Human Anguish and God's Power


Book Description

The intrinsically 'glorious' God' is 'sovereign' in three different ways, each of which has a different sense of 'power.'




Suffering and the Sovereignty of God


Book Description

In the last few years, 9/11, a tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and many other tragedies have shown us that the vision of God in today's churches in relation to evil and suffering is often frivolous. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, many Christians are choosing to become more shallow, more entertainment-oriented, and therefore irrelevant in the face of massive suffering. In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, contributors John Piper, Joni Eareckson Tada, Steve Saint, Carl Ellis, David Powlison, Dustin Shramek, and Mark Talbot explore the many categories of God's sovereignty as evidenced in his Word. They urge readers to look to Christ, even in suffering, to find the greatest confidence, deepest comfort, and sweetest fellowship they have ever known.




Glorification and the Life of Faith (Soteriology and Doxology)


Book Description

Two renowned theologians open up the reality of God's glory in this book, offering readers a dynamic foundation for glorifying God in the twenty-first century. Drawing from Christian spirituality, liturgy, poetry, hymns, iconography, seminal "glory" texts in the Bible, the Nicene Creed, and theologians throughout the ages who caught sight of the glory of God in diverse ways, this book explores the immensely rich and generative soteriological theme of glorification. It shows students how to integrate theology into the life of faith and demonstrates how the practices of Christian worship influence theological thinking. Metaphors, descriptions, evocations, concepts, narratives, and more highlight the amazing, abundant reality of glorification. This is the first book in the Soteriology and Doxology series. These introductory textbooks cover key topics in soteriology, providing substantive treatments of doctrine while pointing to the setting of theology in doxology. Series editors are Kent Eilers and Kyle C. Strobel.




A Stranger in the House of God


Book Description

Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith




The Making of American Liberal Theology


Book Description

In this first of three volumes, Dorrien identifies the indigenous roots of American liberal theology and demonstrates a wider, longer-running tradition than has been thought. The tradition took shape in the nineteenth century, motivated by a desire to map a modernist "third way" between orthodoxy and rationalistic deism/atheism. It is defined by its openness to modern intellectual inquiry; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people. Dorrien takes a narrative approach and provides a biographical reading of important religious thinkers of the time, including William E. Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charles Briggs. Dorrien notes that, although liberal theology moved into elite academic institutions, its conceptual foundations were laid in the pulpit rather than the classroom.




This Too Shall Last


Book Description

This book is not a before-and-after story. Our culture treats suffering like a problem to fix, a blight to hide, or the sad start of a transformation story. We silently, secretly wither under the pressure of living as though suffering is a predicament we can avoid or annihilate by working hard enough or having enough faith. When your prayers for healing haven't been answered, the fog of depression isn't lifting, your marriage is ending in divorce, or grief won't go away, it's easy to feel you've failed God and, worse, he's failed you. If God loves us, why does he allow us to hurt? Over a decade ago chronic illness plunged therapist and writer K.J. Ramsey straight into this paradox. Before her illness, faith made sense. But when pain came and never left, K.J. had to find a way across the widening canyon that seemed to separate God's goodness from her excruciating circumstances. She wanted to conquer suffering. Instead, she encountered the God who chose it. She wanted to make pain past-tense. Instead, God invited her into a bigger story. This Too Shall Last offers an antidote to our cultural idolatry of effort and ease. Through personal story and insights from neuroscience and theology, Ramsey invites us to let our tears become lenses of the wonder that before God ever rescues us, he stands in solidarity with us. We are all mid-story in circumstances we did not choose, wondering when our hard things will end and where grace will come if they don’t. We don't need to make suffering a before-and-after story. Together we can encounter the grace that enters the middle of our stories, where living with suffering that lingers means receiving God's presence that lasts.




The Goodness of God


Book Description

For those times when we’re wounded by broken trust, assaulted by disease, or victimized by evil—or when we’re crushed to see such things happen to people we love—Randy Alcorn offers something solid to hold onto: God's love. In this specially focused condensation of Alcorn’s If God Is Good…: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil, we’re continually guided into a deeper glimpse of God’s loving ways and higher purposes—the very things we’re often most blinded to whenever we battle pain and anguish. Alcorn avoids superficial or sentimental responses, and instead presses forward boldly to explore all the troubling doubts and questions that agitate within us when we confront suffering and evil. The issues are far from simple, the answers far from easy—but Alcorn shows how the way of suffering—a path that Jesus himself followed more than anyone else—can ultimately become a journey into wholeness and even logic-defying joy.




Walking with God through Pain and Suffering


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet Timothy Keller—whose books have sold millions of copies to both religious and secular readers—explores one of the most difficult questions we must answer in our lives: Why is there pain and suffering? Walking with God through Pain and Suffering is the definitive Christian book on why bad things happen and how we should respond to them. The question of why there is pain and suffering in the world has confounded every generation; yet there has not been a major book from a Christian perspective exploring why they exist for many years. The two classics in this area are When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, which was published more than thirty years ago, and C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, published more than seventy years ago. The great secular book on the subject, Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, was first published in 1969. It’s time for a new understanding and perspective, and who better to tackle this complex subject than Timothy Keller? As the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Timothy Keller is known for the unique insights he shares, and his series of books has guided countless readers in their spiritual journeys. Walking with God through Pain and Suffering will bring a much-needed, fresh viewpoint on this important issue.




The Home of God (Theology for the Life of the World)


Book Description

We live in the midst of a crisis of home. It is evident in the massive uprooting and migration of millions across the globe, in the anxious nationalism awaiting immigrants in their destinations, in the unhoused populations in wealthy cities, in the fractured households of families, and in the worldwide destruction of habitats and international struggles for dominance. It is evident, perhaps more quietly but just as truly, in the aching sense that there is nowhere we truly belong. In this moment, the Christian faith has been disappointingly inept in its response. We need a better witness to the God who created, loves, and reconciles this world, who comes to dwell among us. This book tells the "story of everything" in which God creates the world as the home for humans and for God in communion with God's creatures. The authors render the story of creation, redemption, and consummation through the lens of God's homemaking work and show the theological fruit of telling the story this way. The result is a vision that can inspire creative Christian living in our various homes today in faithfulness to God's ongoing work.




Now and Forever


Book Description

Building on the insights of the ressourcement theology of grace, this sophisticated theological aesthetics offers a fresh vision of the doctrine of creation through a consideration of the beauty of time. Conventional eschatological accounts of life after death tend to emphasize the discontinuity between earthly life and the hereafter: whereas this life is subject to the contingencies of time, life after death is characterized by a stolid eternity. In contrast to this standard view, John E. Thiel’s Now and Forever articulates a Catholic eschatology in which earthly life and heavenly life are seen as gracefully continuous. This account offers a reconceptualization of time, which, Thiel argues, is best understood as the sacramental medium of God’s grace to creation. Thiel’s project thus attempts to rescue time from its Platonically negative resonance in the doctrine of creation. Rather than viewing time as the ambiance of sinful dissolution, Thiel argues for a Christian vision of time’s beauty, and so explicitly develops an aesthetics that views time as a creaturely reflection of God’s own Trinitarian life. This thesis proceeds from the assumption that all time is eschatological time and is thus guided by attention to the temporality implicit in the virtue of hope, with its orientation toward a fulfilled future that culminates in resurrected life. This interpretation of the beauty of eschatological time in its widest expanse presses further the insight of ressourcement theology that grace is everywhere, while appreciating how time’s graceful beauty manifests itself in the diversity of temporal moments, human communities, and most fully in the heavenly communion of the saints.