Re Imaging Election

Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of St Andrews, 2006 under title: Re-imaging election: the Holy Spirit and the dynamic of election to representation.

A brief, accessible inquiry into the wideness of God’s mercy in Reformed theology How broad is the scope of salvation? To explore this question, Richard J. Mouw draws on Scripture and a rich heritage of Calvinist theology. Mouw brings voices like the old Princeton theologians, Kuyper, and Bavinck into conversation with more recent voices such as David Engelsma on pertinent topics, including: • The salvation of unbaptized infants • God’s wrath and love for sinners • Problems with universalism • The number of the elect Learned yet approachable, Mouw explains how Christians can affirm God’s justice while holding hope for the wideness of his saving mercy. Congregations today face pressing questions about how to reconcile orthodoxy with empathy in increasingly pluralist neighborhoods and communities. For Reformed pastors, students, and interested laypeople, Divine Generosity serves as a biblically based, doctrinally sound guide.

An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.

Karl Barth's famous account of the doctrine of election in his mammoth Dogmatics has been described as the heart of his theology--a great hymn to the grace of God in Christ. Discover the person who initially stimulated Barth's mammoth reworking of the "classical" view of the doctrine--pastor/theologian Pierre Maury (1890-1956). Their close friendship and especially a seminal paper Maury gave in 1936 entitled "Election and Faith" helped stimulate Barth's reflection. Discover some never-before-translated works of Maury as well as a revision of a previously published piece on predestination. In this revised and expanded second edition, seven theologians reflect on the significance of these works for us today from historical, textual, pastoral, and theological standpoints, and seek to draw conclusions for us in our contemporary setting.

Contemporary theologies of mission rely on the central concept of the missio Dei, which states that mission properly belongs to the triune God over the church. However, present accounts fail to establish any corresponding link between God’s trinitarian economy and ontology. In other words, the problem of the missio Dei is the problem of the break between the act and being of God. Benjamin H. Kim argues that a repair is needed for missio Dei theology, and this repair is found in reexamining Barth’s doctrine of revelation. In doing so, the locus of mission moves from God’s trinitarian sending to his trinitarian revealing. The repair is further advanced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer through his concept of person, which functions as the unity of act and being. This account returns mission to its original definition, which was intended to describe the inner-trinitarian being of God in relation to humanity. The concept of person recovers this meaning of mission by locating it first in the person of Christ and second, in the collective person of the church existing as the Christ community. Thus, Bonhoeffer’s description of revelation in terms of personhood provides and account that is more faithful to the missio Dei’s core insights.

Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit' is an examination of the doctrines of election and atonement in Karl Barth's 'Church Dogmatics', taking up Barth's own challenge to his reader to surpass his argument and offer a better typological interpretationof the cultic texts. Barth's radical re-working of Calvin's doctrine of election is one of the most important developments in twentieth-century theology. Christ synthesizes for Barth a particular dialectic: the binary structure of God's Yes of election and God's No of rejection. The book's central question - how can Jesus simultaneously be both the elected and the rejected (CD II/2), acting as both the judge and the judged (CD IV/1)? - is followed by an exploration of the roles of the Holy Spirit and human freedom in God's electing and saving action. Although commentators acknowledge Barth's innovation in this area but also identify problems with his approach, few have offered what David Ford has called a correction 'from within' Barth, using Barth's ownmethod. Using the concept of Existenzstellvertretung, this critique of Barth's exegetical justification for the doctrines offers an alternative exegesis that not only provides this much-needed correction, but also immerses the reader in a fresh engagement with Scripture itself.

Offering not only state-of-the-art introductions from Biblical, historical, and constructive theologians, this volume also fosters an inter-disciplinary and cross-confessional conversation, reclaiming the idea of election as a central notion for any retelling of the biblical narrative. Several essays explore the variety of ways in which election is spoken about in the Scripture, drawing on research from the last twenty years that offers a more sophisticated framework than the traditionally theological categories of “elect” and “reject”. The historical part of the volume covers new analyses of Medieval and post-Reformation Catholic and Protestant debates on predestination, while the book's constructive part contributes to contemporary conversations on the relationship between Trinity, Christology, and election, the development of a post-supersessionist understanding of Israel's chosenness, as well as voices from contextual struggles in South America, Palestine, and South Africa.

Challenging Bruce McCormack's paradigm of post-Kantian Barth scholarship, this book builds on the interpretative model that Sigurd Baark developed in 2018. This model interprets Barth's innovative adoption of an Anselmian mode of theological speculation, against the intellectual-historical background of the idealist tradition of speculative metaphysics that culminated in Hegel. This book argues that Barth adopted the Anselmian mode of speculation in which immediate self-identity between subject, object, and act is found in the triune God alone, while the speculative identity that enables human knowledge of God is none other than the identity between God-in-and-for-Godself and God-for-us. Exploring the nationalistic dimension of speculative metaphysics in 19th-century Germany, Tseng identifies this as an important aspect of the context of Barth's development of a Christocentric form of speculative theology.