Recovering The Reformed Confession

In this seminal treatise, Peter J. Leithart argues that the coming of the New Creation in Jesus Christ has profound and revolutionary implications for social order, implications symbolized and effected in the ritual of baptism. In Christ and Christian baptism, the ancient distinctions between priest and non-priest, between patrician and plebian, are dissolved, giving rise to a new humanity in which there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Yet, beginning in the medieval period, the church has blunted the revolutionary force of baptism, and reintroduced antique distinctions whose destruction was announced by the gospel. Leithart calls the church to renew her commitment to the gospel that offers "priesthood to the plebs."

Daniel Hyde offers a necessary, fresh exposition and application of its doctrine in the twenty-first century, with the hope of setting the Reformed churches on fire for their historic Christian, Protestant, and Reformed faith in the midst of a cold and lifeless world. The Belgic Confession is not a systematic theology but the historic and systematic confession of faith by the Reformed churches. --from publisher description.

Oliver Crisp offers a set of essays that analyze the significance and contribution of several great thinkers in the Reformed tradition, ranging from John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards to Karl Barth. Crisp explains how these thinkers navigated pressing theological issues and how contemporary readers can draw relevant insights from the tradition.

Rediscovering Confession is about recovering the experience of confession, in danger now of becoming a lost art. It identifies four elements present in psychotherapy and confession: a state of heightened self-awareness, a growing realization that our predicament points in some meaningful direction beyond itself, the necessity to make a relevant response to our situation, and a potential for spiritual encounter that accompanies the process. Each chapter contains a section devoted to practice, with exercises for individual contemplation and experimentation, guidelines for forming a confessional partnership, directions for conducting discussions in a study goup, and ways to organize a small confessional group.

This is a multi-volume set, which compiles numerous Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries translated into English. For many of these texts, this is their debut in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular. It provides the English-speaking world a richer and more comprehensive view of the emergence and maturation of Reformed theology in these foundational centuries for Reformed thought and foundational summaries of Reformed doctrine for these centuries. Each confessional statement is preceded by a brief introduction containing necessary historical and bibliographical background. The confessions are arranged chronologically--Publisher.

A provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in “an age of ecocide” Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist—an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change. Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls “dark ecology,” which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed “Uncivilization” manifesto, asks hard questions about how we’ve lived and how we should live.