Redemption (to buy back). When we think about redemption, salvation and born againaEUR"we think of the birth, death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. How did we get from Adam to Jesus? What did God have to do to span the four thousand years between the two? This series of lessons will answer many of the aEURoewhyaEUR questions. Why did God do that? Why did God allow that to happen?

It is New Year’s Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father’s death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens. Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin’s police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.

John Goodwin (1593-1665), the eminent Puritan Arminian divine, was a man ahead of his time who lived in a turbulent era in which many principals, both theological and governmental, were subjects of controversy. This new edition of Redemption Redeemed (originally published in 1651), provides a major refutation of the Calvinistic limited atonement doctrine. Goodwin has written an adversarial treatise in which he, step by step, examines the overwhelming scriptural and theological evidence supporting the idea that Christ died for all mankind. He also refutes the opposing arguments of his day and argues that God, through his grace, provides the opportunity for all people to be saved. The Methodist Quarterly Review noted: “Had Redemption Redeemed been his only publication, it should have been enough in itself to perpetuate his (Goodwin's) fame. Its great learning, clear reasoning, sound judgment, and admirable spirit, render it worthy of the study of the lovers of this glorious doctrine, and the name of its author is one which all Arminians should delight to honor. A volume so ably written, and going to the bottom of the controversy, could not in that polemical age fail to create a storm.” In the contemporary period, as Christians enter the 21st Century and Calvinism with its disturbing implications is making a resurgence, Goodwin's masterful work is a welcome and much needed contribution to those seeking to understand the truths of God's word.

Even as theologians and others have become more critical of classic theories of atonement, Brondos maintains, biblical scholars have continued to understand Paul's soteriology based on the language and categories of a thousand years later. In this vital volume he draws the theological consequences of the "new perspective" on Paul for our understanding of the meaning and efficacy of Jesus'' death. Paul, says Brondos, understood Jesus' death primarily as the consequence of his mission of serving as God's instrument to bring about the awaited redemption of Israel, in which Gentiles throughout the world would also be included. For Paul, Jesus' death is salvific, not because it satisfies some necessary condition for human salvation as most doctrines of the atonement have traditionally maintained, nor because it effects some change in the situation of human beings or the world in general, but because God responded to Jesus' faithfulness unto death by raising him, ensuring that all the divine promises of salvation would be fulfilled through him. Jesus' death forms part of an overarching story culminating in the redemption of Israel and the world; it is this story, and in particular what precedes and follows Jesus' death on the cross, which makes that death redemptive for Paul.

The book was born out of a desire to lift your spirit. As we look around us today, we see a lot of pain and sorrow and misery. The concept of ?The Nature of God's Divine Redemption? is a deliberate intention to encourage you and to lift your hope, to put your mind on something better and a superior way. The book tells you, ?If the son of man set you free, you are free indeed? (John 8: 36, King James Bible). That is what is ?The Nature of God's Redemption? is about. We are told that whatsoever a man thinks in his heart so is he. The idea behind the book is to help you to think good thoughts and to lift your minds from horizontal things to vertical things. God's love is the most amazing thing. The book tells that faith is also amazing. ?It takes far more faith to believe in the intellectually chic and fashionable evolutionary myth than it does to believe in the existence of God.' Moreover, it says, ?Evolution is based entirely on faith because no facts or proof have ever been found to support it ? Faith does play a primary role in the life of a Christian. For the person who truly wants to seek God and learn to please Him, Hebrews 11:6 tells us that: ?But without faith it is impossible to please God: for him that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarded of them that diligently seek Him? Faith is vital to a Christian. In fact, without it, no one can please God. Notice this verse says that those seeking God ?must believe that He is.' Also the book articulates that ?a deep belief in God, who ?rewards? all who ?diligently seek Him, requires proof of His existence.' It says it is ?After proof has been established, then'and only then can one have faith'absolute confidence that what man does is being recorded in God's mind, to be remembered when he receives his reward.' If you are uncertain that God exists because proof of that existence has not been firmly established, then, under fire, your faith will wane or disappear. But when you truly believe in what Jesus Christ did on the Cross of Calvary, God's Divine love will redeem you and set you free from the heavy load of sin.

Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy’s transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country’s break with Mussolini’s regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.