Book Reviews

Review of Psalms of the Faithful: Luther’s Early Reading of the Psalter in Canonical Context by Brian T. German

German, Brian T. Psalms of the Faithful: Luther’s Early Reading of the Psalter in Canonical Context. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017, pp. 232, $24.99, paperback. In this work, Brian German presents a fresh perspective on the function of the faithful synagogue as an interpretive category within the Dictata super Psalterium, Martin Luther’s first lecture series through the Psalms in the years 1513-1515.  According to German, professor of theology at Concordia University Wisconsin and director of the Concordia Bible Institute, part of the importance of the Dictata for understanding the early Luther is the way in which it furnishes us with an almost daily account of his struggle to make sense of each passage unfolding before him.  This struggle, German points out, provides a window, not only into the interpretive development of the young Doctor, but into the specific theological principles adopted, abandoned, or merely altered throughout his journey.  As he says, “Luther, well informed of the sacred tradition but not yet sure how best to use it, set out on a journey through the Psalter to see where it would take him” (p. 10). German, an able guide throughout, begins by situating his discussion within the complex history of interpretation…

Review of Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers by Michael J. Hollerich
Book Reviews , Church History / March 1, 2023

Hollerich, Michael J. Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2021, pp. 316, $95.00, hardback. Recent trends in early Christian studies have turned their attention toward questions of textuality: what does it mean to read a text, what choices informed an author’s inclusion or omission of details, and how has a text been received among its readers? Moreover, what does it mean to be a reader? These concerns rise to the surface rather quickly when engaging with Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. In Making Christian History, Michael Hollerich (Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas) provides students of early Christian studies, patristics, and Christian historiography with a necessary ground-clearing of all things Ecclesiastical History—and, in doing so, makes a welcome contribution to the field writ large. To be clear, Hollerich does not aim to provide commentary on Eusebius’s work itself; instead, Hollerich begins with the work’s composition and analyzes the ways it has been both received and reappropriated since. In other words, Hollerich’s interest lies primarily in the social and cultural impacts Eusebius’s work had rather than trying to dissect the contents within the work itself. This caveat noted, Hollerich provides a helpful introduction…

Review of Sixteenth Century Mission: Explorations in Protestant and Roman Catholic Theology and Practice edited by Gallagher and Smither
Book Reviews , Church History , Theology / February 1, 2023

Gallagher, Robert L. and Edward L. Smither, eds. Sixteenth Century Mission: Explorations in Protestant and Roman Catholic Theology and Practice. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021, 29.99, paperback. Many readers will be able to recall a barbed quotation taken from the Jesuit, Robert Bellarmine, who castigated Protestantism for its evident lack of apostolic zeal for mission. He claimed that “they had hardly converted a handful” (Stephen Neill, The History of Missions, 1986, p. 188).  As one who wrestled first to understand and then to explain to others the ‘tortoise and the hare’ phenomenon exhibited in the modest beginning of Protestant missionary effort in the sixteenth century, this reviewer was keen to examine Sixteenth Century Mission. The prospect of finding accounts of Reformation-era missions provided from both sides of the confessional divide in a single volume seemed promising. In this review, we shall consider Sixteenth Century Mission as to its concept, as to its methodology, and as to its overall quality. The concept of Sixteenth Century Mission (hereafter SCM) is a noble one. Why hasn’t someone brought together essays representing early modern Protestant and Catholic mission, before now? The volume offers an initial ten chapters describing Protestant missionary activity within and beyond…

Review of Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal edited by Darren Sarisky
Book Reviews , Church History , Theology / September 16, 2022

Sarisky, Darren, ed. Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal. T&T Clark Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017, pp. ix + 359, $175, hardback ($42.95, paperback). The present anthology is an essential read for those interested in the question of how classical texts within the Christian tradition can and should be theologically “retrieved” for the contemporary theological task. The volume’s editor, Darren Sarisky, previously served as Departmental Lecturer in Modern Theology at the University of Oxford before taking up his current post of Senior Research Fellow in Religion and Theology at Australian Catholic University’s Melbourne campus. Sarisky has done readers a great service by gathering a star-studded cast of scholars to guide readers through the thicket of representative figures, movements, and types of theological retrieval that have become prominent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his introduction to the volume, Sarisky rightly distinguishes between correlation and retrieval theologies—the “two main ways” that Christian theologians tend to engage with the present situation (p. 1). Whereas the former seeks “to correlate elements of the Christian tradition with aspects of modern culture” in a conversational manner for sake of helping the Christian message stay intellectually relevant, the latter is “less concerned to…

Review of Baptism: Zwingli or the Bible? by Jack Cottrell

Cottrell, Jack. Baptism: Zwingli or the Bible? Mason, OH: The Christian Restoration Association, 2022, 163pp, $14.99, paperback. Jack Cottrell, arguably the most prolific writer and influential theologian of the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, tackles the topic of baptism in yet another accessible book, Baptism: Zwingli or the Bible? This text incorporates Cottrell’s primary insights on how the Protestant Reformer Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) changed the course of church history by creating a new view of the meaning of baptism from salvific to merely symbolic. Although this concise book contains previously published material by Cottrell, it is good to have an overview and summary of Cottrell’s critique of Zwingli’s view of baptism in one small volume. It is certainly handy for the student as well as the scholar and teacher. Cottrell divides this work into three parts: (1) a review of his Princeton dissertation on Zwingli, (2) his personal views on “Zwinglianism,” and (3) a reproduction of “Connection of Baptism with Remission of Sins.” (Part Three is the work of the nineteenth century Christian Church theologian J. W. McGarvey which was originally included in his New Commentary on Acts of the Apostles [1892] but omitted from later editions.) Part One is divided…

Review of 1 Clement: A Reader’s Edition by Theodore A. Bergren
Book Reviews , Church History / May 27, 2022

Bergren, Theodore A. 1 Clement: A Reader’s Edition. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020, pp. 205, $22.95, paperback. The letter now known as 1 Clement is an important early Christian text that has the potential to shed light on Jesus followers in the areas of Rome and Corinth, to enable readers to see more clearly what created division in early Christian communities, to observe how one author or group of authors attempts to bring about unity, and to illustrate both the variety of ways in which early Christians could interpret scriptural texts and the variant forms in which scripture could be quoted. Yet it is a long letter that can be challenging for the uninitiated to read in its entirety. This may be true even when 1 Clement is translated into a modern reader’s first language, never mind the original Greek. Theodore Bergren’s 1 Clement: A Reader’s Edition offers a chance for intermediate Greek readers who likewise know English to read 1 Clement without needing to look up every unknown word in a lexicon. Bergren is an emeritus professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Richmond, who has conducted significant research on the Latin…

Review of Calvin, the Bible, and History: Exegesis and Historical Reflection in the Era of Reform by Barbara Pitkin

Pitkin, Barbara. Calvin, the Bible, and History: Exegesis and Historical Reflection in the Era of Reform. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. xii + 250, £64.00, hardback. Barbara Pitkin is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Stanford University, where she teaches on the history of Christian thought, including the sixteenth-century reformations and the history of biblical interpretation. She is the author of What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvin’s Doctrine of Faith in its Exegetical Context (OUP, 1999), editor of Semper Reformanda: Calvin, Worship, and Reformed Traditions (V&R, 2018), and co-editor with Wim Janse of The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2006). Pitkin also serves as an editor for the Sixteenth Century Journal and is a former president of the Calvin Studies Society.  In Calvin, the Bible, and History, Pitkin investigates Calvin’s biblical exegesis through a series of case studies and seeks to show how he was consistently historically attuned. Though Pitkin argues that Calvin was not a historian per se, she demonstrates that Calvin was an astute exponent of the Bible as history. Chapter 1 functions as the book’s introduction, which summarises, in broad terms, how Calvin’s biblical interpretation was influenced by…

Review of Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism by Craig A. Carter

Carter, Craig A. Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021, pp. 352, $32.99, paperback. Craig A. Carter currently serves as research professor of theology at Tyndale University in Toronto, Ontario, and he serves also as theologian in residence at Westney Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of St. Michael’s College and has published multiple books within the discipline of theological studies. Carter is both Reformed and Baptist, confessing the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689). The book at hand is the second part of a trilogy that aims to recover important insights from the classical Christian tradition. The first installment was Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis, which took up the subject of classical theological hermeneutics. In Contemplating God with the Great Tradition (CGGT), Carter argues that Christians today should be intentional with retrieving and confessing the doctrines of God and the Trinity that were developed by the pro-Nicene patristic fathers along with the hermeneutics and metaphysics they used in so doing. This retrieval is necessary if Christians are to confess the doctrines of God and the…

Review Article of The Growing Tree of the Global Church: Review Article of Robert F. Rea and Steven D. Cone, A Global Church History: The Great Tradition Through Cultures, Continents, and Centuries by Rea and Cone
Book Reviews , Church History / December 28, 2021

The Growing Tree of the Global Church: Review Article of Robert F. Rea and Steven D. Cone, A Global Church History: The Great Tradition Through Cultures, Continents, and Centuries (London: T. & T Clark Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. xxviii + 847. Michael McClymond Professor of Modern Christianity, St. Louis University When I attended a Protestant seminary in the 1980s, our assigned text for general church history was the venerable work by Williston Walker, D.D., L.H.D., Ph.D. (1860–1922), who had graduated from Amherst College in 1883, from the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1886, from Leipzig University (PhD) in 1888, and then taught and Hartford Seminary, before proceeding to Yale University, where he taught after 1901.  By the time I first encountered it, Walker’s book had already been revised and updated by a team of three scholars from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, first in 1956 (2nd ed.), and then again in 1970 (3rd ed.). A side-by-side comparison between the 1918 and third (1970) editions shows that the essential framework of the original 1918 book—published as soldiers battled in the trenches of World War I—had not appreciably altered, except within the final section of the six-hundred-page book.  “English Unitarianism” was expanded to include both English…

Review of Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Greenway

Greenaway, Jonathan. Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021, 198pp, £80, Hardback. Dr Jonathan Greenaway is currently a Researcher in Theology and Horror at the University of Chester. He is working on a Templeton Religion Trust-funded project to explore the theological importance of all forms of horror media. His background in literary studies, and Gothic fiction in particular, appropriately underpins the conceptual framework for this book, which arises from his doctoral studies at the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. The book is made up of five substantive chapters plus an introduction to ‘Gothic and Theology’ (as opposed to ‘Religion’) and a brief conclusion. Greenaway’s aim is to reposition critical understandings of the role of theology in Nineteenth Century Gothic writing, which in his view have been neglected in recent literary studies. He suggests that Gothic fiction may be read as engaging with theological positions in a variety of ways which are generative of new ideas in the fields of both theology and Gothic studies. Greenaway argues that taking an approach of ‘theological hospitality’ towards these texts opens up a productive dialogue, contributing to an understanding of their contexts as well as informing…