Leitourgia

The Christian Church has a rich history of prayer. From the days of the earliest believers, Christians have devoted time to communicate with their God. Now, in Jeanie and David Gushee's A Morning and Evening Prayerbook  (Thomas Nelson, 2018), there is a rich source from which to join in the prayers of the ages. The Gushees have searched the prayers of saints—from the early Church Fathers to modern theologians—and compiled them into an attractive prayerbook. Each day contains a morning and evening prayer. The prayers are aligned to the Christian calendar. This is a fantastic resource. Families, individuals, pastors, and believers from all walks of life would benefit from the rich spirituality mined by the Gushees. The prayers are probing, insightful, and succinct. The book itself is portable, attractive, and durable. Apart from a short introduction, there are no commentaries—just raw prayers. The collection spans time and tradition. Rather than letting these replace spontaneous...

Worship and theology are inextricably linked; some even say that worship is “lived theology.” The ancient formula lex orandi, lex credendi insists that the goal of theology is to make better worshippers. Yet for many years, there has been a gap in introducing worship as a way of doing theology. To be sure, there is an abundance of works on systematic, historical, and constructive theology, and many on worship theory and practice; however, their intersection is given little attention in current literature. Dennis Okholm observed this problem and offers his Learning Theology through the Church’s Worship: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Baker Academic, 2018) to fill this gap, providing a systematic theology textbook arranged as an order of worship. The book is structured as a worship service, designed to bring readers through the typical movements of a service, stopping along the way to uncover the theology behind the Church’s worship. He opens with an impassioned argument for w...

The biblical drama was situated among a highly complex sociological, political, and geographic backdrop. In particular, the world of the Old Testament was a critical time for human civilization—yet most readers of the Bible tend to imagine that Israel alone was the sole nation on the scene. While most OT surveys identify cultural issues within particular sections of the text, or provide a cursory introduction to the ancient Near East in an opening chapter, Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts (Baker Academic, 2018) provides a comprehensive entry point into the ancient world in the time of the OT. This authoritative tome brings together contributions from the world’s leading biblical and archaeological scholars to offer a variety of articles on OT background issues. It is divided into three parts. The first, “Elements of the Drama,” includes the stage (historical geography), the set and props (archaeology), the scripts (extra-biblical li...

It is no surprise that the locus of the Christian Church is moving outward, from the West to beyond. The missional impulse of recent movements has expanded the meaning of the Church and made John the Seer’s vision increasingly clearer, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). In light of the coming of global Christianity, the Western church has become more pressed to establish a global theology. Langham Global Library’s growing Majority World Theology series has provided exposure to Christian thinkers in the majority world on various doctrines. In its most recent addition, The Church from Every Tribe and Tongue: Ecclesiology in the Majority World (2018), a variety of global voices investigate the doctrine of the Church, offering insights into how non-Western lenses on the Church can shape Western theology and practice.  Nine respected theologians and biblical sc...