The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford Companions)

For The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, the editors gathered together over 250 scholars, mostly British or American, including what one might call a "celebrity" contributor or two. There's an article each by the archbishop of Canterbury and his predecessor. As one would expect from an Oxford Companion, it is a collection of impressively thoughtful, scholarly, perhaps slightly stodgy, brief summaries of academia's collected erudition on a broad selection of big subjects. That said, it aims to be more at the level of the general reader than, say, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, with fewer and longer articles and briefer reading lists.

The book is unable to be as much of a compendium of consensus as such standard reference works usually are because in many cases there is no consensus to record. The editors' have invited contributors with a sympathy for a particular subject to write on it, and this one volume contains a multitude of viewpoints--all expressed within the courteous and cautious limits of the academically respectable and predominantly from theologically liberal perspectives. The angles of approach of the articles on, for example, evangelicalism, homosexuality, and Thomas Aquinas reflect the vastly diverging views of different parts of the Christian world, some more orthodox than others. These differences add an extra level of interest to what is destined to be a standard reference for a long time to come. --David Pickering, Amazon.co.uk