Theology

Who is my neighbor?

The Samaritan Project takes the familiar parable of an injured traveler and invites you to engage the story in a way that will change how you view yourself and the people in your world. Learn the importance of story, discover the revealing nature of questions and explore the distance we have created between ourselves and those God has called us to love.

Fringer and Lane incite you to action as they wrestle with what it means to see, love and be a neighbor. Whether one reads this alone or in community, the questions and experiential projects throughout each chapter will provide practical ways to serve.

Through The Samaritan Project, you will re-imagine what it looks like to embody the compassion of a neighbor.

This article evaluates Paul’s language of death and resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Seeking first to understand the historical and cultural situation that necessitates Paul’s writing of this chapter, it then argues that the dual themes of death and resurrection, when properly understood, are meant to shape the Corinthians’ identity and motivate them toward genuine and lasting transformation in the present. In other words, the theology rich discussion about future resurrection is only the surface issue. This reading helps to better understand how 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 functions within the whole of Paul’s argument. An evaluation of this pericope shows how Paul puts himself forth as an example of one who has correctly embraced both the death and resurrection of Christ in the present. Christ’s sacrificial death and Paul’s embracing of this death would have been a shocking revelation to the Corinthians and the practical implication of this same call to those in today’s church may be equally as shocking to some. Nevertheless, Paul argues for the necessity of this deathly embrace so as to participate in Christ’s resurrection in the present and in the future.

This article argues that Paul inserts oppositional references into his letter to the Philippians in order to provide an antithetical identity to that of the proposed eschatological identity he is seeking to bolster within the Philippian community. This antithetical identity presupposes a group of opponents who were very familiar to Paul’s audience, namely, fellow Greeks and Romans, who were unbelievers and who lived alongside the Philippian Christians in Philippi rather than Jewish or Jewish Christian opponents. Explanations identifying Jewish opponents have proven inadequate because they do not fit convincingly into the overall flow of Paul’s argument. Since the opponents’ concrete identity is only important for establishing a familiar antithesis it is argued that seeking to identify them precisely has little value. Instead focus should shift to the eschatological identity of believers and how this new identity moves them toward transformation and unification, even in the midst of a difficult external situation.

Are all things under God's control or only some things? Do we have a part to play, or does God direct everything to its pre-planned end? What about events that don't seem to be under anyone's control? Where is God then? For that matter, where are we? These questions and others like them are handled with precision in Theology of Luck. After considering what kind of God we believe in, the authors paint a relational portrait of a God of love. It is with this idea of God that we find insight into the inexplicable occurrences of life and arrive at a vision of faith and practice that encompasses both God and ourselves. Theology of Luck is not just about grappling with what we cannot understand about the world. It is about embracing our role as participants in God's loving and ongoing plan for the world. Endowed with grace and the gift of free will, we join God in revealing God's love and vision to the world.

The Bible is of utmost importance to the Christian faith and should be a source of revelation, wisdom, instruction, and connection to God. Nevertheless, it continues to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misappropriated. Therefore, it is vital that we understand what we believe about Scripture as Christians and as Wesleyans. This book helps to unpack difficult concepts related to the authority and inspiration of Scripture, it provides a brief theological reading of Scripture’s grand narrative, and it provides a foundation and template for fruitful, faithful interpretation and application of Scripture.

Most denominational ministry training today is carried out in a higher education context. Such a context requires college leaders to adhere to a policy on academic freedom. Faculty and students must be able to enjoy the freedom to explore ideas even if those ideas do not align with a denomination's confessional stance. While the idea of academic freedom is mostly encouraged in theological colleges, anecdotal evidence suggests that there are points of tension where the desire to uphold academic freedom clashes with ecclesial expectations that candidates for ministry be strongly formed in a confessional ethos. In this paper, we will explore this tension from the perspective of the College Principal and Academic Dean who usually live in this space and thus face the many challenges found therein. We will also suggest that confessional formation and training need not be at odds with a policy of academic freedom. Rather, this tension, if understood, can provide a space for deeper formation and commitment to one's denominational distinctives.

Paul’s Christophany (i.e., his Damascus Road Experience) has been the subject of much scholarly analysis. However, treatments of this phenomenon, while widely varied, have tended to extract the various references from their literary contexts in order to reconstruct the event, to discover the foundations and content of Paul’s Christology, or to analyze Paul’s experience of conversion and/or call. The current study, focused on the undisputed Pauline epistles, evaluates how and why Paul employed the various Christophanic references in their particular literary and sociohistorical contexts. Through this assessment, the importance of Paul’s Christophanic references as part of his larger arguments is established. It is shown how Paul uniquely shapes the various Christophanic references to fit the needs of his argument and through it, the needs of each community. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that Paul’s Christophanic references do not primarily establish his apostolic status or assert his apostolic authority. Through this study, the corporate nature of Paul’s Christophanic references becomes increasingly evident, and multiple general conclusions are drawn, which provide a possible glimpse into Paul’s understanding of his Christophanic experience.