
Argues that theology can respond faithfully to the living God only by paying due attention to human bodily experience Scripture points to the human body and lived experience as the preeminent arena of God's continuing revelation in the world, says Luke Timothy Johnson. Attentively discerning the manifestations of God's Spirit in and through the body is essential for theology to recover its nature as an inductive art rather than—as traditionally conceived—a deductive science. Willingness to risk engaging actual human situations—as opposed to abstract conceptualizations of those situations—is required of the theologian, Johnson argues. He celebrates the intimations of divine presence and power in such human experiences as play, pain, pleasure, work, and aging, showing how theology can respond faithfully to the living God only by paying due attention to human bodily experience.
Author

Luke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Johnson's research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of early Christianity (particularly moral discourse), Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle of James.