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Rating: 
Summary: Great Western Book
Review: Gunton's book is amazing. It covers a vast away of knowledge, but he has woven the strands together too well to notice at times. What he has done in essence is acknowledge the failings of Christianity that caused modernity to react so violently against it, but he has used this to champion a fuller, more Trinitarian concept of Christianity. The only caveat I place on this book is that it tends to be Western: it deals with the culture of modernity well, but one must always bear in mind this book does not deal directly with other cultures.
Rating: 
Summary: Breathtaking!
Review: Gunton's thesis is that the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically in the concept of perichoresis, sheds light on the relational nature of all created reality and can serve as a conceptual model for the restoration of fragmented modern culture. In the perichoretic maintenance-in-tension of the one God and the three Persons, we find a model for a balanced integration of truth, goodness, and beauty in culture that is both unified and particular, coherent and true to diversity. As Gunton puts it (177): "But just as a unitarily conceived ultimate reality encourages fragmentation [reviewer note: i.e., by right, rebellious insistence on the reality and value of the particular], so by contrast a God conceived trinitarianly, a God who contains within himself a form of plurality in relation and creates a world which reflects the richness of his being, can surely enable us better to conceive something of the unity in variety of human culture."The book is in 8 chapters (originally lectures), arranged, as Gunton notes explicitly (e.g., 130), chiastically: the problems described in chap.1 are resolved in chap. 8; the problems of chap. 2 are resolved in chap. 7; etc. Part One: The Displacement of God 1. From Heraclitus to Havel. The problem of the one and the many in modern life and thought
2. The disappearing other. The problem of the particular in modern life and thought
3. A plea for the present. The problem of relatedness in modern life and thought
4. The rootless will. The problem of meaning and truth in modern life and thought Part Two: Rethinking Createdness 5. The universal and the particular. Towards a theology of meaning and truth
6. 'Through whom and in whom...' Towards a theology of relatedness
7. The Lord is the Spirit. Towards a theology of the particular
8. The triune Lord. Towards a theology of the one and the many
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