This collection demonstrates a constructive potential in reimagining with doctrines, which unlocks them from centuries of patriarchal constraint. It opens the way for glimpsing divine action in the economy of salvation, while human struggles for justice are placed within a wider arena when discrete theological resources are deployed in this way.

This book develops creative imagining of traditional doctrines. Chapters show the effectiveness of Latina/mujerista, evangélica, womanist, Asian American, and white feminist imaginings in the furthering of global gender justice.

Geoff Thompson addresses multiple questions concerning Christian doctrine in an engaging narrative, beginning with an in-depth discussion of the origins of doctrine in the various catechetical, polemical and apologetic pressures that the church encountered as it sought to articulate and teach its confession of faith in Jesus Christ. In providing an overview of some of the classic and historically influential doctrinal projects, Thompson employs ten case studies that illustrate the overlapping influences of tradition and contexts-both ecclesial and cultural-on doctrinal discourse. Thompson takes the reader from those historical and paradigmatic case studies into some of the great contemporary debates about doctrine, including those which have been shaped by the critique of doctrine associated with the European Enlightenment as well as the challenges and contributions of theologians of the majority world. He pays particular attention to the influence that these diverse cultural, ecclesial, and academic contexts have had upon the shape and content of particular doctrines. This leads into an engagement with George Lindbeck's seminal The Nature of Doctrine, as well as the more recent proposals of Kevin Vanhoozer and Christine Helmer. This guide concludes by developing the idea of a Christian social imaginary as the framework for holding together doctrine, practice, truth, diversity, and context.

Planetary Solidarity brings together leading Latina, womanist, Asian American, Anglican American, South American, Asian, European, and African woman theologians on the issues of doctrine, women, and climate justice. Because women make up the majority of the world's poor and tend to be more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods and survival, they are more vulnerable when it comes to climate-related changes and catastrophes. Representing a subfield of feminist theology that uses doctrine as interlocutor, this book ask how Christian doctrine might address the interconnected suffering of women and the earth in an age of climate change. While doctrine has often stifled change, it also forms the thread that weaves Christian communities together. Drawing on postcolonial ecofeminist/womanist analysis and representing different ecclesial and denominational traditions, contributors use doctrine to envision possibilities for a deep solidarity with the earth and one another while addressing the intersection of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. The book is organized around the following doctrines: creation, the triune God, anthropology, sin, incarnation, redemption, the Holy Spirit, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

This book is an arresting interdisciplinary publication on Christian education, comprising works by leading scholars, professionals and practitioners from around the globe. It focuses on the integrated approaches to Christian education that are both theoretically sound and practically beneficial, and identifies innovative pedagogical methods and tools that have been field-tested and practice-approved. It discusses topics such as exploring programmes and courses through different lenses; learning challenges and opportunities within organisational management; theology of business; Christian models of teaching in different contexts; job preparedness; developing different interpretive or meaning-making frameworks for working with social justice, people with disability, non-profit community organisations and in developing country contexts. It offers graduate students, teachers, school administrators, organisational leaders, theologians, researchers and education practitioners a fresh and inspiring reimagining of Christian education perspectives and practices and the ramifications of their application to life-long learning.

The Spirit presents itself to many as an enigma. Its existence is mysterious and complex, generating misunderstandings and unawareness of its true purpose. The Spirit's ambiguous nature opens the opportunity for study to unearth the exciting truths that it holds. The Spirit is present in our world in various forms. This book aims to examine the Spirit as experienced in light, wind, breath, and vibration to help us uncover some of its aspects that invite us to work for climate justice, racial justice, and gender justice. The Holy Spirit has always been a mover and shaker of ideas and action. The Spirit's presence moves, stirs, and changes us to become aware of the social ills in our world. The different ways in which we reimagine the Holy Spirit can challenge some traditional assumptions in Christianity and provide a liberative vision that allows us to work for social justice. The work of the Holy Spirit stirs us to work toward new kinships with God that are sustainable, just, and whole.

Domestic violence is a significant threat to women’s survival. But Christian understandings of marriage often prevent women from resisting abusive relationships. Can the Church’s teaching on marriage be reshaped so that it helps women to survive, rather than encourage them to submit to their husband, bear their cross, or sacrifice themselves for the sake of their marriage? Focusing on everyday practices of marriage in two very different contexts: Argentina and England, Reimagining Theologies of Marriage in Contexts of Domestic Violence considers how Christian understandings of marriage as a covenant or sacrament relate to the lived experience of marriage. Drawing on Augustine’s notion of the goods of marriage, and on belief in the saving power of marriage, this book suggests that only when the wellbeing of bodies is central to a marriage can it have the power to save.

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love.

The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change entails a wide-ranging conversation between Christian theology and various other discourses on climate change. Given the far-reaching complicity of "North Atlantic Christianity" in anthropogenic climate change, the question is whether it can still collaborate with and contribute to ongoing mitigation and adaptation efforts. The main essays in this volume are written by leading scholars from within North Atlantic Christianity and addressed primarily to readers in the same context; these essays are critically engaged by respondents situated in other geographic regions, minority communities, non-Christian traditions, or non-theological disciplines. Structured in seven main parts, the handbook explores: 1) the need for collaboration with disciplines outside of Christian theology to address climate change; 2) the need to find common moral ground for such collaboration; 3) the difficulties posed by collaborating with other Christian traditions from within; 4) the questions that emerge from such collaboration for understanding the story of God's work; and 5) God's identity and character; 6) the implications of such collaboration for ecclesial praxis; and 7) concluding reflections examining whether this volume does justice to issues of race, gender, class, other animals, religious diversity, geographical divides and carbon mitigation. This rich ecumenical, cross-cultural conversation provides a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the theological and moral challenges raised by anthropogenic climate change.

"In this important guide, Jeremy Bouma explains how many who speak of the Kingdom of God do not mean what Jesus meant by it. If you are one who is attracted to the liberal gospel, this guide might just save your soul." —MICHAEL E. WITTMER, Grand Rapids Theological Seminary Recently use of Kingdom language in evangelicalism has markedly increased, and rightly so, as the Kingdom is central to the gospel and teachings of Jesus. Several scholars have noted similarities between this language and Protestant liberalism. Yet they have not significantly explored how liberal theology is impacting evangelical notions of the Kingdom, and consequently the gospel. Reimagining the Kingdom traces the development of this language through four generations of liberals—from Schleiermacher to Ritschl, Rauschenbusch, and Tillich—to explore how their liberal language is affecting evangelical theology, as illustrated by progressive evangelical and Emergent Brian McLaren. By exploring how theological liberals define the human problem, understand that problem’s solution, and interpret the nature of the One who bore that solution, this book reveals an inextricable link between progressive evangelicalism and Protestant liberalism. It is vitally important that evangelicals understand the contours of liberal Kingdom theology to understand how it is affecting how evangelicals are showing and telling the gospel itself.