The Revelatory BodyA new book by Luke Timothy Johnson, Candler’s R.W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, has recently been published. In The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art (Eerdmans, 2015), Johnson asserts that discerning manifestations of God’s spirit through the body is a key part of the theological process.

“I’m convinced that the living God continues to press upon us in all the circumstances of our life, and that the human body is God’s preferred medium of self-revelation,” he says.

In order to sense God’s presence through the body, Johnson contends, theologians must be willing to engage in actual human experiences rather than abstract conceptualizations. Through Scripture and personal experience, the book explores the divine presence and power in such experiences as play, pain, pleasure, work and aging, all from Johnson’s perspective that theology can respond faithfully to the living God only by paying due attention to human bodily experience.