Crossing The Gods

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“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity...” (Jeremiah 29:11–14) Walking in the path of darkness, I never looked up to see God’s light. I had put God on the shelf. I was making my way in life. I was gaining notoriety and recognition for my accomplishments. My pride, arrogance, and selfishness were shining in my fleshly success. I was rolling and life was rocking, until one day, God placed a boulder in my path I could not move. In the blink of an eye, I lost my career, and my marriage was coming to an end. My Heavenly Father had stopped my fleshly ways to show me the deep darkness of my soul. He would take the pieces of clay from my brokenness, place me back on His pottery wheel, remold me with His loving hands, and put me through the fire to purify my soul. He would lead me to His place, “The Back Porch,” where He would teach me to meditate, show me visions, give me peace in His quietness, and open my ears to hear His voice. I would listen as He would speak through the pen and I would record His spoken words. Exhausted, tired, and weary, a broken man was being healed through the writings of his Heavenly Father. In this journey, He will use my love for nature to share with me the simple things in life, explain my visions, and gain understanding as we walk through this journey together. God shines His light and speaks to every man and woman. You must take the time to see His light and be still in His presence to hear His voice. Open this book, take a journey with me, and experience how God heals and remolds a broken man. He led me to write this book so you can see how God changed me and experience how God can change you.

This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas, explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage to the next dimension, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist. Dark plots, demonic cults, murderous jungles, quantum mayhem, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality.

The cross of Christ has proven to be no less of a "stumbling block" for Christians living in the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, than it was in the first century, when the newly established community of friends and followers of Jesus Christ sought to define the foundation of their faith over against the critiques of their Jewish and Greek contemporaries. This book presents a theological reception of the contemporary feminist challenge to classical christology by means of an explicit feminist retrieval and reconstruction of a theology of the cross. Gudmundsdottir argues that a feminist theology of the cross serves a dual purpose in feminist christology: it discloses the patriarchal distortion of traditional christology, and can also reveal lost dimensions in the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Although Gudmundsdottir argues that feminist critique is an indispensable element of contemporary christology, she also claims that there is a redemptive message in the cross of Christ that is retrievable for women today. Despite its potential for abuse and indeed its well-documented history of misuse against women in the past, a theology of the cross proclaims Jesus as a divine co-sufferer who brings good news to the poor and oppressed, and as such can be a source of healing and empowerment for suffering women. The constructive task of this book is to show that a theology of the cross can indeed become a theology of hope today, offering women meaning and strength from a God who takes human form and enters redemptively into their situations of suffering.

The apostle to the Gentiles presents a dilemma when in 1Cor 1,21 he asserts that human beings did not know God and in Rom 1,21 that they did. Consistent truth emerges as both of these verses resonate with echoes from Eden and Calvary. Thus, both pericopes in the present study point to the cross as the place where human cognizance of the divine happens most profoundly. The former verse brings to the fore the need for a domain of faithful obedience as a foundation for the human divine relantionship...The word of the cross grasps Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit. Hence human knowledge of God the ultimate goal involving both the cross and the creation, springs from the very life of the Trinity. Joseph Poggemeyer, studies at the Gregorian University I for his licence and doctorate in biblical theology.

The Canterbury Press Lent book for 2021 focuses on the significance of the story at the very centre of Christianity: the crucifixion. Samuel Wells writes as a theologian and pastor to explore the cross in the purposes of God and how this act brings about salvation. Three sections, each with six short chapters, explore the cross in: - the Old Testament (Covenant, Test, Passover, Atonement, Servant, Sacrifice) - the Epistles (Forgiveness, Obedience, Foolishness, Example, Reconciliation, Boast) - the Gospels (Finished, Judged, Betrayed, Pierced, Forsaken, Mocked) Written with characteristic clarity and wearing its considerable learning lightly, A Cross at the Heart of God will give readers a comprehensive understanding of the story at the heart of scripture, the central event in history and a core tenet of the Christian faith. A study guide with questions and prayers makes this ideal for Lent groups as well as individual reading.

God has written over the whole course of history the meaning of the Cross in this way, that the only answer that He can give to sin, to evil, to disobedience, and to all the fruit and results thereof, is travail, despair and death. And yet, withal, He is the God of Hope. He is saying that travail, passion, despair and death are the only way of hope. That is written in the whole history of God's dealings with men. Ever since Adam's sin, and (in him) the race's fall, God has had to work on the basis of the Cross of Christ. The Cross has been implicit in all God's dealings with men, and not only in general, but with His own people in particular. ...The Cross has always been God's way of salvation, God's remedy. It is a very drastic, a very terrible remedy, but it is God's remedy. And if it is an effective remedy, then it produces hope; it is something with hope - new hope - as its issue.

Greatly expanded version of a lecture given at Princeton Theological Seminary on October 22, 1990.

Forty stirring devotions for Lent and Easter, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This book is different from most other books of the same genre. It simply takes another approach at expounding upon these great Biblical themes. The author has taken the letters of each theme, and has built a chapter or chapters upon each letter. The author simply believes that there is something else to be said than what has been said so far about The Christian Faith.the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. May God bless each reader who reads these few pages. Dr. Jones was born in the small, Southeastern Kentucky community of Girdler. He is the youngest of fourteen children (seven boys and seven girls). He and his wife Carolyn now reside in Hamilton, OH. Dr. Jones has earned a Masters degree in Theology, and a Doctorate in Religion, having held five pastorates in over thirty years of ministry. This present work is his fourth book.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” —Matthew 13:31–32 When Jesus began his ministry, he announced that the kingdom of God was at hand. But many modern-day Christians don’t really understand what the kingdom of God is or how it relates to the message of the gospel. Defining kingdom as the King’s power over the King’s people in the King’s place, Patrick Schreiner investigates the key events, prophecies, and passages of Scripture that highlight the important theme of kingdom across the storyline of the Bible—helping readers see how the mission of Jesus and the coming of the kingdom fit together. Part of the Short Studies in Biblical Theology series.

This collection of nine meditations from renowned biblical scholar and Anglican Bishop Tom Wright carries Holy Week from its solemn beginnings to the dramatic conclusion on Good Friday and Easter. "I hope that these addresses," Wright says in his preface, ". . . will contribute both to the enriched understanding, and also to the empowered living out, of the vital and inexhaustible events at the heart of Christian faith." The writings for Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday morning, as well as the Easter Vigil, focus on texts from the Gospel of Matthew; Maundy Thursday evening, Good Friday, and Easter morning focus on texts from the Gospel of John.

Practicing lectio divina. Saint John of the Cross based his teaching of lectio divina on two major sources of spirituality: the Ladder of Monks, Guigo II's classic on the subject and the Rule of Carmel. From the first he received the structure: reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation, and from the second the conditions and inspiration: "Each one of you is to stay in his own cell or nearby, meditating the Lord’s law day and night (cf. Psa 1:2; Jos 1:8) and vigilant in prayer (cfr Eph 6:18)."