Ephraim Radner

Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and morePaul Hinlicky, a leading systematic theologian widely respected for his contributions in contemporary dogmatics, offers a theological reading of Joshua in this addition to the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series. Hinlicky compares and contrasts the politics of purity and the politics of redemption in an innovative and illuminating way and locates the book of Joshua in the postexilic genesis of apocalyptic theology. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

The Holy Spirit is in a way the most mysterious of the three ""names"" of God. For many it is the ""unknown God"" (Acts 17:23). How can a ""Spirit"" be love? How can it be a person? What role can a ""Spirit"" have in the trinitarian relations? In The Breath of God, Veto argues that a more exact comprehension of the third divine person can be reached by considering the way it acts in the economy of salvation and how it reveals itself in its scriptural names: Ruah and Pneuma, breath or wind. Just as, in the eternal life of God, the Father and the Son are precisely what their names designate, likewise, the Holy Spirit is the Breath of God. The procession of the Spirit is the ""breathing out"" of the Father into the Son, the communication of one intimacy into another, and the ""breathing"" back of the Son into the Father. This leads to reshaping many aspects of trinitarian theology, in particular divine personhood. It is also fruitful for the believer's life of prayer because it offers a better understanding of the distinct relationship one can have to Father, Son, and Spirit.

The church changed tremendously in the twentieth century, with new churches emerging and old churches being renewed. This period encompassed the birth of the World Council of Churches, the rise of American evangelicalism, the Second Vatican Council, the coming of age of charismatic Christianity, and more. In this book, Myles Werntz explores the landscape of twentieth-century ecclesiology and shows how the four marks of the church were remade, contested, and reaffirmed in surprising and innovative ways in the course of this turbulent century. Werntz asks what it means to say that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic amid so many diverse alternatives. He explains how the many dynamics of the twentieth century posed both theological and ethical challenges for confessing the marks of the church but also what promise comes from expanding our vision of how God might be at work across traditions. Werntz shows that the four marks of the church can help us see what the last century brought and what we might learn from it now. He also provides guidance for the future of the twenty-first century church. The book includes a foreword from Ephraim Radner.

To describe the Church as "united" is a factual misnomer--even at its conception centuries ago. Ephraim Radner provides a robust rethinking of the doctrine of the church in light of Christianity's often violent and at times morally suspect history. He holds in tension the strange and transcendent oneness of God with the necessarily temporal and political function of the Church, and, in so doing, shows how the goals and failures of the liberal democratic state provide revelatory experiences that greatly enhance one's understanding of the nature of Christian unity.

Living in proximity to human disability, with a son who has Down Syndrome, Andrew Barron has come to understand that not only do we live in a world of human difference, but that God wants us to live in this kind of world, for our own flourishing. Human Difference is an extended meditation on that experience and a reflection on the nature of human care and hospitality. Barron seeks to understand and embrace the uncertainty that comes with living in proximity to difference and disability and reflects on how we might better cope with and ultimately be enriched by its ambiguity. He undertakes a new approach to difference: we must be ready to venture into uncomfortable territory, to "put out into the deep water" and to actively seek out an intimate and open closeness with difference and disability.

Living in proximity to human disability, with a son who has Down Syndrome, Andrew Barron has come to understand that not only do we live in a world of human difference, but that God wants us to live in this kind of world, for our own flourishing. Human Difference is an extended meditation on that experience and a reflection on the nature of human care and hospitality. Barron seeks to understand and embrace the uncertainty that comes with living in proximity to difference and disability and reflects on how we might better cope with and ultimately be enriched by its ambiguity. He undertakes a new approach to difference: we must be ready to venture into uncomfortable territory, to ""put out into the deep water"" and to actively seek out an intimate and open closeness with difference and disability.

This book by one of today's leading theologians examines how Christians might more faithfully and realistically imagine their political vocation. Ephraim Radner explains that our Christian calling is to limit our political concerns to the boundaries of our created lives: our birth, parents, siblings, families, brief persistence in life, raising of children, relations, decline, and death. He shows that a Christian approach to politics is aimed at tending and protecting these "mortal goods" and argues for a more constrained view of our mortal life and our political duty than is common in both progressive and conservative Christian perspectives. Radner encourages us to take seriously what is most valuable in our lives and allow this to shape our social posture. Our vocation is to offer our limited life to God, give thanks for it, and glorify God by living our lives as a gift. Radner also shows how "catastrophe" reveals our time to be fragile, bounded, and easily overturned. And he exposes "betterment," which lies behind most modern politics, as a false motive for human life. The book concludes with a vision of the good life articulated in the form of a letter to his adult children.

Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and moreIn this addition to the series, respected theologian Kathryn Greene-McCreight offers a theological reading of Galatians. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and moreIn this addition to the series, respected theologian Kimlyn Bender offers a theological reading of 1 Corinthians. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and moreIn this volume, one of today's leading theologians offers a theological reading of 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

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Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and moreExodus recounts the origins of ancient Israel, but it is also a book of religious symbols. How should it be interpreted, especially in light of modern historical-critical study? In this addition to an acclaimed series, a respected scholar offers a theological reading of Exodus that highlights Aquinas's interpretations of the text. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.

In the march of modernity and the opening of global boundaries, the face of the world changed. How we understood the world, and our place in it, changed. And with that great shift, our concept of the Holy Spirit also changed. Now the third person of the Trinity became a diffusive power in a universalizing attempt at resolving the expansively harsh realities of human existence. In A Profound Ignorance, Ephraim Radner traces the development of pneumatology as a modern discipline and its responses to experiences of social confusion and suffering, often associated with questions linked to the category of theodicy. Along the way, study of the Spirit joined with natural science to become study of spirit, which was at root study of the human person redefined without limitation. Radner proposes that the proper parameters of pneumatology are found in studying Israel and her historical burdens as the Body of Christ, showing how the Spirit is the reality of God that affirms the redemptive character of Christ, the Son. The traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought to the fore the problematic distance between earlier and more modern approaches to the Spirit. Drawing on writers from Paracelsus to John Berryman, and including theologians and philosophers like Anne Conway and John Wesley, as well as literary figures from d'Aubign?® to Duhamel, Radner attempts to locate modern pneumatology's motives and interests within some of the novel social settings of a rapidly globalizing consciousness and conflicted pluralism. It is by following Israel into the Incarnation of Jesus, Radner contends, that humans find their unresolved sufferings and yearnings redeemed. The Holy Spirit operates in deep hope, the kind of hope that is inaccessible to simple articulation. Finally, Radner argues for a more limited and reserved pneumatology, subordinated to the christological realities of divine incarnation: here, creaturely limitations are not denied, but affirmed, and taken up into the life of God.

Explore how the roots of the ancient Christian tradition inform and shape faithfulness todayThe Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible enlists leading theologians to read and interpret scripture creedally for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places. A rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups, the BTC provides guidance for reading the Bible under the rule of faith. Each volume in the series includes? a Christological focus and framework grounded in the Nicene Creed? connections between biblical interpretation and today's social issues? applications for contemporary faith and life? devotional depth for meditation and reflection? insights from literature, philosophy, culture, and moreHighly acclaimed professor of literature David Lyle Jeffrey offers a theological reading of Luke in this addition to the well-received Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Ultimately the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible demonstrates the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.