Christopher R. J. Holmes - Böcker

Who is the Holy Spirit and how does the Spirit come to be in relation to the Father and the Son? What is the mission of the Spirit and where does it come from? Chris Holmes takes up the questions surrounding the Spirit’s procession and mission with the help of three of the church’s greatest teachers—Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Barth.Drawing on their engagements with the Fourth Gospel, Holmes presents an account of the Spirit’s identity, origin, and acts, to show how the acts of the Spirit derive from the Spirit’s life in relation to Father and Son—and the extent to which the Spirit’s mission testifies to the Spirit’s origin.Holmes presents a way forward for pneumatology. Housed within the doctrine of the Trinity, pneumatology’s joyful task is to describe the Spirit’s acts among us in light of their source in the Spirit’s acts in God. The end of this inquiry is our beatitude—knowledge of the Trinity that yields to love of the Trinity.-ABOUT THE SERIES-New Studies in Dogmatics seeks to retrieve the riches of Christian doctrine for the sake of contemporary theological renewal. Following in the tradition of G. C. Berkouwer's Studies in Dogmatics, this series provides thoughtful, concise, and readable treatments of major theological topics, expressing the biblical, creedal, and confessional shape of Christian doctrine for a contemporary evangelical audience.The editors and contributors share a common conviction that the way forward in constructive systematic theology lies in building upon the foundations laid in the church's historic understanding of the Word of God as professed in its creeds, councils, and confessions, and by its most trusted teachers.

This is an account of how the revealed truth, love, and power of God revealed in Jesus Christ are contemporary and transformative to human life. Christian ethics is a matter of grace, present to us in Jesus Christ. But so often Jesus is reduced to a kind of role model. He represents a way of being from the past that should be emulated and made relevant for today. What such an approach lacks, however, is consideration of Jesus as One who is savingly present and active today. Indeed, what if Jesus were not inert. What if his presence is constitutive of reality? Our task is to become participant in his work of making all things new. For by joining what he is doing, ethics fulfills its task, which it to become human. The purpose of this book is to account for the ways in which the revealed truth, love, and power of God revealed in Jesus Christ are contemporary to human life and transformative of human life. By learning to hear, obey, and serve, men and women become aligned to the ongoing and life-giving presence of the truth, love, and power of Jesus Christ.

In reading Scripture, we encounter not only the living God, but an invitation to the mysteries of the text itself. As readers dig through the soil of the text, they eventually discover living water—a wellspring of life. The speeches of Acts offer an accessible entry point into this life, eloquently demonstrating what Calvin calls the sum total of Christian faith. In Hearing and Doing, Christopher Holmes invites us to feast upon the speeches of Paul and Peter. As a work of constructive theological exegesis, he engages Aquinas and Calvin and some of the most important theologians of our day, notably Rowan Williams and Katherine Sonderegger. At the heart, Holmes aims to draw us to the speeches themselves so that we might become encompassed in their divine beauty. By the same token, he treats the doctrine of God and that of the church, articulating something of what the speeches urge us to say regarding God and the shape of life in relation to God.In sum, Holmes argues that the speeches provide a window into the faith's essentials, inspiring reverence and obedience toward God. Hearing and Doing submits to divine tutoring via the speeches, passing on the fruits of that contemplation to the reader with nuance and clarity, unfolding in an exegetically charged fashion the Christian faith's horizon.