Did Jesus want there to be a Church that would continue his work? What is her message, what constitutes it? How should the Church proclaim the gospel of Christ? What structure is there for the sacred, the mystery? In this book Paul Avis presents his answer to these questions as a fruit of more than twenty years of research and reflection. He argues that there is something solid and dependable at the foundation of the Church's life and mission. The Church is often battered and divided, but at its core is a treasure that is indestructible.Jesus did want a church in a sense, but not as we know it. What is clear is that Jesus himself proclaimed the gospel of the Kingdom and that his disciples proclaimed the gospel whose content was Jesus Christ himself, the Kingdom in person. So a chapter is devoted to the relationship between the Church and the gospel that it confesses. A complementary approach to the mystery of Christianity is the quest for the essence of Christianity, a classic gambit of modern theology. The last major study of this question was by Stephen Sykes in 1984 and that left several matters hanging in the air. This quest brings us back to Jesus with the formula, 'Christianity is Christ'. But this proves to be not the simplistic slogan that it first appears, as it opens up into a set of concepts that elucidate the structure of Christian belief, the texture of faith. When these are articulated in a critical way, they reveal the abiding structure of Christian theology, in which certain polarities (nature and grace, reason and revelation, immanence and transcendence) are inescapable. But the more we probe these, the more we come up against the limits of human thought about the divine, so the book concludes with a reflection on paradox and mystery.

A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers. Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that make up our intellectual modernity. The focus of the text is on Bergson's conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to 'think beyond the human condition'. Not that we are caught up in an existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming. Ansell-Pearson introduces the work of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking; examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.