andygoodliff

(My) 50 Best Theology Books of the 21st Century

The Guardian have been doing a series on the 100 best books/films/albums/etc of the 21st Century. I thought I'd look at my shelves and offer my 50 best theology books I've read, and in many cases return to a lot, published since the 21st Century. I limited myself to one book per author (apart from in one case), otherwise there would be more Freeman, Hauerwas, Wells and Williams. I recognise some of the big names/books are missing — David Bentley Hart, William Cavanaugh, Katherine Sonderegger, David Kesley, Oliver O'Donovan, Miroslav Volf, Michael Banner, John Barclay, John Milbank, and many others — I've just got round to reading them. Some on the list below will be little known, but there books have been important to me. A fair number are memoirs, and I've come to really enjoy this format. The list is in no particular order. 

1. Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God (2009)
2. Curtis Freeman, Contesting Catholicity (2014)
3. Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination (2010)
4. John Webster, Holy Scripture (2003)
5. Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child (2010)
6. Samuel Wells, Improvisation (2004)
7. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (2009)
8. Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust (2007)
9. Robert Jenson, A Theology in Outline (2016)
10. Brian Brock, Wondrously Wounded (2019)
11. John Flett, The Witness of God (2010)
12. John Swinton, Dementia (2014)
13. Fleming Rutledge, Crucifixion (2017)
14. Paul Fiddes, Tracks and Traces (2003)
15. David Ford, Christian Wisdom (2007)
16. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2008)
17. Beverly Gaventa, When in Romans (2017)
18. Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2018)
19. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self (2013)
20. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
21. John Colwell, The Rhythm of Doctrine (2007)
22. Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed (2018)
23. Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship (2015)
24. NT Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008)
25. C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside Down (2009)
26. Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus in the Gospel of John (2004)
27. Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (2009)
28. Brian Walsh and Slyvia Keesematt, Colossians Remixed (2004)
29. Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith (2011)
30. Richard Lischer, Stations of the Heart (2013)
31. Eugene Peterson, The Pastor (2011)
32. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image (2005)
33. Preston Sprinkle (ed.), Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible and the Church (2016)
34. Stephen Cottrell, Walking Backwards from Christmas (2015)
35. Lauren Winner, Girl Meets God (2002)
36. Joanna Jepson, A Lot Like Eve (2015)
37. Walter Brueggemann, The Word that Redescribes the World (2006)
38. Marica Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (2001)
39. Susan Eastman, Paul and the Person (2017)
40. Francis Spufford, Unapologetic (2012)
41. Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith (2001)
42. Eugene Rogers, After the Spirit (2006)
43. Ann Morisy, Journeying Out (2004)
44. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (2009)
45. Ellen Davies, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture (2008)
46. Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle–Earth (2004)
47. Charles Campbell, The Word Before the Powers (2002)
48. Joel Marcus, Mark (2002)
49. Douglas Harink, 1 & 2 Peter (2009)
50. Marylinne Robinson, Gilead (2009)

Theology Live 2020

Theology Live is a one day conference I started with Simon Woodman and Steve Holmes back in 2017. We're back on 23rd January 2020. Its a day for Baptists engaged in post-graduate research and any other interested Baptists to get together to share papers, build friendships and encourage our Baptist family of the important of theology for the life and mission of our national Union and local churches.

We've got a great line-up this year:

Anthony Reddie — Author of Theologising Brexit (2019), Is God Colour Blind? (2010), SCM Core Text: Black Theology (2012) and the new Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, Regent's Park College (from Jan 2020)

Christine Joynes — the new Director of the Centre for Baptist Studies, Regent's Park College, Oxford and author of Perspectives on the Passion (2008)

Joshua Searle — Tutor in Theology and Public Thought, Spurgeon's College and author of Theology After Christendom (2018)

Craig Gardiner — Tutor in Christian Doctrine, South Wales Baptist College and author of Melodies of a New Monasticism (2018)

Israel Olofinjana — Director of the Centre for Missionaries from the Majority World and minister at Woolwich Baptist Church and author of Partnership in Mission (2015)

Gale Richards — Minister of Zion Baptist Church, Cambridge and Co-ordinators the Baptist BME Women's Ministers Network and a PhD student at Bristol Baptist College

Jeff Jacobson — Associate Minister at West Leigh Baptist Church and a PhD student at Bristol Baptist College looking at the Baptist Union's Declaration of Principle

Linda Hopkins — Baptist minister and PhD student at Luther King House, Manchester looking at children and communion

Sian Hancock — PhD Student at the University of Birmingham and author of Re-thinking Children's Work in Churches (2019)

Molly Boot — A Greenbelt Trustee, a Baptist ministerial student and MA student at University of Oxford

Dave Steell — Minister at One Church, Brighton and doing a DThM at the University of Durham on ecotheology

Ruth Moriarty — Minister at Christ Church and doing a DProf at the University of Chester looking at church meetings and discernment

Alistair Cuthbert — Minister at Falkirk Baptist Church and doing PhD at University of St. Andrew's on the theology of Paul Fiddes

Meghan Byerly — Minister at Cemetery Road, Sheffield and doing PhD at Luther King House, Manchester on virtues and Baptist ecclesiology

James Henley — Minister at Budleigh Salterton Baptist Church, Devon and doing a PhD at Bristol Baptist College on the theology of the Eucharist in conversation with Paul Fiddes and William Cavanaugh

Get your ticket here. 

Wondrously Wounded by Brian Brock

Brian Brock, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ (Baylor, 2019)

This is a beautiful and challenging book and Brock's most readable one so far! The big reason for that is the presence of Adam, Brian's son. Through Wondrously Wounded Brock tells stories from Adam's life and how they shaped Brock's life and theology. Like the work of Frances Young, Amos Yong and Thomas Reynolds, this is lived theology or practical theology. Adam is profoundly intellectually disabled, although a big part of Brock's argument in this book is to challenge that description, to re-narrate who Adam is in society and in the church. In so doing it is to challenge the idea that we, as a society and as churches, have 'done' disability because we have made our buildings accessible and have embraced 'inclusivity.' 

The book is divide into five parts: Disability in the Christian Tradition; Welcome and Screening; Systems, Norms, and Modern Medicine; The Everydayness of Mercy and Wonder; and Body–Life as the Communicative Life of the Worshiping Community. At the end of each part Brock provides a Coda, which helpfully offers a summary and the 'general thrust' of the argument. 

In this brief engagement with the book I want to focus on the final two chapters. The first is a close reading of 1 Corinthians 12, the second explores the prophetic presence of the disabled. In the former, Brock begins by recognising that Christians want to be inclusive, but that this often creates an othering, 'we' seek to include 'them', in this case the disabled. Brock's reading of 1 Corinthians 12 seeks to challenge this tendency. Brock sees in description of the church as the body of Christ an understanding of life together, communion, beyond disability. Of course those pushing an inclusive agenda often refer to 1 Corinthians 12, but in ways which do not properly, in Brock's view, with Paul's argument. A close and careful reading, says Brock, sees the Spirit upending 'widespread assumptions' about any attempt at creating a 'we' and others who need to be 'included.' Every member of the church both gives and receives. Brock argues that the church, as the body of Christ, needs to be open to the 'surprise, wonder, and discovery about what sort of gifts the Spirit might be attempting to give through the life of any individual member of the church.' He tells the story of how Adam, at age 13, found his place in the church, sitting very close to the minister, and that this has changed the church. Brock sees that what part of the Spirit's gift through Adam is 'to liberate the congregation from any pretention that we are a church devoted to presenting a culturally and aesthetically flawless performance.' Brock concludes that 'a church that treats some as continual recipients, and never givers of gifts, enacts at forgetfulness that Christians are Gentiles.' In other words we are all those who have been received. 

The final chapter tells some stories of life with Adam in public and the inhospitality experienced. These struggles are contrasted with the church, which Brock sees as being 'at least one space in liberal society exist[ing] solely to foster a more receptive openness to others, a greater willingness to hear, and in which taking responsibility for one another defines its social form.' Of course this is not always the case and Brock acknowledges that churches can be just like any other public space. In a wonderful phrase Brock describes a story of Adam dancing to the music of a young Romanian street performer as an 'assault of grace.' This scene was 'an incursion of the prophetic Christ.' In this final chapter Brock uses militant language, borrowing from Barth, because it 'preserves the ethical bite and political force of the gospel.' He quotes from Barth:

 It is a remarkable stroke in a strange and remarkable war. For the attack is that of the love of the Father and the Son. It is the attack of the grace of God. It is the attack of His affirmation of the world, of his generous self-giving to it, His intervention for salvation, of His pleading and guaranteeing of its life. This is what the Prophet Jesus proclaims to the whole world and to all people. 

The sin of inhospitality is met by the assault of grace, through the Spirit of Jesus, in the lives of Adam and others. Will we dare see it?

Brock offers a different view of those we so easily named as disabled. The gospel centres the margins. He challenges how pre-natal care and testing takes place, he challenges how we view healthy and quality. He says that while there are problems with how the church has historically viewed disability, the church has also had an understanding of mercy and wonder and revelation that we have lost when the conversation in liberal society is reduced to services and rights. He offers a picture of being wondrously wounded seen in the life of Jacob having wrestled with God.

Brock's book will surely sit alongside the likes of Young's Face to Face and Reynolds' Vulnerable Communion, as among the most important contributions to how the church and theology understands, welcomes and rejoices in lives like Adam's. But more than providing theological reflection on 'disability', Brock, likes others, presents us with what it is to be human, to be church — it is to begin with a life like Adam's, in all its joy and all its difficulty, it is to experience what it means to be wondrously wounded.