In Christianity in Evolution, Jack Mahoney seeks to answer the question posed by the late Pope John Paul II at a conference on evolution and religion: “Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear upon theological anthropology, the meaning of the human person as imago Dei, the problem of Christology—and even upon the development of doctrine itself?” (ix). In a well-researched and thoroughly readable text, Mahoney proposes answers to this question through his discussion of original sin, God as Trinity, incarnation and salvation, church and Eucharist, and human freedom. Weaving threads from Scripture, council documents, papal encyclicals, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and theological investigations, the author proposes to sketch the implications of accepting evolution for present and “evolving” forms of Christian doctrine, for morality and ethics, and for human development toward union with God.

With regard to this intention, the reader may find that the work focuses more on the evolution of Christian theology than on Christian evolutionary theology. The difference consists in the engagement with evolutionary science that this text lacks. Many of Mahoney's evolutionary connections are underdeveloped, and much of the reinterpretation that Mahoney offers could have proceeded from theological sources alone. Two exceptions are noteworthy: Mahoney's discussion of the emergence of altruism in the human species and his engagement with “the statistical necessity” (Teilhard) of death in an evolving cosmos. The former discussion sheds light on the perichoretic life of the Trinity and on the paschal mystery. The latter elucidates original sin, incarnation, and redemption. Mahoney effectively teases out the impact of these scientific insights in dialogue with the Pauline letters, the patristic fathers, the medieval Scholastics, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century evolutionary theologians.

At its conclusion, this exploration surveys a range of Christian beliefs that require reinterpretation in the context of evolution. In the light of this far-reaching scope of inquiry, two questions concerning its limits arise. The first pertains to the concentration on human evolution with insufficient consideration of the human as part and parcel of the evolving cosmos as a whole. Such anthropocentrism leads to the assertion that “the death of Jesus…is a remedying for us humans of the evolutionary fact of death that requires the disintegration of some organisms in order to provide for the emergence of others” (65). This conclusion calls into question the author's evolutionary worldview, which segregates human redemption from the redemption of the cosmos in toto. The second concerns a soteriological exclusivism that derives from the first. In his discussion of the “saving from death” of Jesus' death, Mahoney makes the assertion that “being associated with the altruistic death of Jesus saves one from one's own death…and suggests tentatively that those who are not so associated may cease to exist at death” (116). Such exclusivism separates not only humans from the cosmos, but also Christians from humanity itself. Evolutionary theory clearly understands the human as imago mundi, a reflection of the physical world. As such, humans are not exceptional addenda to a naturally evolving cosmos, but involved in and consequent upon the dynamics that characterize the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. These realities cannot be overlooked in any viable evolutionary paradigm.