Here’s to 2024! But before we ring in the new year, a quick update on the status of my work in 2023. My primary focus was drafting the bulk of my new academic book Scripting the Son: Prosopological Exegesis and the Making of Early Christology, forthcoming from Cascade in their Studies in Early Christology series. This project expands and deepens my treatment of the subject of prosopological exegesis in the pre-Nicene period from my doctoral research and subsequent monograph The Trinitarian Testimony of the Spirit: Prosopological Exegesis and the Development of Pre-Nicene Pneumatology (Brill, 2018). In that volume, I briefly explored how prosopological exegesis contributed to the fashioning of early Christology, but the overwhelming focus of that book was pneumatology. This time around, Christology is front and center.

The main challenge in preparing this volume (apart from finding adequate time to work on the project, unsurprisingly) has been the sheer amount of pre-Nicene material to meticulously comb through to make sure I’m not missing any significant examples, especially once I made the decision to fully engage the work of Origen on this subject. Still, I’m pleased to be about 90% finished with the draft (so currently sitting at 207 pages, 60,500 words), so the end is very much in sight. The plan is to deliver the manuscript for Scripting the Son to Cascade in Q1 2024, so I anticipate a publication date in Q4 2024.

Besides this book project, I had the opportunity to deliver a number of smaller pieces. On the subject of Anglican catechesis, I prepared a two-part practical essay “Anglican Confirmation for Suspicious Evangelicals” for The North American Anglican (part 1 and part 2). As part of my work of Christ the King, I taught and prepared a series on hermeneutics, focusing on the fourfold sense and lectio divina. You can check out the video series here.

Most of my other pieces, though, focused on Christian education, spinning off ideas from my book Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age (Cascade, 2022) in various venues, such as the ACCS magazine Classis and in Modern Reformation (here). I was also recently interviewed by Ken Myers of the Mars Hill Audio Journal (here; it’s well worth the subscription!). Finally, I wrote two short pieces for Logos on the subjects of the Trinity in the Old Testament (here) and introductory pneumatology (here).

Thank you as always, readers, for your support of my work. May the Lord richly bless you in 2024!