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Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407174
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Professor Hall has written a major work on an agonizing subject, at once brilliant, comprehensive, and thought provoking.In contrast to many writers who gloss over one or the other, Dr. Hall is true both to the reality of suffering and to the affirmation that God creates, sustains, and redeems.Creative is his view that certain aspects of what we call suffering -- loneliness, experience of limits, temptation, anxiety -- are necessary parts of God's good creation. These he distinguishes from suffering after the fall, the tragic dimension of life.Unique is his structure: creation-suffering as becomingthe fall--suffering as a burdenredemption--conquest from within.Professor Hall succeeds in moving the reader beyond the customary way of stating the problem: "How can undeserved suffering coexist with a just and almighty God?" He also evaluates five popular, leading thinkers on suffering: Harold Kushner, C.S. Lewis, Diogenes Allen, George Buttrick, and Leslie Weatherhead.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407174
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Get Book Here
Book Description
Professor Hall has written a major work on an agonizing subject, at once brilliant, comprehensive, and thought provoking.In contrast to many writers who gloss over one or the other, Dr. Hall is true both to the reality of suffering and to the affirmation that God creates, sustains, and redeems.Creative is his view that certain aspects of what we call suffering -- loneliness, experience of limits, temptation, anxiety -- are necessary parts of God's good creation. These he distinguishes from suffering after the fall, the tragic dimension of life.Unique is his structure: creation-suffering as becomingthe fall--suffering as a burdenredemption--conquest from within.Professor Hall succeeds in moving the reader beyond the customary way of stating the problem: "How can undeserved suffering coexist with a just and almighty God?" He also evaluates five popular, leading thinkers on suffering: Harold Kushner, C.S. Lewis, Diogenes Allen, George Buttrick, and Leslie Weatherhead.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407204
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 588
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Book Description
What does it mean to profess the faith as North American Christians at the end of the second millennium? What is Christian theology as consciously crafted in light of the distinctive history, culture, and experience of North America? Hall marshalls doctrinal resources for a critical, creative response that stresses God's necessary involvement in an unfinished, dynamic, suffering world.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 162189374X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
"Christianity, as faith centered in Jesus as the Christ came to be called, got a foothold in the world, and for a vital and vocal minority changed the world, because it proclaimed a message that awakened men and women to possibilities for human life that they had either lost or never entertained. That message the first Christian evangelists (and Jesus himself, according to the record) called euangellion--good news, gospel. For its first two or three hundred years, Christianity was largely dependent for its existence upon the new zest for life that was awakened in persons who heard and were, as they felt, transformed, by that gospel; and at various and sundry points in subsequent history the Christian movement has found itself revitalized by the spirit of that same 'good news' in ways that spoke to the specifics of their times and places. "The lesson of history is clear: the challenge to all serious Christians and Christian bodies today is not whether we can devise yet more novel and promotionally impressive means for the transmission of 'the Christian religion' (let alone this or that denomination); it is whether we are able to hear and to proclaim . . . gospel! We do not need statisticians and sociologists to inform us that religion--and specifically our religion, as the dominant expression of the spiritual impulse of homo sapiens in our geographic context--is in decline. We do not need the sages of the new atheism to announce in learned tomes (and on buses!) that 'God probably does not exist.' The 'sea of faith' has been ebbing for a very long time." --from the Introduction
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592445802
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The deterioration of our natural environment under the impact of a rampant technological society is one of the major crises of our time. For many analysts, a primary cause of this crisis is the influence on Western culture of the Judaeo-Christian concept of the human being as having dominion over the rest of creation. In this book, Douglas John Hall does not attempt to exonerate historical Christianity from that charge. But, he argues, confession alone is not enough. The crisis of nature forces us to rethink our whole understanding of the relation between humanity and nature - an understanding that is based on the concept that human beings are created in the image of God ('imago Dei'). Hall carefully examines the biblical, historical, and theological meanings of this term, which, more than any other biblical expression, became Christianity's symbolic way of designating the essence of the human. Hall argues that the image of God is not an endowment - it is not something that human beings have; rather, it is a quality that pertains to our relationship with God. We should think of 'imago' as a verb, not a noun, he says. The human vocation within the created order is to image the Creator. When this is applied in a consistent and serious way, the idea of human dominion over all of nature must be radically reinterpreted. Taking the Lordship of Jesus as an authentic model for understanding our human relation to the natural order means that dominion is expressed not as mastery but as service - sacrificial service of the others with and for whom one is responsible. Thus the concept of dominion as stewardship eschews any idea of ownership or superiority in relation to nature, yet assumes a special accountability for its welfare. A provocative and original work, Hall's book retains the biblical centrality of 'homo sapiens' while at the same time raising both nature and God to a new kind of prominence in the dialogue that is life.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407150
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
This bold work culminates Hall's three- volume contextual theology, the first to take the measure of Christian belief and doctrine explicitly in light of North American cultural and historical experience.Hall is deeply critical of North American culture but also of sidelined Christian churches that struggle to gain dominance within it. "We must stop thinking of the reduction of Christendom as a tragedy!" he says. The disestablishment that the churches reluctantly enjoy can enable them to develop genuine community, uncompromised theology, and honest engagement with the larger culture. To a failed culture and a struggling church Hall shows the radical implications of a theology of the cross for the shape and practice of church, preaching, ministry, ethics, and eschatology.Hall's frank and prophetic volume is the trilogy's most practical, and the most sustained probe to date of Christian life in a post-Christian context.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407167
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
In this small gem of theological reflection, North America's foremost "theologian of the cross" offers a profound and compelling contemplation on the relevance of the church's most fundamental confession. Hall ponders what confessing Jesus as crucified means in today's context, one that is postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural, and in some respects post-Christian. A digest of his monumental trilogy, this book lays out in brief compass the heart of Hall's theology of the cross, contrasting it sharply with the theology of established Christianity, showing how it reframes classical Christology and soteriology, and drawing the implications for what it means to be human, for Christian ethics, and for the church.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1621895416
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
What really is Christianity? If all the religious packaging in which it is wrapped were removed, what would remain? These were Bonhoeffer's questions, and they must be ours today--even more urgently! For in many quarters Christianity is being so narrowly identified with some of its parts, cultural associations, and past ambitions that like all militant religion, it represents a threat to the planetary future. We may no longer speak clearly of the essence of Christianity, as von Harnack and other nineteenth-century thinkers did; but perhaps we may still have a sufficiently shared sense of the kerygmatic core of this faith to be able, in the face of these misrepresentations of it, to say what Christianity is not.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725211297
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The biblical image of the steward is highly provocative and even revolutionary. In recent years, environmentalists and peace marchers have been discovering the radical potential of the stewardship motif, while the church, sadly, has muffled this symbol's power in ecclesiastical wrappings. So writes Douglas John Hall in the first edition of 'The Steward' (1982). This provocative book has been so much in demand all over the world that Hall has completely rewritten, revised, and expanded his work, adding new material and deleting dated references. Yet Hall has kept his original book's basic format the same in this new and improved edition. In short, Hall aims to recapture the most basic meaning of the biblical metaphor of the 'steward' and to apply that meaning to our social context, one in which human beings are confused and ambivalent about their place and vocation in a threatened world. Working from numerous angles - biblical, historical, sociological, theological, and ecclesiastical - Hall explores the rich meaning and implications of stewardship. Scripture portrays the steward as a caretaker and servant. Hall compares scriptural teaching on stewardship - concentrated in Jesus' parables - with the role of stewardship in the church's history, maintaining that ever since the fourth century, the church's understanding and practice of stewardship have been distorted by its alliance with institutional power. Hall also puts forth apocalyptic warnings about the fate of the earth unless we heed the call to be stewards of the creation, work for world peace and justice, and nurture life in its many forms. The church around the world, says Hall, urgently needs to live as 'steward' - it is a matter of death and life.
Author: Douglas John Hall
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407235
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
"As the Christian movement nears the end of its second millennium, it faces a crisis that could not have been anticipated at the close of the first thousand years—or, indeed, by most of our own great-grandparents. … "Since the most conspicuous dimensions of the waning of Christendom have to do with material decline (the decline in church membership and active attendance of Sunday services, the decline in financial and physical prosperity, the decline of influence in high places), such analyses as there are usually belabor the obvious: something drastic is happening to the churches! … "Throughout most of its long history, Christianity has not required of its adherents that they should think the faith. The historical accident of its political and cultural establishment 15 centuries ago… ensured that a thinking faith would be purely optional for members of the church. … "But thought-less faith, which has always been a contradiction in terms, is today a stage on the road to the extinction, not only of Christianity itself, but of whatever the architects of our civilization meant by 'Humanity.' Only a thinking faith can survive. Only a thinking faith can help the world survive! " —From the Preface
Author: David Monge
Publisher: ARPress
ISBN: 9780788099007
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revised and with a Foreword by David J. Monge In this great classic, Douglas John Hall analyzes the inadequacies and dangers of the officially optimistic society of North America and its officially optimistic religion. He then appeals to the thin tradition of Luther and Kierkegaard within Christian history as a way into the darkness of our time. He eloquently appeals to this theology of the cross as not only pointing toward a new image of human nature for Christians today but also affording us a glimmer of true light. Students, laypersons, clergy, and many others will find here a gripping critique of modern Western culture and a way toward genuine Christian faith in challenging times. Mind-shaking and spirit-shaking. -- John C. Bennett One of the best and most constructive theological critiques of culture and religion to come along in a good while. -- Larry Rasmussen I believe this is an important book. I know that it is stimulating and provocative--almost maddeningly so. . . .Thoughtful Christians need to reckon with the ideas contained in this book. -- Edgar M. Carlson, The Lutheran Quarterly Douglas John Hall, one of the most respected of North American theologians, is Professor Emeritus of Theology at McGill University, Montreal. Among his many books is the trilogy Christian Theology in a North American Context, which consists of Thinking the Faith, Professing the Faith, and Confessing the Faith. His popular Why Christian? For Those on the Edge of Faith was published in 1998.
