Contrary to impressions possibly encouraged by its title, its well-known author or the respected (recently renamed) monograph series in which it appears, this book is not – or not primarily – a contribution to the formerly trendy study of ‘angelomorphic’ Christology. Indeed, British academia's baleful superintendence of ‘research assessment’ would struggle to classify this well-respected New Testament scholar's latest work: is it a serious research monograph, a ‘textbook’ or theological journalism? Peer-reviewed biblical scholarship, sociology of postmodern religion or devotional edification? Of ‘national’ or ‘international’ significance?

In truth it is probably all of the above. Susan R. Garrett of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary here presents a complex and wide-ranging survey of ancient Jewish and Christian angelology in its acute (if methodologically somewhat casual) relevance for a Christian understanding of the contemporary ‘re-enchantment of the world’. That thesis of re-enchantment turns out in practice to concern not ‘the world’ so much as popular American culture – a point illustrated from the very first footnote via consistently American cultural illustrations all the way to the unusually wide-ranging but strictly anglophone bibliography. We learn thus that experiences of angels are always ‘culturally governed’. Garrett interrogates the ancient sources about angels as divine agents of healing and messengers of truth, as superior beings with access to God's throne, as potentially fallen or even Satanic and disordered in their desires, as guardians and as psychopomps. Following Crispin Fletcher-Louis, ‘angelification’ (or ‘deification’, which is once used synonymously; theosis does not appear) is for Garrett the destiny, and often the present state, of notable Christian individuals and communities. As for Jesus, despite its title the book retains an ambivalence about whether (with Galatians iv.14) he is an angel, however ‘peerless’ and extraordinary, who ‘accepts us as we are’ – or whether instead the fact that he is ‘never called an angel in the New Testament’ makes him ‘distinguished from them’ in important ways, as ‘God's ultimate stooping down to humans’.

So is this work in the end a case of scholarship ‘lite’ and provincial – or is it rather a significant achievement of learning, bridge-building and aggiornamento? Both judgements have merit; but while Her Majesty's academic bottle-top counters may have no categories beyond the former, to this reviewer the latter assessment nevertheless seems preferable.