When the early Christian author Tertullian asked what Jerusalem has to do with Athens, he could not have anticipated the intellectual, cultural, and social challenges facing Christians in the twenty-first century. But his question is no less relevant today. What does life in Christ have to do with the stuff of our daily lives--our work, education, citizenship, and behavior? What are we on earth to do? In this wide-ranging collection, J. Daryl Charles shares insights from nearly thirty year...

The divide between the sacred and the secular life has dogged Christians for centuries. Even today, many Christians and church leaders still assume that the workplace is inferior to pastoring, Bible study, mission trips, and the like. This volume provides a different approach: it surveys the persistence of the sacred-secular divide in Christian history to develop a more robust theology of vocation while engaging with both the Old and New Testament. Charles offers a vision for numerous ways...

Every successive generation finds fresh reasons for the study of natural law. Current interest in the natural law may well be due to a pervasive moral pessimism in the Western cultural context and wider contemporary geopolitical challenges. Those geopolitical challenges result from two significant and worrisome global developments – unprecedented violent persecution of religious minorities on several continents and a growing climate of secular hostility toward religious faith in Western so...

Alluring yet frustrating. Charming yet maddening. Such is our reaction to the literary wonder called Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth), a "wisdom" book that has captured the fascination of readers everywhere for over two millennia with its mix of poetry and personal reflection, its probing of the human experience and its piercing assessment of human activity--especially human labor. Its "All is meaningless!" lament, which frames the document, is well known to all. But its message and the structure o...

Natural law has long been a cornerstone of Christian political thought, providing moral norms that ground law in a shareable account of human goods and obligations. Despite this history, twentieth and twenty-first-century evangelicals have proved quite reticent to embrace natural law, casting it as a relic of scholastic Roman Catholicism that underestimates the import of scripture and the division between Christians and non-Christians. As recent critics have noted, this reluctance has pose...

Erland Waltner explains how 1 Peter applies Jesus' teaching on loving the enemy to the life situation of scattered Christians in Asia Minor. Peter empowers believers to be communities of hope, not retaliating for the abuse they suffer, but bearing witness of their Lord by word, lifestyle, and doing good.J. Daryl Charles shows how 2 Peter and Jude are relevant since the church still faces ethical compromises and pastoral dilemmas. Their apocalyptic imagery stresses that the concerns...

Natural Law Today: The Present State of the Perennial Philosophy explains and defends various aspects of traditional natural law ethical theory, which is rooted in a broad understanding of human nature. Some of the issues touched upon include the relation of natural law to speculative reason and human ends (teleology), the relationship between natural law and natural theology, the so-called naturalistic fallacy (deriving “ought” from “is”), and the scope of natural knowledge of the precept...

Conflict and war were common during the Reformation era. Throughout the sixteenth century, rising religious and political tensions led to frequent conflict and culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) that devastated much of Germany and killed one-third of its population. Some of the warfare, as in central and southern Europe, was between Christians and Muslims. Other warfare, in central and northwestern Europe, was confessional warfare between Catholics and Protestants. Religion was ...

With issues of war and peace at the forefront of current events, an informed Christian response is needed. This timely volume answers 104 questions from a just-war perspective, offering thoughtful yet succinct answers.Ranging from the theoretical to the practical, the volume looks at how the just-war perspective relates to the philosopher, historian, statesman, theologian, combatant, and individual—with particular emphases on its historical development and application to contempora...

Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity addresses each of the key public policy issues of our techno-future from the perspective of deeply informed and philosophically inclined public intellectuals. Among the issues addressed are the detachment of our idea of justice from any credible foundation; Tocqueville’s prescience on how a “cognitive elite” might be the aristocracy to be most feared in our time; robotization and the possibility of being ruled by morally challenged robots; organ ...

Carl R. Trueman and Other Christian Evangelical Scholars Examine the Life and Work of Renowned Catholic, Social Conservative Thinker Robert P. GeorgeRobert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, is one of the most influential conservative intellectuals of his generation. Among many honors and accolades, George received the US Presidential Citizens Medal from President George W. Bush and served as chairman of the United States Commi...

The authors speak from a just-war moral perspective to provide Christians with expert and accessible answers to more than one hundred common questions concerning the ethics of war. With issues of war and peace at the forefront of current events, an informed Christian response is needed. This timely volume answers 104 questions from a just-war perspective, offering thoughtful yet succinct answers. Ranging from the theoretical to the practical, the volume looks at how the just-war perspective...