Appropriating material from her doctoral thesis, Cynthia Bennett Brown offers an engaging and relevant exploration of Emil Brunner's theology and method as unfolded in his mature published and translated works. Clearly fulfilling the stated aims of the book, Brown gives a convincing account of the later Brunner's thought, contextualising his theology within the Christian life of faith in a way that Brunner would have undoubtedly recognised as his own.

The first part of the book deals with Brunner's conception of theology as ‘Believing Thinking’. Here, Brown addresses Brunner's account of what dogmatic theology actually does: beginning in personal encounter with God and bound by the apostolic witness, dogmatics is believing reflection on that encounter. Along the way, Brown helpfully outlines Brunner's attempts to overcome the subject/object antithesis of the Enlightenment for a relational, personal, historical and sui generis account of truth as encounter. Brown then brings these themes to bear on a number of case studies from Brunner's three-volume Dogmatics, offering a running assessment of Brunner's fidelity to his own methodological ideals.

In the second part of the book, ‘Bounded Theology’, which engages other Brunner works such as the Divine Imperative, Man in Revolt and Revelation and Reason, Brown focuses on Brunner's understanding of revelation and his consistency in keeping to the methodological standards outlined in the first part. This is followed by an analysis of corresponding themes in Barth's theology, and Brunner's critical engagement with those themes.

Finally, the third major part of the book deals with ‘Transformed Being’ and Brunner's account of the place of theology in the reality of the Christian life of faith. Here, Brown gives an extended analysis of some of the major themes in Kierkegaard's writing and Brunner's appropriation of those themes in his theology. It is quite helpful that Brown chose to close rather than begin with Brunner's appropriation of Kierkegaard, as the latter ordering has tended to undermine the independence and systematic integrity of Brunner's theology by implying that it is merely a more doctrinally complex form of Christian existentialism. Brown then concludes by briefly outlining how Brunner's theology might be brought to bear on contemporary theology.

As any work on Brunner today will have to address the issue of Brunner's relevance in light of his subsequent eclipse by other figures in modern theology, this question, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, accompanies Brown's analysis from start to finish. As Brunner is frequently only engaged in relation to his debate with Barth and for the purposes of clarifying Barth's thought, Brown rightly and successfully argues that Brunner deserves to be heard on his own terms. In doing so, she provides a convincing analysis of why Brunner's theology continued to find such an ear in the English-speaking theological world well into the latter part of the twentieth century, given what Brunner believed to be the immediate convertibility of theology to the Christian life of faith.

Regarding the material core of Brown's analysis of Brunner's theological methodology, Brown's presentation appears to be right on the mark. However, the contemporary reader of Brunner would also be right to ask, for example, whether Brunner has sufficiently understood those elements of the tradition he so stringently critiques, and whether, indeed, he has understood Barth correctly, especially on revelation and the Trinity. This is a particularly important question because it may indeed point both to the contemporary relevance of Brunner's work, as well as to additional reasons for its eclipse. Key at this point is Brown's recourse to Brunner's treatment of the Trinity in relation to his theological self-understanding over against both Barth and other parts of the Christian tradition. Whereas Brunner was quite explicitly committed to a trinitarian account of God, he nonetheless castigated much of the tradition's – and Barth's – engagement with the doctrine of the Trinity as abstract, speculative theologising that transcends the scope of the apostolic witness. By contrast, much contemporary historical and systematic theology from Barth onwards has rather argued that trinitarian theology is the fountain for precisely those elements of Christian faith that Brunner saw as missing in the tradition's trinitarian ‘speculation’, particularly encounter, personhood, event, actualism and relationality, to name only a few. On this point Brown incidentally betrays a Brunner who correctly identified the conceptual interests of his time, but failed to see how theology could and would ultimately ground them in a thoroughgoing trinitarianism rather than over against it. Had Brunner been able to combine his conceptual contributions with a more robust trinitarian theology, then excellent books on his thought such as the one Cynthia Bennett Brown provides for us here would not be so rare today.