This book comes in the Mentor imprint of Christian Focus, designed mainly for seminary students and pastors. It comprises seven pieces from the pen of Professor Donald Macleod, Principal of the Free Church College in Edinburgh. Only three of the chapters are previously unpublished material. In fact the final two chapters originally appeared in Themelios in 1999 and 2000.

The first three chapters are the most straightforward of the book and is material that was excluded due to constraints of space from Macleod’s 1998 volume The Person of Christ in the IVP ‘Contours of Christian Theology’ series. These chapters explore in turn whether the NT calls Jesus God, the significance of the ascription ‘Lord’ to Jesus and the meaning of the term ‘Son of Man’.

These chapters are both intellectually satisfying and spiritually enriching. Professor Macleod works his way through the key scriptural passages whilst interacting with some widely accepted theological positions (e.g. that the NT never calls Jesus ‘God’ or that the ‘Son of Man’ designation has no precedent in pre-Christian Judaism). Personally I always find Macleod at his richest when dealing with Philippians 2 and this publication is no exception. Here he gives considerable attention to Dunn’s ‘Adam Christology’ approach to the chapter clearly, showing its deficiencies. Macleod’s admission in the forward to ‘The Person of Christ’ that it is a book interacting with views up to the 1980s rather than the 1990s equally applies to these chapters. Even with this there is much of value here.

The next two chapters are historical essays assessing, in chapter 4, the accusation of Arianism against the 18th century Non-Conformists, Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge and in chapter 5 some key Scottish theologians’ views (including Irving, Denney and Torrance) on the incarnation. These studies may carry less interest for some but they are accessible treatments that help to highlight the recurring issues in the field of Christology. The criticism of Torrance that his idea of incarnational redemption flagrantly contradicts the NT insistence on the centrality of the cross is surely a well made point.

The final chapters critique the important work of Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Macleod gives a very sympathetic assessment of Moltmann, identifying his central Christological concept of messiahship and his emphasis on divine suffering as major contributions. He is not uncritical and questions whether Moltmann’s theodicy really does justice to the grace of God and to the anomaly of divine pain. However, he finds something of great significance in the emphasis on God’s sympathy with the oppressed.

The chapter on Pannenberg reflects the difficulty of attempting to assess a diverse body of work in the space of 25 pages. This is by far the hardest chapter and Macleod comes to the end with the statement that Pannenburg is ‘heavy-going’. He questions Pannenberg’s whole enterprise of seeking a Christology from below as an approach running counter to the witness of the NT. He also calls into question the role Pannenberg assigns to the resurrection as the key indicator of Jesus’ divinity. In all this Macleod wishes to point us to the NT emphasis on the self-consciousness of Jesus as divine.

Works that draw together articles from varied sources lack the coherence of full-length treatments. This book suffers from that deficiency but Donald Macleod is never dull and there is still much here to stimulate and inspire.

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