Christopher Ben Simpson tells the story of modern Christian theology against the backdrop of the history of modernity itself. The book tells the many ways that theology became modern while seeing how modernity arose in no small part from theology. These intertwined stories progress through four parts.
In Part I, Emerging Modernity, Simpson goes from the beginnings of modernity in the late Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance Humanism to the creative tension between Enlightenments and Awakenings of the eighteenth-century. Part II, The Long Nineteenth-Century, presents the great movements and figures arising out of these creative tension - from Romanticism and Schleiermacher to Ritschlianism and Vatican I. Part III, Twentieth-Century Crisis and Modernity, proceeds through the revolutionary theologies of period of the World Wars such as that of Karl Barth or novuelle theologie; this part includes a thorough section on modern Eastern Orthodox theology. Finally, Part IV, The Late Modern Supernova, lays out the diverse panoply of recent theologies - from the various liberation theologies to the revisionist, the secular, the postliberal, and the postsecular.