Let’s take a moment and consider how rarely attention is paid to Christian Pneumatology (study of the Spirit). Releasing a new book on the topic may well be enough to either excite or elicit fear in Lutheran hearts! 🙂
I’m very curious about this book.
Here’s the Amazon blurb:
The Christian’s participatory union with Christ is a central element of salvation, both in Scripture and in the historic Christian tradition. In the early twentieth-century, however, this theme gradually began to diminish in its prominence within Lutheran theological writing. Due to a variety of philosophical and theological shifts, many Lutherans began to emphasize forensic justification to the exclusion of participationist motifs. That forensic exclusivism is challenged in this work.
In this book, Jordan Cooper articulates an approach to union with Christ that is drawn from both Patristic theology, and the classical Lutheran tradition. Throughout this study, Cooper exposits union with Christ under three distinctive categories: the objective union of God and man through the Incarnation, the formal union of faith in which the believer is united to Christ’s person and work, and the mystical union through which the Triune God dwells in the hearts of Christians.
This book is the sixth volume in a series titled A Contemporary Protestant Scholastic Theology.
I’m thinking these “participationist motifs” are in addition to forensic justification and not actually opposed. So we get to stay calm and consider some extra Scripture, right? 🙂 There is union with Christ, after all. This book hopes to shed light on that.
.png)