Living Belief

Description

A leading theologian’s concise guide to the beliefs, commitments, and practices of Christianity. What do Christians believe? But also, what do they do? And feel? 

With decades of experience teaching the essentials of Christian faith, Douglas Ottati still finds these questions—and more like them—dynamic and compelling. In Living Belief, he moves beyond trite answers, drawing from the deep well of tradition to offer up wisdom from the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Lord’s Prayer. In so doing, Ottati explores key Christian themes, such as creation, redemption, and love—of neighbor, enemy, and the weak and dependent. 

Concise and approachable, Living Belief makes no claims to be a definitive account of Christianity but rather attempts “to introduce a faith that remains a source of meaning and direction, that orients, that encourages and assures, that supplies moral standards and calls for contrition, and that furnishes grounds for perseverance and hope.” In connection with each chapter, Ottati includes questions for discussion, so that readers—those revisiting the core components of their Christian faith and those learning about it for the first time—can together continue the work, begun here, of understanding the multifaceted life of devotion that is Christianity.

Douglas F. Ottati is the Craig Family Distinguished Professor of Reformed Theology and Justice at Davidson College in North Carolina. He taught for many years at what is now Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics. He is also a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Among his other books are A Theology for the Twenty-First Century and Hopeful Realism: Reclaiming the Poetry of Theology.

Table of ContentsGetting Started
Part One: The Apostles’ Creed
          1. The Text, History, and General Theology of the Apostles’ Creed
          2. An Overview of the First Article
          3. The Good Creation and the Human Creature
          4. God-Talk
          5. An Overview of the Second Article
          6. The Comma
          7. An Alternative Leader
          8. An Overview of the Third Article
          9. The Spirit and the Church
Part Two: The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount
          10. The Commandments
          11. Jesus’s Great Sermons
Part Three: The Lord’s Prayer
          12. The Lord’s Prayer and the Practice of Praying
Postscript: An Examined Faith
Study Questions

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 6 × 9 in