This article is a critical but appreciative response to the emerging theology and proposed theological method of Stanley J. Grenz. It is appreciative of the way that Grenz is helping evangelicals face the fact that they should be more engaging of the broader theological discussions regarding method if it is to avoid becoming hopelessly irrelevant, both within and beyond evangelicalism. At the same time it is critical of the apparent ambiguity in Grenz's proposals for a revised theological method and its resulting theology. The article reflects on the prior work of Grenz but employs his most recent book, Beyond Foundationalism, co-authored with John R. Frank and published by Fortress Press in 2001. In the final analysis the author takes a cautious approach to Grenz's proposals due to the fact that there seems to be an ambiguous understanding of postmodern culture, an uncritical acceptance of a social trinitarian basis for community and a somewhat conflicted understanding of foundations for theology, understood as ‘(post)foundationalism’.

This paper raises the truth question to explore the possibility of constructing a system of systematic theology in the contemporary context. By using Schleiermacher's thought as a constructive resource, two dimensions of truth are discussed in dialogue with Kathryn Tanner's book Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology: coherence and correspondence. Addressed in the first section is coherence, along with its auxiliary, comprehensiveness, as a requirement for system. The whole of the Christian world view is grasped by a principle of coherence that reflects both a subjective component of authorial individuality and an objective component of an individual grasp of the ‘spirit of the age’. Furthermore, consensus regarding systematic coherence in Western Christian thought agrees on a metanarrative structuring doctrines from creation to apocalypse. In Tanner's work, the principle of coherence is gift-giving that is traced from an inner-trinitarian narrative to its outer-trinitarian expressions in creation, the incarnation, eschatology, as well as in ethical response. Thematized in the second section is the tricky issue of theological correspondence between claims of redemption on the one hand and the sin, evil, and tragedy of the world on the other. Tanner's book offers one solution to this problem: analogical correspondence that situates doctrinal patterns of gift-giving (such as the incarnation, creation) as concentric circles in varying degrees of correspondence to their inner-trinitarian center. In view of this solution, this paper questions the relation between systematic coherence and the reality of both life's brokenness and the depths of divine self-giving pathos.

The issue of the ethical status of future generations is significant in debates about research in human genetics, but key (non-theological) statements on the subject, such as the UNESCO Declaration on Human Rights and the Human Genome, reflect a failure to think of future persons as located within communities of ethical reflection and interpretation. I draw on recent work in the philosophy of conservation biology to explore this failure, and argue that a major contribution of theology to ethical reflection on genetic research would be through discussion of ways of reading, transmitting and interpreting texts.

How do a generous orthodoxy and contemporary feminist theology relate and work together, if at all? Can feminist theology have something to say to a generous orthodoxy other than blatant critique? Orthodoxy is seen as that view expressed in the rule of faith as early as Irenaeus and Tertullian, and is a constellation of beliefs which link Creator with Christ, OT with NT, and which employs the interpretation of scripture ‘according to itself’. A definition of generous orthodoxy means a Christ-like submission to the Other, and reasoning about God, three in one, through meditation on the scriptures and tradition of the church such that one's soul is turned to praise. A simple definition of feminist theology is ‘the radical notion that women are people too’ (so Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context, 1998). Can these two ways of envisioning the theological task work together, and if so, to what extent? With key doctrines and concepts of feminist theology such as patriarchy, women's experience, feminist consciousness, one questions the fit between orthodoxy and feminist theology, but of course this is purposefully so on the basis of feminist principles and dogmas. We will examine and compare the construction of sin, Christology and the trinity in feminist theologies and generously orthodox theologies to clarify the discussion.

In his essay ‘Culture, Community and Commitments’, Archie Spencer expresses interest in, and appreciation for, my proposal for evangelical theology, because he finds in me what he characterizes as ‘a moderating voice between the extremes’ in the contemporary discussion. I am deeply gratified that a younger theologian of his potential would look to me as a pioneer and would honor me by taking such keen interest in my work.

This review explores the incipient ecclesiology of Kathryn Tanner's brief systematic theology, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. Gift is the central concept around which Tanner's articulation of the divine life and the incarnation revolves. The lack of ecclesial definition in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity creates tension between Tanner's theology of gift and her insistence elsewhere on the church as a ‘genuine community of argument’. Her brief appeal to a ‘community of mutual fulfillment’ needs more elaboration to head off worrisome interpretations of her vision of divine and human economies. An ecclesiological extrapolation from Tanner's Christology in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity suggests that the church needs to be at once a community in which God's gifts are received and shared and a community of argument in which problems and shortcomings in the church's life can be faced and negotiated.

Amy Plantinga Pauw's ‘Supreme Harmony of All’ is the first book-length treatment of Jonathan Edwards's trinitarian theology. She argues that his trinitarian thought embodies the emphases and polarities of the Western psychological model and the Eastern social model of the trinity. Throughout the book she details his doctrines of the immanent and the economic trinity in the contrasting categories of the psychological and the social models of the trinity. She recommends his ‘cobbled’ approach as the only effective way to construct a contemporary trinitarian theology. In contrast, I argue that Edwards consistently used the Augustinian mutual love model. Furthermore, he developed social themes within the mutual love model. His usefulness for contemporary trinitarianism is not to suggest an eclectic method of appropriating conflicting conceptualities, but to challenge the common assumption that Western Augustinian trinitarianism is inherently monistic and must be transcended by recourse to the Eastern trinitarian tradition.

This is a book that has achieved some notoriety. It was criticised by some rabbis and as a result Dr Sacks rewrote a few passages for a new, revised edition. These changes will be discussed below, but in the book as a whole Jonathan Sacks has again used his gifts of learning, wisdom and accessibility to illuminate a range of concerns of fundamental importance to the future of humanity.

I am very grateful to Amy Pauw for the careful and forceful way in which she has applied her considerable theological acumen, and the fruits of her long engagement with the church, to an interpretation and cautionary commentary on my book. Her remarks are a gift to me even as they chasten and redirect my efforts to expand the arguments of this book into a larger one. As I mention in an aside at the end of Chapter 3, the give and take of intellectual life, at its best, is an intimation of the community of mutual fulfillment which I believe the gospel calls us to realize everywhere. In writing the book I could only hope that faults in my arguments would be remedied and their good points developed, beyond anything I could achieve alone, by fine theologians such as Pauw taking up those arguments and offering them back to me transformed. This very exchange reflects the way a community of mutual fulfillment need not be community at a remove from disagreement, conflict, and the temptation to hubris among fallible, morally weak individuals (such as myself). In a fallen world of finite creatures, a community of mutual fulfillment often just is in this way a community of argument (of the sort I discuss in Theories of Culture) – a community that is agonistic, prone to deep disagreement about matters of shared concern, but a community held together nonetheless by the shared admission of fault and the consequent recognition that the true and the good can be had by anyone only through open engagement with all.

Jonathan Sacks's engagement with the major social and economic problems of our time is unique in the modern rabbinate. To the best of my knowledge no contemporary rabbi of any Jewish denomination equals his breadth of reading and concern in matters ranging from globalisation to the well-being of the family. Rabbi Sacks is well equipped in philosophy, politics and sociology and seeks to take part in debates about the great issues of our time from the standpoint of orthodox Judaism. He is a gifted communicator, unusually able to make complex issues intelligible for the general public without reducing them to banality. He is also a fine rabbinic scholar with a particular expertise in Jewish philosophy.

In his review of my book, Steven Studebaker asserts that Jonathan Edwards's trinitarianism is useful in challenging ‘the common assumption that Western Augustinian trinitarianism is inherently monistic and must be transcended by recourse to the Eastern trinitarian tradition’. While I find Edwards to be theologically useful for a wide variety of reasons, I am in basic agreement with Studebaker's assertion, and certainly do not share in the ‘common assumption’ about Augustinianism that he deplores.