Contemporary Christianity registers a crisis: today many believers remain profoundly disturbed by the utterances and practices of their co-religionists. American critics in so-called ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ Christianity trace the advocation of anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and condemnation of alternative lifestyles to the biblical text itself. No longer do these critics view scripture as a historical or dogmatic text which dictates individual and corporate religious practice. Chief among these American voices are Marcus Borg, Shelby Spong, Dominic Crossan and Garry Wills.

To the voices of these critics must be added another from Germany: Eugen Drewermann, whose work was introduced to the English-language public with Matthias Beier's 2004 study A Violent God-Image: An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann. Drewermann advocates an interpretation of the Bible resting on ‘typological’, or symbolic, grounds. The Bible is not to be understood as history or dogma, but instead primarily as a text expounding existential-psychological realities. His most recent project of biblical criticism, Die Apostelgeschichte: Wege zur Menschlichkeit (The Acts of the Apostles: Paths Towards Humanity), closes a trilogy of texts on the writings of the apostle Luke, which had begun with the two-volume Das Lukasevangelium: Bilder erinnerter Zukunft (The Gospel of Luke: Images of a Remembered Future).

In the introduction to the work, Drewermann advances the question which is probably on every (at least religious) reader's mind: according to his ‘typological’ reading ‘Is Jesus the Messiah’? Drewermann answers the question, in a similar fashion to the advocates of liberal or progressive Christianity, with ‘yes’ and ‘no’: ‘no’ in that the belief in Christ does not ‘express a doctrine that separates orthodoxy from heresy’ (p. 38), but ‘yes’ in that it expresses the ‘trust. . . that Jesus was right in that he shows us a God that we must no longer fear’, which allows the believer to state that since the acceptance of such a God ‘[his] life has changed completely’ (p. 38).

The book's thousand-plus pages proceed with a chapter-by-chapter interpretation which maintains a double purpose: first, to situate Luke's Acts in their historical context while showing that the writer altered the historical account to proclaim the central message of Acts, that ‘God is not determined by a particular people or culture, church, or confession of faith; on the contrary, God is that person that lives in every human being and leads them all together towards a universal human community’ (p. 59). Second, Drewermann provides a psychological reading of the text which extracts an existential meaning which then can be applied to some aspect of contemporary society and belief. For example, the story of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11 not only becomes another example of the traditional belief in a terrorising God but also acts as the basis for raising the question of how the early Christian community's abolition of private property can be exemplary for contemporary Western capitalist society: ‘money should be nothing other than a public asset and unit of measurement for the exchange of goods and services; it is not a private, but a social commodity’ (p. 257). Again and again, Drewermann performs this move between a critique of the traditional historical and doctrinal understanding of the Bible and its emphasis on a fear-based God, and this tradition's tacit support of contemporary political and economic ideology.

In a perhaps more radical manner than his American contemporaries, who for the most part seek to maintain an identity within either the ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ church, Drewermann calls the very identity of church into question. In fact, in the book's introduction he claims that to translate the Greek ecclesia as ‘church’ only furthers the ‘false’ interpretation of Christ's words which has had such disastrous consequences for contemporary Christianity: ‘what a “church” signifies is shown in the communal spirit of the adherents of the new “Way”, not by some hierarchy within this community. . . a community of such believers does not need and makes impossible what we would call today a “bishop”’ (p. 45).

One wonders at this juncture: if the essence of the Christian message can be reduced to a claim for a universal humanity which believes in a God of unconditional love and trust and cannot be bounded by a particular church institution, does anything yet remain of the specific doctrinal content of Christianity which has remained its distinct source of identity at least since the First Council of Nicaea in 325? Drewermann does not seem to offer an answer to this question; though we cannot hope to ‘recreate’ the New Testament church we must look instead to a time prior to the co-implication of church and empire to discern the truth. In this respect, much like the writings of liberal and progressive Christians, his book ultimately disappoints – it does not quite provide a thorough and nuanced reading of the biblical text, nor does it provide an orientation for resolving the impasse of contemporary Christianity outlined above.