This is a powerful and learned meditation on Christianity by a senior Irish theologian, and the main reason it should be noticed in a journal of philosophy is that James Mackey conceives theology as fundamentally philosophical in the way it reflects on and develops our ideas about the sources and nature of being and conduct as they have been articulated in myth, symbol and poetry, as well as more abstractly in metaphysics. On this view the philosophical aspect of theology is displayed no less in the scrutiny and interpretation of that myth, symbol and poetry than in the more narrowly focussed field of natural theology as this has come to be practised by recent analytic philosophers—a field, indeed, which might well be thought, on the evidence of this book, to depend upon and be undermined by an uncritical reception of discredited readings of the imagery of the creation myth (see 381). It is appropriate—and something of a relief—that in his nuanced and compelling reflections on that myth Mackey's philosophical temper leads him to stress the importance of the creative imagination, particularly that of the poet, who is ‘the seer, the prophet, the visionary, who sees so deeply into the fabric of reality that the ways of the Creator with creation are revealed in the ensuing poetry, and with a power and a clarity seldom equalled in other forms’ (35). Indeed he opens his chapter on Creation by highlighting the importance of the metaphors and imagery which are to be his theme and by which myth is constituted and ‘reality’ mediated. He refers to them as ‘configurations through which reality first rewards the attentive, or more precisely the contemplative mind’ (29) and remarks that at its outer limit ‘imagination … ends up by telling a cosmic story, resulting in nothing less than a cosmic myth’ (ibid.). One important implication of this fertile approach is that it also requires engagement with a question about the nature of the relationship between myth and metaphysics: after all, some philosophers still incline to the view that metaphysics underwrites and validates what the poet ‘sees’. However, it provokes another question, which is at least as important, about the status of theism as itself perhaps ‘a cosmic myth’. What kind of ‘reality’ is revealed by the poet? Are ‘the ways of the Creator with his creation’ the reality (in some way independently ascertained) whose nature is revealed by the poet? Or is it, rather, that ‘the ways of the Creator with his creation’ are part of a particular configuration of images by which the poets widen our perceptions and articulate their wonder at the world of creative forces in the form of story-telling, both mythopoeic and metaphysical.

If Mackey's writing invites dialogue it also provides an educational resource. The analytic philosophers of religion have been largely unconcerned with, if not ignorant of, the main burden of his historical narrative about the complexities of the shifting—sometimes irenic, sometimes vicious—relationship between doctrine, philosophy and the mythological core and how it is properly to be read and understood. Such readings have often taken place in a cultural and political environment in which philosophically sclerotic assessments of the nature and status of that core have fused into it to become part of a calcified corpus of belief. By contrast, Mackey claims to re-read the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament as innocently as possible of the traditional Platonisms that started as responses to those texts but later became embedded in doctrines for which the texts then became justificatory sources. He explores what he calls a theological naturalism, about the ‘revelation’ of God in the history of creation and evolution, and about original sin and salvation.

An anti-supernaturalist theism has not been uncommon among theologians for several generations, but, once the scholarly and philosophical dismantling of discredited positions has been achieved, the pressing and important work lies in the balance sheet of religious loss and gain. What is the positive content, what conception of life might emerge from this naturalism? What makes it a distinctively, if not exclusively, Christian conception? What might commend it to the practitioners of other ‘faiths’, or even to agnostics or atheists? And if it commends itself to the latter, as Mackey would wish it to do, why is it not merely coincident with and reduced to a secular humanist ethic—and what precisely is that? This is a place for dialogue and elenchus, these are important and difficult questions and Mackey's timely alliance-building throws them into relief. One of his pivotal thoughts here is that particular theologies are symbiotically related to particular anthropologies, and that perhaps it is around an anthropology that there can be some convergence of judgment between the parties to the proposed alliance. Mackey refers in particular to doctrines of God and Creation whose stark and distorting dualisms (destructively embodied in human lives) were subjected to the powerful philosophical critiques of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. He represents these thinkers as subverting pernicious and erroneous theological ideas, rather than the very idea or possibility of theology, and applauds their positive explorations of the creativity and self-transcendence of our human being as a necessary contribution to a richer and more adequate theology of God and Creation, one in which God is eternal and therefore continuous Creator and human beings co-creators—subject in their lives, nevertheless, to real and fateful transitions represented mythically in the Christian tradition in terms of Fall and Salvation. This possibility of convergence around an anthropology does not, of course, imply that there is no further controversy about such questions as whether a theology that more adequately reflects insight into human nature is not after all merely a heuristic or projective device (Mackey tellingly acknowledges Feuerbach in his subtitle) that is made redundant when its role as a vehicle of self-knowledge is once perceived—or whether, by contrast, it is in some important way foundational, a transcendent condition of the possibility of the values that constitute the anthropology.

But a second reason for noticing the book here is connected to the first, and to the theologically (and philosophically) debased nature of current popular religious controversy. The calcified corpus of belief, still defended by a certain kind of religious apologist, with its insider information about the mind of God and its precise and self-confident answers to the question of how we should live, is rightly the target of sharp intellectual criticism. Mackey is no more of a slouch here than any paid-up secularist who inveighs against monstrous torturer-divinities, amoral moralities, miracles and magical sacraments. Besides this, his bluntly satirical reflections on the gulf between the controlling self-aggrandisement of the official Church and the proper exercise of teaching authority and power within a Christian community, will incense some of his co-religionists—and delight others, who will no doubt relish the image of the Irish monk Columbanus wagging an admonitory finger at a pope of Rome. But, to come to the point of the second reason, his book provides a powerful corrective against the common error of taking the legitimate target of criticism to be the thing itself—and it provides, again, an educational resource to improve the quality of the theology on both sides of the argument. In the process of delivering its critical account of the main doctrines of Christianity, the book stakes out intelligent and imaginative ground between the tensely patrolled camps of the religious apologists and the secular polemicists.

It has to be said that despite the real merits of their negative critiques current public discussions of religion by secularists are frequently vitiated by ignorance of what creative theology of the kind offered here can contribute to the available forms of human self-knowledge, or to the epistemologically vigilant articulation of our sense of what we call transcendence. Such forms and articulations are overlooked by the negative focus of the critiques themselves, and occluded by the nature of polemic and of apologetics, which both seek vindication and deal in certitude, and are thus de-sensitised to what infuses this book, the spirit of exploration and the elusive intimations of religious language and imagery.

Christianity and Creation is avowedly ‘written for those who still maintain a thoughtful and preferably critical interest in religion, whether they still retain any allegiance to Christianity, or indeed to any other religion in a world in which all religions are increasingly thrown together, sometimes violently, or their interest lies rather in the decline of religions that they have personally left behind, some with a sense of loss or betrayal, others with a more positive intent to contribute to the loss to the world, again either of Christianity or of any and all religions’ (xi). Mackey's systematic theology begins with a Prologue, ‘The Lapses in Christian Theology at the End of the Second Millennium’, intended for professional theologians, and offered as an ‘overview of the more recent background to the context, mood and prospects of contemporary theology’(ibid), which the general reader is invited to pass over unread (though a careful reading of the rest of the book may lead them back to it). The work is then divided into two parts and has an Epilogue, ‘Christianity and Other Religions’. Part One is entitled ‘The Essence of the Faith of Jesus the Jew’ and consists of four chapters, on Creation, Fall, Salvation and God. Part Two is entitled ‘Christianity: the Religion that Developed from the Faith of Jesus the Jew’ and has four more chapters, on Credo, Code, Cult and Constitution.

In his Epilogue Mackey returns to a picture of Jesus which would be congenial to Muslims, as one who on several occasions referred to himself as a prophet, one who proclaimed, and realised in the manner in which he lived and died, a new (or ‘renewed’) covenant with the Creator whose original testament held fast through the history of human perversity and frailty. Mackey calls this ‘the covenant of creation’. His theism, as already noted, is that of a continuous Creator who, crucially, brings into being creative forms, particularly, from our point of view, creative, imaginative human beings called on to share in this continuous and evolving creation. But ‘creative’ is not a term that sits alone, as it were: we want an answer to the question, ‘creative of what?’—a question which applies as much to the creative forms as to their creator. The answer Mackey offers is, in essence, ‘creative of love’, though one also recalls here Debray's picture of God as both murderer and nurse. The crucial propositions here are that God sends his rain to fall on the just and the unjust and that Jesus exhibits in his life and death a steadfast refusal to return evil for evil. If anything counts for Mackey as the ‘essence’ of Christianity it is this. He cites the famous passage from the First Epistle to John, “If anyone says ‘I love God’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (366). As Mackey remarks, ‘As God creates through other creatures, there is no loving of God except through the love of other creatures, expressed in the form of the highest creativity that can be mustered for the benefit of all. Those who urge people to love their neighbour for God's sake are so far mistaken as to have turned the matter entirely on its head.’ (366). Mackey cites the Johannine Epistle in the context of a larger, summary discussion in the Epilogue, of what it is to know God: ‘The co-creative creature must be creative for the advancement of all, must share out life and the necessities and enhancements of life with all others as much as is possible and, especially in the case of fellow humans, quite irrespective of their deserts. Just as God sends life-giving light and heat and water, having the sun shine for the good and the bad, and the rain fall for the just and the unjust, so that good must be returned for evil, and never evil returned for evil suffered.’ (363). In plain Pelagian spirit Mackey sees the myth of the Fall as a representation of a primal impulse, communal as well as individual, to self-aggrandisement at the expense of others, and salvation as the reinstatement of the primal impulse to love that contends with it, brought about by ‘a creative kind of forgiveness that puts life and the limitless promise of life at the forefront of the human agenda once more’ (364).

This is a masterly piece of work, penetrating, passionate and wise, and far more wide-ranging and detailed than can be adequately indicated here.