Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity

Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity PDF Author: David A. deSilva
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780830815722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
David A. deSilva demonstrates in this book how paying attention to the cultural themes of honor, patronage, kinship and purity opens us to new facets of the New Testament documents.

Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity

Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity PDF Author: David A. deSilva
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780830815722
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
David A. deSilva demonstrates in this book how paying attention to the cultural themes of honor, patronage, kinship and purity opens us to new facets of the New Testament documents.

Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity

Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity PDF Author: David A. deSilva
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 1514003864
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
For contemporary Western readers, it can be easy to miss or misread cultural nuances in the New Testament. To hear the text correctly we must be attuned to its original context. As David deSilva demonstrates, keys to interpretation are found in paying attention to four essential cultural themes: honor and shame, patronage and reciprocity, kinship and family, and purity and pollution. Through our understanding of honor and shame in the Mediterranean world, we gain new appreciation for how early Christians sustained commitment to a distinctive Christian identity and practice. By examining the protocols of patronage and reciprocity, we grasp more firmly the connections between God’s grace and our response. In exploring kinship and household relations, we grasp more fully the ethos of the early Christian communities as a new family brought together by God. And by investigating the notions of purity and pollution along with their associated practices, we realize how the ancient map of society and the world was revised by the power of the gospel. This new edition is thoroughly revised and expanded with up-to-date scholarship. A milestone work in the study of New Testament cultural backgrounds, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity offers a deeper appreciation of the New Testament, the gospel, and Christian discipleship.

Pauline Solidarity

Pauline Solidarity PDF Author: Daniel Oudshoorn
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532675291
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Building on the themes established in the first two volumes of Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Pauline Solidarity explores: (a) how the Pauline faction transforms relationships within the household unit in the new transnational family of God; (b) how dominant cultural conceptions of honor are rejected in the embrace of shame in the company of the crucified; (c) how vertical practices of patronage are replaced with a horizontal sibling-based political economy of grace; and (d) how the gospel of the Caesars is overcome by the lawlessness of the good news that is being assembled in an uprising of life among the left for dead. Along the way, many of the traditional themes associated with Paulinism (grace, justice, love, loyalty, sin, flesh, death, Jesus, spirit, life) are reexamined and understood as core components of a movement that was spreading among vanquished, colonized, oppressed, dispossessed, and enslaved peoples who were finding new (and treasonous) ways of organizing themselves in order to be life-giving and life-affirming, and in order to counter all the death-dealing structures of Roman imperialism.

The Priest and Levite as Temple Representatives

The Priest and Levite as Temple Representatives PDF Author: Michael Blythe
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666771406
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The parable of the good Samaritan is well-known, yet scholarship has not plumbed the depths of its meaning within its first-century Palestinian context. For the majority of Christian history, the parable has suffered either from extreme allegorical treatments or from unimaginative readings limiting the parable to a single-point example story of virtue. A creative reading employing social and historical methods generates a refreshing telling of the story, within Jesus’s context, whereby each variable, from the Samaritan to the priest and even the innkeeper, takes on representative forms, not only indicative of widespread concerns from Jesus’s audience, but also becoming symbols of the eschatological age when the new temple supplants the old.

New Life in the Risen Christ

New Life in the Risen Christ PDF Author: Jonathan A. Powers
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 166679371X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Baptism is a foundational rite and sacrament of the church. Over the centuries, the significance of baptism for Christian life and faith has been confirmed by the church, but baptism remains a highly controversial topic. Numerous disagreements exist between denominations and faith traditions--including the various descendants of the original Methodist movement--over the doctrine and practice of baptism. Who can be baptized? Why is baptism done? What does the rite mean? New Life in the Risen Christ: A Wesleyan Theology of Baptism seeks to address confusion over baptism and offer a coherent treatment of the sacrament from a Wesleyan theological perspective. Distinguished scholars from around the world are brought together in this volume to examine the writings of John Wesley and offer scholarly reflections on topics related to the sacrament of baptism. Their work is an invitation to remember and be thankful for baptism as the sign of divine grace that initiates Christians into a new reality: life in the risen Christ.

Pauline Eschatology

Pauline Eschatology PDF Author: Daniel Oudshoorn
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532675267
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
When seeking to understand what Paul and his coworkers were trying to accomplish, it is no longer possible to ignore Graeco-Roman cultural, economic, political, and religious beliefs and practices. Nor can one ignore the ways in which colonized and vanquished peoples adopted, developed, subverted, and resisted these things. Therefore, in order to properly contextualize the Pauline faction, the traditional background material related to Paul and politics must be developed in the following ways: Pauline eschatology must be examined in light of apocalyptic resistance movements; Pauline eschatology must be understood in light of the realized eschatology of Roman imperialism; and the ideo-theology of Rome (its four cornerstones of the household unit, cultural constructs of honor and shame, practices of patronage, and traditional Roman religiosity now all reworked within the rapidly spreading imperial cult[s]) must be explored in detail. This is the task of Pauline Eschatology, the second volume of Paul and the Uprising of the Dead. In it, we will witness how Pauline apocalypticism ruptures the eternal now of empire, and this, then, paves our way for the detailed study of Paulinism that follows in volume 3, Pauline Solidarity.

Wealth in Ancient Ephesus and the First Letter to Timothy

Wealth in Ancient Ephesus and the First Letter to Timothy PDF Author: Gary G. Hoag
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 157506832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Scholars are divided in their views about the teachings on riches in 1 Timothy. Evidence that has been largely overlooked in NT scholarship appears in Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus and suggests that the topic be revisited. Recently dated to the mid-first century C.E., Ephesiaca brings to life what is known from ancient sources about the social setting and cultural rules of the wealthy in Ephesus and provides details that enhance our knowledge of life and society in that place and time. In this volume, Hoag introduces Ephesiaca and employs a socio-rhetorical methodology to explore it alongside other ancient evidence and five passages in 1 Timothy (2:9–15; 3:1–13; 6:1–2a; 6:2b–10; and 6:17–19). His findings augment our modern conception of the Sitz im Leben of the wealthy in Ephesus. Additionally, because Ephesiaca contains some rare terms and themes that are found in 1 Timothy, this groundbreaking research offers fresh insight for biblical reading and interpretation.

In the World but Not of the World

In the World but Not of the World PDF Author: A. Sue Russell
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532644744
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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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.

Songs of the Lisu Hills

Songs of the Lisu Hills PDF Author: Aminta Arrington
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085843
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of how the Lisu maintained their faith through twenty-two years of government persecution and illuminating how Lisu Christians transformed the text-based religion brought by the missionaries into a faith centered around an embodied set of Christian practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, this volume documents the development of Lisu Christianity, both through larger social forces and through the stories of individual believers. It explores how the Lisu, most of whom remain subsistence farmers, have oriented their faith less around cognitive notions of belief and more around participation in a rhythm of shared Christian practices, such as line dancing, attending church and festivals, evangelizing, working in one another’s fields, and singing translated Western hymns. These embodied practices demonstrate how Christianity developed in the mountainous margins of the world’s largest atheist state. A much-needed expansion of the Lisu story into a complex study of the evolution of a world Christian community, this book will appeal to scholars working at the intersections of World Christianity, anthropology of religion, ethnography, Chinese Christianity, and mission studies.

Ministering in Patronage Cultures

Ministering in Patronage Cultures PDF Author: Jayson Georges
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 083087089X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Patronage governs many relationships in Majority World cultures. But regrettably, Western theologians and missionaries rarely notice this prominent cultural reality. Patronage—a reciprocal relationship between social unequals—is a central part of global cultures and the biblical story of God's mission. Misunderstanding patronage creates problems not only for Westerners ministering in other cultures, but also for contemporary people reading the Bible. If we ignore the concepts of patronage in biblical cultures, we will misinterpret Yahweh's relationship with Israel and miss some of the meaning in Jesus' parables and Paul's letters. Understanding patronage will illuminate theological concepts such as faith, grace, and salvation. Jayson Georges, coauthor of Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures, now brings his ministry experience and biblical insights to bear on the topic of patronage. With sections on cultural issues, biblical models, theological concepts, and missional implications, this resource will serve not only ministry practitioners but also anyone who studies Scripture and worships God.