Untimely Christianity: Hearing the Bible in a Secular Age

Christianity is always untimely, always foreign to our beliefs and contrary to our desires. It was untimely in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome when Jesus and his early followers were killed. It is just as untimely now. But we have become deaf to its otherness, to the disruptive strangeness of Christian faith. If we are to hear it again, we must traverse the distance between our comfortable and overly conceptual Christianity and the true Christianity that "turns the whole world upside down." In Untimely Christianity, acclaimed poet and literary scholar Michael Edwards calls for a countercultural Christianity that recovers the Bible's radical otherness and renews our habits of attention to its message--to its revelation of a God who is not merely a set of doctrines but a person, someone we can know. Edwards's work is an eloquent, prophetic effort to recapture the revolutionary power of the Bible to transform the way humans view the world and how they live in it. Rich in theology, philosophy, poetry, biblical interpretation, and cultural criticism, Untimely Christianity invites readers of all kinds to encounter the Bible anew, as "a continuous questioning of the reader and a prodigious expansion of reality."