Divine Grace and Emerging Creation PDF Download

Author: Thomas Jay Oord
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606082876
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Wesleyans and Wesleyan theology have long been interested in the sciences. John Wesley kept abreast of scientific developments in his own day, and he engaged science in his theological construction. Divine Grace and Emerging Creation offers explorations by contemporary scholars into the themes and issues pertinent to contemporary science and Wesleyan Theology. In addition to groundbreaking research by leading Wesleyan theologians, Jÿrgen Moltmann contributes an essay. Moltmann's work derives from his keynote address at the joint Wesleyan Theological Society and Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting on science and theology at Duke University. Other contributions address key contemporary themes in theology and science, including evolution, ecology, neurology, emergence theory, intelligent design, scientific and theological method, and biblical cosmology. John Wesley's own approach to science, explored by many contributors, offers insights for how two of humanity's central concerns--science and theology--can now be understood in fruitful and complementary ways.

Author: Amos Yong
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866123
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Is a pentecostal-charismatic worldview defensible in light of contemporary science? In The Spirit of Creation Amos Yong demonstrates that pentecostal thought does indeed have merit in scientific contexts. What s more, he argues that pentecostal-charismatic views regarding the dynamic presence and activity of the Spirit of God and the pluralistic cosmology of many spirits have something important to add to the broad discussion now taking place at the crossroads of science and religion. Interacting with many scientific fields of study including psychology, sociology, evolutionary science, cosmology, and more Yong s Spirit of Creation demonstrates the significance of pentecostal ideas to the ongoing dialogue between theology and science.

Author: M. Kathryn Armistead
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818410
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Science and religion are living, organic, and creative traditions. Both see humans as profoundly interconnected and in some way responsible for our environs. This worldview is especially true for social science and Wesleyan religious tradition. While the dance between science and religion will always be complex, it can also be enjoyable and mutually satisfying. However when couples dance only one at a time can lead and both have to acknowledge the importance of the other. This book is written with the conviction that theology and science can have a beneficial relationship if only both recognize their mutual value to the lives of persons. The Methodist tradition links the welfare of the body with care for the soul. Historically, ministry involved tending to physical and psychological needs of the Methodist band members but also to non-churched poor and imprisoned. Thus Methodists built places of worship, schools, orphanages, and hospitals. For John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, practical divinity always involved attention to whole persons including their living conditions and basic physical needs. He sought to improve life for all. Therefore throughout his life, Wesley was interested in theology but also scientific discovery as paths toward a better future. He believed that both were of value to help people move toward “perfection.” He even attended lectures and offered medical treatment in the first Methodist meeting hall in Bristol, England. As a scientific practitioner Wesley wrote the best selling book, Primitive Physic or An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases using the cutting edge science of his day. Packed next to the Bible, this book traveled with countless pioneers as they settled the territories that became the United States. Methodism has a long tradition of using science and religion to carry out the biblical mandate to go into the world and make disciples for Jesus Christ. This book seeks to continue that legacy by bringing current trends in psychology into conversation with Wesleyan theology. Composed of essays that represent different psychologies and theological traditions, which trace their roots to Wesley, this book aims at creating a space where science and theology can partner and dance. In the book readers will find positive psychology, self psychology, object relations, family systems, moral psychology, and neuroscience in conversation with various theologies. Under this canopy, the contributors see themselves as “people called Methodists” seeking to follow the example of Wesley to use all available tools to enable persons to live fully and well.

Author: Aaron Jason Swoboda
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004397167
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This book develops a Pentecostal ecological theology (ecotheology) by utilizing key pneumatological themes that emerge from the Pentecostal tradition. It examines the salient Pentecostal and Charismatic voices that have stimulated ecotheology in the Pentecostal tradition and situates them within the broader context of Christian ecumenical ecotheologies (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Ecofeminist). The author advances a novel approach to Pentecostal ecotheology through a pneumatology of the Spirit-baptized creation, the charismatic creational community, the holistic ecological Spirit, and the eschatological Spirit of ecological mission. Significantly, this book is the first substantive contribution to a Pentecostal pneumatological theology of creation with a particular focus on the Pentecostal community and its significance for the broader ecumenical community. Furthermore, it offers a fresh theological approach to imagining and sustaining earth-friendly practice in the twenty-first century Pentecostal church.

Author: Bradford McCall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725278537
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
What are the things that God values in the creative process? How does one define God's activity in such a world? How is God's involvement different from a contingent--what this author labels contingentist--instance? Why do we need a God-idea at all? Herein, Bradford McCall addresses how divine, amorepotent love works with and within a contingentist (i.e., radically contingent) evolutionary theory and worldview. Within the course of this project, he reaches a via media between the (somewhat) radical formalist position of Simon Conway Morris and the veritably radical contingent position of Stephen Jay Gould. But . . . how is the contingentist amorepotent and uncontrolling love of God understood as purposeful? McCall argues in detail that there in fact is some sort of purposiveness that is nevertheless working in a chastened Gouldian position, and he distinguishes between contingency and veritable divine involvement. He contends that God does not insist upon a particular outcome but merely allows propensities to work themselves out. God amorepotently loves the population of the natural world into greater forms of complexity, relationality, and beauty in varied and multifarious forms, along with the extension of diversity.

Author: James Peterson
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802865496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
As debate over the manipulation of human genes rages in the public sphere, James Peterson offers an informed Christian defense of genetic intervention. In Changing Human Nature he pointedly reminds us that the question we need most to consider is not whether our genes will undergo change but whether we will be conscious of and conscientious about the direction of that change. Drawing from the biblical tradition, Peterson argues that human beings have a unique capacity and calling to tend and develop the natural world - including themselves, their bodies, and their genes - as God's garden. While carefully addressing legitimate religious concerns, Peterson's theologically grounded yet jargon-free discussion puts forth clear and specific guidelines for the proper use of genetic intervention to help people. Distinctive for its nuanced approach, Changing Human Nature will fill the need for a thoughtful, positive Christian perspective on this timely topic. Book jacket.

Author: Chandra Wickramasinghe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137535032
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
As advanced by astronomer-cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomy, biology, astrobiology, astrophysics, and cosmology converge agreeably with natural theology. In The Big Bang and God, these interdisciplinary convergences are developed by an astronomer collaborating with a theologian.

Author: W. Ross Hastings
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498240798
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book re-imagines the universe (and the scientific study of it) through the lens of a triune Creator, three persons of irreducible identity in a perichoretic or coinherent communion. It modestly proposes that Trinitarian theology, and especially the coinherent natures of the Son in the incarnation, provides the metaphysic or "theory of everything" that manifests itself in the subject matter of science. The presence of the image of the triune God in humanity and of traces of this God in the non-human creation are discussed, highlighting ontological resonances between God and creation (resonances between the being of God and his creation), such as goodness, immensity-yet-particularity, intelligibility, agency, relationality, and beauty. This Trinitarian reality suggests there should be a similarity also with respect to how we know in theology and science (critical realism), something reflected in the history of ideas in each. These resonances lead to the conclusion that the disciplines of theology and science are, in fact, coinherent, not conflicted. This involves recognition of both the mutuality of these vocations and also, importantly, their particularity. Science, its own distinct guild, yet finds its place ensconced within an encyclopedic theology, and subject to first-order, credal theology.

Author: Akeel Bilgrami
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550901
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Today, as we confront an unprecedented environmental crisis of our own making, it is more urgent than ever to consider the notion of nature and our place within it. This book brings together essays that individually and as a whole present a detailed and rigorous multidisciplinary exploration of the concept of nature and its wider ethical and political implications. A distinguished list of scholars take up a broad range of questions regarding the relations between the human subject and its natural environment: when and how the concept of nature gave way to the concept of natural resources; the genealogy of the concept of nature through political economy, theology, and modern science; the idea of the Anthropocene; the prospects for green growth; and the deep alienation of human beings in the modern period from both nature and each other. By engaging with a wide range of scholarship, they ultimately converge on a common outlook that is both capacious and original. The essays together present a revaluation of the natural world that seeks to reshape political and ethical ideals and practice with a view to addressing some of the fundamental concerns of our time. Nature and Value features widely known scholars in a broad swath of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, politics, and political economy to geology, law, literature, and psychology. They include Jonathan Schell, David Bromwich, James Tully, Jedediah Purdy, Robert Pollin, Jan Zalasiewicz, Carol Rovane, Sanjay Reddy, Joanna Picciotto, Anthony Laden, Nikolas Kompridis, Bina Gogineni, Kyle Nichols, and the editor, Akeel Bilgrami.

Author: Catherine Keller
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823276236
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.