The Revelatory Body is, by my count, Johnson's thirty-fourth book since 1973. Drawing on a life of New Testament scholarship, teaching, and writing for both scholarly and popular audiences, Johnson plays on Sandra Schneiders’ 1999 title The Revelatory Text to propose human bodies as a “privileged arena of divine disclosure” (iv). The seductive power of words means that the constructions of theologians might just be “the most subtle and sophisticated of all idolatries” (1). Johnson's provocative characterization of systematic theology as “a wonderfully oxymoronic designation” (12) signals his desire to move contemporary theology “more toward being an inductive art than a deductive science”(5), more about discerning divine and human spirit in embodied lives than interpreting authoritative texts. The more is central, as Johnson seeks to restore equilibrium between revelatory text and revelatory body. Rather than recycled “experiential expressivism,” however, his appeals to experience are wise and hermeneutically sophisticated, giving a key role to the “formative function of Scripture” (46). Indeed, the revelatory text points us to the revelatory body. This is a book about how to practice theology in a way that reads bodies as well as texts, that writes more as poets and novelists do in the everyday “phenomenology” of description that can yield both real presence and absence.

After a programmatic introduction to theology as inductive art, Johnson clears the ground with a devastating critique in chapter 1 of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body as disembodied, abstract, and an “implicit recognition of the argumentative inadequacy” (31) of Humanae Vitae. The next two chapters, “Scripture and Body” and “Spirit and Body,” lay out and, to some extent, perform the back-and-forth movement between revelatory text and revelatory body. Johnson is at his absolute best when talking about Scripture, as in chapter 2's suggestion that we read 1 Corinthians backward so that Paul on body in chapters 15 and 12 clarifies his “deeply puzzling” remarks in chapters 7 and 6 (63). Johnson is much less compelling when generalizing about Enlightenment and secularization in chapter 3.

The next four chapters deal with bodies at play, in pain and suffering, in passion, and at work. The last two chapters, 8 and 9, are devoted to the topics “The Exceptional Body” and “The Aging Body.” We generally do not practice theology as an inductive art, so, in these chapters, Johnson makes initial forays that suggest what it might look like. In all these chapters, he has to draw on his own Scripture-formed experience. We learn repeatedly, for example, how he feels about grading papers. More often than not he succeeds at the kind of descriptive writing he recommends. As a person close to his own age, I found Johnson's account in the section “The Experience of Aging” (208–13) in the last chapter both eloquent and insightful, as was the section “Sexual Difference” (191–98) in the previous chapter.

Johnson's individual topical chapters on play, suffering, work, and so on lend themselves well to use in undergraduate classrooms. The work as a whole is suitable for graduate reflection on theological method. The book has a subject index, an extensive index of Scripture references, and an index of other ancient sources. This stimulating work by a seasoned scholar will challenge theologians and help students learn how to read revelatory bodies in tandem with revelatory texts, and maybe even to write more like novelists than philosophers.