E. Gordon Rupp and Philip Watson offer commentary on these texts as well.Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.

    Leon McBeth's 'The Baptist heritage' is a definitive, fresh interpretation of Baptist history. Based on primary source research, the book combines the best features of chronological and topical history to bring alive the story of Baptists around the world.

    In The King's Two Bodies, Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the King's two bodies--the body politic and the body natural--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a political theology.?The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation The king is dead. Long live the king.Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this political theology. It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.Kantorowicz fled Nazi Germany in 1938, after refusing to sign a Nazi loyalty oath, and settled in the United States. While teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he once again refused to sign an oath of allegiance, this one designed to identify Communist Party sympathizers. He was dismissed as a result of the controversy and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he wrote The King's Two Bodies.

    MacArthur states clearly that there is no eternal life without surrender to the lordship of Christ.

    Black Theology & Black Power is James H. Cone's initial attempt to identify liberation as the heart of the Christian gospel, and blackness as the primary mode of God's presence. As he explains in an introduction written for this edition, "I wanted to speak on behalf of the voiceless black masses in the name of Jesus whose gospel I believed had been greatly distorted by the preaching and theology of white churches."

    As G. K. Chesterton explains, "Only with original sin can we at once pity the beggar and distrust the king."Do we arrive in this world predisposed to evil? St. Augustine passionately argued that we do; his opponents thought the notion was an insult to a good God. Ever since Augustine, the church has taught the doctrine of original sin, which is the idea that we are not born innocent, but as babes we are corrupt, guilty, and worthy of condemnation. Thus started a debate that has raged for centuries and done much to shape Western civilization.Perhaps no Christian doctrine is more controversial; perhaps none is more consequential. Blaise Pascal claimed that "but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves." Chesterton affirmed it as the only provable Christian doctrine. Modern scholars assail the idea as baleful and pernicious. But whether or not we believe in original sin, the idea has shaped our most fundamental institutions—our political structures, how we teach and raise our young, and, perhaps most pervasively of all, how we understand ourselves. In Original Sin, Alan Jacobs takes readers on a sweeping tour of the idea of original sin, its origins, its history, and its proponents and opponents. And he leaves us better prepared to answer one of the most important questions of all: Are we really, all of us, bad to the bone?

    Chapter 1 recovers strands of early Christian accounts of Jesus and his significance for a very different age. Chapter 2 situates Christology in a religious vision of the whole cosmos, while Chapter 3 lays out the ethical and political implications of the vision. Chapter 4 speculates about the "end" of things in Christ. Tanner's work was developed from the Scottish Journal of Theology lectures in 1999 in Edinburgh.

    This evocative book by an influential Christian thinker explores the pattern of mutual indwelling that characterizes the creation at every level. Traces of the Trinity appear in myriad ways in everyday life, from our relations with the world and our relationships with others to sexuality, time, language, music, ethics, and logic. This small book with a big idea—the Trinity as the Christian theory of everything—changes the way we view and think about the world and places demands on the way we live together in community.

    It is Luther's response to Desiderius Erasmus's "Diatribe on Free Will, " written in his direct and unique style, combining deep spirituality with humor. Luther writes powerfully about man's depravity and God's sovereignty. The crucial issue for Luther concerned what ability free will has, and to what degree it is subject to God's sovereignty. For Luther, this key issue of free will is directly connected to God's plan of salvation. Is man able to save himself, or is his salvation entirely a work of divine grace? This work is vital to understanding the primary doctrines of the Reformation and will long remain among the great theological classics of Christian history.

    Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Thru the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual & social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity. Brown examines the rise of the church thru the lens of money & the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty & called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose & Jerome, Brown examines the controversies & changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, & describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors & their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world & sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions & offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.

    This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation, showing the impact of Jewish character and imagination upon the world.

    It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.

    This was the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when the lives of activists on all sides of the civil rights issue converged and their images of God clashed. He weaves their voices into a gripping narrative: a Ku Klux Klansman, for example, borrows fiery language from the Bible to link attacks on blacks to his priestly calling; a middle-aged woman describes how the Gospel inspired her to rally other African Americans to fight peacefully for their dignity; a SNCC worker tells of harrowing encounters with angry white mobs and his pilgrimage toward a new racial spirituality called Black Power. Through these emotionally charged stories, Marsh invites us to consider the civil rights movement anew, in terms of religion as a powerful yet protean force driving social action.The book's central figures are Fannie Lou Hamer, who worked for Jesus in civil rights activism; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi; William Douglas Hudgins, an influential white Baptist pastor and unofficial theologian of the closed society; Ed King, a white Methodist minister and Mississippi native who campaigned to integrate Protestant congregations; and Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC staff member turned black militant.Marsh focuses on the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that is by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it may be possible to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the person who embraces faith's life-affirming energies will leave behind a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion.-- "Publishers Weekly"

    But is what we've been taught about them or their harvest feast what actually happened? And if not, what difference does it make?Through the captivating story of the birth of this quintessentially American holiday, veteran historian Tracy McKenzie helps us to better understand the tale of America's origins--and for Christians, to grasp the significance of this story and those like it. McKenzie avoids both idolizing and demonizing the Pilgrims, and calls us to love and learn from our flawed yet fascinating forebears.The First Thanksgiving is narrative history at its best, and promises to be an indispensable guide to the interplay of historical thinking and Christian reflection on the meaning of the past for the present.

    As he struggled to find the right Christian stance toward big social issues such as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Mouw discovered Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism — and, with it, a robust vision of active Christian involvement in public life that has guided him ever since. In this “short and personal introduction” Mouw sets forth Kuyper’s main ideas on Christian cultural discipleship, including his views on sphere sovereignty, the antithesis, common grace, and more. Mouw looks at ways to update — and, in some places, even correct — Kuyper’s thought as he applies it to such twenty-first-century issues as religious and cultural pluralism, technology, and the challenge of Islam.