Virus As A Summons To Faith

Why bother with the interpretive categories of biblical faith when in fact our energy and interest are focused on more immediate matters? The answer is simple and obvious. We linger because, in the midst of our immediate preoccupation with our felt jeopardy and our hope for relief, our imagination does indeed range beyond the immediate to larger, deeper wonderments. Our free-ranging imagination is not finally or fully contained in the immediacy of our stress, anxiety, and jeopardy. Beyond these demanding immediacies, we have a deep sense that our life is not fully contained in the cause-and-effect reasoning of the Enlightenment that seeks to explain and control. There is more than that and other than that to our life in God’s world!

Discover a different way of seeing and responding to the Coronavirus pandemic, an approach drawing on Scripture, Christian history, and the way of living, thinking, and praying revealed to us by Jesus. What are we supposed to think about the Coronavirus crisis? Some people think they know: "This is a sign of the End," they say. "It's all predicted in the book of Revelation." Others disagree but are equally clear: "This is a call to repent. God is judging the world and through this disease he's telling us to change." Some join in the chorus of blame and condemnation: "It's the fault of the Chinese, the government, the World Health Organization…" N. T. Wright examines these reactions to the virus and finds them wanting. Instead, he shows that a careful reading of the Bible and Christian history offers simple though profound answers to our many questions, including: What should be the Christian response? How should we think about God? How do we live in the present? Why should we lament? What should we learn about ourselves? How do we recover? Written by one of the world's foremost New Testament scholars, God and the Pandemic will serve as your guide to read the events of today through the light of Jesus' death and resurrection.

Where is God When We Suffer? God’s silence in the midst of human suffering is a great mystery of our existence. Faced with mass suffering, such as pandemics, plagues, and natural disasters, we may wonder whether God actually cares about us or whether He just says that He does. Pandemics, Plagues, and Natural Disasters: What is God Saying to Us? helps explain the role of God in suffering. Dr. Erwin Lutzer examines how God uses tragedies throughout the Bible to speak to His people, and that, ultimately, God always has our well-being in mind even when He doesn’t relieve our immediate pain. Perhaps most importantly, find lasting joy and relief by learning how times of such widespread trouble reveal God’s ultimate plans for our salvation from all temporary and eternal suffering.

Beloved and respected by scholars, preachers, and laity alike, Walter Brueggemann offers penetrating insights on Scripture and prophetic diagnoses of our culture. Instead of maintaining what is safe and routine, A Gospel of Hope encourages readers to embrace the audacity required to live out ones faith. This must-have volume gathers Brueggemanns wisdom on topics ranging from anxiety and abundance to partisanship and the role of faith in public life.

A noted author and activist brings his critical acumen and rhetorical skills to bear in this polemic against the dark side of religion. Unlike some popular works by stridently outspoken atheists, this is not a blanket condemnation of all believers. Rather the author's focus is the heartless exploitation of faithful followers by those in power, as well as sectarian intolerance, the violence against heretics and nonbelievers, and the reactionary political and economic collusion that has often prevailed between the upper echelons of church and state. Parenti notes the deleterious effects of past theocracies and the threat to our freedoms posed by present-day fundamentalists and theocratic reactionaries. He discusses how socially conscious and egalitarian minded liberal religionists have often been isolated and marginalized by their more conservative (and better financed) coreligionists. Finally, he documents the growing strength of secular freethinkers who are doing battle against the intolerant theocratic usurpers in public life. Historically anchored yet sharply focused on the contemporary scene, this eloquent indictment of religion’s dangers will be welcomed by committed secular laypersons and progressive religionists alike.

Explore the Book is not a commentary with verse-by-verse annotations. Neither is it just a series of analyses and outlines. Rather, it is a complete Bible survey course. No one can finish this series of studies and remain unchanged. The reader will receive lifelong benefit and be enriched by these practical and understandable studies. Exposition, commentary, and practical application of the meaning and message of the Bible will be found throughout this giant volume. Bible students without any background in Bible study will find this book of immense help as will those who have spent much time studying the Scriptures, including pastors and teachers. Explore the Book is the result and culmination of a lifetime of dedicated Bible study and exposition on the part of Dr. Baxter. It shows throughout a deep awareness and appreciation of the grand themes of the gospel, as found from the opening book of the Bible through Revelation.

In these several pieces I have worked to trace out possible interfaces between specific scripture references and matters at the forefront of our common social life. It is my hunch that, almost without fail, such an interface creates a very different angle of vision for any element of our common social life, because it situates such a topic in the context of the biblical narrative that is occupied by the holy agency of God. Such an alternative angle of vision helps to defamiliarize us from our usual discernment according to the master narrative of democratic capitalism that is most widely shared across the spectrum of conservatives and progressives. Because our common angle of vision shared by progressives and conservatives has a very low ceiling of human ultimacy, we (all of us!) easily come to think that our particular reading of social reality is absolute and beyond question, even if dominated by a tacit ideology. It is my bet that an interface with biblical testimony can and will deabsolutize our excessive certitude and permit us to look again at the social “facts” that are in front of us. I do not think and do not suggest that such interfaces with scripture are inevitable; they are rather suggestive, impressionistic, and fleeting, the kind of linkage that is available in the matrix of faith that is not fixed on certitude.

“This is a time when the fragile form of this world is felt. The seemingly solid foundations are shaking. The question we should be asking is, Do we have a Rock under our feet? A Rock that cannot be shaken—ever?” —John Piper On January 11, 2020, a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) reportedly claimed its first victim in the Hubei province of China. By March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization had declared a global pandemic. In the midst of this fear and uncertainty, it is natural to wonder what God is doing. In Coronavirus and Christ, John Piper invites readers around the world to stand on the solid Rock, who is Jesus Christ, in whom our souls can be sustained by the sovereign God who ordains, governs, and reigns over all things to accomplish his wise and good purposes for those who trust in him. What is God doing through the coronavirus? Piper offers six biblical answers to that question, showing us that God is at work in this moment in history.