Download or read book Reordering Theological Reflection written by Helen Collins and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would theological reflection look like if scripture were the starting point? For many, beginning the process of formation the bible is already a natural place to begin, and models of theological reflection which start in other places can be hard to swallow. All too often, as a result, they reject the idea of reflecting theologically altogether, an outcome which is damaging for their future ministry and for the church as a whole. This book to re-discover the theological heart of the discipline of practical theology and develop new methods which take scripture and tradition more seriously. Offering an alternative to the usual models of theological reflection, this careful and helpful guide demonstrates to students the possibilities which emerge when the starting point for theological reflective practice

Download or read book Reordering Theological Reflection written by Helen Collins and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an alternative to the usual models of theological reflection, this careful and helpful guide demonstrates to students the possibilities which emerge when the starting point for theological reflective practice.

Download or read book Biblical Hermeneutics in the Metamodern Mood written by Seán M. W. McGuire and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do contemporary Christians seem to routinely talk past one another amid contentious theological debates? In this illuminating study, Sean M. W. McGuire argues that interpreters' lack of self-critical reflection on the process of interpretation and compounding cultural factors are problematizing interpretive practice. Thus, to work through difficult topics, Christians need to develop the ability to reflect on the complexity informing how they interpret Scripture, and how they see others interpreting Scripture, so that they can coherently and constructively discuss their interpretations with others. Grounding the study in the discipline of practical theology, McGuire utilizes the cultural theory of metamodernism and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), together with a proposed revision of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, to develop a paradigm for observing and describing differences in biblical interpretive practice. Using current debates regarding sexuality as an illustrative example, the project reveals the complexity underlying contemporary interpretive practice, showing that amid this complexity the prioritization (or lack thereof) of theological reflection sources prompts certain interpretive conclusions. Perceiving the multivalent nature of interpretation, readers will be equipped to think carefully and critically about how they come to their biblical interpretive conclusions and how those conclusions inform transformed living in Christ.

Download or read book Evangelicals Engaging in Practical Theology written by Helen Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to introduce a distinctively evangelical voice to the discipline of practical theology. Evangelicals have sometimes seen practical theology as primarily a ‘liberal’ project. This collection, however, actively engages with practical theology from an evangelical perspective, both through discussion of the substantive issues and by providing examples of practical theology done by evangelicals in the classroom, the church, and beyond. This volume brings together established and emerging voices to debate the growing role which practical theology is playing in evangelical and Pentecostal circles. Chapters begin by addressing methodological concerns, before moving into areas of practice. Additionally, there are four short papers from students who make use of practical theology to reflect upon their own practice. Issues of authority and normativity are tackled head on in a way that will inform the debate both within and beyond evangelicalism. This book will, therefore, be of keen interest to scholars of practical, evangelical, and Pentecostal theology.

Download or read book Reimagining Ministerial Formation written by David Heywood and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Church is currently experiencing a transition in the way it understands and practises both mission and ministry. It is to be outward-looking, engaging with the wider community, involving all its members in mission and clergy are to play the role of enablers and equippers of the ministry of the whole church. However, ministerial formation in colleges and courses throughout the country lags behind this emerging consensus. ‘Theological education’ is still largely based on academic models. Reimagining Ministerial Formation offers a new way forward, where ‘ministry’ comes to be about the whole church, and ministerial formation is about collaboration between clergy and laity. It argues strongly for a shift away from ‘front-loaded’ training, to a new focus on formation as a life-long process.

Download or read book Charismatic Christianity written by Helen Collins and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the essence of charismatic Christianity, a renewal movement that stresses the Holy Spirit's work, the church's use of spiritual gifts, and the significance of the supernatural? Helen Collins gives a novel summary explanation drawn from the spiritual gifts. Through Scripture and doctrinal reflection, she shows that charismatic spirituality is a coherent, reasonable, and rich tradition with much to offer. Collins demonstrates how practicing spiritual gifts embodies a distinctive theology, making these practices carriers of doctrine. Using the Acts 2 narrative, she summarizes seven key emphases and associated practices: expectancy (prophecy), enchantment (miracles), encounter (healing), expression (testimony), equality (tongues), empowerment (evangelism), and enjoyment (worship). The result is a fresh introduction that is biblical, theologically robust, and practical, helping charismatic students to learn more about themselves and others to understand the movement and what it has to contribute to global theological discussions.

Download or read book Ministry in Conversation written by Andy Goodliff and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book of essays for Paul Goodliff, some of the loves of his life are put into conversation with the practice of ministry. Paul Goodliff has been a Baptist minister for nearly thirty-five years, in roles that have been local, regional, national, and ecumenical. Ministry has also been the subject of his own research and publications. Ministry in Conversation seeks to extend his work and offer new insights.

Download or read book Peculiar Discipleship written by Claire Williams and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a theology of neurodiversity. It is a theology from neurodiversity. In her ground-breaking and daring theological exploration, Claire Williams considers how the experience of God for an autistic person challenges and interrogates our normal theologies about knowing God. Demonstrating how her autistic perspective offers a distinct and fresh hermeneutical lens, Williams shows that a liberation theology of neurodiversity can gift the church a new way of understanding worship, practice, ethics and even the nature of Christian hope itself.

Download or read book Pregnancy and Birth written by Karen O'Donnell and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pregnancy is a period of time that institutes great change in the lives of those who are pregnant. Regardless of whether a pregnancy concludes with the birth of a live child or not, there are experiences that are common for many people who are pregnant. Yet as a site of theological reflection pregnancy is underrepresented. This landmark book seeks to begin the conversation within theology about pregnancy, the positive and negative experiences, and the potential for pregnancy to be understood theologically. Chapters consider a number of avenues in this exploration, from early pregnancy loss to trauma in labour, from adoption to the end of reproductive years at the onset of menopause. Throughout, this book seeks to understand the resources that theology brings to the experiences of pregnancy as well as the situations of oppression and underrepresentation that currently exist. Allowing for intersections of race, parenting, childlessness, and disability, this book approaches pregnancy from different theological perspectives in order to complexify the theological response and engagement as well as produce constructive resources for both the academy and the church. Contributors include Chine McDonald, Julie Gittoes, Margaret Kamitsuka and Rachel Muers.

Download or read book From the Shores of Silence written by Ashley Cocksworth and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist practical theology has emerged in the gap between wider feminist and wider practical theology. It celebrates distinctive concerns, arguments, emphases, and questions – unafraid to re-form practical theology in shape and substance, and to guide feminist theology towards the silences and stories of human lives that some professional theologies (including those shaped by feminist commitments) sometimes overlooks. Feminist practical theology is bold in exploration of doctrinal themes in poetic and prayerful modes, characteristically collaborative and in search of alliances with other advocacy perspectives. In the UK, such commitments have been exemplified by Nicola Slee, whom this volume honours. Chapters invite readers into wide ranging conversations that flow from young women’s experiences at university, poetic practice as theology, queer priesthood, theologies of critical masculinities, women presiding in worship, Black and decolonial theologies adjacent to feminist convictions, confrontations with sexual violence, rest and rewilding, and a post-menopausal Mary. Contributors are: Al Barrett, Gavin D’Costa, Deborah Kahn-Harris, Michael N. Jagessar, Sharon Jagger, Rachel Mann, Jenny Morgans, Eleanor Nesbitt, Karen O’Donnell, Mark Pryce, Anthony G. Reddie, Ruth Shelton and Alison Wooley.

Download or read book Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals written by Dr David Jasper and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary thought is marked by heated debates about the character, purpose and form of religious thinking and its relation to a range of ideals: spiritual, moral, aesthetic, political and ecological, to name the obvious. This book addresses the interrelation between theological thinking and the complex and diverse realms of human ideals. What are the ideals appropriate to our moment in human history, and how do these ideals derive from or relate to theological reflection in our time? In Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines (physics, art, literary studies, ethics, comparative religion, history of ideas, and theology) engage with these crucial questions with the intention of articulating a new and historically appropriate vision of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals for our global times.

Download or read book Searching for an Adequate God written by David Ray Griffin and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book advocates of both process and free-will theism come together for the first time to describe their respective theological perspectives and enter into constructive dialogue with each other. Featuring two of today's best philosophers-David R. Griffin representing process theology and William Hasker representing free-will theism- as well as theologians interested in both views, this volume provides a fully orbed discussion of these two vital theological positions.

Download or read book System and Story written by Gale Heide and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: System and Story is intended to develop a means for bridging the gap between critics of system and those who may find value in doing systematics from a Biblically oriented context. Narrative theologians have rightly identified and critiqued the development of system in academic theology. Unfortunately, they have not identified the ways in which systematic elements have always played a role in theological knowledge. This study demonstrates the inherent systematic tendencies that still exist in narrative approaches to theology, while at the same time acknowledging the appropriateness of aspects of the narrative critique of system. The reaction against Enlightenment modernism is examined from the perspective of the heightened role of system in religious epistemology. The work of Stanley Hauerwas serves to carry much of the conversation regarding the critique of system and a narrative alternative as it is discovered in communal formation. After "summarizing" Hauerwas' theology, if such a thing is possible, the final chapters explore the ecclesiological concerns of narrative theologians according to a more systematic rendering of pneumatology. A Biblical rendering of pneumatology from the perspective of the Spirit's role in ecclesiology allows for a modest (i.e., pre-modern) systematic presentation commensurate with narrative communal formation. Thus, the narrative attempt to once again "do" theology for the church is seen as compatible with a Scriptural (i.e., modestly systematic) theology of the Spirit.

Download or read book Homiletical Theology written by David Schnasa Jacobsen and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Barth famously argued that all theology is sermon preparation. But what if all sermon preparation is actually theology? This book pursues a thoroughgoing theological vision for the practice of preaching as a way of doing theology. The idea is not just that homiletics is the realm of theological application. That would leave preaching in the position of simply implementing a theology already arrived at. Instead, the vision in these pages is of a form of theology that begins with preaching itself: its practice, its theories, and its contexts. Homiletical theology is thus a unique way of doing theology--even a constructive theological task in its own right. Homiletician David Schnasa Jacobsen has assembled several of the leading lights of contemporary homiletics to help to see its task ever more deeply as theological, yet in profoundly diverse ways. Along the way, readers will not only discover how homileticians do theology homiletically, but will deepen the way in which they understand their own preaching as a theological task.

Download or read book Reforming a Theology of Gender written by Daniel R. Patterson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Butler and conservative Christian theology are often perceived to be antithetical on questions of gender. In Reforming a Theology of Gender they are shown to be strange bedfellows. By engaging in dialogue with Butler on her terms—desire, violence, and life—this book absorbs the heart of Butler’s critique, revealing a righteous law and a seductive image in conservative theologies of gender. The law of Adam and Eve manifests in the unjust administration of guilt, grief, and death. By confronting this law, which in fact condemns all in their bodies, further reflection on Butler’s thought leads to thinking about where one finds life in one’s body of death. The seductive image of Adam and Eve is revealed to be a false hope and a site that induces slave morality or body-works-based righteousness. Butler’s voice is strangely prophetic because it calls the church to offer hope and life by reorienting its gaze from the beautiful yet lifeless bodies of Adam and Eve to the bloodied and scarred, risen body of Jesus Christ. Gender, in the end, is shown to be a vocation of becoming what one is not.

Download or read book God and the Excluded written by Joerg Rieger and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rieger offers an enlightening way to understand the chief strands or options in theology today and a valuable proposal for resituating theology around the crucial issue of inclusion. He sees four competing vectors at work in Christian today's theology: Theology of Identity, Theology of Difference, Theology and the Postmodern and Theology and the Underside.

Download or read book Farewell to Innocence written by Allan Aubrey Boesak and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While we acknowledge that all expressions of liberation theology are not identical, we must protest very strongly against the false divisions that some make: between black theology in South Africa and black theology in the United States, between black theology and African theology, and between black theology and Latin American liberation theology. But moving away from the illusioned universality of western theology to the contextuality of liberation theology is a risky business; one that cannot be done innocently. In the search for theological and human authenticity in its own situation, black theology does not stand alone. It is but one expression of this search going on within many different contexts. Until now, the Christian church had chosen to move through history with a bland kind of innocence, hiding the painful truths of oppression behind a facade of myths and real or imagined anxieties. This is no longer possible. The oppressed who believe in God, the Father of Jesus Christ, no longer want to believe in the myths created to subjugate them. It is no longer possible to innocently accept history "as it happens," silently hoping that God would take the responsibility for human failure. The theology of liberation spells out this realization. For the Christian church it constitutes, in no uncertain terms, farewell to innocence.