New Book on Early Christian Worship

I am pleased to announce that my third book, New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance, is being released this summer on Aug 7 by IVP Academic. Click here for the link to the publisher’s page. Focusing on the passages in the New Testament that describe Jesus in a hymnic style, this book touches on early Christian worship, the Greco-Roman and Jewish cultural contexts of the New Testament, and the development of early Christian belief. Comparing these early Christian compositions to other first century expressions of hymnic praise helps provide new perspective on the significance of these fascinating and rich passages. It also gives us a lot to think about for contemporary worshipers of Jesus. Please check out the web site and see what you think.

If you were to ask me for a little more detail about what the book is about, here is what I would say:

This is a book about worship in the New Testament in which I show that praise of Jesus uses some of the same language that was used in praise of the Roman emperor, in part, to emphasize that Jesus was greater than the emperor. This language, which just sounds religious to us (savior, Lord, son of God), actually had very significant political implications. To worship Jesus in this way was to affirm a view of reality that was counter-cultural and anti-imperial. But this worship of Jesus did not arise from nowhere; it draws on a long tradition of Jewish resistance poetry that can be traced back through to some of the oldest poetry of the Hebrew Bible. It also draws on prophetic promises of divine renewal that were still alive in first century Judaism. So in the book I argue that we should seek to understand worship passages in the New Testament in light of their interaction with these larger cultural factors. When we do so we gain new insight into some of the richest passages in the New Testament and also into what the earliest worship of Jesus was about. And, if we take them seriously, there is a challenge for modern Christians in terms of how we engage with our culture and with the prevailing political powers today.

The book is currently available for pre-order at a discount on the IVP Academic site as well as on Amazon, and will ship on Aug 7, 2018.