John Behr’s In Accordance with the Scriptures presents the 2024 Didsbury Lectures in published form. As such, the book is brief: 127 pages apart from front and back matter. But this compactness in no way corresponds to the book’s theological scope. To the contrary, In Accordance with the Scriptures is grand. Behr’s preface describes it as a sort of decennial report: ‘having produced editions and translations (with extensive introductions) of Origen’s On First Principles (2017) and Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Human Image of God (2023) as well as a full study of the Gospel of John (2019), it became clear to me that it was time to summarize again what I have since learnt of early Christian theology’ (p. xiii).

The book bears out this summary characterisation in that it is densely studded with block quotations from early Christian writers, almost a florilegium. More than just featuring textual excerpts, the two middlemost chapters showcase a selection of early Christian icons, and the first chapter, a series of almost geometric diagrams.

All this – florilegium, visual smorgasbord – could sound eclectic or compendious. But In Accordance with the Scriptures, though grand in its theological ambition, is tightly focused in its argumentation. It not only summarises early Christian theology but launches a constructive proposal – indeed a counterproposal. Behr’s preface describes his own process of ‘unlearning what I thought I knew about Christian theology’ (p. xiii), and his lectures-cum-book aim to visit that same unlearning on their readers. The first two chapters, especially the first, thus assume a polemical pose. They propose to unmake ‘the Bible’ (always in ‘scare quotes’) and the liturgical calendar, respectively, or rather, the theological frameworks that each of these reflects and reifies.

The first chapter, titled ‘Figuring Scripture’, begins with ‘the Bible’: a single printed volume divided into two testaments, which starts with Genesis and ends with Revelation. The theological framework that results from this object (which Behr characterises on p. 2 as ‘the invention of the printing press’) is linear, commencing with creation and proceeding to the fall, whereby Adam and Eve bring corruption and mortality into the world. Salvation history ensues, with the incarnation of Christ at the midpoint and the age of the church succeeding.

Behr radically challenges this picture. Instead of scripture as a bounded book, he describes it as a literary field; instead of Christ as the midpoint of history, he understands Christ as the beginning and the end – the antitype to which Adam is a type. Instead of seeing mortality as a tragic aberration, Behr recovers from Irenaeus of Lyons a two-step arc of human existence: first, a life of ‘animation’ by breath that is naturally subject to death, and second, a life of ‘vivification’ through the Spirit. The overall effect is to re-envision the significance of the cross. Instead of (only) responding to the catastrophe of sin and evil, the cross unveils the treasure hidden throughout the whole field of scripture, epitomising its truth and disclosing in advance the fate of the human race: to die, and through dying to be born into new and imperishable life. The cross completes creation.

This account ‘naturalises’ death and refits the cross into the primary, creation economy of God. Behr returns throughout the book to the sequence of animation-vivification that the first chapter introduces, and he peppers the work with quotations that relate the cross to creation rather than salvation. John 19:30, for instance, ‘It is finished’, answers back to Genesis 1:26, ‘Let us make the human being in our image’. And the Martyrology of Jerome says that ‘“Our Lord Jesus was crucified, and conceived, and the world created” – in that order!’ (p. 49). The vocation of Christians is, like Christ, to take up the cross, transforming the end of breath from a brute fact into an occasion of self-giving love.

The first chapter sets all these terms and concerns in motion. The following chapters then take up more specific dimensions from this barnstorming entrée. The second chapter, ‘The Paschal Christ’, shares with the first a polemical interest; it challenges the liturgical decomposition of Christ’s life into a chronological chain of episodes, and so it replicates the critique of ‘the Bible’ on the smaller scale of Christ’s individual career. The chapter’s major accomplishment is to show that birth language – in the Gospel infancy narratives, in Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, in early Christian visual art – does not indicate a discrete moment prior to the cross but rather refers pervasively to the cross: the ‘today’ of ‘Today I have begotten you’ (Ps. 2:7) is not Christmas but Good Friday (p. 61).

The third chapter, ‘The Virgin Mother’, extends this claim about natality-mortality outward from Christ the head to his body. Whereas the second chapter focuses on Jesus Christ as ‘the firstborn of many brethren’ (i.e., his passion as a conception and his resurrection as a birth), the third chapter demonstrates the link made by early Christian texts between Christ’s passion and the birth of the church. It tours through maternal imagery in Paul, John, and other early Christian writings, and it inspects the gynaecological iconography of Christ’s death. It also initiates the turn that the final chapter pursues more directly: away from the ‘inevitable’ or built-in participation of all humans in the death of Christ and toward the willing, preemptive sharing in Christ’s passion that Christians observe through sacramental worship and spiritual discipline. The final chapter, ‘Becoming Human’, then traces out human maturation in Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos the Confessor, both at the level of particular lives and of the whole human race. Individually and together, the human path of growth retraces Christ’s own willing embrace of his death in order to enter life.

In sum, In Accordance with the Scriptures offers a concise and learned digest of early Christian thinking about ‘the economy of God, the mystery of Christ, and reality of being human’ (p. 123) – but also a fierce argument against entrenched linear understandings of scripture and Christ. More provocative is the book’s recasting of the divine economy, including and especially the cross, so that it effects birth and growth rather than sin and salvation. I, for one, appreciated this massive re-imagination, even as I wondered about the relative sparsity of ‘intermediate’ actions and agents within this vision. Adam and Christ loom large, and the end of all humans is coterminous with Christ; but between this typological centre and this universal (and universalist) circumference, the people of Israel receive only half a page (p. 66) and the church, a couple of pages (pp. 88–90). This sparseness may be a byproduct of the book’s grand scope and brief compass. But still, while agreeing with the book’s de-linearising, I hope ‘the shape of Christian theology’ might take more advantage of scripture’s sprawling ‘middle’ materials.