Edwards the Exegete


Book Description

Scholars have long recognized that Jonathan Edwards loved the Bible. But preoccupation with his role in Western "public" life and letters has resulted in a failure to see the significance of his biblical exegesis. Douglas A. Sweeney offers the first comprehensive history of Edwards' interpretation of the Bible.




Locke and Biblical Hermeneutics


Book Description

The volume presents illuminating research carried out by international scholars of Locke and the early modern period. The essays address the theoretical and historical contexts of Locke’s analytical methodology and come together in a multidisciplinary approach that sets biblical hermeneutics in relation to his philosophical, historical, and political thought, and to the philological and doctrinal culture of his time. The contextualization of Locke’s biblical hermeneutics within the contemporary reading of the Bible contributes to the analysis of the figure of Christ and the role of Paul’s theology in political and religious thought from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. The volume sheds light on how Locke was appreciated by his contemporaries as a biblical interpreter and exegete. It also offers a reconsideration that overarches interpretations confined within specific disciplinary ambits to address Locke’s thought in a global historic context.




History of New Testament Research, Vol. 1


Book Description

Stressing the historical and theological significance of pivotal figures and movements, William Baird guides the reader through intriguing developments and critical interpretation of the New Testament from its beginnings in Deism through the watershed of the Tubingen school. Familiar figures appear in a new light, and important, previously forgotten stages of the journey emerge. Baird gives attention to the biographical and cultural setting of persons and approaches, affording both beginning student and seasoned scholar an authoritative account that is useful for orientation as well as research.




John Locke and Personal Identity


Book Description

One of the most influential debates in John Locke's work is the problem of personal identity over time. This problem is that of how a person at one time is the same person later in time, and so can be held responsible for past actions. The time of most concern for Locke is that of the general resurrection promised in the New Testament. Given the turbulence of the Reformation and the formation of new approaches to the Bible, many philosophers and scientists paid careful attention to emerging orthodoxies or heterodoxies about death. Here K. Joanna S. Forstrom examines the interrelated positions of Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More and Robert Boyle in their individual contexts and in Locke's treatment of them. She argues that, in this way, we can better understand Locke and his position on personal identity and immortality. Once his unique take is understood and grounded in his own theological convictions (or lack thereof), we can better evaluate Locke and defend him against classic objections to his thought.




Political Theory on Death and Dying


Book Description

Political Theory on Death and Dying provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic review that compiles and curates the latest scholarship, research, and debates on the political and social implications of death and dying. Adopting an easy-to-follow chronological and multi-disciplinary approach on 45 canonical figures and thinkers, leading scholars from a diverse range of fields, including political science, philosophy, and English, discuss each thinker’s ethical and philosophical accounts on mortality and death. Each chapter focuses on a single established figure in political philosophy, as well as religious and literary thinkers, covering classical to contemporary thought on death. Through this approach, the chapters are designed to stand alone, allowing the reader to study every entry in isolation and with greater depth, as well as trace how thinkers are influenced by their predecessors. A key contribution to the field, Political Theory on Death and Dying provides an excellent overview for students and researchers who study philosophy of death, the history of political thought, and political philosophy.




John Wesley's Conception and Use of Scripture


Book Description

Despite wide acceptance of the "Wesleyan quadrilateral", significant disagreements have arisen in both academic and church circles about the degree to which Scripture stood in a place of theological primacy for Wesley, or should do so for modern Methodists, and about the proper and appropriate methods of interpreting Scripture. In this important work, Scott J. Jones offers a full-scale investigation of John Wesley's conception and use of Scripture. The results of this careful and thorough investigation are sometimes surprising. Jones argues that for Wesley, religious authority is constituted not by a "quadrilateral", but by a fivefold but unitary locus comprising Scripture, reason, Christian antiquity, the Church of England, and experience. He shows that in actual practice Wesley's reliance on the entire Christian tradition - in particular of the early church and of the Church of England - is far heavier than his stated conception of Scripture would seem to allow, and that Wesley stresses the interdependence of the five dimensions of religious authority for Christian faith and practice.




A Companion to Milton


Book Description

The diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies is brought alive in this stimulating Companion. Winner of the Milton Society of America's Irene Samuels Book Award in 2002. Invites readers to explore and enjoy Milton's rich and fascinating work. Comprises 29 fresh and powerful readings of Milton's texts and the contexts in which they were created, each written by a leading scholar. Looks at literary production and cultural ideologies, issues of politics, gender and religion, individual Milton texts, other relevant contemporary texts and responses to Milton over time. Devotes a whole chapter to each major poem, and four to Paradise Lost. Conveys the excitement of recent developments in the field.




Locke's Metaphysics


Book Description

Matthew Stuart offers a fresh interpretation of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing for the work's profound contribution to metaphysics. He presents new readings of Locke's accounts of personal identity and the primary/secondary quality distinction, and explores Locke's case against materialism and his philosophy of action.




Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination


Book Description

In three carefully researched volumes, this ground-breaking study examines the gift of tongues through 2,000 years of church history. Starting in the present and working back in time, these volumes consider (1) the modern redefinition of “tongues” as a private prayer language; (2) the church’s perennial understanding of “tongues” as ordinary human languages; and (3) the Corinthian “tongues,” which, in light of Jewish liturgical tradition, turn out to have been a foreign liturgical language (Hebrew or Aramaic) requiring bilingual interpreters. In the first volume, the authors establish that modern glossolalia, far from being a supernatural gift enjoyed by certain believers since the time of Pentecost and undergoing a resurgence in modern times, has no precedent in church life prior to the nineteenth century. They discuss why German theologians, responding to the Irvingite revival, coined the term “glossolalia” in the 1830s; why Pentecostals between 1906–8 quietly began redefining “tongues” to mean a heavenly language unintelligible to human beings but pleasing to God, instead of foreign languages useful for evangelism; why Protestant cessationists believed miraculous tongues had ceased; and why interpolated idioms like “unknown tongues” in Protestant Bibles were aimed originally at Rome’s use of Latin.




The Challenge of History


Book Description

The advent of the modern, historical, and critical methods of reading Scripture is one of the most significant events in the last five hundred years of Christian history and theology. New questions arose in the course of that history that led to new, sometimes troubling answers. New ways of considering Scripture were articulated. The crisis in which academic Christian theology has found itself for approximately two hundred years is directly related to the emergence of new ways of studying--and criticizing--the Bible. The Challenge of History traces the trajectory of these developments, presenting key readings from over thirty-five theologians--from Erasmus to Pannenberg--whose writings relate to the birth of modern historical and critical exegesis and, more broadly, to the emergence, among theologians and biblical scholars, of a certain historical consciousness that characterizes vast segments of modernity. How did the historical and critical methods arise? How did they impact the study of Scripture? What are their implications for Christian theology? Scripture is read--and needs to be read--differently in a parish, in a monastery, and in an academic setting. But the various ways of approaching Scripture should not be cordoned off from one another. This volume is an ideal textbook for in-depth study of one of the most important topics in modern theology.