William Abraham
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Among The Ashes
$23.99Add to cartHow can we hold fast to the hope of life eternal when we lose someone we love? In this book William Abraham reflects on the nature of certainty and the logic of hope in the context of an experience of devastating grief.
Abraham opens with a stark account of the effects of grief in his own life after the unexpected death of his oldest son. Drawing on the book of Job, Abraham then looks at the significance of grief in debates about the problem of evil. He probes what Christianity teaches about life after death and ultimately relates our experiences of grief to the death of Christ.
Profound and beautiful, Among the Ashes tackles the philosophical and theological questions surrounding loss even as it honors the experience of grief.
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Canonical Theism : A Proposal For Theology And The Church
$39.99Add to cartCanonical Theism is a post-Protestant vision for the renewal of both theology and church. The editors call for the retrieval and redeployment of the full range of materials, persons, and practices that make up the canonical heritage of the church, including scripture, doctrine, sacred image, saints, sacraments, and more. The central thesis of the work is that the good and life-giving Holy Spirit has equipped the church with not only a canon of scripture but also with a rich canonical heritage of materials, persons, and practices. However, much of the latter has been ignored or cast aside. This unplumbed resource of canonical heritage waits for the church to rediscover its wealth. With a bold set of thirty theses, the authors chart and defend that mine of opportunity. They then invite the entire church to explore the benefits of their discoveries. This ambitious book offers insights to be integrated into the church body, renewing the faith that nourished converts, created saints, and upheld martyrs across the years.
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Crossing The Threshold Of Divine Revelation
$23.99Add to cartThe last few decades have seen a revolution in debates about the rationality of Christian belief. Among the array of current options for justifying religious belief, however, nearly every one assumes that a general theory of knowing and a minimal version of theism must be adopted before the rationality of Christian belief can be tackled.
In Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation William J. Abraham confronts both of these assumptions, arguing that epistemology must begin with its particular target of inquiry – in Abraham’s case the full-blooded “canonical theism” of the early, undivided Christian church. He argues, moreover, that special divine revelation forms a crucial threshold at the entrance to the epistemology of Christian belief. Sure to intrigue philosophers, theologians, and curious students, Abraham’s robust vision of Christian faith provides a creative solution to many of the current difficulties in philosophy and theology.
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Wesley For Armchair Theologians
$24.00Add to cartCalled the most important Protestant since Luther, the founder of the Methodists preached Christ to hundreds of thousands of people, formed small groups to foster discipleship, and actively helped the poor and downtrodden. Abraham gives a remarkably evenhanded presentation of Wesley’s emphases, achievements, and legacy.
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Logic Of Renewal
$25.99Add to cartThe Western church is currently awash in a sea of renewal movements so much so that she is in danger of drowning. Across the church’s many denominations and great theological divisions there is a persistent quest for change, reflected in repeated calls for “revival,” “reform,” revitalization,” and “restoration.” We now have so much literature on the topic that one is hard-pressed to keep up with it, let alone evaluate it critically.
In “The Logic of Renewal” William Abraham helps church leaders and members get their bearings in the renewal debate by analyzing the most salient proposals for church renewal that have surfaced over the last fifty years. In successive chapters he pairs outspoken figures who (in all but one chapter) represent strongly contrasting convictions James T. Draper and Dennis Bennett, Lesslie Newbigin and John Shelby Spong, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Cardinal Ratzinger, Martin Luther King Jr. and Archbishop Romero, Alexander Schmemann and Gilbert Bilezikian, Don Cupitt and Edward Norman, C. Peter Wagner and R. R. Reno. Abraham gives special attention to the theological assumptions of each proposal, highlights its overall strengths and weaknesses, and develops his own proposals for church renewal through interaction with those under review.Articulate, bracing, and constructive, “The Logic of Renewal” will redefine the way Christians think about church life.
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Waking From Doctrinal Amnesia
$20.99Add to cartAsserting that the “return to Wesley” that is represented in the Quadrilateral is “intellectually wrongheaded,” William J. Abraham argues that the Quadrilateral is not, and should not be, United Methodist doctrine. Abraham’s lively treatise makes a provocative appeal for a reasoned exploration of the significance of the UMC’s doctrinal identity. He reveals how churches have faced incompatible doctrinal proposals within their midst and examines the specific issues facing the United Methodist church as a whole.
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Logic Of Evangelism
$28.99Add to cartAbraham argues, in contrast both to the traditional focus on proclamation and to the more recent emphasis on church growth, that evangelism should be construed as primary initiation into the kingdom of God. Fleshing out his thesis by discussing how conversion, baptism, morality, the creed, the gifts of the Spirit, and the classical spiritual disciplines are related to kingdom initiation.