Powerful, trustworthy... beautiful?

Samuel G. Parkison makes a startling claim: Jesus is the most beautiful man to ever exist. His defence is theoretical and experiential: he knows him to be ultimate beauty and he has experienced him to be so.

Deconstructing cultural notions that beauty is subjective or sentimental, Parkison constructs an impressive picture of God's breathtaking beauty. On this firm foundation, the only building to rise is one that testifies to Jesus, the God-man, as the most beautiful man that ever lived.

There's beauty on every page of Jesus' story. From before time, the beautiful foreknowledge of the Father prepared for the beauty of the incarnation. From this beautiful birth came a ministry brimming with beauty, and a death that overflowed with it. This beautiful sunset is followed by a resurrection sunrise: the beautiful declaration that salvation is secure. Having ascended, with beauty unbound, he now reigns forever as our ceaseless intercessor.

Through the pages of this journey, the unvarnished Jesus radiates with a true beauty like nothing and no one else. His rivals, the lesser versions, knockoffs and dupes, are ugly in comparison to the beautiful Jesus of the Holy Scriptures. He is the only one through whom satisfaction and communion with God, the ultimate beauty we're wired to desire, is found.

This is a beauty that everyone needs to know and experience. With sidebars and a glossary to distil complex terms, readers are invited to delve deeper into the beauty of Jesus. There's beauty in the big words, and it's within the grasp of every reader.

So, put the proposition to the test. Read and revel in Jesus; he's beautiful.

For the weapons of our warfare are not of flesh but have divine power to destroy strong-holds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). Life in Western civilization is rapidly changing. In such a cultural landscape, it can be overwhelming for Christians to find the bearings. How should they think about same-sex marriage? Or transgenderism and the concept of preferred personal pronouns? Or the ever-confounding topic of racism? Or technology and transhumanism? How should Christians think about their involvement on social media? Or their consumption of entertainment? And does their Christianity have anything to do with these matters at all? In Thinking Christianly, Samuel Parkison demonstrates an exercise in obedience to 2 Corinthians 10:4-5; he labors to bring sundry thoughts captive to Christ. Sacred cows are not spared in this collection of short essays. Parkison is concerned with showing how Christ's lordship applies to how Christians thinking about everything, including the many perplexing and novel issues Christians face today.

What hath beauty to do with systematic theology? In this new monograph, Samuel G. Parkison explores this question by examining the relationship between Christ's divine beauty and regeneration and faith. Building on recent scholarship in (a) theological retrieval of the Christian tradition, and (b) Protestant developments in theological aesthetics, this project is concerned with soteriology's aesthetic dimension. While many today may consider beauty a mere matter of preference, glibly assuming that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Parkison pushes fiercely in the opposite direction, dignifying beauty by recognizing its objective value--a feature of aesthetics that has fallen on hard times since the so-called Enlightenment, and the subsequent uglification of culture (as Sir Roger Scruton put it).

In this doxologically flavored, dogmatically charged work, Parkison pulls from a variety of disciplines to demonstrate Christ's beauty, and the relevance of Christ's beauty on Christian theology. Irresistible Beauty is the work of a synthetic generalist. It is not strictly a work of exegesis, though it will stand firmly on exegetical findings. It is not strictly a work of biblical theology, though it will be biblical-theological. It is not strictly a work of historical theology, though it will engage in theological retrieval of the church's history. It is not strictly a philosophical work, though, driven by a love for wisdom, it will be irreducibly philosophical. Thus, this is a systematic-theological work in the full sense of the term--informed and shaped by these disciplines and informing and shaping the pursuit of them.

Irresistible Beauty is sure to stimulate readers who enjoy a wide range of topics: the philosophy of beauty, metaphysics, Classical Christian Theism, biblical theology, and a Protestant Reformed conception soteriology are all dealt with in this dense theological work. Parkison also converses with some of the greatest minds of Christian history (e.g., Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Turretin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Herman Bavinck, Hans Urs von Balthasaar), making Irresistible Beauty a stimulating work for many a reader.