The
Modern Churchpeople's Union
Modern Believing 49:2 July 2008
Books Reviewed - each picture link will take you to Amazon
Margaret Barker,
The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God.
London: SPCK, 2007. Pp. 144.Review by Augustine Casiday
The book under review is part of Margaret Barker's ‘Temple Theology' project. In keeping with that project, in this book she elucidates in its complexity the Jewish heritage of early Christianity, as against, for example, the view that Christianity is characteristically a product of the interaction of Jewish religion and Greek philosophy. The project is cumulative, and in consequence the argument in this book moves very briskly.
Paul M. Collins,
Christian Inculturation in India
Liturgy, Worship and Society Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xvii, 234.
Anyone who has set foot in India recognises that here Christianity finds itself as not only a minority religion, but one located among a wide variety of vibrant religious cultures with living cult and ancient scriptures. It might be a tiny statue of Ganesh on the bus driver's dashboard, or a colourful temple, or the initially incongruous sight of a cow with decorated horns calmly walking along a footpath. To Christians long familiar with their religion being either identical with culture (as in Europe) or capable of being identified with ‘the advent of civilisation' (as in Africa), India was a problem.Reviewed by Thomas O'Loughlin
Larry J. Kreitzer,
Hierapolis in the Heavens: Studies in the Letter to the Ephesians ,
Library of New Testament Studies 368. London: T & T Clark/Continuum, 2007. Pp. 160.
Reviewed by Thomas O'Loughlin
In 1997 Larry Kreitzer published an excellent commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians where he argued that this NT letter, traditionally attributed to Paul, was written by someone who was a disciple of Paul in one church – he argues for Colossae, in the Lycus valley – to another in the area. This daughter-church he argued was in the city of Hierapolis (only a few miles from Colossae) which was famous for its volcanic cave that was believed to be one of the entrances to the underworld. Since then he has developed particular aspects of that basic thesis, or found new ways of arguing their credibility, in a series of articles in diverse academic locations, and now he has reprinted these studies in this book.
Angela Shier-Jones (ed.),
Children of God: Towards a Theology of Childhood
Peterborough: Epworth, 2007. Pp. xvii, 205.
Reviewed by Steve Dixon
The government has an ‘Every Child Matters' agenda; ‘pester power' makes every child also matter to the commercial world; in 2006 BBC Radio 4 ran an extensive series on the invention of childhood; The Children's Society is in the midst of a thorough ‘Good Childhood Inquiry'. It seems that everyone has something to say about childhood. Children of God: Towards a Theology of Childhood attempts to give some response to the question, ‘What does theology have to say on the matter?'