Ivor J Davidson – författare

This book explores how Catholics should speak about sin and grace in a world where structural injustice holds sway causing violence and harm. Bray brings diverse voices into creative dialogue to explore why unjust social situations can properly be called sin from a Catholic theological perspective, and how this sin can be understood to impact one’s agency, freedom, and historical condition vis-à-vis God. Discussing disparate thinkers such as John Paul II, Judith Butler, Thomas Aquinas, and key Latin American liberation theologians, Bray deepens and constructively develops the Catholic understanding of social sin. She argues that the language of social sin presents us with an idea more theologically profound than just the identification of structural injustice; it depicts the power of collective human sinfulness to shape our lives and environments in ways which harm our relations with God, one another, and the rest of the created world.

This book explores John Webster’s contribution to one of the most important and contested topics in Christian theology: the relationship between divine and human agency. By examining the theme of moral ontology in Webster’s constructive dogmatics, this work sheds light on his contribution to this crucial subject.Jones achieves this through close study of Webster texts ranging from his early, middle and late periods. He reveals that Webster’s moral ontology is not only a major theme in his thought but is among his most significant contributions to contemporary systematic and moral theology. As the first book-length study of a central theme in Webster’s ethics, this text will be of interest to Webster scholars and those teaching courses in late modern systematic theology and theological ethics.

In this incisive work, Michelson traces contemporary debates on the doctrine of God back in time to the philosophical critiques of Hume and Kant. Schleiermacher and Barth each offered accounts of the doctrine of God. This book offers a critical evaluation of these accounts and demonstrates how they were responding to early modern critiques of the possibility of knowing God. Michelson also leverages Charnock’s account constructively to demonstrate how this earlier writer has the theological resources to tackle those same critiques.Not content to stop there, Michelson also highlights how these critics built their arguments on faulty interpretations of classical theological tradition. In doing so, this book carves out a provocative, constructive path forward for contemporary theological reflection on the doctrine of God.

This book considers what it means to die.Trew achieves this through the prism of two significant twentieth century thinkers: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Christos Yannaras. In doing so, he continues an esteemed tradition of works considering the theology and philosophy of death, including Karl Rahner’s On the Theology of Death and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. However, Trew is also breaking new ground: this is the first English language book to compare the late Christos Yannaras with major western theologians, making this an innovative and ecumenical work.Different as they are, both Bonhoeffer and Yannaras are well-known for their robustly relational views of human existence. Trew elegantly guides us through a systematic unfolding of how they both believe that, in and through Christ and his church, human life stands newly formed and empowered before the radical individuation of death. Bonhoeffer and Yannaras both see in the means for modern theological anthropology to address the asymmetrical togetherness of historical existence and divine transcendence. Trew highlights how this is crucial for a redescription of what individual death might mean in the context of the church as ‘communion’. In doing so, he constructively recasts Heidegger’s best insights about anticipating death with Bohoeffer and Yannaras. Ultimately, Trew powerfully argues for the Christological conversion of human creaturely passivity into recapitulative activity wherein human beings, by their ‘daily dying’ take up death’s power and transfigure it into new life. Death becomes entangled within a distinctively and irreducibly relational vision of the human being.

This work traces the contours, shape, and development of Webster’s Trinitarian theology and subsequently enliven debates in contemporary systematic theology. Rempel deftly takes us from Webster’s engagement with Eberhard Jüngel and Karl Barth to his later concerns with Trinity, economy and Christian Distinction.This journey allows Rempel to identify Webster’s contributions to contemporary systematic theology with a retrieval of divine perfection as well as a reframing of the doctrines of revelation and election. This work also highlights how Webster’s work interacts with and diverges from other major theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Robert Jenson. This, ultimately, leaves a work that brings Webster’s theology to bear on several debated issues in contemporary systematic theology.

To call Karl Barth a “theologian of nature” may seem like a stretch to those who know him as the great opponent of natural theology. This book argues that Barth’s rejection of natural theology and the “orders of creation” does not impede his development of a robust account of creation’s nature and order. It makes the case, first, by tracing the development of his theology of nature from Romans I to the completion of his doctrine of creation in the Church Dogmatics. Second, it examines the ways in which Barth's doctrine of creation is shaped by his doctrine of election. Creation exhibits constant structures, patterns, and limits that are real because they are determined and ordered by our election as creatures in Christ. Third, a close reading of his ethics of creation shows that without this quasi-essentialist ontology of creation’s nature, Barth’s ethics of creation are unintelligible. The book pushes interpreters to grapple with this quasi-essentialist understanding of creation’s nature and order that animate even Barth’s starkest “actualistic” moments. When Barth's theology of nature is given its proper due, the eudaimonistic essence of his ethics comes into full view.

Logan R. Hoffman deftly crafts a reconstruction and evaluation of the Doctrine of God in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s primary theological work: The Christian Faith. This book identifies the new-found limitations to theological speech that were contemporary in Schleiermacher’s day before offering a distinctive interpretation of Schleiermacher’s solution for these limitations.This work reconstructs what Schleiermacher had to say about the divine being, a subject seldom treated in book-length detail. By looking closely at the theological method employed (and offering a distinctive interpretation of Schleiermacher’s method among Anglophone scholars), and then tracing that method through the major sections of The Christian Faith, the book brings clarity to what exactly Schleiermacher could justifiably say about God as given in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence.

Reclaims the theology of Christian conversion by integrating Karl Barth’s doctrine of conversion within a constructive theological framework.This book delivers a doctrinally rich account of Christian conversion that challenges reductive, experience-based approaches. Drawing from Scripture and Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Tom Dove introduces a fourfold framework that defines conversion as inseparably connected to Christ’s person and work, purposive, a divine event, and integrated with the Christian life.He develops this framework through engaging with Barth’s doctrines of election, reconciliation, calling, baptism with the Holy Spirit, and creation. Subsequently, Dove constructively extends Barth’s theology to show how the Holy Spirit’s activity across Christ’s history provides the basis for connecting conversion and the Christian life.By magnifying the work of Christ and the Spirit, this study offers a holistic theological vision that integrates conversion with the reality of Christian existence.

The theology of salvation stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Very often the structure of Christian salvation is seen in terms of a single theme, such as atonement for sins, forgiveness, liberation or friendship with God. It is easy to reduce soteriology to a matter of merely personal experience, or to see salvation as just a solution to a human problem. This book explores a vital yet often neglected aspect of Christian confession - the essential relationship between the nature of salvation and the character of the God who saves. In what ways does God's saving outreach reflect God's character? How might a Christian depiction of salvation best bear witness to these features? What difference might it make to start with the identity of God as encountered in the gospel, then view everything else in the light of that? In addressing these questions, this book offers fresh appraisals of a range of major themes in theology: the nature of creaturely existence; the relationship between divine purposes and material history; the holiness, love and judgement of God; the atoning work of Jesus Christ; election, justification and the nature of faith; salvation outside the church; human and non-human ends; the nature of eschatological fellowship with God. In looking at these issues in the light of God's identity, the authors offer a stimulating and tightly-argued reassessment of what a Christian theology of salvation ought to resemble, and ask what the implications might be for Christian life and witness in the world today.

The theology of salvation stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Very often the structure of Christian salvation is seen in terms of a single theme, such as atonement for sins, forgiveness, liberation or friendship with God. It is easy to reduce soteriology to a matter of merely personal experience, or to see salvation as just a solution to a human problem. This book explores a vital yet often neglected aspect of Christian confession - the essential relationship between the nature of salvation and the character of the God who saves. In what ways does God's saving outreach reflect God's character? How might a Christian depiction of salvation best bear witness to these features? What difference might it make to start with the identity of God as encountered in the gospel, then view everything else in the light of that? In addressing these questions, this book offers fresh appraisals of a range of major themes in theology: the nature of creaturely existence; the relationship between divine purposes and material history; the holiness, love and judgement of God; the atoning work of Jesus Christ; election, justification and the nature of faith; salvation outside the church; human and non-human ends; the nature of eschatological fellowship with God. In looking at these issues in the light of God's identity, the authors offer a stimulating and tightly-argued reassessment of what a Christian theology of salvation ought to resemble, and ask what the implications might be for Christian life and witness in the world today.

Christians today are becoming more and more interested in studying the roots of their faith and the development of the church.Finally there is an accessible but authoritative series every Christian can turn The Monarch History of the Church. Readers will not merely learn the basics but also examines much-ignored themes, such as the role of popular religion, women, and the history of the Bible.In volume one, The Birth of the Church, Ivor J. Davidson helps readers explores the first 300 years of church history using the most recent biblical research and historical scholarship. This highly readable series also examines recurring problems of the church, like its relationship with the state, other religions, and secularism.The Monarch History of the Church is an eight-volume series by world-renowned historians and theologians.Each volume offers an even-handed, comprehensive and readable assessment of the main strands of Christianity within its period.