In an age of relativism, tolerance and political correctness, the church is called to walk in the footsteps of Christ. As his witnesses, we must reject all forms of coercion and violence while simultaneously refusing to shy away from the authority and conviction that come from carrying his revelation. Dr. Ervin Budiselić examines the concept of “witnessing” in the writings of Luke, contextualizing it within the larger framework of Scripture’s emphasis on revelation and testimony. Like Judaism, Christianity is a religion of revelation, where specific content must be preserved, passed on and proclaimed to others. Dr. Budiselić explores the communal nature of this calling, as well as its pneumatological implications within Luke’s writings. Acknowledging the tendency within the Western church to emphasize moral transformation over physical, he reminds readers that Jesus’s kingdom ministry was accompanied by deeds as well as words. He specifically engages the dangers of normalizing a gospel disconnected from the supernatural or the miraculous, as partnership with the Holy Spirit was central to the calling given to the early church. This book offers a prophetic message for the church today as it seeks to fulfill its calling to faithfully witness to the revelation of Christ.

A festschrift for Gerald Sheppard, which examines the historical problems presented throughout the biblical testimony. >

Trinity After Pentecost considers the triune God from a Pentecostal viewpoint. In so doing, it offers a fresh articulation of the theology of the Trinity, taking the Holy Spirit as its starting point. It concludes that the Trinity cannot be adequately appreciated using any single model - whether social, modal, or psychological. Instead, it presents three models - relational, instrumental, and substantial - that must be held in paradoxical tension with one another to gain insight into the Trinity. Of these, the relational model is the foremost. Pentecost offers rich potential for seeing the relations between the Father, the Son and the Spirit as a dynamic reciprocal 'dance', in which each Person empties their 'self ' in order to exalt the others.

Contributors to this volume examine the various collections of canonical sub-units in the canon, considering the state of the question regarding each particular collection. The chapters introduce the issues involved in sub-collections being accepted in the canon, summarize the historical evidence of the acceptance of these collections, and discuss the compositional evidence of “canonical consciousness” in the various collections. The contributors consider paratextual evidence, for example, the arrangement of the books in various manuscripts, the titles of the books, and also include evidence such as the presence of catchwords, framing devices, and themes. The book begins with a consideration of the two overarching collections – the Old and New Testaments. Next, several sub-collections within the Hebrew Bible (OT) are considered, including the Torah, Prophets, the Megilloth, the Twelve (both in their Masoretic Text and Septuagint forms), and the Psalter. In addition, sub-collections in the New Testament include the four-fold Gospel, the Pauline Collection (usually with Hebrews in the early manuscripts), the function of Acts within the New Testament, the Praxapostolos (Acts along with the Catholic Epistles), and the function of Revelation as the end of the canon.

This wide-ranging collection of essays provides the reader with a critical introduction to the New Testament as the church's canon. The authors' conviction is that the Bible belongs first of all to the community of believers rather than to the guild of biblical scholars. But that does not make the tools and tasks of modern biblical criticism unimportant. Rather, they are the constructive means by which the scholar discerns the nature of the ongoing conversation between the church and its biblical canon and helps form the church into a community of worship and witness. Whether from a particular composition's point of origin, or from the various properties added to it during the canonizing process, or from its location within the final canonical product, the scholars recover multiple clues from the ancient church's dialogue with its scriptures that help delimit the boundaries and establish the aims of the same dialogue between today's faith community and its biblical canon.

The articles and talks included in this collection cover fifty years of theological engagement, the primary focus being on education for ministry in Australia and abroad. Despite the diversity of topics, such as hermeneutics, New Testament theology, preaching, ecumenical relations, and early church history, there is a connecting concern to listen to the unique voices of early Christian witnesses as foundational for the faith and the apostolic claims of the church in its present-day witness. The publication of these essays has been suggested for some time. Despite my reluctance to reissue articles written over a period of more than five decades, I have relented in the hope that there will be enough to engage the interest of a variety of readers, and not only former students in seminaries and theological colleges in Australia and various places overseas. Included here are mainly articles written specifically for publication in journals, but also lectures and talks to various groups of clergy, lay people, and theological students. Of prime concern has always been the explication of the Christian faith according to its earliest witnesses in the early church of apostles and martyrs. Faith remains attested and lived, approved not proven.

In the Days of Caesar is a constructive political theology formulated in sustained dialogue with the Pentecostal and charismatic renewal one of the most vibrant religious movements at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Amos Yong here argues that the many tongues, practices, and gifts of renewal Christianity offer up new resources for thinking about how Christian community can engage and transform the social, political, and economic structures of the world. Yong has three goals here. First he seeks to correct stereotypes of Pentecostalism, both political and theological. Secondly he aims to provoke Pentecostals to reflect theologically from out of the depths of their own Pentecostalism rather than merely to adopt some framework for theological or political self-understanding. Finally Yong shows that a distinctively Pentecostal form of theological reflection is not a parochial activity but has constructive potential to illuminate Christian belief and practice. This book s engagement with political theology from a Pentecostal perspective is the first of its kind.

This title was first published in 2002. How does one go about "doing Christian theology"? Yong explores this question by proposing a pneumatological-trinitarian hermeneutic. Its thesis is that interpretation and theological method is an ongoing tri-logue of Spirit-Word-Community: of interpretive subjects as imaginative, obligated and relational agents; of the horizons of the interpreter, the biblical and ecclesial traditions, and the world; and of founding, historical, and ongoing communities of faith and inquiry. Ecumenical perspectives on the topics of pneumatology (the doctrine of the Spirit), metaphysics (foundational pneumatology), epistemology (the pneumatological imagination), and trinitarian theology converge in this book to move forward the present discussion of theological method.

The book of Acts was recognized as canonical throughout most of the Catholic Christian world by the early third century. Its canonization was due largely to its linking of the Old Testament with the ministries of Jesus, the Jerusalem apostles, Paul, and the "bishops" of Ephesus. In this way it functioned as a unifier of the developing Biblical canon and provided justification for episcopal hermeneutical authority. Chapters in The Canonical Function of Acts are "The Patristic Use of Acts: Late Second/Early Third Centuries," "The Patristic Use of Acts: Fourth Century," "The Patristic Use of Acts: The Works of Bede as Synthesis and Development," "A Comparative Analysis of the Apocryphal Acts," "Acts and Contemporary Issues," and "References to the Holy Spirit in Acts."