CTS Library

After Method assumes the impossibility of doing theology right–and moves beyond it. Organized as a conversation in two voices—with systematic-theological commitments represented by Karl Barth and constructive-theological commitments represented by Marcella Althaus-Reid—this book calls the redemptive potential of any methodological program into question. Indeed, the search for a full and complete theological account of reality has only further fragmented theological discourse. Thus, Hanna Reichel argues that method cannot “save” us—but that does not mean that we cannot do better. After Method harnesses the best insights systematic and constructive theologies have to offer in their mutual critique and gestures toward a “better” theology.

A concise survey of Black theology in the Caribbean and United States. Contemporary Black theology is complex and far-reaching. In this concise yet thorough volume, Noel Leo Erskine examines Black theology from every angle, seeking to answer the question, Why would Africa's children turn to the God of their oppressors for liberation? Beginning with the Middle Passage, which brought millions of Africans into the Caribbean and United States, Erskine unpacks the background and distinctive ideas of Black theology. Erskine covers major thinkers and illumines various areas of inquiry: suffering and theodicy, sin and reconciliation, baptism and the sacraments, womanism and Christology, and others. What unites these strands is the goal of liberation-of a faith that delivers not theoretical orthodoxies but real change in the lives of those buckling under racist oppression. Black Theology and Black Faith is the perfect reading for students and scholars looking to recenter the voices of the marginalized in their theology. Readers will leave its pages with a faith more alive to God's call to institute his kingdom on Earth.

A brief, accessible inquiry into the wideness of God's mercy in Reformed theology. How broad is the scope of salvation? To explore this question, Richard J. Mouw draws on Scripture and a rich heritage of Calvinist theology. Mouw brings voices like the old Princeton theologians, Kuyper, and Bavinck into conversation with more recent voices such as David Engelsma on pertinent topics, including: The salvation of unbaptized infants God's wrath and love for sinners Problems with universalism The number of the elect Learned yet approachable, Mouw explains how Christians can affirm God's justice while holding hope for the wideness of his saving mercy. Congregations today face pressing questions about how to reconcile orthodoxy with empathy in increasingly pluralist neighborhoods and communities. For Reformed pastors, students, and interested laypeople, Divine Generosity serves as a biblically based, doctrinally sound guide.

A lushly illustrated, magisterial exploration of the imaginative truth of the gospel. David Brown challenges us to expand our understanding of the gospel past source criticism and historical Jesus studies to include works of imagination. Reading Scripture in tandem with works of art throughout the centuries, Brown reenvisions the gospel as an open text. Scholars of theology and biblical studies, freed from literalism, will find new avenues of revelation in Gospel as Work of Art. This volume includes over one hundred color illustrations.

Joyful and daunting opportunities to live into God’s dream of justice and beloved community are compelling and available. Hope, says Luther Smith Jr., is essential to the needed personal and social transformations that prepare us for such sacred opportunities. Yet genuine hope is often confused as merely wish fulfillment, optimism, or perceiving better tomorrows. In Hope Is Here! Smith describes how we truly perceive and join “the work of hope,” enlivening us to a life that is oriented toward immediate and future experiences of personal fulfillment, justice, and beloved community. Interpreting five spiritual practices for individuals and congregations to experience the power of hope, this book prepares us to engage racism, mass incarceration, environmental crises, divisive politics, and indifference that imperil justice and beloved community. It delivers the inner resources necessary to work for change through its interpretation of hope. Additionally, each chapter ends with questions that prompt readers to examine their experiences and their readiness to journey with hope. Written for Christians who want to commit themselves to justice and beloved community, this book will provide helpful guidance for a life sustained by God’s gifts of hope and love. Hope is here for our “responsibility” and “response-ability” to live the fulfilling life that God dreams for us.

In this landmark collection of essays, Matthias Henze and David Lincicum marshal an international group of renowned scholars to analyze the New Testament, text-by-text, aiming to better understand what roles Israel’s Scriptures play therein. In addition to explicating each book, the essayists also cut across texts to chart the most important central concepts, such as the messiah, covenants, and the end times. Carefully constructed reception history of both testaments rounds out the volume.

What does it mean to be a Christian community? And what does it mean to lead one? How does a pastor address today’s challenges, from lack of faith in institutions, to conflict in the church, to the tension between tradition and innovation? C. Kavin Rowe addresses these topics and a multitude of others in this collection of keen essays. Bite-size and conversational, yet deeply rooted in Scripture and recent pastoral theology, the essays in Leading Christian Communities reflect on the shaping of Christian leaders for the flourishing of their communities. Pastors and seminarians, as well as all those involved in church ministry, will find inspiration and insight in these pages.

This inaugural Interpretation Bible Commentary volume on Matthew by Mark Allan Powell brings theological and pastoral sensitivity to the text, exploring how the Gospel of Matthew might be understood today by readers who receive it as its intended audience.

A long-awaited culmination of scholarship by a pioneer of missiology and global Christianity. The history of the missions is complex and fraught. Though modern missions began with European colonialism, the outcome was a largely non-Western global Christianity. Highly esteemed scholar Andrew Walls explores every facet of the movement, including its history, theory, and future. Walls locates the birth of the Protestant missionary movement in the West with the Puritans and Pietists and their efforts to convert the Native Americans they displaced. Tracing the movement into the twentieth century, Walls shows how colonialism and missionary work turned out to be essentially incompatible. Missionaries must live on another culture's terms, and their goal-the establishment of churches of every nation-depends on accepting new, indigenous Christians as equals. Now that Christianity has become primarily an African, Latin American, and Asian religion rather than a European one, the dynamics of the church's mission have transformed. Sensitive to this shift, Walls indicates new areas of listening to and learning from this new center of Christianity and speculates on the theological contributions from a truly global church. Throughout his long and fruitful career, Walls told the story of missions as a dedicated Christian scholar, teacher, and mentor. Prior to his passing in 2021, he entrusted the editing of his lectures to his friends and students. The result of this labor of love, The Missionary Movement from the West is a must-read for scholars of missiology, world Christianity, and church history.

In Proclaiming the Parables, noted preacher and scholar Thomas G. Long moves away from past treatment of the parables primarily as literary devices and moves toward an emphasis on their theological impact as pointers to the kingdom of God. Long sees parables not merely as creative figures of speech but as GPS devices taking hearers to those places where the event of God is happening all around us. This book provides two chapters for each synoptic Gospel. The first focuses on the Gospel as a whole and the parables’ place in it, and the second provides preachers and teachers with detailed exegetical and homiletical commentary for each major parable in that Gospel. Two introductory chapters additionally situate this book in the history and theology of the parables’ interpretation and address questions that preachers have about preaching the parables. Preachers who consult this volume will be informed about each major parable, guided through the controversies regarding interpretation, and stimulated to preach on the parable in fresh, faithful, and creative ways.

In this follow-up to They Were All Together in One Place? (2009) and Reading Biblical Texts Together (2022), biblical scholars from different racial/ethnic minoritized communities move beyond defining and pursing cross-cultural interpretation to investigating how spatial-geographical and temporal-historical locations affect the purposes and practices of minoritized biblical criticism today. Through an examination of a range of contemporary issues from HIV/AIDS to US immigration policy, contributors establish that how and why they engage the Bible are the result of the intersection of social and cultural factors.

In the past fifteen years, a number of books have been published to help people make sense of God’s violent behavior in the Bible. Yet very little has been written about how to use these (and other) violent texts constructively in church. This leaves religious practitioners—pastors, priests, Sunday school teachers, worship ministers, lay leaders, and others—at a real disadvantage. What should they do with stories that sanction genocide or praise individuals for killing others? How can they use these violent texts in sermons, liturgies, Christian educations classes, and elsewhere without promoting the violent ideologies they contain? In Redeeming Violent Verses, Eric Seibert addresses these questions by focusing on a wide range of practical ways to use violent biblical texts responsibly in the church and beyond.

James L. Gorman’s fresh edition of Richard T. Hughes’s classic work, Reviving the Ancient Faith, illuminates the movement started by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell. The authors trace the movement’s sociological transformation into a denomination from the 1830s into the twentieth century. Four developments forged this new identity: the premillennialist controversy, the divide over institutions, the racial segregation of congregations and schools, and the fight over liberalism in the 1960s. New to the third edition, the final chapters bring the history of Churches of Christ from the 1960s up to 2022, analyzing the growing diversity of the movement amid intradenominational “culture wars.”

Discover how studying the Bible can renew your church community. How do we teach the Bible in a way that makes a real difference in our students' lives and our communities? Too often, biblical introductions treat Scripture as a mere historical artifact. Mark W. Hamilton and Samjung Kang-Hamilton combine their decades of experience in theological and religious education to devise a new way to teach Scripture that brings out its life-giving qualities. The authors show how Scripture has four modes: story, ritual, prophecy, and wisdom. With an eye toward spiritual formation, the authors explore examples of each of the four genres within the Bible and show how they address real needs in the life of the church today. They also recommend how to incorporate contemporary tools like digital media alongside art, music, and other practices to draw wisdom from Scripture. Combining multicultural sensitivity with ecumenical spirit, this guidebook is ideal for educators and pastors seeking to renew their own Christian communities through biblical education.

A theological reading of the Tabernacle Narrative in Exodus and Leviticus, exploring the themes of incarnation and atonement. What does Israel's tabernacle mean for Christians today? The Tabernacle Narrative comprises passages in Exodus and Leviticus that detail the construction, furnishing, and liturgical use of the tabernacle. Given its genre and style, the narrative is often passed over by those reading Scripture for theological insight. But what can these complex passages reveal about Christ? Gary Anderson shows how these passages shed light on incarnation and atonement both in ancient Israel's theology and in Christian theology. Anderson explains how the chronology of the narrative reflects sacred time, how the Israelites saw divine features in the physical aspects of the tabernacle, and how Isaac's sacrifice foreshadowed the sacrificial rite revealed to Moses at Mt. Sinai. Ultimately, Anderson shows how the Old Testament can deepen our understanding of the gospel. For Athanasius and many church fathers, God's "indwelling" in the tabernacle offers a unique witness to the nature of incarnation, supplementing the story told in the gospels. Likewise, careful analysis of the purpose of sacrifice at the tabernacle clarifies the purpose of Christ's passion. Far from connoting penal substitution, sacrifice in the Old Testament demonstrates self-emptying as an antidote to sin. Theologians, pastors, and serious readers of the Bible will appreciate how Anderson's canonical and literary analysis of the Tabernacle Narrative illuminates Christian theology.

Meet the women who followed Jesus even when the Twelve failed. To be a disciple is to follow Jesus. And that requires action. But in the gospels, the disciples often falter. The Twelve even abandon Jesus at his crucifixion in many of the narratives. Yet it is female disciples who remain faithful to Jesus to the end. What do we make of this? In Women Who Do, Holly J. Carey examines what it means to be a disciple-and contends that it's the women who best embody discipleship in the gospels. Carey describes the expectations and social roles for women in first-century Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts. Then she offers a close reading of each of the four gospels, as well as Acts of the Apostles. What emerges is a cohesive narrative-critical case that the Twelve are not an equivalent group to the disciples. In fact, the Twelve are set as foils against the faithful, active, and often nameless disciples who populate the narratives-many of whom are women. Women Who Do is essential reading for students and scholars seeking a fuller understanding of women's roles in Jesus's ministry. Carey's argument not only clarifies the narrative of the gospels but also raises questions about how the church conceives of women's leadership today.