What actually is “the Gospel”? What about “sin” and “salvation”? How should we really understand the Trinity, the church, theology, creation, the cross, the image of God?

These kinds of fundamental questions have rarely been answered and explained more clearly and succinctly than in Robert W. Jenson’s 2016 book A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? — a book composed of the edited transcripts of Jenson’s 2008 lectures at Princeton University.

This book is the topic of our next Mockingbird Zoom Book Club, coming up this Sunday, September 24, at 3:30pm (EST). Leading us through this beautiful summary of Christian theology will be Mockingbird’s friend, regular contributor, United Methodist pastor, and “tamed cynic” Jason Micheli.

Even for those well-versed in the basics of Christian theology, this month’s short read is packed with insights often conveyed with remarkable clarity. Take, for example, this passage from Jenson’s chapter on “Sin and Salvation”:

The whole story of the God of Israel reaches its climax in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Now that climax … turns out of be the completion of humanity’s rupture with God. Notoriously, Jesus uttered as he hung on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The rupture and alienation between humanity and God that we have just called “sin” achieves its fulfillment and completion in the death of Jesus. So the climax of God’s story with Israel turns out to be the rupture with God and the death that it entails.

God raised Jesus from the dead. And it is in this event that the unity of God and humanity is restored on the other side of sin and death. It is a unity that incorporates sin and death within itself and thus transcends the crucifixion. Christ was crucified; in him sin and death have achieved their fulfillment. But Christ also lives. And he lives, moreover, precisely as the Christ of Israel so that the sin and death in which God’s story with Israel climaxes is transcended because it is included in Christ’s living existence.

Of course, Jenson doesn’t merely offer a terse explanation of Christian theology (alongside a good deal of history and tradition) itself, he also does so in a way that helps to present all of it as a fresh and viable option for contemporary believers, ultimately endeavoring to answer in the affirmative the question posed long ago by God to Ezekiel: “Can These Bones Live?”

Hopefully, you will find this read as compelling as I have. If you have any interest in this topic, even if you haven’t had time to read the book, we hope you will tune in on Zoom this Sunday for what will surely be a fascinating conversation.

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Future books, discussion leaders, and dates are:

October 29th — Stephanie Phillips, Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) (304 pgs)

November 26th — Todd Brewer, T. S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1959)

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