Christianity is a global faith. Today, people are increasingly aware that Christianity extends far beyond Europe and North America, permeating the Eastern and Southern hemispheres. What we may know less well is that Christianity has always been a global faith. A vast untold story waits to be heard beyond the familiar tale of how the Christian faith spread across Europe. Not only was Jesus born in Asia, but in the early years of the church Christianity found fertile soil in Africa and soon extended to East Asia as well. In this brief introduction to world Christian history, Derek Cooper explores the development of Christianity across time and the continents. Guiding readers to places such as Iraq, Ethiopia and India, Scandinavia, Brazil and Oceania, he reveals the fascinating-and often surprising-history of the church.

In the spring of 1738, Fr. Bernardino Bevilacqua was hustled out of Shandong to quiet the uproar over his sexual seduction of young Chinese converts. Fr. Alessio Randanini followed him to Macau in 1741. The story of this scandal has remained largely untold for nearly three centuries. Among Christians in Shandong and southern Zhili provinces during the years 1650-1785, the spirit and the flesh lived in constant tension as the aspirations of the spirit (faith, hope, love, devotion, mercy, and piety) contended with the passions of the flesh (hatred, jealousy, lust, and pride). The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong tells the deeply human story of the introduction of Christianity to a provincial region in China where European missionaries shared the poverty and isolation of their Chinese flocks. Their close personal relationships led to intellectual and pastoral collaboration, suppression, an underground church, imprisonment, apostasy and martyrdom as well as peasant secret society affiliations, self-flagellation, and sexual seduction. In the remote villages of this region, the missionaries and their converts lived out their pious aspirations and eternal damnations under a darkening sky of growing anti-Christian policies from the capital.

Worship of the triune God has always stood at the center of the Christian life. That was certainly the case during the sixteenth-century Reformation as well. Yet in the midst of tremendous social and theological upheaval, the church had to renew its understanding of what it means to worship God. In this volume, which serves as a companion to IVP Academic's Reformation Commentary on Scripture series, Reformation scholar Karin Maag takes readers inside the worshiping life of the church during this era. Drawing from sources across theological traditions, she explores several aspects of the church's worship, including what it was like to attend church, reforms in preaching, the function of prayer, how Christians experienced the sacraments, and the roles of both visual art and music in worship. With Maag as your guide, you can go to church-with the Reformers.

One deep problem facing the Catholic church is the question of how its teaching authority is understood today. It is fairly clear that, while Rome continues to teach as if its authority were unchanged from the days before Vatican II (1962-65), the majority of Catholics - within the first-world church, at least - take a far more independent line, and increasingly understand themselves (rather than the church) as the final arbiters of decision-making, especially on ethical questions. This collection of essays explores the historical background and present ecclesial situation, explaining the dramatic shift in attitude on the part of contemporary Catholics in the U.S. and Europe. The overall purpose is neither to justify nor to repudiate the authority of the church's hierarchy, but to cast some light on: the context within which it operates, the complexities and ambiguities of the historical tradition of belief and behavior it speaks for, and the kinds of limits it confronts - consciously or otherwise. The authors do not hope to fix problems, although some of the essays make suggestions, but to contribute to a badly needed intra-Catholic dialogue without which, they believe, problems will continue to fester and solutions will remain elusive.

This is a landmark work, providing the first complete collection of the remaining excerpts from the writings of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia together with a ground-breaking study of the controversy regarding the person of Christ that raged from the fourth to the sixth century, and which still divides the Christian Church. Destroyed after their condemnation, all that remains of the dogmatic writings of Diodore and Theodore are the passages quoted by their supporters and opponents. John Behr brings together all these excerpts, from the time of Theodore's death until his condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople (553) - including newly-edited Syriac texts (from florilegium in Cod. Add. 12156, and the fragmentary remains of Theodore's On the Incarnation in Cod. Add. 14669) and many translated for the first time - and examines their interrelationship, to determine who was borrowing from whom, locating the source of the polemic with Cyril of Alexandria. On the basis of this textual work, Behr presents a historical and theological analysis that completely revises the picture of these 'Antiochenes' and the controversy regarding them. Twentieth-century scholarship often found these two 'Antiochenes' sympathetic characters for their aversion to allegory and their concern for the 'historical Jesus', and regarded their condemnation as an unfortunate incident motivated by desire for retaliation amidst 'Neo-Chalcedonian' advances in Christology. This study shows how, grounded in the ecclesial and theological strife that had already beset Antioch for over a century, Diodore and Theodore, in opposition to Julian the Apostate and Apollinarius, were led to separate the New Testament from the Old and 'the man' from the Word of God, resulting in a very limited understanding of Incarnation and circumscribing the importance of the Passion. The result is a comprehensive and cogent account of the controversy, both Christological and exegetical together, of the early fifth century, the way it stemmed from earlier tensions and continued through the Councils of Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople II.

One of the most significant works on Anglican and Women's history to be published in recent years. Includes a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This book tells the story of how a parish women's meeting started in 1876 by a Victorian vicar's wife is now the most authentic and powerful organization of women in the new global Christianity. Its cross-disciplinary approach examines how religious faith and shifting ideologies of womanhood and motherhood in the imperial and post colonial worlds acted as a source of empowerment for conservative women in their homes, communities and churches. In contrast to much of feminist history, A History of the Mothers' Union 1876-2008: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation shows how the beliefs of ordinary women led them to become advocates and activists long before women had the vote or could be ordained priests. Having survived an identity crisis over social and theological liberalism in the 1960s, the Mothers' Union provides a model of unity and reconciled diversity for a divided world wide church. Today it is hailed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and international development practitioners as an outstanding example of global Christian engagement with poverty and social transformation issues at the grass roots. The material is arranged both thematically and chronologically. Case studies of Australia, Ghana and South Africa trace how the Mothers' Union arrived with white British women but evolved into indigenous organizations. CORDELIA MOYSE is Adjunct Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, PA, USA.

Here is Friedrich Nietzsche's great masterpiece The Anti-Christ, wherein Nietzsche attacks Christianity as a blight on humanity. This classic is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy. "We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts-the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.' Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity " -Friedrich Nietzsche

The second century was a religious and cultural crucible for early Christian Christology. Was Christ a man, temporarily inhabited by the divine? Was he a spirit, only apparently cloaked in flesh? Or was he the Logos, truly incarnate? Between varieties of adoptionism on the one hand and brands of gnosticism on the other, the church's understanding took shape. In this clear and concise introduction, James Papandrea sets out five of the principal images of Christ that dominated belief and debate in the postapostolic age. While beliefs on the ground were likely more tangled and less defined than we can know, Papandrea helps us see how Logos Christology was forged as the beginning of the church's orthodox confession. This informative and clarifying study of early Christology provides a solid ground for students to begin to explore the early church and its Christologies.

Penitential practice in the Holy Roman Empire 900-1050, examined through records in church law, the liturgy, monastic and other sources. This study examines all forms of penitential practice in the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonian and Salian Reich, c.900 - c.1050. This crucial period in the history of penance, falling between the Carolingians' codification of public and private penance, and the promotion of the practice of confession in the thirteenth century, has largely been ignored by historians. Tracing the varieties of penitential practice recorded in church law, the liturgy, monastic practice, narrative and documentary sources, Dr Hamilton's book argues that many of the changes previously attributed to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be found earlier in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Whilst acknowledging that there was a degree of continuity from the Carolingian period, she asserts that the period should be seen as having its own dynamic. Investigating the sources for penitential practice by genre, sheacknowledges the prescriptive bias of many of them and points ways around the problem in order to establish the reality of practice in this area at this time. This book thus studies the Church in action in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the reality of relations between churchmen, and between churchmen and the laity, as well as the nature of clerical aspirations. It examines the legacy left by the Carolingian reformers and contributes to our understanding of pre-Gregorian mentalities in the period before the late eleventh-century reforms. SARAH HAMILTON teaches in the Department of History, University of Exeter.

Robert Barriger es considerado un valioso punto de referencia para miles de pastores en Latinoamerica. Sin ninguna duda, el trabajo logrado por su iglesia le da autoridad para hablar sobre formas en las que una congregacion de creyentes puede convertirse en una influencia relevante en su comunidad, incluyendo el establecimiento de programas medicos, politicos y familiares como muy pocas congregaciones de America. Barriger es el pastor principal de Camino de Vida en Lima, Peru, una de las iglesias de mas impacto en el pais y en todo Sudamerica. Esta iglesia ha llevado a cabo una serie de proyectos de valor cultural y de influencia gubernamental en servicio a la comunidad. Barriger es de California, pero hace muchos anos hizo del Peru su casa donde vive con Su esposa, dos hijos y nietos. Su libro, La Iglesia Relevante, es una lectura sin duda requerida para cualquiera que quiere que su iglesia crezca en calidad como en cantidad y que busca que sea de un profundo impacto en la sociedad que la rodea."

"He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world . . ." Among the traditional tenets of the Christian faith is the belief that God chooses or elects people for salvation. For some Christians, such an affirmation is an indication of God's sovereign and perfect will. For others, such a notion is troubling for it seems to downplay the significance of human agency and choice. Throughout the church's history, Christians have sought to understand the meaning of relevant biblical texts and debated this theological conundrum. With care and insight, theologian Mark Lindsay surveys the development of the Christian doctrine of election. After exploring Scripture on this theme, he turns to the various articulations of this doctrine from the early church fathers, including Augustine, and medieval theologians such as Aquinas, to John Calvin's view, the subsequent debate between Calvinists and Arminians, Karl Barth's modern reconception of the doctrine, and reflections on election in the shadow of the Holocaust. On this journey through the Bible and church history, readers will discover how Christians have understood the affirmation that God has chosen.

From the struggles of the very first Christians to the challenges and scandals of today, the Catholic Church has wrestled with how to organize itself, express its beliefs, and nurture its members. The Church has grown from a handful of disciples in the first century to over one billion members in the twenty-first, resulting in profound changes that demand a theological response. In this sweeping history, renowned scholar Richard McBrien reveals the evolution of the Church's relationship to the divine, its leadership of the faithful, and its role as a global religion. "The Church" answers the questions raised by this extraordinary history, including:

Where did the idea of the pope's infallibility come from?

Why are priests celibate and women barred from the priesthood?

What inspired the Inquisition?

What was the position of the Catholic Church on Hitler's policies in World War II?

What is the Church's relationship to Islam?

How will the growth of the Church in South America, Africa, and Asia shape its future?

McBrien helps the reader understand the evolution of the Catholic Church's understanding of itself through the centuries, its leadership, and its relationship to national governments and world religions. From Jesus's apostle Peter to Pope Benedict XVI, "The Church" explains in layperson's terms the evolution of the Catholic Church, its power, its scope, its theology, and its influence.

Branded as "the new Falun Gong" by local authorities, The Church of Almighty God is the most persecuted religious movement in China today. Thousands of police officers are deployed full time to identify and arrest its members. Hundreds of thousands of its devotees are in jail. Authorities claim, perhaps hyperbolically, that it has some four million members and accuse the group of serious crimes. Yet, the movement continues to grow. In this ground-breaking study, Massimo Introvigne offers an inside look at this once-elusive movement, sharing interviews with hundreds of members and the Chinese police officers who hunt them down. The story of The Church of Almighty God is one of rapid growth, dramatic persecution, and the struggle of believers to seek asylum in countries around the world. In his telling of the story, Introvigne reconstructs the Church's idiosyncratic theology, centered in the belief that Jesus Christ has returned in our time in the shape of a Chinese woman, worshipped as Almighty God, to eradicate the sinful nature of humans, and that we have entered the third and final time period in the history of humanity: the Age of Kingdom. A major book from one of the world's leading scholars of new religious movements, Inside The Church of Almighty God is a critical addition to the scholarship of Chinese religion.

Die Vorstellungen von den Osmanen schwanken in ihren Nachbarlandern und uberhaupt im Abendland. Eingebettet in eine romanhafte Rahmenhandlung werden Geschichte, Soziologie und Psychologie der Osmanen des 18. Jahrhunderts vor ihrer zunehmenden Verwestlichung im 19. Jahrhundert dargestellt und zeigen ein Selbstverstandnis, das in abgewandelter Form vor allem auch heute noch nachschwingt. Insgesamt vermitteln sie einen verstandnisvolleren Blick in die Entwicklung des Islam.

The Bible is meant to be read in the church, by the church, as the church. Although the practice of reading Scripture has often become separated from its ecclesial context, theologian Derek Taylor argues that it rightly belongs to the disciplines of the community of faith. He finds a leading example of this approach in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who regarded the reading of Scripture as an inherently communal exercise of discipleship. In conversation with other theologians, including John Webster, Robert Jenson, and Stanley Hauerwas, Taylor contends that Bonhoeffer's approach to Scripture can engender the practices and habits of a faithful hermeneutical community. Today, as in Bonhoeffer's time, the church is called to take up and read. Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

Obwohl die Apostolische Paenitentiarie das alteste Dikasterium der Roemischen Kurie ist, gehoert sie zugleich zu den unbekannteren Dikasterien. Ihr Hauptcharakteristikum ist ihre exklusive und fast ausschliessliche Zustandigkeit im Forum internum. Ihre Aufgaben sind vielfaltig und umfassen den Strafnachlass von reservierten Zensuren genauso wie die Gewahrung verschiedener Gnadenerweise und von Ablassen. Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt Kompetenzen, konkrete Aufgaben, personelle Zusammensetzung und spezifische Verfahrensweisen der Apostolischen Paenitentiarie anhand der geltenden Rechtsgrundlagen dar. Dabei werden fortlaufend unter vergleichendem Aspekt die AEnderungen, Erganzungen und Modifikationen mit vorangegangenen Gesetzes- und Normenkomplexen gepruft und ausgewertet.

A Texas oilman. A brilliant female archaeologist. An unknown world underneath the Vatican.

In 1939, a team of workers beneath the Vatican unearthed an early Christian grave. This surprising discovery launched a secret quest that would last decades — a quest to discover the long-lost burial place of the Apostle Peter.

From earliest times, Christian tradition held that Peter — a lowly fisherman from Galilee, whom Christ made leader of his Church — was executed in Rome by Emperor Nero and buried on Vatican Hill. But his tomb had been lost to history. Now, funded anonymously by a wealthy American, a small army of workers embarked on the dig of a lifetime.

The incredible, sometimes shocking, story of the 75-year search and its key players has never been fully told — until now. The quest would pit one of the 20th century’s most talented archaeologists — a woman — against top Vatican insiders. The Fisherman’s Tomb is a story of the triumph of faith and genius against all odds.

Dr. Buddy Bell, founder of Ministry of Helps International, combines humor with informative teaching and practical tips to help ushers realize the importance of serving people in the local church with excellence. Ushering in the local church is much more than just shaking hands and passing offering plates. Fulfilling the role as an usher is just as important to the body of Christ as that of a prophet, teacher, or evangelist. Dr. Buddy Bell, founder of Ministry of Helps International, helps readers understand both the biblical and practical aspects of church ushering. Filled with humor and sound, scriptural teaching, this valuable book helps ushers learn to be effective in their ministry. Readers discover the scriptural role of ushering, practical tips on what not to do and what to do in various situations, the responsibilities of the head usher, and more!

In this comprehensive overview of the Anglican Church, theologian J. I. Packer showcases the hallmarks of "authentic Anglicanism" and its rich history while casting a vision for the future.