I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.