The Encyclopedia of Christianity authors critical?

Now Unix ... how could we possibly know the answer to your first question, unless we had been friends with them in their younger years?

But I wouldn't regard EOC as 'critical'. The word 'balanced' might be more appropriate.  I copied the latter part of Peter Nagel's article on gnosticism below. My impression of EOC is a place people can go to get a 'once-over' without having to 're-invent the wheel'.  So if you were a pastor, and needed a quick reasonable discussion of something without getting into a major search, EOC would be good.

I've never been thrilled with it. Like (I guess) you, I want 'hard-data' (what little there is). And that's not EOC's function.

Soooo ... I'll make you an offer. If you talk to Logos and tell them DMB (Denise Barnhart) wants to transfer her copy to you (3 Logos resources: vols 1-3,4,5 ... refer to this thread) then I'll confirm an email they'll send me. You pay the $20 transfer fee and it's yours.  It does have good articles and obviously very wide coverage; just not my cup of tea.

Here's a screen of EOC (had to use a JPG; PNG's don't work)

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Frankly from your question, you'd do better with the Logos resource 'Dictionary of Historical Theology'. Logos puts it on sale periodically and it's quite well written.  Article size isn't a lot different; just the contents.

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I cannot directly answer your question because I do not know the resources.  They are ones I wished I had, and suspect that I would value them.  But I don't have direct experience with them.

So why am I bothering to answer this?  First of all, you have repeatedly asked if certain resources are "critical" or if authors are trained in "critical thinking".  I have found that there are many different meanings to this term, each insisting that it is correct.  There are a few that by "critical" mean rejecting the supernatural a priori, and so, whenever presented with something seeming supernatural, either reject that it happened, or provide a naturalistic explanation for it.  I guess there was once a pastor who took "Man shall not live by bread alone" as the sermon text to tell his farmers to plant potatoes...

There are others who recognize that things should be looked at from multiple perspectives and try, to the best of their ability, to present those perspectives honestly and then weigh all the information before putting it together.

There are also those who try to look for a new facet to approach something, and try to bring that new facet to the fore as strongly as possible to bring a new, neglected voice to the discussion.

All of these can be described as critical.  I admit that I do not find the first to be that useful, and find the 3rd only useful if you are grounded with additional information.

And yes, just about any book is obsolete when printed.  The real happening things happen in journals, and I suppose online in blogs now.  But we can only keep track of so much in our minds, and so summaries of the debate, even when out of date, are valuable as an aid to memory or to teach us about the basic issues which are the background for the current debate.  A good Dictionary/Encyclopedia does this, and so is valuable even if out of date.

SDG

Ken McGuire