Tithing is a well-known church practice in our day and age, but do church-goers really practice it? When did the concept of tithing begin? How is it justified? What does the Bible say about it? You Mean I Don't Have to Tithe? is a detailed study on the controversial topic of tithing, covering over 2,000 years of well-known theologians regarding this topic. Dr. Croteau's intense tithing investigation will enable you to explore tithing and related topics in-depth, expounding many misconceptions of tithing as well as aiding in a correct understanding of this popular topic.Ê

The premise of Why Christians Should Not Tithe is simple: God, having freed his people from the Law through faith in Jesus Christ, does not place on them a burden from the Law. The thesis is equally as simple: Christian giving is not a tithe. Christ challenges the believer to give himself and his possessions to the gospel cause, but the tithe fixes a limit and implies nothing more is needed. Why Christians Should Not Tithe is a thorough discussion of the four tithes in Moses' Law, Jesus' comments on tithing, and the twenty-one principles of giving developed by the apostles' in Acts and the epistles. Included is a brief review of the history of tithing from post-apostolic times to the present. The book concludes with a new paradigm for giving not based on the tithe, but on the apostles' doctrine of Christian giving. Should Christians tithe to support the gospel? Here is a study that will help every Christian discover the biblical answer for him or her self.

The period between the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment has long been regarded as the zenith of the "republic of letters", a pan-European community of like-minded scholars and intellectuals who fostered critical approaches to the study of the Bible and other ancient texts, while renouncing the brutal religio-political disputes that were tearing their continent apart at the same time. Criticism and Confession offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive challenge to this account. Throughout this period, all forms of biblical scholarship were intended to contribute to theological debates, rather than defusing or transcending them, and meaningful collaboration between scholars of different confessions was an exception, rather than the norm. "Neutrality" was a fiction that obscured the ways in which scholarship served the interests of ecclesiastical and political institutions. Scholarly practices varied from one confessional context to another, and the progress of 'criticism' was never straightforward. The study demonstrates this by placing scholarly works in dialogue with works of dogmatic theology, and comparing examples from multiple confessional and national contexts. It offers major revisionist treatments of canonical figures in the history of scholarship, such as Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Louis Cappel, based on unstudied archival as well as printed sources; and it places those figures alongside their more marginal, overlooked counterparts. It also contextualizes scholarly correspondence and other forms of intellectual exchange by considering them alongside the records of political and ecclesiastical bodies. Throughout, the study combines the methods of the history of scholarship with techniques drawn from other fields, including literary, political, and religious history. As well as presenting a new history of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, it also critiques modern scholarly assumptions about the relationships between erudition, humanistic culture, political activism, and religious identity.