Gunton was ordained in the United Reformed Church in 1972.[7] He became an Associate Minister of the Brentwood United Reformed Church in 1975, a position which he held until his death.[8] Gunton was appointed Lecturer in Systematic Theology at King's College in 1980, and in 1984 became Professor of Christian Doctrine, later becoming the Dean of Faculty from 1988 to 1990. He also served as Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies from 1993 to 1997. Gunton founded and directed the Research Institute in Systematic Theology which drew distinguished scholars and many graduate students from around the world. In 1992 he delivered the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford, (published as The One, the Three and the Many) and delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993. He also co-founded the International Journal of Systematic Theology with John Bainbridge Webster and Ralph del Colle in 1999.
Gunton's most influential work was on the doctrinesofcreation and the Trinity. One of his most important books is The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (1993), which has been described as "a profound analysis of the paradoxes and contradictions of Modernity."[11]The One, the Three and the Many remains a "majestical survey of the western intellectual tradition and a penetrating analysis of the modern condition."[11]
Gunton, Colin E. (1973). Becoming and Being: A Comparison of the Doctrine of God in Process Theology and in Karl Barth (DPhil thesis). Oxford: University of Oxford. OCLC43092369.
Jenson, Robert W. (2010). "A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton's Thinking". In Harvey, Lincoln (ed.). The Theology of Colin Gunton. London: T&T Clark. pp. 8–16. ISBN978-0-567-55862-6.
Mulcahy, Eamonn (2007). The Cause of Our Salvation: Soteriological Causality According to Some Modern British Theologians, 1988–1998. Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana. ISBN978-88-7839-080-5.
Roest, Gert-Jan (2019). The Gospel in the Western Context: A Missiological Reading of Christology in Dialogue with Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004386488. ISBN978-90-04-38648-8. S2CID171891870.
Webster, John (2010). "Gunton and Barth". In Harvey, Lincoln (ed.). The Theology of Colin Gunton. London: T&T Clark. pp. 17–31. ISBN978-0-567-55862-6.
Green, Bradley G. (2012). Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine. Cambridge, England: James Clarke & Co. ISBN978-0-227-68005-6.
