George Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 350 pp.

George Pattison holds the Lady Margaret chair of Divinity at Oxford University and remains a
preeminent voice in contemporary theology. The topic of this most recent volume is grand and
ambitious, but not at all too ambitious for a theologian of his stature. In God and Being Pattison
revisits an ever-present concern among all doctrinal enquiries into the nature of God: the
question of being. In what ways is it appropriate and accurate to describe divine being? This
question may have been taken for granted throughout many generations of the Church, but in the
late modern period, it has suffered a scathing critique by the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger. For Heidegger, there is no being as such; there is only Dasein (translated from
German as “being there”). In other words, being is conditioned by time and space. Humans
maintain Dasein by virtue of their location in the world and their orientation to eventual death.
From this perspective, Heidegger and his followers have developed a deep distrust of abstract or
purely metaphysical conceptions of being (i.e. what he calls “onto-theology”). It is this
contemporary distrust of divine being that Pattison seeks to address with his timely exploration.
So in this new work of philosophical theology, Pattison takes seriously the onto-theological
critique of Heidegger and others, and more than merely trying to defeat or debunk those claims,
this theologian seeks to incorporate the admonitions of modern phenomenology and explore
more fruitful ways for theology to communicate the truth of divine being nonetheless. Pattison’s
contemplative and reflective study pursues these themes in relationship to such topics as
language, space, time, community, and human embodiment. Such a meditation will no doubt
provoke further meditations and more persistent efforts from theologians to speak rightly of the
unknowable and ineffable God.

Taylor Worley, Ph.D.

Union University