Ice Axes for Frozen Seas: A Biblical Theology of Provocation Walter Brueggemann, Ice Axes for Frozen Seas: A Biblical Theology of Provocation, ed. Davis Hankins. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014, pp. 439. $59.95 (hardback). Reviewed by Marcus A. Hong   The main title of this collection of Walter Brueggemann’s recent writings draws the attention, while the subtitle gives an idea of the content. In line with the prolific agitator’s oeuvre, these pieces—edited by his former student and current collaborator Davis Hankins—aim to crack open hearts, minds and communities made numb by our society’s unrelenting anxiety. Brueggemann does so through sharp-edged and clear-eyed examination of biblical texts, avoiding the closure of fundamentalism on one hand and the aimlessness of progressivism on the other by wrestling with the God of the texts as an active agent. The essays are...

      Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology Kimlyn Bender. Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014, pp. 389. $40.00 (paperback). Reviewed by Max Heidelberger   In Confessing Christ for Church and World, Truett Theological Seminary’s Kimlyn Bender presents a collection of essays which set Karl Barth and—to a lesser extent— Friedrich Schleiermacher in conversation with the American theological landscape. Bender’s desire in this collection is to look along with (rather than at) Schleiermacher and Barth toward the “the true object… nothing less than God’s glorious breaking into our world in the person of Jesus Christ” (16). The topics range from ecclesiology to revelation to the legacy of the reformation, and are helpfully divided into three thematic sections: “Church and Conversation,”...

      Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human Michael Banner. Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 240. $35.00 (hardcover). Reviewed by Stephanie Mota Thurston   Michael Banner, of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, takes up two broad tasks in Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human. The first is to argue that moral theology, moral philosophy, and social anthropology currently relate to one another in a disordered way and that there should be a disciplinary realignment that addresses this disorder. The second and more constructive task is to demonstrate, albeit in a cursory fashion, what this newfound relationship between moral theology and social anthropology...

      The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability Archie J. Spencer. The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015. pp. 445. $28.00 (paperback). Reviewed by Michael Reed   One of the great ironies of modern theology is that in attempting to ensure we speak accurately about God we find ourselves with less and less to say. Can we have any confidence that human speech about God ‘reaches’ God in any meaningful or accurate way? Archie’s Spencer’s The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability labors over this foundational question. His answer—to put it in simple and Barthian fashion—is that we cannot unless God in Christ shows us how. His monograph is meant to establish the preconditions for reliable human speech about God in a Christological “analogy of faith”—that is, in the correspondence between God and humanity...

      God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology. Volume I: God and the Works of God John Webster. God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology. Volume I: God and the Works of God. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015. pp. 240. $120.00 (hardback). Reviewed by Kevin Vollrath   John Webster’s new release collects his recent thoughts on a variety of doctrines. The book is thereby accessible for narrow reading on a particular doctrine, but the organization builds on itself with recurring themes and echoes to previously and later developed thoughts. The refrain of the book is the precedence of the trinity before all other doctrines: proper Trinitarian theology is the means of explicating any and every other doctrine. Webster repeatedly shows how any attempt outside of such grounding consistently falls short. Webster offers frequent quips about the nature of...