The subtitle of Drake's book, ‘The Politics of Intolerance’, provides an apt starting place. First, ‘Politics’: it is Drake's contention that many earlier scholars’ investigations of Constantine have run amok by adopting largely theological perspectives, by worrying whether Constantine was ‘sincere’ in his Christian profession. Indeed, much in Constantine's practices and discourse (such as we can recover them) suggested to previous commentators that he had little understanding of theological niceties, and that his Christian commitment was to some degree feigned. Drake argues that we should rather look to the political problems that Constantine faced and the policy options available to him. (For one, Diocletian's persecution had proved a massive and costly failure: where to go from there?) If ‘politics’ is the arena in which we assess Constantine, scholars should investigate social processes, not theological puzzles. We have been using the wrong map: ‘political symptoms’ should not be treated with ‘theological remedies’ (465). Public policy studies, in particular, is the field to which we should turn.

I may have agreed to review this work under false pretenses. In a book I wrote called The Domestication of Transcendence, and elsewhere, I raised two sorts of objections to many of the contemporary discussions of the problem of evil among Anglo-American philosophers of religion. First, they often defend an abstract philosophical theism which I think has quite different implications from Christianity, or for that matter from Judaism or Islam or any other major world religion. So, as a Christian theologian, I find myself doubting that their detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments they consider is really worth the trouble, given that the results may not have much to do with what religious folk actually believe.

Dan Williams challenges the ‘historylessness’ of much contemporary evangelicalism and pleads for a recovery of the great Tradition as a way of ‘renewing evangelicalism’. I agree with the need to pay attention to history but am not so optimistic about its resulting in renewal and find problems in the statement of the case that require further exploration. To follow Tradition is to affirm the authority of scripture. The Rule of Faith itself was a summary of the teaching found in scripture. Theological programmes other than the ‘Bible alone’ have not been notably successful in overcoming division. The early creeds and councils may be accepted as confessions of faith but not as tests of fellowship.

Elizabeth Clark was characteristically generous and incisive in her comments. She asks six questions, which I will paraphrase as follows: (1) How can we know Constantine's intentions? (2) Did ‘pagan monotheism’ have a broad enough appeal to create the type of constituency Constantine would have needed, and (3) even if it did, would not the turn from ‘cultic practice’ to ‘a system of belief’ – whether pagan or Christian – still have resulted in ‘intolerance and its political analogue, compulsion’? (4) Do I overrate the impact of Julian? (5) ‘Where are the Jews in this discussion?’ (6) Can metaphors based on modern political language and a public policy model be applied to this period without distorting the subject?

American evangelicals are in the process of discovering patristics. Books, articles, large-scale projects of scripture commentary produced by evangelical publishers, growing numbers of courses offered and students who wish to take them demonstrate that serious study of the literary and intellectual life of early Christianity is slowly moving into current theological reflections of evangelicalism. By ‘serious study’ I am signaling a distinction from those contemporary readings of the early fathers which have tended to re-make them in the image of twentieth-century evangelicalism. In their own right then, the fathers are being heard as having relevant voices.

Although my book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999) takes its polemical starting point from discussions of the problem of evil by analytic philosophers from the 1950s onwards, it has an underlying theological perspective which begins with Job (and shades of 4 Ezra), continues with Christology, and stretches forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. My medieval friends – Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham – reinforce and give philosophical interpretation to Job's ‘size-gap’ between God and creatures. My youthful wrestlings with existentialist philosophers and neo-orthodox theologians lead me to locate the imago dei in human nature in its alleged capacity for meaning-making rather than its putative potential for moral virtuosity. The goal of reciprocal divine–human identification, so prominent in Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, combines with Matthew's Emmanuel-theme and Chalcedon to render the Christology; while the conditions of the possibility of defeating horrors constitute my rubric for interpreting credal commitments and adjusting traditional eschatologies. Throughout the book and my sequel Gifford lectures, I try to rivet attention on the category of horrendous evils because they disrupt conventional approaches to evil in philosophy and theology alike.