Excerpts | Running Heads

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What is a woman?

I am in the middle of proofreading an exciting new book from Cascade Books. Thinking Woman: A Philosophical Approach to the Quandary of Gender by Jennifer Hockenberry Dragseth is a helpful philosophical inquiry about women.

Here are a few paragraphs on the method and design of the book:

This is a philosophical book, not a sociological study or a political treatise. This book explores a “What is X?” type of question, namely “What is a woman?” The book’s method follows that of the ancient philosopher, Socrates. Socrates’s method, which he advocates for both men and women philosophers according to Plato, was to ask a question, hear an answer, discuss the answer, detail the limits or problems of the answer, and then continue with another possible answer. This is the method that is used in each chapter of the book.

As such, this book is an invitation to the reader to a philosophical dialogue on the question: “What is a woman?” The book is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. I have limited the conversation to four major theories that are active in contemporary Western feminist discourse. These theories are Gender Essentialism, Gender Neutrality, Gender Existentialism, and Gender Fluidity. Gender Essentialism is the theory that women have an essential and unique nature that is both biologically and psychologically different from the nature of men. Gender Neutrality is the claim that women have the same essential psychological and intellectual nature as men despite biological differences in sex. Gender Existentialism is the theory that women, although biologically different from men, have intellectual and psychological habits that differ from men only because of cultural factors. The theory of Gender Fluidity claims that both gender and biological sex are constantly changing categories that are culturally defined.

Each chapter presents each system by introducing some of the women thinkers who most famously articulated the theories. Because their views were born in the context of their lives, the lives and historical context of the thinkers are important. Each chapter presents the biographies as well as the ideas of the women who were the main architects of each theory. Included also is a description of the ways the specific theory influenced the feminist struggle to help women thrive. Importantly, each chapter shows an area of contemporary public discourse where the theory remains a dominant voice. This demonstrates that each theory is still very much alive. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of the possible objections to the discussed theory before summarizing the main points of the chapter.

In the conclusion, the book does not advocate for a specific theory of woman as being true or correct. Rather the conclusion acknowledges that the concept of woman is complex. Each of the four theories says something obviously true. Thus, understanding women requires holding all four theories simultaneously while acknowledging their contradictions. However, all four theories also clearly fall short of a comprehensive account of women. Thus, understanding women requires continuing dialogue with women and those who are interested in them.

Look for it to be available in the next month or so. It would make for a great reading assignment in all sorts of university and college courses.

Symposium on Race and Racism

October 1, 2015 / Chris / 0 Comments

A week ago at this time I was somewhere over the Rockies on my way to Chicago and the Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture at North Park Theological Seminary. The three days at North Park were full and lively, with several great sessions on the topic of Race and Racism. Eventually the papers will be published in the annual journal Ex Auditu from Pickwick Publications, hence my presence there. Below you will find a teasing excerpt from each of the main papers. Keep in mind these are pulled from larger essays and the essays themselves may undergo revision before they are published some time next Spring. The title of the presentation may not be the title of the published essay, and so because of this, I am only providing the speakers’ names. You can follow links to find out more about who they are, where they work, etc. Videos of all of the sessions of the symposium are here.

Lisa Sung:

The very employment of racial concepts and categories, in the absence of critical historical awareness—using “race” terminology in unmarked, unqualified, and ultimately non-deconstructive ways—comprises a naive realism, and is evidence of the power of socialization—the extent to which the church and its teachers are still captive to a “false consciousness”—the positing of a racial scheme as value-neutral, substantive explanatory concepts, one that conceals its historical origins and essential logic as a classificatory scheme underwriting a stratified social order which secured dominance by assigning persons to newly created status groups to which the goods of society would be disparately allocated.

Bo Lim:

If the Cross is the Lynching Tree, and the lynchee is the Suffering Servant, then salvation for Americans rests upon their acknowledgment of our racist past, most exemplified in the mass terror lynchings of African Americans. The inability to see Christ as the first lynchee results not merely from a lack of information but a lack of faith. Yet those who see that Christ was lynched on a tree can claim, “But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Isa 53:6).

Love Sechrest:

The goal of allyship is not for people in privileged groups to be shamed, punished, or retaliated against, but to eliminate the conditions that dehumanize us all, to restrain evil in our midst, and to seek our common good. Each and every one of us needs to be able to see what and who have been previously invisible as we cautiously move towards inhabiting the kinds of relationships that give honor to the gospel, risking pain but persisting in our desire to build the Beloved Community.

Ray Aldred:

By entering into the shared narrative of the Treaties as equals, the possibility exists for a shared identity that does not necessitate the eradication of identity. Instead it is an opportunity to embrace the past and be open to a future of walking together in the Creator’s land in a good way. Treaty functioning as a shared narrative allows for a re-envisioning of history and becomes a tool for healing.

Kyle Small:

Coming up from the turbulent waters of initiation is new life, indeed a white person with a white body can participate differently. Rising from the drowning, ascending from hell is a rejection of Caucasian as an identity marker. The word is drowned in the depths and will not return. The initiation is a participation in something other than whiteness currently understood. The journey to hell exposes the fullness of white privilege and supremacy practiced by white-followers of Jesus. The journey down discloses the full white consciousness. The pain, misery, and shame that will occur to a white body that enters hell will emerge from the depths out of breath and seeking help from divine participants who are image-bearers-of-many-hues.

Néstor Medina (old CV):

Since the middle of the twentieth century, hermeneutics has changed at a faster pace in great part because the Eurocentric character of theology, biblical scholarship, and philosophy has been challenged. Those other cultural groups previously absent from prevalent versions of Christian scholarship and theology brought forth critical new approaches to interpretation, which reclaim the role of gender, social location, racial-ethnic background, and cultural tradition in the biblical text, from its original production when it was written to its reading and interpretation in multiple settings today.

Emerson Powery:

Are translations responsible to present ancient tensions in new ways to help “address” our contemporary concerns and conversations or should they translate what “they see,” which is always interrelated in complex ways with how translators view their own contemporary world. It is not only language that changes, however; perspectives, in this case, with regard to ethnic conflict also changes. So are translators responsible to present ancient tensions in new ways to “address” (indirectly) contemporary conflicts?

Lewis Brogdon:

Because [Onesimus was not a Christian in the house of a Christian master] is ignored as an exegetical and theological issue, the impact of the conversion of Onesimus is lessened. Instead great emphasis is given to Philemon’s benevolence and the return of a wayward slave. . . . This is both a distorted and limited reading of the letter. In my reading of Philemon, exclusion and its role in the unconverted condition of a house slave is an important theological issue. I believe that Onesimus departed and was not a Christian because of Philemon’s practice of selective inclusion. In this sense, the conversion of Onesimus serves as an indictment against Philemon and the church. In addition, the return of Onesimus as a Christian takes on a different kind of significance that what is argued by slave-flight interpreters.

Convictional Differences

July 9, 2015 / Chris / 1 Comment

In 1974 a secular atheist and a Christian theologian set out “to discuss discordant elements that divide our own society into fragments and to discover” ways of working together “that can make even discordant elements one.” Twenty years later James M. Smith and James Wm. McClendon Jr. believed “that the times [had] at long last caught up with [them]” in two important ways:

1) “Philosophers can no longer be dismissed as threats to the faith or religious believers as soft-headed dogmatists”; and 2) “there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the general approach to the theory of knowledge called ‘foundationalism’ . . . . there is a much greater tendency today to examine the credentials of claims in terms of the disciplines or communities within which the claims are made.”

And so these two “unequally yoked” authors took on the task of revising their twenty-year-old book. Now, twenty-one years on, I can think of few other books that are as relevant to our times. Still today—and maybe even more so than the 70s or 90s—“differences in those beliefs that guide our lives, that make us who we are . . . are indeed the stuff of arguments, manifestos, estrangements, revolutions, and wars.” Many are asking again Smith’s and McClendon’s guiding questions.

“Why are differences in convictions so intractable, so impervious to appeals to evidence or rational argument? And is there a method by which this intractability can be overcome, a method by which convictions can be justified not only to those who already hold them but to those who presently hold other, rival convictions?”

I cannot recommend enough their book-length answer to these questions. Click through and pick up a copy of Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism (rev. ed.; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002; orig. Trinity, 1994) right now!

One last lengthy excerpt to further make the case that this is a book you should read:

Convictions are the beliefs that make people what they are. They must therefore be taken very seriously by those who have them. This means that to take any person seriously we must take that person’s convictions seriously, even if we do not ourselves share them. If we regard integrity and a certain degree of consistency as important elements in being a person, we should neither expect nor want others’ convictions to be easily changed or lightly given up. On the other hand, if we have a true esteem for our own convictions, we will want them to be shared in appropriate ways by anyone whom we regard. A certain tension appears here. If persons who hold opposed convictions are to come to share common ones, then some sort of exchange must take place in which the disparate partners communicate with, persuade, change one another in significant ways, so that one or both become significantly different persons than they were.

For God so loved the world…

May 14, 2015 / Chris / 0 Comments

A couple of days ago, Robin took a stab at encapsulating the gospel in one sentence. A few commenters did the same. I’m not going to try to add to the list. I would, however, like to call attention to a book about a very familiar sentence, which, for many, summarizes the gospel quite well.

We are just a few weeks away from publishing a short book on John 3:16 by well-known New Testament scholar, Murray J. Harris. Harris might add to the conversation Robin started with the following:

Of course, John 3:16 is not the totality of the gospel (“the good news”) nor a summary of the entire New Testament. How could one sentence of twenty-five words (in Greek) possibly sum up the message of nine different authors writing over some forty years? But this sentence is a summary of the message of the Fourth Gospel and it does sum up the essence of the “good news” which is the invitation given to all to believe in Jesus, God’s Son, and the promise that those who do this will avoid God’s condemnation and will share in the very life of God forever.

John 3:16: What’s It All About? should be available by early summer. It would make for an excellent small group study. And could easily be read in one day at the beach!

Van Gogh’s Ghost Paintings

April 23, 2015 / Chris / 0 Comments

In the same year that he painted Sunflowers, The Yellow House, and The Bedroom, Vincent van Gogh painted “A Garden of Olives—with a blue and orange Christ figure, a yellow angel—a piece of red earth, green and blue hills. Olive trees with purple and crimson trunks, with grey green and blue foliage. Sky lemon yellow.” But as Vincent wrote to his brother, Theo, “I scraped it off because I tell myself it’s wrong to do figures of that importance without a model” (Letter 637). Seventy-five days later, in another letter to Theo, Vincent wrote,

For the second time I’ve scraped off a study of a Christ with the angel in the Garden of Olives. Because here I see real olive trees. But I can’t, or rather, I don’t wish, to paint it without models. But I have it in my mind with color—the starry night, the figure of Christ blue, the strongest blues, and the angel broken lemon yellow. And all the purples from blood red purple to ash in the landscape. (Letter 685)

And two weeks later:

I mercilessly destroyed an important canvas—a Christ with the angel in Gethsemane—as well as another one depicting the poet with a starry sky—because the form hadn’t been studied from the model beforehand, necessary in such cases—despite the fact that the color was right. (Letter 698)

In Van Gogh’s Ghost Paintings: Art and Spirit in Gethsemane, Cliff Edwards, Professor of Religion in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of three previous books on van Gogh, asks,

Exactly what is it about painting Jesus and the angel in Gethsemane that led to this double creation and double destruction during the height of the artist’s creativity? Why had he never composed a scene from the life of Christ before, and why would he never compose such a scene again?

The answer to the mystery of the lost paintings illuminates the relationship of joy and suffering, discovery and creation, religion and the arts in Van Gogh’s life and work. In this fascinating book Edwards solves a long-ignored mystery that provides a critical key to the relation of Van Gogh’s religion and art. Look for the book in late Spring or early Summer.

Scripture Together

March 26, 2015 / Chris / 0 Comments

I’m currently working on a book by Shannon Nicole Smythe called Women in Ministry: Questions and Answers in the Exploration of a Calling. It’s an important book, I think, because the issue is one still dogging evangelicals. Smythe approaches it in a helpful way. Rob Wall, in the foreword, writes:

Dr. Smythe offers readers a careful selection of sacred texts because she has a bone to pick; that is, the dialogue between selected biblical passages and her core belief in the triune God guides her to where theological goods are mined that most likely will help her readers engage in their process of discernment. But they are also selected with a full awareness that a primary reason why people disagree over this topic concerns how to read the very passages she has selected to study. While the reasons for these disagreements are complex, often involving social worlds as much as linguistic analysis, the practices for doing so are properly communal. This is a book that encourages interested people to read, study, and discuss Scripture together. Worshiping God and studying Scripture together cultivates those characteristics that enable earnest Christians to resist the tendency of allowing disagreements between them to harden into non-negotiable positions that occasion harsh and hurtful accusations of others on the other side of the divide. This provides a context for both understanding and reconciliation.

Wall’s foreword has some great reflections on theological interpretation. In addition to calling attention to the book itself, highlighting Wall’s words is the purpose of my post today. Here are some longer excerpts I found especially good given my own ongoing interests in theological interpretation:

A theological interpretation of Scripture does not bring a particular modern “criticism” to the biblical text but, rather, a range of theological interests as ancient as the church. Strong students not only recognize that Scripture bears authoritative witness to God’s saving work in history, they expect that a faithful reading of Scripture targets the loving relationship between God and God’s people. That is, if Scripture is approached as a revelatory text, then any Spirit-directed application by its faithful readers should result in a more mature understanding of God’s word whose effective yield is a more satisfying life with God.

The practical problem of such a task, of course, is the abundant surplus, not scarcity, of theological resources at the church’s disposal in its Scriptures. In fact, one could say that the Bible, from beginning to end, is about the relationship between God and God’s people: what does it truly mean to be God’s people and do as they ought? In part, this is because the Bible is the church’s holy Scripture, shaped and sized from beginning to end in the company of the holy Spirit to size and shape a holy church that is also one, catholic, and apostolic. Toward this end, every Scripture is God-breathed to inform, form, and reform God’s people into a covenant-keeping community, a light to the nations.

…

This book is deeply grounded in the church’s confession that its Scripture—every bit of it—is God’s inspired and inspiring word. Any attentive engagement with what Scripture says, especially if it demands our repentance, as I think this book does, not only recognizes the holiness of the biblical texts that are studied—even those well-known “texts of terror” such as 1 Timothy 2:9–15—but their proper reading and application within the economy of grace. That is, Scripture is the sanctified auxiliary of the holy Spirit who teaches us God’s word and draws us into loving communion with God and with all our neighbors. The practice of studying biblical passages together commends the belief that Scripture’s authority cannot subsist apart from an engaged community of readers who carefully and prayerfully wait upon the Spirit to disclose God’s truth to them.

10 Theses for Trinitarian Biblical Interpretation

July 24, 2014 / Chris / 1 Comment

I’ve had the fortune this summer of working on two projects that stand apart for me among the many book projects to which I attend. I am sure all of the authors with whom I work would like for me to tout their latest writing project. And if I had the time, I would. Despite the sometimes mundane tasks of cleaning up commas and repairing sentence structure, I really do get to have my hands in the making of a lot of wonderful books. A person could get lost for hours browsing the titles we publish.

Out now is Michael Gorman’s terrific new book on the atonement: The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement. As with all of Gorman’s books, I can’t recommend this one enough.

Newly appointed Dean of the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Joel Green, says this about the book:

With this biblically and theologically mature study, Michael Gorman shifts our focus away from fascination with the how of the atonement and toward reflection on the what: What does Jesus’s death accomplish? The result is a richly textured statement of how the atonement reaches deeply into the scriptural story of God’s mighty acts in order to present the consequences of the cross for the church’s faith, hope, and love.

Currently in the proofing stage is C. Clifton Black’s Reading Scripture with the Saints. In this book Black takes the reader on a tour of interpreters of scripture who have been both careful and formed readers of Christianity’s sacred texts. He uses “saint” flexibly to refer to magisterial figures who have been “set apart” in the cultural imagination. Given that description, I think the reader should be intrigued by the Table of Contents:

Introduction Chapter 1. Welcome
Patristic Stirrings
Chapter 2. Trinity and Exegesis ”In which Trinitarian doctrine frames a reading of Ecclesiastes”
Chapter 3. Serving the Food of Full-Grown Adults “Augustine preaches First John in the fifth and twenty-first centuries”
Chapter 4. Listen ”Benedict rules today’s biblical exposition”
Middle Ages
Chapter 5. Transfigured Exegesis ”Twenty centuries of interpreters teetering on Mount Tabor”
Chapter 6. Doubtless Thomas ”In which Aquinas probes the Fourth Gospel’s Prologue”
Chapter 7. Luther Times Three “’Have Mercy on Me, O God,’ Martin cries across two decades”
Some Early Moderns
Chapter 8. “Not of an Age, But for All Time” ”King James’s Job suffers with Shakespeare’s Lear”
Chapter 9. Searcher of the Oracles Divine ”Accompanying Charles Wesley on two breathtaking journeys from Jerusalem to Jericho”
Chapter 10. American Scriptures ”Washington and Lincoln: biblical exegetes”
Conclusion
Chapter 11. Until Later

In chapter 2 Black shows himself to be a tour guide with positions and commitments of his own. His Ten Theses for biblical interpretation with a trinitarian understanding harmonize well with the rising voices in the choir of theological interpretation. He says much about each thesis. I simply list them here and encourage you to get the book when it is available (hopefully) next month.

Considered reflection on the triune God is appropriate to exegesis that attends to the Bible’s theological character.
If, as the historic church has confessed, the Trinity is a true and faithful expression of the God whom it worships, then that doctrine inevitably bears on the church’s understanding of the Bible as Holy Scripture, its inspiration and sanctification, prior to its disciplined exegesis.
Even as theology arises from worship, the native habitat for a Trinitarian approach to Scripture is the church and its ancillary communities, like schools of theology, whose special vocation in service to the gospel is the strengthening of the church’s ministry.
No academic exegete is required to practice scriptural interpretation as herein characterized, nor is every student required to study the Bible as Christian Scripture.
For Christian theological exegetes, Trinitarian doctrine tends toward a less sectarian, more comprehensive, and arguably less problematic framework within which to read Scripture.
The components of a Trinitarian confession—the integrity of Persons that voluntarily respect the space between themselves and one another, thereby fructifying loving freedom—suggest a salutary framework within which to consider the variety of biblical texts, the diversity of interpretive methods, and the inevitable divergence among Scripture’s interpreters.
A Trinitarian hermeneutic does not abjure historical criticism en bloc. It embraces and opens up historical investigation while challenging historicism’s fatalistic imperialism.
A Trinitarian approach to exegesis is eschatologically pregnant, affirming God’s freedom to dynamite interpretive obstacles and to guide Scripture’s faithful readers to fresh, truthful insights.
By its nature Trinitarian exegesis of Scripture engages the interpreter intimately. Properly construed, the relationship is not merely that of “subject matter” and “investigator.” Rather, it is nothing short of “Lover” and “beloved.”
So understood, scriptural theology recognizes no insuperable division between scholarly and devotional reading, even though the needs of different communities respect differences of emphasis.

What is Leadership?

July 10, 2014 / Chris / 2 Comments

I’m willing to guess that if you were to browse the bookshelves of most evangelical ministers you would likely find more books on leadership than you would just about any other topic. Of course the fascination with leadership is not peculiar to evangelicals. It just seems to be more pronounced and widespread. So why would the Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Theology at Morling College in Sydney, Australia want to add to this already crowded market? I’ll let David Starling tell you in his own words:

There will always be a place for the occasional book or conference or course focusing on leadership itself—on the qualities and techniques of an effective leader. But the more such books and conferences and courses proliferate, the more they need to be matched by a different sort of leadership-discourse: the sort that deliberately places the theme of leadership off-center and out-of-focus, orienting it toward the ends which it ought to serve and locating it within the relationships in which it ought to belong.

Starling.27920 copy I’m finishing up a proofread of Starling’s excellent little book, UnCorinthian Leadership: Thematic Reflections on 1 Corinthians.
It should be sent to the printers next week. I recommend pastors, evangelical and otherwise, pick it up and read it straight away.

In the introduction Starling takes some time to note how leadership overlaps with, yet is different from authority, office, teaching, and servanthood (all more “biblical” concepts, by the way!). He lands on the following working definition:

leadership is the act or task of making an intentional contribution toward the direction and motivation of a group in the framing and pursuit of a common purpose. The concept of leadership, understood according to this definition, is thus closely related to but distinguishable from the concepts of authority, office, teaching, and servanthood.

And as the title and subtitle suggest, Starling spends most of the book in his wheelhouse, the New Testament, namely Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. He writes:

Thus, while 1 Corinthians is not a Pauline leadership manual, it is (one could argue) something even more useful for our current purposes than that. It is an inspired, canonical case study—a worked example of what is involved in the complicated task of disentangling the various components of leadership from the cultural matrix in which they have come to be understood, in order to reorient them toward their proper end.

Why Protest?

January 16, 2014 / Chris / 0 Comments

For three days in November of 1964 fourteen of America’s best known Christian peacemakers gathered, by invitation of their host Thomas Merton, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky for an informal retreat to discuss “The Spiritual Roots of Protest.” Gordon Oyer, with an insatiable “curiosity and relentless digging,” has reconstructed for our generation the story and discussions from those three days at a monastery in the damp, chilly, rural Kentucky hills.

Jim Forest, one of the fourteen participants, recalls the persistent question during those three days—”By what right do we protest?” He writes, “Merton and others at the retreat made me more aware that acts of protest are not ends in themselves but ultimately must be regarded as efforts to bring about a transformation of heart of one’s adversaries and even one’s self. . . Merton put great stress on protest that had contemplative roots, protest motivated not only by outrage but by compassion for those who, driven by fear or a warped patriotism, experience themselves as objects of protest” (from the Foreword).

It seems these days, especially in America, people are quite willing to “protest.” But as people queue up to buy chicken sandwiches, boycott television networks, and hold signs at freeway overpasses, I wonder how compassionate their motives are.

Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat should be available in the late winter or early spring of this year. (NB: I realize the working cover has the singular Peacemaker. That will be changed to the plural Peacemakers before the books release.)

Paul’s Non-Violent Gospel

September 12, 2013 / Chris / 3 Comments

Jeremy Gabrielson completed his PhD at St. Andrews a couple of years ago under the supervision of Bruce Longenecker and Kelly Iverson. His dissertation is now soon to be published in our academic imprint, Pickwick Publications, with the title Paul’s Non-Violent Gospel: The Theological Politics of Peace in Paul’s Life and Letters. Scholars are beginning to take notice of the peaceable dimensions of Paul’s thought, theology, and life (see, for example, Michael Gorman and N. T. Wright), but no one that I know has yet to put forth such a sustained argument as Gabrielson does. Here’s a description of his thesis from the Introduction:

As briefly and pointedly as can be stated, my argument is this: adoption of a politics of non-violence was, for Paul and the communities he established, a constitutive part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather than viewing Paul’s references to peace and non-retaliation as generalized ethical principles drawn from his Jewish background (though this no doubt contributes to Paul’s understanding of these concepts), these terms and their corresponding practices are linked to Paul’s experience of being a violent persecutor of Jesus’ followers whose violent life was shattered on the road to Damascus. Enlivened by the risen Jesus from this point on, Paul’s task of announcing the gospel to the nations involved calling and equipping assemblies of people whose common life was ordered by a politics (by which I mean, chiefly, a mode of corporate conduct) characterized by peaceableness.

Here’s what others have said about Gabrielson’s work:

In Paul’s Non-Violent Gospel, Jeremy Gabrielson asks new questions regarding Paul’s theological commitments and, in the process, discovers new theological resources within Paul’s worldview. This important and challenging work deserves wide consideration. —Bruce W. Longenecker, W.W. Melton Chair of Religion, Baylor University

Gabrielson’s work is of importance for its scholarly insight and practical instruction. Gabrielson establishes beyond any doubt that Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus radically changed Paul’s life, politics, and character; practically, the work reminds the contemporary church that how Jesus embraced non-violence stood at the center of what Paul required of all believers. Scholarly, yet accessible, the book needs to find a home among groups of readers—from the graduate seminar on Paul to home bible studies, not only in the United States and Canada, but throughout the world. —John W. Wright, Professor of Theology and Christian Scriptures, Point Loma Nazarene University

Gabrielson’s thesis is important, I think, for today’s Christians who are often more inclined to beat the war drums than smoke the peace pipes. I encourage you to look for the book this coming fall. If you will be in Baltimore for ETS, SBL, and/or AAR in November, you should find discounted copies of the book at our stall. Come by, check it out, and say hi to the Wipf and Stock crew.

Running Heads

From the editors of Cascade Books and Pickwick Publications at Wipf and Stock Publishers