Monday, July 29, 2013

Author Frank Viola on Good Reads

Frank Viola's books

GOD'S FAVORITE PLACE ON EARTH
BEYOND EVANGELICAL
EPIC JESUS
REVISE US AGAIN
JESUS MANIFESTO
FINDING ORGANIC CHURCH
FROM ETERNITY TO HERE
REIMAGINING CHURCH
PAGAN CHRISTIANITY
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE NT CHURCH


Sunday, July 21, 2013

Heaven's Race Card

The Zimmerman trial and the tragedy that surrounds it has captured the world’s attention. Including that of the body of Christ.
Media coverage has heightened passions on both ends. Conversations about race, law, injustice, prejudice, guns, etc. are all being argued and inflamed.
In this article, we don’t want to weigh in on the public debate. Instead, our passion is to encourage God’s people everywhere to transcend the debate that the world is holding on its own terms by seeing ethnicity through the eyes of our Lord. There is only one race, the human race, which is comprised of different ethnic groups (Acts 17:26).
We want you, dear Christian, to take your cue from the New Testament believers, for they can teach us a great deal about this subject.

Monday, July 15, 2013

God's Eternal Purpose

Do you think that someone could agree with you completely about what the church is and could be but disagree about the form a local church should take (i.e. traditional, denominational church vs. house or organic church)?

Absolutely. In fact, Christians from a wide variety of church forms and expressions have endorsed the book: Ed Stetzer (Baptist), Alan Hirsh and Dan Kimball (Missional), Shane Claiborne (New Monastic), Myles Munroe and James Goll (Charismatic), Brian McLaren (Emergent), Greg Boyd (traditional evangelical church form), Leonard Sweet (Methodist, and who knows what else!), Michael Spencer (New Covenant-Reformation), Ralph Neighbor (Cell Church) are just some of them. In addition, I‘ve received a fair share of enthusiastic mail from Anglicans on the one hand and Reformed folks on the other, both of whom have resonated strongly with the message of the book.

All told, From Eternity to Here is a book written for all of God‘s people irrespective of which church forms and structures they might embrace.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Author Frank Viola on N.T. Wright and F.F. Bruce

Frank Viola

From Frank Viola:

"My favorite New Testament scholar of the 20th century was the British scholar F.F. Bruce. Bruce was a bright and shining light” in 20th century evangelicalism. He was prolific, churning out high quality work year after year. He had the rare ability to write academic books as well as popular (accessible) books. Bruce’s specialty was Jesus and Paul
.
F.F. Bruce also understood the importance of chronology in New Testament studies. Consequently, he published a translation of the New Testament that put all of Paul’s letters in chronological order. (Yes – cough — F.F. Bruce was a major inspiration for me. Hence, I credit him in my Untold Story of the New Testament Church.)
In addition, Bruce was a powerful apologist, substantiating the historicity of the Gospels in the face of 20th century liberalism. To top it off, F.F. Bruce was a capable theologian as well as a New Testament exegete (a rare combination).
Enter N.T. Wright. Another British evangelical scholar.
N.T. Wright is the 21st century equivalent to F.F. Bruce. What Bruce did for evangelicalism in the modern world, Wright is doing for evangelicalism in the postmodern world.
Like F.F. Bruce, N.T. Wright is remarkably prolific, he has the rare ability to write academically as well as popularly, he specializes in Jesus and Paul, and he is an effective and compelling apologist. (Wright has brilliantly excoriated the arguments of liberal scholars who traffic in historical Jesus studies.)
Like Bruce, Wright is both a theologian and an exegete, and he wrote his own translation of the New Testament (though not in chronological sequence).
To my mind, N.T. Wright is the new F.F. Bruce."