Offering for publication yet another general survey of Christian theology demands some sort of apologia. First of all, following in the footsteps of others, I offer the excuse that my students and many others have found the material presented here to be have been sufficiently enriching and illuminating for them to have made repeated requests to do something that I otherwise would not have seriously thought of doing, namely, to publish it.

Secondly, I believe that the book does have something new to offer as regards its presentation of Christian theology. It is an attempt to write a book on Christian theology that can be used by the broad spectrum of Western Christianity – Protestant and Catholic. Though I myself am a Roman Catholic, I have spent my entire university career teaching mainly students from Anglican and Protestant traditions. For me it has been a most enriching experience and the result has been to try to teach as much of Christian doctrine as I could without pigeon-holing it into one particular denominational perspective. To do that I have tried to find the gospel values embedded in each other's positions and present them in a new light, albeit one that seeks always to retain its continuity with the lasting acquisitions of the past. At times one has simply to say that one group of Christians believe this and another group believe that. But even on those occasions I have tried to look for bridges that would help each side understand the other. So I offer this book – which covers both Protestant and Catholic beliefs – in the hope that it will enable readers from the major divided Churches of the west to see their differences in a new light and take steps towards overcoming them. My lack of knowledge of the Orthodox tradition has prevented me from weaving their insights into the text, much as I would have liked to. But I trust that even an Orthodox reader will find something of interest in what follows.

Moreover, the book has a very closely knit unity. It operates with a deliberately chosen key-concept – that of the community that love creates – and shows how love's power to unite and transform all that it unites can illuminate every aspect of the Christian faith, from the doctrine of God to the doctrine of a new heaven and a new earth.