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'I plead for the acceptance of this central truth as the great hope of the gospel, that the victory of Jesus Christ must be final and complete, i.e., that nothing can impair the power of his cross and passion to save the entire human race.'--Thomas Allin In 1885, the Rev. Thomas Allin waded into the debates on final punishment that had plagued the Church of England during the nineteenth century. His contribution was a radical book that sought to demonstrate that reason, tradition, and Scripture all affirm that God will one day redeem his whole creation through Jesus Christ. Universal salvation, he maintained, was the only way to coherently affirm the victory of God over evil. Allin's book is one of the first detailed attempts to show that global salvation was not some modern heresy, but an ancient Christian tradition with a serious claim to catholicity and orthodoxy. Turning the tables on the critics, Allin boldly argued that universalism, far from being dangerous, was actually needed to defend the orthodox faith of the church. This new edition of Allin's classic work includes an introduction that sets it in its historical context, the addition of subtitles to help readers navigate the argument, and numerous explanatory annotations.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.

If worship is God centered, and God is the Trinity, then worship should be Trinity centered. Worshipping Trinity explores the meaning and implications of that simple claim. Written for church leaders, worship leaders, and songwriters, as well as for those interested in theology, this volume explains why the Trinity matters so much and explores practical ways our worship can be made more Trinitarian. This second edition is fully updated and expanded.

'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'Lady Julian of Norwich Universalism runs like a slender thread through the history of Christian theology. It has always been a minority report and has often been regarded as heresy, but it has proven to be a surprisingly resilient'idea.'Over the centuries Christian universalism, in one form or another, has been reinvented time and time again. In this book an international team of scholars explore the diverse universalisms of Christian thinkers from the Origen to Moltmann. In the introduction Gregory MacDonald argues that theologies of universal salvation occupy a space between heresy and dogma. Therefore disagreements about whether all will be saved should not be thought of as debates between'the orthodox'and'heretics'but rather as'in-house'debates between Christians. The studies that follow aim, in the first instance, to hear, understand, and explain the eschatological claims of a range of Christians from the third to the twenty-first centuries. They also offer some constructive, critical engagement with those claims. Origen (Tom Greggs) Gregory of Nyssa (Steve Harmon) Julian of Norwich (Robert Sweetman) The Cambridge Platonists (Louise Hickman) James Relly (Wayne K. Clymer) Elhanan Winchester (Robin Parry) Friedrich Schleiermacher (Murray Rae) Thomas Erskine (Don Horrocks) George MacDonald (Thomas Talbott) P. T. Forsyth (Jason Goroncy) Sergius Bulgakov (Paul Gavrilyuk) Karl Barth (Oliver Crisp) Jaques Ellul (Andrew Goddard) J. A. T. Robinson (Trevor Hart) Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edward T. Oakes, SJ) John Hick (Lindsay Hall) Jurgen Moltmann(Nik Ansell)

'Eschatology is the explication of what must be true of the end, both of history and of the individual, if God is to be the God of the biblical faith. All eschatological statements can finally be reduced to, and their validity tested by, sentences beginning:'In the end, God...''J. A. T. Robinson The God revealed in Israel's story is the Lord of history--a God with good purposes for his creation and a God capable of bringing those purposes to pass. All biblical eschatology arises from this fundamental theological insight. If God is this God then what shape must the future have? John A. T. Robinson explores biblical eschatology with an eye both to the text and to contemporary culture. Revealing the foundation of eschatology to be the experience of God by the community of faith, he calls readers to embrace the eschatological vision of the Bible, but to do so in a way that is alert to its mythic character. In the course of these explorations Robinson also lays bare his own theology of universal salvation. But, contrary to what one may expect, this universalism is one that seeks to take both human freedom and the reality of hell with the utmost seriousness. This special edition of John A. T. Robinson's classic text also includes a debate between Robinson and Thomas F. Torrance (played out across three articles from the Scottish Journal of Theology in 1949), an extended introduction by Professor Trevor Hart (University of St Andrews, Scotland), and a foreword by Gregory MacDonald (author of The Evangelical Universalist).