[Update: I totally forgot to add a proper intro to this post, and to also note that these titles were mine to read and peruse thanks to Zondervan Academic and IVP Academic.]
I’ve written about the Five Solas series elsewhere (see this review of Faith Alone). Stephen Wellum’s contribution on Jesus rounds out the series well. The first part of the book examines the biblical data, before Wellum moves into more theological territory as it relates to Christ’s offices and work as redeemer. The final part turns to contemporary issues, particularly as it relates to sufficiency and exclusivity of Christ. This work pairs well with Wellum’s other work on Christology in Crossway’s Foundations of Evangelical Theology series (God the Son Incarnate) without overlapping too much. This volume probably more fits the average to above average reader’s needs for a solid intro to Christology.
ReSourcing Theological Anthropology
This work is a kind of follow up to Marc Cortez’s previous work, Christological Anthropology in Historical Perspective. Here, Cortez’s goal is to explore issues in theological anthropology, using Christ as a key of sorts. The core of the book is the 5th chapter, where Cortez offers readers 11 theses on Christological Anthropology and gives you a good glimpses at his overall theological reasoning. I found the chapters on either side of this most stimulating though. Chapter 4 digs into issues related to Christ’s sinlessness, while chapter 6 explores sexuality in light of Christ’s embodied existence. Much like the previous volume, this is a great read for those who want move from basic understandings of Christology into deeper waters.
While not quite the hot topic it was a few months back, eternal generation is still worth looking into. However, I think you can just start here and have most of your questions answered (and the tradition well defended). The parts of the book are divided between exegetical deep dives, historical surveys, and contemporary formulations of the doctrine. The essays can be read in any manner or sequence, but I might start with Scott Swain’s opening essay, and then Matthew Emerson on the role of Proverbs 8, before skipping farther ahead to Fred Sanders on Eternal Generation and Soteriology.
Knowing Creation + Christ and The Created Order
Technically the first volume here is focused on the doctrine of creation, but I’ve paired them because they complement one another. Each volume, as the subtitles suggest, contains essays from theological, scientific, and philosophical perspectives on the topics at hand. They are actually weighted more toward the theological because each volume has a section on biblical and historical perspectives after the theological section. Throughout the volumes, you’ll find essays like N. T. Wright on “Christ and the Cosmos,” Chris Tilling on “Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time,” John Walton on “Origins in Genesis,” and Richard Bauckham on “Gospel Narratives and the Psychology of Eyewitness Memory.” If you’re feeling extra adventurous, you’ll wanna check out James K. A. Smith’s “Our Chalcedonian Moment: Christological Imagination for Scientific Challenges.” There’s a lot to dig into here, and readers interested in creation and Christology will find much to digest.
Conformed to The Image of The Son
You would think at this point we might have run out of things to explore in Romans. And yet, Haley Goranson Jacob was able to write her dissertation on a single verse (8:29). Under N. T. Wright’s supervision, she takes readers on a re-examination of glory in and glorification in Jewish literature. This sets the stage for looking more closely at the topic in Romans in general and then 5-8 in particular. With the proper framework in place, she then helps readers make better sense of what Paul means in 8:29. As we are in the season of Advent, this book provides a kind of eschatological meditation on the ultimate aim of Christ’s coming. If you’d like to probe into the idea of conformity to Christ more deeply, at least as it relates to Paul’s argument in Romans, this is the go-to book on the topic.