In his latest book Colin Gunton -- one the foremost systematic theologians writing today -- addresses the complex question of God's attributes: or the defining characteristics of the deity. As Gunton makes clear, after nearly two thousand years of discussion there seems to be little clarity about how the identity of God as Father, son and Holy Spirit relates to the kids of things that have been, and are, said of the kind of being that God is. Theologians often seem to have been content with a list of intelligible, but often abstract terms, as to the contents of our idea of God.' And for Gunton, the doctrine of the divine attributes seems often to have been approached using the wrong method developing the wrong content; and even, when that has no been the case, treating things in the wrong order. As the author shows, this has much to do with what has become a tangles web of the relations between Greek and Hebrew discussions and characterizations of the topic. In this book he attempts to disentangle these threads as individually and carefully as possible. Successive chapters on the problems of the tangles web'; the nature of theological language; and the difference that the Trinity might make to the discussion succeed in developing one of the most coherent and intellectually stimulating pictures of the divine attributes to have been published in recent times. The author's many admirers will find this book mandatory reading, as will all serious students and teachers of systematic theology and Christian doctrine.
