What is secular biblical criticism? 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' presents a selection of essays that examine the nature of secular biblical studies and its hermeneutical principles. The essays outline and analyse debates within biblical studies over the issue of secularism and explore the interplay of atheism, agnosticism and faith in the interpretation of the Bible. The book argues for a hermeneutics of suspicion and a wider engagement with cultural, literary and anthropological disciplines. Examining biblical hermeneutics from a range of perspectives - from Europe, Israel and the USA - 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' offers a provocative and challenging approach that will be of interest to all students and scholars of the Bible.

What is wrong with Scripture scholarship today? Why is it that the last place one should go to study the Bible is a biblical studies program at virtually any university? Why are so many faithful priests and pastors, and the people in their pews, unaware of the centuries-long effort to turn the sacred Word of God into just another secular text? In The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture: How the Bible Became a Secular Book, authors Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker trace the various malformations of Scripture scholarship that have led to a devastating loss of trust in the inspired Word of God. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment and beyond, Hahn and Wiker sketch the revolutions and radical figures that led to the emergence of the historical-critical method and the pervasive ill effects that are still being felt today.

Now available in the timeless King James Version, the Archaeological Study Bible features a full-color interior, over 500 full-color photographs, in-text maps, detailed charts, study notes, and cultural facts that bring the ancient biblical world to life.

A sociology professor examines the demographic shift that has led more Americans than ever before to embrace a nonreligious life and highlights the inspirational stories and beliefs that empower modern-day secular culture.

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, she contends, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging. Secularism and Hermeneutics reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging and challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.

In this radical critique of his own academic specialty, biblical scholar Hector Avalos urges his colleagues to concentrate on educating the broader society to recognize the irrelevance and even violent effects of the Bible in modern life.

"Our Christian assertion is that there is more to our lives than 'now.' If there is not then even the now is meaningless. But we say now counts. Why? Now counts because we are creatures who have an origin and a destiny which is rooted and grounded in God." --R.C. Sproul ------ There is no such thing as a meaningless moment. Since we're made in God's image and created for His eternal glory, everything we think, say, and do today matters forever. The question is, How should this truth direct our daily lives? For more than forty years, Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote his recurring column in Tabletalk magazine, Right Now Counts Forever, to apply the teachings of the Bible and Reformed theology to everyday life. No topic was off-limits because every part of our lives bears enduring significance. Through the years, Dr. Sproul helped Christians give careful thought to topics in theology and history, politics and current events, relationships and entertainment, and more. In this four-volume collection, hundreds of Dr. Sproul's columns have been brought together for the first time. Written to serve the church, this treasury of theological reflection can help guide believers of all ages to live with eternity in mind and devote all of life to the glory of God.

In How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Larry Hurtado investigates the intense devotion to Jesus that emerged with surprising speed after his death. Reverence for Jesus among early Christians, notes Hurtado, included both grand claims about Jesus' significance and a pattern of devotional practices that effectively treated him as divine. This book argues that whatever one makes of such devotion to Jesus, the subject deserves serious historical consideration. Mapping out the lively current debate about Jesus, Hurtado explains the evidence, issues, and positions at stake. He goes on to treat the opposition to -- and severe costs of -- worshiping Jesus, the history of incorporating such devotion into Jewish monotheism, and the role of religious experience in Christianity's development out of Judaism. The follow-up to Hurtado's award-winningLord Jesus Christ (2003), this book provides compelling answers to queries about the development of the church's belief in the divinity of Jesus.

Twelve leading scholars have collaborated on this unique volume, bringing their biblical and patristic expertise together to show how the first followers of Jesus used their own canonical scriptures to address concerns central to life in the Roman Empire. Sacred Scripture and Secular Struggles offers an overview of how early Christians approached and appropriated biblical texts in addressing wider societal issues of imperial power, slavery, the use of wealth, suicide and other fundamental issues brought about by the convergence of empire and ecclesia.