A Gracious and Compassionate God (Timmer): Mission, Salvation ad Spirituality in the Book of Jonah (NSBT Vol. 26) / January 01, 2011

Requires Accordance 11.2 or above.

Also available in the 42-volume NSBT bundle. See list of other NSBT volumes.

The book of Jonah is arguably just as jarring for us as it was for the ancients. Ninevah’s repentance, Jonah’s estrangement from God, and the book’s bracing moral conclusion all pose unsettling questions for today’s readers.

For biblical theologians, Jonah also raises tough questions regarding mission and religious conversion. Here, Daniel Timmer embarks on a new reading of Jonah in order to secure its ongoing relevance for biblical theology. After an examination of the book’s historical backgrounds (in both Israel and Assyria), Timmer discusses the biblical text in detail, paying special attention to redemptive history and its Christocentric orientation. Timmer then explores the relationship between Israel and the nations—including the question of mission—and the nature of religious conversion and spirituality in the Old Testament.

This New Studies in Biblical Theology volume concludes with an injunction for scholars and lay readers to approach Jonah as a book written to facilitate spiritual change in the reader.

About the Series:
Addressing key issues in biblical theology, the works comprised by New Studies in Biblical Theology are creative attempts to help Christians better understand their Bibles. The NSBT series is edited by D. A. Carson, aiming to simultaneously instruct and to edify, to interact with current scholarship and to point the way ahead.

New Studies in Biblical Theology volumes focus on three areas:

• the nature and status of biblical theology, including its relationship to other disciplines
• the articulation and exposition of the structure of thought from a particular biblical writer or text<
• the delineation of a biblical theme across the biblical corpus

While volume notes interact with the best of recent research, the text of each work avoids untransliterated Greek and Hebrew or too much specialist jargon. The volumes are written within the framework of confessional evangelicalism, but they also engage a variety of other relevant viewpoints and significant literature.