Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes

In his latest book Colin Gunton - one of the foremost systematic theologians writing today - addresses the thorny question of God's attributes. Theologians often seem to have been content with a list of intelligible, but often abstract, terms as to 'the contents of our idea of God'. And for Gunton, the doctrine of the divine attributes seems often to have been approached using the wrong method; developing the wrong content; and even, when that has not been the case, treating things in the wrong order. This has much to do with what has become a tangled web of the relations between Greek and Hebrew discussions and characterisations of the topic. In this book Gunton attempts to disentangle these threads as individually and carefully as possible. Successive chapters on the problems of the 'tangled web'; the nature of theological language; and the difference that the Trinity might make to the discussion succeed in developing one of the most coherent and intellectually stimulating pictures of the divine attributes to have been published in recent times. The author's many admirers will find this book mandatory reading, as will all serious students and teachers of systematic theology and Christian doctrine. Colin E Gunton was Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College London. He is the author of numerous books, including Becoming and Being (published in a new edition by SCM Press in 2001), The Actuality of Atonement The One, the Three and the Many, and The Christian Faith. He edited, in addition, the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine..