The Importance of Outsiders to Pauline Communities PDF Download

Author: Emma Louise Parker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567713814
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book argues that, despite Paul's often dramatic and critical descriptions of non-Christians, his letters reveal a deep concern for the presence of outsiders and for their opinion of Christians. Parker suggests that outsiders are enormously important to Paul: they determine whether Christian communities dwindle or thrive, while also playing a key role in helping such communities to understand and shape their purpose as missional disciples, develop their thinking and practice around normal daily events and relationships - and even shape how they understand God. Parker offers a careful exegesis of the main texts within the Pauline corpus, revealing a sensitivity to the outsider; including 1 Thessalonians, Romans, 1 Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles. By using Social Identity Theory she explores key concepts of group boundaries, identity and inter-group relations, highlighting a theme which is significant in Paul's own thought: the importance of similarity between groups. Whilst not denying the counter-cultural identity of the new Christian communities, Parker concludes that Paul reveals the areas of overlap between insiders and outsiders, since these areas not only create opportunities for positive opinions and relationships but also point to a greater understanding of God.

Author: Paul Raymond Trebilco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108314325
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
What terms did early Christians use for outsiders? How did they refer to non-members? In this book-length investigation of these questions, Paul Trebilco explores the outsider designations that the early Christians used in the New Testament. He examines a range of terms, including unbelievers, 'outsiders', sinners, Gentiles, Jews, among others. Drawing on insights from social identity theory, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of deviance, he investigates the usage and development of these terms across the New Testament, and also examines how these outsider designations function in boundary construction across several texts. Trebilco's analysis leads to new conclusions about the identity and character of the early Christian movement, the range of relations between early Christians and outsiders, and the theology of particular New Testament authors.

Author: Jacobus (Kobus) Kok
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783161521768
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From its very beginning, Christianity was an innovative movement which had to construct and maintain its identity, morality, and social as well as theological boundary markers as it developed from a religion of conversion into a religion of tradition. Early Christianity's sensitivity to "outsiders" evolved in various ways as circumstances and socio-cultural contexts changed. In this volume, scholars from around the world reflect on the dynamic relationship between mission and ethos in the New Testament and Early Christianity, focusing particularly on the sensitivity, or lack thereof, to outsiders, and thereby offering new insights into old questions. Most of the New Testament and several second century books are individually studied by specialists in the field making this book a valuable reference volume on the topic.

Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In contrast to past studies that focus narrowly on war and massacre, treat Native peoples as victims, and consign violence safely to the past, this interdisciplinary collection of essays opens up important new perspectives. While recognizing the long history of genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples, the contributors emphasize the agency of individuals and communities in genocide’s aftermath and provide historical and contemporary examples of activism, resistance, identity formation, historical memory, resilience, and healing. The collection also expands the scope of violence by examining the eyewitness testimony of women and children who survived violence, the role of Indigenous self-determination and governance in inciting violence against women, and settler colonialism’s promotion of cultural erasure and environmental destruction. By including contributions on Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, the Pacific, Greenland, Sápmi, and Latin America, the volume breaks down nation-state and European imperial boundaries to show the value of global Indigenous frameworks. Connecting the past to the present, this book confronts violence as an ongoing problem and identifies projects that mitigate and push back against it.

Author: Moyer V. Hubbard
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1441237097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Background becomes foreground in Moyer Hubbard's creative introduction to the social and historical setting for the letters of the Apostle Paul to churches in Asia Minor and Europe. Hubbard begins each major section with a brief narrative featuring a fictional character in one of the great cities of that era. Then he elaborates on various aspects of the cultural setting related to each particular vignette, discussing the implications of those venues for understanding Paul's letters and applying their message to our lives today. Addressing a wide array of cultural and traditional issues, Hubbard discusses: • religion and superstition • education, philosophy, and oratory • urban society • households and family life in the Greco-Roman world This work is based on the premise that the better one understands the historical and social context in which the New Testament (and Paul's letters) was written, the better one will understand the writings of the New Testament themselves. Passages become clearer, metaphors deciphered, and images sharpened. Teachers, students, and laypeople alike will appreciate Hubbard's unique, illuminating, and well-researched approach to the world of the early church.

Author: Trevor Burke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567516687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians boasts a preponderance of fictive kinship terms (e.g. father, children, nursing mother, brother etc). In this book, Burke shows that Paul is drawing on the normal social expectations of family members in antiquity to regulate the affairs of the community. Family metaphors would have resonated immediately with Paul's readers and the author surveys a broad range of ancient texts to identify stock meanings of the father-child and brother-brother relations. These stereotypical attitudes are explored to understand Paul's paternal relations (2:10-12) with his Thessalonian children and in resolving sexual immorality (4:3-8) and the refusal by some brothers to work (4:9-12; 5:12-15). This study has implications for the structure of early Christian communities.

Author: Colleen Shantz
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
ISBN: 1589836707
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This collection of essays continues the investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity begun in Experientia, Volume 1, by addressing one of the traditional objections to the study of experience in antiquity. The authors address the relationship between the surviving evidence, which is textual, and the religious experiences that precede or ensue from those texts. Drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, social memory theory, neuroscience, and cognitive science, they explore a range of religious phenomena including worship, the act of public reading, ritual, ecstasy, mystical ascent, and the transformation of gender and of emotions. Through careful and theoretically informed work, the authors demonstrate the possibility of moving from written documents to assess the lived experiences that are linked to them. The contributors are István Czachesz, Frances Flannery, Robin Griffith-Jones, Angela Kim Harkins, Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, John R. Levison, Carol A. Newsom, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Colleen Shantz, Leif E. Vaage, and Rodney A. Werline.

Author: A. Sue Russell
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532644744
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
There has been much discussion of two dimensions of the kingdom of God in scholarship: the temporal (already/not yet) and the embodied (spirit/flesh). Russell proposes that there is a third parallel dimension, a social dimension. Using Victor Turner’s concepts of structure, antistructure, and liminality, Russell explores how these concepts are consistently expressed in Jesus’ teaching, in Paul’s writing, and through the writers of the second and third centuries. She demonstrates how, from the very beginning of the Jesus movement, Christ followers were unique, not because their members were to live liminal lives apart from structure, but because they lived out new antistructural relationships within existing structures and thus transformed them. They lived liminally within their structure.

Author: David G. Horrell
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567086587
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
In the past twenty-five years, New Testament scholars have drawn on the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, to develop a variety of new perspectives on early Christianity. David Horrell here gathers together the classic works in this field, including essays by, for example, John Barclay, Philip Esler, Wayne Meeks, Luise Schottroff and Gerd Theissen. For each selection, David Horrell provides a short introduction and suggestions for further reading. He also provides an introduction outlining the development and future prospects of the discipline.An excellent reference and textbook for scholars and students.

Author: Paul Avis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019108137X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology is a unique scholarly resource for the study of the Christian Church as we find it in the Bible, in history and today. As the scholarly study of how we understand the Christian Church's identity and mission, ecclesiology is at the centre of today's theological research, reflection, and debate. Ecclesiology is the theological driver of the ecumenical movement. The main focus of the intense ecumenical engagement and dialogue of the past half-century has been ecclesiological and this is the area where the most intractable differences remain to be tackled Ecclesiology investigates the Church's manifold self-understanding in relation to a number of areas: the origins, structures, authority, doctrine, ministry, sacraments, unity, diversity, and mission of the Church, including its relation to the state and to society and culture. The sources of ecclesiological reflection are the Bible (interpreted in the light of scholarly research), Church history and the wealth of the Christian theological tradition, together with the information and insights that emerge from other relevant academic disciplines. This Handbook considers the biblical resources, historical development, and contemporary initiatives in ecclesiology. It offers invaluable and comprehensive guide to understanding the Church.