Theology for the Community of God

Written by Stanley J. Grenz Reviewed By Craig L. Blomberg

Students of systematic theology wanting an evangelical textbook surveying all the major Christian doctrines have generally had to choose between multi-volume works (e.g. the recent three-volume series by Erickson, Lewis and Demarest or Williams) or relatively brief overviews (e.g. Milne and McGrath). Stanley Grenz has now bridged this gap with a weighty but eminently readable one-volume tour of theology, anthropology, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology and eschatology. All of the major topics of a systematic textbook are then arranged under one of these six headings.

Grenz’s integrating motif, as the title suggests, is that theology is to be done from and for the Christian community and that most of the major doctrines have more of a corporate focus than Western individualism has usually recognized. A second major concern is to appropriate the eschatological orientation of Grenz’s Doktorvater, W. Pannenberg, and rework a number of the doctrines from the standpoint of God’s promises about the future. Much of the work, nevertheless, remains entirely conventional in organization and contents, and the author presents himself as ‘unabashedly Baptist’ though largely Reformed in perspective. Strikingly different in location, however, are his treatments of Scripture (under pneumatology) and soteriology (parcelled out between Christology and pneumatology). Women’s issues surface once, and basically only once, under ‘Jesus’ fellowship with humankind’.

Grenz displays a commendable concern for a number of contemporary issues, including ecology, spiritual warfare, and sexual and social ethics, and it is largely in these areas that he takes culture as his starting point for conversation. His other two, more dominant norms for doing theology are Scripture and tradition, though his grasp of current exegetical debates and literature is too often limited to quotations from theological wordbooks and dictionaries. Helpful and creative twists emerge as omnipresence is said to imply that past, present and future are all present before God, that implantation may be the moment God first looks on a growing zygote as human, that governments and other social structures can be both divine and demonic, that pride is not necessarily the heart of women’s sin, and that the best ordo salutis may be glorification, sanctification, conversion, application of the word, predestination, foreknowledge, and omniscience (an exact reversal of the classic Arminian sequence used in defence of a moderate Calvinism!).

Grenz accepts, largely uncritically, the popular modern notion of humans as holistic entities without considering the full force of the exegetical, theological, philosophical or biological evidence for a substantial dualism of body and soul (as defended, respectively, in the writings of Osei-Bonsu, Cooper, Goetz and Eccles). His description of ‘amillennial realism’ (as over against ‘premillennial [i.e. dispensational] pessimism’ and ‘postmillennial optimism’) sounds more appropriate for historic or classic premillennialism than for a movement that believes we are living now in the golden age of human history. And it is one thing to be unabashedly Baptist (so am I), but it is getting carried away when one can claim to find in Scripture support for formal church membership, letters of transfer between congregations, and the uniting of churches in regional associations, or to pronounce on patterns for organizing them via church boards, officers with terms of definite length, and standing committees!

Visually, one of the most pleasant things about Grenz’s volume is the large type, which publishers so often refuse to provide for a work of this length. One who is myopic is exceedingly grateful. The greatest problem with the book is the large number of glaring ‘typos’, which even minimally competent proofreaders should have caught—more than I have ever seen in any printed work from an English-language publisher (I have a list of over 60, and in many places I read rapidly so I am sure there are more). Nevertheless, I recommend the contents of Grenz’s volume with great enthusiasm and hope that soon British (not to mention a number of North American, non-Southern Baptist) book-sellers will wake up to the existence of Broadman Press and begin to market this and a number of its other fine, recent publications.


Craig L. Blomberg

Craig L. Blomberg
Denver Seminary
Denver, Colorado, USA