Charlton's main aim is to free some central and traditional Christian doctrines from ‘outdated philosophy and gross internal tensions’ (160). There are in addition chapters in which he altogether rejects some less central but specifically Roman Catholic teachings. And there are also chapters on the general concept of a religion, and on the the notion that the expansion of Christianity was the politically imposed and temporary interruption of a process of progressive secularisation in which the more backward a society the greater part religion plays in its life. Charlton maintains that our concept of religion is the concept of whatever has a sufficient number of the ingredients and institutions of Judaism and Christianity, and that historians have failed to recognise that Christianity expanded partly because its converts, quite intelligibly, thought it true.

Charlton holds that we have no proper conception either of Jehovah or of the Christian God. Is not Jehovah a person with desires? We are to recognise that the notion of a person with desires is the purely formal notion of the subject of a sentence containing teleological conjunctions. ‘Our notion of a human being gets all its content from the human body. Wittgenstein said that the human body is the best image of the human mind; there is in fact no other. If Jehovah has no body or bodily needs and powers, we can have no conception of him’ (108). Nor have we a conception of the triune Christian God. ‘The doctrine of the Trinity rules out both a conception which applies to the one God, since it says that God is three, and a conception that applies to three distinct Persons, since it says that the three are one’ (110). Charlton does however think that despite this conceptual deprivation we can gain some understanding of the doctrines of creation and salvation.

‘All statements about God’, according to Charlton, ‘have the character of teleological explanations’ (102). The explanandum is the existence and continuation of the physical universe; the explanans the wish or will of God. For what purpose does God create and sustain the physical universe? ‘The Old Testament does not make that very clear; there is a suggestion that it is for his own amusement: the creator is like a pianist playing for the delight of playing … But Christians are inclined to say that Jehovah wants physical processes to go on for the benefit of us human creatures, for the benefit of intelligent creatures elsewhere in the universe, if there are any, and perhaps for the benefit of other sentient creatures like lions and earthworms’ (88). Why should we believe in the existence of such a purposive agent? Charlton thinks that since there cannot be an infinite set of physical events there was a first physical event, and that a first physical event can at least have no causal explanation. But that the universe was created for our benefit by a purposive agent is not something for which Charlton claims that there is convincing evidence. To believe it is rather like believing that one's spouse is faithful: ‘Perhaps … it is wisest to believe that the universe depends on a benevolent principle unless we find ourselves forced to think otherwise’ (105). But if, as Charlton seems to think, the teleological explanation of human behaviour does not require the existence of a human self distinct from the human body, why should the teleological explanation of the existence and continuation of the physical universe crequire the existence of a purposive agent distinct from that universe?

Charlton stresses the centrality to Christian theology of the doctrine of the Trinity: ‘Upon it hang the doctrines of the Incarnation, salvation and the sacraments’ (113). Though he denies that we have any conception either of the one God who is three or of three distinct Persons who are one, and though he says indeed that ‘any attempt to form concepts of three Persons must be tritheistic’ (109) Charlton does not think that Trinitarianism is ‘unintelligible in itself’, and he compares the three divine Persons in the one Christian God with three types of human motivation: you may act as a lone individual, as a member of society with respect for its rules and customs, or altruistically. This allows us to say that in the one God is not only a creator acting alone, but also a social being who enters into communication with creatures, and this second divine person is naturally identified with the Son, in whom God ‘took flesh’ from the Virgin Mary and became, as Christ, a man with both a human life and a divine life. Charlton does not consider how, if Christ was divine he could seem not to be omniscient or how, if he was just one person with two natures, and the Persons of the Trinity are not three distinct selves, Christ could seem to address the Father as another self. Instead he moves on to develop the doctrine that what Christ saves us from is death and does so by imparting to us the divine life. It would have been interesting to have had Charlton's reaction to the ‘social’ theory of the Trinity which is developed in Swinburne's book The Christian God. Swinburne bases his theory on a well argued dualism of mind and body and does of course repudiate the charge of tritheism.

That human beings have a naturally immortal soul is for Charlton a mistaken doctrine, accepted by Christians under the baneful influence of Plato. According to Charlton we cannot survive bodily death except by sharing in a divine life superior to that of a mortal organism, and which we can know from the resurrection that Christ possessed. This seems to exclude eternal damnation. We share the divine life through the sacraments. Charlton thinks that while it would be ‘very temerarious’ to believe that only the baptised are saved, salvation is traditionally at least ‘connected more closely’ with the Eucharist (138). He thinks that the doctrine of Transubstantiation has only a historical interest. It depends on an Aristotelian metaphysics of change and Prime Matter ‘which no philosopher today would consider defensible’ (143). It gives no support to the Tridentine doctrine that it is when they are consecrated that the bread and wine turn into Christ's body and blood. And it fails to explain how the Eucharist gives us a share in Christ's divinity. Charlton suggests that the bread and wine turn into Christ's body and blood only when they are eaten and drunk by the communicant. By being nourished by the consecrated bread and wine we share in Christ's life: ‘our flesh and blood are one with his in the literal way in which, throughout his life, the flesh and blood which arose from his food and drink were one with the rest of his body’ (140). To make this doctrine fully intelligible it would I think be necessary for Charlton to say a good deal more about the nature of the body that Christ now has, and about how this body is related to the body or bodies that he had before and after his resurrection. And if there is a distinction between eating flesh or drinking blood and eating or drinking what turns into flesh and blood, then what is the bearing on Charlton's theory of the passage in John 6 which reports Christ as saying to his recalcitrant hearers that a necessary condition of having eternal life is eating his flesh and drinking his blood?

In his final chapters Charlton rejects the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and the presuppositions of much current Catholic moral teaching. On Papal Infallibility he remarks that ‘outside Western Europe attaining truth about God and about good and evil would not normally be thought independent of good character and even sanctity’ (149). He suspects that the doctrine ‘is intended at least to enable Catholics to reason as follows: ‘Everything the Church teaches is true. It teaches so-and-so—the Immaculate Conception, for example. So the Immaculate Conception is true’. And he claims rather unconvingly that since it is a presupposition not a premiss of an argument that its premisses are true, this reasoning has the same defect as ‘the fallacy of “What the Tortoise said to Achilles” (148). ‘Vatican theologians’ are then attacked for teaching that there are exceptionless moral rules. ‘People without philosophical training … hear philosophers describe as subjectivism or relativism the would-be irenic but actually silly opinion that what makes an action right is the agent's honestly thinking it is right; and they confuse this with two doctrines which are almost self-evident … First, … What is good or bad must be good or bad for some beneficiary or for some purpose … Secondly … a particular action is right or wrong only in relation to the circumstances in which it is performed’ (155). A further mistake of Vatican theologians is to suppose that rightness and wrongness are ‘intrinsic properties of actions’. For Charlton, ‘Thinking it would be good to bring something about is wanting to bring it about’ (158) though he also maintains, all too briefly, that there is a correctness or incorrectness in this wanting which is analogous to the truth and falsity of beliefs in a way obscured by the seventeenth century tendency to model all thinking on mirroring or depicting.

This is an honest, original, delightfully written and highly thought-provoking book. It is well produced and accurately printed. I hope that the publishers will soon bring out a more moderately priced edition.