As Daniel Whistler observed in his own introduction to the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology, Christian self-reflection and doctrinal thought ‘attained modernity in the nineteenth century, and this modernity was constituted out of anxiety over its own foundations’. The twentieth century saw theology continue to grapple intensely with the searching intellectual challenges of modernity so crucial to those previous developments. This nineteenth-century legacy is evident in the continued preoccupation with theology's foundations and methods, with the consequences of the transposition of the study of divinity into the study of homo religiosus, with the propriety and significance of historical and hermeneutical critique to Christian self-understanding, doctrinal reflection and reconstruction, as well as with the fate of faith itself in a world increasingly secularised by social reorganisation under the prestigious tutelage of the natural and social sciences. In many ways the controlling images of the nature and tasks of theology cultivated in the hundred years following Kant's death continued to organise the theological imaginary of the century to follow.

Yet, as one of our philosophers has aptly remarked, ‘Much of twentieth-century history has been a very unpleasant surprise’, populated with events that shock in virtue of both their scale and profound contradiction of the optimistic expectations previously cultivated by modern humanity. And so the theological discourses and deliverances of the nineteenth century were themselves cut across, shaken and disrupted by the advent of further social, technological, political and intellectual revolutions throughout the course of the new century. It was undoubtedly a century in which Christian theology was provoked by its exposure to world historical events: the invention and prosecution of new and unheard-of forms of total war in Europe between 1914 and 1945 and its global entanglements and entailments; the Holocaust of European Jewry; the ideological reordering of geopolitics and accompanying ‘cold war’; the simultaneous modulation of dissolving European empires into both the international order of the ‘global village’ and ravenous global capitalism amidst the emergence of a post-colonial ‘majority world’; the first orbital vision of the earth as a ‘big blue marble’ and the dawning discernment of our age of the Anthropocene. This was also a century that witnessed the unprecedented globalisation of both Christianity and theological discourse in what was anticipated by many in the West to be the ‘Christian century’.