A Neo-Hegelian Theology: The God of greatest hospitality
Andrew Shanks
Ashgate £55
(978-1-4724-1087-0)
Church Times Bookshop £49.50 (Use code CT463 )

Heidegger and Theology
Judith Wolfe
T & T Clark £16.99
(978-0-567-03376-5)
Church Times Bookshop £15.30 (Use code CT463 )

ANDREW SHANKS has two objectives, which he pursues with admirable passion and rigour: the rehabilitation of Hegel, and the reorientation of Christianity from "truth-as-correctness" to "truth-as-openness". The two are linked by his conviction that Hegel's challenge to Christian ideology (truth-as-correctness) has now matured into a ready-made vehicle for people of faith to foreswear closed-minded strategies more akin to propaganda than Christ-centred apologetics.

The fact that Christianity in the developed world is losing numerical strength and socio-political influence is welcomed by Shanks, because the way is cleared for truth-as-openness to be given the chance to recover that Spirit of mutual respect and genuine dialogue which institutionalised "truth-as-correctness" tends to smother at birth. "Never before such an opportunity", as Shanks repeatedly, and somewhat melodramatically, avers.

The first two chapters recast the conventional definition of heresy as doctrinal deviance to see it more in terms of any ideological foreclosing on open and honest debate. The core of the gospel message subverts all attempts to neutralise the ambiguities characteristic of religious discourse - especially those predicated on propaganda as the means to promote supposedly normative moral and theological correctness. This is the argument of chapter three, while chapter four concentrates on how Hegel challenges Kant's aversion to religious ambiguity, not least when it came to honouring both scripture's "violent", and Reason's "cunning", revelations.

The final chapter asks "Where did it all go wrong?" and Shanks develops Hegel's philosophy of history to show how an age-old addiction to truth-as-correctness is now making way for the divine Spirit of openness to liberate the Church - and those her ideology so often oppresses and excludes.

This bravura performance confirms Shanks's status as one of the most adventurous and challenging theologians at work today. His championing of Hegel occasionally leans towards the kind of propagandising that he criticises in others, and his tendency to deviate from the main argument in order to engage with Barth, Bonhoeffer, and others along the way can be distracting. But the Church of England is fortunate to have his voice in its ear, as it wrestles with a range of difficult and divisive issues.

If Hegel stands in need of rehabilitation on account of his being routinely misrepresented, then what about Martin Heidegger? He was, without doubt, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, but his brief association with the Nazis in pre-war Germany has severely blighted his reputation and legacy. This has been so particularly in relation to his theological significance. So this latest addition to T & T Clark's excellent Philosophy and Theology series is very welcome.

Judith Wolfe acknowledges that Heidegger's language is notoriously difficult to translate - and, we might add, to understand. But she brings admirable clarity to the task she has set herself, i.e. to introduce students of theology to Heidegger, and students of Heidegger to his engagement with theology.

A cradle Roman Catholic, and destined for the priesthood, Heidegger rebelled against the Vatican's anti-modernist polemics. He embraced Protestantism, but never entirely at the expense of his RC roots, to which he returned in later life.

Like Hegel, he reacted against church ideology, and saw asking the right questions as more important than assent to ready-made answers. And the questions need to emerge from lived experience with "being-unto-death" as an "affliction" not susceptible to palliatives predicated on the expectation of post-mortem existence - an "eschatology without an eschaton". His philosophy becomes a-theist rather than atheist, dealing with key questions of Being and Time (the title of his magnum opus) without recourse to metaphysical presuppositions.

Heidegger certainly sided with Hegel against "truth-as-correctness", and he saw the part played by "spirit" in history in neo-Hegelian terms. This lay behind his initial support for National Socialism until its "blood and soil" ideology alienated him as he looked increasingly towards Hölderlin's "the god to come" as the eschaton he had rejected in his earlier work. As Wolfe puts it, his late work favours "an attitude of . . . calm receptivity to the world and to the potential inbreaking of a yet-unknown 'god'".

Two final chapters tell the story of Heidegger's reception both by his contemporaries and subsequently, and so readers are set on their own paths of engagement with Heidegger and theology.

Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.