Considering the number of high-profile practitioners in the ‘Emerging Church’ movement, people who have their roots in evangelicalism and yet want to relate the Christian message to post-modern, post-Christian cultures, this book is a timely contribution seeking to develop an ordered analysis.

Franke calls his approach ‘post-conservative and evangelical’. The basic thesis of his book is set out in the first chapter, where Franke examines postmodernism as a critique and rejection of modernity’s commitment to rationality. He then highlights two aspects of post-modern thought which provide a useful basis for developing our theology. The Linguistic Turn is the idea that language does not have a set meaning, but acquires its meaning within social interaction. The Nonfoundationalist Turn suggests that there can be no universal and indubitable means of grounding the edifice of human knowledge. These two aspects of postmodern thought form the basis of the task and nature of theology in the postmodern context throughout the book—for example, the latter, it is pointed out, can be appropriated for Christian ideas of sin and the ultimate finiteness of human thinking.

Franke goes on to explore the subject of theology, basically God as Trinity, but points out that all commitments to truth in a nonfoundationalist context remain provisional and open to reconstruction. Truth still exists, but the foundations of truth are not given to us. The nature of theology is to be an ongoing, second-order discipline working within the particular context of the church at any point in time. The task of theology is to find ways of communicating the Biblical narrative using the tools of a particular culture without being controlled by them. The purpose of theology is to assist, promote, and participate in the missional calling of the church.

The great advantage of this book is the drawing together of many strands of thought that are deeply influential within the church today. Franke ably and clearly highlights the philosophical and theological currents that inform many emerging church leaders’ calls to regain respect for tradition and community in Christian thinking. The idea that languages and ideas only gain meaning within a social context are obviously important here; hence the social context of theology as the church and the history of the church become particularly significant in emergent theology. It certainly wasn’t clear to me before I read this book how particular aspects of the emerging church movement were influence by postmodernism—this makes the hermeneutical trajectory, as Franke calls it, very clear.

However, despite some useful reminders about the task of theology to equip the church for mission, I wasn’t totally convinced that the postconservative and evangelical approaches are compatible. I’m not sure that evangelicals can sign up to nonfoundationalism even if we happen to be believers in total depravity—in fact I think this shows in the book itself. On a number of occasions I felt Franke uses some sort of sleight-of-hand manoeuvre where foundationalism is rejected, but historical formularies of the church such as the Chalcedonian formulation on Christology are used as foundations beyond which we cannot move or question. Similarly, Franke rejects using either Scripture or tradition as a foundation of knowledge, but says that the Spirit speaks through both. Doesn’t then the Spirit then, through Scripture and tradition, become a foundation?

There are useful insights in this book, in the readable history of Trinitarian theology, and perhaps most significantly, in the conception of church as a community called into being to reflect the image of God. But Franke did not convince me that his approach is either compatible with evangelicalism, or internally consistent.

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