Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity

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This is the second Cambridge Dictionary I have reviewed, and I find this volume has the same basic problem and the title on Philosophy. This defect, which costs both volumes one star, is the absence of a bibliography following each larger entry. The primary object of books like this are to be a jumping off point, a means of finding the next step in locating more information about a subject. These volumes don't even have bad bibliographies. They have nothing but the name of the author of each article. For many topics, this is useful. For example, the author of "Post-Christian Thought" is Daphne Hampson, who is a true expert theologian in this field. So, if you check out her books, you will get a good 'lead' as they say in the cop shows. But with the article on Meister Eckhart, the author is no slouch on Medieval churchmen, but he is not a leading expert on Eckhart, such as Bernard McGinn. I am amazed at how 'tentative' some of the articles sound, as if they weren't sure of themselves. The article on Eckhart is very short, but it seems as if the summarization seems to have mislead us a bit on, for example, the declaration made by the Pope on Eckhart's work. McGinn says the upwhot was that Echart was not declared heretical. The Dictionary suggests the conclusion was more damning. It just seems too thin to limn the facts with precision.
Another symptom of tentativeness is the article on Behemoth, where it is said it may be associated with the Leviathan. The two could not be more closely connected, as they both appear in the same speech by YHWH, to Job.

This is NOT the kind of book you want if you wish to study the Bible. For that, get the Harper/Collins Bible Dictionary (newest edition) and the Harper/Collins annotated Bible. This kind of book will soon be replaced by Wikipedia, when that becomes more trustworthy. As it is now, the Wikipedia gives better information on most things you will find in this book. This volume has the virtue of knowing that the articles were written by people who know their field.