Christian theology

Dr. Allison served many years as a staff member of Campus Crusade, where he worked in campus ministry and as a missionary to Italy and Switzerland. He also serves as the Secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society and the book review editor for theological, historical, and philosophical studies for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Dr. Allison is the author of several books, including most recently Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Zondervan, 2011) and Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Crossway, forthcoming). As this issue of SBJT explores the doctrine of the Trinity—that God eternally exists as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each of whom is fully God, yet there is only one God—it is good to remember that this orthodox position was hammered out amid challenges to a “Trinitarian consciousness” that arose in the early church. By this consciousness I mean a sense, grounded in the teaching of ...

A systematic theologian offers a theological aggiornamento (bringing-up-to-date) of two critical doctrinal areas that affect Christian education: (a) the doctrine of Scripture, with particular attention to recent challenges to the inerrancy of Scripture; and (b) the doctrine of humanity, with particular focus on the latest findings from neurophysiology and current evangelical reworkings of the doctrine of theological anthropology. For each doctrinal area explored, implications for Christian educators are indicated and discussed.

Dr. Allison served many years as a staff member of Campus Crusade, where he worked in campus ministry and as a missionary to Italy and Switzerland. He also serves as the book review editor for theological, historical, and philosophical studies for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Dr. Allison is the author of Getting Deep: Understand What You Believe about God and Why (B&H, 2002) and Jesusology: Understand What You Believe About Jesus and Why (B&H, 2005). While r ecently engaged in some careful consideration of my own sanctification, or ongoing maturity in the Christian faith, I turned to the apostle John’s affirmation: “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him” (1 John 5:18).1 I experienced a deep sense of joy as I contemplated the protection promised in this verse, while at the same time I puzzled over the evident discrepancy between the clause “does not k...

have teamed up to write Is the Reformation Over? a remarkable book about the recent relationship between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. The subtitle of the book notes that their work is to be "an evangelical assessment of contemporary Roman Catholicism," which examines recent friendly relations and continuing difficulties between these two religious groups. The ambitious nature of their project is immediately apparent as the reader is taken on a whirlwind tour Protestant and Catholic animosity, spanning five centuries, and recent manifestations of Roman Catholic and evangelical cooperation. The difficult task before Noll and Nystrom is taking all of these manifestations and making sense of them for the reader. Given the amount of information with which they deal, they do an admirable job. Nonetheless, even as a scholar of American religious history and evangelicalism, I found myself grateful for the "taking stock" summaries concluding each chapter. History is the strength of this book. Here the authors' expertise shines; through the lens of history, they show the reader that animosities between Catholics and evangelicals have subsided since the midtwentieth century. If Martin Luther thought the pope an antichrist in the sixteenth century, little had changed by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout most of American history, mainstream evangelicals Protestants believed Roman Catholicism, not only theologically erroneous, but incompatible with democratic institutions. This leads the reader to ask why cooperation after centuries of animosity has occurred between these once rivals. The authors cogently argue that changes within the Catholic Church, world Christianity, American society and politics, and evangelicalism helped facilitate the change. In short, this can be boiled down to the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council and subsequent ecumenical outreach by Pope John Paul II, the advent of a post-Christian context of the western world, the extension of personal liberty and individualism in American society and politics, and the advent of evangelical self-critique and an 1

Opening the window on how poorly-managed school environments affect children and staff, the New York State Association of School Nurses surveyed its members last winter and then urged passage of laws to protect children from toxics. Seventy-one percent of 206 nurses from across the state

A systematic theologian offers a theological aggiornamento (bringing-up-to-date) of two critical doctrinal areas that affect Christian education: (a) the doctrine of Scripture, with particular attention to recent challenges to the inerrancy of Scripture; and (b) the doctrine of humanity, with particular focus on the latest findings from neurophysiology and current evangelical reworkings of the doctrine of theological anthropology. For each doctrinal area explored, implications for Christian educators are indicated and discussed.

Studies (KUIS) has engaged in redesigning a curriculum for the Self-Access Learning Centre (SALC) by following a framework adapted from the Nation and Macalister (2010) model. This framework, which is based on an investigation of student needs, aims to establish criteria in the shape of clear principles and goals. Following the Environment Analysis stage, detailed in the previous installment of this column (Thornton, 2013),