Ten Theology Books to Watch For – Sept. 2017

[easyazon_link identifier=”0802871860″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Church in Ordinary Time: A Wisdom Ecclesiology[/easyazon_link]

Amy Plantinga Pauw

Eerdmans

Much of Christian theology is focused on the story of Jesus and the promised consummation of all things-but the church spends its life in the gap between them. How can we live more faithfully as Christians in this gap between the resurrection of Christ and the eschaton? In Church in Ordinary Time, Amy Plantinga Pauw argues that the liturgical season of ordinary time aptly symbolizes the church’s existence as God’s creature in this time between the times.

Pauw presents a compact Trinitarian ecclesiology that is attuned to church life in this era of ordinary time. Formal ecclesiologies have largely neglected this ordinary-time dimension of Christian life, she says, and in so doing have virtually ignored the ongoing graciousness of God’s work as Creator. Drawing on the seasons of the church year and the creation theology elaborated in Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, Pauw offers wisdom for daily life in Christian communities of faith.

[easyazon_link identifier=”0465096409″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World[/easyazon_link]

Philip Jenkins

Basic Books

One of America’s foremost scholars of religion examines the tumultuous era that gave birth to the modern Judeo-Christian tradition

In The Crucible of Faith, Philip Jenkins argues that much of the Judeo-Christian tradition we know today was born between 250-50 BCE, during a turbulent “Crucible Era.” It was during these years that Judaism grappled with Hellenizing forces and produced new religious ideas that reflected and responded to their changing world. By the time of the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, concepts that might once have seemed bizarre became normalized-and thus passed on to Christianity and later Islam. Drawing widely on contemporary sources from outside the canonical Old and New Testaments, Jenkins reveals an era of political violence and social upheaval that ultimately gave birth to entirely new ideas about religion, the afterlife, Creation and the Fall, and the nature of God and Satan.

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