Books published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers

This book argues that Christian nonviolence is both formed by and forms ecclesial life, creating an inextricable relationship between church commitment and resistance to war. Examining the work of John Howard Yoder, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, and Robert McAfee Brown, this book explores how each thinkers advocacy for nonviolent resistance depends deeply upon the ecclesiology out of which it comes. These forms comprise four strands of a comprehensive Christian approach to a nonviolent witness rooted in ecclesial life.Because each of these figures'' ecclesiology implicates a different mode of resistance to war and a different relation between ecclesiology and resistance to war, the volume argues that any account of an ecclesially-informed resistance to war must be open to a multitude of approaches, not as pragmatic concessions, but as a foretaste of ecumenical unity. Insofar as the pursuit of peace in the world can be seen as a church bearing out the work of the Spirit, the approach of other ecclesial traditions can be seen not as competitors but as common works of the Spirit, which other traditions may learn from and be challenged by.

The question of the Christian Zionism - the religious and political support of the state of Israel - is fiercely debated within theology and the church. This volume includes essays from Christian scholars around the globe, as well as Jewish and Palestinian contributors to provide interfaith contextual dialogue.

Although healing constitutes both a major theme of biblical literature and a significant practice of biblical communities, healing themes and experiences are not always conspicuous in presentations of biblical theology. Walter T. Wilson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the healing narratives in the Gospel of Matthew, combining the familiar methods of form, redaction, and narrative criticisms with insights culled from medical anthropology, feminist theory, disability studies, and ancient archaeology. His focus is the New Testament''s longest and most systematic account of healing, Matthew chapters 8 and 9, which he investigates by situating the text within a broad range of ancient healing traditions. The close exegetical readings of each healing narrative culminate in a final synthesis that pulls together what can be said about Matthew''s understanding of healing, how Matthew''s narratives of healing expose the distinctive priorities of the evangelist, and how these priorities relate to the theology of the Gospel as a whole.

The "Great Whore" of the Book of Revelationthe hostile symbolization used to illustrate the authors critique of empirehas attracted considerable attention in Revelation scholarship. Feminist scholar Tina Pippin criticizes the use of gendered metaphors "Babylon" as a tortured womanwhich she asserts reflect an inescapably androcentric, even misogynistic, perspective. Alternatively, Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza understands Johns rhetoric and imagery not simply in gendered terms, but in political terms as well, observing that "Babylon" relies on conventionally coded feminine language for a city.Shanell T. Smith seeks to dismantle the either/or dichotomy within the Great Whore debate by bringing the categories of race/ethnicity and class to bear on Johns metaphors. Her socio-cultural context impels her to be sensitive to such categories, and, therefore, leads her to hold the two elements, "woman" and "city," in tension, rather than privileging one over the other. Using postcolonial womanist interpretation of the woman Babylon, Smith highlights the simultaneous duality of her characterizationher depiction as both a female brothel slaveandas an empress or imperial city. Most remarkably, however, Smiths reading also sheds light on her own ambivalent characterization as both a victim and participant in empire.

Theologians and philosophers are turning again to questions of the meaning, or non-meaning, of the natural world for human self-understanding. Brian R. Doak observes that the book of Job, more than any other book in the Bible, uses metaphors drawn from the natural world, especially of plants and animals, as raw material for thinking about human suffering. Doak argues that Job should be viewed as an anthropological ground zero for the traumatic definition of the post-exilic human self in ancient Israel. Furthermore, the battered shape of the Joban experience should provide a starting point for reconfiguring our thinking about natural theology as a category of intellectual history in the ancient world.Doak examines how the development of the human subject is portrayed in the biblical text in either radical continuity or discontinuity with plants and animals. Consider Leviathan explores the text at the intersection of anthropology, theology, and ecology, opening up new possibilities for charting the view of nature in the Hebrew Bible.

Offers an historical account of theology''s modern institutional origins in the United Kingdom. This book explores how Oxford theology, from the beginnings of the Tractarian movement until the end of the Second World War, both influenced and responded to the reform of the university.

Latin American Christianity is too often presented as a unified story appended to the end of larger western narratives. And yet the stories of Christianity in Latin America are as varied and diverse as the lands and the peoples who live there. This book intends to help students and scholars understand the histories of Latin American Christianity.

The identification of God with beauty is one of the most aesthetically rich notions within Christian thought. However, this claim is often at risk of becoming untethered from core Christian theological confessions. To avoid a theological account of beauty becoming a mere projection of our wildest desires, it must be reined in by dogmatics. To make this case, this book employs the thought of Robert W. Jenson to construct a dogmatic aesthetics. Jensons whole theological program is directed by exploring the systematic potential of the core doctrines of the faith that finally opens out into a vast vision of the beauty of God and creatures:God is a great fugue . . . the rest is music. Taking Jensons cue, the account of beauty presented in this book is propelled by a core conviction of Jensons theology: the sole analogue between God and creatures is not being or any other metaphysical concept, but Jesus Christ.

For far too long, Lauri Thurn argues, the parables of Jesus have been read either as allegories encoding Christian theologyincluding the theological message of one or another Gospel writeror as tantalizing clues to the authentic voice of Jesus. Thurn proposes instead to read the parables "unplugged" from any assumptions beyond those given in the narrative situation in the text, on the common-sense premise that the very form of the parable works to propose a (sometimes startling) resolution to a particular problem. Thurn applies his method to the parables in Luke with some surprising results involving the Evangelists overall narrative purposes and the discrete purposes of individual parables in supporting the authority of Jesus, proclaiming God''s love, exhorting steadfastness, and so on. Eschatological and allegorical readings are equally unlikely, according to Thurn''s results. This study is sure to spark learned discussion among scholars, preachers, and students for years to come.

What is Hip-Hop, and how does it impact the Black Church? How do Black Churches think about Hip-Hop? How does it integrate Hip-Hop? How do these different, yet deeply interrelated communities think about the key topics of modern life-be it gender, sex, race, or globalization? This book deals with these questions.

Draws together the strengths of two exegetical approaches to the Gospel of John. Part of the Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries series, this book takes a broad thematic approach to the Gospel while at the same time giving exegetical and homiletical insights about individual pericopes.

The Fortress Commentary on the New Testament presents a balanced synthesis of current scholarship. The contributors bring a rich diversity of perspectives to the task of connecting solid historical critical analysis of Scripture with sensitivity to theological, cultural, and interpretive issues arising in our encounter with the text.The volume includes introductory articles, section introductions, and individual book articles that explore key sense units through three lenses: The Text in Its Ancient Context; The Text in the Interpretive Tradition; and The Text in Contemporary Discussion.Comprehensive and useful for preaching, teaching, and research.

In this provocative study, Joseph A. Marchal argues that biblical interpretation, but most especially Pauline studies, must engage the full range of critical challenges brought by feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and Roman imperial studies. A feminist, postcolonial analysis requires negotiating the gaps, overlaps, and tensions between these three "strands" by adopting an explicitly multi-axial focus and an interdisciplinary methodology. Using Philippians as a test case, the analysis covers issues of both ancient and contemporary import: from imitation and authority to travel and contact. As a result, Marchal provides strikingly new perspectives on Paul's letters and fresh challenges to the paradigms of Pauline interpretation.

Drawing from a career of pioneering scholarship, Schssler Fiorenza situates the critical feminist theory that has characterized her work in the praxis of liberation. These pathbreaking essays challenge academic and ecclesiastical theologians to embrace critical theory and the analysis of overlapping oppressions in their work. Transforming Vision seeks to free theology from the disciplinary constraints that allow acquiescence to and perpetuation of oppression.

Sameer Yadavs central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of Gods availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem.The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception.

Vital to an agrarian communitys survival, threshing floors are also depicted in the Hebrew Bible as sites for mourning rites, divination rituals, cultic processions, and sacrifices. Jaime L. Waters examines these sacred functions and the various personnel active in the use and operation of the sites and shows that they were sacred spaces connected to Yahweh, under his control and subject to his power to bless, curse, and save, providing Israel a special ritual access to Yahw

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Aberdeen, 2012.

Jerry L. Sumneys The Bible: An Introduction offers clear answers to the most basic questions that first-time students and curious inquirers bring to the Bible. The Study Companion is a handy complement to the textbook, providing primary readings and a running glossary of terms keyed to the textbook along with exercises for further reflection.

Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton Theological Seminary, 2011.

Although Basil of Caesarea was the first to write a discourse on the Holy Spirit, many scholars have since questioned if he fully believed in the Spirits divinity. Timothy McConnell argues that Basil did regard the Spirit as fully divine and an equal Person of the Trinity. However, Basil refused to use philosophical terminology to make the point, preferring to use what the Spirit himself revealed through divine act and Scripture. Thus, illumination becomes the primary paradigm for Basil setting the stage for this studys high relevance for contemporary thought.

Political Vanity aims to illuminate the central debates over the historical, moral, and political legitimacy of market capitalism as though still profoundly theological in character. This theological sensitivity is achieved by keeping conversation with central theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular the philosopher and sociologist Adam Ferguson. Ferguson was a contemporary of Hume and Smith, and actively questioned many of the pillars of early capitalism on theological grounds.

Empowering Memory and Movement Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza completes a three volume look across her influential work and career. In Transforming Vision (2011) she drew from a career of pioneering scholarship to offer the contours of a critical feminist hermeneutic. The chapters in Changing Horizons (2013) sketched a theory of liberation. Now, the consequences for a liberating praxis are evident in interviews and essays that look back over personal and movement history, look around at challenges and potentialities, and look ahead to an emancipatory future, the critical engagement with scripture always at the center.

Tracing out the origins of the Trinitarian revivial in the modern era, particularly on account of the influence of Schleiermacher, Tillich, Barth, Rahner, and Pannenberg, through to the destabilizing effects of postmodernity on Trinitarian discourse, the author provides a critical hermeneutic for the evaluation and implementation of thoughtful Trinitarian theology. The author argues for viewing the Trinity as the intellectual and conceptual context and interdisciplinary arena of interaction between theology and other forms of intellectual inquiries to generate a robust, multifaceted, and historically fluent doctrine of the Trinity.

Finding practical theology not always able to present frameworks for understanding concrete and lived experience with divine action, Andrew Roots Christopraxis seeks to reset the edifice of practical theology on a new foundation. While not minimizing its commitment to the lived and concrete, Root argues that practical theology has neglected deeper theological underpinnings. Root seeks to create a practical theology that is properly and fully theological, post-postmodern, post-Aristotelian, and that attends to doctrines such as divine action and justification.

Equipped with a rich heritage detailing the content of human character, it would seem that Christianity is ideally positioned to address a culture where morality and personal character are set adrift. Contemporary Lutheranism has struggled with the place of morality and character formation, concerns often seen as at odds with the doctrine of justification. A Case for Character argues that Christian doctrine is altogether capable of encouraging character formation while maintaining a faithful expression of justification by grace alone.

Before Nature caps a set of themes first brought to the fore in Santmires previous work. Santmire continues the pursuit of a theology bound up with nature and its condition, especially the fragility and fervent expectation of natures redemption. Santmire invites readers on a theological and spiritual journey to a prayerful and contemplative knowledge of the Triune God, in which practitioners are inducted into a bountiful relationship with the cosmic and universal ministry of Christ and the Spirit.