Author’s Corner

Each week on Credo we welcome you to join us in the Author’s Corner where we will meet a set of authors whose recent books deserve your attention and might even help you grow in your knowledge of theology, history, philosophy, and the scriptures. We hope the Author’s Corner can keep you up-to-date on the most important books published today and where you can find them.

On today’s Author’s Corner we present you with a selection of excellent works on Classical Theism.

Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Baker, 2021) by Craig A. Carter

Following his well-received Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, Craig Carter presents the biblical and theological foundations of trinitarian classical theism. Carter, a leading Christian theologian known for his provocative defenses of classical approaches to doctrine, critiques the recent trend toward modifying or rejecting classical theism in favor of modern “relational” understandings of God. The book includes a short history of trinitarian theology from its patristic origins to the modern period, and a concluding appendix provides a brief summary of classical trinitarian theology.

God of Our Fathers: Classical Theism for the Contemporary Church (Davenant, 2018) edited by Bradford Littlejohn

Protestantism today has an idolatry problem. Not merely in the sense of worshipping false gods—of pleasure, wealth, or politics—but in the sense of worshipping the Triune God of Scripture according to images and ideas of our own devising. Whether it’s a God who suffers and changes alongside his creatures, or a “Trinitarian circle dance” of divine personalities, or a hierarchically-arranged Trinity that serves as a blueprint for gender relations, modern evangelical theology has strayed far from historic Christian orthodoxy. Needing a God that can be put on a greeting card or in a praise song, our idolatrous hearts shrink the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob down to size, and make him more like us.

Amidst this scramble to make God more relevant, we seem to have forgotten that the only God truly capable of saving us is a God who is radically other and transcendent, far above our imaginings. This incomprehensible God is not the God of the philosophers, as modern revisionists frequently charge, but the God of the Bible. The essays in this volume, written by scholars and pastors deeply concerned for the life of the church, seek to retrieve and defend the tradition of classical theism as the historic Protestant faith, rooted in Scripture, philosophically coherent, and still relevant to the needs of the church today.

All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Reformation Heritage, 2017) by James E. Dolezal

Unknown to many, increasing numbers of conservative evangelicals are denying basic tenets of classical Christian teaching about God, with departures occurring even among those of the Calvinistic persuasion.  All That Is in God provides an exposition of the historic Christian position while engaging with these contemporary deviations.

His convincing critique of the newer position he styles “theistic mutualism” is philosophically robust, systematically nuanced, and biblically based. It demonstrates the need to maintain the traditional viewpoint, particularly on divine simplicity, and spotlights the unfortunate implications for other important Christian doctrines—such as divine eternality and the Trinity—if it were to be abandoned. Arguing carefully and cogently that “all that is in God is God Himself,” the work is sure to stimulate debate on the issue in years to come.