Douglas Knight’s The Eschatological Economy is one of the most stimulating works of theology in recent years. It is also one of the densest. The density doesn’t come from difficult prose or lack of clarity, but from the sheer profusion of insights and ideas, and from Knight’s determination to leave the reader to wrestle out things for himself rather than spell out every connection.

One of the themes of this rich book is the way Western theology has given priority to the biblical story of creation and fall over what Knight insists is the more over-arching story of Scripture, the story of human maturation: “We need to make Irenaeus’s account of the growth of Adam the main story and to tell Augustine’s account of the fall only as its subplot.”

Later, Knight returns to this theme: “The Adam believed in by the Western history of secularization is the individual who cannot make his choice stick. He can only continue to choose and choose again, such that he can never actually decisively choose anything, be satisfied by his choice, and let it inform his future. He cannot finish any act and be ready for another. The biblical story of the fall and separation of humankind from God, divorced from humanity;s place in the evangelical narrative, has become the foundation story of the West . . . . The Western tradition, for which Kant is now representative, teaches that everything is subsequent to, and constituted by, the fall of Adam. Yet the Adam who fell thereby ceased to be the first and constitutive Adam. A second Adam has become the source and beginning of Adam’s race.”

Taking Jesus’ parable of the two sons as an allegory of the history of two Adams, Knight writes (in a passage that shows the quicksilver movements of the book): “One son would not hear his father’s command, would not serve or receive the discipline that makes a good son. Like the kings of the earth, he would rather be served than to go work himself. This son is the individual, the product of the economy of modernity. There is no work that originates in the individual. His work may be credited to him only if it is built with God as master workman, thus only inasmuch as he does not work alone and is no individual. Otherwise he is building his house on sand, tearing down his barn to store what he will never live to enjoy, sowing for another man to reap. Nothing belongs to the individual, and his action brings him no gain. The belief that sacrifice is the violent act by which the individual wrests something from another individual, or by which on individual overcomes and consumes another, is the myth of Marduk and Tiamat. It is the myth that the Genesis account of creation refutes. One individual cannot propel another into being or motion. Human action, including sacrifice, cannot be understood as the action of propelling an inert other into action, thereby bringing something out of nothing.”