Andrew Shanks is one of the most intelligent and, doubtless, the most persistent promoter of Hegel's religious thought as an important object for intellectual contemporary reflection and as a significant resource for the fashioning of a church theology appropriate to our late modern or postmodern situation. Hegel and Religious Faith is not only very much in line with Shanks’ previous books, but also could be taken to be their summary. Shanks is declaratively bold from the outset. Hegel's thought is asserted to be ‘one of the great pinnacles of the Christian tradition’ (1), and the philosophy of philosophy when it comes to ‘conversational openness’ (2), which is a sine qua non for contemporary Christian theology. Of course, these assertions are really theses to be demonstrated, and this demonstration is the main constructive task of Shanks’ concise and elegantly plotted book. Hegel and Religious Faith is, however, a two-sided text. While it offers a constructive proposal, whose merits can be assessed relatively independently of what it appears to reject, it actually takes a stand against those commentators and critics who would query Hegel's preeminence as a religious thinker and question whether he sacrifices the essentials of Christian thought and practice at the altar of speculative philosophy. William Desmond is taken to be representative of the kind of Hegel interpretation with which Shanks takes issue, and his work Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? a synecdoche of a swathe of Hegel interpretation that indicts Hegel's thought as totalitarian and his sublation of Christianity in speculative philosophy as mischievous.

The challenge to Desmond's negative reading of speculative philosophy is in the main carried out in chapters 1 and 2, but there are definite echoes in chapter 8 and throughout. As I see it, Desmond's interpretation is a strong one. While he does not deny that Hegel is a great philosopher to whom he returns time and again, he makes no apology for his judgment that Hegel's speculative philosophy is seriously flawed. Hegel's thought is a promise betrayed in that its openness to the gift of reality and its various discourses is reneged in a pansophistic vision of self-mediating and thus self-totalizing Spirit. Hegel's illustration of the dialectical self-mediation of Spirit represents a derailment in that the true task of philosophy is to register and render the complex intermediation of reality which resists reduction to identity. The totalization ingredient in Hegelian speculative thought in turn suggests that a fundamental aim of the Hegelian system is fulfilling the theodicy program of modern philosophy by offering a justification of evil in historical existence that in effect is a kakodicy (37). The complementary side of Desmond's interpretation of Hegel is hermeneutic. He asks whether or not Hegel's reading of the representations of Christianity is accurate and whether the conceptual transcription of these representations keeps the intent of representations such as creation, Christ, and Trinity intact. He also asks whether standard Christian practices such as prayer and liturgy are not reduced to metaphors in Hegel's philosophy. While not positioning himself as a theologian, Desmond is convinced that there is overwhelming evidence that standard Christian understandings and practices are compromised and that Hegel produces a counterfeit of Christian belief and practice as he produces a counterfeit double to the God of Christian belief (8).

Whereas Shanks mounts an explicit and vehement challenge to Desmond's general characterization of Hegel's speculative thought, his challenge to Desmond's reading of Hegel's hermeneutic of Christian symbols and practices is somewhat more implicit. As is to be expected, Shanks denies what Desmond affirms, and affirms what he denies. Shanks considers mediation in Hegel to be not unifying dialectical self-mediation, but complex, dispersed, and contingent (40). Moreover, against Desmond and interpreters like him, he reads Hegel's historical philosophy and philosophy of history as elaborating an unrealized eschatology, as being in the order of hope rather than knowledge, and thus as an anti-theodicy rather than a theodicy. Despite a phrase such as ‘Die Weltgeschichte is das Weltericht’ (38), history is not the ultimate tribunal (38–40). No more than Desmond is Shanks fighting the battle alone. If he cites Lukács as support, there are any number of other Hegelian commentators and theologians influenced by Hegel who have gone down this line and whom he could potentially call on. This Aussereinandersetzung is in fact as old as Hegel's works themselves. Shanks also has problems with the views of God and community that Desmond think to be violated by Hegel's Aufhebung (2–8). He thinks that Desmond's view of the human community as a community of agape represents an embrace of the impossible. He also judges that Desmond uncritically supports a classical view of God as the ‘beyond’ (Jenseits) that Hegel showed to be fatally flawed intrinsically as well as out of alignment with the Gospel (97). Given his view of the primacy of the Phenomenology for the interpretation of Hegel, Shanks is accusing Desmond and those with similar interpretive positions of supporting precisely that form of ‘unhappy consciousness’ that Hegel dispatched in his bravura text (157).

What is as interesting as Shanks’ actual rebuttal of Desmond is the style of the rebuttal. The brevity of Shanks’ response rules out refutation in the strict sense. What replaces it is an amalgam of forceful assertions of the opposite reading of Hegel (sometimes weakened by the plea that this opposite reading is at least possible (38-40), together with ad hominem arguments of a psychological sort about Desmond's intransigence (6) and perfectionism (4, 9, 12). Shanks provides interpretive cover for the latter when he inscribes Desmond's either/or in the Hegelian dialectic of the ‘beautiful soul’ whose refusal to deal with reality and get ‘dirty hands’ proves totally deleterious with regard to the best possible social and political outcomes which are never perfect (12–16). A crucial element of Desmond's problem, for Shanks, is that Desmond goes down the Kierkegaardian line of a hyper-critical Hegel interpretation that represents something like the nec plus ultra of social and political disengagement (156–58). This is not a minor infraction for Shanks, but the infraction of infractions, for in his view Hegel's philosophy is social-political all the way down, and to the extent to which Hegel is a theologian, he is a political theologian who has truly important things to say about the biblical kingdom of justice and peace.

As intimated already, Shanks opposes Desmond's negative reading of Hegel's sublation of Christianity in philosophy not only as fundamentally uncritical, but also dangerously wrongheaded. On Shanks’ account, Desmond and his ilk fail to see either the possibility or the actuality of distortion in the ideation of the Christian tradition and turn a blind eye to the ideological temptation of the institutional church to reproduce itself and its hierarchical structure of power (86). On this account, Desmond's embrace of orthodoxy is, therefore, as reactionary as it is naive. Interestingly, Shanks provides a genealogical frame for the difference in the interpretation of Christianity. In chapter 8 he refers to Meister Eckhart and Joachim de Fiore as mystical precursors of Hegel's ‘theological’ positions (146–53). It is thinkers on the margins such as these who in his view provide authentic interpretations of Christianity which can speak to the modern world. For Shanks, the standard-bearer of the anti-mystical interpretation of Christianity, by contrast, is Augustine. He makes it clear, however, that he opposes not only the historical Augustine, but also all modern theology in the Augustinian line. This would include de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Milbank among others (159). But by implication, it also includes Desmond. The choice between Hegel and Augustine is stark and it makes all the difference in the world. Shanks holds that Desmond and others make the wrong choice. According to Desmond, for example, the Christian God is a God to whom one can pray; one cannot pray to Hegel's God. For Shanks, by contrast, Augustine's God is a pious comforting fiction who serves to legitimate destructive power structures. Moreover, not only does Shanks insist that Hegel's God is a God to whom one can pray, but in the Coda, which makes up chapter 9, he produces a Psalm to demonstrate the point. His Psalm depends on the biblical psalms and also the prophetic literature. Rhetorically speaking the vertical dimension exists, but is made a function of the horizontal. And it seems evident that though the God to whom one prays is the biblical God of justice, he is also ineluctably incognito.

The value of Hegel and Religious Faith lies in making the conflict of interpretation regarding Hegel's philosophy and its hospitality/hostility ratio regarding Christianity fully transparent and shockingly exigent. It certainly does not lie in Shanks demonstrating his case. Shanks neither demonstrates the superiority of his construction of Hegel, nor proves that Hegel redeems rather than seriously injuries Christianity. Were the reviewer to decide, he would side with Desmond, and not feel embarrassed to be classed as an Augustinian. Perhaps more importantly, however, given his methodology, it is not clear that Shanks can demonstrate his case. This book, which constructs a prophetic Hegel, itself functions largely in the prophetic mode. At times, this is moving, as is the case with the Psalm which ends the text, where despite some dissonance regarding the eclipse of the transcendent One, which is a grammatical feature of biblical religion, one feels something of a transformative spiritual force. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, for surely the critique of idolatry and/or ideology is central to the prophetic tradition. Unfortunately, one cannot say the same thing about Shanks’ unbridled enthusiasm for Ian McGilchrist's views on how the bicameral brain provides a key to the Western mind. Shanks’ deployment of McGilchrist is about as unconvincing as McGilchrist itself. Even more unfortunate is the linking of the unsophisticated McGilchrist and the super-sophisticated Hegel, a linkage in which McGilchrist plays the role of key to the lock of Hegel. Perhaps this metaphor suggests what brings McGilchrist and Hegel together. One wonders whether despite all the appeals to the democratic, and specifically with respect to conversational openness, it is not finally the notion of the secret, the conviction that one has found in these two thinkers the explanation for historical reality and the nature of Christianity that regulates as well as motivates Shanks’ Hegel interpretation. There is, for Shanks, definitely a split between the unenlightened and the naïve, although it would be unhelpful—even abusive—to label Shanks a ‘gnostic,’ even a ‘gnostic manqué.’ Still, despite its best intentions, Hegel and Religious Faith evinces a certainty, and an apocalyptic tone, that performatively cuts against its explicit avowals.