The Wisdom of Justin Martyr
Insights on Communicating Faithful Witness from a Second-century Church Leader
Mark Allan Steiner
YEAR
2025
Division
Axios
Pricing
Price: TBD
The American evangelical church today faces profound political and cultural challenges. It is vitally important for the church to understand these challenges more fully and to think about them more theologically. It is also important for the church to repent of how we have failed to be the edifying and countercultural influence we ought to be, and craft an approach to public and political life that bears authentic and life-giving witness to who our God is and what he is like. In this book, the author shows how Justin Martyr, a prominent second-century church leader, provides a useful and powerful blueprint by which the church in America can fulfill these God-given tasks more powerfully, more effectively, and more faithfully. In his response to the Roman Imperial culture of his time, in his views of truth, and in his passion for translating the essential truths of the Christian faith for the audiences he faced, Justin Martyr offers a powerful testimony for how we can be faithful witnesses in our own day.
About the Author
Mark Allan Steiner
Ph.D. Indiana University
Mark Allan Steiner is Associate Professor of Communication at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, and is a past president of the Religious Communication Association. His areas of expertise include rhetorical theory and criticism, religious rhetoric, public/political discourse, and the relationship between mediation and religious identity. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Operation Rescue: Projecting the Christian Pro-Life Message (2006) and “Reconceptualizing Christian Public Engagement: ‘Faithful Witness’ and the American Evangelical Tradition” (2009) and has published a range of articles and book chapters on evangelical Christian rhetoric, media and religion, undergraduate communication pedagogy, and rhetoric education at the primary and secondary school levels. He lives in Suffolk, Virginia with his wife and four children.