John R. Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is an important contribution to an important topic—namely, the theological challenge of animal suffering. Theodicy has traditionally been more focused on human suffering, but the emergence in the modern era of what Schneider calls “the Darwinian world” (the revolutionary new picture of nature that…

Ministry in urban areas has been heavily prioritized in recent years. Partly in response to this, Stephen Witmer’s A Big Gospel in Small Places: Why Ministry in Forgotten Communities Matters provides a theological framework for ministry in smaller/rural areas. Witmer doesn’t suggest that such ministry is more important than urban or suburban ministry, or that…

Different views on creation in the church today are often summarized in terms of whether one takes the biblical creation story “literally.” Similarly, Augustine’s crowning achievement on the doctrine of creation was, as we have noted, the production of a “literal” commentary on Genesis 1-3. Yet what Augustine means by “literal” is quite different from…

From conversion to death, Augustine was captivated by Genesis 1–3. He kept writing and re-writing commentaries on these chapters, and they pop up his other works as well (many have noticed, often with puzzlement, that even the Confessions climax into an exegesis of Genesis 1). Then, for 15 years, he labored on a kind of…

Sometimes Christians treat Genesis 1-3 as a kind of prolegomenon to the biblical narrative. These chapters are important, it is thought, primarily to set the stage for the real business of Christian theology—those issues involved in the doctrine of redemption. Moreover, when we do engage the theology of creation more directly, our interest tends to…

Imagine a young man in his late teen years. He has recently moved to the city to go to school. In the course of his study, he becomes convinced that Genesis 1 is no longer consistent with the most sophisticated intellectual trends of the day. He rejects the Christian faith in which he was raised,…