Reflecting the Divine Image


Book Description

John Wesley strived for a theology--a theology both written and lived--that delicately balanced sanctification and justification. He hoped to uphold both "faith alone" and "holy living." Sadly, says theologian H. Ray Dunning, many of Wesley's followers have not maintained that balance. Some have tended toward legalism, some toward a preoccupation with personal holiness, and others toward social activism with little theological grounding. Dunning believes Wesleyanism possesses the resources to help all Christians "reflect the divine image," and to do so holistically, in all aspects of life. His book incisively examines issues of ethical methodology and then shows how an ethic based on the "Imago Dei" shapes our relation to God, to one another and to the earth. This introduction to and overview of ethics will enlighten and benefit Christians in all traditions, not despite but especially because it is written in the true Wesleyan tradition--passionate, profoundly faithful and plainspoken.




Reflecting the Divine Image


Book Description

John Wesley strived for a theology--a theology both written and lived--that delicately balanced sanctification and justification. He hoped to uphold both faith alone and holy living. Sadly, says theologian H. Ray Dunning, many of Wesley's followers have not maintained that balance. Some have tended toward legalism, some toward a preoccupation with personal holiness, and others toward social activism with little theological grounding. Dunning believes Wesleyanism possesses the resources to help all Christians reflect the divine image, and to do so holistically, in all aspects of life. His book incisively examines issues of ethical methodology and then shows how an ethic based on the Imago Dei shapes our relation to God, to one another and to the earth. This introduction to and overview of ethics will enlighten and benefit Christians in all traditions, not despite but especially because it is written in the true Wesleyan tradition--passionate, profoundly faithful and plainspoken.




Waiting on the Word


Book Description

For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. A scholar of poetry as well as a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Advent. Among the classic writers he includes are: George Herbert, John Donne, Milton, Tennyson,and Christina Rossetti,as well as contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and Grevel Lindop. He also includes a selection of his own highly praised work.




The Divine Image


Book Description

Theologian Ian McFarland claims that Christians have mainly misappropriated the "image of God" language for 2000 years and thereby missed a rich resource for our knowledge of God. What, then, does it mean to say that we are made in God's image, or that Christ is the very image or prototype of God? Rather than referring to some germinal divine element in humans, such as reason, McFarland claims that the image of God in us tells us something about God and how we know God. It tells us that God, though not identical with us, communicates Godself to us in creative love, in a way that offers precious clues about God's transcendence, immanence, triune life, self-disclosure, incarnation, and intentions for human life. Too, we "learn from Jesus something new about God." Gathered as Christ's body, the church too images God and sets us on a quest to discern the image of God in Christ's incarnate body. McFarland's careful and exacting work builds from this kernel a powerful Christian vision of God's life and our own destiny in Christ.




Three Treatises on the Divine Images


Book Description

In AD 726, the Byzantine emperor ordered the destruction of all icons, or religious images, throughout the empire, and icons were subject to an imperial ban that was to last, with a brief remission, until AD 843. A defender of icons, St John of Damascus wrote three treatises against "those who attack the holy images." He differentiates between the veneration of icons, which is a matter of expressing honor, and idolatry, which is offering worship to something other than God.




The Divine Image


Book Description




The Divine Image


Book Description

Although attempts to understand the growth of aniconism focus on the Pentateuchal legal material, scholars increasingly make reference to the prophetic literature to illuminate the debate. Jill Middlemas provides the first comprehensive analysis of the prophets with attention to rhetorical strategies that reflect anti-iconic thought and promote iconoclasm. After illuminating the idol polemics, which is the rhetoric most often associated with aniconism, she draws out how prophecy also exposes a reticence towards cultic symbols and mental images of Yahweh. At the same time the theme of incomparability as well as the use of metaphor and multiple imaging, paradoxically, reveal additional ways to express aniconic belief or the destabilization of a single divine image. Middlemas' analysis of prophetic aniconism sheds new light on interpretations of the most iconic expression in the Old Testament, the imago dei passages in Genesis, where God is said to create humanity in the divine image.




Created in God's Image


Book Description

ccording to Scripture, humankind was created in the image of God. Hoekema discusses the implications of this theme, devoting several chapters to the biblical teaching on God's image, the teaching of philosophers and theologians through the ages, and his own theological analysis. Suitable for seminary-level anthropology courses, yet accessible to educated laypeople. Extensive bibliography, fully indexed.




Songs of Innocence


Book Description




Image and Presence


Book Description

Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present--from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another. Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.