This introductory theology text helps students articulate basic Christian doctrines, think theologically so they can act Christianly in a diverse world, and connect Christian thought to their everyday lives of faith. Written from a solidly evangelical yet ecumenically aware perspective, this book models a way of doing theology that is generous and charitable. It attends to history and contemporary debates and features voices from the global church. Sidebars made up of illustrative quotations, key Scripture passages, classic hymn texts, and devotional poetry punctuate the chapters. The first edition of this book has been well received (over 25,000 copies sold). Updated and revised throughout, this second edition also includes a new section on gender and race as well as new end-of-chapter material connecting each doctrine to a spiritual discipline.

Many believers accept traditional Christian sexual morality but have very little idea why it matters for the Christian life. In Faithful, author Beth Felker Jones sketches a theology of sexuality that demonstrates sex is not about legalistic morals with no basis in reality but rather about the God who is faithful to us. In Hosea 2:19-20 God says to Israel, "I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord." This short book explores the goodness of sexuality as created and redeemed, and it suggests ways to navigate the difficulties of living in a world in which sexuality, like everything else, suffers the effects of the fall. As part of Zondervan's Ordinary Theology series, Faithful takes a deeper look at a subject Christians talk about often but not always thoughtfully. This short, insightful reflection explores the deeper significance of the body and sexuality.

Whether on the printed page, the television screen or the digital app, we live in a world saturated with images. Some images help shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us in positive ways, while others lead us astray and distort our relationships. Christians confess that human beings have been created in the image of God, yet we chose to rebel against that God and so became unfaithful bearers of God's image. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus, who is the image of God, restores the divine image in us, partially now and fully in the day to come. The essays collected in The Image of God in an Image Driven Age explore the intersection of theology and culture. With topics ranging across biblical exegesis, the art gallery, Cormac McCarthy, racism, sexuality and theosis, the contributors to this volume offer a unified vision-ecumenical in nature and catholic in spirit-of what it means to be truly human and created in the divine image in the world today. This collection from the 2015 Wheaton Theology Conference includes contributions by Daniela C. Augustine, Craig L. Blomberg, William A. Dyrness, Timothy R. Gaines and Shawna Songer Gaines, Phillip Jenkins, Beth Felker Jones, Christina Bieber Lake, Catherine McDowell, Ian A. McFarland, Matthew J. Milliner, Soong-Chan Rah and Janet Soskice, as well as original poems by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner and Brett Foster.

It is a central tenet of Christian theology that we will be resurrected in our bodies at the last day. But we have been conditioned, writes Beth Felker Jones, to think of salvation as being about anything but the body. We think that what God wants for us has to do with our thoughts, our hearts, or our interior relationships. In popular piety and academic theology alike, strong spiritualizing tendencies influence our perception of the body. Historically, some theologians have denigrated the body as an obstacle to sanctification. This notion is deeply problematic for feminist ethics, which centers on embodiment. Jones's purpose is to devise a theology of the body that is compatible with feminist politics. Human creatures must be understood as psychosomatic unities, she says, on analogy with the union of Christ's human and divine natures. She offers close readings of Augustine and Calvin to find a better way of speaking about body and soul that is consonant with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She addresses several important questions: What does human psychosomatic unity imply for the theological conceptualization of embodied difference, especially gendered difference? How does embodied hope transform our present bodily practices? How does God's momentous "yes" to the body, in the Incarnation, both judge and destroy the corrupt ways we have thought, produced, constructed, and even broken bodies in our culture, especially bodies marked by race and gender?
Jones's book articulates a theology of human embodiment in light of resurrection doctrine and feminist political concerns. Through reading Augustine and Calvin, she points to resources for understanding the body in a way thatcoheres with the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. Jones proposes a grammar in which human psychosomatic unity becomes the conceptual basis for sanctification. Using gender as an illustration, she interrogates the difference resurrection doctrine makes for holiness. Because death has been overcome in Christ's resurrected body, human embodiment can bear witness to the Triune God. The bodily resurrection makes sense of our bodies, of what they are and what they are for.