The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by Colin E. Gunton

Academic theology can have a future only if theologians themselves are interested in it. Why should anybody else read it if theologians are so caught up in experimenting with every philosophical movement and political program that they ignore their own field? If this volume is any indication, theology seems to have rediscovered itself as a tradition with its own resources and issues.

What's most surprising about the important essays collected here is how little attention they pay to methodology. All the great theologians of the 1970s and '80s focused on method. Even those who rejected this emphasis wrote methodological books. Now those concerns seem to be passé.

Theology has become more grounded in history than ever before. In the wake of the 1960s, theologians rushed to reconstruct the Christian tradition from the ground up. Now theologians are recovering the rich heritage of the past, immersing themselves in those ancient thinkers who were speaking to and for the church, not for some abstract educated elite. The central debates that have always defined the church now seem more complex and intriguing than do the cunning theories theologians have used to combat or accommodate secularism during the past 30 years.