In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 479 above all, to the impossibility of separating theory from practice-thus they insist that theory simply is a kind of practice and would align themselves with precisely the kind of practice which Jager seems to prefer. And so his critique of their work as "wanting to escape theory into a world of intentionality" misses the mark (227) since for them intentionality simply is a kind of practice and "meaning" is just another name for intentionality. But Jager is certainly right to point out, as he does, that the desire to overcome differentiation is present in much recent theory even if it doesn't animate Knapp and Michaels' work. And it is precisely for the ways that he recognizes sublimated and transmuted Christian theology and dogma that Jager needs to be commended for The Book of God. And, even if scholars may debate some of his readings or historicizations, Jager contributes an irreproachable example of the waythat a kind of amnesia has inflicted the present Academy, allowing it to forget or fail to notice the degree to which it is indebted to certain, irreducibly "religiousforms:' This kind of analysis of sublimated forms ispreciselythe kind of intellectual work needed now to help us understand our post-secular age. Caleb Spencer Art Institute ofChicago Saving God: Religion after Idolatry. By Mark Johnston. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN978-0-691-14394-1. Pp. xi + 198. $24.95. With a title like Saving God, questions immediately arise. "Why exactly does God need to be saved?" "From whom?" "And is that 'salvation' ultimately effective ?" Mark Johnston clearly thinks that God needs to be saved and that his method is effective. Whether the reader will agree is another story. But, however one answers these questions, there can be no doubt that Johnston's thesis and his book will have given the reader much to consider. That first question above is answered in the very first sentence of chapter one. "SavingGod is saving God from us, from our lazy and self-satisfied conviction that our conventional patterns of belief and worship could themselves capture God" (l). I think this is truly at the heart of the book. Each part of the sentence contains something that needs to be examined, from laziness and self-satisfaction, to having a conviction to conventional belief and worship patterns to the very idea of capturing God. It is not too much to say that here it is not the devil but God who is in the details. Johnston begins with the rather obvious points 1) that "God" is not a proper but a descriptive name that refers to "the most high" and 2) that "belief" in such a God means having an orientation of faith and trust to the most high. Looking 480 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam leads Johnston to claim that they are all about "salvation" that cures such things as aging, arbitrary suffering, and untimely death. But all three religions turn out to be forms of idolatry. For, instead of"radical selfabandonment to the divine" (24), each religion turns out to be a way "to use and domesticate the god" (23). Idolatry, then, is all about construing God to fit our needs. Although dismissing the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris as "undergraduate atheists;' Johnston uses the term "spiritual materialists" for "idolaters" who utilize religion for their own selfish needs. On Johnston's account, "sin" is self-love and "false righteousness" is the assumption that a group's ready-made moral practices are equivalent to the good. Yetreligious believers can outgrow these old gods and discover a true God. Defining original sin as a violent defensiveness of one's own conception of the Good that self-interestedly ignores ethical obligations to others, Johnston says that we need to overcome our self-interest and idolatry. He uses the phenomenological method to arrive at the "Highest One;' defined solely in terms of the natural world, with the result that worship is defined as worship of the whole of reality. Utilizing Saint Thomas' discussion of God's essence as existence, Johnston considers creation to be an expression of Existence Itself.The divine nature is composed ofits...

pdf

Share