To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face

by Robert H Churchill

2011 · University of Michigan Press

After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement’s most extreme voices that attracted the lion's share of attention. In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement. Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government. A historian of early America, Robert H. Churchill has published numerous articles on American political violence and the right to keep and bear arms. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Hartford. "This book is about how we think about the past, how cultural memories are formed and evolve, and how these memories then come to impact current understandings of issues. Churchill provides an enlightening analysis of the ideology, structure, and purpose of the militia movement. Where much scholarship has categorized it as a cohesive, single movement, Churchill begins the process of unraveling its complexity." ---Steve Chermak, Michigan State University "To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face addresses an area---the relationship of American political violence to American ideology---that is of growing importance and that is commanding an ever increasing audience, and it does so in a way like nothing else in the field." ---David Williams, Indiana University Bloomington

The Essential Nature of New Testament Preaching

by Robert H. Mounce

2005 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

This book makes plain that the man in the pulpit occupies a position of unrivaled significance in the life and destiny of his fellow man. It concerns the 'kerygma,' or, as Professor A. M. Hunter of King's College, Aberdeen, states in the Foreword, the preached Gospel which the first heralds of Christ proclaimed to the great pagan world of their day, that Gospel which, after nineteen centuries, remains the Word from the Beyond for our human predicament. It tells what the Proclamation really was and how it runs, like a golden thread, through the whole New Testament.Ó Dr. Mounce introduces his study with a survey of related terms as they appear in classical Greek, proceeds to show the role of the herald in the life and culture of the Old Testament world through a careful investigation of the Septuagint, and, more importantly, gives a detailed analysis of the nature of preaching as it occurs in the New Testament itself. The closing chapter forcibly demonstrates that true Christian preaching has ever been and always should be the medium through which God contemporizes His historic self-disclosure in Christ, and offers man the opportunity to respond in faith. As a study of the heart of the joyful message that the first heralds of Christianity proclaimed, this book breaks fresh ground for a new understanding of the vital significance of preaching.

God So Loved the World

by Robert Spitzer

2016 · Ignatius Press

In this volume the brilliant Fr. Spitzer probes in detail the major question that if an intelligent Creator God – manifest in logical proofs, scientific evidence, and near death experiences - who is the source of our desire for the sacred, and the transcendental desires for truth, love, goodness, and beauty, would want to reveal himself to us personally and ultimately. He then shows this is reasonable not only in light of our interior experience of a transcendent Reality, but also that a completely intelligent Reality is completely positive--implying its possession of a completely positive virtue – namely love, defined as agape. This leads to the question whether God might be unconditionally loving, and if he is, whether he would want to make a personal appearance to us in a perfect act of empathy – face to face. After examining the rational evidence for this, he reviews all world religions to see if there is one that reveals such a God – an unconditionally loving God who would want to be with us in perfect empathy. This leads us to the extraordinary claim of Jesus Christ who taught that God is "Abba", the unconditionally loving Father. Jesus' claims go further, saying that He is also unconditional love, and that his mission is to give us that love through an act of complete self-sacrifice. He also claims to be the exclusive Son of the Father, sent by God to save the world, and the one who possesses divine power and authority. The rest of the book does an in-depth examination of the evidence for Jesus' unconditional love of sinners, his teachings, his miracles, and his rising from the dead. As well as the evidence for Jesus' gift of the Holy Spirit that enabled his disciples to perform miracles in his name, and evidence for the presence of the Holy Spirit today. If this strong evidence convinces us to believe that Jesus is our ultimate meaning and destiny, and desire His saving presence in our lives, that evidence should galvanize the Holy Spirit within us to show that Jesus is Lord and Savior, the way, the truth, and the life. And our faith in him will transform everything we think about our nature, dignity, and destiny– and how we live, endure suffering, contend with evil, and treat our neighbor.

Salvation Accomplished by the Son

by Robert A. Peterson

2024 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

In this unique and insightful work, Robert Peterson insists that we look afresh at all that the Bible teaches about who our Savior is and what he has accomplished, with the conviction that a careful examination of this teaching will lead us to adoration and worship. Peterson explains the saving work of Christ, both his deeds and the biblical pictures illustrating them, and thereby points to the magnitude of what Jesus did to save sinners. Offered here is a substantive, significant, and enduring treatise on a key Christian doctrine—the work of Christ.