Book Review
Pulpit Masters
The Pastor as a Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision
by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan
Baker Academic, 2015
(240 pages, $19.99, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
Addressed in distinctively Reformed tones to the Protestant Evangelical world, The Pastor as Public Theologian, in its historical essay, surveys the phenomenon from the patristic period through Augustine, and then from the Reformation through the present, finding a steep decline in Protestant public theology and theologians from a high point among the Puritans and in the First Great Awakening, down through the emotional manipulations of Charles Finney as carried forward by evangelizing Methodists and Baptists, to its marginalization and practical nullification in our own culture, a culture that has very little interest in the opinions of learned divinity. This is reflected in the universities, where it may at best survive as an adjunct of "religious studies."
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S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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