(Peeters 1994)

Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Over the last four decades, evangelical scholars have shown growing interest in Christian debates over other religions, seeking answers to essential questions: How are we to think about and relate to other religions, be open to the Spirit, and at the same time remain evangelical and orthodox? Gerald R. McDermott and Harold A. Netland offer critiques of a variety of theologians and religious studies scholars, including evangelicals, but also challenge evangelicals to move beyond parochial positions. This volume is both a manifesto and a research program, critically evaluating the last forty years of Christian treatments of religious others and proposing a comprehensive direction for the future. It addresses issues relating to the religions in both systematic theology and missiology, taking up long-debated questions such as contextualization, salvation, revelation, the relationship between culture and religion, conversion, social action, and ecumenism. It concludes with responses from four leading thinkers of African, Asian, and European backgrounds: Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Vinoth Ramachandra, Lamin Sanneh, and Christine Schirrmacher.

A constructive new proposal for Christian dialogue with other faiths. Religious pluralism is today the most challenging issue facing traditional Christianity. This constructive work by a leading voice on the subjects of religious pluralism and interfaith relations probes the Christian understanding of God and salvation and offers a new perspective on religious pluralism that affirms unique salvation in Christ while also recognizing the religious ends of other faiths. The questions explored here are both difficult and enlightening. What is the distinctive nature of salvation? Is there a place in Christian theology for recognizing other religious ends in addition to salvation? In pursuit of meaningful answers, S. Mark Heim uses the classical doctrine of the Trinity to develop a theology that allows Christians to respect the possibility that alternative relations with God exist in other religions.

The heart of Christianity is trinitarian. The subject matter of Trinitarian Theology casts a long shadow over our faith. The relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is central to the salvation story. The Trinity is central to Christianity, for the vibrancy of our churches, and for the clarity of our witness in the world. In Trinitarian Theology, Bruce Ware, Malcon B. Yarnell III, Matthew Y. Emerson, and Luke Stamps discuss issues such as the eternal functional subordination of the Son, the nature of the God-human relationship, and theological methods for forming the doctrine of the Trinity. This is a discussion of great importance, offered by scholars who represent varying views held by today’s Southern Baptist scholars.

How are Christians to think of non-Christian religions? How are they to relate to people who do not share their faith? Two senior scholars survey the field of theology of religions from an evangelical perspective, and propose fresh approaches to long-debated questions such as salvation, revelation, the relationship between culture and religion.

These select essays, brought together from the 2008 Wheaton College Theology Conference by editors Daniel J. Treier and David Lauber, show both the substance and the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity for our worship, our reading of Scripture and the mission of the church.

Shows that many so-called "pluralist" theologies are actually masks for a secularizing agenda and that the doctrine of the Trinity holds more potential for interreligious understanding and dialogue. D'Costa recommends the Trinitarian approach which attains the goals that pluralism seeks: openness, respect, and learning from other religions. It accomplishes this without the reductionism associated with pluralism and by examining the serious differences between traditions. He applies the Trinity to interreligious prayer with surprising results.

Through an intimate conversation with the writings of Thomas F. Torrance, Flett articulates a Trinitarian theology of culture. Torrance's work suggests that Christian assumptions in the areas of God, creation, and humanity had an important influenceupon the development of Western scientific culture. This book develops each of these areas of Torrance's thought in order to articulate a theology of culture rooted in a Christian understanding of God as triune, creation as contingent, and human persons as stewards created in the image of God. Drawn together, these three areas of Torrance's thought suggest that human culture and cultural plurality ultimately originate in the creative action of a triune God, mediated through the creative activity of the human creature as it engages a contingent created order in its attempts to foster human flourishing and to bear embodied witness to its Creator. The result is not only a unique contribution to the emerging secondary material on Torrance's work, but also a contribution to the field of theology of culture as a systematic locus in its own right.

The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most distinguishing marks of Christian faith. This is the first book to present an overview of the role of the Trinity in Christian theology in relation to religious pluralism and other religions. Approaching the study of the relationship between Christianity and other religions from the perspective of the Trinity, this book surveys all the major contributions to the topic by leading theologians at the international and ecumenical level. Veli-Matti Karkkainen points to future challenges and areas in need of development, examining in detail a case study exploring how the Catholic Church has responded to Islam from the perspective of the Trinity. Students of theology and religious studies will find this an invaluable text for courses that discuss religious pluralism and Christianity's relation to other religions. Pastors, other Christian workers, and academics will also find it a handy reference tool for teaching and further study.

Written in 1975 as a birthday greeting to the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Klaus Hemmerle's Theses Towards A Trinitarian Ontology is of the highest theological moment as a key source text for the recent widespread interest in the idea of a "Trinitarian ontology." Drawing on Hemmerle's deep familiarity with German Idealism, the Theses sketch an ontology beginning not from invariance, but from "self-giving," from kenosis, and articulate a distinctively Trinitarian response to the aporias of early twenty-first-century thought-a response for which only Love can credibly be understood as the meaning of Being.