Divinity United

René Padilla will be speaking at Spring Garden Church this Sunday (June 17). Along with being an important evangelical figure in Latin America, he is the author of the essay "Evangelical theology in Latin American contexts," in Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier, The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (Cambridge 2007): 259-73. Padilla's essay frames evangelical theology in Latin America around three time periods of history: the Roman Catholic, revolutionary, and evangelical growth. He highlights the way in which Christianity came to Latin America with the imperial power of Spain and Portugal and that the Roman Catholic Church was essentially the same, state and religion. Out of this arose a revolution that sought to see faith in the care of the poor and not just the powerful and rich. Since the revolutionary time, evangelical groups have seen dramatic growth, but Padilla warns that evangelical church in Latin America cannot and should not replace the dom...

In David C. Steinmetz's, 1980 essay "The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis" in Theology Today , he cites the Alexandrian church father Origen: "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, 'planted a paradise eastward in Eden,' and set in it a visible and palpable 'tree of life,' of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of 'good and evil' by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to 'walk in the paradise in the cool of the day' and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate...