As I’m on the editorial group for Grove Doctrine, I plan to promote (but not review) each of the books released in the series as and when they’re published.
In my experience, people often suppose the Reformed tradition is a stern and inflexible system designed primarily by John Calvin to discipline, control, and punish. But, as Cameron D. Clausing shows in Doing Theology in the Reformed Tradition, this is a caricature and far from the truth. Doing Reformed theology is fundamentally a conversation between Scripture (chapter 2), church tradition (chapter 3), and the given context in which people live (chapter 4). The conversation is ongoing; it never ends; and so the Reformed tradition has ‘a dynamic character’—it is ‘“reformed always reforming”’ (p. 5). Clausing concludes,
Doing theology in the Reformed tradition is not some dull and boring activity, for it is life-giving. For a theologian, God is not a problem to be solved but the reality to worship. Consequently, doing theology in the Reformed tradition is a practice of learning to sing the praises of God (p. 22).
Doing Theology in the Reformed Tradition is available for £4.95 from the Grove Books website (in both print and electronic formats), as well as through Christian bookshops.
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