Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

Christopher Hall shows that studying the writings of the leaders of the early church reveals how the Bible was understood in the centuries closest to its writing. He also lays out how modern Christians can benefit from patristic interpretation of Scripture.

Whereas scholarly study of Creationism usually places it in the context of religion and the history or philosophy of science, The Creationist Debate, here revised and completely updated in its second edition, has been written in the conviction that creationism is ultimately about the status of the Bible in the modern world. Creationism as a modern ideology exists in order to defend the authority of the Bible as a repository of transhistorical truth from the challenges of any and all historical sciences. It belongs to and is inseparable from Protestant Fundamentalists' desire to resubject the modern world to the authority of the inerrant Bible. Intelligent Design creationism, to the extent that it distinguishes itself from reactionary biblicism, is a program advocating a supernaturalist, providentialist understanding of the world. Accordingly, The Creationist Debate situates Creationism and Intelligent Design in relation to the rise, from the early modern period onwards, of historical thinking in various scientific and scholarly disciplines (including theories of the earth, chronology, civil history, geology, biblical criticism, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology) in their complex relationship to the status of the Bible as an historical authority. It argues that the debate over Creationism is at bottom a debate over how to interpret the biblical text rather than over how to interpret the world.

Since its first publication in 1859, few works of political philosophy have provoked such continuous controversy as John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, a passionate argument on behalf of freedom of self-expression. This classic work is now available in this volume which also includes essays by scholars in a range of fields. The text begins with a biographical essay by David Bromwich and an interpretative essay by George Kateb. Then Jean Bethke Elshtain, Owen Fiss, Judge Richard A. Posner and Jeremy Waldron present commentaries on the pertinence of Mill's thinking to early 21st century debates. They discuss, for example, the uses of authority and tradition, the shifting legal boundaries of free speech and free action, the relation of personal liberty to market individualism, and the tension between the right to live as one pleases and the right to criticize anyone's way of life.

In this volume noted Evangelical historians and theologians examine the charge of the supposed "ahistorical nature of Evangelicalism" and provide a critical, historical examination of the relationship between the Protestant evangelical heritage and the early church. In doing so, the contributors show the long and deeply historical rootedness of the Protestant Reformation and its Evangelical descendants, as well as underscoring some inherent difficulties such as the Mercersburg and Oxford movements. In the second part of the volume, the discussion moves forward, as evangelicals rediscover the early church-its writings, liturgy, catechesis, and worship-following the "temporary amnesia" of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Most essays are accompanied by a substantial response prompting discussion or offering challenges and alternative readings of the issue at hand, thus allowing the reader to enter a conversation already in progress and engage the topic more fully. This bidirectional look-understanding the historical background on the one hand and looking forward to the future with concrete suggestions on the other-forms a more full-orbed argument for readers who want to understand the rich and deep relationship between Evangelicalism and the early church.

This study examines the contentious claim that much evangelicalism is fundamentalist in character. Within Protestantism, the term `fundamentalism' denotes not only a movement but also a mentality which has greatly affected evangelicals, and which involves preserving as factual a reading of scripture as possible. Here the development and dismantling of the fundamentalist mentality is examined in light of philosophical influences upon evangelicalism over the last three centuries, notably: Common Sense Realism, neo-Calvinism, and modern hermeneutical philosophy. Particular attention is paid to James Barr's critique of fundamentalism and to evangelical rejoinders. Harriet A. Harris proposes that the fundamentalist mentality does not do justice to evangelical experience since it is more concerned with the Bible's factual truthfulness than with its life-giving effects. An appendix on Global Fundamentalism brings together two rarely united fields of study: Protestant fundamentalism's relation to evangelicalism, and its relation to resurgent movements in other religions.

What is left of the Gospel if you take away the cross? This central question, asked by C. L. Loos but tucked away in a nineteenth-century journal, launched The Cruciform Church twenty-five years ago. Read by a generation of ministers and church leaders, The Cruciform Church began a reimagination of the church in our increasingly, secular age. Now updated, with responses from eight key leaders, this contemporary classic aims to reach a new generation with the critical questions of faith and life. New Responses by: - Sara Barton - Richard Beck - Lee Camp - Raymond Carr - Randy Harris - John Mark Hicks - Scot McKnight - Jonathan Storment

This book places the present Creationist opposition to the theory of evolution in historical context by setting out the ways in which, from the seventeenth century onwards, investigations of the history of the earth and of humanity have challenged the biblical views of chronology and human destiny, and the Christian responses to these challenges. The author's interest is not primarily directed to questions such as the epistemological status of scientific versus religious knowledge or the possibility of a Darwinian ethics, but rather to the problems, and various responses to the problems, raised in a particular historical period in the West for the Bible by the massive extension of the duration of geological time and human history.