Can the West Be Converted?

Can the West Be Converted? PDF Author: Jean-Georges Gantenbein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793633827
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Rather than reconsidering contemporary culture in light of secularization, much of the western church operates with a degree of nostalgia. She has yet to fully embrace prospective, innovative models for what form her task might take in some of Christianity’s historic heartlands. Amidst rapidly declining church membership, contextualizing the Gospel for the contemporary West is an urgent task for churches and Christians living in this context. This book seeks an interdisciplinary, international, and ecumenical response to this challenge, uniting historical, sociological, theological, and missiological perspectives. Benefiting from recent studies in sociology of religion, Dr. Gantenbein offers several detailed contextual case studies before establishing correlations between western cultural-religious characteristics and corresponding theological affirmations. This study includes several unexpected dimensions, including the development of a theological aesthetic in tension with the typically Word-alone tradition of Protestantism; a constructive reading of the book of Revelation as a source for contemporary aesthetic missiology; reflections on a soteriology for the postmodern era; and a proposal for an anonymous ecclesiology within a European context where churches are viewed with growing suspicion. With rare perspicacity, Gantenbein’s study creatively calls churches to apply renewed intellectual rigor in faithfulness to their common purpose.

Can the West Be Converted?

Can the West Be Converted? PDF Author: Jean-Georges Gantenbein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793633827
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rather than reconsidering contemporary culture in light of secularization, much of the western church operates with a degree of nostalgia. She has yet to fully embrace prospective, innovative models for what form her task might take in some of Christianity’s historic heartlands. Amidst rapidly declining church membership, contextualizing the Gospel for the contemporary West is an urgent task for churches and Christians living in this context. This book seeks an interdisciplinary, international, and ecumenical response to this challenge, uniting historical, sociological, theological, and missiological perspectives. Benefiting from recent studies in sociology of religion, Dr. Gantenbein offers several detailed contextual case studies before establishing correlations between western cultural-religious characteristics and corresponding theological affirmations. This study includes several unexpected dimensions, including the development of a theological aesthetic in tension with the typically Word-alone tradition of Protestantism; a constructive reading of the book of Revelation as a source for contemporary aesthetic missiology; reflections on a soteriology for the postmodern era; and a proposal for an anonymous ecclesiology within a European context where churches are viewed with growing suspicion. With rare perspicacity, Gantenbein’s study creatively calls churches to apply renewed intellectual rigor in faithfulness to their common purpose.

Western Culture in Gospel Context

Western Culture in Gospel Context PDF Author: David J. Kettle
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1610971841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Approaching us in sovereign freedom, God comes alive to us, we come alive to God, and all creation comes alive as a sign pointing to God. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives and discloses himself in this immediate way as our ultimate context and host, within the provisional medium of creation. This life-giving gospel is met by blindness, however, among those who live today in a collapsing Western culture. This is because their imaginative world is shaped by habitual assumptions and practices that lie--largely unacknowledged--deep within that culture, and that preclude openness to the gospel. Moreover, Western Christians themselves widely share these assumptions, betraying the gospel into cultural captivity. God calls for the conversion of Western culture to the living gospel. Crucially this must include, as Lesslie Newbigin recognized, a repentance from modern Western assumptions about knowledge. Part One explores seeking, knowing, and serving God, as providing a true paradigm for understanding all human enquiry, knowledge, and action. Part Two examines ten resulting "hot spots" where conversion from prevailing cultural assumptions is vital for authentic mission to Western culture.

Communities of the Converted

Communities of the Converted PDF Author: Catherine Wanner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Theologian of the Resurrection

Theologian of the Resurrection PDF Author: E. J. David Kramer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004701869
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In this study, N.T. Wright’s exceptional work on the resurrection is shown to form the centre of his eschatology and mission theology. Wright’s emphasis on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection for the gospel’s missional encounter with the West is highlighted. By drawing out the significance of the resurrection for Wright’s eschatological narrative, the author sets the stage for Wright’s mission theology, focusing on the church, evangelism, political theology, and eschatological ethics. Wright’s emphasis on doing history is explained in terms of the theological conviction that, since God acted in history, historical study has become a sphere of missional engagement.

The Gospel in the Western Context

The Gospel in the Western Context PDF Author: Gert-Jan Roest
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004386483
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
In The Gospel in the Western Context, Gert-Jan Roest focuses on discerning a Western contextual gospel, an endeavour that is very relevant to the current state of Christianity in the postmodern and post-Christendom West. After giving an in-depth analysis and synthesis of how Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton read the Western context and contextualize their Christology, he develops a gospel-centred model for reading the context. Meanwhile, he makes a creative and much-needed attempt to connect the two disciplines of systematic theology and missiology and convincingly shows that both disciplines cannot only enrich one another but also can give church practitioners insight and wisdom for their tasks.

Conversion

Conversion PDF Author: Alfred Clair Underwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Conversation
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


The Rise of Western Christendom

The Rise of Western Christendom PDF Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118301269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 741

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Book Description
This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface, additional color images, and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power. Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as 'late antiquity' Includes a fully updated bibliography and index

Textile Recorder

Textile Recorder PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Textile fabrics
Languages : en
Pages : 980

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Book Description


Be Always Converting, be Always Converted

Be Always Converting, be Always Converted PDF Author: Rob Wilson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674033436
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Wilson's reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry 'Ōpūkaha'ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, torn from his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that 'Ōpūkaha'ia's conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American.

How to Reach the West Again

How to Reach the West Again PDF Author: Timothy J Keller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578633756
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
Christianity is declining in the West. Churches in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe are closing their doors at an accelerating rate. How will the church respond? In this short but sweeping manifesto, New York Times bestselling author and pastor Timothy Keller argues that this decline should prompt us to rethink evangelism from the ground up. Using the early church as our guide, churches and individual Christians must examine ourselves, our culture, and Scripture to work toward a new missionary encounter with Western culture that will make the gospel both attractive and credible to a new generation.