Paul DeHart wants to ‘bury’ postliberalism (p. 54), but he does not want to cast aside the theology of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei in the process. He thinks there is much to learn from the ‘Yale School’, but that its fundamental insights need to be refined by a critique which moves beyond the exhausted distinctions of the past. A good portion of the book is spent developing this critique and, while interesting, it is not the most significant element in the work: that distinction belongs to DeHart's constructive proposal, one which offers a vision for a chastened, yet resilient, liberal theology. It stands as perhaps the most creative appropriation of the work of Lindbeck and Frei to date.

DeHart focuses much of his criticism upon Lindbeck's notions of intratextuality (interpreting a world into a text) and extratextuality (interpreting a text into the world). He believes these notions arise from the misplaced idea of a ‘single system of meaning which could unify and commensurate every cultural instantiation of Christianity’ (p. 182). Such an approach ‘obscures the fact that it is faithful identity itself which must be under constant construction in the life of Christian cultures’ (p. 189). The church, he insists, must have a ‘semantic investment in its cultural location’ such that it can ‘“reacquire” Christ from ever new cultural vantage points’ (p. 244). Christ is encountered, in other words, precisely when the church allows its witness to be criticised by external discourses which are, in fact, already a form of God's activity in the world. God's Spirit is ‘already at work in the human production of meaning, opening up culture from within to enable a creative conjunction with the word of Christ as it makes its way through history’ (p. 268). The church's submission to external testing, therefore, is a submission to the judgement of God's living Spirit. This means that the church must broaden its understanding of God's activity ‘beyond the incarnation of the word in a human life’ so that it can be recognised in the ‘whole cosmic process’ and particularly in the ‘cultural processes of both the witnessing community and the world with which it exists in cultural symbiosis’ (p. 263). This is precisely what Lindbeck's notion of intratextuality does not allow, DeHart argues, and his approach leaves the church with a reductive vision of God's action in the world.

Interestingly, this argument is developed by way of a sympathetic reading of Hans Frei. Through an examination of Frei's later work, in particular his description of five theological ‘types’, DeHart argues that Frei gestured in the direction of DeHart's own proposal. He supports this claim, in part, by distancing Frei from Karl Barth and it is here that DeHart's interpretation begins to falter. Frei identified Barth as a ‘Type Four’ theologian, one who allows Christian self-description to serve as theology's essential guide while making unsystematic use of external discourses and taking external questions seriously. DeHart, by contrast, portrays Barth as so unwilling to give any real independence to ‘generally accepted concepts’ that his theology may actually be ‘a disguised version of Type Five’ (p. 223), a theology in which external discourses are given no place at all in Christian self-description. As a result, Frei's distance from Type Five turns into distance from Barth as well. This reading of Barth, however, misrepresents both Barth's engagement with the biblical witness and his relationship to external discourses, and it leads to an unbalanced interpretation of Frei's relationship to the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and H. Richard Niebuhr. DeHart makes much of Frei's often sympathetic statements about these figures, even though Frei himself labelled many of these thoughts ‘hypothetical’ in nature. Yet Frei read Schleiermacher and Niebuhr as he did precisely because he placed their insights in tension with what he had learned from Barth, particularly Barth's high christology. By distancing Frei from Barth on these matters, DeHart removes this tension from Frei's stance and he thus stretches Frei's often cautious statements about Schleiermacher and Niebuhr to their breaking point.

These insights help us see that DeHart's portrayal of Lindbeck and Frei is shaped nearly as much by his own constructive interests as it is by their own work. His goal is to articulate a ‘generous, liberal orthodoxy’ (p. 244) which shows a way beyond the tired dichotomies of the past. He succeeds on one level because he helpfully shows that some of the divisions which have separated revisionists and postliberals can be overcome. He falls short on another level, however, since some of the gains he achieves – gains made possible by an alignment with Frei – occur because distinctions which were central in Frei's theology have been blurred. The book's main contribution thus lies less in its analysis of Lindbeck's and Frei's theology than in its suggestive insights as to what a liberal theology after postliberalism might look like.