News, Theology

Ten Theology Books to Watch For – January 2024

Here are some excellent new theology books * that will be released in January 2024:

* broadly interpreted, including ethics, church history, biblical studies, and other areas that intersect with theology

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Theology Books January 2024

The Uses of Idolatry

William Cavanaugh

( Oxford UP)

In The Uses of Idolatry, William T. Cavanaugh offers a sustained and interdisciplinary argument that worship has not waned in our supposedly “secular” world. Rather, the target of worship has changed, migrating from the explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things. Cavanaugh examines modern idolatries and the ways in which humans become dominated by our own creations.

While Cavanaugh is critical of modern idolatries, his argument is also sympathetic, seeing in idolatry a deep longing in the human heart for the transformation of our lives. We all believe in something, he argues: we are worshipping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful. Following an invisible God is hard for material creatures, so we-those who profess belief in God and those who don’t-fixate on things that are closer to hand.

Ranging widely across the fields of history, philosophy, political science, sociology, and cultural studies, Cavanaugh develops an account of modernity as not the condition of being disenchanted but the condition of having learned to describe the world as disenchanted. For a better description of the world, Cavanaugh turns to scriptural, theological, and phenomenological accounts of idolatry as inordinate devotion to created things. Through deep explorations of nationalism and consumer culture, The Uses of Idolatry presents a sympathetic but critical account of how and why we sacrifice ourselves and others to gods of our own design.

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Theology Books January 2024

The Emancipation of God: Postmarks on Cultural Prophecy

Walter Brueggemann

( Fortress Press )

Understanding the gospel as emancipation has been central to Walter Brueggemann’s biblical interpretation. This book illustrates the theme’s centrality, addressing the emancipation of God from our attempts to control, the emancipation of the church to be the people of an emancipated God, and the emancipation of the gospel to be a cultural prophecy.

This volume divides into three parts: “The Emancipation of God,” “The Emancipation of the Church,” and “The Emancipation of the Neighborhood.” What the three parts hold in common is the kingdom of God. In each chapter, Brueggemann grinds away at biblical texts that have been muffled, silenced, and disabled to free the text from its cultural entrapments so that that the liberated text can speak for an emancipated God and a liberated church to free the world.

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