In the Reformation and in the period of Reformed orthodoxy, there was no question whether the Christian faith is true. There were great and important questions debated between the Reformed churches and theologians with the Roman communion, the Lutherans, the Anabaptists, and others but almost all of them were asking the same question: “What has God said?” By the end of the 17th century, however, that question was supplanted by another, “Has God said”? How Christianity reacted to that shift is story that we need to study well. One of the scholars who is helping us to piece together what happened to the Christian consensus is Paul C. H. Lim, Associate Professor of the History of Christianity in Vanderbilt University. Last September he published an important new work, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England. It’s part of the Oxford Studies in Historical Theology series and winner of the prestigious Roland H. Bainton Prize for History or Theology at the most recent Sixteenth Century Studies Society. Here’s the table of contents. The image above is linked to Amazon, where the volume is little less expensive.

Paul sat for an Office Hours broadcast July, 2012, just before the book was published. If you haven’t met Paul, the interview will make you want to read his work. The book has garnered high praise from some significant readers. Jonathan Sheehan at UC Berkeley writes, “Paul Lim’s erudite book demonstrates just how challenging it was when, during the English seventeenth century, Christianity’s central mystery of the Trinity moved to the center of political, cultural, and religious controversies. With enormous theological and scriptural learning, Lim lets us see these controversies from the inside.” John Morrill, Selwyn College, Cambridge says this volume is “of very high intelligence and immaculate scholarship, equally impressive on Late Reformation biblical and patristic hermeneutic and on the work of Hobbes and other proponents of heterodoxy.”

I just bought my copy of the book and I’m looking forward to reading it right away.