Faith Matters : Theology for Church and World

In an earlier book, God and the Creature: The Trinity and Creation in Karl Barth, Gordon Watson gave Australia a very powerful, but not uncritical, account of Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity and the central role to which he restored it in the teaching of the church. In that book Dr Watson gave considerable attention to the all-important methodological issues which Barth had raised in his great Church Dogmatics. In this book he gives more attention to the liturgical or doxological issues in the worship, life and mission of the church, with particular reference to the situation in Australia in respect of the ecumenical, social, and ethical questions with which the Uniting Church in Australia is faced in its public life and on-going mission in the modern world. Faith Matters is a superb and timely book. In it Dr Watson begins with a rigorous discussion of the Being and Self-disclosure of the Trinity from the perspective of the Holy Spirit, and then proceeds to offer a careful account of the distinctive character of Karl Barth’s epoch-making interpretation of St Anselm’s Fides Quarens Intellectum and Cur Deus Homo. His purpose is first to clarify Barth’s theological method, with particular respect to the procession of the Holy Spirit and the divergence between Eastern and Western churches over it. It is then only after his careful account of these central issues and only under guidance of rigorous theology, that Watson turns to the pressing questions of the nature of the church, its sacramental life, and the nature of its unity and mission.