Karl P. Donfried
— Smith College
‘A penetrating analysis of western Christianity in crisis as well as an incisive and compelling guide for course correction. Written with clarity, insight, and conviction, That All May Believe is Braaten at his very best. A must-read for Christians in the northern hemisphere.’
Gabriel Fackre
— author of The Church
‘Who else but Carl Braaten could show us an ecumenical vision of theology as evangelical but not simply Protestant, catholic but not just Roman, orthodox but not only Eastern? Here is a needed call to share our ecclesial gifts with mutual affirmation on classical convictions and mutual admonition regarding teachable differences. Yet all this is done with a well-known Braaten ‘edge’ — indictment of conventional Christianity and a drifting academic theology. We are in the author’s debt for charting the right course toward visible unity and full communion for a church solid in its centralities and passionate about its mission.’
Frank C. Senn
— Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston, Illinois
‘Employing his gift for incisive analysis of theological movements and trends according to the criterion of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, Braaten affirms the catholic tradition with its canon of Scripture and historic dogmas as the indispensable bearer of the gospel. With evangelical passion for the missionary enterprise, he shows how the church must move toward ecumenical unity in order to bring the world to belief. He does not ignore the reality of the powers of evil that strive against the mission of the gospel. Nor does he shrink from saying that dialogue with the religions must not blunt the apostolic imperative to proclaim the gospel and bring converts into the community of faith in the crucified and risen Christ. This timely book, confessionally anchored and ecumenically hopeful, will engage theological readers from beginning to end.’
Over de auteur
Carl Edward Braaten is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He served as a parish pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Messiah in Minneapolis from 1958-1961. From 1961-1991 Braaten served as a professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. In 1992 he together with Robert W. Jenson founded the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology in Northfield, Minnesota. For fifteen years he served as the executive director of the Center, an ecumenical organization whose mission is to cultivate faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the churches, and also as the editor-in-chief of Pro Ecclesia, a journal of theology published by the Center. Braaten has authored and edited over fifty theological books, including Principles of Lutheran Theology (Fortress Press, 1983), The Future of God: The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), Mother Church: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism (Fortress Press, 1998), Because of Christ: Memoirs of a Lutheran Theologian (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), and Who Is Jesus? Disputed Questions and Answers (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), as well as hundreds of articles and editorials in various academic journals. Braaten was born on January 3, 1929 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He grew up on the island of Madagascar where his parents served as missionaries of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America. He graduated from Augustana Academy, a Lutheran high school in Canton, South Dakota. He received degrees from St. Olaf College (B.A.), Luther Seminary (M. Div.), and Harvard University Divinity School (Th.D.). In 1951 he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), in 1957 a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg where he wrote his dissertation, and in 1967 a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford University. In 1974 he spent a sabbatical making a worldwide lecture tour of various colleges and seminaries in Japan, China, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. This tour resulted in a book on the universal mission of the church entitled, The Flaming Center (Fortress Press, 1977).