Westminster Handbook To Evangelical Theology

What the Westminster Handbook To Evangelical Theology Actually Is

It is a reference work published by Westminster John Knox Press, edited primarily by Mark A. Noll with contributions from dozens of evangelical scholars across theological subfields. The book is organized alphabetically by topic, with each entry written by a different specialist. You will find entries on doctrines like atonement, scripture, justification, and eschatology, but also on broader cultural and historical subjects such as evangelicalism and science, evangelism, and bioethics. I picked it up expecting a straightforward textbook reference. What I got was more useful than that. The entries are short enough to read in fifteen minutes each, but they are written by people who actually publish in those subfields, so the citations are real and the disagreements between contributors are visible. That visibility is worth paying attention to.

Westminster Handbook To Evangelical Theology

Here is how I actually use it. I do not read it cover to cover. I look up the specific term or doctrine I am working with, then I cross-reference two or three other entries that touch the same topic from a different angle. For instance, if you are writing about the authority of scripture, you read the entry on scriptural authority first, then you look up biblical interpretation, inspiration, and canon to see where the contributors agree or diverge. The divergence is often the most interesting part. The entries range from about one to four pages. That length forces the authors to be concise, which is a feature, not a bug. Most evangelical theology textbooks spend thirty pages on a single doctrine and still skirt the hard questions. These entries tend to sit down with the hard questions in the last paragraph. I ran into a specific problem last year that made me appreciate the handbook's structure. I was preparing a lecture on the relationship between justification and sanctification in Reformed evangelical thought. I looked up the justification entry and found the author, Thomas Schreiner, presenting the classical Reformed position clearly. But when I checked the sanctification entry by another contributor, the framing shifted in ways that created tension with Schreiner's section. Instead of glossing over that tension, the handbook let it stand. I used that tension directly in the lecture and the students actually engaged with it rather than tuning out a sanitized summary.

There are a few things you should know before you rely on this book as your primary source. First, the contributors are all evangelical, and most are within the Reformed or near-Reformed tradition. That is not a flaw if that is your tradition. It is a flaw if you are trying to get a balanced view of charismatic, Anabaptist, or non-evangelical perspectives. The handbook will not give you those. If you need those, you will have to supplement with works like the Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modernity or the Cambridge Companion to Evangelicalism. Second, the alphabetical format means some entries overlap significantly. The entry on covenant theology will reference the entry on Abraham, which will reference the entry on justification. This is normal for handbooks. The workaround is to read the entries in a loop rather than linearly, and to take notes on where the citations point you. I keep a single document where I list each entry I consult along with the page numbers of the other entries it references. It takes about ten minutes to set up and saves you an hour of going back and forth.

Third, the date of publication matters. The original edition came out around 2007, and while the entries are solid, some of the debates referenced inside them have moved on. The entry on gender roles, for example, reflects the complementarian debate as it stood in the mid-2000s. If you are citing this for current research, you should pair it with newer journal articles from the last five years on any topic where the evangelical landscape has shifted noticeably. The practical value of this handbook is in its breadth and its willingness to show disagreement. Many evangelical reference works try to present a unified front. This one does not. That makes it more honest and more useful for anyone who has actually sat in a theology seminar where two professors disagree and neither one is wrong. I also want to flag a limitation that will catch people off guard. The handbook does not include a bibliography at the end of each entry. It uses footnotes or endnotes, and those are the real resource. If you are doing academic work, you need to track down the sources cited in those notes yourself. The handbook is a starting point, not a destination. I have lost time on papers because I assumed the footnote was sufficient and then had to go hunting for the original source at 11 PM the night before a deadline.

If you are a graduate student or a pastor doing serious study, this book belongs on your shelf next to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Evangelical Theology and the Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms by James R. White. Use them together. The handbook gives you the overview, the Blackwell companion gives you the broader academic conversation, and the pocket dictionary handles terminology you keep mixing up. The book is available through Westminster John Knox Press, Amazon, and major academic retailers. The hardcover runs around forty dollars and the paperback is somewhat less. If you are ordering from an academic distributor, check whether your institution has a standing order. I got mine through my seminary library's acquisition list and it saved me the retail price. Bottom line: it is a good reference tool for evangelical theology, but it is not a comprehensive one. It reflects a particular tradition within evangelicalism, it has dated certain debates, and it requires you to follow its footnotes if you want to do proper research. Use it as a map, not as the territory.