The story of Christian thought is essential to understanding Christian faith today and the last two millennia of world history. This fresh and lively introduction explores the central ideas, persons, events, and movements that gave rise to Christian thought, from early beginnings to its present forms. By highlighting the important but often neglected role of women and the influence of non-Christian ideas and movements, this book provides a broader context for understanding the history of Christian ideas and their role in shaping our world. Christian Thought: provides an overview of the context of Christianity’s origin, including discussion of the influence of Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans explores the major events and figures of the history of Christian thought, while drawing attention to significant voices which have often been suppressed analyses the impact on Christian thought of widely discussed events such as The Great Schism, the Scientific Revolution, and modernism surveys contemporary trends such as fundamentalism, feminism, and postmodernism. This fully revised and updated second edition features a new chapter on liberal theology and reflects recent scholarship in the field. Complete with figures, timelines and maps, this is an ideal resource for anyone wanting to learn more about the development of Christian thought and its influence over the centuries. Further teaching and learning resources are available on the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/meister.

In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted classrooms around the world, teachers scrambled to convert their lectures and presentations into a format more conducive to online and distance learning. For Eugene Rogers, this meant transcribing as closely as possible the spoken lectures that have made his Introduction to Christian Thought course at UNC Greensboro, a course he has taught some forty times, justly famous. The result is this book: an insightful, winsome, and engaging introduction to the history of Christian thought by a teacher at the height of his craft. For Rogers, the history of Christian thought is the story of a language--it's "Christianese," if you will--that participants use to frame their agreements and their disagreements alike. From Anselm to Wyschogrod, Rogers introduces us to the most interesting speakers of Christianese and their importance, enabling us to both listen in on and take part in the living conversation about God's activity in and for our world.

Written by a veteran Christian educator, this readable book describes the relationship between the Christian faith and the world of learning by looking at the five modern worldviews competing with Christian theism.

Or at least, such an outlook should unite Christians of all theological and church backgrounds. However, alternate visions of reality often infect and corrupt Christians’ thinking. In The Essentials of Christian Thought, eminent theologian and church historian Roger Olson outlines the basic perspective on the world that all Christians, regardless of the place and time in which they are born, have historically held. This underlying metaphysic accords with all orthodox theologies, whether Calvinist or Arminian, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, but it separates Christianity from other religious and secular perspectives. It is, quite simply, the essential requirement of a Christian view of the world. Bold and incisive, The Essentials of Christian Thought will prompt thoughtful readers and students to more consciously appropriate the core of their faith, guarding against ideas that subtly but necessarily invite compromise.

A collection of seventeen essays presenting theological perspectives on children throughout history. Discusses the care of children, their spiritual education, and the role of parents, the church, and the state in raising children.

This book explores for the first time the broad range of ways in which Christian thought intersects with American legal theory. Eminent legal scholars—including Stephen Carter, Thomas Shaffer, Elizabeth Mensch, Gerard Bradley, and Marci Hamilton—describe how various Christian traditions, including the Catholic, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and Lutheran traditions, understand law and justice, society and the state, and human nature and human striving. The book reveals not only the diversity among Christian legal thinkers but also the richness of the Christian tradition as a source for intellectual and ethical approaches to legal inquiry. The contributors bring various perspectives to the subject. Some engage the prominent schools of legal thought: liberalism, legal realism, critical legal studies, feminism, critical race theory, and law and economics. Others address substantive areas, including environmental, criminal, contract, torts, and family law, as well as professional responsibility. Together the essays introduce a new school of legal thought that will make a signal contribution to contemporary discussions of law.

Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history. Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.