Adam Harwood has been a theology faculty member of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for nearly a decade. This volume seems to be the fruit of those years of training men and women for ministry, and is aimed at graduate and upper-level undergraduate students (xxii).
Most pastors and seminarians are familiar with Gonzalez’s work on church history. His two-volume The Story of Christianity serves as the standard historical text in first year history courses in addition to offering one the best pathways into church history for a general audience. Gonzalez’s work is standard reading for good reason. He has the rare ability to synthesize deep scholarly knowledge and present it in a way that is readable for eighteen-year-olds. He does this, moreover, while still offering enough substance to be informative for seasoned students of theology.
The premise of this work is that although the Old Testament “provides the basic grammar for the church’s confession on creation, providence, figuration, the nature of biblical inspiration, authorship, Trinity, Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology”—in short, for Christian faith and practice—its witness has been neglected in the modern period, leading to a variety of problems within the Christian church (pp. 1-2).
The premise of this work is that although the Old Testament “provides the basic grammar for the church’s confession on creation, providence, figuration, the nature of biblical inspiration, authorship, Trinity, Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology”—in short, for Christian faith and practice—its witness has been neglected in the modern period, leading to a variety of problems within the Christian church (pp. 1-2).
Perhaps the greatest success of Alan Jacobs’s biography of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is his own facility with the English language. Thomas Cranmer’s masterpiece rivals Shakespeare in beauty and influence. Few contemporary authors do justice to this work, however, not for lack of expertise, but for lack of ability in the language Cranmer himself mastered. Jacobs succeeds where many others have failed. And thank goodness. This is a delightful book. Beginning with Cranmer in his library at Croydon, Jacobs weaves a compelling tale that carries us through nearly five centuries of turbulent history and sends us around the globe into a communion of nearly 80 million Christians worldwide.
Perhaps the greatest success of Alan Jacobs’s biography of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is his own facility with the English language. Thomas Cranmer’s masterpiece rivals Shakespeare in beauty and influence. Few contemporary authors do justice to this work, however, not for lack of expertise, but for lack of ability in the language Cranmer himself mastered. Jacobs succeeds where many others have failed. And thank goodness. This is a delightful book. Beginning with Cranmer in his library at Croydon, Jacobs weaves a compelling tale that carries us through nearly five centuries of turbulent history and sends us around the globe into a communion of nearly 80 million Christians worldwide.
Gilbert Meilaender’s Thy Will Be Done is a creative attempt to think about the Christian life in dialogue with the Decalogue, or, the Ten Commandments. Meilaender’s treatment of the commandments is prefaced by a chapter on “The Law of Christ” wherein he situates the Decalogue within the larger context of the gospel, describing it as “instructional prophecy” (15). In this regard, he follows more closely with Karl Barth’s Law-Gospel reversal and Calvin’s third use of the law than he does with his own Lutheran tradition.
Michael Naughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, has given a thought-provoking gift to the church today. In a society driven by productivity and profits, he’s presented a powerful defense of what would have been known by all Christians just a generation or two ago: that we are finite creatures who have been given a divine calling (or vocation).
N.T. Wright’s latest book outlines seven themes, or “signposts,” that point to the reality of God, and that only find fulfillment and clarity in Jesus Christ.
The book, Broken Signposts, draws upon work done earlier by Wright in Simply Christian (2006), and in his recently published Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology (2019). In this work, Wright focuses on seven themes: Justice, Love, Spirituality, Beauty, Freedom, Truth, and Power, and connects each one with the portrait of Jesus found in John’s Gospel. The result is a beautifully written, rhetorically persuasive, and devotionally rich work of biblical and theological apologetics.
In Taking America Back for God, Whitehead and Perry offer a helpful diagnostic of the engine of American nationalism, revealing both the fuel and force of the movement in but clearly also beyond the church. One of the most helpful insights was the distinction between evangelicalism – and a robustly biblical Christianity and ethic – and Christian nationalism. While many evangelicals hold to some form of Christian nationalism, it is clearly not innate to evangelicalism, and in many ways is diametrically opposed to it.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the mature fruit of the long-time Union Seminary professor and leading liberation theologian James Cone, forces readers to look, and so, perhaps, to see. In doing so, it redresses not an imbalance but a heresy, an injustice.
Should a Christian be antiracist? Before Ibram X Kendi’s book came out, most Christians I know would have seen the answer as an obvious “yes,” akin to asking “Should a Christian be loving, kind, or self-sacrificial?” However, after reading How to be an anti-Racist, given the definition of “antiracism,” I’m not so sure.
As I read Jennings’ book, I could not help but ask myself: Might we be carrying a mutated doctrine of providence in our own theological imaginations? As pastors, we are called to shape the theological vision of our congregations, to form them to see the world through the lens of the gospel, and to do the hard work of exploring the formation of our ecclesial imagination, both for ourselves and our congregation. So how might this mutation be infecting the Body of Christ today?
Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop promises to be “a sermon to White America”—a promise on which Dyson over-delivers. Tears is not merely a sermon; it is an entire liturgy. Whether or not it is truly for White America is, for the time being, an open question. Dyson’s tone and rhetoric often leaves him “preaching to the choir.” But even preaching to the choir has its place in the august history of homiletics. Dyson intentionally locates himself within the great American tradition of jeremiad. Thus, we are not surprised to find Dyson prodding and pleading his readers to return to the path of American holiness.
Time spent with the 4th century pastor posthumously surnamed “the Golden Mouth” proves a worthy investment for anyone who preaches or who thinks carefully about preaching. In recent decades, studies of Chrysostom’s preaching have focused on what his sermons tell us about the congregation. While this remains a worthy endeavor, James Cook’s Peaching and Popular Christianity shifts the focus back to the role of the pastor and the importance of preaching as a discourse.
Since the Yale historian Perry Miller ushered in the Edwards renaissance resulting in Yale’s twenty-six volume print publication of a number of Edwards’ works and the launch of edwards.yale.edu, where the remaining seventy-three volumes of the Edwards corpus may be accessed—scholars, pastors, and serious lay readers have become acquainted with a number of Edwards’ personas. Edwards is known as America’s theologian, a first-rate philosopher, revival preacher extraordinaire, and, more recently, a premier exegete of the Holy Writ (c.f. Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete).
Since the Yale historian Perry Miller ushered in the Edwards renaissance resulting in Yale’s twenty-six volume print publication of a number of Edwards’ works and the launch of edwards.yale.edu, where the remaining seventy-three volumes of the Edwards corpus may be accessed—scholars, pastors, and serious lay readers have become acquainted with a number of Edwards’ personas. Edwards is known as America’s theologian, a first-rate philosopher, revival preacher extraordinaire, and, more recently, a premier exegete of the Holy Writ (c.f. Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete).
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