Revelation was written because God wants us to know what the future holds. For Christians, the prophetic truths within provide wisdom, reassurance, and discernment—while for unbelievers, Revelation is a plea to receive God’s grace while there is still time.

Bestselling author Amir Tsarfati examines what Revelation makes known about the end times and beyond.

Guided by accessible teaching that lets Scripture speak for itself, you’ll take a closer look at the:

• timeline of what believers and nonbelievers will experience before, during, and after the tribulation
• plan that the Lord has specifically prepared for the people of Israel in the end times
• encouragements, challenges, and warnings Jesus Himself gave to prepare us for His return

Christian Reflections on The Leadership Challenge gathers together in one place a remarkable collection of leaders who share insights on faith and leadership.

Well-grounded in research, this reflective and practical book shows how Christian leaders - no matter the setting - put into place The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership:

• Model the Way
• Inspire a Shared Vision
• Challenge the Process
• Enable Others to Act
• Encourage the Heart

Is your soul weary? Are you worn out by the demands of life, disappointing setbacks, or downcast days? If so, stand under the waterfall of God’s unfailing love and soak in the promise that God will never let you go.

“For God so loved the world…” This verse stops us in our tracks: “Wait, this world? With heartbreakers, hope-snatchers, and dream-dousers?” Yes. And God loves this world so much that he gave us the precious gift of himself. New York Times bestselling author and pastor Max Lucado invites us to dive deep into the heart-stilling, mind-bending, deal-making claim of John 3:16.

In this book, Max will help you:

• Rest in the fact that there is nothing you can do to earn salvation.
• Understand more fully the living hope you have through Jesus’ resurrection.
• Stand in awe of how deep, wide, long, and high God’s love is for you.

Don’t wait another minute to get to know the God who invented time. Don’t live another second without growing close to the God who is life itself. Today, step confidently into the greatest news you’ll ever receive.

A revolutionary new offering from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, renowned psychologist and author of the global bestseller 12 Rules for Life.

In We Who Wrestle with God, Dr. Peterson guides us through the ancient, foundational stories of the Western world. In riveting detail, he analyzes the Biblical accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering, and triumph that stabilize, inspire, and unite us culturally and psychologically. Adam and Eve and the eternal fall of mankind; the resentful and ultimately murderous war of Cain and Abel; the cataclysmic flood of Noah; the spectacular collapse of the Tower of Babel; Abraham’s terrible adventure; and the epic of Moses and the Israelites. What could such stories possibly mean? What force wrote and assembled them over the long centuries? How did they bring our spirits and the world together, and point us in the same direction?

It is time for us to understand such things, scientifically and spiritually; to become conscious of the structure of our souls and our societies; and to see ourselves and others as if for the first time.

Join Elijah as he discovers the Voice of God in the dictates of his own conscience and Jonah confronting hell itself in the belly of the whale because he failed to listen and act. Set yourself straight in intent, aim, and purpose as you begin to more deeply understand the structure of your society and your soul. Journey with Dr. Peterson through the greatest stories ever told.

Dare to wrestle with God.

Today's headlines shout of modern plagues, social tensions, economic crises, and rampant depression. Many are asking, what day is it on God's prophetic calendar?

Trusted Bible teacher and Pastor, Dr. David Jeremiah opens up the Word of God to reveal what it has to say about the days we are living in. Sharing how prophecies and wisdom from centuries ago still speak the truth today and point the way forward for tomorrow.

Whether one is new to biblical prophecy or a longtime student of the Bible, this timely message will encourage and recalibrate us to the mission of God in our daily lives.

Journey with Dr. Jeremiah back to the Bible to find out, Where Do We Go from Here?

During the last twenty years, the theory of recognition has become an established field of philosophy and social studies. Variants of this theory often promise applications to the burning political issues of current society, such as the challenges of multiculturalism, group identity, and conflicts between ideologies and religions. The seminal works of this trend employ Hegelian ideas to tackle the problem of modernity. Although some recent studies also investigate the pre-Hegelian roots of recognition, this concept is normally considered to be a product of the secular modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study challenges this assumption and claims that important intellectual roots of the concept and conceptions of recognition are found in much earlier religious sources. Risto Saarinen outlines the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to present day. He connects the history of religion with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of the insights provided by the tradition of religious recognition. He proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the long history of religious recognition.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Confessions describes Saint Augustine's conversion to Christianity and is the basis for his reputation as one of Christianity's most influential thinkers.

This study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century-the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.

This work presents a historically informed, systematic exposition of the Christology of the first seven Ecumenical Councils of undivided Christendom, from the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD to the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD. Assuming the truth of Conciliar Christology for the sake of argument, Timothy Pawl considers whether there are good philosophical arguments that show a contradiction or incoherence in that doctrine. He presents the definitions of important terms in the debate and a helpful metaphysics for understanding the incarnation. In Defense of Conciliar Christology discusses three types of philosophical objections to Conciliar Christology. Firstly, it highlights the fundamental philosophical problem facing Christologyahow can one thing be both God and man, when anything deserving to be called "God" must have certain attributes, and yet it seems that nothing that can aptly be called "man" can have those same attributes? It then considers the argument that if the Second Person of the Holy Trinity were immutable or atemporal, as Conciliar Christology requires, then that Person could not become anything, and thus could not become man. Finally, Pawl addresses the objection that if there is a single Christ then there is a single nature or will in Christ. However, if that conditional is true, then Conciliar Christology is false, since it affirms the antecedent of the conditional to be true, but denies the truth of the consequent. Pawl defends Conciliar Christology against these charges, arguing that all three philosophical objections fail to show Conciliar Christology inconsistent or incoherent.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the work of an otherwise shadowy figure, John Climacus (meaning of the Ladder), abbot of St. Catherine's, Sinai (ca. 579-649 CE), is one of the most popular and enduring classics of Greek ascetic spiritual direction. Hailed as the great synthesis of early ascetic writings, the Ladder presents a spirituality self-consciously rooted in the literary and theological tradition of the Desert Fathers and the Great Old Men of Gaza. Despite its incredible popularity among monastic and lay readers, the Ladder is virtually unknown in scholarship. In this work, Jonathan L. Zecher offers a sustained study of the Ladder's spiritual vision, which is contextualized within an equally sustained genealogical survey of Climacus' own tradition. The Ladder is built up through the 'memory of death', a term referring to admonitions of early authors to remember one's inevitable but unknowable death and to contemplate the divine judgment which would follow to cultivate particular ascetic, Christian, lifestyles in their readers. In the literature that formed Climacus, every aspect of the 'memory of death' varied considerably, but Climacus draws these together in the Ladder so that death and the judgment which follows defines a symbolic framework within which monks reflect on their past and approach the future. Climacus also took up metaphorical practices of dying to oneself and others to craft an idea of spiritual progress in the imitation of Christ taking into account failure and frailty. At the heart of this study is the abiding question of how tradition forms, and in the Ladder is an outstanding example of how unflinching fidelity to tradition results in a creative, synthetic achievement.

It is far more common nowadays to see references to the afterlife-angels playing harps, demons brandishing pitchforks, God among heavenly clouds, the fires of hell-in New Yorker cartoons than in serious Christian theological scholarship. Speculation about death and the afterlife seems to embarrass many of America's less-evangelical theologians, yet as Greg Garrett shows, popular culture in the U.S. has found rich ground for creative expression in what happens to us after death. The rock music of U2, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC, the storylines of TV's Lost, South Park, and Fantasy Island, the implied theology in films such as The Corpse Bride, Ghost, and Field of Dreams, the heavenly half-light of Thomas Kinkade's popular paintings, and the supernatural landscape of ghosts, shades, and waystations in the Harry Potter novels all speak to our hopes and fears about what comes next. Greg Garrett scrutinizes a wide array of cultural productions to find the stories being told about what awaits us: depictions of heaven, hell, and purgatory, angels, demons, and ghosts, all offering at least an implied theology of life after death. The citizens of the imagined afterlife, whether in heaven, hell, on earth, or in between, are telling us about what awaits us, at once shaping and reflecting our deeply held-if sometimes inchoate-beliefs. They teach us about reward and punishment, about divine assistance in this life, about diabolical interference, and about other ways of being after we die. Especially fascinating are the frequent appearances of purgatory, limbo, and other in-between places. Such beliefs are dismissed by the Protestant majority, and quietly disparaged even by many Catholics. Yet many pop culture narratives represent departed souls who must earn some sort of redemption, complete some unfinished task, before passing on. Garrett's incisive analysis sheds new light on what popular culture can tell us about the startlingly sharp divide between what modern people profess to believe and what they truly hope to find after death.

Significant advances in science bring new understandings of the human as a unity of mind, body and world and calls into question the deep-seated dualistic presuppositions of modern theology. Oliver Davies argues that the changing framework allows a return to the defining question of the Easter Church: 'Where is Jesus Christ?'. This is a question which can bring about a fundamental re-orientation of theology, since it gives space for the theological reception of the disruptive presence of the living Christ as the present material as well as formal object of theology in the world. At the centre of this study therefore is a new theology of the doctrine of the exaltation of Christ, based upon St Paul's encounter with the exalted or commissioning Christ on the road to Damascus. This places calling and commissioning at the centre of systematic theology. It provides the ground for a new understanding of theology as transcending the Academy-Church division as well as the divide between systematic and practical theology. It points also to a new critical theological method of engagement and collaboration. This book begins to explore new forms of world-centred theological rationality in the contexts not only of scripture, doctrine, anthropology, ecclesiology and faith, but also of Christian politics and philosophy. It is a work of contemporary and global Christological promise in Fundamental Theology, and is addressed to all those who are concerned, from whichever denomination, with the continuing vitality of Christianity in a changing world.

In The Republic, Plato suggests that the enlightened person will find himself disoriented on his return to the realm of the shadows. So at the very beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, there is a clear affirmation of the idea that following enlightenment, the sensory world can be differently experienced. In this book, Mark Wynn takes up this idea, but argues that 'enlightenment' or spiritual maturity may result in, and may partly consist in, not so much a state of confusion or bewilderment in our experience of sensory things, but in a renewal of the realm of the senses. On this view, the 'shadows', as they feature in the seer's experience, can bear the imprint of religious thoughts and attitudes, and it is therefore possible to be occupied with religious thoughts even as we engage with the realm of sensory things. And if that is so, then one standard objection to Christian, and in general broadly Platonic, conceptions of the spiritual life will have been removed: attending to the realm of religious truth need not after all imply any neglect of the world of sensory forms; and it may even be that it is in our encounter with the realm of sensory forms that certain religious insights are presented to us most vividly.

Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview (from patristic humanism to the Reformation and beyond) and individual examples (Jewell, Calvin) of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education.

One of the twentieth-century's masterpieces of Catholic theology.

Taking the Long View argues in a series of engagingly written essays that remembering the past is essential for men and women who want to function effectively in the present--for without some knowledge of their own past, neither individuals nor institutions know where they have been or where they are going. The book illustrates its thesis with tough-minded examples from the Church's life and thought, ranging from more abstract problems like the theoretical role of historical criticism to such painfully concrete issues as the commandment of Jesus to forgive unforgivable wrongs.

John Calvin's American Legacy explores the ways Calvin and the Calvinist tradition have influenced American life. Though there are books that trace the role Calvin and Calvinism have played in the national narrative, they tend to focus, as books, on particular topics and time periods. This work, divided into three sections, is the first to present studies that, taken together, represent the breadth of Calvinism's impact in the United States. In addition, each section moves chronologically, ranging from colonial times to the twenty-first century. After a brief introduction focused on the life of Calvin and some of the problems involved in how he is viewed and studied, the volume moves into the first section - "Calvin, Calvinism, and American Society " - which looks at the economics of the Colonial period, Calvin and the American identity, and the evidence for Calvin's influence on American democracy. The book's second section examines theology, addressing the relationship between Jonathan Edwards's church practice and Calvin's, the Calvinist theological tradition in the nineteenth century, how Calvin came to be understood in the historiography of Williston Walker and Perry Miller, and Calvin's influence on some of the theologies of the twentieth century. The third section, "John Calvin, Calvinism, and American Letters,looks at Calvinism's influence on such writers as Samson Occom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Max Weber, Mark Twain, and John Updike. Altogether, this volume demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of Calvin's thinking throughout American history and society.

Brian Davies offers the first in-depth study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's thoughts on God and evil, revealing that Aquinas's thinking about God and evil can be traced through his metaphysical philosophy, his thoughts on God and creation, and his writings about Christian revelation and the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Davies first gives an introduction to Aquinas's philosophical theology, as well as a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Aquinas's writings have been considered over time. For hundreds of years scholars have argued that Aquinas's views on God and evil were original and different from those of his contemporaries. Davies shows that Aquinas's views were by modern standards very original, but that in their historical context they were more traditional than many scholars since have realized.
Davies also provides insight into what we can learn from Aquinas's philosophy. Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil is a clear and engaging guide for anyone who struggles with the relation of God and theology to the problem of evil.

Throughout church history, the book of Psalms has enjoyed wider use and acclaim than almost any other book of the Bible. Early Christians extolled it for its fullness of Christian doctrine, monks memorized and recited it daily, lay people have prayed its words as their own, and churches have sung from it as their premier hymn book. While the past half century has seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the thought of American theologian Jonathan Edwards, including his writings on the Bible, no scholar has yet explored his meditations on the Psalms. David P. Barshinger addresses this gap by providing a close study of his engagement with one of the Bibles most revered books. From his youth to the final days of his presidency at the College of New Jersey, Edwards was a devout student of Scriptureas more than 1,200 extant sermons, theological treatises, and thousands of personal manuscript pages devoted to biblical reflection bear witness. Using some of his writings that have previously received little to no attention, Jonathan Edwards and the Psalms offers insights on his theological engagement with the Psalms in the context of interpretation, worship, and preaching. Barshinger shows that he appropriated the history of redemption as an organizing theological framework within which to engage the Psalms specifically, and the Bible as a whole. This original study greatly advances Edwards scholarship, shedding new and welcome light on the theologians relationship to Scripture.

By exploring how Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and John Calvin interpreted a set of eight messianic psalms (Psalms 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 110, 188), Sujin Pak elucidates key debates about Christological exegesis during the era of the Protestant reformation. More particularly, Pak examines the exegeses of Luther, Bucer, and Calvin in order to (a) reveal their particular theological emphases and reading strategies, (b) identify their debates over the use of Jewish exegesis and the factors leading to charges of 'judaizing' leveled against Calvin, and (c) demonstrate how Psalms reading and the accusation of judaizing serve distinctive purposes of confessional identity formation. In this way, she portrays the beginnings of those distinctive trends that separated Lutheran and Reformed exegetical principles.

What is the nature of affections such as joy, compassion, sorrow, and shame and what role do they play in politics? While political experience is replete with affectivity, the affective dimension of political experience has typically been under-conceptualised in political theory. Joshua Hordern argues that Christian political theology and contemporary theory of emotions have resources to respond to this challenge and, in so doing, to offer diagnoses and remedies for the political alienation and democratic deficit which trouble contemporary political life. Hordern contends that affections have a cognitive aptitude whereby they become enduring features of shared political reasoning. In conversation with Martha Nussbaum, Jurgen Habermas, Roger Scruton, Oliver O'Donovan and other political thinkers both classical and contemporary, his argument interrelates affections with memory, moral order, death, suffering, virtue, neuroscience, familial life and national identity. In contrast to dualisms which would separate reason from affection and theology from politics, Hordern describes the way that affections' role in politics is shaped by the eschatological commitments of political thought. Through close attention to Deuteronomy, Luke and Acts, Hordern considers the role of affections in institutions of political representation, law and healthcare. Over against post-national visions which underplay locality in human identity, the account of political affectivity which emerges suggests that civic participation, critical patriotic loyalties, social trust and international concern will be primarily galvanised by the renewal of local affections through effective political representation. Moreover, churches, shaped by the affective vision of their Scriptures, are to embody the joyful, hopeful affective life of the Kingdom of God and thereby offer renewal to social and political experience at local, national and international levels.

The year 2009 marked Calvin's 500th birthday. This volume collects papers initially written as the plenary addresses for the largest international scholarly conference held in connection with this anniversary, organized in Geneva by the Institute of Reformation History. The organizers chose as theme for the conference ''Calvin and His Influence 1509-2009, '' hoping to stimulate reflection about what Calvin's ideas and example have meant across the five centuries since his lifetime, as well as about how much validity the classic interpretations that have linked his legacy to fundamental features of modernity such as democracy, capitalism, or science still retain. In brief, the story that emerges from the book is as follows: In the generations immediately after Calvin's death, he became an authority whose writings were widely cited by leading ''Calvinist'' theologians, but he was in fact just one of several Reformed theologians of his generation who were much appreciated by these theologians. In the eighteenth century, his writings began to be far less frequently cited. Even in Reformed circles what was now most frequently recalled was his action during the Servetus affair, so that he now started to be widely criticized in those quarters of the Reformed tradition that were now attached to the idea of toleration or the ideal of a free church. In the nineteenth century, his theology was recovered again in a variety of different contexts, while scholars established the monument to his life and work that was the Opera Calvini and undertook major studies of his life and times. Church movements now claimed the label ''Calvinist'' for themselves with increasing insistence and pride. (The term had largely been a derogatory label in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.) The movements that identified themselves as Calvinist or were identified as such by contemporaries nonetheless varied considerably in the manner in which they drew upon and understood Calvin's thought. Calvin and His Influence should become the starting point for further scholarly reflection about the history of Calvinism, from its origin to the present.

This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day, the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God.
The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of God.
A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more faithfully in the world.