All That God Cares About: Common Grace and Divine Delight
Richard J. Mouw (Brazos Press)
Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian and statesman, famously affirmed that Christ’s rule extends over every square inch of his creation. In All That God Cares About, Richard Mouw celebrates Kuyper’s understanding of common grace while cautioning against a “triumphalist tendency” that it sometimes encourages among believers who are fired up by his vision of cultural reclamation for kingdom purposes. As Mouw explains, “we need to discern the signs of God’s renewing work in the present.” However, “we do still need to be constantly reminded about Christ’s call to us to share in his suffering. The ravages of the fall are all too obvious in our world.”
Where Is God in all the Suffering?
Amy Orr-Ewing (The Good Book Company)
With each month COVID-19 lingers, it exacts an even heavier physical, psychological, and material toll. Writing in the thick of the pandemic, Oxford-trained apologist Amy Orr-Ewing takes a warm, personal approach to addressing the suffering that people experience and their doubts about God’s protective care. “For me,” she writes, “love is the starting place for untangling questions of pain and suffering, and especially the question, ‘Where is God in all the suffering?’ Love seems to be at the absolute core of why suffering feels like it does. Suffering feels so wrong to us because of our love for another person who is in distress.”
For the Body: Recovering a Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the Human Body
Timothy C. Tennent (Zondervan)
The evangelical witness on matters of sex, gender, and public morality can suffer from a piecemeal focus. We mount distinct arguments against things like abortion, same-sex marriage, gender reassignment, pornography, or cohabitation, but we neglect knitting them together into a holistic theology of bodily life. Asbury Theological Seminary president Timothy C. Tennant sets out to correct this imbalance in For the Body. Too often, he writes, believers are rushing around “like firefighters desperately careening from one spot to another, trying to put out this fire or that fire,” and “our focus on extinguishing individual fires has prevented us from examining the underlying cause.”
