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This book tells the story of how the 16th-century religious conquerors of America attempted to change the belief systems of the Native Americans. To what degree did they succeed or fail? And why? The European protagonists and frontline representatives of the new religion in the spiritual struggles were the Jesuits (members of the Society of Jesus) who, although latecomers to America, soon became the most vocal and visible spokespersons. Invasion and military power are nothing new to minority societies. But how did they handle the waves of spiritual conquerors that came ashore in the 16th century? “Why have you come here?” are the words of a Florida Indian chief to a Jesuit missionary. The reply enlightens and at the same time demonstrates the renaissance certainty of the Europeans. From their first encounters with the Indians of La Florida, through Mexico, New France, the Paraguay Reductions, Andean Peru, to contact with Native Americans in pre-revolutionary Maryland, the Jesuits were ubiquitous in North and South America, with missions, preaching, and public theater, with the goal of changing what the Native American thought about God. Drawing on an abundance of primary material, the book also integrates the latest in published scholarship. The Jesuit Archives of Rome, the Archivo de Indias, Seville, besides those in Madrid and South America, have been tapped to throw light on the spiritual conquest of America.

The relationship between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas has become a hotly debated issue, with several scholars arguing that John and Thomas are gospels in conflict. The first part of this book argues that the two gospels were written about the same time, but without knowledge of each other. Their authors drew upon similar Jewish and early Christian traditions independently from each other. The second part is devoted to the enigmatic ‘disciple Jesus loved’ in the Gospel of John, arguing that this disciple was created not only to authenticate this gospel, but also to replace the brothers of Jesus. Hence, this figure was developed in the context of a conflict, but that conflict was not related to Thomasine Christianity but to Jewish Christianity.

This book shows how a simple message embedded in the New Testament and also handed on in a Christian oral tradition has been expressed consistently through ancient Christian communities (Catholic and Orthodox churches), churches of the Protestant family, and Evangelical Christian communities. The book begins by examining the New Testament and the primitive expressions of the early Christian message that are embedded in New Testament documents. Using formal doctrinal statements of churches and more informal ways in which church teachings have been “received” in churches, the book highlights the single unifying core of faith that almost all Christian churches and communities have shared. The book examines not only Christian scriptures, traditional creeds, and doctrinal statements, but also forms of worship (liturgy), hymns, Gospel music, and contemporary Christian music to understand how they have conveyed this same message. It shows, moreover, how this message has been expressed in the ecumenical movement, the movement that has sought the unity of Christian churches since the early twentieth century.

This book uses the martyrs’ imitation of Jesus in the acts of the martyrs as a window into the history of ideas. It argues, first, that the presentations of the deaths of the martyrs are modeled on portrayals of the death of Jesus in early Christian literature and practice. Given that the martyrs are presented as Christ figures, they serve as narrative reinterpretations of the death of Jesus and can serve as valuable, early sources for the reception history of the New Testament. It also argues that the assimilation of the martyrs to Christ goes further than the narrative contours and stylistic features of their deaths. In the depiction of the salvific value of the martyr’s death, the postmortem functions of martyrs in heaven, and the martyrs’ status vis-à-vis Christ in the afterlife, the martyrs continue to be presented as Christly figures. As a result, the martyr acts can also contribute to our understanding of the development of ideas about Jesus (Christology) and the way in which human beings are saved (soteriology) in the early church in the pre-Constantinian period.

This book brings together twelve originally independent articles dealing with various aspects of 2 Corinthians which were published between 1985 and 1993. The articles deal with (a) co‐authorship in 2 Cor; (b) the connection between 2 Cor 2:13 and 14; (c) the problems envisaged by 2 Cor 3:1‐6; (d) a comparison between the ‘new covenant’ in Paul and in the Dead Sea Scrolls; (e) the effort to drive a wedge between the resident pneumatikoi and the intruding Judaizers in 2 Cor 2:14‐4:6; (f) what ‘resurrection’ in 2 Cor 4:13‐14 means; (g) 2 Cor 5:6b as a Corinthian slogan; (h) how 2 Cor 6:14‐7:1 fits into its context; (i) the parallels to Philo in 2 Cor 6:14‐7:1; (j) a synthetic presentation of the problems created by the pneumatikoi in 1‐2 Cor; (k) the identification of 2 Cor 10‐13 as ‘the sorrowful/severe letter’ (2 Cor 2:4); (l) what Paul means when he uses ‘Jesus’ unqualified.

The cross of Christ has proven to be no less of a “stumbling block” for Christians living in the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, than it was in the 1st century, when the newly established community of friends and followers of Jesus Christ sought to define the foundation of their faith over against the critiques of their Jewish and Greek contemporaries. This book presents a theological reception of the contemporary feminist challenge to classical christology by means of an explicit feminist retrieval and reconstruction of a theology of the cross. This book argues that a feminist theology of the cross serves a dual purpose in feminist christology: it discloses the patriarchal distortion of traditional christology, and can also reveal lost dimensions in the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Although the book argues that feminist critique is an indispensable element of contemporary christology, it also claims that there is a redemptive message in the cross of Christ that is retrievable for women today. Despite its potential for abuse and indeed its well-documented history of misuse against women in the past, a theology of the cross proclaims Jesus as a divine co-sufferer who brings good news to the poor and oppressed, and as such can be a source of healing and empowerment for suffering women. The constructive task of this book is to show that a theology of the cross can indeed become a theology of hope today, offering women meaning and strength from a God who takes human form and enters redemptively into their situations of suffering.

Sickness and suffering are nearly universal human concerns, and many of the world's great religious traditions are devoted, in part, to teaching their adherents how to live faithfully in the midst of these unhappy realities. A recent spate of scholarly and popular literature suggests that religious activity – what frequently is referred to as spirituality – is a potentially effective means of achieving better health. This contemporary rapprochement between religion and medicine, however, has little in common with the Christian tradition and its concern for the well‐being of the human creature. The God whose presence is displayed to the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not one who may be domesticated by human belief, but who calls into existence a community of friends who care for one another as a sign of God's care for the world.

The present‐day situation of the Roman Catholic Church has been described as a state of ‘peril’. That fact alone, to say nothing of the challenges inseparable from faith in God, implies that the embrace of ecclesial faith is less likely today. Seeks both to account for the emergence of such a situation and to identify sources of possibility for the church. In order to do so, begins by examining both the internal life of the Catholic Church, especially what has occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and the relationship between the church and the wider society, with a particular emphasis on the Western world. As the necessary foundation for expressing how the church might respond to its present situation and what might enable or support the embrace of ecclesial faith, the book focusses on a broad understanding of ‘the church’, one that highlights its multiple implications for human communion and for the communion between God and humanity. In particular, develops a contemporary theology of the foundational elements of Christian faith in regard to the church, especially its relationship to Jesus Christ and its existence as symbol of the Holy Spirit. In the light of that theology, analyses also how controversial elements of ecclesial faith – such as tradition and authority – might be appropriated positively. The final chapters identify possibilities for both a constructive relationship between the church and the surrounding culture and for a more reconciled diversity within the church. The emphasis of the final chapters is on the need to understand the church as ‘unfinished’, as not simply able to develop, but as defined by the dynamism that expresses the presence of God. Concludes that a willingness to embrace the need for movement, for being a pilgrim, is inseparable from the risk of ecclesial faith.

Can those who appreciate the explanatory power of modern science still believe in traditional religious accounts of the nature and purpose of the universe? This book is intended for those who care about that question and are dissatisfied with the rigid dichotomies that dominate the contemporary debate. The extremists won’t be interested – those who assume that science answers all the questions that matter, and those so certain of their religious faith that dialogue with science, philosophy, or other faith traditions seems unnecessary. But far more people today recognize that matters of faith are complex, that doubt is endemic to belief, and that dialogue is indispensable in our day. In eight probing chapters, the authors of The Predicament of Belief consider the most urgent reasons for doubting that religious claims – in particular, those embedded in the Christian tradition – are likely to be true. They develop a version of Christian faith that preserves the tradition’s core insights but also gauges the varying degrees of certainty with which those insights can still be affirmed. Along the way, they address such questions as the ultimate origin of the universe, the existence of innocent suffering, the challenge of religious plurality, and how to understand the extraordinary claim that an ancient teacher rose from the dead. They end with a discussion of what their conclusions imply about the present state and future structure of churches and other communities in which Christian affirmations are made.

This book tells the story of those who have taken Jesus and his apostles at their word and have received from God the rare and terrible charism of holy folly. The book encounters a wide variety of fools for Christ's sake: the wild men of Byzantium, Russia, and Ireland, whose apparently outrageous and provocative behaviour masks a deeper sanctity; the ‘merry men’ of the Middle Ages, God's jongleurs, who proclaim the ‘Gospel of Good Humour’; and finally, those who have gone the darker and more perilous way of being written off by the world as mad and contemptible but who ‘rejoice and are glad’. It is not argued that all the saints of God conform to one or other of these categories, nor is it claimed that folly for Christ's sake is itself a homogeneous phenomenon. The book is concerned with the fools for Christ's sake in the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions only.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God guides and saves his people through the words of his prophets. When the prophets are silenced, the people easily lose their way. What happened after the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ? Did God fall silent? The dominant position in Christian theology is that prophecy did indeed cease at some point in the past — if not with the Old Testament prophets, then with John the Baptist, with Jesus, with the last apostle, or with the closure of the canon of the New Testament. Nevertheless, throughout the history of Christianity there have always been acclaimed saints and mystics, most of them women, who displayed prophetic traits. In recent years, the charismatic revival in both Protestant and Catholic circles has once again raised the question of the place and function of prophecy in Christianity. Mainstream systematic theology, both Protestant and Catholic, has mostly marginalized or ignored the gift of prophecy. This book argues that prophecy has persisted in Christianity as an inherent and continuous feature in the life of the church. Prophecy never died but rather proved its dynamism by mutating to meet new historical conditions. This book presents a history of prophecy and closely examines the development of the theological discourse that surrounds it. Throughout, though, there is always an awareness of the critical discernment required when evaluating the charism of prophecy. It is shown that the debate about prophecy leads to some profound insights about the very nature of Christianity and the church.

The fatherhood of God has a central, if increasingly controversial, place in Christian thinking about God. Yet although Christians have referred to God as Father from the earliest days of the faith, it was not until Athanasius in the 4th century that the idea of God as Father became a topic of sustained analysis. Looking at the genesis of Athanasius' understanding of divine fatherhood against the background of the Alexandrian tradition, the author of this book demonstrates how the concept came to occupy such a prominent place in Christian theology. He argues that there is a continuity in the Alexandrian tradition that runs from Origen to Athanasius, and shows how in the detail of their language and in the structure of their arguments, the 3rd and 4th century Alexandrians drew on Origen's portrayal of God as Father. For Origen, the fatherhood of God lay at the heart of the Christian faith: to know God fully and thus to be saved is to know God as Father. For Athanasius, the fatherhood of God was integral to the defence of the divinity of the Son against the Arian challenge: Fatherhood identified God as the loving and fruitful source of all things and as the one who has sought to meet us in his Son Jesus Christ. Arius, however, was an important exception, and for him it was logically possible to refer to God without calling him Father.

Can Christians continue to worship Jesus Christ as the full, final, and ‘absolute’ revelation of God in an age of historical relativism, an expanding universe, and the impinging of other world faiths on Western Culture? To the great German liberal theologian Ernst Troeltsch, the answer was no; but so vehemently negative was the ‘neo-orthodox’ reaction to his viewpoint that, until now, no full exposition of his Christology has been available. This study includes a close analytical account of the nature of Troeltsch's relativism in the light of current debates in the social sciences. It assesses the strength of his case against traditional incarnationalism, and argues that Troeltsch's Christological method, far from marking the ‘collapse’ of liberal theology, opens new possibilities for the future.

The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead involved a violation of natural laws, and so could have happened only if natural laws depend for their operation on God, who set them aside on this occasion. The main reason he would have for setting them aside would be any reason he had himself to become incarnate; the Resurrection would then be the divine signature on his work, showing that he had become incarnate. So any evidence from natural theology that there is a God with a certain nature, and any reason to suppose that having that nature would lead a God to become incarnate, is evidence (background evidence) that some sort of super‐miracle like the Resurrection would occur. Any evidence against the existence of God or against him being such as to become incarnate would be evidence against the Resurrection. I argue that God does have reason to become incarnate—to provide atonement, to identify with human suffering, and to reveal truth. Our evidence about the life of Jesus (the prior historical evidence) is such that it is not too improbable that we would find it if God was incarnate in Jesus for these reasons. Our evidence about what happened after the death of Jesus (the posterior historical evidence) is such that it is not too improbable that we would find it if Jesus had risen from the dead. For no other prophet in human history, is there anything like this combination of prior and posterior historical evidence. Given a moderate amount of positive background evidence, it then becomes very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate who rose from the dead.