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Chapter 6 treats Niebuhr’s mixed reception among Protestant Christians during his lifetime and today, in popular as well as academic circles. The “positive thinking” and naïve optimism of Norman Vincent Peale and his contemporary followers are anathema to Niebuhr. Treated with indifference in the “Sojourners movement” around Jim Wallis, Niebuhr’s perspective is honored in the publication First Things. Niebuhr’s most vociferous academic critic, Duke Divinity School’s theological ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, writes from the perspective of pacifism. This chapter responds to Hauerwas’s critique that Niebuhr’s theology is more pragmatic and naturalistic than theistic, lacks a proper sense of the church, and compromises the radicality of Jesus’s self-giving love. Chapter 6 maintains that Niebuhr is fully within the trajectory of mainstream Christian thinking and argues that Hauerwas, and similar critics, could benefit from Niebuhr’s teaching on sin, humility, and self-awareness of the Christian life. Far from capitulating to a political agenda, Niebuhr’s stress on a radically transcendent deity challenges fundamentalism and the politicized use of religion in our day.

This chapter argues that Catholic Learning and Receptive Ecumenism are more than purely ecclesiological concepts. Catholicity does not concern merely a certain style, distinct from other competing Christian forms. Catholic Learning does not simply refer to what (Roman) Catholicism might learn with integrity from other traditions. It suggests that ‘ being Catholic’ is something learned progressively and that we are to resist the siren voices both of premature certainty and of purification by processes of exclusion. It also suggests that there is a distinctively Catholic way of learning that is, by definition, integrated and that counteracts the separation of the intellectual from the practical and theology from spirituality — the conduct of a Christian life.

Bourdieu’s concept of Habitus provides a framework for understanding the nexus of practice and belief in early Judaism and how a shared set of practices and world-view can encompass multiple interpretations. From this perspective, we can explore how self-understandings in so-called early Christian writings both overlap with each other and with Jewish patterns and differentiate themselves from them. A language of mutuality was particularly important in Christian writings, which often emphasize practice more than belief. Although these distinguish themselves from Jews and ‘pagans’, many of their values were shared in common, and perhaps lived out in cooperation more than conflict.

The four volumes of Church Dogmatics which entailed Barth's ideas regarding the notion of reconciliation were written during the period between 1951 and 1959. The fourth part, and the parts that have been unrevised that were written between 1959 and 1961, were then published as The Christian Life. This period marked the German ‘economic miracle’ in which Europe experienced recovery in terms of economy and industry and the standards of living were significantly improved across all countries of central Europe. As such, secularization brought about great impacts in the cultural movement as church attendance was in decline. The ‘end of ideology’ theory was initiated because of the affluence and technological development experienced. In this chapter, we look into how Barth furthered his theology through focusing on how a sense of freedom can be acquired if focus would shift back to religion and the Church.

This chapter analyzes Theodore's spiritual theology, with its anthropological and sacramental presuppositions, using a descriptive exposition with annotations. Theodore believes that the very act of creation was an act of beauty, God ‘beautifying’ man in honoring him with his image and likeness. When Adam fell prey to Satan, man lost the integrity of his nature, being subject to passions and sin that disfigure the soul, obscuring its beauty and nobility. It was Christ's mission to restore man to his former dignity. To free man from ‘unjust’ and ‘diabolical’ servitude. Christ became sin for man's sake. It is by the illumination of baptism that man can become a ‘son of God,’ enriched with all knowledge of good. To live according to baptismal grace was to live according to the commandments of the Lord, and this includes belonging to the lay order. The laity was bound essentially to the same obligations of Christian living as monks were, except in the way or circumstances in which Christian life was lived, especially with regard to marriage. Despite its dignity, marriage had to be considered a corruption of virginity for it represented the cares and anxieties of the fallen world that prevented or corrupted the soul's pure contemplation of God and heavenly things. Theodore preaches that the church, through its sanctifying rituals, provides the means for all Christians and not just monks to achieve holiness. By claiming that it was Christ himself who established these rites, Theodore put himself in a better position to defend the credentials of the monastic institution.

This chapter puts the qualifications of Christendom's minor premise — works of love, witnessing, and suffering for the truth into a larger view so that a true understanding and expression of the Christian life can emerge in the modern age. The first section reflects on the paradox of faith, the double movement of faith, dialectical problems relating to faith, the role of the Will in Faith, the faith of Abraham, and becoming a self. The second section looks into the workings of hope in a Christian sense. The third section examines the origin and nature of Christian love, Christian love as self-denial, the equality of love, the emancipation of women, God as the middle term in human love relations, the danger of Christian love, and martyrdom.

Two of the ablest medieval theologians who set to work on the meaning of the cross for the Christian life were Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Dame Julian of Norwich (b. 1342). St. Thomas's treatise on the passion, found in part III of the Summa Theologiae, not only synthesizes the various images commonly applied to Christ's work on the cross, but also balances teachings on love and righteousness (1965). Mother Julian, a 14th-century English theologian, had a bolder and more independent voice. She took a clear and uncompromising stand on the love of God, daring the church to unreservedly embrace the transforming power of love.

This chapter aims to exploit the language of ‘presence’ to give an understanding on the mysterious activity of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the whole world. It mentions that St. Paul pictured the life of Christians as their being ‘in Christ’ and the Holy Spirit being ‘in them’. It argues that it may be possible that the Holy Spirit is also ‘in’ those who have not been baptized because Christ denies no one. In this case, it is worth developing the theme of the universal presence of divine Wisdom.

This chapter discusses the beginnings of a life as a Christian and as a Southern Baptist. In this description these are marked by two distinct and essential experiences: conversion and a believer's baptism by immersion. The first experience is necessary to enter the community of God, while the second experience is necessary to become a member of a Southern Baptist church. For Southern Baptists, conversion is the essential step in the Christian life, and sometimes it is considered as a dramatic experience.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of lay saints. Between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, in the independent citizen-governed communes of Italy, numerous civic cults dedicated to contemporary laymen and laywomen appeared. Joining long-established cults for early Christian martyrs and holy bishops were new cults dedicated to midwives, goldsmiths, domestic servants, and merchants. These new cults promoted the idea that it was these laymen and laywomen who had lived model Christian lives and personified civic ideals. Although only one lay saint from the Italian communes would be canonized by the Roman church in the Middle Ages, the vitae, miracle collections, civic statutes, tombs, and altars dedicated to pious men and women provide convincing evidence that their cults were of great local importance. This book argues that the phenomenon of contemporary lay civic sanctity had a meaning and significance that went well beyond the confines of particular Italian cities. Moreover, it contends that the rise of lay sanctity in the Italian communes illuminates a complex debate that was taking place between the laity, the church, and civic authorities over the source of religious power and charisma.

The principal point made in this book is that the author's doctrine leads to a form of prayer that is no more than an intensification of the ordinary Christian life. The first part of the book examined his enigmatic sentence from Dionysius that “the most godly knowing of God is that which is known by unknowing”. The second part of the book dealt with the “blind stirring of love” that burns mystically at a deep level of personality. The third part examined the purificatory aspect of the two clouds: forgetting and unknowing. The fourth part explored the union with oneself and with God. This chapter concludes that the author's contemplation is one way to perfection—and an ordinary way; but it is not the only way.

Joshua Z. Gahr and Michael P. Young’s chapter provides a historical analysis of the somewhat counterintuitive, yet central, role that Protestant institutions played in the emergence of the new Left. Through a case study of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community at the University of Texas at Austin from 1955 to 1962, the chapter documents how a group of liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist clergy pushed university students to reconceive the Church’s “mission-in-the-world” and their personal witness to this mission in ways that unleashed a moral “breakthrough.”

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who almost defies characterization. Monk, abbot, adviser of kings and popes, author of some of the finest Latin prose to emerge from the Middle Ages, he was a man of many talents. At first glance he can seem abrasive, overconfident, and almost arrogant. But as this book shows, he is a point of departure for European culture in its search for faith, meaning, and community. Any history of Western Europe in the twelfth century has to include Bernard and his almost frenetic activities. Bernard deserves reevaluation as a person and participant in the history of Christian life and spirituality. His inner life and external actions illuminate his own time and provide a context for ours. In addition to his sophisticated theology, his moving sermons, and his influence among kings and popes, Bernard can plausibly be considered the first European. Through his vision and talent for inspiring people to work together, he helped build Christianity's first continent-wide monastic order, the Cistercians, whose monasteries extended from Ireland to Sicily and Norway.

This book has articulated how central will be our understanding of the relation of nature and grace for the proper contemplation and living of Christian life, and for the Christian's participation in cultural and public life. It has considered the implications of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that there is indeed a proximate and natural end, distinct from the supernatural end, and from which the human species is derived. With no injustice, God could have created man merely with this order, in puris naturalibus, but from the divine goodness, love, and liberality instead created man in sanctifying grace. Yet even given one's creation in grace, the baneful effects of the Fall, and one's restoration and elevation in grace, the intelligible impress of the proximate natural finality remains in man.

This chapter examines how sacred space is socially constructed in an urban context in different types of buildings from historic churches to former commercial buildings adapted for religious purposes. “Sacralization” is a social process in which a physical space becomes sacred (inviolable) and a vehicle for spiritual transcendence. This process occurs both within a faith community and in correspondence with context. Two congregations from very different traditions on one intersection are described as they have created sacred space in a former ironworks store and funeral home.