Rather than seeing science and religion as oppositional, in Origins: God, Evolution, and the Question of the Cosmos Philip Rolnick demonstrates the remarkable compatibility of contemporary science and traditional Christian theology. Rolnick directly engages the challenges of evolutionary biology - its questions about design, natural selection, human uniqueness, and suffering, pain, and death. In doing so, he reveals how biological challenges can be turned to theological advantages, not by disputing scientific data and theory, but by inviting evolutionary biology into the Christian conversation about creation. Rolnick then lets the vastly expanded time and macroscopic beauty of big bang cosmology cast new and benign light on both biology and theology. The discovery of a big bang beginning, fine-tuning, and a 3.45 billion year evolutionary process brings new ways to think about the creativity of creation. From the tiny to the tremendous, there is an intelligent generosity built into the features of the cosmos and its living creatures, a spectrum of interconnected phenomena that seems tinged with grace. By recognizing the gifts of creation that have been scientifically uncovered, Origins presents a new way to understand this universe of grace and reason.

Description: For about the last fifteen years of his life, Thomas A. Langford pondered how grace is central to Christian theology. This book records his reflections and provides numerous gems of mature Christian insight. From beginning to end, the book is christologically focused. Grace is not something that God gives us; rather, it is the way God gives us himself. Grace is a person--God present to human beings. Grace is not a gift but rather a giver. Grace is Jesus Christ. The central contribution of this work is its personalization of grace, its sharp focus on God present in Jesus Christ. Because its focus on grace gives the reader such a clear and thematically developed entry point, this work is a great introduction to theology and the life of the church, the kind that pastors and parishioners would certainly benefit from confronting. Endorsements: ""Who better to teach us grace than one who so genially embodied, personified, and incarnated grace? . . . Langford] taught Christian grace in the manner of the great classical philosophers whom he so admired by embodying in his life that which he professed in his books, in the classroom, and in the pulpit. How appropriate that this manuscript was lying upon his desk when he died. What grace that we have it now. Grace, pure grace."" --from the foreword by William H. Willimon ""Reflections on Grace looks at grace from every facet of systematic theology. Methodists and Wesleyans will want to read and ponder these pages carefully, but the work reaches out to all Christian communions--Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical. This grace-filled book can help any faithful and thoughtful Christian think deeper about and live more boldly in the constant grace of the Triune God."" --Alan G. Padgett, Methodist minister and Professor of Systematic Theology, Luther Seminary ""Tommy Langford exemplified what Methodism at its best should be. We can celebrate the publication of these last thoughts, as they demonstrate that Tommy was unafraid to change. May we learn from his example."" --Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School About the Contributor(s): Thomas A. Langford (1929-2000) served the United Methodist Church and Duke University throughout his adult life. Langford was ordained a Methodist minister in 1952. He was the primary author of the United Methodist Church's ""Our Theological Task"" (1988) and a member of the World Methodist Council bilateral theological discussions with the Roman Catholic Church, the World Lutheran Federation, and the World Reformed Alliance. He was the author or editor of fourteen books including Intellect and Hope (on the thought of Michael Polanyi), In Search of Foundations (on English theology and culture), and the widely read Practical Divinity (theology in the Wesleyan tradition). This current book, Reflections on Grace, is the work that he had been writing during the last years of his life. Philip A. Rolnick is Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He is the author of Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God and Person, Grace, and God (2007) Jonathan R. Wilson is Pioneer McDonald Professor of Theology at Carey Theological College. He completed his PhD at Duke in 1989 under the supervision of Thomas Langford.

This volume offers a robust theological investigation of the concept of the person. Philip Rolnick calls us to think about personhood not just psychologically ? understanding it as a set of traits or behaviors or as a level of social adroitness ? but theologically. He believes that person represents our highest understanding of our lives with regard to each other, the world, and God. Some understanding of person underlies virtually every significant Christian doctrine and points to what is most at stake in it.

A philosophically astute, historically informed, scientifically minded theologian, Rolnick here highlights the centrality of person for Christian thought by tracing its development from pre-Christian anticipations through the early church councils to Augustine, Boethius, Richard of St. Victor, and Aquinas. Examining contemporary challenges to the concept of the person from evolutionary biology and postmodern thought, Rolnick demonstrates the impressive accomplishment of neo-Darwinian research and then shows ways to interpret the biological data that are consonant with Jesus' love commands.

Rolnick's Person, Grace, and God is a wide-ranging, deeply informed study of a topic of no small importance in a world in which science, postmodern thought, and Christian theology continuously engage each other.