Theology in the Flesh is the first comprehensive overview of the toolkit that contemporary cognitive linguistics offers for theological appropriation. Biblical scholars have been using some of these tools for more than a decade, but cognitive linguistics has not gotten much attention from theologians, aside from a few articles in journals and anthologies, and my 2014 Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology after Cognitive Linguistics. My book, while suggesting broader theological and ecumenical implications, is a more constructive and speculative appropriation of one trajectory, and I focus, by and large, on issues arising from a Roman Catholic context. Sanders, who for the last decade has been a participant in the interchanges between biblical scholars and cognitive linguists, gives a much more wide-ranging introduction to the discipline of cognitive linguistics and to its implications for theology. While thorough enough to provide theologians and graduate students with a very substantive introduction to this emerging area of investigation, his book is also very accessible. It could serve as an excellent textbook introduction for undergraduates and the general reader. Though broadly ecumenical, Sanders’ theological applications incline toward issues central in Protestant and Evangelical contexts. The book includes a helpful list of suggested readings drawn from an annotated bibliography that Sanders has been collecting over the years and sharing with colleagues. If there is a second edition, an invaluable addition would be the larger unpublished annotated bibliography, or perhaps better, a link to an online current version of that expanding compilation.

The book is divided into three parts. The first provides an overview of cognitive linguistics, which Sanders explains does not constitute a single tight-knit theory but rather is a broader school of shared commitments, themes, and analytical approaches. Those shared elements are based on the study of cognition's grounding in the specific sensory and motor systems of human embodiment. Sanders sums up the commonality in the notion that meaning for humans is “anthropogenic.” That is to say, meaning depends upon people's embodied cognitive capacities and cultural interactions, and hence meaning also is dynamic. Words prompt for meaning rather than capture it, because language is an underspecified tip of a giant iceberg of underlying and typically unconscious cognitive processes of categorization and conceptual mapping. Categorization and mapping are guided by factors such as metaphor, metonymy, framing, image schemas, idealized cognitive models, and conceptual blends. While this first section emphasizes how cognitive linguistics has transformed the understanding of metaphor's role in conceptualization and inference, these chapters give ample treatment as well to the discipline's illuminating research on the other factors, including the prototypical, graded, and radial dimensions of categorization.

The second section of the book examines the implications of cognitive linguistics for understanding the nature of religious truths, the emergence of meaning in religious communities, and moral reasoning. The chapter on truth shows how cognitive linguistics’ conception of the radial and anthropogenic character of conceptual mapping and categorization can help theologians better address questions about the possibility of many truths, objective truths, and universal truths. The chapter on meaning in community illustrates how the cognitive linguists’ toolkit provides innovative ways to address questions about the literal versus figurative, and about the possibility of principled criteria for revising or rejecting some teachings in the Bible. The final chapter in this section demonstrates the ways in which moral reasoning is guided by metaphorical inferences, prototypical categorization, and anthropogenic framing.

The final section investigates how Christians reason about doctrines, the Bible, and God. Chapters consider, among other topics, sin, salvation, divine judgment and hell, church, Trinity, identifying the true Christian, anthropomorphism, apophaticism, divine transcendence, and conceptions of God as being and agent. Sanders’ examples demonstrate the many ways in which cognitive linguistics can help prevent theological confusion and clarify theological and confessional disagreements.

Of course, Sanders’ selection and consideration of issues is necessarily limited. Not surprisingly, there are points where his applications will be contested. I would give greater emphasis, for example, to the role of conceptual blending theory and its application to key notions discussed in the second and third parts of the book. Given the potential scope of his book's objective, some limitations are inevitable and do not detract in the least from its success in achieving its ambition to “serve as a primer to engender conversations about this approach in both the church and academy” (13).