God's Reign and the End of Empires


Book Description

In this profound and enlightening book, theologian Antonio Gonzalez analyzes the nature of global empires since the time of Babylon. His premise is that empires maintain power by any means necessary, including exploitation, injustice and idolatry. It is in this context of empire, specifically the Roman empire, that Jesus proclaimed the reign of God as opposed to the reign of Caesar. Within God s reign, God alone rules, with mercy, love, justice, and special concern for the oppressed. Imbued with this faith, a new community of believers developed, particularly among the poor, who lived what Jesus proclaimed, sharing resources and practicing equality and forgiveness rather than retribution. The author documents




The Middle East in Bible Prophecy


Book Description

The Arab Spring, the continuing Israel - Palestine conflict... why does the Middle East dominate the news headlines so often? One obvious answer is oil, the lifeblood of our modern world. The crucial importance of oil alone ensures that the Middle East will remain in the headlines for years. The Middle East is also the birthplace of the world's three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has also been the battlefield for each religion—trying to control the territory they consider holy. Nowhere are these conflicts more obvious than in Israel, and specifically in Jerusalem. Whether you understand it or not, events in the Middle East are destined to affect the lives of every person on earth! Bible prophecy gives us the clues to understand what will happen. This ebook, "The Middle East in Bible Prophecy", will help you better understand the troubled history of the Middle East—and its tumultuous future. Chapters in this ebook: -- Introduction: Worlds in Turmoil -- The Middle East: Worlds in Collision -- The Sons of Abraham -- The Rise and Fall of Ancient Israel -- The Four Empires of Daniel's Prophecies -- The Coming of Islam -- The Jews: From the Dispersion to the Modern Israeli State -- The Creation of the Modern Middle East -- A Rising Tide of Arab Nationalism -- Fundamentalist Islam Resurges -- Anger Mounts Following Gulf War -- Not Enemies Forever -- "Why Do People Hate Us So Much?" -- War and Peace in the Middle East -- What Is the "Abomination of Desolation"? -- Prophecy of an Arab Confederation -- What Should You Do? Inside this Bible Study Aid ebook: "It’s impossible to understand the present Middle East without a knowledge of the three great religions that emanate from the area—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These three faiths all trace their spiritual roots back to the same individual, Abraham." "However, conflict between Christians and Muslims has been a constant theme of history for 14 centuries." "Many other factors have contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and subsequent terrorism, including the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the domination of American culture." "After so much death and destruction, and centuries of war and unrest in the Middle East, imagine what a difference the second coming of Jesus Christ will make."




Re-membering the Reign of God


Book Description

Reflecting theologically on the 50-year history of ecclesial base communities in El Salvador, this book argues that the church of the poor is a decolonial sacrament of the reign of God. The authors challenge Christians to unlearn colonial expressions of faith, concluding with a retrieval of solidarity in the Catholic social tradition.




The Gospel According to the Blues


Book Description

'The Gospel According to the Blues' dares us to read Jesus's Sermon on the Mount in conversation with Robert Johnson, Son House, and Muddy Waters. It suggests that thinking about the blues - the history, the artists, the songs - provides good stimulationfor thinking about the Christian gospel. Both are about a world gone wrong, about injustice, about the human condition, and about hope for a better world. In this book, Gary Burnett probes both the gospel and the history of the blues, to help us understand better the nature of the good news that Jesus preached, and its relevance and challenge to us.




Apocalypse


Book Description

The Book of Revelation has always been a mysterious and intriguing book, describing in symbolic terms the confrontation between the Disciples of Christ and the powers - political and supernatural - that hold sway over the current age. Fundamentalists have been attracted to the book and have sought to decipher its strange symbols as coded prophecy of future events. But as Pablo Richard shows in Apocalypse, the most powerful readings of the Book of Revelation are through the eyes of the oppressed, living out their Christian faith in the context of the modern empire. It is they who identify most strongly with Revelation's ultimate message of hope and life in the midst of death and persecution. Apocalypse first provides a general introduction to the reading of Revelation by examining three keys for its understanding: the historical, he sociological, and the literary-structural. The book then goes on to explore the whole of the Book of Revelation, following the book's own structure. Each section provides a line-by-line reading of the text, establishing the literal meaning before applying the interpretive keys already established.




The Insurgency of the Spirit


Book Description

The Insurgency of the Spirit taps mutli-disciplinary methodologies of post-colonial biblical scholarship and anthropology, liberation theologies, indigenous studies, grief/trauma research, and nature-meditation writings to shape a constructive retrieval of the animist Jesus. The vision that emerges is one that sets forward an Earth-loving Jesus who challenges Christians in particular to mobilize against the destructive relationship that exists between imperial religion and political systems.




The End of Empires


Book Description

The articles of this comprehensive edited volume offer a multidisciplinary, global and comparative approach to the history of empires. They analyze their ends over a long spectrum of humankind’s history, ranging from Ancient History through Modern Times. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume scrutinizes the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires. All contributions locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes all the contributions to this volume comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes.




Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel


Book Description

The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras.




Befreiung von Gewalt zum Leben in Frieden. Liberation from Violence for Life in Peace


Book Description

This volume raises troubling questions about the heritage of the Reformation - with respect to the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists, Jews and Muslims. The authors come from different churches - Lutheran, Mennonite and Reformed. They analyze the limitations of the Reformation in their own historical context and offer constructive theological and ethical reflections to we achieve the challenges of global economic justice, the groaning earth of radical commitment to peace and inter-religious reconciliation.




Matthew and the Margins


Book Description

This detailed commentary presents the gospel of matthew as a counter-narrative, showing that it is a work of resistance written from and for a minority community of disciples committed to Jesus, the agent of God's saving presence. It was written and functions to shape the identity and lifestyle of the early community of jesus' followers as an alternative community that can resist the dominant authorities both in rome and in the synagogue. The Gospel anticpates the time when Jesus will return and establish God's reign over all, including the powers in Rome.