This book explores how truth, beauty, and goodness can save our relationships even when we disagree with those we love.This book is for:1) Mormons who want to better understand a family member or friend who doubts2) Unorthodox or former Mormons who are looking for ways to talk about their transition with believing family members and friends3) People who are experiencing a Mormon faith crisis and wondering where to turnExcerpts from this book can be found at jonogden.com

    In What Is Biblical Theology?, Jim Hamilton introduces us to this narrative, helping us understand the worldview of the biblical writers so that we can read the Old and New Testaments as the original authors intended. Tracing the key patterns, symbols, and themes that bind the Bible together, this book will help you understand Scripture's unified message and find your place in the great story of redemption.

    A prolific lecturer and author, he has been at the forefront of key developments in contemporary theology, ranging from narrative theology to the “recovery of virtue.” Yet despite his prominence and the esteem reserved for his thought, his work has never before been collected in a single volume that provides a sense of the totality of his vision. The editors of The Hauerwas Reader, therefore, have compiled and edited a volume that represents all the different periods and phases of Hauerwas’s work. Highlighting both his constructive goals and penchant for polemic, the collection reflects the enormous variety of subjects he has engaged, the different genres in which he has written, and the diverse audiences he has addressed. It offers Hauerwas on ethics, virtue, medicine, and suffering; on euthanasia, abortion, and sexuality; and on war in relation to Catholic and Protestant thought. His essays on the role of religion in liberal democracies, the place of the family in capitalist societies, the inseparability of Christianity and Judaism, and on many other topics are included as well. Perhaps more than any other author writing on religious topics today, Hauerwas speaks across lines of religious traditions, appealing to Methodists, Jews, Anabaptists or Mennonites, Catholics, Episcopalians, and others.

    . . and has he lost his mind? Carl Trueman wrestles with those two provocative questions and concludes that modern evangelicals emphasize experience and activism at the expense of theology. Their minds go fuzzy as they downplay doctrine. The result is "a world in which everyone from Joel Osteen to Brian McLaren to John MacArthur may be called an evangelical."Fifteen years ago in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, historian Mark Noll warned that evangelical Christians had abandoned the intellectual aspects of their faith. Christians were neither prepared nor inclined to enter the intellectual debate, and had become marginalized. Today Trueman argues, "Religious beliefs are more scandalous than they have been for many years"-but for different reasons than Noll foresaw. In fact, the real problem now is exactly the opposite of what Noll diagnosed―evangelicals don't lack a mind, but rather an agreed upon evangel. Although known as gospel people, evangelicals no longer share any consensus on the gospel's meaning. Provocative and persuasive, Trueman's indictment of evangelicalism also suggests a better way forward for those theologically conservative Protestants once and formerly known as evangelicals.

    In some cases these ideas were once peculiarly Baptists, though they are now more widely held among other groups. For Stan Norman, healthy Baptist churches intentionally and diligently adhere to their Baptist distinctives.

    

    Adopting those aspects of the religion that suited his purposes, he turned Rome on a course from the relatively open, tolerant and pluralistic civilization of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority, whether that of the Bible, or the writings of Ptolemy in astronomy and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. Only a thousand years later, with the advent of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern science, did Europe begin to free itself from the effects of Constantine's decision, yet the effects of his establishment of Christianity as a state religion remain with us, in many respects, today. Brilliantly wide-ranging and ambitious, this is a major work of history.

    In the fog of the culture war, complex issues like gender dysphoria are reduced to slogans and sound bites. And while the war rages over language, institutions and political allegiances, transgender individuals are the ones who end up being the casualties. Mark Yarhouse, an expert in sexual identity and therapy, challenges the church to rise above the political hostilities and listen to people's stories. In Understanding Gender Dysphoria, Yarhouse offers a Christian perspective on transgender issues that eschews simplistic answers and appreciates the psychological and theological complexity. The result is a book that engages the latest research while remaining pastorally sensitive to the experiences of each person. In the midst of a tense political climate, Yarhouse calls Christians to come alongside those on the margins and stand with them as they resolve their questions and concerns about gender identity. Understanding Gender Dysphoria is the book we need to navigate these stormy cultural waters.

    The difference characterizes an extraordinary amount of our day-to-day experience, often dividing fear from hope, and death from life. At the heart of Christianity lies a similar and related dynamic: between the Law and the Gospel. Far from being a reductive or antiquated distinction, understanding where one ends and the other begins allows a person to see both the Bible and themselves—indeed, the whole world!—in a fresh and enlivening way. Written with the non-theologian in mind, this short volume unpacks the good news of God’s grace with practicality, humor, and a whole lot of heart.

    Ladd, whose work has included much technical study of the doctrine of the kingdom, here presents a practical and devotional scriptural study of the many aspects of the kingdom, based on the parables, the Sermon on the Mount, and other key passages.

    How should members of the church interact with such a culture, especially as deeply enmeshed as most of us have become? D. A. Carson applies his masterful touch to this problem. He begins by exploring the classic typology of H. Richard Niebuhr with its five Christ-culture options. Carson proposes that these disparate options are in reality one still larger vision. Using the Bible's own story line and the categories of biblical theology, he clearly lays out that unifying vision. Carson acknowledges the helpfulness of Niebuhr's grid and similar matrices but warns against giving them canonical force. More than just theoretical, Christ and Culture Revisited is also designed practically to help Christians untangle current messy debates on living in the world. Carson emphasizes that the relation between Christ and culture is not limited to an either/or cultural paradigm -- Christ against culture or Christtransforming culture. Instead Carson offers his own paradigm in which all the categories of biblical theology must be kept in mind simultaneously to inform the Christian worldview. While many other books on culture interact with Niebuhr, none of them takes anything like the biblical-theological approach adopted here. Groundbreaking and challenging, Christ and Culture Revisited is a tour de force.

    But for those who know that Christ is coming to establish a new and perfect order, ours is not just a world to endure but a world to invade. Believers have not been stationed here on earth merely to subsist but to actively subvert the enemy’s attempts at blinding people in unbelief and burying them under heartbreaking loads of human need.The kingdom of God changes all that.Ed Stetzer’s Subversive Kingdom is a personal call for Christians to reorient their thinking and lifestyle to match what Jesus described of His people in Scripture, while teaming up with other believers through their churches to bring light into a dying and darkening culture. Stetzer uses the parables of Christ to unlock the “kingdom secrets” that bring this mysterious concept within understandable reach, while urging Christians to turn this knowledge into practical, everyday, ongoing missions designed to set people free from lives headed for hopelessness.

    It differs from moral philosophy in that biblical ethics is distinctively Christian, and it is more specific than Christian ethics proper because it specifically focuses upon the application of the moral law -- as it is revealed in Scripture -- to daily living. Introduction to Biblical Ethics explains the nature, relevancy, coherency, and structure of the moral law as revealed throughout the Bible. In addition to covering the foundational elements of biblical ethics, major issues investigated in this volume include: different types of law in Scripture, the relationship between the law and the gospel, and issues related to the prospect of conflicting moral absolutes. Additionally, after a discussion of ethical methodology, and using the Ten Commandments as a moral rubric, author David W. Jones explores the place of the moral law in the lives of believers. In the final chapters, the events surrounding the giving of the Decalogue are surveyed, and the application of each of the Ten Commandments to Christian living is explored.

    Jim Wallis argues that America's separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from the public square. God's Politics offers a vision for how to convert spiritual values into real social change and has started a grassroots movement to hold our political leaders accountable by incorporating our deepest convictions about war, poverty, racism, abortion, capital punishment, and other moral issues into our nation's public life. Who can change the political wind? Only we can.