century authors, particularly Milton, represented it. Poole first examines the range and depth of early modern thought on the subject, then explains and evaluates the basis of the idea and the intellectual and theological controversies it inspired from early Christian times to Milton's own century. The second part of the book delves deeper into the development of Milton's own thought on the Fall, from the earliest of his poems, through his prose, to his mature epic. Poole distinguishes clearly for the first time the range and complexity of contemporary debates on the Fall of man, and offers many insights into the originality and sophistication of Milton's work.




Justification in Earlier Medieval Theology


Book Description

One of the pleasures and privileges of scholarship is the opportunity to express one's gratitude to friends and colleagues upon the occasion of a publication. As with many scholarly first books, this present work had its genesis as a doctoral dissertation, and hence my first and most profound acknowledgment must be to Professor S. Harrison Thomson of the University of Colorado, whom I am honored to be able to describe as my mentor. Only my fellow "Old Thomsonians" can appreciate the common debt we owe to this great medievalist who was also a magni ficent teacher and counsellor. Presently in retirement, he continues to be our principal inspiration and model of scholarly distinction. I am also greatly indebted to another former mentor and now my senior colleague and chairman at the University of Denver, Professor Allen D. Breck, who, together with Deans Edward A. Lindell and Gerhard H. Mundinger, constantly encouraged and assisted my further progress and read the manuscript in its final stages, offering many valuable sugges tions as to style and substance. My university provided me with generous support in the form of research funds and clerical services; I am grateful to. those colleagues who made this assistance possible, as well as to friends at other institutions who shared their knowledge and frequently gave salutary advice.




The Radical Evangelical


Book Description

The gospel we profess is the most radical power on earth, reaching to the depths of our personal, social, and political existence. It needs a radical people to embody and proclaim it. This book examines the nature of evangelical theology, dealing with areas of persistent disagreement and controversy, such as the status of the Bible, the nature of Christ's achievement on the cross, and the meaning of "hell." It offers a new way forward that remains committed to the fundamentals of faith while retaining a flexible response to the challenges of the future.