Christopher Ben Simpson tells the story of modern Christian theology against the backdrop of the history of modernity itself. The book examines the many ways that theology became modern while seeing how modernity arose in no small part from theology. These intertwined stories progress through four parts.
In Part I, Emerging Modernity, Simpson discusses the period from the beginnings of modernity in the late Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance Humanism to the creative tension between Enlightenments and Awakenings of the 18th-century. Part II, The Long Nineteenth-Century, presents the great movements and figures arising out of these creative tension - from Romanticism and Schleiermacher to Ritschlianism and Vatican I. Part III, Twentieth-Century Crisis and Modernity, proceeds through the revolutionary theologies of the period of the World Wars such as that of Karl Barth or nouvelle theologie. Finally, Part IV, The Late Modern Supernova, lays out the diverse panoply of recent theologies - from the various liberation theologies to the revisionist, the secular, the postliberal, and the postsecular.

Designed for classroom use, this volume includes the following features:
- charts/diagrams/visual organizations of the information presented included throughout
- both a one-page chapter title table of the contents and an expanded (multipage) table of contents
- chapter at-a-glance outlines at the beginning of each chapter
- references to further reading at the end of chapters