Rev i ew s April 2019 Ed i t i o n 1 0 .2 IN THIS ISSUE: ñ Rowan Williams: Christ the Heart of Creaton ñ Joshua Searle: Theology afer Christendom ñ Gregory A Boyd: Crucifxion of the Warrior God and many more... Regent’s Regent’s Gregory A. Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God. 2 Vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017). ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) ........... 9 Joshua Searle, Theology After Christendom: Forming Prophets For a Post-Christian World (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018) ......................................................................................... 12 Steven D. Cone, Theology from the Great Tradition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 726 pp. .................................................................................................................................................. 13 Christopher R. Baker and Elaine Graham (eds), Theology for Changing Times: John Atherton and the Future of Public Theology (London: SCM Press, 2018), 192pp. ................................................................................................................................................... 15 Paul Avis (ed.),The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 649pp. ....................................................................................................................... 17 George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth: Post-Holocaust Theologian? (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 171pp. ....................................................................................................................... 19 Lincoln Harvey (ed.), Essays on the Trinity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 240pp. .................................................................................................................................................................. 22 Lee C. Barrett (ed.), T & T Clark Reader in Kierkegaard as Theologian (London: T & T Clark, 2018) ................................................................................................................................ 23 Michael Davies and WR Owen (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 681pp +index. ............................................... 24 Ashley Cocksworth, Prayer: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2018) .................................................................................................................................................................. 25 Ben Pugh, SCM Studyguide: Philosophy and Christian Faith (London: SCM, 2018) .................................................................................................................................................................. 26 Daniel L. Migliore (ed.), Reading the Gospels with Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017) .............................................................................................................................. 27 Sarah Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, Amos Yong (eds.), The Bible and Disability: A Commentary (Waco: Baylor University Press / London: SCM, 2018) ....................... 29 Aaron W. White, Craig A. Evans and David Wenham (eds.), The Earliest Perceptions of Jesus in Context: Essays in Honour of John Nolland on His 70th Birthday (London: T & T Clark, 2018) ..................................................................................... 30 James Maston and Benjamin E. Reynolds (eds.), Anthropology and New Testament Theology (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018) ............................. 32 Susan Grove Eastman, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017) .............................................................................................. 33 Peter J. Leithart, Revelation. 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018). ...... 34 Lauren F. Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (London: Yale University Press, 2018). ................. 35 Christopher Deacy, Christmas as Religion: Rethinking Santa, the Secular, and the Sacred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ............................................................... 36 Peter Tyler, Christian Mindfulness: Theology and Practice, (London: SCM Press, 2018), 177pp. ..................................................................................................................................... 37 James M. Houston and Jens Zimmerman (eds), Sources of the Christian Self: A Cultural History of Christian Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 692pp. .................................................................................................................................................................. 39 Myk Habets, Heaven: An Inkling of What’s to Come (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018) .................................................................................................................................................................. 41 Celia Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology. Theology for a Fragile Earth (Eugene OR: Cascade, 2017), pp. xiv + 1-167. ...................................................................... 42 Celia Deane-Drummond & Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser (eds.) Theology and Ecology across the Disciplines. On Care for our Common Home (London: T & T Clark, 2018), pp. xii + 261. ......................................................................................................................... 43 Aaron P. Edwards, A Theology of Preaching and Dialectic: Scriptural Tension, Heraldic Proclamation and the Pneumatological Moment (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 245pp. ..................................................................................................................................... 46 Timofey Cheprasov, Like Ripples on the Water: On Russian Baptist Preaching, Identity, and the Pulpit’s Neglected Powers (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 152pp. .................................................................................................................................................................. 48 John Hughes and Andrew Davidson (eds.), The God We Proclaim: Sermons on the Apostles’ Creed (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017) ....................................................................... 50 Richard Harries, Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith (London: SPCK, 2018) 240pp. .................................................................................................... 51 Paul Beasley-Murray, Retirement Matters for Ministers (Chelmsford: College of Baptist Ministers, 2018) ................................................................................................................ 52 Editorial In this edition of Regent’s Reviews there is an article length review of Greg Boyd’s magnum opus The Crucifixion of the Warrior God by the Director of the new Centre for Bible and Violence, Helen Paynter. The Centre is based at Bristol Baptist College. Other titles under review include Rowan Williams on christology, Joshua Searle (Tutor at Spurgeon’s College) on theology after Christendom, and Lauren Winner on the dangers of Christian practice. Andy Goodliff Editor Gregory A. Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God. 2 Vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017). Greg Boyd begins his magnum opus by explaining the conundrum of Old Testament violence that drove him to write it. ‘I am […] caught between the Scylla of Jesus’ affirmation of the OT as divinely inspired and the Charybdis of his nonviolent revelation of God’ (p.xxix). He is motivated by a sense that all the attempts that have been offered to account for the violence of the OT were unsatisfactory. In response to this conundrum, then, he writes this book, consisting of 1445 closely-argued, and occasionally rather discursive pages. In it he offers a novel way of reading the Old Testament, which he calls the ‘Cruciform Hermeneutic’. He describes it in his introduction like this: When we interpret these [violent] portraits of God with the resolved conviction that the true character of God is fully revealed in the crucified Christ, we are able to see beyond the surface appearance of these portraits (viz. beyond what mere exegesis can unveil) and discern the cruciform character of God in their “depth”… The driving conviction of the Cruciform Hermeneutic is that since Calvary gives us a perspective of God’s character that is superior to what people in the OT had, we can also enjoy a superior perspective of what was actually going on when OT authors depicted God engaging in and commanding violence (p.xxxiv). Essentially the Cruciform Hermeneutic is defined by the choice to use the Cross as the supreme lens for examining the rest of scripture. So far, so uncontroversial. However, this decision, as Boyd develops it, has three distinct elements. First, just as at the cross God is both acting and acted upon, so the way that God ‘breathed’ scripture should be regarded less as a unilateral act of inspiration, but as a dialectical activity (pp.480ff.); a position that would not surprise those who are familiar with his allegiance to Openness Theology. This rather controversial- sounding suggestion is then boiled down to the rather more bland assertion that God does not over-ride the human authors but that their personhood remains intact in the ‘inspiring’ process. However, what this means, for Boyd, is that