Fred SandersA scene from the Leben der heiligen Altväter (1482)
Book Reviews
Review of Harrower, God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of this World
Working from the conviction that Christian theology has deep resources for those who have experienced trauma, this volume explores “how God the Trinity engages with horrors and trauma, and what people can hope for in light…
Review of Daley’s Leontius of Byzantium
This impressive volume provides the full text, in Greek with an English translation on facing pages, of six polemical works attributed to an accomplished sixth-century monastic theologian. It also includes much of the necessary textual arcana,…
Review of Levy, Introducing Medieval Biblical Interpretation
This volume introduces the thought of key interpreters of Scripture from nearly a millennium of Western intellectual history. Though there is a brief opening overview of church fathers reaching back to Origen, Levy’s real tale picks…
Review of Lunn, The Theology of Sanctification and Resignation in Charles Wesley’s Hymns
Charles Wesley is a theologian to be reckoned with, and the handful of scholars who give him their serious attention find themselves rewarded in many ways. Nearly everything that seems at first to be a scholarly…
Review of Anthony C. Thiselton’s A Shorter Guide to Holy Spirit
‘‘Shorter Guide’’ is a peculiar genre. Though it is on the same topic by the same author, this volume is an entirely new book rather than a condensed version of its predecessor.
Spiritual Formation in the Trinity: A Review Essay of Donald Fairbairn’s Life in the Trinity
As I was rearranging some shelves recently, I was struck by the fact that my books on spiritual formation occupy a peculiar region. They live somewhere toward the end of the whole theological collection, after the…
Review of Carl L. Beckwith’s The Holy Trinity
To those on the outside of its institutions and traditions, Lutheranism can sometimes seem like a parallel universe. Even when Lutheran theologians are writing about doctrines with a common ecumenical status (and the Trinity is such…
Review of Treier and Lauber’s Trinitarian Theology for the ChurchScripture, Community, Worship
The Trinity was forgotten for a period of “centuries of doctrinal tragedy,” until suddenly in the middle of the twentieth century, theologians rediscovered it. Several decades after that ecumenical rediscovery, evangelical theologians are finally catching up. “So goes…
Review of Budde and Wright’s Conflicting AllegiancesThe Church-based University in a Liberal Democratic Society
The central idea of this set of essays (which grew out of a 2002 conference at Point Loma Nazarene University) is that all modern Christian university education has been distorted and truncated by the constraints placed…
Review of Jowers’ Karl Rahner’s Trinitarian Axiom“The Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity and Vice Versa”
[an excerpt:] He reminds us that Rahner is so committed to revelation as a transcendental phenomenon, in which God is known by creatures only as he imparts himself to them, that as a corollary Rahner rejects…
Review of Bowman and Komoszewski’s Putting Jesus in His PlaceThe Case for the Deity of Christ
The case as perceived by scholars for the deity of Christ is stronger now than it has been for a long time, and those who went through seminary more than a decade ago should take a…
Review of Bergmann, Creation Set FreeThe Spirit as Liberator of Nature
Sigurd Bergmann is a theologian who teaches at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Creation Set Free, a volume in Eerdman’s Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series, is Bcrgmann’s first…
Review of Keay’s Alexander the CorrectorThe Tormented Genius who Unwrote the Bible
When Cruden’s Concordance was first published in 1737 in London, it was immediately recognized as a revolutionary research tool. In the American colonies, Jonathan Edwards read a magazine ad that same year for a work “more…
Review of Paul Molnar’s Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity
Paul D. Molnar’s important book on the Trinity is probably best understood as a voice of dissent against the prevailing tendency of late twentieth century trinitarian theology. The most influential Trinity books from the decades just…
Review of Anatolios’ AthanasiusThe Coherence of his Thought
As the title indicates, this book describes the theology of Athanasius of Alexandria as a coherent system. What may be surprising to many readers is that a book-length treatment of Athanasian theology does not already exist….
Review of Hunt’s What Are They Saying About the Trinity?
Anne Hunt is a Roman Catholic theologian who teaches at Yarra Theological Union in Melboume, Australia. This brief book on the Trinity is part of Paulist Press’ popular What Are They Saying About … ? series,…
Review of Gunton’s The Triune Creator and Coffey’s Deus Trinitas
If anyone has written prolifically enough on the Trinity to declare with some credibility that the subject is temporarily overexploited and in need of a moratorium, it would be one of these two prolific authors. Both…
