Books
The Screen-Free Church: How Pastors Can Diagnose and Resist the Spiritual Costs of Technology (Baker, February 2027)
“A clear, compelling, and courageous vision of an incarnational church in a hollow, empty time. I enjoyed this book immensely; I think you will too.” —John Mark Comer, founder of Practicing the Way
“If you have been entrusted with any form of leadership in the church, you must read this book.” —Andy Crouch, author of The Tech-Wise Family and The Life We're Looking For
Our lives are saturated with screens, and digital technology continues to encroach even into our churches.
Brad East argues that resisting this encroachment is a critical task of ministry. Screens sap our attention and drain us of the ability to pray, read, or be still for more than a fleeting moment. In The Screen-Free Church, he reflects on the scope of the problem and offers practical advice for church leaders on reclaiming their congregations, ministries, and worship services--addressing pastors' own relationship with technology as well as their preaching preparation and pastoral care.
The Screen-Free Church will be a lifeline for pastors who want to understand and resist the technological takeover of the church.
Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024)
An invitation to the Christian faith for the bored, the distracted, and the spiritually hungry
Dear future saint,
Why is the gospel worth living for?
Why is it worth dying for?
In these letters, a fellow pilgrim addresses future saints: the bored and the distracted, the skeptical and the curious, the young and the spiritually hungry. Lively and readable, these bite-sized letters explain the basics of Christian life, including orthodox doctrine, the story of Scripture, the way of discipleship, and more.
Interweaving Scripture, poetry, and theological writings, Letters to a Future Saint educates readers in the richness of the Christian tradition. But beyond that, this earnest and approachable volume offers young people— who may be largely uninformed of the depths of faith despite having been raised in Christian homes —an invitation into the life of the church and into a deeper relationship with God.
The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024)
You belong to God’s family. But do you understand what that means?
The Bible tells the story of God and his people. But it is not merely history. It is our story. Abraham is our father. And Israel’s freedom from slavery is ours.
Brad East traces the story of God’s people, from father Abraham to the coming of Christ. He shows how we need the scope of the entire Bible to fully grasp the mystery of the church. The church is not a building but a body. It is not peripheral or optional in the life of faith. Rather, it is the very beating heart of God’s story, where our needs and hopes are found.
The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022)
Foreword by Stephen E. Fowl
What role does the doctrine of the church play in the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture? This book explores recent accounts of the Bible and its exegesis in modern theology and traces the differences made by divergent, and sometimes opposed, theological accounts of the church. Though the rise of theological interpretation of Scripture has led to a measure of convergence between scholars and theologians from different ecclesial traditions, the book argues that attending to the particularities of those traditions helps to explain what appears to be the current impasse—one determined far less by hermeneutical issues than by ecclesiological disagreements.
The argument proceeds through close engagement with three contemporary theologians: Robert Jenson, John Webster, and John Howard Yoder. Each of them bears and redirects the influence of Karl Barth in a unique way, even as they represent distinct strands of Western Christendom: respectively, the catholic tradition, the magisterial reformation, and the radical reformation. How do these ecclesiological “logics” inform their proposals regarding the Bible’s nature and interpretation? How do these proposals relate to one another, to the communions they seek to represent, and to the state of bibliology today? That is what the book sets out to answer.
The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021)
Foreword by Katherine Sonderegger
When Holy Scripture is read aloud in the liturgy, the church confesses with joy and thanksgiving that it has heard the word of the Lord. What does it mean to make that confession? And why does it occasion praise? The doctrine of Scripture is a theological investigation into those and related questions, and this book is an exploration of that doctrine. It argues backward from the church’s liturgical practice, presupposing the truth of the Christian confession: namely, that the canon does in fact mediate the living word of the risen Christ to and for his people. What must be true of the sacred texts of Old and New Testament alike for such confession, and the practices of worship in which it is embedded, to be warranted?
By way of an answer, the book examines six aspects of the doctrine of Scripture: its source, nature, attributes, ends, interpretation, and authority. The result is a catholic and ecumenical presentation of the historic understanding of the Bible common to the people of God across the centuries, an understanding rooted in the church’s sacred tradition, in service to the gospel, and redounding to the glory of the triune God.
The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford UP, 2019)
By Robert W. Jenson | Edited by Brad East | Foreword by Bruce D. Marshall
At the time of his death in the autumn of 2017, Robert W. Jenson was arguably America's foremost theologian. Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, much of Jenson's thought was dedicated to the theological description of how Scripture should be read-what has come to be called theological interpretation. In this rapidly expanding field of scholarship, Jenson has had an inordinate impact.
Despite its importance, study of Jenson's theology of scriptural interpretation has lagged, due in large part to the longevity of his career and volume of his output. In this book, all of Jenson's writings on Scripture and its interpretation have been collected for the first time. Here readers will be able to see the evolution of Jenson's thought on this topic, as well as the scope and intensity of his late-period engagement with it. Where other twentieth-century thinkers rely on non-theological, secular methods of scriptural investigation, Jenson is willing to let go of "respectability" for the sake of a truly Christian theological interpretation. The result is a genuinely free, intellectually invigorating exercise in reading and theory from one of the greatest theologians in the last century.