A God Like No Other: Depaganizing the God of the Hebrew Bible

A God Like No Other: Depaganizing the God of the Hebrew Bible
Author: David A. Brondos
Publisher: David A. Brondos
Total Pages: 792
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 6079803496

For centuries, scholars and interpreters of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament have read those Scriptures as if they spoke of a God whose desires, concerns, and interests were essentially no different than those of the other gods of antiquity known to us. Like those gods, what the God of Israel supposedly sought above all else was the honor, worship, and obedience of human beings and their submission to his will as his faithful and devoted servants. While he undoubtedly demanded the practice of what was good, right, and merciful among his people in a way that set him apart from other gods, ultimately he did so for his own sake in order to bring about in them the type of behavior that pleased him and compel them to live in conformity with his justice, holiness, and righteousness. Those who sought to enjoy his blessings and avoid his fierce wrath and punishments had no choice but to strive to keep him content by observing all that he had commanded and making atonement for the sins and offenses they committed by offering him the sacrifices that appeased him. Although he loved his people deeply, his righteous and holy nature placed limits on that love and prevented him from showing them his favor unless the demands of his nature were satisfied. When we abandon such an understanding of the God of Israel and instead read the Hebrew Bible on its own terms in order to grasp the logic underlying its narratives, however, a very different portrait of God emerges. The God of whom the biblical texts speak is a God who desires nothing but the good for all those whom he has created and refuses to back down from his efforts to bring them to live in ways that will allow them to enjoy the wholeness and well-being he desires for all when they insist on filling their lives with injustice, suffering, and violence. When he demands that they obey all that he has commanded by practicing justice and compassion and avoiding behaviors that do them harm, he does so not for his sake but for theirs. If he jealously refuses to let his people serve and worship other gods, it is only because those gods bring death and destruction rather than the life that is found in him alone. While at times he must himself resort to violence and even bring down evil on human beings in order to put a stop to oppression and injustice, he does so only because his passionate and unbending commitment to the well-being of all of the families of the earth together with his beloved people Israel will not allow him to hold back or relent in his efforts to save them, not from him, but from themselves. Christian and Jewish readers alike will find in the present volume a God who is very different from the God they have been taught to encounter previously in the biblical texts, a God whose ultimate concern is not for his own glory, honor, or worship or for the demands of a righteous and holy nature that holds him captive, but for the healing, wholeness, and well-being of all of his creatures. Such an understanding of God not only calls into question traditional interpretations of the Hebrew Bible but also lays the basis for a fresh reading of the many difficult passages that have long challenged biblical interpreters due to the violent and troubling image of God that they convey.

Lucifer Book Five

Lucifer Book Five
Author: Mike Carey
Publisher: Vertigo
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2014-12-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1401257178

Cast out of Heaven, thrown down to rule in Hell, Lucifer Morningstar has resigned his post and abandoned his kingdom for the mortal city of Los Angeles. In this final LUCIFER volume, the war in Heaven reaches its universe-shaking conclusion, as the forces of Heaven, Hell, and everyone in between wage a final battle to determine the fate of both Yahweh and Lucifer's Creations - a fate no one, not even the Lightbringer, could foresee. And in the aftermath of the battle, how will Lucifer and his cohorts pick up their lives and tie up loose ends? Collects LUCIFER #62-75.

The Parting of the Gods

The Parting of the Gods
Author: David A. Brondos
Publisher: David A. Brondos
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2021-05-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 607980347X

In recent years, a growing number of New Testament scholars have questioned traditional portrayals of the Apostle Paul as a leader of a new religious movement that set faith in Christ in opposition to the Jewish tradition. Instead, they have stressed the need to interpret Paul from within the Judaism of his day, regarding him as a faithful Jew who cherished deeply his Jewish identity and saw observance of the Mosaic law or Torah among Jewish believers in Christ as a good thing. While the present work argues strongly in favor of this latter interpretation of Paul, it also seeks to delve deeper into his thought in order to explore at length the points of continuity and convergence between Paul and the Judaism(s) of his day as well as the beliefs that distinguished him from his fellow Jews who did not share his faith in Christ. Chief among these beliefs was the conviction that the identity and will of God were now to be defined primarily on the basis of his relation to Jesus his Son, through whom he had intended from the start to accomplish his purposes for Israel and the world. Yet rather than bringing Paul to reject his Jewish heritage, this conviction led him to redefine and resignify around Christ his understanding of Judaism and the way of life prescribed in the Torah, thereby filling them with new meaning, though he also continued to value and uphold them for the same reasons he had previously. According to Paul, the purpose for which God had sent his Son and delivered him up to death was not that he might atone for sins or make it possible for God to forgive sins, as later Christian thought came to affirm, but rather that through him he might establish a new community in which Jews and non-Jews would be brought to live together as one in fellowship and solidarity. While Paul expected his fellow Jews to continue to live as Jews and members of Israel within this community, which he called the ekklēsia, his conviction that those non-Jews who lived faithfully as part of the same community yet did not submit fully to the Mosaic law were equally acceptable and righteous in God’s sight led him to oppose all attempts to impose on them the observance of that law. Such attempts implied that the members of the community who observed the law were to be regarded as more righteous or as superior in some way to those who did not and thus threatened to destroy the very fabric of the communities that Paul had worked so hard to establish. Rather than running contrary to Jewish thought, Paul’s teaching that it was a life of faith rather than the observance of works of the law per se that led people to be accepted as righteous by God would have been regarded by most Jews as being fully in accordance with traditional Jewish belief. What they would have found novel was Paul’s claim that faith in the God of Israel was now to be equated with faith in Jesus as his Son or “Christ-faith” and that through such a faith non-Jews who did not observe the law could come to be as fully acceptable to God as those Jews who did. Paul’s redefinition of God and Judaism around Jesus as God’s Son would have led many of his fellow Jews to conclude that he was proclaiming a God who was distinct from the God in whom the people of Israel had believed from time immemorial, since that God was never thought to have such a Son and much less to have intended to exalt him to his right side as Lord of all after handing him over to death on a cross. From the perspective of Paul and his fellow believers in Christ, however, the God of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ were one and the same.

The City Lament

The City Lament
Author: Tamar M. Boyadjian
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501730851

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is known as the ritha al-mudun. In The City Lament, Tamar M. Boyadjian traces the trajectory of the genre across the Mediterranean world during the period commonly referred to as the early Crusades (1095–1191), focusing on elegies and other expressions of loss that address the spiritual and strategic objective of those wars: Jerusalem. Through readings of city laments in English, French, Latin, Arabic, and Armenian literary traditions, Boyadjian challenges hegemonic and entrenched approaches to the study of medieval literature and the Crusades. The City Lament exposes significant literary intersections between Latin Christendom, the Islamic caliphates of the Middle East, and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, arguing for shared poetic and rhetorical modes. Reframing our understanding of literary sources produced across the medieval Mediterranean from an antagonistic, orientalist model to an analogous one, Boyadjian demonstrates how lamentations about the loss of Jerusalem, whether to Muslim or Christian forces, reveal fascinating parallels and rich, cross-cultural exchanges.

A God Like No Other

A God Like No Other
Author: Richard Reichert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9780697028785

Senior High.

Team Teaching at the College Level

Team Teaching at the College Level
Author: Horatio M. Lafauci
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2013-10-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1483155188

Team Teaching at the College Level describes a college-level team teaching program which affords unusual opportunities for developing an educational environment that fosters productive personal relationships between and among college students and faculty. The book describes the nature and scope of selected team teaching programs; the manner in which such programs can be administered; the potential impact of team teaching on a developing curriculum; the role of faculty and students who constitute the teaching-learning team; the particular housing requirements of team teaching programs; and finally, the limitations and future prospects of this emerging concept. In the following chapters frequent reference is made to the philosophy, program, and methodology of Boston University's College of Basic Studies, where a team system was first developed in 1949 and where an entire collegiate two-year program of studies functions on a team teaching plan. This College's extensive experience with team teaching has made possible refinements which may interest those seeking to broaden their understanding of the potential role and function of team teaching in higher education.* Rich in case studies, examples, and in-chapter elements that focus on the challenges of launching and operating a technology venture* In-depth examination of intellectual property development, valuation, deal structuring, and equity preservation, issues of most relevance to technology start-ups* Extensive discussion of technology management and continuous innovation as a competitive advantage* Addresses the issue of leading, managing, motivating, and compensating technical workers* More time on the fundamentals of marketing and selling, as these are elements of entrepreneurshipcommonly most neglected by engineers and scientists

No Other Gods

No Other Gods
Author: Robert Karl Gnuse
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1997-05-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567374157

This is the first full-scale assessment of the theological, social and ideational implications of our new understandings of ancient Israel's social and religious development. Scholars now stress the gradual emergence of Israel out of the culture of ancient Palestine and the surrounding ancient Near East rather than contrast Israel with the ancient world. Our new paradigms stress the ongoing and unfinished nature of the monotheistic 'revolution', which is indeed still in process today. Gnuse takes a further bold step in setting the emergence of monotheism in a wider intellectual context: he argues brilliantly that the interpretation of Israel's development as both an evolutionary and revolutionary process corresponds to categories of contemporary evolutionary thought in the biological and palaeontological sciences (Punctuated Equilibrium).