Theology as invitation
What would it mean to do systematic theology as collage rather than edifice? In We with God, Brian Bantum undertakes a deliberate experiment in theological form. The traditional loci remain: theological prolegomena, doctrine of God, creation, theological anthropology, hamartiology, covenant, Christology, atonement and resurrection, ecclesiology. But the discursive monograph is set aside in favor of a layered arrangement of essay, poetry, Scripture, and curated quotation from voices across the tradition.
The book's nine chapters are organized as weeks, each subdivided into sections that function as days, inviting a contemplative pace of reading and rereading. Wide margins, variable layouts, and intentional negative space are not ornamental but argumentative: They enact Bantum's claim that theological knowing is participatory, accumulative, and shaped as much by what is unsaid as by what is asserted. The form refuses the false certainty that has too often made systematic theology an instrument of exclusion, while preserving the discipline's characteristic ambition to render doctrines as a coherent and living whole.
We with God will reward scholars and students working at the intersections of constructive theology, theological aesthetics, pedagogy, and spirituality. Instructors of introductory systematics will find chapters and sections readily adaptable as primary or supplementary readings, generative prompts for written and creative response, and models for integrating the arts into doctrinal study. For the broader reader weary of theology's polemical registers, Bantum offers a serious, generous alternative: a theology that argues by inviting.
