Friends, my PhD dissertation was recently published by Wipf and Stock publishers and is now available in print online (amazon.com). You haven’t heard of them? Well, if you’re not into reading obscure theological books, then it's completely understandable! I don’t begrudge anyone for not diving into a read like this. Yet it is an exciting moment for me to finally see the end of a very long journey.
I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Tom Greggs, who wrote the forward to the book, and some of my contemporaries and mentors wrote nice endorsements on the back. Yet all I intend to do here is to show what is now in print form in the Dedication page as well as the “Acknowledgements” section of the book to express my gratitude to EPC for your support in this journey:
for my boys—Andrew and David
&
Escalon Presbyterian Church
τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν
—Colossians 1:17
This book is dedicated first to my boys—Andrew and David—who joined me in Scotland for periods of this more than six-year study and were a rock to me amid painful circumstances that we weathered together. They are a joyful blessing and I love them beyond compare. It is also dedicated to the congregation I’ve served for over twenty years now—Escalon Presbyterian Church—which enabled me to employ a modified sabbatical to pursue PhD studies at the University of Aberdeen. They also were a gracious congregation during severe personal difficulties towards the end of the study, requiring additional time and attention to cross the finish line. Indeed, in Christ all things hold together (Col 1:17).
Thank you, once again, for your support in the journey to write a thesis on the confessional foundations of the church in Jesus Christ at a particularly crucial time in church history - a book about the church, and for the church. Thank you as well, for your prayers and support through the dissertation process.
Cover Blurb:
This book is devoted to understanding the confessional foundations of church unity in the earlier theology of Karl Barth. This book follows Barth’s academic and ecclesiastical career from the years 1921 to 1938 as he moves from a non confessional pastor in Switzerland prior to his first teaching post in Göttingen to articulating, in his first volume of Church Dogmatics, the critical and essential authority of the church’s confession in its public witness at the start of his final teaching post in Basel. During these years, each academic placement and public ecclesiastical assignment is crucial for understanding the development of Barth’s confessional theology in order to make sense of his mature dogmatic understanding of the authority of the church’s confession in CD I/2.