Welcome to a new, quarterly column at Mere Orthodoxy: the Heron.
The title of this column takes inspiration from Kirsten Sanders’s explanation of the title of her own “Magpie” column:
Magpies are the rascals of the avian world. They gather shiny things they find beautiful and potentially useful. Such behavior is derided by intellectuals under the category of curiositas, a vice of the classical world. I do understand the preference for sustained, careful critique over flitting-about from one thing to the next. But perhaps a thoughtful-enough magpie might herself be the center around which such wild and interesting curiosities might cohere.
Sanders’s playful but insightful posture with respect to her column reminded me of the quip frequently credited to the Greek philosopher Archilochus, that “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” This saying served as the inspiration for both Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” and for the contemporary publication The Hedgehog Review.
For my part, having lived my entire life in North Texas, I have never spent much time with magpies, foxes, or hedgehogs. However, there is at least one kind of bird that routinely establishes a rookery in my neighborhood: Nyctanassa, the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron.
Almost a decade ago Jake Meador shared with me Wendell Berry’s poem “Do Not Be Ashamed.” Before then, I thought of the heron primarily as an exceedingly focused, patient bird, which stalks before carefully pouncing on its prey. True to its name, the night heron is subtle; I rarely find the night heron out and about during the daytime, but they are companions whenever I venture out under the cover of darkness. I have come to expect to find them shrouded in shadowy mist whenever the weather is foggy. The night heron is not like the disciples in Gethsemane; while others recline and take their rest, the heron is watchful, focused, and patient, before striking with precision.
But the bird took on even greater, nearly mystical significance in my imagination as I pondered the conclusion to Berry’s poem:
…it is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.
The heron not only is patient and carefully looks ahead, quietly focused; in this poem the heron’s flight embodies a determined earnestness and candor that are unencumbered by expediency, people-pleasing, or the anxiety and cynicism that easily deceive and corrode our souls.
This quarterly column is devoted to forthcoming books, primarily focusing on Christian theology, Christian history, and biblical studies, but with an eye to related fields that bear upon the life of the church. As exemplified in the first iteration of this column below, each entry will typically contain five or so forthcoming publications that merit heron-like patience and watchfulness.
My comments on each book will include a brief explanation of why I think the book will be interesting or significant. Notably, I have no incentive to promote any of the authors or publishers I mention. I am neither endorsing all the contents of every book listed (something impossible, given that many of these books are not yet published). And the same time, I am not interested in generally noting what is being published without any sense of discernment about what is helpful and unhelpful for healthy, scriptural, Christian belief and practice.
I aim to write in the most irenic tone and register possible, in the spirit of true Christian charity. Thus, where a forthcoming book looks like it will be a valuable contribution, I will say so; where it appears that an influential book will argue something I will find helpful or concerning, I will say so. But very often what I will seek to do is to invite further conversation.
Routinely when I peruse the new books lists from various publishers, I think to myself “wow, I would love to read how X would respond to what Y appears to be arguing in this new book!” Perhaps this column might foster not merely awareness of new forthcoming books I find interesting, but I hope it actually leads to some such conversations for the edification of the church and the reconciliation of the world to the glory of the triune God.
Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume 3: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Missions of the Divine Persons (Fortress Press, 2026).
Probably the single book I am most looking forward to that will be published in 2026 is volume 3 of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology.
I have an ambivalent relationship with her project thus far; I found volume 1, especially on divine simplicity, unicity, and invisibility, an exhilarating read. Because Sonderegger is such a beautiful writer, is a diligent student of Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, and many masters in the Christian tradition, and because her books are primarily focused on God, rather than merely being words about words about God, she is a blast to read. I once set down her volume 1 and sang the Doxology! I could not put her book down, and it influenced my own thinking on theology proper in productive ways.
However, I struggled significantly to follow her project in volume 2, where she turned to contemplation of the eternal processions of the Son and the Spirit primarily by way of an extended reading of Leviticus, specifically the Nadab and Abihu narrative. Further, confessional Protestant that I am, I was disappointed in some of the ethical turns taken in volume 2 with respect to human sexuality.
But the description of her forthcoming volume 3 arrested my attention:
In the modern era, Christology and Pneumatology have been treated as independent loci, with Christology owning the lion's share of theological terrain. But properly, these two doctrines are expressions of the dogma of the Holy Trinity: they are the temporal missions of the divine processions. Katherine Sonderegger treats the missions of the divine persons in this volume, the third book of her Systematic Theology. The structural aim of this volume is to return these doctrines to their original home; much of the dangers in modern treatments of the Life of Jesus will be mitigated by this return to a dogmatic center.
Those moves are not only plausible but exactly right and needed. Arguably there is little original contribution in them; they can be found in the traditional approaches of the Protestant scholastics, though that is well off the beaten path of contemporary biblical studies and modern theology.
However, I am far less certain about the course charted in the paragraph which follows, and the sentence to which I have added emphasis:
The Scriptural center of the divine missions is found in the Book of Exodus. In the encounter with Moses, the Lord God says: "I have heard the cry of my People and I have come down to deliver." This is the temporal end of the divine Life: to deliver and to hallow. The plagues visited upon the taskmasters provides the form of the Life of Jesus; the Passover and crossing of the Red Sea are connected to the Passion and rising of the Incarnate Son. The doctrines of atonement and sanctification are caught up in the act of sacrifice, the central cultus of ancient Israel and of the church. Christ is prophet, priest, and king, the deliverer with healing in his wings.
I am deeply sympathetic to her Christological reading of the whole canon, and of prioritizing the Passover, exodus, cultus, and more. But is Exodus truly the center of the divine missions in Holy Scripture, any more than Leviticus is a vestige of eternal processions? It seems tenuous to locate the canonical lynchpin of the divine missions with Exodus, given the astonishing revelation of how the triune God relates outwardly to creatures in Ephesians 1:3–14 or Galatians 4:4–7.
Regardless, I will always be grateful for a gift Dr. Sonderegger gave me. During my final years as a PhD student at Trinity College, Bristol, she was the visiting scholar in residence for a full week. It just so happened that she and I ate breakfast at the same time in the dorms in the morning, and she—towering intellect that she is—was deeply pious, kind, and humble. Though I don’t expect her to even remember eating those breakfasts with me, she took a genuine interest in me as a person and a student, and she prayed very deep and earnest prayers for me.
Matthew Arbo, The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues (Baker, 2026).
Near the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark After Virtue, he notes that when we attempt to retrieve something like virtue ethics in the conditions of modernity, we will inevitably retrieve only isolated fragments that at one time were integrated into a whole that cannot be restored today. Setting aside that metaphysical and epistemological problem, in my own attempt to learn about virtue ethics, I am painfully aware that I have contemplated some of them more (faith, hope, love, and justice), and some of them far less than I should (prudence, temperance, and fortitude).
Mainly, however, I am interested in this book because I desire to be virtuous, routine failures and contradictions notwithstanding. If there is one thing I have learned in my years of serving in pastoral ministry, it is that character matters. In my younger years, I could roll my eyes at calls for personal piety, given the urgency of attending to commendable social, political, theological, missional, evangelistic, mercy-ministry, and other related concerns. But with time, I have come to increasingly discover that if the personal pursuit of holiness is in place, then many other things fall in line—but that if it is not, all of it inevitably becomes undermined and worse off.
Christopher R. Mooney, Augustine's Theology of Justification by Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2026)
The Reformation cannot be understood apart from Augustine. If you read Calvin’s Institutes, or John Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, there are prolonged arguments about who are the true heirs to (and who is the continuing witness to) the faith of the early church and Augustine in particular.
Yet, simultaneously, the Protestant Reformation can be understood as an unraveling of tensions that had roots in Western theology going back to Augustine of Hippo; though recently critiqued by James Wood, B.B. Warfield famously said that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church.
But a somewhat surprising gap in scholarship hitherto has been an exhaustive study of how Augustine understood justification by faith, notwithstanding centuries of debates about related topics such as righteousness, faith, and more. Mooney’s book will likely be the decisive study on this topic for a long time to come, and I am eager to see how he handles this wonderful and complex topic.
Denise C. Flanders, Interpreting Biblical Numbers: A Rhetorical and Literary Guide (Baker Academic, 2026)
All of the numbers in the Bible are profoundly significant—and we as modern readers are routinely ill-equipped to discern how biblical numbers create meaning. At least two pitfalls lie before us. First, probably the most common, is total indifference. We are either inattentive, or uninterested, in understanding the vast significance of numbers in the Bible. Even if we know we should care about this, we think it takes too much work or the conclusions will remain too speculative and tenuous to invest time and energy into this. Second, other people are far too interested in numbers in the Bible, veering into “Bible code”-esque theories that become arbitrary and distort the nature of what Scripture is and the intentions as to why God gave it to us.
I fall into the former category. From Gemetria in Revelation to John’s mentioning of the 153 fish, I know that I should care about and need a guide on this difficult topic. I am not at all familiar with this author but would like to find help on this topic and hope this book is insightful.
David M. Moffitt, Ascension and Sacrifice: The Return of the Risen Son (Fortress Press, 2026).
David Moffitt has made at least two extremely valuable contributions to New Testament theology in the past decade and a half. First, he has helped debunk widespread misconceptions about sacrifice in the Old Testament and early Jewish context wherein the NT authors spoke about sacrifice, the temple, and more. This is extremely helpful for pastors and lay Christian readers of the Bible. Even those of us who believe that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, correction, rebuke, and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3.16) nonetheless routinely struggle to know what to do with Leviticus and its numerous different kinds of offerings and sacrifices.
However, if we are patient and diligent enough to learn about all of this, it truly does unlock countless NT texts and clarifies the nature of Christ’s saving work. As Paul Sloan once quipped, “No Leviticus, no Bible; know Leviticus, know Bible!” Second, Moffitt has thoroughly demonstrated that the resurrection is integral to the logic of atonement in the epistle to the Hebrews; Christ offered himself not merely on the cross but specifically as he presented his risen and ascended flesh-and-blood body in the heavenly holy of holies.
That said, an enduring question I have had about Moffitt’s work is how precisely it relates to the very best of historic Christian theology on the atonement. For example, Moffitt’s vision is a powerful rebuke of common, street-level assumptions that Jesus’s shed blood on the cross is itself what saves us—to the point that the resurrection seems like a random, almost gratuitous miracle after the fact. Rather, the resurrection is integral to salvation, for we would be dead in our sins without it! However, the nature of Christ’s work as ascended, interceding high priest in heaven has long had a place of priority in the Reformed tradition (for instance, in the Heidelberg Catechism, or Calvin’s eucharistic theology in Institutes book IV), but I am not sure I understand how precisely Moffitt’s vision might relate to such theological traditions. R.B. Jamieson, for instance, has argued in response to Moffitt that what Christ presents in heaven is not so much his risen flesh, but rather the risen Christ presents in heaven his faithful death on the cross.
I would love to see Jamieson review Moffitt’s new book, which is not merely an historical or exegetical study of New Testament text but raises important theological questions about the nature of atonement.
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