Author’s Corner

Welcome to the Credo Author’s Corner, where we will meet a set of authors whose recent books deserve your attention and might even help you grow in your knowledge of theology, history, philosophy, and the scriptures. We hope the Author’s Corner can keep you up-to-date on the most important books published today and where you can find them.

On today’s Author’s Corner we present you with a selection of recent works from Christian Focus Publications.

No Shadow of Turning: Divine Immutability and the Economy of Redemption by Ronni Kurtz

How does God’s unchanging nature impact the salvation of his people?

While divine immutability enjoyed a broad affirmation through much of Christian theological antiquity, it has fallen on harder times in modernity. Seen as a holdover from overly philosophical theology, divine immutability has often been characterized as rendering God static and incapable of having meaningful relationships with his creation.By anchoring the economy of redemption in divine immutability, we see the benefit of rooting all of God’s economic work in the immanent life of God. Click To Tweet

This book aims to swim upstream from this claim and demonstrate that divine immutability does not handicap soteriology but is a necessary and vital component of God’s economy of redemption as triune changelessness protects and promotes the redemption of God’s creatures. By anchoring the economy of redemption in divine immutability, we see the benefit of rooting all of God’s economic work in the immanent life of God.

This book aims to be a work of dogmatic theology and therefore will arrive at this thesis by way of exegetical, historical, and philosophical theology. In harmony, these fields will interact with varying deviations and denials of divine immutability and ultimately conclude that a classical articulation of God’s changelessness does most justice to the economy of redemption.

Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ by Samuel G. Parkison

What hath beauty to do with systematic theology?

In this new monograph, Samuel G. Parkison explores this question by examining the relationship between Christ’s divine beauty and regeneration and faith. Building on recent scholarship in (a) theological retrieval of the Christian tradition, and (b) Protestant developments in theological aesthetics, this project is concerned with soteriology’s aesthetic dimension. While many today may consider beauty a mere matter of preference, glibly assuming that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Parkison pushes fiercely in the opposite direction, dignifying beauty by recognizing its objective value—a feature of aesthetics that has fallen on hard times since the so–called Enlightenment, and the subsequent “uglification of culture” (as Sir Roger Scruton put it).While many today may consider beauty a mere matter of preference, glibly assuming that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Parkison pushes fiercely in the opposite direction, dignifying beauty by recognizing its objective value Click To Tweet

In this doxologically flavored, dogmatically charged work, Parkison pulls from a variety of disciplines to demonstrate Christ’s beauty, and the relevance of Christ’s beauty on Christian theology. Irresistible Beauty is the work of a synthetic generalist. It is not strictly a work of exegesis, though it will stand firmly on exegetical findings. It is not strictly a work of biblical theology, though it will be biblical–theological. It is not strictly a work of historical theology, though it will engage in theological retrieval of the church’s history. It is not strictly a philosophical work, though, driven by a love for wisdom, it will be irreducibly philosophical. Thus, this is a systematic–theological work in the full sense of the term—informed and shaped by these disciplines and informing and shaping the pursuit of them.

Irresistible Beauty is sure to stimulate readers who enjoy a wide range of topics: the philosophy of beauty, metaphysics, Classical Christian Theism, biblical theology, and a Protestant Reformed conception soteriology are all dealt with in this dense theological work. Parkison also converses with some of the greatest minds of Christian history (e.g., Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Turretin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Herman Bavinck, Hans Urs von Balthasaar), making Irresistible Beauty a stimulating work for many a reader.