Anyone exploring a new territory knows the benefit of an experienced guide. A guide can make the difference between tiresome drudgery and a life-changing adventure. This is as true for exploring new thinkers and books as it is for places. If ever a theologian required a guide, it would be Karl Barth. His many writings have secured his place as the most significant theologian of the twentieth century. ...

Few thinkers have been as influential as Augustine of Hippo. His writings, such as Confessions and City of God, have left an indelible mark on Western Christianity. He has become so synonymous with Christianity in the West that we easily forget he was a man of two cultures: African and Greco-Roman. The mixture of African Christianity and Greco-Roman rhetoric and philosophy gave ...

The Reformed churches of the sixteenth century affirmed the need to be semper reformanda--always reforming. But in the ensuing centuries, some have taken this conviction as a mandate to abandon the departure from received orthodoxy, while others have progressed toward a rigid confessionalism that cements the Reformation itself as a final codification of truth. Between these extremes ...

"Both evangelicalism and feminism are controversial movements that provoke complex loyalties and ambivalence within the church and the world at large. In spite of a considerable degree of shared history, they are quite often defined against each other. Most of the rhetoric from and about the movements assumes that there are few connections and little overlap, and that individuals might locate themselves ...

The consensual roots of Christianity found in the common understanding of the faith among the early church fathers is the foundation on which the church can and should build in the twenty-first century. Edited by Kennth Tanner and Christopher A. Hall, the eighteen essays found in this volume span theological and ecclesiastical perspectives that emphasize what the various Christian traditions hold ...

"We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity." (Athanasian Creed, 6th century A.D. The triunity of the Christian God is not just one isolated doctrine among others. Allan Coppedge unfolds the implications of the trinitarian being of God for our entire understanding of the nature, character and acts of God. Building on the theology of the church from the early church fathers, tracing it ...

What is the future of theology in the midst of rapid geopolitical and economic change? Carl A. Raschke contends that two options from the last century—crisis theology and critical theory—do not provide the resources needed to address the current global crisis. Both of these perspectives remained distant from the messiness and unpredictability of life. Crisis theology spoke of the wholly other God, ...

What do God's judgments have to do with history? Steven J. Keillor presents the bold thesis that divine judgment can be a fruitful category for historical investigation. In fact, he makes the case that Christianity is rightly grasped as an interpretation of history more than a worldview or philosophy. Grounding his thesis first on a study of God's judgments in the teaching of both the Old and New ...