John Goldingay

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Mark Boda begins this book with a great quote from Luther affirming that 'the entire life of believers should be one of repentance.' So repentance is not just for gross wrongdoers or people who have turned right away from God. It is for all of us. Most of the book then treats the biblical material book by book, even passage by passage, which will make it especially useful for Bible study and for preaching. It's not a book to read in one go. Read it section by section and let it draw you to God. But Dr. Boda doesn't stop at the book-by-book treatment, and he is especially illuminating when he stands back and relects on the material as a whole.”

"Here Are Your Gods"

Christian Living

“Fearless, provocative, clear, direct, sharp, urgent, wide-horizoned: it was all those things when he wrote it. But in light of subsequent events, by the time it's published it is a tract for the times.”

A Boundless God

Theology

“It’s well known that the Hebrew word for spirit is also the word for wind and for breath, but I don’t think anyone has done as much with that fact as Jack Levison in this book. He shows how the word rûaḥ speaks of the spiritual and the material not as two separate things but as related facets of the way that God in his liveliness involves himself in the world. It is appropriate that this book on the spirit should be inspiring. A beautiful combination of the academic and the nurturing, it works by careful, thoughtful, life-giving study of whole passages where rûaḥ appears, and it invites measured and reflective assimilation.”

A Hermeneutic of Imagination

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Nobody told me that we need imagination to read the Scriptures. The stress was on thinking logically. Using our imagination might lead us astray. Yet failing to use our imagination might lead us just as far astray. So this is a really useful book to enable us to work out the vital role of imagination in the study of the Scriptures. It’s good on the theory, and it has lots of useful examples.”

A Theological Approach to the Old Testament

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“This marvelous book grew out of a course of lectures expounding a 'Biblical Theology of the Old Testament for Pastors.' Who better than my colleague, Leslie Allen, to write on this subject? He loves the Old Testament and he has a pastor's heart (every Friday he puts his Hebrew Bible down and visits our local hospital as a chaplain). No danger that this volume will either sell the reader short on the inherent significance of the Old Testament or sell the reader short on its significance in the context of Christian faith. And it does indeed fulfill both of those expectations.”

As It Was in the Beginning

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“I have wondered about 'new creation' in Paul and I was intrigued by a study that works with the thesis that Paul 'would have read and interpreted Isaiah as a unified whole.' Dr. Owens follows the trajectory of passages in Isaiah 40-66 in a sure-footed fashion, illumines the texts he studies, and opened my eyes helpfully to the issues involved in studying the Pauline texts about new creation.”

Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament

Theology

“Wow, Gary Anderson thinks that the Old Testament may help us understand Christian doctrine, and vice versa! What a marvelous series of studies, full of connections one hadn't made before and full of informative footnotes!”

Confronting Old Testament Controversies

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread, but Tremper Longman is no fool. This book covers ground on which people can make fools of themselves, but he has been thinking for decades about the questions he discusses here. He has stayed abreast of changing views among evangelicals and knows how to keep reflecting on issues without giving up ground when he knows one needs to stand firm. If you want not-too-conservative and not-too-liberal answers to the questions he raises, you will find them here.”

Conspicuous in His Absence

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“What is the significance of books in the Bible that don't mention God? Chloe Sun has been thinking around this question and reading around what other scholars have written about it, and she here offers a book full of insights on whether God is there when you can't see him and what this God is like. In Conspicuous in His Absence you get the fruit of wide reading in the scholarly literature and discerning reflection in light of this reading. It's easy to stay with the mainstream of scriptural teaching and ignore its more exotic byways, and Professor Sun invites readers to profit from the margins without losing the mainstream.”

Dementia

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“For the last decade of her life my first wife, Ann, couldn't speak, not because she couldn't move her lips but because she could no longer work out what to say. She had dementia. . . . I would worry over how she and God could relate if she couldn't think straight, so I love Swinton's statement that people such as Ann 'remain tightly held within the memories of God' and I resonate with this description of the church as 'a living body of remembering friends.' Indeed, as I read this book, I kept saying, 'Yes, Yes, Yes!'”

Did God Really Command Genocide?

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“This brave, hard-nosed, and wide-ranging study constitutes a serious attempt at facing all the varied aspects of a question that troubles so many people. Well done!”

Discovering Isaiah

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Isaiah is the richest book with the richest story, from its origins to the present day. Andrew Abernethy has written a rich guide to this story and to the book itself.”

Discovering Psalms

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“This introduction to the Psalms, by a scholar who has been studying them and praying them for decades, amply demonstrates their potential to feed our worship and revolutionize the way we pray.”

Divine Council, Ethics, and Resistance in Psalm 82

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“You may have been puzzled by Psalm 82. It’s an extraordinary psalm! But Erica Mongé-Greer has also written an extraordinary study of it, in which she looks at the psalm from all sorts of interesting and thought-provoking angles. Her study might even push you into doing something about the powerless rather than being the kind of person that the psalm confronts.”

Dust and Ashes

Arts & Literature

“"James Crenshaw's prose always makes me think slowly yet also furiously, and refuses me the luxury of easy answers. Now his poems do the same, though they also open up avenues to hope and trust.”

Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations

Theology

“The various 'isms' usually start outside evangelicalism. They arrive in nonevangelical packaging and may provoke questioning and anxiety, but then they may get thought through within an evangelical framework and become fruitful within evangelicalthinking and commitments in a way that can be instructive for the whole church. It can take time to navigate the sequence, even though evangelicalism is related to Protestantism, and postcolonialism (as one of the contributors notes) is a protest movement. This collection is the marvelous fruit of the work of those who have reflected deeply on postcolonialism. It's neat that so many of the chapters are cowritten. And whereas terms like empire can sound as if they apply chiefly to the empire against which the American colonies rebelled, it's encouraging for a Brit to be able to note how much attention is paid to the colonial nature of thinking and action within the Americas.”

Exegeting Orality

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“It’s obvious to modern people that the Bible is a book that we read (silently). Yet over the centuries, most people listened to it read by someone else, and the people who wrote the Bible expected that most people would hear it read in that way. So in their oral culture they wrote it with that expectation. So it’s useful to have this book from which you will learn a lot about scholarly theories concerning orality.”

God Behaving Badly

Apologetics

“David Lamb faces up to all the questions that most often trouble people about the God of the Old Testament. Written in a winsome and engaging way, this book is going to help many who wonder if the God of the Old Testament is indeed the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

God's Messiah in the Old Testament

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the King. So what happens when you look back into the Old Testament for passages that might foreshadow him? If you wonder about the kind of passages that could have fed into an understanding of Jesus as King, then this book will examine them for you and with you.”

Hearing the Message of Daniel

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Many people are afraid of where the world is going, and Christians often seem as fearful as anyone. Daniel’s visions showed his hearers why they didn’t need to be afraid, and the stories about him and his friends modeled what it meant to be brave, forthright, and faithful. Chris Wright has often preached on Daniel, and he’s therefore just the person to help us hear the book’s message for the pressing context of our lives today.”