Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. A few weeks ago we had our good friend Tim Challies with us and we

sent him off to the deserted island for him to read. We've rescued him, we've brought him back and he looks he looks quite rested and ready to go. Welcome back to him. Thank you. Yeah, it's good to be back. Well we're glad to have you. We ran out of time last time we were together to talk about the books you've written and usually when we have

an author visit us and visit our island, we let them leave one of their books behind.

You've written many books.

Which of your books would you like to leave behind on the island?

I guess I would leave visual theology behind.

So this is your new book, Visual Theology.

What prompted you to write this?

Why did you write this book?

That was really just an attempt to see what we could do by combining words and graphics,

and especially things like infographics, a relatively new form of graphic.

What could we do by combining that with words?

The idea here is to use these tools to teach theology.

Right, yeah, to teach theology through words and then hopefully to teach it equally

through pictures. So what interests me about this book is on the one hand it is utilizing something that's new.

You mentioned infographic is sort of a new image, a new way to convey information that has been very effective for

accomplishing that.

But on the other hand, what you're doing in this book

actually has a lot of historic precedent to it. So one of the things I was

thinking about here was I was thinking of stained glass. So was this in the back of

your mind at all as you wrote this book or do you see any connections here?

Maybe to some degree. Most of the stained glass I've seen at least is more around characters around people right so displaying pictures of people we were actually thinking a little bit further back we were going back to the Garden of Eden with two trees and God giving truth do this and you'll have life do this and you'll have death

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