"Why I Am a Lutheran explores the foundational teachings of the Christian church. In each chapter, Daniel Preus calls upon more than 20 years of pastoral experience to reveal Jesus as the center of the Christian faith. As he addresses central doctrines such as sin and grace, Law and Gospel, the person and work of Jesus Christ, worship, the Sacraments, and the office of the ministry, Preus keeps the focus on Jesus Christ--who is "always and only at the center of all Christian teaching."

    Even those who do not follow him admit the vast influence of his life. For anyone interested in knowing more about Jesus, study of the four biblical Gospels is essential. Four Portraits, One Jesus is a thorough yet accessible introduction to these documents and their subject, the life and person of Jesus. Like different artists rendering the same subject using different styles and points of view, the Gospels paint four highly distinctive portraits of the same remarkable Jesus. With clarity and insight, Mark Strauss illuminates these four books, first addressing their nature, origin, methods for study, and historical, religious, and cultural backgrounds. He then moves on to closer study of each narrative and its contribution to our understanding of Jesus, investigating things such as plot, characters, and theme. Finally, he pulls it all together with a detailed examination of what the Gospels teach about Jesus’ ministry, message, death, and resurrection, with excursions into the quest for the historical Jesus and the historical reliability of the Gospels.

    This new primer by N. Clayton Croy offers a succinct, single-volume introduction to Biblical Greek that has already been tested in classrooms around the country.Taking a primarily deductive approach to teaching Biblical Greek, this volume assumes that students will have no prior knowledge in Greek. Divided into 32 separate lessons, each containing a generous number of exercises, the text leads students from the Greek alphabet to a working understanding of the language of the Bible.

    Pastor and provocateur Alice Connor introduces these women and invites us to see them not as players in a man's story—as victims or tempters—nor as morality archetypes, teaching us to be better wives and mothers, but as fierce foremothers of the faith. These women's stories are messy, challenging, and beautiful.Fierce will provoke you, open up possibilities for you, invite you to imagine the inner lives of other women, even offend you at times, like the prophets did. Although separated by centuries and cultures, we aren't so different from these women; we share their desires and abilities. We are all part of the story that God is telling.We all—men and women—can be as fierce as these women of the Bible. Sometimes our ferocity is almost invisible, but it is not extinguished. When we read their stories, we can see not only their particular, fearsome lives but also our own.

    While some see Acts as the story of the founding of the Christian church, Jennings argues that it is so much more, depicting revolutionlife in the disrupting presence of the Spirit of God. According to Jennings, Acts is like Genesis, revealing a God who is moving over the land, putting into place a holy repetition that speaks of the willingness of God to invade our every day and our every moment. He reminds us that Acts took place in a time of Empire, when the people were caught between diaspora Israel and the Empire of Rome. The spirit of God intervened, offering new life to both. Jennings shows that Acts teaches how people of faith can yield to the Spirit to overcome the divisions of our present world.