The Bible is as strange as it is surprising. Even its most well-known stories can catch us off guard, revealing things about God and about ourselves that we had not seen before. Nowhere is this more true than with the book of Genesis. Its iconic accounts of shepherds and nomads, apple-eaters and ark-builders, sharpen our view of human life and the God who works in the midst of it. With empathy and imagination, Eden and Afterward traces the first notes of the song of grace which plays throughout the entire Bible.

There's a big difference between judgment and love, obligation and freedom, a wage and a gift. The difference characterizes an extraordinary amount of our day-to-day experience, often dividing fear from hope, and death from life. At the heart of Christianity lies a similar and related dynamic: between the Law and the Gospel. Far from being a reductive or antiquated distinction, understanding where one ends and the other begins allows a person to see both the Bible and themselves-indeed, the whole world -in a fresh and enlivening way. Written with the non-theologian in mind, this short volume...