MINI-REVIEW OF

THE GENESIS OF DOCTRINE: 
A STUDY IN THE FOUNDATIONS 
OF DOCTRINAL CRITICISM

by Alister E. McGrath [ISBN 1-57383-072-0]

© 1998 by Orchid Land Publications

[4-5-98; most recently updated 10-2-99]

         After judging McGrath's The intellectual origins of the European Reformation an A+ production, it is painful to report disappointment with the present work.  He is obviously a better historical reporter than a systematizer--the essence of doctrine.   While the work under review is full of learning (the author apparently reads everything and keeps a card index of quotations from each thing read), so that much can be learned from it, it exhibits distressing lacunas of such a fundamental nature as to detract considerably from success.  Before saying what the reviewer considers these defects to be, it needs to be said that it is difficult to accept McGrath's characterization of dogma and his reasons for avoiding the term--rather than rehabilitating it.  Why not simply say that the dogmas are a  list of essential topics--or questions, if you will--that have got to be dealt with in order for any doctrinal discussion to qualify as Christian or whatever?  Even if you reject, say the two natures of Jesus Christ, a doctrinal discussion of Christian belief has at least got to deal with it!     Doctrine, on the other hand, should be a theological explication of how one thinks the dogmas ought to be interpreted and integrated into a system that obviates apparent contradictions or incompatibilities among them and articulates each point in conjunction with all of the other points.  One thinks of the way in which the biblical notion of  enérgeia ties together so many of the basic beliefs of Orthodox theology--creation, the Assimilation to God (or Cognation with God--omoíosis--in addition to the Icon [Image] of God, in which humanity has also been created), the Incarnation of God the Son, time, tradition, the Resurrection of Christ, our resurrection, the Mysteries (Sacraments), the final T(h)aboric Vision of Light and the ultimate Divinization of the ontological members of Christ's risen Body.  One will naturally go looking for what ties it all together for McGrath.
      After mentioning the basic defects that I find, I'll close with some niggling points too trivial for most readers to bother with.   McGrath hits (almost) all over the place to prove his point that cultural ideology determines our view of history in decisive ways, though not completely, and to show what his view of what can be true is--as well as to show that the predicament of being culture-bound is unavoidable, yet all right if we view our basic assumptions critically.   While this is mostly unexceptionable--though he fails to observe that people of our time can understand the gist of Euclid's geometry as well as his own pupils thousands of years ago could--the main point or two get repeated so often that one gets the impression that just by eliminating their many repetitions, the author could reduce the size of the 200-page volume by  a quarter.    
        As one would expect in a Western author, the Resurrection takes second place to the (juridical) Crucifixion.  On p. 178, which one should peruse for more than one reason, Luther's "theology of the Cross" prevails over the Resurrection--though the Resurrection does get mentioned often  along with  the Crucifixion.  
      Let me explain why I have said that McGrath has hit "almost" all over the place, since I contend that there are significant omissions.  In this volume, McGrath writes as though the Eastern tradition, and in fact most Western theology of the first millennium--apart from Augustine--might just as well not have existed.  We could ignore that as normal Western practice if it were not for the fact that this void results in a failure to explain a central topic of the author's, viz. the neglect of time and tradition in Christian thinking.  While the rejection of history and tradition are ascribed primarily and repeatedly to the Enlightenment, the real cause goes back a lot further--in fact to antisacramental Gnosticism in the early centuries of Christianity.   For that outlook, time was cyclic, if at all real, and a sign of what is wrong with the universe.    It is not only the Incarnation, bodily Resurrection, and Mysteries (sacraments; these receive scant mention from McGrath in this volume) that are treated as religiously worthless by this outlook; it is obvious that a negative view of time entails a neglect of tradition:    Tradition is routinely dismissed by all of those who value the role of time and the material creation in religion negatively.   (And this includes some historians!)   While that should have been pointed out, the reader will not, in this volume, meet with the notion that you cannot recover  tradition in an axiomatic religious framework that rejects time and materiality--Creation, Incarnation, Mysteries (Sacraments), resurrection of the body, etc.   For such religionists, the source of dogma and doctrine may  be Jesus of Nazareth as McGrath wishes, but this Source will be treated as an episode abstracted from time and interpreted (with no help from Apostles' disciples and immediate successors like SS. Ignatios of Antioch and Clement of Rome) "spiritually" (Gnostically)--or perhaps "morally" or in some other non-ontological voluntaristic manner.  
        McGrath fails to tell us about the doctrinal survival of the fittest--why the centrality of a coming millennium lost out in mainstream Christianity (not in sectarianism, where it looms large), whereas the harder-to-believe Resurrection did not get left out--at least in the East and traditional West.   Our author doesn't refer the reader to the sifting factor of tradition--the result of the effort of many devout and brilliant people (even heretics who pinpointed the questions at issue) expended in exploring and testing every avenue of explanation--every possible doctrine--to clarify each dogma.  The result of this coöperative endeavor is that all inadequate explanatory doctrines have fallen into desuetude (at least in the holy tradition); only one has survived the testing to win general approval--and endure for two millenniums--viz. the Greek-language tradition and conceptual framework of holy Orthodoxy.
           McGrath knows as well as anyone that Christianity came on the scene providentially at a time when Hellenism and Judaism cultures met (even in Galilee).    From the Hebrew religion, traditional Christianity got its emphasis on time and matter, whereas Protestantism (influenced by the scholastic  via moderna--partly derived from, and heavily influenced by, Arabic and Jewish philosophers in Spain) got something quite different from these twofold cultural streams--a volitional framework with an juridical emphasis and a focus on words--from Semitic thinking.  (Material sacraments--more judicially, ordinances; more metaphorically, tokens--have no efficacy apart from the WORD--with greater reference to the scripture, and specifically a sermon, than to God the Son [LOGOS], all of which Denominationists call "the Word.")  From Hebrew thinking and antisacramentalism (in the traditional sense).  Reformation Gnosticism derived from various Gnostic streams, including Pietism.   With regard to both sources, this contrasts with the holy tradition, which from the first received from Hellenism its interest in ontology, and from the Hebrews its positive view of the rôle of matter and time (tradition) in Christianity.   If Denominationists inherited something very different from this cultural font, viz. a disdain of time, creation, and material sacraments--some Protestants even deny the resurrection of the Body--these views entailed many others.  
     Thus, the evacuation of the idea of an ontological Body of Christ combined with  the Western focus on the judicial aspects of the Crucifixion to emphasize Christ's defeat over His Victory in the Resurrection--where the focus of Eastern Christianity lies.   Virtual Justification (a legal fiction) and a parallel imputative view of Grace replaced energetic-ontological Grace and  Justification.   The incompatible views derive from incompatible frameworks invented up to fourteen centuries apart and originally derived from separate Semitic sources (Jerusalem and Cordova).   There is no way to understand the Greek of Philp. 2:13 and Gal. 2:20 (not to speak of John 6:48-58) literally in a framework in which energy and energize are replaced by quite different concepts built on vastly different premises. The later framework adopted anachronistic interpretations of the matter (the Bible) that fitted its premises.   The Reformers, love of "the Book" and "the Word" is originally as Islamic as their predestination (mediated through Ockham) and their anti-iconism--arguably also their weakened Trinitarianism.
     McGrath  ignores the dominance of will over lógos among the scholastic (via moderna)  predecessors of the Reformers,  the Reformers, and the Reformers' successive heirs.  But the Reformation system is not intelligible--nor are most of its descendents--without such an understanding of the origin of its premises--which McGrath knows as well as anyone.
       Such considerations make one thing abundantly clear:   East and West have a lot of "matter" in common, but probably less than four per cent of "form" or meaning in common.   The Latin axiomatic framework is as different from Orthodoxy's Greek-language conceptuology as its third-hand Aristotelianism (Latin translations of Arab translations of the Greek originals) derived from Islamic Cordova)--and as it partial  derivation from the juridicalism from lawyers like the great Cordovan Muslim, Ibn Rushd (Averroës) and its partial derivation of its juridicalism from early Western lawyers like Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine on the ex-Semitic territory of Carthage  and Ambrose in Italy.  As McGrath himself has shown elsewhere, the Protestant Revolution has similar sources.  However, there is a crucial difference in that the Reformers made a different energy (not their concept) to be the divine Essence; for where it is actus purus and existence and even intellect that are the divine Essence for the Latin scholastics, it is will for the Reformers.  Divine will can overrule reality to establish a virtual reality that is more real and more true that the reality it sets aside.    This is why there are three Christianities and at least as many "traditions," each incompatible with the others; one is the original Greek-language conceptuology, while the Western variants are late-Medićval, Islam-derived conceptuologies that are only anachronistically capable of interpreting the early Greek ideas of the New Testament.  To speak of one tradition is to speak of an abstract or virtual "tradition" if it has got any meaning at all.      
     To make this virtual tradition,  "the Christian tradition," or the virtual community that McGrath titles "the Christian community" or "the community of faith" the basis of one's approach, as  McGrath does, means that everything is based on virtual realities having no existence that one can point to.   The situation is even worse, when the only real Greek-language tradition agreeing with that of early Christianity, one that has held up for two millenniums, is left out--so far as one can see.    If  empirical fact is lacking, so is conceptual coherence.    Yet McGrath comes back again and again to these vacuous concepts.   It is not too much to say (and is certainly no distortion to say) that  "the community of faith" is a basic notion of McGrath's, since it  preserves and transmits "the history of Jesus of Nazareth"--which everything goes back to and stems from:   It is in fact where one discovers what doctrine is all about.   If there is one such community that one can define if only ostensively, and if it includes modern Protestantism, why is it so incompatible with Orthodoxy as well as Papalism?   
     If the idea of "the" Christian community, say in the latter fourth century, when the New Testament and Creed were finally codified and ratified, is part of McGrath's virtual tradition, how does it form a coherent unity with Thomas Aquinas and/or the Reformers?    How can the Church that codified the Bible and wrote the Creed have produced an infallible result if it was fallible; if it was not fallible, then how can the incompatible ideas of the Latins and Reformers--especially their axiomatic frameworks--have created a unified and coherent "tradition" or community of thought?   We are not given a hint of an answer.     We might as well discuss Angels dancing on the head of a pin.   Where do the Monophysites stand in McGrath's scheme?  Presumably, McGrath's denomination is part of "the" tradition, since a seeker of truth would as a matter of course choose to belong to a group that s/he deemed to be part of "the" Christian community.  If the terms under scrutiny have any non-mythical content at all they cannot leave Orthodoxy out; but they cannot include Orthodoxy without leaving incompatible heterodoxy out, unless coherence and meaning are to be abandoned altogether.  So why then are Orthodoxy and the Orthodox Fathers (of whom some settled the question of which books were to be included in the New Testament and the wording of the Creed before Charlemagne put the pope on notice to change that wording) pretty much absent from all talk about this community--one in which the Bible was born and has resided, in which Christian revelation is to be found, etc.?   Does it exist in any or all of the 28,000 denominations of incompatible beliefs, customs, Worship, etc., and of incompatible views about the value and authority not only of the contents of the  Bible but also of the (non-)acceptability of any necessary rôle for materiality (Incarnation and bodily resurrection as well as eucharistic reality) and time (tradition itself) in Christianity?   It's a huge muddle--a quagmire.  
     If the community that handed down the New Testament is as important as McGrath claims, why are the Fathers (other than Augustine, that noble and most readable font of cacodoxies)) and Orthodoxy herself so nearly absent from this book?  All of this is very hard to fathom, and the terminology under scrutiny strikes this reader as being more of a handy (if empty) slogan than an idea with either empirical or conceptual content; and yet,  it is a fundamental idea in this book.  That is a regrettably hard judgment, since it means that everything in the book that depends on that idea falls with it--and that is a good deal.
       One can only guess what McGrath's virtual community of faith would say about John 6:48-58; the Reformation part of it rejects the literal Greek of Philp. 2:13, which resolves the conflict between Grace and the good works of Christ's ontological members.   It should be self-evident that the real continuation of the Christian community of the Apostolic Age and the Apostles' disciples (e.g. St. Ignatios of Antioch) as well as the Fathers of the age when creed and Scripture were canonized cannot be incongruous with the Greek-language thinking of those early Christians--and their interpretations of the verses in question.  What McGrath cannot claim they mean--both that the bread and wine both do literally and ontologically become AND that they don't literally and ontologically become the Body and Blood of OLGS Jesus Christ--but merely recall or betoken our Savior's  immaculate Body and Blood.  (Is, e.g.,  Barth's modalist Trinity that of the holy Fathers, viz. the Son--Reason and Wisdom of God--and Paraclete, or all-holy Spirit, both proceeding from the inoriginate Father?  Despite his rejection of the analogia entis, Barth seems to think that the Spirit's relation to the Son in the economy parallels His relation to the Son in the divine Ousía--but without separating Energies from Essence, what alternative did he have for interpreting John 15:26?)   
     The point would not be so emphasized here if some sort of virtual unity or agreement among Christians were not so frequently emphasized by McGrath as a fundamental concept.  Try to  find an answer to any disputed matter with McGrath's rule of thumb and you will founder, EVEN IF you view the Christian community as a contentless abstraction rather than as the Orthodox Church of the ages.  Yet, McGrath is apparently not of appears not to be of the Orthodox persuasion.  This point is not a partizan issue raised in order to be querulous.  Our author has a right to accept any Faith he wishes.  But when he tells us to find what we are to believe by looking to "the" Christian community, where can we logically look for such a reality?  He doesn't offer any useful discovery procedure or other solid information.  Indeed, where can we look for that if not to the continuing Orthodox Church from Jesus Christ, SS. Peter, Paul, John, and James through SS. Ignatios, St. Clement, St. Eirenaios, St. Athanasios the Great, the Cappadocian Fathers and Mother, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. John of Damaskos (also a Confessor), St. Gregory Palamas, and the Athonite and other Saints of still later dates--all part of a single Community and agreed-on beliefs?  No other community is that community--whatever its greatness, its virtues, its age, its theological acumen, or its ideas.  No Western theology thinks in the Greek-language manner; just consider the mistranslations of enéryeia and so on; even sárx "flesh" is Gnostically misrendered as "sinful nature" in the NIV, which is popular among Evangelicals.   In brief, McGrath's undefined "the Christian community" utterly lacks any sort of definable intelligibility; it's a shame he  wastes so many words on such a mythological entity.
           (In passing, one may interject a note of surprise that in assessing the reliability of our sources about Jesus, McGrath does not mention the importance of our trifocal view in the Gospels:  Matthew and Luke with different combinations of Mark and the sayings of the Q tradition common to them, plus John.  But what McGrath says on pp. 186-87 is nevertheless worth reading.) 
       In view of the reported 28,000 denominations and the reality that only one form of Christianity goes back the whole way, the ideas of "the Christian community" and "the Christian tradition" are not very useful  abstractions.  So relying on them as basic starting points is fatal to McGrath's enterprise.   In any case, how could it  be otherwise when most Christian groups reject tradition and history, appealing only to what is in effect a timeless moment exempt from history--or the wisdom of current otherdox theologians--a moment into which the anachronisms of Papalism or Protestantism can easily be read when one's paradigm forces one to read the early Christian documents in its terms?    To summarize, whatever "the Christian tradition" is, it is too amorphous to have sufficient meaning to serve the fundamental purpose McGrath ascribes to it, e.g., on p. 197 (near the end of his text).
    If, as McGrath correctly says on p. 192, a universally agreed on framework or vantage point is both "uninhabited" and "inherently uninhabitable," why are "the Christian community" and "the Christian tradition"--both of which play the central rôle in McGrath's approach--not equally uninhabited and uninhabitable?  They are quite phantasmagoric.   Of paradigms Thomas Kuhn views them as embedded in a social network; and they arise as practically unargued replacements of, rather than continuations of, older paradigms either unknown or deemed inadequate.  What is wanted for a basic understanding of Christianity is something pretty much like the original Greek-language framework of the sub-Apostolic age ordained by God for the propagation of His forming Gospel--with its view of being as energy.  Failing that, what more realistic kind of approach to resolving McGrath's concerns is called for?   A reader could justifiably wonder why a book emphasizing as its source and guide "the history of Jesus of Nazareth" would devote so many pages to Marxist and other post-Reformation figures while at the same time omitting the informative Letter to the Corinthians of  St. Paul's comrade, St. Clement, while according  to St. Ignatios (St. John's disciple and St. Peter's successor at Antioch) only eight words--cited from a Letter that is hardly the most significant of his genuine letters.   Then there are Chrysostom, the Cappadocians, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. John of Damaskos, St. Gregory Palamas, and the prominent ascetics before and after the Palamite.  The silence accorded to them says something, though I leave it to others to infer exactly what; all that I will venture here is that the situation represents an odd view of "the" Christian history or tradition.  Nothing will ever be universal if it is at odds with the Greek-language Apostolic tradition.  For we cannot suppose that God  foreordained Christianity to be propagated through Greek for no reason.
     There is no denying that this book is worth reading for much valuable information, though some of this tends to get lost amid the academic clutter and lack of unifying theme--other than the idea of avoiding a culture-centric ideology that would block an adequate appreciation of tradition.  In the end, amid tons of learning (mostly, if my impression is right, from German sources or about German figures), there is not much in McGrath's  scatter-shot exposition to "tie it all together"--where "it" refers to the assembled basic dogmas of traditional Christianity.  It's not tied together the way energy forms the basis of distinctions and unities in original Christianity.  It's even hard to say that a system is missing when the basic point or points being made are so few.   
     But if tradition and history are to be treated adequately, one cannot avoid assessing the views, positive and negative, of time or temporality (and tradition) during Christianity's formative phases.  A further conditio sine qua non is a consideration of the replacement of a logos-ontological primacy vis-ŕ-vis the antisacramental primacy of will that the Reformers bequeathed to Denominationists.  To be as brief as possible about this, note Luther's view that he could have the Lord's Supper any time he so wills, through faith--which he volitionally characterizes as willed assent.    There's no point in omitting a showing how will dominates Protestantism at the cost of ontology; vicarious imputation is only the most prominent example of a long list of volitional innovations and virtual realities in Reformation thinking that are incompatible with the earliest, and still continuing, Greek-language, Greek-conceptualizing Christian tradition.
     McGrath certainly has all of the knowledge of modern works that he needs.  It remains to be hoped that in his future work, he will turn his knowledge to (1) dealing with the full history of Christianity (in the first millennium, it was mainly Eastern, except for  the North Africans); and to (2) getting at the truly basic ideologies--not omitting contratemporal, contrasacramental volitionalism (a barbarism invoked to avoid voluntarism, which is misleading, and theletism, which is a Greek formation alien to Western writers); and then to (3) making a system out of it all, one in which each point is systematically, though not necessarily either mystically or rationalistically, derived from the basic ideology and the basic sources.   To learn how this is done, one can look at L. Berkhof's Systematic theology (or other similar volumes)--or Aquinas; if one is not a Westerner, at St. John of Damaskos.
     As matters stand, though, it is hard to see what it is in McGrath's view that ties Christian doctrines together in any articulated, coherent theological system--let alone in the mythical "Christian tradition" that he is so taken with.   Is "Christian tradition" the modern (and Medićval) Denominationist theologians he cites?  Is it some fundamental belief or beliefs; ontological assumption; will; Worship; words; morality?   It certainly is not the Biblical energy.  Calvin reduced sacramental efficacy to words and intention; like a good Muslim, he permitted on the walls of meeting houses no decoration other than the words of the Decalogue--which occurs in Reformation liturgies (and in the first centuries of the Book of common prayer) at about the point where the Orthodox Beatitudes are sung.  If one doesn't treat the history of theology thematically in order to learn how various ideas have arisen, why bother with doctrine in the first place--why not just accept the uninterpreted basic dogmas as such? 
       McGrath makes mention two or three times of liturgies, as though most of the 28,000 Christian bodies (especially those in areas of the world where Christian bodies have greatly proliferated) had liturgies--i.e. as if lex orandi, lex credendi (or better, the dýnamis efchęs dýnamis písteos) could have any objective meaning for members of those groups--as if the minimal rites for the (infrequent) "Lord's Supper" in such groups could suffice for even a minimal tying of their beliefs together.  Don't most Denominationists agree  that it is the word (sermon) that lends validity to any sacramental ordinance?   (Don't they even mistranslate LOGOS as "word"?)  Not only have the Roman and Anglican liturgies been revised down; an application ofOGOS as "word"?)  Not only have the Roman and Anglican liturgies been revised down; an application of dýnamis efchęs dýnamis písteos to the denominations is just as vacuous as McGrath's concept of "the Christian community" or "the community of faith."   McGrath himself concedes that  you cannot just say that Jesus is GOD and human and let it go at that.  You have to say something to keep one aspect of the truth from obliterating the other; and that something is doctrine!  It would be naďve to suppose otherwise.    Anyhow, that's what doctrine is for!   
    This goal is not promoted by threading a recommendation about "the history of Jesus of Nazareth"--transmitted by a "community of faith"--through   masses of divergent and mostly recent epistemological theories , however intrinsically valuable they may be for some purpose or other.  Where is the basic concept of "energy" in McGrath's view of Christianity?  Without it, how can he deal with the contradictions that this Biblical term resolves?

     Many brilliant "modern" writers get so fascinated with  critiques from Marx and other heretical philosophers and so turned on by current fads that they invest a disproportionate amount of effort and time in reacting to ideas stuck in the post-Reformation and indeed secular Western mould--while paradoxically ignoring non-static notions of current science.  Should not a proportionate  effort and proportionate time be devoted to the real tradition of undisputed continuity--like it or not?  Should a Christian apologist pay less attention to the historical survival of the fittest than to the unsurvivable teachings of a Lessing or a Marx?  While getting stuck in the Western Middle Ages or any period in the second millennium inevitably creates a scotosis for the liberating values of  Eastern theology, there is merit in looking at Christianity trioptically or even from a fourfold point of view--Orthodoxy, Roman Papalism, Liberalism, and Fundamentalism--or, with five eyes, including Monophysitism.   Yet, whether this brings with it the insights of comparing contraries, it will certainly do one thing--viz. cast into limbo any concept of "the community of faith" that has handed down "the Christian tradition" intact.   
       Nor is it being unobjective to hint that one is looking in the wrong place when one concentrates solely on the West--the post-Enlightenment West at that.  One cannot convince others if one gives the appearance of being more interested in academic respectability and paying one's dues to the academic establishment than in explicating the Faith itself.  Explicating the Faith takes more than the rational, though reason cannot be ignored when dealing with things within its competence.   Theology  requires more than a little of the mystical.  What won't suffice is to wave hands at "the history of Jesus of Nazareth"--however laudable it may sound on first reading.   If McGrath's apologetics--and epćnetics and parćnetics--are all to the good, there is still no profit in supposing that apologetics is a substitute for coherent doctrine.  A well thought-out apologetic isn't likely to convert the followers of dead philosophers or the followers of the founders of this or that denomination; nor would that be a huge plus, if it were feasible, given that those standouts and leaders are so few and that the work of so many is so ephemeral--something for the history books to talk about.  
     Indeed, this sentiment can be no better stated than McGrath himself states it on the penult page of his text:   "The liberal suggestion  that we defend Christianity by making its ideas acceptable to the secular world has been tried, and found wanting."   Yet, when he continues by saying that "we must now commend the Christian proclamation of judgment and conversion through Christ, with the invitation to stand within the Christian tradition"--which "tradition" of the many conflicting ones is it that he's referring to?   From the Orthodox standpoint, McGrath rightly goes on to comment:  "It is thus evangelism, rather than just apologetics, which commends itself as of strategic importance in the present situation within Western culture."  . . . which (by the way) doesn't do despite to good apologetics.   Of course, the validity of the last statement quoted depends on what gets evangelized.  Of the so-called "mainline" (non-sectarian) religions in Russia North America, Orthodoxy is gaining more converts today than the others in both Russia and North America--though this statement does not apply to all jurisdictions, and is not meant to imply that Orthodoxy is spreading as fast as many of the sects--particularly the Mormons, if they aren't now regarded as "mainline."
       It's too bad that McGrath has been so inconcise about the Christian community and tradition in his reďterated arguments against a universal framework of rationality.  Repetition may be necessary to enforce a point; but there is a limit beyond which it becomes wearisome.    One welcomes a rational approach, and it certainly makes better sense today than the volition-based approach of the Reformers; but without ontology, without energy, without the mystical element, it easily becomes as rationalistic as Kant and Hegel.
     A person of McGrath's evident acumen and undoubted erudition and expressed desire to preserve the content of historic Christianity might well take being (ontology), reason, will, and sacramentalist (materiospiritual) reality--along with time--into consideration in the thematics of his volumes to come.  For they constitute the basic themes for realistically understanding reality, Christian history, and the holy Gospel itself--a traditional term that one hopes would be preferred to the more weak-kneed "history of Jesus of Nazareth."  McGrath might offer readers more on the conflicts of subjective volition with objective  lógos and mysteric (i.e. sacramental) ontology that have characterized and plagued concerns about the communities of faiths.   He ought to get real about an idealized "community of faith" (which is nowhere to be found) and tell us more about the coherence of any of the traditions he deems worth talking about.  Let what he's said about Lessing, Marx, and others suffice; we know he's done his homework.  Maybe future scholarship can offer more unidirectionality and fewer iterated hammerings in of the points being made.

     As adumbrated earlier, there are niggling points of little interest to most readers.  One is the writer's use of concepts from an older linguistics; "generate" may not mean what McGrath thinks; and other concepts are of little value (at least to the most recent linguistics)--"synchronic," "diachronic," etc.  He uses "referent" for referenD; that he knows better is evidenced by his use of explicanDum and similar terms.  One wonders about "ahistoric" for anhistoric--or better, unhistoric or ant(i-)historic--and the use of an before historic when it is a separate word.  For "h" is no longer dropped before an initial unstressed vowel in English, though it is dropped before non-initial unstressed vowels.   "An" before "historic" is as archaic as "an one."  But an- in anhistoric is cognate with our un- and Latin in-, though the "h" in this word was merely etymological for Greek by the time of OLGS Jesus Christ and can most properly be omitted.