Humans are inveterate mythmakers, a habit that any serious theology of culture must face. Rather than locating theology above the realm of myth, Andrew Shamel encourages approaching it on mythic terms. His objective is not to treat Christianity as merely one myth among many, or to reduce theology to myth, but to articulate a Christian theology in which human myths and mythmaking can participate in God’s own creative work.

The book opens with a discussion of the “mythic sensibility” by which humans encounter the world as meaningful. Chosen examples stem from so-called “mythopoieic fantasy” – not only the Christian-friendly confines of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but also the explicitly and thoroughly non-Christian fantasies of Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett. No reader would take the supernatural elements in these modern myths as real, yet readers can enter into their mythic elements seriously, in a manner resembling a player’s participation in a game.

This is a reasonably challenging academic book; some prior familiarity with discussions of analogy as the similarity-in-dissimilarity of God and creation would help the reader. The dimension of participation in God’s creative work looms large. Within this, Shamel makes room for human mythmaking as distinct from, yet, even in its sinfulness, pointing toward, and so sharing in, divine creativity. This approach provides ground to distinguish his account from process theologies, which fail to account for God’s freedom over creation, and also from secular materialism, which cannot account for creation at all.

One of the book’s distinctive features is Shamel’s careful dialogue with John Milbank. He broadly accepts Milbank’s critique of secular modernity as a flawed reading of Christianity and suggests that modern mythmaking can be similarly understood. However, Shamel differs productively in his account of how the Christian mythos may come to convince adherents of other myths. Where Milbank argues that myth cannot be refuted but only out-narrated, Shamel is concerned that such a contest of narration merely repeats at a higher level the violent contest typical of human idolatries of nation and religion. It’s hard not to read Shamel’s critique of Milbank in light of increasing cultural violence (under the anodyne label “polarization”) evident in the decades since the publication of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory. In answer, Shamel turns to the distinctive features of the life of Christ as myth, and its redemptive power as expressed in baptism to reshape and re-narrate us.

I admire the book’s range and creativity. Even so, it did not convince at all points. I question whether disenchanted scientific materialism sufficiently describes modern culture in its strange and unstable commitments. I think Rudolf Bultmann with his infamous project of “demythologization” is misunderstood as simply opposing myth, and under a better reading could be enlisted as an admittedly uncomfortable ally. More broadly, I wonder whether participation is adequate to redeem the stories we tell to justify our worst deeds. Here, however, Shamel’s potent image of Christ as spoilsport offers a better word: Christ has playfully entered into our myths to unmask their arbitrary violence, and so the God of the Babylonian exile and the cross is, without contest, the redeemer.