James P. Mackey – författare

Far from merely reinvigorating relativism, postmodernism has detected and expressed in our time a powerful nihilating process of which truth and reality itself are the final casualties; and with these morality and religion. Beginning from the theological reaches of philosophy, this book argues that gods played a crucial part in modern philosophy, even when it was most critical of them; that the dominant nihilism of Derrida is really an excessive and misleading outcome of a contemporary philosophy which could otherwise resonate with all that is best in our evolutionary image of the universe; that moralists who turn to art in order to overcome the fact-value version of this deadly dualism do not thereby rule out religion; and that a Christian theology which recognises the evolutionary and historical conditions of faith and revelation is once again producing a theology that builds upon the best of contemporary philosophy and science.

In the conventional analysis of human behaviour, power and ethics are frequently considered contrary principles, in that power enforces, while ethics elicits a free response. But, as James Mackey forcefully shows, a more adventurous philosophical study of human morality escapes the sense of contraries, and sets us on a quest for the kind of power that liberates human creativity. It then becomes possible to establish the framework for a critical assessment of the kind of power that ought to be operative in the major structures of human society, civil or ecclesiastical, state governments and church hierarchies. Mackey analyses the religious question which then quite naturally emerges, as to whether this Eros-type power so manifest in human society originates from beyond the more empirical structures of churches, states and 'nature'; and the effort to detect the specifically Christian characterisation of an allegedly ultimate power working in us for final well-being finds its natural context.

Far from merely reinvigorating relativism, postmodernism has detected and expressed in our time a powerful nihilating process of which truth and reality itself are the final casualties; and with these morality and religion. Beginning from the theological reaches of philosophy, this book argues that gods played a crucial part in modern philosophy, even when it was most critical of them; that the dominant nihilism of Derrida is really an excessive and misleading outcome of a contemporary philosophy which could otherwise resonate with all that is best in our evolutionary image of the universe; that moralists who turn to art in order to overcome the fact-value version of this deadly dualism do not thereby rule out religion; and that a Christian theology which recognises the evolutionary and historical conditions of faith and revelation is once again producing a theology that builds upon the best of contemporary philosophy and science.

James Mackey has written a bold one-volume systematic theology in eight chapters on creation, fall, salvation, God, creed, code, cult and church constitution. It is fashioned out of material from two sources: the major theological movements of the 20th century, which in haphazard, start-stop fashion sought to construct a theology of some of these themes in the light of contemporary cultural categories of thought and imagery, and a thorough reading of the Bible as innocent as possible of the influence of theologies borrowed from Platonism. The first source yields the conclusion that nature and history provide the dominant sources of divine revelation, thus eliding the crass distinctions between nature and super-nature, reason and faith. The second confirms the notion that from the opening of Genesis to the teaching of Jesus, the Bible, when read on its own terms, proclaims a creation faith: the central idea being that grace and revelation are to be found in the eternal activity of the loving creator God ever evident in evolving creation.Finding the essence of Christianity in the lived creation faith of Jesus the Jew, Mackey goes on to shows what the Christian religion has lost or corrupted on the way, what corrections and advances need to be made in all the Christian churches, and what future the Christian faith can plot for itself in a world characterized by an increasing secular culture, by a growing interest in spirtualities without the trappings of religion, and by ever-closer encounters between all the religions of the human race. The fact that Christian faith is fundamentally a creation faith offers common ground for a dialogue of human equals between Christians and members of other religions or of none.