Reinventing Liberal Christianity. By Theo Hobson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2013. viii + 332 pp. $30.00 (cloth).Stanley Hauerwas once compared the word with the notion of speed. The thrust of liberalism, Hauerwas noted, moves quickly over the particulars of human life and experience, relying on universal and ahistorical concepts to help produce the person, that is, a person who isfree from the constraints of absolute authority in politics, economics, and religion. What is natural for the liberal is to set spontaneity over law, the individual over community, and even spirit over the flesh. If is a tradition, it is one that never has time to settle.Theo Hobson s Reinventing Liberal Christianity is an attempt to ground a liberal form of Christianity into something deeper than what Hauerwas critiques. As a project of reinvention, Hobson addresses two false moves that he argues have contributed to a confused status for liberal Christianity. First, there is the legacy of bad that Hobson associates with the ascendency of an uncritical rationalized humanism. Second, there is the nostalgic fantasy present in the arguments of Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others in the postliberal fold who see the liberal as a source of corruption to church life and practice. His proposed honest liberalism is the result when the nineteenth-century progressives and their twentieth-century critics are shown to have eclipsed the genius of the stubborn sacred value in the liberal state (p. 327).Through a series of genealogical surveys, Hobson seeks to demonstrate how liberal Christianity, particularly in the United States, is well positioned to reclaim the legacy of Roger Williams, John Milton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, in the estimation of Hobson, represent a tradition of authentic liberal theology. In Williams, Hobson finds an exemplar for toleration and liberty; in Milton, a prophet of a free, disestablished church; and in Bonhoeffer, a proponent of a ritualized Christianity that holds the mystery of faith and an openness to the world in constructive tension. This legacy of a culticliberal Christianity, Hobson concludes, counters the theocratic tendencies of post-liberalism, and the sentimentality of bad liberalism, with a vision of the church as an embodied vision of Christ-based cultural order (p. 12). For Hobson, the church ought to be a culturally exciting place (p. 324).Hobsons vision is grand. As he sees it, liberal Christianity is under threat of becoming a parody of nineteenth-century sensibilities. …