Customer Reviews

Fifty Key Christian Thinkers (Routledge Key Guides)

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This is a fine book for Latter-day Saints (i.e., Mormons) who might be struggling to figure out who many of the leading lights in Christian theology are and something about what they believed or did not believe.

The fifty "key" figures are listed alphabetically by their surname, but there is a useful "Chronological list of Contents" (pp. vii-viii). The entries are competently done. The choice of "key" figures is also acceptable, even if it is a bit odd to have an entry on Ludwig Feuerbach, who is described as an "anti-theologian," meaning that he was an atheist.

There are a few other similar oddities or anomalies, but this is common among those known as "theologians." Among the fifty entries are writers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. They are part of the antique world. Then there are also entries on later writers such as John Calvin, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich.

Eight of the authors whose views are described were still alive when the book was published.

The introduction gives criteria for the book as "theologians who have self-consciously and explicitly attempted to rethink the Christian faith for their context and time."

That definition includes heretics. So there are many (many!) entries on folks whose ideas are non-Christian; feminist and post-modern theorists, for example. They aren't Christian thinkers, they just thought (or think) about Christianity. Churches dissolve in proportion to the extent they accept the beliefs of such people.

There are some good entries for earlier, historical figures, but most of the entries will be of no interest or use to people wanting to learn about Christianity -- no more so than a book about mathematics with articles about people who wrote about the "color" of numbers, how they make them feel, numerology, astrology, etc.

There are criteria for who is a mathematician and what mathematics is. The same is true for Christianity.

Expensive enough relative to disappointment to actually request return.