Written over three decades ago, Cardinal Ratzinger's profound treatise on the true meaning of Christian brotherhood is perhaps even more timely and important now as a clear statement on the biblical grounds for cooperation among believing Christians. In treating Christian brotherhood from the perspective of salvation history, Ratzinger opens up the meaning of both the Old and New Testament in this most essential area. After establishing the distinctively Christian sense of brotherhood (vis-À-vis Judaism, Hellenism, Stoicism, the Enlightenment, and Marxism), he shows how fraternal charity can only be perfected through God's fatherhood, Christ's divine sonship, and our brotherhood in Christ.

A once-respected missionary pastor deserts his wife and children - and so does the church. What makes the Christian community so cruel to its own sheep?

On a sweltering June morning in 1933 a fifteen-year-old Muslim orphan girl refused to rise in a show of respect for her elders at her Christian missionary school in Port Said. Her intransigence led to a beating—and to the end of most foreign missions in Egypt—and contributed to the rise of Islamist organizations. Turkiyya Hasan left the Swedish Salaam Mission with scratches on her legs and a suitcase of evidence of missionary misdeeds. Her story hit a nerve among Egyptians, and news of the beating quickly spread through the country. Suspicion of missionary schools, hospitals, and homes increased, and a vehement anti-missionary movement swept the country. That missionaries had won few converts was immaterial to Egyptian observers: stories such as Turkiyya's showed that the threat to Muslims and Islam was real. This is a great story of unintended consequences: Christian missionaries came to Egypt to convert and provide social services for children. Their actions ultimately inspired the development of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups. In The Orphan Scandal, Beth Baron provides a new lens through which to view the rise of Islamic groups in Egypt. This fresh perspective offers a starting point to uncover hidden links between Islamic activists and a broad cadre of Protestant evangelicals. Exploring the historical aims of the Christian missions and the early efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood, Baron shows how the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamist associations developed alongside and in reaction to the influx of missionaries. Patterning their organization and social welfare projects on the early success of the Christian missions, the Brotherhood launched their own efforts to "save" children and provide for the orphaned, abandoned, and poor. In battling for Egypt's children, Islamic activists created a network of social welfare institutions and a template for social action across the country—the effects of which, we now know, would only gain power and influence across the country in the decades to come.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a "spiritual brotherhood" formed among the Puritans, shaped by the reforming activity and training of Cambridge. These pastor-theologians initiated a new emphasis within the established church, stirring up a greater understanding of the Reformation doctrines of grace and preaching for conversion and Christian growth and piety. In this study, Paul Schaefer looks at six thinkers in this group who stand out because each was used as the human vehicle to bring the gospel to the next: William Perkins, Paul Baynes, Richard Sibbes, John Cotton, John Preston, and Thomas Shepard. By examining their teaching on the relation between man's depraved nature and sovereign grace, as well as the distinct but inseparable relation of justification and sanctification, Schaefer demonstrates how the Puritan movement came to focus most intently on the cultivation of Reformed piety within the church. Table of Contents: 1. Knowing the Times: The Spiritual Brotherhood and Its Puritanism in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Social Contexts 2. William Perkins: The Good Fight of the Heart Redeemed 3. Paul Baynes: Ministering to the Heart Set Free 4. Richard Sibbes: The Union of the Heart with Christ 5. John Preston: The Triumph of Grace on the Inclinations of the Heart 6. An American Epilogue: Looking at Sola Gratia from Differing Angles--Cotton and Shepard and Massachusetts's Antinomian Controversy Appendix: Orthodoxies in Massachusetts?