Patience-A Theological Exploration: Part One, from Creation to Christ

Description

What does it mean to exercise patience? What does it mean to endure, to wait, and to persevere-and, on other occasions, to reject patience in favor of resistance, haste, and disruptive action? And what might it mean to describe God as patient? Might patience play a leading role in a Christian account of God's creative work, God's relationship to ancient Israel, God's governance of history, and God's saving activity? The first instalment of Patience-A Theological Exploration engages these questions in searching, imaginative, and sometimes surprising ways. Following reflections on the biblical witness and the nature of constructive theological inquiry, its interpretative chapters engage landmark works by a number of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary authors, disclosing both the promise and peril of talk about patience. Patience stands at the center of this innovative account of God's creative work, God's relationship with ancient Israel, creaturely sin, scripture, and God's broader providential and salvific purposes.

Paul Dafydd Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, USA.

This volume is a remarkable achievement-deeply aware of, yet not overburdened by, questions of theological method, language, and epistemology. Paul Daffyd Jones' examination of patience both human and divine appreciates the wisdom of the Christian past while opening a horizon for patience as a divine perfection in the present. -- Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, University of Cambridge, UK Can "regular dogmatics" be inspiring, liberative, and empowering? Jones' magisterial treatment of patience-on human terms, a "burdened virtue"!-is all of those things. Recast as first and foremost an attribute of God, patience enables creaturely co-creativity, bestows temporal blessings, and is rewarded by responsive action in history. I impatiently await part 2! -- Hanna Reichel, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA Patience-A Theological Exploration features a commanding appraisal of how theologians past have taken up the language of patience and richly illuminates what "patience" might signify when it comes to understanding the being in action of the triune God today. A vibrant, compelling, and timely volume. -- Angela Dienhart Hancock, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, USA This is an exceptional book. Jones succeeds not only in profiling the often neglected motif of God's patience. Above all, he brilliantly uses this motif to cast new light on classical theological topics like God's creation, God's providence or human sin. And he does so in a theological exploration that constructively relates insights from the past with present day concerns and hopes for liberation. Readers of this first volume of Jones' theological project will await the second volume with impatience. -- Markus Hoefner, Universitat Zurich, Switzerland Patience-A Theological Exploration is an exemplary synthesis of interpretive and constructive enquiry. Jones draws deeply and widely upon biblical, patristic, medieval, reformation-era, and modern sources to articulate a fresh and challenging vision of patience as, in one respect, a divine perfection, and in another, a neglected yet "burdened" human virtue. -- Joel David Stormo Rasmussen, University of Oxford, UK