T&T Clark Cornerstones Series (15 vols.)
Scholars produce thousands of books each year covering vast numbers of topics related to theological, historical, and religious inquiry. While each book influences the trajectory of its field of study, relatively few individual works define, (re)shape, or transform their respective academic discipline. Those master works that do have such transformative influence transcend their own generation and perennially speak with insight, conviction, and wisdom to theologians, pastors, and laity—permanently stamping their ideas on the consciousness of the church.
Theologians, working at the end of the modern and beginning of the postmodern eras have produced numerous works of such standing. The T&T Clark Cornerstones Series celebrates these seminal works of the contemporary era by gathering them into a single series. They span the academic disciplines from ancient history to contemporary hermeneutics, from dogmatics to postmodern feminism. Featuring forty landmark theological contributions from scholars such as—John Webster, Hans Urs Balthasar, Thomas F. Torrance, Stanley Hauerwas, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Larry W. Hurtado, Francis Watson, and Judith Lieu—each volume contains a reflective essay on the impact that book has had in its field, and the ways in which the field has developed since its initial publication.
In the first Logos installment of this series, you’ll receive the first fifteen volumes of the Cornerstones Series, many available in Logos for the first time. Featuring several of the series’ most distinguished volumes, including Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, The Trinitarian Faith, Confessing God, Sanctify Them in Truth, and The Christian Doctrine of God, this installment informs your research with key titles from today’s most preeminent scholars.
- Celebrates seminal works from across the fields of Biblical Studies and Theology
- Each new edition contains a reflective essay on the impact that the book has had in its field
- Updated to demonstrate the ways in which the field has developed since initial publication
- Title: T&T Clark Cornerstones Series: Part 1 (15 vols.)
- Series: T&T Clark Cornerstones
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Volumes: 15
- Pages: 4,832
- Resource Type: Monographs
- Topic: Theology
- Ancient Israel: A New History of Israel by Niels Peter Lemche
- Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)Version of Biblical Narratives by J. Cheryl Exum
- In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’: In Search of Biblical Origins by Philip R. Davies
- Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology by Elisabeth S. Fiorenza
- Messianism among Jews and Greeks: Biblical and Historical Studies by William Horbury
- Neither Jew Nor Greek?: Constructing Early Christianity by Judith Lieu
- One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism by Larry W. Hurtado
- Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith by Francis Watson
- Sanctify Them in Truth: Holiness Exemplified by Stanley Hauerwas
- Solidarity and Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul’s Ethics by David G. Horrell
- The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons by Thomas F. Torrance
- The Israelite Woman: Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative by Athalya Brenner-Idan
- The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary by John Van Seters
- The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church by Thomas F. Torrance
- Word and Church: Essays in Biblical Dogmatics by John Webster
Partially includedThe Logos edition of T&T Clark Cornerstones Series equips you for better study with cutting-edge functionality and features. Logos Bible Software gives you the tools you need to use your digital library effectively and efficiently, searching for verses, finding Scripture references and citations instantly, and performing word studies. Additionally, important terms link to dictionaries, encyclopedias, commentaries, theology texts, and other resources in your library. Perform powerful searches to find exactly what you’re looking for. With most Logos resources, you can take the discussion with you using tablet and mobile apps. With Logos Bible Software, the most efficient and comprehensive research tools are in one place, so you get the most out of your study.
When this provocative text was first published, Lemche presented a new model of how we should understand Israelite society, its history and its religion. Follow Lemche’s argument that ‘Israel’ was the result of a social development among the Canaanite population of Palestine in the second half of the second millennium BCE. This implies that Israelite religion was originally ‘Canaanite’ and that what we think of as typically ‘Jewish’ religion did not arise until around 500 BCE.
Lemche’s radical reassessment of Israelite history is based on the conviction that the Old Testament contains hardly any historical sources older than the seventh century BCE. The early history of Israel must therefore be reconstructed from archaeological results and non-biblical evidence, not from the Old Testament. In this new edition Lemche provides an extensive new introduction and bibliography, considering how the field has developed since the work first appeared.
When it first appeared, Lemche’s Ancient Israel was the first of a new generation of Iron age histories, with its insistence on a sociological rather than theological approach, its rejection of the ’rationalistic biblical paraphrases’, (as Lemche felicitously termed what had gone before). If some features of this new approach were already being anticipated, Lemche provided the first synthesis, laying the foundation for the current agenda. In this new edition, some of his own modifications and developments of that agenda are also reviewed. It remains an excellent foundation for historical research into the Hebrew Bible.
—Philip Davies, professor emeritus of biblical studies, University of Sheffield
When it was first published, this best-selling introductory textbook on the history of ancient Israel stood at the cusp of the departure from a history based on a rational paraphrase of the Bible and the construction of the critical, archaeologically based history of Palestine which is dominant today. Rooted in a social science-based perspective of Palestine’s ancient past, Lemche based himself in the rapidly changing perspectives of Israel and Judah’s histories of the decade preceding his textbook and set a firm foundation for the critical histories of the present.
—Thomas L. Thompson, professor emeritus of theology, University of Copenhagen
Niels Peter Lemche is professor of Old Testament studies, at the University of Copenhagen and founder and editor of the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament. He is a major proponent of the historical movement known as “biblical minimism” and his other writings include Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy, The Canaanites and Their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites, and The Old Testament Between Theology and History: A Critical Survey.
In the biblical narratives, women are usually minor characters in the stories of men. Fragments of women’s stories must be gleaned from the more cohesive stories of their fathers, husbands and sons. Fragmented Women begins with the premise that, to recover shards of women’s stories from androcentric texts like the Bible, it is necessary to step outside the ideology of the text, subverting the patriarchal perspective that has focused attention on the male characters.
In this classic work, J. Cheryl Exum draws on feminist literary theory to critique the dominant male voice of the biblical narrative and to construct (sub)versions of women’s stories from the submerged strains of their voices in men’s stories. For this Cornerstones edition Exum has provided a reflective introduction on the book’s impact, and upon how the field has changed since it was published.
This classic book in feminist literary readings of the Hebrew Bible reminds us anew that alternative interpretations teach us to resist the daily onslaught of androcentric and othering images, discourses, and politics, whether they appear in the Bible or in the world. Exum’s lucid subversions of several biblical “men’s stories” into “constructed versions of women’s stories” raise readerly consciousness about the power of the feminist pen even in today’s post-postmodern era.
—Susanne Scholz, professor of Old Testament, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University
Cheryl Exum is remarkable for the subtlety of her interpretations. A fine literary sensibility combines with psychoanalytic finesse and an intense feminist commitment. She is very good at playing biblical characters off against each other: Bathsheba and the Levite’s concubine, Jephthah’s daughter and Michal. She is concerned with the androcentric agenda of the narrators, and how it may be subverted both by the text and the resistant reader. Does the depiction of rape repeat the crime or question it? For Exum, it does both; the male reader is both complicit and absolved. These brilliant, interconnected readings are as timely now as when they were first published.
—Francis Landy, professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Alberta
This book is a model of mature, balanced, well considered feminist criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Exum deliberately steps out of both the ideology of the text and the confines of religious exegesis, reading the biblical text as a cultural artifact, with the tools of cultural as well as traditional bible criticism. She analyses afresh fragments of biblical stories about women that are embedded in stories about men. In so doing, she affords her readers new insights and angles for understanding the texts and their influence. And by bringing the stories together, Exum manages to defragment the women, at least a little. And this is no mean achievement.
—Athalya Brenner-Idan, professor emerita, Universiteit van Amsterdam
Bloomsbury is to be much commended for making professor Exum’s seminal work accessible to new generations of scholars. Elegantly combining the critical and constructive tasks of feminism, Fragmented Women defies the often assumed opposition between second and third-wave. It also efficiently demonstrates how much literary readings have to gain from thoroughly questioning the surface ideology of texts. After two decades of rapid theoretical development, the impact and importance of the work appears all the more clearly. The political edge of specifically feminist criticism is not outdated and much work still remains to be done.
—Mikael Larsson, senior lecturer of theology and Old Testament, University of Uppsala
J. Cheryl Exum is professor emeritus of biblical studies at Sheffield University. Previously she taught at Boston College and served on the Translation Team for the New Revised Standard Version. She is a proponent of feminist biblical interpretation and has published multiple books, including Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, and Beyond the Biblical Horizon: The Bible and the Arts.
The appearance of In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ generated a still-raging controversy about the historical reality of what biblical scholars call ‘Ancient Israel’. Understand a critical perspective on Biblical history by its argument that not only takes in the problematic relationship between Iron Age Palestinian archaeology and the biblical ‘Israel’ but also outlines the processes that created the literature of the Hebrew bible-the ideological matrix, the scribal milieu, and the cultural adoption of a national literary archive as religious scripture as part of the process of creating ‘Judaisms’. As such, in this volume Philip R. Davies challenges the whole spectrum of scholarly consensus about the origins of ‘Israel’ and its scriptures, in a manner that is both learned and accessible. For this new edition Davies has provided a new extended introduction, in which he considers how the debate has raged since the book was first published, and in which he repositions this classic work within the present scholarly context.
Philip Davies has been a key force in resetting the agenda and method for modern historians and biblical scholars. His many studies on the Persian and Hellenistic periods have helped scholars to envision these late centuries as the time when the biblical text was most likely composed. But his monograph In Search of "Ancient Israel" belongs to those tours de force that cut through the complexities of a discipline to make a point that has been at once obvious to many, yet enunciated by few - in this case: "biblical Israel," "historical Israel," and the scholarly construct of "ancient Israel" are distinct entities and should not be facilely confused with each other.
—Douglas A, Knight, Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Hebrew Bible Emeritus, Vanderbilt University
This new edition of In Search of "Ancient Israel" is more than welcome, because the questions that Philip Davies raises in this groundbreaking essay are still highly topical. He brilliantly challenges what has been for a long time a scholarly consensus about the origins of "biblical Israel" and its sacred texts. Whether one agrees always or not with Davies’ provocative thesis this book is a must read for every student and scholar of Hebrew Bible.
—Thomas Römer, professor of Hebrew Bible, Collège de France
This book by Philip Davies is a classic because it articulated a compelling idea that is larger than and outlives any specific explanation. When we speak of ancient Israel, we must separate its biblical renditions from whatever Israel was in history. For those of us who persist in this search, it is still worth attending to Davies’ acerbic challenge, which should make the reader think—and smile.
—Daniel Fleming, professor of Hebrew and Judiac Studies, New York University
Philip R. Davies is professor emeritus of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield. Formerly he was the codirector at the Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as editorial director for Sheffield Academic Press. He is closely related to the "biblical minimalist school and has written extensively on the Old Testament. His books include Cities of the Biblical World: Qumran,Scribes and Schools, and The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza makes a unique contribution to two quite different discussions of Jesus the Christ. On the one hand, she looks at biblical Christology from a critical feminist perspective in the tradition of liberation theology. On the other, she examines the feasibility of a feminine Christology by considering such problems as Christian anti-Judaism, ideological justification of domination, religious exclusivism and the formation of patriarchal identity. Re-imagine the Jesus movement in a feminist key with the author and transcend the boundaries set by history, gender and doctrine. By assessing various Jesus traditions and interpretations in terms of whether they can engender liberating visions for today, Schüssler Fiorenza will challenge you as she seeks to transform a Christianity dominated by masculinity and exclusivist theological frameworks so that it offers a vision of justice and well-being for all, the central image in which is the reign, the coming world, of God. This Cornerstones edition features a new extended introduction which takes into account the developments in the field since the work was originally published in 1994.
This is a most welcome reissue of Schüssler Fiorenza’s groundbreaking work. With analysis of women’s experience as the starting point, Schüssler Fiorenza uses vivid images such as "into the hill country," and "the open road to Galilee," to invite readers into new spaces where images of Christ in the Scriptures can be explored from a different perspective and christological discourses can be reconceptualized toward liberating practice. For those willing to embark on the journey with her, the destination is no less than global well-being.
—Barbara E. Reid, professor of New Testament studies, Catholic Theological Union
“In this new edition of her deep and influential book, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza continues her singuar retrieval of the bibilcal figure of Sophia for contemporary theology. As this book demonstrates, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has for many of us herself become a Sophia figure of our period continuously contributing her wisdom over and over again.
—David Tracey, Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies and Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is Krister Stendahl Professor of Scripture and Interpretation, Harvard Divinity School. Fiorenza immigrated from Romania to the United States after receiving her doctorate from the University of Münster. She has taught at University of Notre Dame and the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the first woman elected as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. Her many works include In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, and Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation.
William Horbury considers the issue of messianism as it arises in Jewish and Christian tradition. Whilst Horbury’s primary focus is the Herodian period and the New Testament, you will also gain a broader historical trajectory, looking back to the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and onward to Judaism and Christianity in the Roman empire. Within this framework Horbury treats such central themes as messianism in the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Son of man and Pauline hopes for a new Jerusalem, and Jewish and Christian messianism in the second century.
Understand often neglected topics, including suffering and messianism in synagogue poetry, and the relation of Christian and Jewish messianism with conceptions of the church and of antichrist and with the cult of Christ and of the saints. Throughout, Horbury sets messianism in a broader religious and political context and explores its setting in religion and in the conflict of political theories. This new edition features a new extended introduction which updates and resituates the volume within the context of current scholarship.
Several of the articles - those first in order - and substantially updated since their original publication. Throughout, bibliographic material is updated. An invaluable list of selected literature on messianism is coupled with an introductory essay, written for the volume, that surveys the history and present state of scholarship. This includes incisive criticism of the recent works of R. J. Bauckham.
—Crispin Fletcher-Louis, professor of biblical theology, Whymanity Research and Training
These studies form a substantial and impressive body [...] Examining a wide range of material some of it relatively obscure or little known, Horbury deftly demonstrates underlying messianic themes and undertones that would normally be hidden from a casual or less focussed reading.
—Susan Pierce, Journal of Beliefs and Values
There is very much that is valuable in the essays. Horbury is a keen reader of texts, and he has read from an assortment of literatures that for most of us are separated by the boundaries of academic disciplines or linguistic competence.
—W.A. Meeks, Woolsey Professor Emeritus Religious Studies, Yale University
William Horburyis professor of Jewish and early Christian studies, University of Cambridge. Horbury has spent his entire career at Cambridge, and his work focuses on the social and theological relationship of Judaism to Christianity as well as on the Qumran scrolls.
A ground-breaking study in the formation of early Christian identity, by one of the world’s leading scholars.In Neither Jew Nor Greek, Judith Lieu explores the formation and shaping of early Christian identity within Judaism and within the wider Graeco-Roman world in the period before 200 C.E.
Examine the way that literary texts presented early Christianity and combine this with interdisciplinary historical investigation and interaction with scholarship on Judaism in late Antiquity and on the Graeco-Roman world. This work will give you insight into four of the key questions in current New Testament scholarship: how did early Christian identity come to be formed? How should we best describe and understand the processes by which the Christian movement became separate from its Jewish origins? Was there anything special or different about the way women entered Judaism and early Christianity? How did martyrdom contribute to the construction of early Christian identity?
The chapters in this volume have become classics in the study of the New Testament and for this Cornerstones edition Lieu provides a new introduction placing them within the academic debate as it is now.
[A] wonderfully learned volume, Judith Lieu’s capacity to hold together biblical, Jewish and patrisitc material commands respect, and she is an authority on the borderland between early Christianity and Judaism.
—Stuart G. Hall, former professor of ecclesiastical history, King’s College, London
Anyone interested in early Christian origins would be well advised to read this text. Lieu is a very careful biblical historian, marshaling a range of evidence while also able to acknowledge the limitations and ambiguity of some of this evidence.
—Mary Coloe, associate professor, Yarra Theological Union, Australia
This is a helpful collection which focuses on a broadly coherent theme. The essays are wide-ranging and show up their author’s broad and detailed knowledge of both primary and secondary material. One is given a strong sense of the complexity of the subjects under discussion, not least because of the difficulty we encounter in dealing with texts (and it is texts with which Lieu is primarily concerned) with such a heavy rhetorical aspect- in fact much of what Lieu presents us with are a gradual unveiling of problems. We should, however, be grateful to have this erudite collection so easily available to us, not least because of the many issues and problems with which it presents its reader.
—James Carleton Paget, fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge University
Judith Lieu is Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Lieu taught at Queen’s College, and King’s College, London. She specializes in the formation of early Christian identity within its historical context and literary analysis of the New Testament. She has edited Studia Patristics and is the president of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014.
Larry Hurtado’s One God, One Lord has been described as ’one of the most important and provocative Christologies of all time.’ The book has taken its place among works on Jesus as one consistently cited, consistently read, and consistently examined in scholarly discourse.
You will expand your knowledge of the early cultic devotion to Jesus through a range of Jewish sources. Hurtado outlines an early ‘high’ Christological theology, showing how the Christ of faith emerges from monotheistic Judaism. The book has already found a home on the shelves of many in its two previous editions. In this new Cornerstones edition Hurtado provides a substantial epilogue of some twenty-thousand words, which brings this ground-breaking work to the fore once more, in a format accessible to scholars and students alike.
Professor Hurtado traces the rise of ideas of Christ’s divinity to Jewish sources. He shows that Christians naturally relied on Jewish concepts of a principal angelic helper to God to understand the meaning of Jesus’ mission ... Christians worshipped their mediator figure, thus ensuring an eventual break with Judaism ... one of the most interesting Christologies of the decade.
—Alan F. Segal, formerly Ingeborg Rennert Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies, Barnard College USA
This book has had a huge and salutary influence in the study of early Christology. It remains essential reading for anyone interested in that subject. The new edition is very welcome indeed.
—Richard Bauckham, senior scholar, Ridley College, University of Cambridge
Since its initial publication in 1988, this book has become somewhat of a classic for anyone interested in Christian origins. Now supplemented by a timely interaction with conversation partners from the last two decades, Hurtado’s readable, clear, and carefully formulated arguments regarding the rise of devotion to Jesus will continue to steer discussion of New Testament Christology during the coming years. A must read!
—Loren Stuckenbruck, professor of New Testament, University of Munich
Larry Hurtado’s seminal study, One Lord, One God, advanced the case that devotion to Jesus arose early and in Jewish Christian circles. That this thesis no longer seems implausible or novel is due in large measure to this book, as well as to Hurtado’s continued contributions to the study of the practices of Jesus-devotion in earliest Christianity. The updated material provided with this third edition makes the book fresh and continually useful for those interested in understanding Hurtado’s argument in its context and the impact that it has continued to make.
—Marianne Meye Thompson, George Eldon Ladd Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary
Larry W. Hurtado is professor emeritus of New Testament language, literature and theology at the University of Edinburgh and previously served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins at Edinburgh. Hurtado has made seminal contributions to several subdisciplines within the broader category of New Testament studies, including Jewish Monotheism, early Christian understanding of Jesus Christ, and text criticism. He is a member Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, received the Rh Institute Award for outstanding contributions to the humanities, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, served as President of the British New Testament Society from 2009 to 2012, and has won numerous research grants. He is the author of numerous books, including Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, and The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins.
In recent years, scholars from both Christian and Jewish backgrounds have tried to rethink the relationship between earliest Christianity and its Jewish milieu; and Paul has emerged as a central figure in this debate. Francis Watson contributes to this scholarly discussion by seeing Paul and his Jewish contemporaries as, above all, readers of scripture. However different the conclusions they draw, they all endeavor to make sense of the same normative scriptural texts—in the belief that, as they interpret the scriptural texts, the texts will themselves interpret and illuminate the world of contemporary experience.
In that sense, Paul and his contemporaries are standing on common ground. Far from relativizing their differences, however, it is this common ground that makes such differences possible. In this new edition Watson provides a comprehensive new introduction entitled A Response to My Critics in which he directly engages with the critics of the previous edition. There is a substantial new Preface and two new Appendices, and the text has been fully revised throughout.
This book is a splendid piece of theological scholarship. It is completely up to date on the most important critical scholarship in the many fields it covers, displaying a sure and wholly independent judgement and an amazing technical expertise in places. It is innovative and perspicacious, but also well-balanced and catholic in its way of adjudicating well-known scholarly conundra.
—Troels Engberg-Pedersen, professor of biblical exegesis, University of Copenhagen
Francis Watson has produced a magisterial work that significantly challenges existing readings of Paul on all sides and will influence subsequent interpretations for decades to come. Henceforth, responsible readers of Paul will need to wrestle with Watson’s provocative and nuanced arguments regarding Paul’s own responsible interpretation of Scripture... The detail of his textual analysis is breathtaking, and the consequent discussion is fascinating and instructive on many levels. We are all in his debt.
—Susan Eastman, associate research professor of New Testament, Duke University
One of the most creative and innovative books ever written about Paul and scripture... Reviewers are too ready with the phrase ’ground-breaking’, but Watson’s book richly deserves it.
—N.T. Wright, research professor of New Testament and early Christianity, St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews
To commend Watson as a careful and sensitive reader of these ancient texts is to name only one of the book’s many excellences. In Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith we encounter a rare combination of range and depth of analysis. Watson gives us detailed readings of an impressive range of Jewish interpreters of Torah, from Wisdom of Solomon to 4 Ezra, with loving attention to their literary shape and wholeness. Throughout, he keeps the focus firmly on primary texts, not secondary debates. Furthermore, Watson’s way of handling the texts demonstrates in practice a union of historical, literary, and theological interpretation... In sum, Watson is teaching us all how we should do business as interpreters of Scripture. I will put this book into the hands of graduate students and tell them, "See, this is how Biblical scholarship should be done; you should aspire to write like this.
—Richard B. Hays, professor of New Testament, Duke Divinity School
Francis Watson is a professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, and formerly served as Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen. He has been a major proponent of examining the Bible from a theological perspective and has contributed to understanding the Bible from “canonical” perspective. He has authored numerous books, including Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective, and Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology.
In Sanctify them in the Truth Stanley Hauerwas provides readers with an overview of the development of theology and ethics. You will learn how the two disciplines interrelate, explore the nature of sin, how any account of sin requires a more determinative account of moral law, the nature of sanctification, the body as a subject for Christian holiness, and the relationship between sanctification and truthfulness. The volume ends with sermons - Hauerwas emphasizes the freedom the sermons create, as they remind us that the words we use are not our words. The inclusion of sermons also underlines Hauerwas’ point that the truth of the gospel cannot be discovered apart from its embodiment in specific communities of faith. The Christian life, he argues, is not about being in possession of "the truth," defined as a set of timeless and universal principles of belief and action. Rather, it is about learning and living the life of truthfulness toward God and one another.
For this Cornerstones edition Hauerwas has provided a new preface that places the work in the present debate and brings this remarkable work to a new audience.
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke University. Formerly, he taught at the University of Notre Dame and in 2001 was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time Magazine. He has been highly influential in the field of theological ethics and has particularly emphasized the role of language in communal and ethical formation. He is the author of numerous books, including Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian, Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering, Disrupting Time: Sermons, Prayers, and Sundries, and Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible: Matthew.
David G. Horrell presents a study of Pauline ethics, examining how Paul’s moral discourse envisages and constructs communities in which there is a strong sense of solidarity but also legitimate difference in various aspects of ethical practice. Horrell reads New Testament texts with an explicit awareness of contemporary ethical theory, and assesses Paul’s contribution as a moral thinker in the context of modern debate.
See how a framework indebted to the social sciences and contemporary ethical theory helps to examine the construction of community in Paul’s letters, the notions of purity, boundaries and identity, Paul’s attempts to deal with diversity in his churches, the role of imitating Christ in Paul’s ethics, and the ethic Paul develops for interaction with ‘outsiders’. Finally, the pattern of Paul’s moral thinking is considered in relation to the liberal-communitarian debate, with explicit consideration given to the central moral norms of Pauline thought, and the prospects for, and problems with, appropriating these in the contemporary world. This Cornerstones edition includes an extended reflective introduction and a substantial foreword from N.T. Wright.
One of the most creative and innovative books about Paul I have ever read.
—N. T. Wright, research professor of New Testament and early Christianity, St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews
In a global, pluralist, fractured world, may Christians hope to find a healing and hopeful word in - of all places–the letters of Paul, themselves centers of controversy and division from the beginning? Horrell answers with a resounding "Yes", After a penetrating analysis and critique of the polarized conversation among ethicists in recent decades, he proposes a new, "third way" to find a model in Paul for communities that embrace the other without losing their identity.
—Wayne A. Meeks, Woolsey Professor Emeritus Religious Studies, Yale University
This is a bold and highly stimulating intellectual experiment...Through close study of key texts and carefully reasoned debates across multiple disciplines, Horrell reconfigures the Pauline ethic and opens it up to dialogue with public morality as never before. Both New Testament scholars and ethicists will welcome this ground-breaking work.
—John Barclay, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity, Durham University
There is much exegetical and moral wisdom in this lucidly written book, a wisdom which avoids simplifications and the peril of modernizing Paul. The Paul we encounter in this book is no eccentric, but a serious moral thinker of Early Christian wrestling with problems which are not out of date, but which recur again and again in this life.
—Gerd Theissen, professor of New Testament theology, University of Heidelberg
David G. Horrell is professor of New Testament studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of several books, including The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence (SNTW), Becoming Christian: Essays on 1 Peter and the Making of Christian Identity, and The Bible and the Environment. He was the editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament from 2002-2007. He is an active member of the British New Testament Society, having chaired the Social World of the New Testament Seminar from 2001 to 2006, and is also a member of the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) and Society for New Testament Studies (SNTS). He completed his PhD at Cambridge on Paul’s Corinthian letters and the letter known as 1 Clement.
Written by one of the twentieth-century’s foremost modern Trinitarian theologians The Christian Doctrine of God remains a classic ground work for scholars and students alike. In the book Thomas F. Torrance offers a detailed study of the most profound article of the Christian faith—the Holy Trinity. Torrance adopts a holistic approach when examining the inter-relatedness of the three persons—Father, son, and Holy Spirit—and their dynamic Communion with the Being and Nature of God. Combining immense academic range with his characteristically fresh theological perspectives, Torrance builds a significant theological bridge between ancient and modern, as well as between the Roman and Protestant theology; he engages deeply with the Church Fathers and discusses the ontological nature of God. Here Torrance conveys a simple message—the doctrine of the Trinity is the doctrine of God.
This Cornerstones edition includes a new introduction written by Professor Paul D. Molnar, in which Molnar sets Torrance’s classic work in its modern context and considers how it continues to influence the way we think about the Trinity today.
Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) was one of the most important Reformed theologians of his era. Known for his own considerable efforts in Christian theology, Torrance also notably served as one of the editors for Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He has authored several works, including Divine and Contingent Order, Ground and Grammar of Theology, Space, Time and Incarnation, and all of the volumes in the The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.
Torrance was born in China in 1913 to missionary parents. For nearly 30 years until his retirement in 1979 he was professor of Christian dogmatics (“systematic theology”) at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. A prolific writer on many topics, he published numerous books and papers on the "Philosophy of Theology" dealing with the epistemology of theological concepts and with the relation of theology to natural science. In 1976 to 1977 Torrance served as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and in 1978 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
In the first edition of The Israelite Woman Athalya Brenner-Idan provided the first book-length treatment by a feminist biblical scholar of the female characters in the Hebrew Bible. Now, thirty years later, Brenner provides a fresh take on this ground-breaking work, considering how scholarly observation of female biblical characters has changed and how it has not. Brenner-Idan also provides a new and highly personal introduction to the book, which details, perhaps surprisingly to present readers, what was at stake for female biblical scholars looking to engage honestly in the academic debate at the time in which the book was first written. This will make difficult reading for some, particularly those whose own views have not changed.
The main part of the book presents Brenner-Idans’s now classic examination of the roles of women in the society of ancient Israel, and the roles they play in the biblical narratives. In Part I Brenner-Idan surveys what can be known about the roles of queens, wise women, women poets and authors, prophetesses, magicians, sorcerers and witches and female prostitutes in Israelite society. In Part II the focus is on the typical roles in which Hebrew women appear in biblical stories, as mother of the hero, as temptress, as foreigner, and as ancestress. In these narratives, for which there are standard plots and structures and characterizations readily available, women play a generally domestic role.
Not only is the book a highly valuable resource detailing the social role of women in ancient Israel, and showing how the interpretation of women in the bible has been influenced by convention, but it is also a challenging reminder of how outdated attitudes can still prevail.
A wonderful book—concise, thoughtful, and as much an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as a whole as a reflection of the place of women within it. Athalya is very attentive to detail, and comprehensive—she provides a rich spectrum of the social roles of women, and a survey of literary schemata concerning women e.g. as temptresses, or as mothers of heroes. The book concludes with a brilliantly insightful consideration of the pros and cons of the story of the Garden of Eden, and woman’s place in it. As Athalya writes in her final reflection, she intended in writing the book to fill in the gaps in Israelite history and the study of women in its literature. It succeeds beautifully.
—Francis Landy, professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Alberta
The Israelite Woman represents the first book-length treatment of the appearance of female characters in the Hebrew Bible. Mainstream male scholars routinely assumed that the portrayal of women characters in the text corresponds fairly accurately to the lives and activities of real women. Brenner’s solution was to use a broad swathe of methods drawn from folklore, literary criticism, classics, anthropology, and archaeology to begin to sort through the relationship between literary character and lived reality. The resulting work is no less than a methodological revolution that brought female scholars into relevance, gathering together voices and work that had never appeared together previously, and transforming existing practices and conclusions.
—Carole Fontaine, professor of Hebrew Scriptures, Andover Newton Theological School
Athalya Brenner-Idan is professor emerita of the Hebre Bible/Old Testament at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and professor in biblical studies at the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and research associate at the Biblia Arabica Project there. In addition, she is extraordinary professor in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Brenner-Idan has published widely and her work includes Discourse, Dialogue, and Debate in the The Bible and Words, Ideas, Worlds.
In this magisterial overview of the Pentateuch John Van Seters reviews the various historical-critical attempts to read it that arise from notions about the social evolution of Israel’s religion and culture. Is the Pentateuch an accumulation of folk traditions, a work of ancient historiography, a document legitimizing religious reform? In dialogue with competing views, Van Seters advocates a compositional model that recognizes the social and historical diversity of the literary strata. Van Seters argues that a proto-Pentateuchal author created a comprehensive history from Genesis to Numbers that was written as a prologue to the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings) in the exilic period and later expanded by a Priestly writer to make it the foundational document of the Jerusalem temple community.
This social-science commentary on the Pentateuch is renowned as one of the most influential volumes on this group of texts. For the new edition Van Seters has revised several sections of the text, updating and integrating new bibliographical items, and refining the text where necessary. A reflective preface summarizes these changes and developments for the reader’s convenience.
John Van Seters is distinguished university professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Previously he served as James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. A distinguished scholar, Van Seters has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowship at Oxford, Cambridge, the Catholic University of Luovain, and the National research Foundation of South Africa. In 1983 he won James H Breasted Prize and American Academy of Religion Book Award for his book In Search of History. His other publication include Abraham in History and Tradition, The Biblical Saga of King David, and The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers.
Cutting across the divide between East and West and between Catholic and Evangelical, Thomas F. Torrance illuminates our understanding of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Torrance combines here the Gospel and a theology shaped by Karl Barth and the Church Fathers, and offers his readers a unique synthesis of the Nicene Creed. This volume remains a tremendously helpful resource on the doctrine of the Trinity and the Nicene Creed. The new introduction for this Cornerstones edition is written by Myk Habets, the leading Thomas F. Torrance scholar today.
Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) was one of the most important Reformed theologians of his era. Known for his own considerable efforts in Christian theology, Torrance also notably served as one of the editors for Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He has authored several works, including Divine and Contingent Order, Ground and Grammar of Theology, Space, Time and Incarnation, and all of the volumes in the The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons.
Torrance was born in China in 1913 to missionary parents. For nearly 30 years until his retirement in 1979 he was professor of Christian dogmatics (“systematic theology”) at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. A prolific writer on many topics, he published numerous books and papers on the "Philosophy of Theology" dealing with the epistemology of theological concepts and with the relation of theology to natural science. In 1976 to 1977 Torrance served as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and in 1978 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
In Word and Church readers are treated to chapters that examine the field of Christian Dogmatics, presenting a clear trajectory in the work of John Webster, that moves from interpretation of 20th-century Protestant theology to doctrinal construction.
Webster addresses the modern traditions of Christian divinity, and the topics which come to the fore in making sense of these traditions: the nature of the Bible and its interpretation; the place of Jesus Christ in modern theological culture; and the basis and shape of human agency. As a whole the book boldly indicates how dilemmas or inadequacies in modern treatments of these topics might be clarified by more direct employment of language about God and the gospel.
The classic chapters present the work of one of the world’s leading contemporary theologians at his creative best. For this Cornerstones edition the author has provided a new preface in which he contextualizes the work within his current theology.
John Webster was professor of systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen, and is now professor of divinity at the University of St. Andrews. He also served as chaplain at St. John’s in Durham and as canon of Christ Church, Oxford. His published work includes a number of books on the theology of Karl Barth, on the nature and interpretation of Scripture, and on Christian dogmatics, including Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, Holiness, and Karl Barth. biog. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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