“A theocentric vision of health:” Todd Billings at LATC 2025

With the 2025 Los Angeles Theology Conference coming up in March, I’m posting mini-interviews with some of our speakers, asking them to share about what they’ll be presenting at the conference. We’re excited to have Todd Billings with us this year. Here’s what he’ll be speaking about:

Q: LATC 2025’s theme is Receiving Redemption, and it focuses on how salvation is received by human persons and communities. Why is this aspect of soteriology worth close theological attention?

The gift of life in Christ is exactly that—a gift. Yet it is an astonishing drama that we can easily lose sight of. Forgiveness and new life are not abstract concepts, nor are they rewards for our hard work or earnest praise. By the Spirit’s work, we are united to Christ through faith and receive an identity and calling that we did not create. We are adopted children of the Father through the beloved Son, longing for and rejoicing in the hope of redemption’s full arrival, on the final day.

For many Christians today, this is deeply counterintuitive. Our culture often teaches that we are “self-made” individuals who construct our own identities, but as creatures, we are first and foremost recipients—given lavish gifts in both creation and redemption. Scholars such as Tara Isabella Burton have shown how pervasive this idea of a self-made identity is within various Western cultural movements. When this way of thinking shapes our imagination, it can make it much harder to grasp the radical grace at the heart of the Christian life.

Q: The title of your plenary address is “From Sheol to Temple: A Theology of Healing for Pilgrims on the Way”” How will you be approaching the conference theme?

A: We live in an era where people pursue “health” and “healing” with great fervor. Beyond conventional health care, the quest for well-being fuels a multi-billion-dollar wellness industry. But what exactly is “health,” and how does it connect to Christian claims about salvation? In the New Testament and early Christianity, the language of “saving” and “healing” was deeply interconnected. I will explore how a biblical vision of health and salvation differs significantly from contemporary discussions of health—both in medical contexts and in the broader “wellness” movement. While both are valuable, they are often pursued with a kind of religious devotion, as if our highest calling is simply to maximize our lifespan, attention, and energy.

However, the Psalms present a very different “geography” of human existence. The deepest contrast is not between biological life and death but between Sheol—a place of abandonment, far from communion with God and others, and as a result, a place of death—and the Temple, where God dwells in fullness with His creatures, and they with one another. In this biblical vision, health is good not as an end in itself, but as a byproduct of the Lord’s holy and life-giving presence. It is a precious gift for frail and mortal beings like us, and caring for our bodies and the bodies of others is a high calling. Yet a theocentric vision of health reshapes both how we understand and how we pursue it.

Q: Can you describe how this new talk fits in with your previous theological work?

A: About a decade ago, I explored a theology of joy and lament amidst incurable illness in Rejoicing in Lament. In 2020, I published The End of the Christian Life, seeking to give a biblical-theological account of how embracing our mortal limits can lead to a renewed vision of resurrection hope. In the fall of 2020, during the pandemic, I began researching a theology of illness, focusing particularly on theologies of illness and healing—especially in cases of chronic illness, which our medical systems often struggle to treat and congregations sometimes find difficult to understand. I felt that we needed interdisciplinary exploration of this project. So, I started the Faith and Illness Initiative at Western Theological Seminary, to give a series of colloquies to discover a renewed theology of vocation and virtue for Christians with chronic illness. We’ve brought together theologians, physicians, pastor-theologians, and students for ‘think-tank’ colloquies, and I’ve learned a great deal from these discussions. Participants have included scholars such as Helen Rhee, Matthew Levering, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, along with extraordinary clinicians in general medicine and mental health, as well as a remarkable group of theologically minded pastors. As I continue exploring this topic, my work is deeply indebted to all of them.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the conference? Are there any papers or issues that have especially caught your eye?

A: I teach courses on the Holy Spirit and salvation, so many of the papers at the conference are of great interest to me! There are quite a few that stand out, but I’m especially looking forward to those by Andrew Davison and Fellipe do Vale.