The theme of this volume was first presented as the Lyman Beecher Lectures On Preaching at the Yale Divinity School in 1945. Some of the same lectures were given, by arrangement, under the Warrack Lectureship On Preaching at the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen in Scotland in the winter of 1947. Some of the chapters were used as the basis of lectures given under the Olaf Petri Foundation of the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I sought to develop various portions of a general theme in these various lectureships. In this volume I have drawn these lectures into a more comprehensive study of the total problem of the relation of the Christian faith to modern conceptions of history. While the total work, therefore, bares little resemblance to the lectures, it does contain consideration of the specific problems which were dealt with in the lectures. I shall not seek to identify this material by chapters as I subjected the whole to reorganization. Two of these lectureships usually deal with the art of preaching, though not a few of the actual lectures have been concerned with the preacher’s message. Since I had no special competence in the art of homiletics I thought it wise to devote the lectures to a definition of the apologetic task of the Christian pulpit in the unique spiritual climate of our day. Since several of the Beecher lecturers in the past half-century sought to accommodate the Christian message to the prevailing evolutionary optimism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I thought it might be particularly appropriate to consider the spiritual situation in a period in which this evolutionary optimism is in the process of decay. This volume is written on the basis of the faith that the Gospel of Christ is true for men of every age and that Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday, today and forever.” It is, nevertheless, the task of the pulpit to relate the ageless Gospel to the special problems of each age. In doing so, however, there is always a temptation to capitulate to the characteristic prejudices of an age.

Excerpt from Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History I should like to express my gratitude to Dean Luther A. Weigle and the faculty of the Yale Divinity School for the invitation to this historic lectureship, and to the faculty and the students of the school for their kindness to me during the course of the convocation at which the lectures were delivered. I am also deeply indebted to many of my colleagues on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary for helpful criticisms on various chapters of the book; and especially to Professor Richard J. Kroner, Mr. Roger L. Shinn, and Professor John E. Smith of Barnard College for a critical scrutiny of the entire manuscript. My secretary, Mrs. Nola Meade, deserves special grati tude for painstaking work on the manuscript; as does also Mr. Langdon Gilkey, for preparing the index. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

An expanded and updated version of the author's thesis (M.A.-- Oral Roberts University, 1982) under the title: The Kenyon connection : a theological and historical analysis of the cultic origins of the Faith Movement.

This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.

"Magisterial. . . . A learned, brilliant and enjoyable study."—Géza Vermès, Times Literary Supplement In this exciting book, Paula Fredriksen explains the variety of New Testament images of Jesus by exploring the ways that the new Christian communities interpreted his mission and message in light of the delay of the Kingdom he had preached. This edition includes an introduction reviews the most recent scholarship on Jesus and its implications for both history and theology. "Brilliant and lucidly written, full of original and fascinating insights."—Reginald H. Fuller, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "This is a first-rate work of a first-rate historian."—James D. Tabor, Journal of Religion "Fredriksen confronts her documents—principally the writings of the New Testament—as an archaeologist would an especially rich complex site. With great care she distinguishes the literary images from historical fact. As she does so, she explains the images of Jesus in terms of the strategies and purposes of the writers Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."—Thomas D’Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is ‘natural’ and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history. This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of ‘histories’. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our ‘common-sense’ notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.