The Amen: A Biblical Biography
A Study of Scripture's Most Trusted Word
£9.99
THE AMEN: A BIBLICAL BIOGRAPHY
Volume I: The Word in Scripture
A Four-Volume Study of Scripture's Most Trusted Word
You have said it thousands of times. At the end of the Creed. After grace before a meal. Sealing a prayer you meant with your whole heart, or one you barely noticed yourself praying. But what does it actually mean, this word we inherited from a language most of us have never studied, and have never stopped to ask about?
The Great Amen is a four-volume study of that single word, and this first volume traces its story where it begins: in Scripture itself. From the Hebrew root that binds together faith, truth, and trust, through the covenant Amens of Israel's earliest worship, into the doxologies of the Psalter, the striking claim of Isaiah that God himself bears the title "Amen," and on to the New Testament, where Jesus prefaces his own words with it, John doubles it as a mark of divine authority, and Paul distils the whole biblical theology of the word into a single sentence: all the promises of God find their Yes in him. The volume closes where the Christian Bible closes, with the word that ends the Book of Revelation.
Written for the parish reader and the newcomer to serious theological reading alike, this is a book that assumes no prior training in Hebrew, Greek, or biblical scholarship. Each chapter opens with a short reflection and a guiding epigraph, walks carefully through the biblical text with the aid of the Church's best scholarship, and closes with questions for prayer, study, or parish discussion. Sources are drawn from the original languages and the standard critical editions, always explained in plain terms before they are put to work.
Whether you are leading a study group, deepening your own prayer life, or simply curious about a word you have spoken all your life without asking where it came from, this book offers a way in: careful, warm, and unafraid of the difficult questions.
The Word in Scripture is Volume I of four in The Great Amen series and may be read on its own or alongside the volumes to follow: The Word in Worship, The Word in Prayer, and The Word in Tradition.