Confessions of a Recovering Fundamentalist

Confessions of a Recovering Fundamentalist
Author: Keith Ward
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2019-11-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 153269671X

Can theology be expounded almost entirely in jokes? This is an attempt to do so. But it is also a record of how one person recovered from fundamentalism, and found a different, more positive spirituality within Christian faith. It seeks to speak to those who only know an exclusive and dogmatic version of Christianity, and who feel the need for something more universally compassionate and friendly to informed scientific thought. Ward argues that we need to escape from the image of a vindictive, wrathful, judgmental God, who saves just a few people from endless torture for no obvious reason. He proposes instead a view of the universe as evolving towards a goal, guided by a supreme cosmic consciousness, which manifests its nature in this historical process. Jesus is the human image of this consciousness, an image of universal self-giving love and a foreshadowing of the transformation of human lives by their union with the divine. The jokes are there because Christian faith should be really joyful, hopeful, and positive good news for everyone—that there is a spiritual basis and goal of the universe which wills everyone without exception to share in its unlimited wisdom and love.

Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist

Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist
Author: James C. Alexander
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2008-04
Genre:
ISBN: 1434381323

This book presents a sound and practical view of the missionary world. Dr. Price leads the reader through each step, from the first urgings we feel as God begins to speak to us, to understanding God's call on our lives, and finally the essentials of getting to the field. In this process, Dr. Price insists on maintaining a healthy relationship with the home church and its leadership. This book will strengthen you, as well as deepen and challenge you as you prepare for missionary service.

Confessions of a Beginning Theologian

Confessions of a Beginning Theologian
Author: Elouise Renich Fraser
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1998-03-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780830815197

Elouise Renich Fraser describes her personal journey to become a theologian: confronting the past, befriending the Bible, developing theological imagination and finding an authentic voice.

The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist

The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist
Author: Gabriel Gordon
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2024-06-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666785687

As recovering Fundamentalists we often find ourselves unknowingly remaining within the Fundamentalist worldview. We think that if we enter into Progressive Christianity we’re leaving behind the irrational, hurtful, racist, and untrue theological worldview we were brought up in. But what if Fundamentalism is really a kind of Progressive Christianity? And both of these twin children of modernity are inherently racist, anti-Jewish, and colonial, and therefore antithetical to the brown Jewish Incarnation of the God of Israel? What if instead of leaving Fundamentalism we’ve really just changed the garbs of the Northern European Enlightenment rather than truly reorientating our whole lives towards the True, Good, and Beautiful? In this book we will examine a need for former Fundamentalists to be reintroduced to the Christian faith. One that looks backwards towards Christianity as it existed before the Enlightenment and even the Reformation. One that de-centers Christian traditions which originated out of Northern Europe by centering Christian traditions rooted in such places as Southwest Asia and North and East Africa. By criticizing modernist white Christianity the reader is guided into a Christianity that isn’t merely the other side of the same coin but looks radically different.

Confessions of a Christian Humanist

Confessions of a Christian Humanist
Author: John W. De Gruchy
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2006
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780800638245

How can one genuinely follow Jesus today, and what does that mean about one's lifestyle, social and political commitments, and ethical stance? In this fine work, internationally renowned theologian John de Gruchy answers that question. Reviving an almost silenced tradition, he lifts the banner of Christian humanism - not secular humanism with a Christian veneer, but a critical retrieval of Christianity's core convictions and values in ways that are both critical of and yet constructively engaged with secular culture in serving the well-being of humanity.

The Priority of Mind

The Priority of Mind
Author: Keith Ward
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2021-11-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666735280

Is the mind just a by-product of the brain? Or is mind the fundamental reality, which creates matter? This book is a defense of mind as prior to matter. It is a philosophical work, written in an accessible style, which explains idealism as the teaching of most classical philosophers, and as most consistent with modern science.

Sharing in the Divine Nature

Sharing in the Divine Nature
Author: Keith Ward
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725266385

A defense of the New Testament view that all things are to be united in Christ, which entails that the ultimate destiny of the universe, and of all that is in it, is to be united in God. Keith Ward argues that this conflicts with classical ideas of God as simple, impassible, and changeless—ideas that many modern theologians espouse, and which Ward subjects to careful and critical scrutiny. He defends the claim that the cosmos contributes something substantial to—and in that way changes—the divine nature, and the cosmos is destined to manifest and express the essential creativity and relationality of a God of beatific, agapic, redemptive, and unitive love.

Adventures in Belief

Adventures in Belief
Author: Keith Ward
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2022-11-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1666756237

Keith Ward—philosopher, ethicist, theologian, Anglican priest, cathedral canon, and book-writing addict—has spent his life thinking about “the big questions” (and, what’s more, getting paid for it!). This philosophical pilgrimage led him from jobs at Glasgow and St. Andrew’s Universities in Scotland, to Cambridge University, then on to King’s College, London, followed by Oxford University (by invitation of the Queen!), before moving back to London at Gresham College, Heythrop College, and Roehampton University. Along the way he became a fellow of the British Academy and of a number of academic institutions, gathering up doctorates from various places, and writing more books than your bookshelf can handle. This sounds awfully dull, but according to Keith Ward, it was great fun, and he experienced all these things with a feeling of slight surprise, and with an irrepressible sense of humour. Having retired, exhausted, at eighty-one, Ward could not resist one more book. This is it—a humorous account of his life and thought, especially to show how he developed his own philosophy of personal idealism. It is both a genuinely amusing account of the life of an English academic and a rather profound account of an anti-materialistic and scientifically informed philosophy.

Mind, Value, and Cosmos

Mind, Value, and Cosmos
Author: Andrew M. Davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1793636400

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.

From Force to Persuasion

From Force to Persuasion
Author: Andrew M. Davis
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666784443

At the heart of process-relational theology in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) is the rejection of coercive omnipotence and the embrace of divine persuasion as the patient and uncontrolling means by which God works with a truly self-creative world. According to Whitehead, Plato's conviction that God is a persuasive agency and not a coercive agency constitutes "one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion." According to Hartshorne, omnipotence is a "theological mistake." What is behind these claims? Why do process-relational philosophers and theologians reject divine omnipotence? How have they justified a commitment to divine persuasion, and what kind of theoretical and practical implications are involved? Featuring contributions from key process-relational thinkers, this book situates a shift "from force to persuasion" across multiple thresholds of discourse, from philosophy and theology to spirituality and politics to pluralism, axiology, and apocalypse. It aims to reawaken attention to the operations of divine persuasion as ever-loving and inherently noncoercive, but always at risk in an open and relational universe.