Looking before and after : testimony and the Christian life / Alan Jacobs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jacobs, Alan, 1958-

Series:

Stob lectures ; 2006.

The Stob lectures ; 2006

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Witness bearing (Christianity).

Christian life.

Christian biography.

Physical Description:

x, 114 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Grand Rapids, Mich. : William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2008.

Summary:

In the Work of Such Major Theologians as Lesslie Newbigin and Stanley Hauerwas, the "Christian story" is communal, and the individual Christian achieves meaning only through participation in this communally recounted narrative. While Alan Jacobs acknowledges the importance of the communal story, he suggests that something has been neglected in the development of narrative theology - the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives.

Looking Before and After encourages us to ask how individual lives can, in a specifically Christian sense, be meaningful, how we can discern and rightly interpret those meanings, and how we might tell our own stories in ways that avoid the dangers of presumption and despair. In his typically beautiful writing style, Jacobs here reinvigorates narrative theology and demonstrates the power of individual life stories well told and properly understood.

Contents:

Introduction: On narrative theology

My testimony

Testimony and testifying

Memoria

Despair, presumption, hope

The first Adam and the last.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 104-114).

ISBN:

9780802849816

0802849814

OCLC:

181072607