Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, by Kathryn Tanner
Kathryn Tanner's first book, God and Creation in Christian Theology (1988), was technical, austere and tremendously important. Tanner argued that most modern theology gets the relation of God and world wrong. It thinks of God as one being among the other beings in the world, and that sets up a number of misguided zero-sum games: the more God is transcendent, the less God is involved in the world; the more power God has, the less freedom creatures have.
Tanner recovered from premodern theology a more radically transcendent God, a God who is on an entirely different plane from the beings in the world. Such a God isn't in some place, and therefore can't be either farther away or closer. Such a God directs all things, and thus isn't in competition with creatures over relative amounts of power. (We can argue about who's funnier in The Odd Couple, Oscar or Felix, but it makes no sense to debate whether either of them is funnier than Neil Simon: Simon wrote all the lines.)
In this book, her fourth, Tanner, now professor of theology at the University of Chicago, sketches the outline of a full systematic theology--something she promises to write at much greater length in the future. She adds to her earlier emphasis on God's transcendence a second central theme: God as "the giver of all good gifts, their fount, luminous source, fecund treasury, and store-house."
