A fascinating look at the founders of the world's main religions. The major religious traditions of the world owe their existence to the vision of an ancient founder. This important volume explores the lives of the five founders of major world religions-Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad-chronicling what is actually known of these charismatic men and introducing readers to the cultural and religious worlds that heard their messages. Readers in predominantly Christian lands, in addition to learning about the lives of Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad- whom they might not be familiar with- will also be introduced to modern research now casting fresh light on the careers of Moses and Jesus. Whether studied individually or in comparison with one another, these biographies, together with a chapter on the characteristics of religious leadership, chart the spiritual rivers that continue to feed the diversity of religious expression today.

2018 Book Award Winner, The Gospel Coalition (Academic Theology) A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 Will all evil finally turn to good, or does some evil remain stubbornly opposed to God and God's goodness? Will even the devil be redeemed? Addressing a theological issue of perennial interest, this comprehensive book (in two volumes) surveys the history of Christian universalism from the second to the twenty-first century and offers an interpretation of how and why universalist belief arose. The author explores what the church has taught about universal salvation and hell and critiques universalism from a biblical, philosophical, and theological standpoint. He shows that the effort to extend grace to everyone undermines the principle of grace for anyone.

The enormous effort by scholars to study the historical Jesus -- now an academic industry in itself -- has made Jesus both more accessible and more distant. Recent research into Jesus' social and cultural context has helped to illuminate his life, yet it also often sets him apart from modern life as well as from the portrait of Jesus affirmed by church tradition. In "Familiar Stranger Michael McClymond summarizes current scholarship on Jesus and offers a clear, comprehensive, and compelling report on our knowledge about him here at the start of the twenty-first century.

After introducing the history of Jesus research and reviewing the sources and methods used for study, McClymond examines the issues raised by present attempts to piece together the features of Jesus' life. He looks at the first-century Palestinian world and the place of John the Baptist as forerunner to Jesus' ministry. In the main body of the book, McClymond examines what we know with fair certainty about Jesus' teachings, his public ministry, and the events of his death. The book concludes with a chapter on theological themes and a critical reflection on contemporary images of Jesus.

Comprehensive yet concise, balanced and fairminded, and sensitive at once to the academic nature of Jesus studies and to the place of learning in genuine faith, McClymond's "Familiar Stranger will instruct and encourage reflection in settings as diverse as university classrooms, seminaries, and church-based study groups.

Godly Love: Impediments and Possibilities examines the theory of "Godly Love," understood as including a vertical axis denoting the love of God and a horizontal axis involving the love of others, is at the core of a new field of research that studies how divine love influences the love of others and vice-versa. It is a multidisciplinary research program into the benevolent expressions of the Great Commandment of the Christian tradition involving the theological and social sciences. Theological and social scientific essays that ask why there is not more Godly Love in this world and what might be done to change the situation. This book focuses on the problems confronting, challenging, prohibiting, and perhaps even resisting the concrete expression of Godly Love in the world, utilizing a range of theological and especially social scientific methodologies.

Winner of the 2013 Christianity Today Book Award for Theology / Ethics
Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory.
The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.