Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Church Leadership & Ministry
“If you are a pastor who is feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities, intimidated by social challenges, or simply uncertain about your priorities for how to spend your time and energy, then please read this book. It will relieve you of false burdens, embolden your ministry of the Word, and energize you for your true pastoral vocation. And, for those contemplating a call to become ministers of the gospel, this book provides a rule of 'plumb'—namely, a practical plan for stewarding the mysteries of God and for making the potentially crooked pastoral path straight. Highly recommended.”
A Practical Primer on Theological Method
Theology
“A Practical Primer on Theological Method flouts the proverbial social wisdom not to discuss religion during dinner and instead encourages us in Table God-talk. Theology is discourse about God, and a good conversation will include voices from a number of disciplinary fields, each of which has a seat, and a voice, at the Table. Doing theology also requires table manners, virtues that keep the conversation appropriately critical and constructive. So pull up a seat as Glenn Kreider and Michael Svigel set the Table for a nourishing meal. Watch and learn as they serve up the various sources, norms, and tasks—the main courses of which the feast of theology consists.”
A Primer for Christian Doctrine
Theology
“Wilson's Primer makes it not only safe but salutary for churchgoers to reenter doctrinal waters, and his clear writing ensures that no one will get in over his or her head and drown. Simple but not dumbed down, Wilson's presentation of theology is both welcome and winsome.”
Apologetics
“Pascal lived centuries ago but his thoughts continue to speak to and resonate with our present human condition, even more so now thanks to Stephen Williams’s ambassadorial work. One wonders what the world would be like if Pascal rather than Descartes had had modernity’s ear. Williams thinks he knows: it would be more realistic and hearty (the operative term in Pascal’s thinking), acknowledging both the contradiction of sinful humanity and the rationality of salvation in Christ.”
Theology
“In a modern secular age, it is all too easy for Christians to overlook the major source of conflict in the drama of redemption: the devilish powers of darkness that seek to seduce hearts away from the truth of the gospel with glittering images and empty promises. Graham Cole rightly reminds us that, while angels and demons are not at the heart of biblical revelation, to ignore them is to risk being blindsided. Against the Darkness is a model of how to judiciously read Scripture and formulate Christian doctrine on matters that are both peripheral and essential to the Bible’s main storyline. This is theology for the twenty-first-century church, and Cole helpfully draws out the pastoral implications of angelology and demonology—all the while never losing sight of the centrality of Jesus Christ and his lordship over the angelic and earthly realms.”
An Introduction to Theological Anthropology
Theology
“What’s a theologian, whose speciality is God, doing making claims about the nature of humanity? Isn’t Reformed theology, with its doctrine of total depravity, itself a crime against humanity? Farris’s book responds to these and other contemporary questions, arguing that humans will be able to answer the big questions about meaning, identity, and destiny only insofar as they can position themselves in relation to God and to the story of God’s relationship to humanity attested in Scripture. To an age poised between modern confidence in science that reduces humanity to its materiality and postmodern suspicion of fixed forms that throws open the Pandora’s box of human plasticity, Farris calls for a reconsideration of the biblical narrative and a retrieval of the way the church has traditionally interpreted it. While not shirking the contemporary challenges—their name is Legion—Farris here lets Jesus Christ, the God-man and light of the world, illumine what it means to be human.”
Christian Living
“Prayer is theology in miniature, the essence of the creature’s interpersonal relation with the Creator: human answering speech to the divine address. Prayer is also the beating heart of the Christian life, a participation through the gift of the Spirit in the Son’s response to the Father: “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them to pray, and as Brendsel rightly notes in this important book, teaching God’s people to pray is one of the pastor’s chief tasks. Answering Speech is an excellent resource for doing just that. Brendsel helpfully engages both theological and practical matters and, in the process, helps us see all of life as eminently theological, an ongoing dialogue in different registers—confession, intercession, adoration—with our covenantal, triune God.”
Apologetics at the Cross, Second Edition
Apologetics
“Just when you think this book is the comprehensive apologetics textbook you’ve been looking for—covering Scripture, history, philosophy, and culture—you realize it’s also something more: a creative, original proposal for an “inside-out” apologetic that is precisely what we need in our secular age. If you're skittish about “apologetics,” like I am, this book will show you another way. JAMES K. A. SMITH, professor of philosophy, Calvin College, and author of You Are What You Love and How (Not) to Be Secular This is a welcome addition to the library of books on apologetics. It is also a rare book: most defenses of the faith do not make the gospel their lodestar and template. This one breaks new ground in letting the reason for the Christian hope—Jesus crucified and risen—guide and govern the forms and methods of faith’s defense. Apologetics at the Cross incorporates biblical materials, the history of apologetics, and theology to make a cumulative case for the church as a socially embodied cruciform argument whose members are alert to how different people may need to be shown various different paths (i.e., kinds of arguments) that lead to, and into, the reality of the gospel. This is a book brim full of apologetic wisdom—most notably, the wisdom of the cross.”
Aquinas, Science, and Human Uniqueness
Science & Faith
“Mary Vanden Berg makes a persuasive case for retrieving Aquinas’s notion of the soul’s intellective capacity as the best way forward for doing justice not only to human uniqueness but to the human dignity of the disabled as well. The argument turns on rightly dividing physical from metaphysical judgments, science from theology. The conclusion—that humans are material-spiritual worshiping animals—is compelling.”
Theology
“If Christian theology had superheroes, Athanasius would perhaps lead the list thanks to his sometimes single-handed struggle to maintain trinitarian orthodoxy. Leithart's excellent study shows Athanasius to be christocentric in his biblical interpretation and theology long before Barth made it fashionable to be so. The 'sense of the Fathers' is indeed being visited upon their evangelical great-grandchildren, and with mostly salutary effect. Leithart has got the Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality series off to a splendid start.”
Theology
“Doing theology and reading fiction figure among my best-loved pastimes. Reading theology about fiction ranks almost as high. Yet Balm in Gilead is something better: an interdisciplinary conversation about the theological presuppositions and implications of one of America's most important living novelists. Entertaining does not come close to doing justice to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, though they are that. Robinson raises profound questions about the shape of Christian ministry and community and, in so doing, exposes and seeks to transform America's secular social imaginary. In similar fashion, Balm in Gilead raises profound questions about Robinson's work and theology, putting her in conversation with theologians past (Augustine, John Calvin) and present (Rowan Williams).”
Barth’s Theological Ontology of Holy Scripture
Theology
“This is a welcome attempt to clarify a key aspect of Barth's doctrine of Scripture. Yuen surveys a number of Barth's writings and sermons that others neglect, and in so doing discovers the importance for Barth of the Spirit's vivifying work in biblical authors and readers alike. This study provides further help in correcting the tendency to view the Bible and its interpretation apart from the activity of the triune God, in whom the Bible lives, and moves, and has its being.”
Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
“Pastors minister; theologians seek—and minister—understanding. Ministering understanding of how the Bible addresses real-world issues is the great privilege and responsibility of the pastor theologian. Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson have put together a whole ministry team that ministers understanding worth its weight in gold on one of the most socially complicated, politically fraught, yet existentially unavoidable issues of our day or any: human sexuality. In an age where the male/female duality is in danger of becoming extinct, these essays serve as salient reminders of the beauty and mystery of God's created order: 'Male and female he created them' (Gen 1:27).”
Church Leadership & Ministry
“Pastors minister; theologians seek—and minister—understanding. Ministering understanding of how the Bible addresses real-world issues is the great privilege and responsibility of the pastor theologian. Todd Wilson and Gerald Hiestand have put together a whole ministry team that ministers understanding worth its weight in gold on one of the most socially complicated, politically fraught, yet existentially unavoidable issues of our day or any: human sexuality. In an age where the male/female duality is in danger of becoming extinct, these essays serve as salient reminders of the beauty and mystery of God's created order: 'Male and female he created them' (Gen 1:27).”
Arts & Literature
“This book reminds us that the iniquities and inquiries alike of the (nineteenth-century) fathers have been visited on the children of modernity. We are all products, conscious or not, of a powerful cultural sea change that has made belief in God difficult and supernaturalism hard to imagine. Roger Lundin features poets, novelists, and theologians who not only express this difficulty but chart a way through it. This is not a book for specialists, however, but for all wide-awake Christians who have wondered how we came to be where we are and what we can do to renew the sea of faith at a time of its low Western tide.”
Theology
“Those who do not know the history of theology are doomed to repeat it. Alan Torrance and Andrew Torrance make good on this adage, showing that the same religious, cultural, and philosophical currents of immanentism that Kierkegaard and Barth each confronted in their own time and context continue to bedevil contemporary theology. Accordingly, what could have been simply a competent comparative historical study (which it is) here takes on additional urgency, for the temptation to let culture shape Christian theology and church practice remains strong. Beyond Immanence is a timely reminder that Barth and Kierkegaard were not geniuses, but apostles: people who know the transcendent God only because of what they have been told about Jesus Christ, the space-time incarnation of the Word of God.”
Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
“Watkin turns and overturns the tables of today’s culture-changers by examining various critical theories through biblical lenses rather than vice versa. Biblical Critical Theory is an important update of Augustine’s City of God, a proposal for making biblical sense of what is happening in contemporary culture. This is the ultimate how-to book for disciples looking to beat ideological swords and other weapons in the popular culture wars into gospel plowshares, tools for making sense of, and reconciling, the contradictions of our present moment.”
Arts & Literature
“These essays helpfully remind us how and why imagination should matter to people of faith. The contributors make a compelling case that C. S. Lewis and his circle were not merely tellers of tales but theologians in their own right, whose stories and images advance faith's search for understanding.”
Theology
“How does God work on human hearts to convert what is initially darkened, hard, and implacably resistant to the truth of the gospel into something that rejoices in and welcomes it? If being born again is less an impersonal causal effect than an effectual personal call, how are we to understand the latter? Hoglund here provides what is to date the best response to these important and longstanding questions, making fresh proposals about the agent and content of the call as well as its peculiar efficacy. I especially appreciated the combination of serious exegetical analysis coupled with rigorous dogmatic reflection. This is theological interpretation of Scripture at its best.”
NOTE: Only includes books currently in our catalog; not necessarily a complete list.
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