Neil MacDonald has made a strong attempt to build a metaphysic which provides a way of thinking of and allowing for the reality of God, and doing so on the basis of what is central to the Old and New Testaments. It may not be precisely what the subtitle indicates (‘Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments’), but it is a philosophical and theological engagement with the Bible. His guides in this process are not difficult to discern and, in fact, are identified early in the process. They include the following: Gerhard von Rad for his insight about the shaping of Israel's faith, beginning with the soteriological identity of YHWH, that is, as the one who delivers Israel from bondage, a crucial conclusion because ‘the epistemic priority lies with this God acting in the world rather than with his acting to create the world’ (p. xiv); Karl Barth for his way of understanding God's acting in the world and in creation, his notion of divine spatiality as a way of giving conceptual possibility to heaven and his discernment of a doctrine of substitutionary atonement as ‘objectively present in the Gospels’ (p. xv); Brevard Childs for his pressing to make theology accountable for the insights of biblical scholarship but especially for his focus on the significance of the canonical order, beginning with the priestly creation narrative; Nicholas Wolterstorff for his conceptuality of divine speech without speaking organs and the priority of the concept of present event as regards God's knowledge; Richard Bauckham for thinking about God in terms of identity rather than ousia and Robert Jenson, second only to Barth in theological influence on MacDonald, for his notion of heaven as a way Jesus can be understood as in God's own space.

I mention these influences because they show the varied and rich resources operative in MacDonald's theological work. The book itself is much too dense – not unintelligible – to summarise in a short review. The author is concerned with and develops several dimensions of theology as engaged with scripture. At the heart of the book is MacDonald's concern to show the rationality of scripture or the possibility of translating the biblical texts and concepts into a mode of rationality, using especially analytic philosophy. In line with this is his effort to make sense of divine action, something he does by means of the notion of God's self-determining self, specifically God's determining that he will be the Creator as over against God's creating in order to be determined as the Creator: ‘My claim will be that God creates the world precisely by determining himself to be the creator of the world’ (p. 24). This notion of divine self-determination is the key to a rational view of divine action and avoids the tendency since the Enlightenment to view God's creating the world as more tractable than God's acting in it (p. 131). The two come together in the seventh day of creation, when God's resting is not a retirement from the creation but is a part of the divine self-determination, God defined now in terms of ‘being and potentially acting, in the time of his own creation’ (p. 74) and so available to be acting in the world and history. The problems of God's acting in the world and of a timeless God acting in time are overcome through a concept of self-determination. As MacDonald puts it at one point:

Thus there is nothing God has to do other than determine to be what God determines to be. The matter of divine identity is the key to divine action, though, as the quote above indicates, MacDonald will sometimes couch his point in terms of God's self-determination ‘to do’ as well as ‘to be’.

Interacting with the more methodological or metaphysical efforts are two substantive claims. One is an understanding of the identity of God, who God is out of which God determines what God does. The identity of YHWH/God ‘is a judging yet desisting, forebearing self’ (p. 121 and repeated often). MacDonald roots this understanding of God's being and doing in the scriptures, with reference especially to the initial Yahwistic story of the inexplicable disobedient act of the first couple, but also having in mind the Flood story and God's way with Israel again and again, particularly in the Exodus and in many events recounted in the Deuteronomistic History, such as with regard to Ahab and Jehu, where judging but desisting is God's response to their actions.

This judging yet desisting, forbearing identity is then especially revealed in the second substantive claim MacDonald makes – very much under the influence of Barth – which is that the fundamental motif of the Gospel narrative is: ‘YHWH, the God of Israel who takes his own judgement on himself – in the form of his son, Jesus of Nazareth’ (p. 184). He goes on to say that ‘the evangelists recognised that this God was precisely the one identified in the Old Testament and principally in Old Testament narrative, as essentially a soteriological identity. The God of Israel reveals himself to be a judging yet desisting, forbearing and saving historical identity’ (p. 184).

MacDonald's immersion in the biblical story, and his ability to read that story so that it interacts with metaphysical and dogmatic issues, is impressive. Such interaction is what the community of faith needs. This reviewer did not find the analysis easy going but learned much from it. Others will have to say whether the notion of divine self-determination is as easy a key to the rationality of divine reality and being as MacDonald argues. I hope it is. His treatment of the biblical material is informed by some of the best historical-critical and biblical-theological work of recent decades. I think he has made a good case for the identity of God revealed in the narratives as judging, yet desisting and forbearing. At the same time, I would want to suggest that the summary statement about the Gospels discerning that the God of the Old Testament is ‘essentially a soteriological identity’ (italics MacDonald's) should be more at the heart of his discussion than it is. Even in the quote above, ‘saving’ is tacked on at the end when it belongs at the beginning. MacDonald does not think the Exodus identity of God as ‘the one who releases Israel from the bondage of Egypt’ is sufficient in the light of the whole narrative. Certainly, he makes a good case in the narrative material he takes up for judging yet desisting as central to what God does. In tension with this emphasis, however, are other kinds of statements and other voices. The prophets do not come in to play very much in the volume. Perhaps of even more importance is the absence, as far as I can tell, of the primary Old Testament confessional language about Israel's God, language that is clearly aimed at identifying the deity. One of these linguistic foundation stones is, of course, the identity of God as the one ‘who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’, which MacDonald appropriates but also deems insufficient. Alongside this, one must place the ancient Israelite confession best articulated in Exodus 34:6–7: ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation’. There is probably no text in scripture to which allusion is made more often than this one. The weight of the claim about divine identity is clearly not towards judging. That is there but only after extensive elaboration of the compassion and love and patience and faithfulness of God. The contrast between the thousand generations who receive steadfast love and the third and fourth who are judged is also evident. Israel did not let go of this understanding of the divine identity even as it experienced the judgement. Might one therefore argue for the identity of God as gracious, loving and faithful, but not ignoring human sin?

Simply to illustrate the complexity of the biblical story that makes it difficult to reduce it to single themes, even when they do cover much of what is there, one can point to the significance of Luke 4:16–18, Jesus’ reading from the book of Isaiah and in so doing defining his mission as good news to the poor and release for the oppressed and bound (in sin and other chains that bind). The consistency of this understanding of divine action in Jesus Christ with the identity and activity of the God of Israel is not to be understated. So also one might note that MacDonald's claim that there is no kerygmatic dimension, no faith decision for the people in the Deuteronomistic narrative as there is in the Gospels, stumbles on what is clearly a call for a faith decision in Deuteronomy 30 when the people are confronted with life and death and called to choose life, a text which probably belongs to the latest strand of Deuteronomy when the judging activity of God had been long evident.

MacDonald concludes with an important chapter on the significance of his interpretation for understanding the Trinity or the triunity of God. Here, among other things, he shows the importance of the theme of God as judging, yet desisting and forbearing (‘saving’ seems to drop off again) as a dispositional ad intra description of divine identity in the way that is not the case for ‘the one who released Israel from the bondage of Egypt’ or ‘the one who raised Jesus from the dead’. He has a point, yet the story seems to make clear, as Robert Jenson has emphasised in his systematic theology, that the unity of those two statements/facts is central for the identity of the God revealed in scripture.