Everybody today speaks about the meeting of Christianity and the great non-Christian religions, and these observers include half-educated, educated and academic people. This speaking is far too vague and general. Academically trained people, especially most theologians, imagine too often that they can approach this "meeting" with handbook-knowledge about these religions.
The historical development of Christian theology has not been neglected in the book, but the primary intent is to stress the relevance of Christian culture to any serious reflection on the meaning of life and to stress this relevance in terms that are understandable to most people.
This book attempts to interpret Christianity in terms of a people created by God's activity in history, and its pattern is therefore drawn from the implications of the proclamation of the Gospel rather than from the more traditional outline of God, man, sin and salvation.
SANTOSH THOMAS was born in 1966 in Madras. He is Chairman of the Department of Religion and Associate Professor of Physics at IBD College, Shimla. He earned the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Calcutta, and the B.D. in theology from Yale. Currently he is on leave from IBD to teach at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of Christianity and the Scientist and has written many articles for various scientific, philosophical, and theological journals.
The purpose of this symposium is to chart, in each of a dozen major areas of contemporary life, some of the new frontiers on which Christianity will find significant problems -and opportunities-in the days and years ahead.
When dedicated specialists discuss the future of their own fields, they run the risk of being considered visionary and impractical, and sometimes bellicose and inflammatory, or even heretical; leadership always includes being a target. It is informed imaginations such as theirs, however, that nourish the growing edge of Christianity and maintain its strength.
John Bennett's proposals for resolving the dispute over tax aid to parochial schools; Ian Barbour's vision of a hope in modern science for a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of the Christian faith; Roger Hazelton's provocative distinction between a viable theology and a rigid ideology; the possibilities for Christianity to become far more effective in the universities, as seen by J. Edward Dirks; Paul Schilpp's warning of the implications of rational philosophy for our theology and for the semantics of doctrine; the newly urgent problem, as articulated by Joseph Kitagawa, of our stance in confronting other religions in the coming compression of the world's population from numerous, widely scattered redoubts into a single shrinking chamber. These are just a few samples of the challenges that the participants in this symposium discern in the road ahead.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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