My brother in law, Logan Hoffman, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in the Spring, and last month he and my sister relocated to New Zealand to be Wesleyan church planters. You can keep tabs on them at The Well. Before leaving Logan told me about a new book co-edited by Bruce L. McCormack, the well known Barth scholar who teaches at PTS. The book is Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction. This week I read the first four of the book’s fifteen chapters. It is a slam dunk. So much information and the articles are really well written, complicated information but clearly communicated.

Steven R. Holmes’ contribution maps the modern development of the doctrine of the divine attributes. At points a mind-bender, and at other points your skin crawls as he talks through some of the blasphemies of modern theology. What a brain full of information to process. And as if that wasn’t enough, Daniel J. Treier’s chapter on scripture and hermeneutics is easily the best summarization I have read; again, what a brain full of information to process.

The title really does describe what the book aims to accomplish . . . thus far the authors really do “map out” for the reader the past 200 years of theology. I am looking forward to the remainder of this book.