Two fundamental propositions drive the central argument of this important book. The first arises out of the author’s professional career commitments at Oxford, initially as Professor of Historical Theology and subsequently as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. This is the confidently articulated contention that a clear analogy or ‘parallelism’ may be drawn between the Christian Church’s articulation of its doctrine and the scientific explanation of the nature of reality generally. Indeed, McGrath’s preferred metaphor for describing the enterprise of the production and articulation of the Church’s doctrine is that of a ‘laboratory’.

Just as a scientist assembles and analyses factual information with a view to producing a coherent account of what it amounts to when seen whole, so the theologians of the Church are said to have gathered basic information from the New Testament which they organized systematically into what was discerned to be its overall meaning. Thus, they are said to have produced a comprehensive understanding, for example, of the nature and identity of Christ in what has become the doctrine of the Incarnation, and of the nature of the God of Jesus Christ in what has become the doctrine of the Trinity. McGrath argues that this kind of achievement mirrors Ptolemy’s scientific account of the universe, at least until Copernicus in turn urged the adoption of the corrective heliocentric account as a better interpretation of the evidence.

In the case of the development of Christian doctrine, McGrath is clear, however, that the basic information-gathering and organizing work of the Church’s doctrinal ‘laboratory’ is not confined just to what may be found in the New Testament. He points out that the early history of the development of doctrine demonstrates that the continuing experience of the worship of Christ as God also played a key role in securing belief in his divine nature and identity. Indeed, this focus on the worship of the raised and glorified Christ can already be discerned in the earliest Christological traditions of the New Testament itself. In the subsequent writings of Early Church Fathers, such as (very notably) those of Athanasius, the fact that the Raised Christ had become the object of worship ensured that the subordinationist proposals of Arius in relation to the understanding of Christ’s identity were eventually consigned to oblivion. This kind of doctrinal ‘paradigm shift’ from Arianism to Athanasian orthodoxy is in turn said to be mirrored in the scientific replacement of Ptolemy’s view of the universe with Copernicus’s heliocentric understanding of things.

One important outcome of this methodological association of the work of the Christian doctrinal ‘laboratory’ with the pursuit of the scientific method in the secular world is that it helps McGrath secure an understanding of the objective realism of the canon of Christian doctrine. The scientific commitment to identifying ‘ontic structures in the external world, beyond the mind of the observer’ (p.122) provides him with a springboard, for example, from which to launch a thorough-going critique of a prevailing paradigm of the function of Christian doctrine that was originally articulated by George Lindbeck in 1984. In The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Lindbeck famously articulated a reductionist account of the Church’s doctrine by entertaining a kind of agnosticism as to whether it had any objective reference beyond itself in actual reality and expounding its function purely in non-cognitive terms of its affective impact in the subjective consciousness of Christian believers.

McGrath’s basic complaint in relation to these conclusions is that Lindbeck treated his preferred non-cognitive and subjective ‘experiential-expressive’ theory and a more objective ‘cognitive-propositionalist’ model of doctrine as mutually exclusive, whereas McGrath himself opts for a ‘both/and’ approach. The fact that doctrine has a behavioural impact on the manner of life of Christian believers does not mean that at the same time it does not point towards objective ontological truth.

Indeed, McGrath argues that, far from being mutually exclusive, these different approaches are mutually interpretative and supportive. The same goes for scientific theories that explain the nature of material and historical reality. At this point, McGrath draws upon a wide range of reflection on the scientific method and the function of scientific explanation. For example, he notes the similarity of the scientific work of ‘mapping’ a complex reality, and ways of interpreting the world proposed by Mary Midgley, and the parallels she draws with the doctrinal function of establishing the Christian community’s ‘central focus and peripheral boundaries’ (p.62) which in turn help believers find their way around the theological terrain.

The second organizing commitment that directs the fundamental thesis of McGrath’s book is that doctrine is not to be narrowly conceived in terms of a body of over-rationalized and purely theoretical material but is to be thought of much more broadly so as to incorporate its functional or participative impact on the manner of Christian life and worship. Just as the experience of worshipping Christ as God had an impact on the formulation of doctrine, so the reverse is the case: formulated doctrinal judgements have a concrete impact on the manner of life of Christian believers.

This means that McGrath’s focus quickly moves to what is common amongst dogmas, Church doctrine and theological reflection, all understood as a kind of verbal conglomerate to which he refers using the ancient term theoria. Indeed, on this point he follows some initial insights of Plato and Aristotle concerning the reciprocity of reflection and practice and the coherence of what is thought and what is done (p.14). McGrath points out that the original work of understanding and verbally articulating Christian doctrine also included an imaginative and celebrative sense of participation in the actual realities being talked about. Instead of thinking of doctrine in terms of abstract and desiccated rationalistic ‘theories’, the early Church appreciated the significance of its entry into the new form of life that was being described and explained.

As a result, the Church’s doctrine is understood by McGrath as more than the purely theoretical product of an arid logic-chopping rationalism, which he in fact identifies as a nineteenth-century phenomenon and which he therefore tends to dismiss as ‘modernism’ (p. 141). Even so, McGrath’s all-inclusive emphasis on theoria means that the ontological realism of Christian doctrine that is expounded in the earlier part of his book tends to recede into the background as cash value is given, for example, to the doctrine of redemption in the final chapter by expressing it in metaphorical terms that are more clearly subjectively affective and descriptive of actual experience, without reference to ontic entailments. Somehow, the net result is that McGrath’s discussion ends by drawing much closer to Lindbeck’s subjectivist account of doctrine than he might have intended us to notice.

Perhaps this book suffers from something of a deficit insofar as a discussion of the exercise of authority in the Church is not really addressed. This introduces a tantalizing ambiguity, given that McGrath’s basic contention that doctrine generally has an objective ontological reference does not lead into a careful consideration of the question of the truth (or otherwise) of Christian doctrine. Indeed, in his own actual writing, McGrath has a tendency to slip between what is effectively an appeal to a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth when he is discussing the scientific method and ‘coherence’ theory of truth when the reference is to doctrinal truth.

Certainly, when the Church opts for one doctrine rather than another and speaks of what is rejected in terms of its ‘error’, which is accordingly anathematized by being declared ‘heretical’, something more seems implicit than just the contention that one formulation is ‘better than’ or more adequate than another. The judgement of ‘error’ in relation to one doctrinal proposal implies the truth of its accepted alternative.

Furthermore, McGrath’s insistence on the objective realism of doctrinal statements generally, as descriptive of an ontological state of affairs as against Lindbeck’s subjectivism, itself carries an assumption of their truth insofar as they may be thought to correspond to objective reality. In other words, the ontologically objective reference of doctrinal claims over against the shortcomings of Lindbeck’s reductionism necessarily leads logically to the making of truth claims. Indeed, McGrath himself admits this: ‘the recognition of the social function of doctrines in no ways weakens their truth-claims’ (p. 74).

This naturally invites the suggestion that a candid discussion of the nature of truth itself might very usefully be brought to the question of the relation of science and religion at this point. Certainly, in his enthusiasm to highlight parallels and convergences between scientific theories and the historical development of Christian doctrine, ‘without implying identity’ (p. viii), McGrath sometimes tends to minimize some obvious differences between what are in fact radically different areas of discourse. For example, at one point, McGrath declares his view that ‘the distinction between “epistemic” and “ontic” approaches to scientific knowledge is illuminating’ because it provides a framework that helpfully distinguishes and coordinates ‘the ontological correspondence of the economic Trinity to the immanent Trinity’ and vice versa (p.134-35). This somewhat uncritical application of Rahner’s Rule suggests that both in the formulation of doctrine and in the scientific evaluation of evidence ‘the epistemic coordination of observations leads to the recognition of the ontic reality that undergirds them’ (p.135). Surely in reference to the Trinity, however, this would read more felicitously as ‘the epistemic coordination of observations leads to the recognition in faith of the ontic reality that is believed to undergird them’.

This raises an important question as to whether the matter-of-fact world of scientifically demonstrated proofs and the theological and doctrinal enterprise of ‘faith seeking understanding’ may have a little less in common than McGrath would have us envisage.

In order to do justice to this book, it has to be said that the writing is richly dense and very often profoundly insightful. This is certainly a book to have and to own, to read and re-read, and to return to, and to dip into from time to time. It may well be that when systematic theologians of the coming generation seek to explore the origin, development and function of Christian doctrine, they will find themselves returning to this book as a ‘required text’. If there are some significant deficits and ambiguities in its discussion of the nature and function of Christian doctrine, particularly in relation to the exercise of authority in the Church and the implications of the relative authoritative status of different doctrines and dogmas, not to mention the claim to truth that is implicit in the definition of doctrine explicitly for the avoidance of error, then this is simply an invitation for further work to be done.