Early Christian Life And Thought In Social Context

Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context fills a vacuum in current scholarship. While there exist a number of anthologies of sources for students of the New Testament and early Judaism, this book integrates concise explanatory comment on various aspects of the historical and social situation of the early Christians with substantial extracts from early Christian, early Jewish, and Graeco-Roman sources.

Examines the continuity between early Christianity and Judaism - the focus of much controversy.

Much has been written about the Roman family unit, but relatively little about the early Christian period, comparing Roman, Jewish and Christian concepts of the family.

New to this expanded & updated edition are revisions of Ferguson's original material, updated bibliographies, & a fresh dicussion of first century social life, the Dead Sea Scrolls & much else.

The great Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the 4th-6th centuries provide the main theme for the articles collected here - seven of which appear for the first time in English. Underlying these studies is the author's determination to subject the extant texts to the most careful analysis, in order to reveal fully their true meanings, and to determine the accuracy - or, as is also proved, the inaccuracy - of long-accepted attributions and chronologies. As a result, Professor Abramowski has made a contribution towards unravelling the tangled history of early Christian dogma, not to mention the compilations of Church politics, and towards putting it on a firm chronological basis. Other particular topics covered are those of Antiochene and Nestorian thought, and the contacts between Gnosticism and the Neoplatonists.

Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to reforms and is getting worse. This analysis of the causes underlying the crisis seeks to offer concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform. Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles, two experienced classroom teachers and education consultants, argue that because teachers are recruited from a pool of underqualified candidates, given inadequate preparation, and dropped into a culture of isolation without mentoring, support, or incentives for excellence, they are programmed to fail. Half quit within their first five years. Troen and Boles offer an alternative, a model of reform they call the Millennium School, which changes the way teachers work and improves the quality of their teaching. When teaching becomes a real profession, they contend, more academically able people will be drawn into it, colleges will be forced to improve the quality of their education, and better-prepared teachers will enter the classroom and improve the profession.

Theissen inquires into the correlation between the theological and ethical convictions of the first Christians as well as the social realities of the world in which they lived. He expands the form-critical inquiry into the Sitz im Leben of early Christian texts to ask about the significance of early Christian convictions in society.

Professor Tillich analyzes the development of Christian theology.