Early Jewish Literature: An Anthology Brad Embry, Ronald Herms and Archie T. Wright. Early Jewish Literature: An Anthology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018. Vol. 1, 728 pp.; Vol. 2, 756 pp. $125.00. Reviewed by David Wallace     Early Jewish Literature: An Anthology (EJL) provides a fresh introduction to literature from the Second Temple period by presenting an in-volume access to a wide range of primary material used by Jewish groups in the first centuries BCE and CE. Because of the importance of this literature to some of the early Christian communities, highlighted points of contacts related to New Testament texts are discussed in introductory sections. The two-volume work is arranged by literary genre based on form and theme. A description of the specific characteristics of each genre is given at the beginning of each chapter. Volume 1 includes: (1) Scriptural Texts and...

    Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody James H. Cone. Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018, 176 pp. $28.00. Reviewed by Corey Patterson     Few public intellectuals have influenced America’s theological conversation on race more than James H. Cone, the late Bill and Judith Moyers Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary. His influential books on the black experience and its theological implications have culminated in his memoir Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, a look into his career as a professor and the struggles he overcame to articulate a new theological perspective within academia. In the book, Cone claims white, European theologians have dominated the study of faith, and he deems it necessary to unpack both his experience and American history to justify the need for voices in black theology. Cone begins his...

    Reading Nahum-Malachi: A Literary and Theological Commentary Steven Tuell. Reading Nahum-Malachi: A Literary and Theological Commentary. Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2016, 304 pp. $33.00. Reviewed by Jonathan Mellison     In this commentary on the final six prophetic books (Nahum–Malachi) from the collection often referred to as the “Minor Prophets,” Steven Tuell seeks to engage these books in a way that honors their collective identity. He observes that many ancient readers saw a unity in these books, and these books bear evidence of redactional links tying them together (2). Tuell strives to combine literary and theological scholarship in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader. Each book is treated by itself, but Tuell also discusses each book’s relationship to the others in the larger collection. Tuell begins his treatment of each book by discussing theological questions...

    Redeeming Gender Adrian Thatcher. Redeeming Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 225 pp. $35.95. Reviewed by Micah Cronin       In Redeeming Gender, Adrian Thatcher considers the theological problems of androcentrism and patriarchy through the history of one-sex and two-sex theories. He relies on Thomas Laqueur’s hypothesis in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud—until the eighteenth century, humans were considered to be one-sex. Men were the default, more perfect rendering of that sex, while women were defective men. The two-sex theory, which may claim either the inequality or equality of two essentially different sexes, is an innovation of the modern period. In contrast, Thatcher seeks a christological and Trinitarian view of gender that resists the gender binary, accounts for human difference, and is egalitarian (141). Thatcher first describes the...

    Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness: Exploring Missiology Through the Lens of Disability Studies Benjamin T. Conner. Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness: Exploring Missiology Through the Lens of Disability Studies. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018, 160 pp. $24. Reviewed by Wayne Hancock   Benjamin T. Conner, Professor of Practical Theology at Western Theological Seminary, does not have a disability himself (5). Nevertheless, Conner is well equipped by his previous works (Amplifying Our Witness, 2012; Practicing Witness, 2011) to offer this intriguing title intended to “stimulate a conversation between disability studies and missiology around a vision of the entire body of Christ sharing in the witness of the church” (26). The book consists of two parts. Part one serves as an accessible introduction to disability studies and missiology with an eye toward how they might inform each...

    The Whole Church Sings Robin A. Leaver. The Whole Church Sings: Congregational Singing in Luther’s Wittenberg, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017, 206 pp. $22. Reviewed by Nicholas Hopman     Nearly 500 years after Martin Luther first reformed the Mass, we are living through a golden age of scholarship on Luther’s work in music and liturgy and its effects on early Lutheranism. The dean of scholars in this genre is Robin Leaver, Professor Emeritus at Westminster Choir College (Princeton, NJ). In The Whole Church Sings, Leaver corrects the erroneous scholarly consensus that no hymnal with new vernacular Lutheran congregational hymns existed in Wittenberg until 1529. This would have left Wittenberg itself far behind other early Lutheran municipalities in terms of congregational singing. Leaver argues that two hymnals of congregational hymns, no longer extant, were published in Wittenberg...