Following his first monograph on the Christology of the book of Revelation (YHWH at Patmos, Tübingen 1999), Sean McDonough here continues his work in central topics of New Testament Christology and theology. Picking up on what biblical scholars have often seen as the important, but still relatively opaque, concept of Christ as the mediator or indeed the agent of creation, highlighting Colossians 1, Hebrews 1 and the Fourth Gospel, McDonough aims to steer understanding of this doctrine away from antecedent Hellenistic or Jewish (especially Philonic) philosophical concepts towards core concerns evident in the early Church's narrative memory of Jesus of Nazareth as miracle-working Messiah. More particularly, McDonough follows writers like Fee and Gathercole in opposing the scholarly mainstream view that has tended to link Christ's role in creation, and Christology more generally, with the development of Jewish speculation on the personified figure of the mediating Logos or of Wisdom (for example Dunn, Hengel, von Lips, Witherington). Jesus ‘has’ or ‘teaches’ divine wisdom, but does not personify it. For McDonough, Proverbs viii is of little importance for Christology in the New Testament writings, and the ‘labeling of New Testament creation texts as “Wisdom Christology” is inappropiate’ (p. 95). Instead, Jesus’ work in creation is singularly qualified and constituted by his Messianic identity, a point he finds most clearly expressed (not in Athanasius’ faux-pas of identifying Christ with wisdom, nor in Pannenberg or Moltmann, but) in Barth's repudiation of any and all mediation: God's creative power and wisdom were from the beginning the wisdom and power of Christ. The pre-incarnate Jesus, in other words, is ‘the One who in the eternal sight of God has already taken upon Himself our human nature’, so that the world is created ‘through Him and in Him as through God, and in God’ (pp. 256–7, 261, quoting CD III/1, 53–5).

This is without doubt an important work on a topic of enormous theological consequence, to which it contributes the strongly argued thesis that Christ's role in Creation is a function primarily of his messianic identity. Here is a timely and, one hopes, catalytic reminder to biblical scholarship about not reducing core theological topics in the biblical text to their apparent meaning in ‘background’ sources. At the same time, while uncritical gullibility toward Wisdom Christologies is justly criticised, McDonough's own discovery of Christ as Creator throughout the Gospels, for example in the raising of Lazarus or the joint ‘work’ of the Father and the Son at John v.17, seems at times no less resistant to eisegetical temptation. And conversely, granting that Wisdom Christology has been overrated, this argument surprisingly fails to engage with some of the texts that would appear to support it most strongly, including, for example, 1 Cor i..24, 30 (‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God'… ‘who became to us wisdom from God’), which are never cited.

The profusion of typographical errors seems unworthy of the publisher's reputation.