From Bread to Wine: Creation, Worship, and Christian Maturity

Biblical rituals are not strange practices or obscure formalities but correspond to the stages of human life, revealing God's design for how we can emulate His ways.

In From Bread to Wine: Creation, Worship, and Christian Maturity, James B. Jordan explores how sin disrupts the rhythms of human life and how biblical rituals restore us to our place in God's historical plan with special emphasis on the motifs of bread and wine throughout the Scriptures.

In the Bible, bread is priestly while wine is kingly and prophetic. Bread comes first and wine later. You eat bread in the morning and drink wine at night. Bread is suitable for children while wine is for adults. Bread is made quickly, but wine takes much longer to ferment and mature. 

The entire Old Creation, the childhood of humanity (Galatians 4), is the time of bread, while the New Covenant, our maturity in Christ, is the time of bread and wine. Between the two comes the breaking of the bread, the death of Jesus Christ.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James B. Jordan was born in 1949. His father was a professor of French Literature and his mother a piano teacher and a poet. He served as a Military Historian in the U.S. Air Force for four years. He began seminary training at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS, and graduated with an M.A.R. and a Th.M. from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, majoring in Systematic Theology. In 1987, he founded Biblical Horizons in Niceville, FL.

Beginning in 1999, Jordan served part time as Professor of Biblical Studies at the Reformed Theological Seminary of St. Petersburg, Russia. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including From Bread to Wine: Creation, Worship and Christian Maturity, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World, and The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on Daniel, as well as scores of monographs and short essays.