While Richard Dawkins' polemic against religion scores easy points against Christian fundamentalisms, he supposes his target to be much vaster: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods”. Given The God Delusion's lack of extended argument, historical ignorance and unfamiliarity with the literature, the praise it has received from some distinguished scientists is troubling.

This essay seeks, first, to examine some of the book's chief weaknesses – its ignorance of the grammar of “God” and of “belief in God”; the crudeness of its account of how texts are best read; its lack of interest in ethics – and, second, to address the question of what it is about the climate of the times that enables so ill‐informed and badly argued a tirade to be widely welcomed by many apparently well‐educated people.

The latter issue is addressed, first, by considering the illusion, unique to the English‐speaking world, that there is some single set of procedures which uniquely qualify as “scientific” and give privileged access to truth; second, by examining historical shifts in the senses of “religion”; thirdly, by locating Dawkins' presuppositions concerning both “science” and “religion”, his paradoxical belief in progress, and the reception which the book has received, in relation to tensions in our culture signalled, fifty years ago, by C. P. Snow.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a Notification criticising Jon Sobrino's Christology. In their criticism of Sobrino's description of Jesus as a man of faith, they risk introducing a semi‐Docetism by emphasising Jesus' closeness to his divine Father and his relative distance from us. Paul, on the other hand, brings Christ and believers very close together – he gives them a ‘spiritual identification’ in a common experience of death, burial, sonship, heirdom and resurrection. A parallel is also drawn between the faith/faithfulness of Christ and all Christian believers who, according to Paul, are made righteous (justified) through their faithfulness.

This article engages David Bentley Hart's critique of coercive “demonstration” in apologetics in favor of Gospel proclamation in the mode of “persuasion.” More specifically, I evaluate Hart's articulation of persuasion as a discourse that is primarily aesthetic and traffics primarily in beauty. After expressing an appreciation for Hart's critique of the traditional apologetics of demonstration, I suggest that Hart's own proposal still has elements of an “apologetic”—a kind of natural “aesthetic” theology, but a natural theology nonetheless. I conclude by extrapolating the Reformed critique of natural theology (based on the “noetic effects of sin”) to include a critique of Hart's aesthetic quasi‐natural theology by providing an account of the “affective” effects of sin.

In “The Beauty of the Infinite,” David Hart offers a persuasive case for why the beauty of God's infinity is at the heart of the Christian evangel of peace, a peace funded by our analogical participation in God's Trinitarian life. At the heart of his argument is an appropriation of Gregory of Nyssa's concept of infinity, which presupposes a “non‐dialectical creation of out of nothing.” He then links this understanding of infinity with what he calls the “Christian evangel of peace”, which he contrasts with what he calls a “genealogy of violence” (identified with Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). His main contribution lies in his use of this understanding of God's infinity to rethink important issues in Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Nonetheless, the question can be raised about whether his argument does justice to classically Christian understandings of the following: the presupposition, rooted in creation, of a shared human rationality, the importance of law, the centrality of the prophetic critique of idolatry and individual and corporate sin, and the place for lament in biblical depictions of Christ's death and the Christian life.

I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.

This article possesses no continuous argument of its own, but consists in a series of replies to observations made by J. K. A. Smith, L. Malcolm, and G. Loughlin regarding my book The Beauty of the Infinite. Thus it addresses a great number of topics, often only tenuously related to one another, and in an order dictated by the pieces to which it responds. Certain themes, however, can be identified as dominant: the capacity of natural reason to discover spiritual truths, the proper rhetoric of evangelical persuasion, the ontological premises that inform (and perhaps justify) that rhetoric, the place of aesthetics within theological reasoning, the role of divine law within Christian ethics, the need for Christian rhetoric adequately to encompass the reality of suffering and loss, the Christian metaphysics of being, the nature of Christian hope, the value of ‘tragic theology’ and the Christian metaphysics of evil.