Matthew Y. Emerson (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of religion at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of The Story of Scripture: An Introduction to Biblical Theology, Between the Cross and the Throne: The Book of Revelation, and Christ and the New Creation: A Canonical Approach to the Theology of the New Testament.
Overall: theologically solid systematic book that isn't great to read cover-to-cover, and sometimes feels a bit lacking in the answers.
The good: - This would be a great book to assign certain questions to a class to have them read, or to have on your shelf to reference from time to time - Theologically super solid. You can tell the authors are very careful - Interesting information about the trinity - The authors care about you as a reader growing in the knowledge of God, but more importantly about formation of your Christian life through this knowledge. Every chapter has reflections questions to immediately think about
The bad: - EXTREMELY repetitive. I can't count how many times I heard the phrase "actions, adoration, attributes, and appellations" (or similar) throughout the book. (But maybe that's good because I remember it? You decide). Even the reflections questions were repeated across multiple chapters! - Sometimes, in an effort to avoid saying any heresy (it seems), the authors don't even answer the question that the chapter is titled after. For instance, I don't feel they gave even an attempted answer to "How can God be three in persons", they more answered "Why do we say God is three in persons?" which I think is less interesting (and maybe was answered before, I can't recall right now). - Nitpick, but there are typos and other mistakes (conversatio instead of conversation, a ".." at the end of a sentence, etc)