ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT WORKS of Christian scholarship published in 1976" was how Christianity Today described the first edition of Reason within the Bounds of Religion. Now Nicholas Wolterstorff has substantially enlarged his earlier work with the addition of new material which complements and broadens the range of inquiry of the original.

Two fundamental issues, writes Wolterstorff, face all scholars: they must decide which matters to investigate, and on the matters under investigation they must decide which views to hold. In the first edition of this book Wolterstorff addressed himself exclusively to the bearing of the Christian faith on the latter of these issues, in an effort to see how the "theory of theories" can illumine the Christian scholar's situation.

In this second edition, Wolterstorff supplements that discussion with an examination of the role of faith in the decisions scholars make about their choice of subject matter, paying particular attention to the debate between defenders of pure theory and defenders of praxis-oriented theory.