In Scripture, a number of individuals are raised from the dead prior to Jesus Christ. Whereas these were once interpreted as prefigurations of that climactic event, a series of challenges in the modern period led to the dismissal of the accounts of the widow's son at Nain, Lazarus, and others as irrelevant to a theology of resurrection. For "they would die again," as scholars as diverse as Karl Barth and N. T. Wright have argued. With Refiguring Resurrection, Steven Edward Harris contests this position by drawing on recent literary and theological interpretation of the Bible, as well as the deep wells of premodern exegesis and theology, to demonstrate how Scripture itself views these events as dialectical signs, shadows, or figures of Christ's resurrection--and humanity's own future. Furthermore, Harris develops a comprehensive eschatology in which the figural character of these earlier resurrections is taken into account while considering the four last things of Christ's return, final resurrection, last judgment, and new creation. An eschatology thus emerges that sets a new direction for theology in several areas of recent discussion: inaugurated eschatology, the figural reading of Scripture, puzzle cases regarding resurrection in analytic theology, whether believers can properly be said to "go to heaven" when they die, and the debate between narratival and apocalyptic interpretations of the apostle Paul.  Refiguring Resurrection offers a robust, canonically holistic "figural eschatology" that has not been defended in three centuries. By being more faithful to Christian Scripture, this is an approach more theologically promising than any offered in the modern era, including the twentieth century "rediscovery of eschatology.

Theologians today are facing a crisis of identity. Are they members of the academy or the church? Is it still possible to be members of both? In God and the Teaching of Theology, Steven Harris argues a way through the impasse by encompassing both church and academy within the umbrella of the divine economy. To accomplish this, Harris uses St. Paul's description of this economy in the opening chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians. Through Paul's discussion of wisdom, the Spirit, and the apostles' role in sharing that divine wisdom, theologians of the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras found a description of their own work as educators; they discovered that they too had roles within the same divine economy. This book thus offers a rich description of the teaching of theology as part of God's own divine pedagogy, stretching from God the teacher himself, through the nature of students and teachers of theology, to the goal of this pedagogy: human salvation in the knowledge of God. In addressing the current identity crisis of theology faculties, Harris looks backward in order to chart a way forward. His book will appeal to academic theologians, and to theological and church educators, pastors, and Christians interested in the relationship between academic study and their faith.