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The Old Testament raises far-reaching issues for the Christian faith and the Christian Church, and in this valuable historical study Kraeling surveys the attitude of the Church to the Old Testament since the Reformation.

A comparative study of the way in which two great theologians, one medieval and one modern, view the Christian doctrine of Revelation.

A major study of the doctrine of the Atonement from an Evangelical perspective, showing its theological and historical significance.

This anthropological study considers the Santal people who live in the area north-east of the mouth of the Ganges. It looks at dancing, music and poetry; folk-tales; myths and clan organization; festivals; birth and initiation; marriage; death; and the impact of Christian missions.

Based on a range of textual, literary and archaeological evidence, this informative guide to the religion of the Semitic peoples reveals both their religious practice and the place it occupied in their civilisation.

A fascinating contribution to biblical theology, in which the figure of Jesus is understood in terms of the concepts of Messiah and kingship developed in the Old Testament.

A collection of studies in the relationship between spirit and tradition in the bible, combining the insights of Orthodox theology with Western biblical scholarship.

A translation of the major texts produced by Luther in the critical years of the Reformation, from the Wittenberg disputation of 1517 to after the Diet of Worms in 1521. Includes many of his most important writings.

A series of six representative scenes in which the author, applying the methods of the social historian to the early Church, describes the daily life of the first believers.

Two essays by distinguished Reformed scholars that present original interpretations of the central meaning of the Lord's Supper.

Moving beyond a chronological record, this account places sport within the wider context of British life, examining its social, political, financial and international implications. It discusses the roles and styles of play that have marked the varying stages of British social history, and their influence on our contemporary experience.

A guide to the origins and development of the stone tombs and monuments of English churchyards.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was writing at a time of Evangelical unease. In a society ravaged by Asiatic cholera, numbed by levels of infant mortality, and fearful of revolution and the toxicity of industry (to name but a few of the many challenges), the 'gospel' proclaiming eternal damnation for unbelievers was hardly good news; rather, Christianity was increasingly viewed as the source of bad news and a tool of state oppression. MacDonald agreed: in his view, the church had become a vampire, sucking the blood of her children instead of offering them Eucharistic life. In contrast, like Christ, MacDonald offers us a child. Although at first sight a familiar Romantic incarnation, in MacDonald's theology 'the child' becomes an unlikely icon challenging the vampire's kingdom and confronting the foundations of much of Western theology. John R. de Jong's meticulously researched study of MacDonald's work - especially his 'realist' and fantasy novels - in its Victorian context is of more than historical interest. In light of the growth of fundamentalist expressions of Christianity, we are encouraged to consider embracing MacDonald's radical solution to religious vampirism: becoming children.

David Martin was one of the world's leading commentators on secularization theory. He was also a committed and lifelong reader of English poetry. Christianity and 'The World' develops Martin's argument against simplistic secularization narratives with reference to the history of poetry, a topic with which few social theorists have been concerned. Martin shows the enduring but ever-changing centrality of Christian thought and practice, in its many different forms, to English poetry. Always mindful that the most important aspects of poetry's history can be captured only by attending to the minutest particulars of individual poems and poets, Martin's study sheds unexpected light on a wide range of English poets, from Spenser and Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill. The result is a study at once informed by an authoritative sociological perspective on secularization and richly coloured by the singular intensity of Martin's own reading life.

Maximus the Confessor's combustive historicalera, committed doctrinal reflection, and loud and influential voice took him ona turbulent career of traveling and writing around the Mediterranean. Maximuswas a spiritual teacher, an ascetic and a contemplative, but he was also apolemicist, a crafter of dogma, an embattled Christologian, a premeditatingrhetorician. In this study, Luke Steven binds togetherthese two disparate sides of the man and his writings by showing thatthroughout his oeuvre the Confessor positions imitation as the key toknowledge. This lasting epistemology characterizes his earlier ascetic andspiritual works, and in his later works it prominently defines his dogmaticChristological method - that is, the means by which he communicates andpersuades and brings people to understand and encounter Jesus Christ, the onewith two natures, divine and human. This multifaceted study offers a deepassessment of Maximus's forebears, new insight on the animating assumptions ofhis thought, and an unprecedented focus on the rhetoric and method of hischristological writings.  

Even in the twenty-first century, criticaland creative engagement with modern and postmodern philosophy is a rarity inOrthodox circles. The collection of essays presented here by ChristophSchneider makes a significant contribution to overcoming this deficit. Eightscholars from six different countries, working on the intersection betweenOrthodox thought and philosophy, present their research in short and accessibleform. The topics covered range from political philosophy to phenomenology,metaphysics, philosophy of self, logic, ethics, and philosophy of language.The authors do not all promote one particularapproach to the relationship between Orthodox theology and philosophy. Nevertheless, taken together, their work demonstrates that Orthodox scholarshipis not confined to historical research about the Byzantine era, but cancontribute to, and enrich, contemporary intellectual debates.  

Jean-Jacques von Allmen's work was animated bythree key insights: the Church both learns and becomes what it truly is when itgathers to worship; worship tells the story of God's salvation history andinvites God's people into it; and by doing so, the church offers the world botha stern warning and a hopeful promise. The Swiss Reformed pastor and professoris among the most admired liturgical theologians of the twentieth century, buthis work is largely and lamentably unknown to most worship leaders. In Church at Church, Ron Rienstra provides an introduction tothis important thinker. He offers methodological and biographical context andthen explores von Allmen's most generative insights concerning the church as itengages in its most foundational activity: worship. Viewed through the lens ofthe Nicene marks, Rienstra's exploration yields the outlines of a 'liturgicalecclesiology', a way to help the church think more deeply about its identityand to help its leaders shape the worship they prepare and lead today. 

In his commentary, John Paul Heil presents two new proposals regarding Paul's letter to the Galatians. First, he demonstrates an entirely new chiastic structure embracing the entire letter, based on strict linguistic and textual criteria rather than on conceptual or theological themes. This chiastic structure accords with the view that Galatians was originally performed orally in a setting of communal worship. Second, Heil offers a new proposal for a key theme that runs throughout Galatians, as expressed by the subtitle of this book - 'Worship for Life by Faith in the Crucified and Risen Lord'. Here, 'worship' is considered to be a comprehensive concept that includes liturgical, cultic, or ritual worship as well as the moral behaviour that is to complement it as ethical worship in accord with the biblical tradition. 'Life' refers both to the present way of living as well as to future eternal life. 'Faith' refers to the acceptance of divine grace available to the believer because of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The complex nature of Christian communion with a personal God requires a nuanced expression. Since its inception, the early church affirmed God's unknowable nature and also participation in God through Christ. The church fathers employed the language of theosis in talking about union with God and human transformation in the likeness of God. However, the term theosis or deification is a broad category and requires precise explanation to avoid human dissolution into the divine in the mystical union it attempts to describe. In Triadosis, Eduard Borysov offers a new approach to the conundrum of the imparticipable divine nature and the prospect of personal union between human and the Trinity. Most significantly, he proposes that if God is Trinity, then we are created and restored in the image of the same tri-personal God.

The contemporary philosopher William Desmond has many companions inthought, and one of the most important of these is Augustine. In lucid prosethat draws on the riches of a vibrant philosophical-theological tradition,Rene Khler-Ryan explores Desmond's metaxological philosophy. Shebrings together philosophy, theology and literature to elaborate on theconversation that Desmond's philosophical work in discovering how humans areconstantly 'between' sustains with a tradition of thinkers that also includesPlato, Thomas Aquinas and Shakespeare.Whether considering how our elemental wonder at creation brings uscloser to God, or how our most intimate revelations about being human happen inthe interior space of prayer, reading Desmond with Augustine illuminates aporous and interdisciplinary space of inquiry. With a foreword from Desmondhimself, Companions in the Between is a unique contribution to thegrowing body of scholarship on his thought. Khler-Ryan's analysis will enticeany reader who wants to know more about how contemporary philosophy can contesta space where philosophers are formulaically expected to shy away from divinetranscendence.   

Wagner's Ring is one of the greatest of all artworks of Westerncivilization, but what is it all about? The power and mystery of Wagner'screation was such that even he felt he stood before his work 'as though beforesome puzzle'. A clue to the Ring's greatness lies in its multiple avenues of self-disclosure and thecorresponding plethora of interpretations that over the years has granted amplescope for directors, and will no doubt do so well into the distant future. Onepossible interpretation, which Richard Bell argues should be taken seriously,is the Ring as Christiantheology. In this first of two volumes, Bell considers, among other things, howthe composer's Christian interests may be detected in the 'forging' of his Ring, in his appropriation of sources (whether theybe myths and sagas, writers, poets, or philosophers), and in works composedaround the same time, especially his Jesus ofNazareth. 

The second volume in a two-part analysis of Wagner's most famous workand its theological message.

In this remarkable study, Pamela Sambrook rescues from obscurity the contribution of a former member of Napoleon's Imperial Guard to the development of specialist hotels and catering in the formative years of the railway network in England and France. In doing so, she interrogates what lies behind some of Zenon Vantini's very real achievements, legacies and disasters. She asks how far he was driven by his familial background in Elba and his involvement in the political turmoil of early-nineteenth-century France, and to what extent his whole life was known to those around him. Vantini's extraordinary life encapsulates the change between two very different worlds - the old imperial past and the new age of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Never shaking off his old political loyalties, he believed resolutely that the mobility afforded by railway travel would change Europe fundamentally. In the long view he was a component part in the very early years of an industry which arguably changed England and Europe more than did even his hero, Napoleon. Scholars and casual readers of British and European social history will be fascinated by his story.