By Keith Ward
Read or Download Christianity: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Beginner’s Guides) PDF
Similar church history books
The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine
An previous, self-described "very conservative evangelical" reviewer criticized the essays during this assortment for his or her "questionable" liberal conclusions. it truly is curious how assorted humans can learn a similar textual content and arrive at assorted conclusions. my very own analyzing of this anthology is that the essays attempt (perhaps overly a lot, in truth) to stick in the course of the line.
New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 2: Baa-Cam
Others. as well as the masses of recent signed articles on a large choice of issues, this new version additionally positive factors biographies of up to date spiritual figures; hundreds of thousands of images, maps and illustrations; and up to date bibliographical citations. The fifteenth quantity is a cumulative index to the whole encyclopedia.
ACO I, 1, eight Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum
Additional resources for Christianity: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Beginner’s Guides)
Example text
Souls may also come to have different bodies. Very few Christians believe in reincarnation, when a soul takes on a different earthly body. But it is a theoretical possibility, and Christian belief in resurrection seems to suggest taking on a body which is not physically continuous with this earthly one (which decays in the earth). Christians have never believed that the material body is bad, and that the soul is trapped in it, needing to be liberated by fasting and prayer. That is a typical belief of Gnosticism, from which early Christian thinkers tried to distance themselves.
Second view: A divine man Christology Many Christians would find such a minimalist and metaphorical view far from satisfactory. qxd 7/31/2007 12:00 PM Page 53 Jesus, the incarnation of God 53 reliability on the Gospel accounts. There is, they might say, a Devil and there are demons. Miracles do occur, and by means of them God shows that Jesus is master of the forces of darkness and of the natural world. Indeed, they would think it quite inadequate to start by thinking of Jesus as some sort of local preacher or faithhealer.
Qxd 7/31/2007 12:00 PM Page 55 Jesus, the incarnation of God 55 possible way. When Jesus died and rose from death, he was liberating human nature from death and separation from God. In him the estrangement of humanity from God was decisively and completely overcome. He becomes the Saviour of humanity, the one who saves us from estrangement and eternal separation from God, because in himself he unites humanity to God for ever, and he has the power to unite our humanity to God as well. For such Christians, the heart of the Christian faith is that God the creator has actually united human nature to the divine nature, has entered into human history at a particular point in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and has thereby promised that humanity itself will be assumed into the closest possible relation to divinity.