Mark Boda’s New Book on Repentance in Scripture (Gupta)

Over the summer, Mark Boda published a new book entitled Return to Me: A Biblical Theology of Repentance (IVP, 2015). Boda is a well-respected OT scholar at McMaster Divinity College.

About nine months ago or so, Boda kindly sent me a copy of the manuscript because I was working on research related to this subject. I was very impressed with his work. Firstly, I value that he allows for different parts of Scripture to have their own nuances regarding repentance. Secondly, I appreciate that he did not just treat the Old Testament, but includes a short, but important section on the New Testament. The significance of this work, for my part, is that Boda avoids the fallacy of treating the OT as covenantally-focused (expectation and obedience), and the NT as one-side (“grace only”). Rather, Boda demonstrates how patterns of divine-human interaction and expectation continue from OT to NT – repentance (from a relational-perspective) is present and important in the NT in ways congruous with the OT.

I think that the subject was too large for Boda to do more than soundings and big-picture work, and his NT section is very cursory, but this is a major step in the right direction of thinking about covenant, obedience, and repentance in a holistic and whole-Bible way. I hope someone will continue to study how covenantal repentance is at work in the New Testament (in its pluriform ways).