Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity ... What? Agenda for Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 201 pp., cloth, $14.99.

Clark H. Pinnock, Tracking the Maze: Finding Our Way Through Modern Theology from an Evangelical Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 222 pp., cloth, $24.95.

Hendrickus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology: Report of a Personal Journey Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 312 pp., cloth, $29.95.

A visiting church leader from an undeveloped nation recently commented that American pastors seemed answerable to efficiency and growth as the measures of ministry. In his part of the world, he related, they could afford only the standard of faithfulness.

Every serious preacher knows that a theological vocation is part of the call to the pulpit. And yet, many preachers consider engagement with the theological issues to be among the luxuries displaced by the press of ministry tasks.

We preach and minister in an atheological age; that is, an age in which theology, the pursuit of the true, has been pressed to the margins by the pursuit of the practical, the successful, and the entertaining. This makes the preacher's vocation as a steward of the Christian theological heritage all the more critical. If faithful engagement with doctrine and theological concerns is not found in the pulpit, it will not be found.

Preachers looking for an opportunity to join three capable and engaging theologians on a journey into some of the most basic issues in contemporary theology will find Thomas Oden, Clark Pinnock, and Hendrikus Berkhof worthy summer companions.

Oden, who teaches theology and ethics at Drew University in New Jersey, is one of the most prolific contemporary theologians, with a half-dozen significant titles published in the 1980s. Oden's After Modernity, a revision and expansion of his earlier Agenda for Theology, is part mea culpa and partly an indictment of modern theology's abdication of classical Christianity.

Oden's confessional rehearsal of his days as a "movement theologian" speak volumes of the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. Oden chronicles his travels from one theological way station to the next, each a form of accommodation to modernity at the expense of classical concerns. "The shocker," he states, "is not merely that I rode so many bandwagons, but that I thought I was doing Christian teaching a marvelous favor by it and at times considered this accommodation the very substance of the Christian teaching office." Each of these movements had, in Oden's pointed words, "rebaptized Christianity in the triune name of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries."

In Agenda (1979) Oden had called for a return to "postmodern orthodoxy," the classical expression of Christian truth communicated in contemporary terms. In the meantime, the deconstructionists and revisionists had hijacked the term "postmodern," necessitating Oden's use of "postcritical" for his call to faithfulness. Oden's systematic efforts reveal a postcritical appropriation of classical and patristic texts. (See the two volumes of his systematic theology The Living Word and The Word of Life (Harper and Row). A third volume will eventually complete the project.)