This Festschrift in honor of Professor Charles Fensham aims to celebrate his remarkable contributions to the fields of missiology and systematic theology as well as his advocacy for the rights of the LGBTQI2+ community. His books include Emergence from the Dark Age Ahead (2011), To the Nations for the Earth (2013), Misguided Love (2019), and Mission as Penance (Pickwick Publications, 2023). His scholarly work has left an indelible mark on academia, inspiring generations of students and res...

Who do we meet in the stories Jesus told? In The Parables of Jesus the Galilean: Stories of a Social Prophet, a selection of the parables of Jesus is read using a social-scientific approach. The interest of the author is not the parables in their literary contexts, but rather the parables as Jesus told them in a first-century Jewish Galilean sociopolitical, religious, and economic setting. Therefore, this volume is part of the material turn in parable research and offers a reading of the p...

History Matters brings together distinguished scholars whose essays span diverse periods and contexts yet converge around enduring theological and historical questions. Across studies of witch trials in sixteenth-century Scotland; demonological debates in seventeenth-century England; moral reasoning about wartime bombing, secularization, and doctrinal development in Canadian Protestantism; and the formation of medieval church leaders, the contributors examine how Christian identit...

The Johannine Gospel's Concept of Community takes an interdisciplinary approach to contextualizing the New Testament in an African milieu, which helps Johannine scholarship intersect with Akan anthropology and sociology through a tripartite frame of interpretation--a narratological analysis of community-oriented narratives in John, the exegesis of the Akan concept of community encapsulated in their proverbial lore (the anthology of inestimable information about the Akan conceptualization o...

Most of the challenges today's church is experiencing were experienced by the early church in New Testament times. Knowing this makes it possible to handle the challenges of today more effectively and in a way in which perplexity gives way to sober and informed attitudes. This book brings to the fore the role human sentiments within relational and ministerial dynamics play in creating problems of strife, rivalry, and unhealthy competition among leaders and members of the church, and provid...

The central aim of the Gospel of Mark is to introduce the reader to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In this book, MacDonald examines not just what the Gospel writer says, but also how he says it. When the Gospel of Mark is examined as a complete work, and the motifs of allegiance, opposition, and misunderstand are traced through the narrative, Mark is seen to be a rather sophisticated literary work. The Gospel writer is not simply a compiler of tradition, but one who shaped his narrative for...