all, ‘most people have convictions that they arevery disinclined to question and to doubt,’ this notbeing a feature only shown by religious believers(p. 321). Biggar points out that it is neither thecontent of commitments nor their unshakeabilitythat is the problem for the liberal polity but theway they are deployed in communication thatneeds attention, care and restraint. ‘What isimportant is not that we all speak the samelanguage [terminology]. . . . What is important isthat we want to reach a common understanding ofthe truth, that we are prepared to explain as far aspossible how and why we see things as we do, thatwe are open to honest negotiation, and that we areinclined to exercise charity in our construction andreconstruction of each other’s point of view’ (p.173). Here motives and intentions should governhow our comprehensive doctrines are engaged andconveyed through conversationally fruitful virtuesthat are derived from faith and taught by thechurch. These virtues are described as: ‘docility

(human beings are finite and fallible creatures); areadiness to confess error (human creatures aresinners); a respect for others as potential speakers ofthe truth (all sinners are potentially media of God’sredeeming Spirit); and patience (we look forward tothe day when all that remains stubbornly hiddenwill be revealed)’ (p. 326, slightly modified).These essays should be of great interest, not only

to theologians and philosophers, but to reflectiveprofessionals whose role involves working withfaith communities, as well as with people of noreligious affiliation, in health and welfare, law andorder, education and public policy. The bookencourages us all to ask: how can we live in peacetogether with people whose worldviews are radi-cally different from ours? It also prompts us to ask:how can we effectively learn from each other’sperspectives and harness each other’s commit-ments in service of the common good?

Liverpool Hope University John Sullivan

What Are We Waiting For? Christian Hope and Contemporary Culture. By Stephen Holmes & Russell Rook.Pp. vi, 243, Milton Keynes, Paternoster, 2008, d6.59.

This book brings together essays interested inexploring eschatology for the benefit of scholarsand laypeople alike. The subjects are chosen for acontemporary British evangelical mind that choseto opt out of the Left Behind series but still hasquestions about the end that draws near. This is adiverse collection of brief essays, all looking tomake eschatology more practical, tangible andthought-provoking on an introductory level. Im-portantly, it is the need for writing like this thatalso makes for its limitations. Such a variety oftopics have been chosen for this range of shortessays that their multiplicity demands brevity fromeach writer.These essays are more about opening vistas than

closing doors - although Steve Holmes’ introduc-tion does close the door to the Left Behind series (p.2). These essays are enjoyable because of theirfreshness, their conviction, and the challenge theyoffer to consider what the multiple venues ofordinary life look like eschatologically. While itgoes without saying that, in the academy, eschatol-ogy is a fruitful cornerstone for contemporarythinking about ‘what we are waiting for,’ thisvolume is right that much more needs to be saidabout this for the contemporary British evangelicalchurch. How might our thinking and acting in thename of Jesus Christ be eschatologically qualified?The essays begin with biblical context, move

through the history of the doctrine, and thenaddress the question of the church’s eschatological

relation with the world. Among the biblical essays,I.H. Marshall’s ‘Eschatology at the Heart of NewTestament Theology’ seems to be the most repre-sentative. Marshall makes a felicitous introductionto the history of the interpretation of the Kingdomof God in the New Testament. He ties together thevarying strands of the Kingdom of God conceptand addresses the history of the modern interpreta-tion as well. Importantly, he employs Jeremias’concept of a ‘self-realizing eschatology,’ striking abalance between quietism and activism in the midstof a biblical-eschatological tension.The second section on the church looks at

different slices of the history of doctrine, startingwith the early church. Most notably, DavidBebbington’s ‘Eschatology in Evangelical History’raises the provocative questions that are faced byHolmes in the introduction in historical detail.Bebbington asks what the widespread interest inparticularized eschatologies in post-ReformationGreat Britain and the United States might meanfor the development of doctrine on the whole.Bebbington’s contribution to this volume iscrucial, charting the church’s dialogue withculture, as the eschatologies of the West have, inthe last two centuries, more and more circledaround the question of dispensationalism.The third section on the ‘Hopeful Culture’

covers the theology-and-culture sector with a wideswath of interests. In particular, Krish Kandiah’s‘Eschatology and Pop Culture’ contains valuable

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reflection on the relation between cinema and itspop-eschatologies in the modern West. Kandiahfinds the contribution of a Christian eschatology isthat it brings the concept of hope into a worldpervaded by the unaccountable scientism ofmodernity and the ‘future shock’ of a postmoder-nity evacuated of hope.Finally, the last section, ‘Hopeful World,’ is best

highlighted by John Colwell’s essay ‘Living for theFuture.’ Colwell’s essay is a result of his reflectionon how a Christian ethics is to be oriented toChrist and the eschatological goal for the creaturein the Holy Spirit. ‘Living for the future,’ Colwellsays, is above all a participation in Jesus Christ.While it is a strong theme throughout this

volume that the One we are waiting for is JesusChrist, it obscures the task of Christian eschatol-ogy when we ask this question impersonally. ‘Whoare we waiting for’ would be a possible title for asecond volume I would welcome. For numerous

reasons, theologians tend to write impersonaleschatologies around the ‘What’ question, andthis can tend to ‘eclipse the biblical person,’ theOne who comes to us eschatologically. Saying that,this volume is a ‘what’-style volume on eschatol-ogy that is still focused on keeping Jesus Christ atthe fore. Heaven and hell, politics, music, workand the environment are all addressed in the nameof Jesus Christ. Holmes’ introduction, which offersa trajectory starting from A. Schweizer and K.Barth, also raises the ‘Who’ question for the wholeof the volume as well. Overall, while it is topicallyarranged, the objective and task of this volume isto raise eschatological questions about the comingof Christ in particular and to make concretesuggestions for how this ought to affect life today.

King’s College,University of Aberdeen,Scotland

Christopher Green

Visions of Development: Faith-Based Initiatives. Edited by Wendy R. Tyndale. Pp. xxii, 188, Aldershot,Ashgate, 2006, $100.00.

What exactly is a faith-based initiative, and whatare its presuppositions and implications? Thisbook, which deals with faith-based initiatives indeveloping countries, gives us a pretty compre-hensive answer. Offering a close look at thirteenstories of groups that have made an impact inLatin America, Asia and Africa, we also see theapproaches of faith communities as diverse asIslam, the Baha’i, Christianity, Buddhism andHinduism. Each of these has a particular con-tribution to make. For example, the Muslimwomen’s movement in Indonesia called MuslimatNahdlatul Ulama has transformed the govern-ment’s originally coercive birth control pro-gramme not only into something more benign,but also something far more successful. Thanks tothis many-layered and mass movement in the

country, and its educational and developmentalwork, ‘total fertility rates in Indonesia decreasedrapidly from 5.6 births per woman in 1971 to 2.8births per woman in 1997. The rate of reductiondecreased most rapidly only after religious asso-ciations, such as Nahdlatul Ulama, becameinvolved in family planning and the governmentfocused on the welfare of parents and childrenrather than in limiting populations growth’ (p.100). This would seem to indicate that workingwith religious groups, rather than against them, isone key to success. And it also gives an indicationwhy so many aid projects fail: because they makeno sense to the people they are designed to help,being alien to their culture.

Haywards Heath Alexander Lucie-Smith

Christian Realism and the New Realities. By Robin W. Lovin. Pp. viii, 231, Cambridge University Press,2008, d45.00/$90.00, d17.99/$29.99.

The meaning of ‘Christian realism’ is not self-evident. Reinhold Niebuhr employed the term inthe 1950s to designate a theological and ethicalapproach to politics that ‘suggested the checks andbalances of constitutional democracy as the bestway to preserve both order and freedom. Betweennations, a balance of power provided the realisticalternative to utopian plans for world government’(pp. 2–3). A half-century later, constitutionaldemocracy has been widely accepted throughoutthe world but one of the two major powers that

required balancing has all but disappeared. Giventhe appearance of new political realities, how isChristian realism to be reconceived and assessed?To begin, Lovin distinguishes three interrelated

types of realism and four positions on Christianrealism. The three types are political, which‘analyzes political choices in terms of self-interestand power’ (p. 6), moral, which introduceshumility and self-restraint into political discus-sions (p. 9), and theological, which sees ‘God bothpresent in and standing in judgment on the human

708 BOOK REVIEWS