Saving God.. Religion after Idolatry

Johnston's Saving God: Religion after Idolatry presents a provocative reconceptualization of authentic religion that challenges both conventional theism and secular atheism. The work argues that the major monotheistic traditions have systematically misunderstood the divine by treating God as the highest being among beings—a form of idolatry that Johnston terms "religionism." This critique extends beyond popular piety to encompass sophisticated theological systems that conceptualize God as a supernatural person who intervenes in history, answers prayers, and guarantees personal immortality.

Drawing on analytic philosophical methods, Johnston develops an alternative understanding of divinity as the self-disclosure of existence itself—what he calls "the Highest One." This is not a being that exists alongside other entities but rather the ontological condition that allows anything to exist at all. Johnston argues that authentic religious experience involves recognizing this fundamental reality through practices of self-abandonment and ethical transformation, rather than through belief in supernatural doctrines or hope for otherworldly rewards.

The work engages critically with both theistic and atheistic positions. Against traditional theists, Johnston deploys what might be characterized as a reverse cumulative case, demonstrating how supernatural interpretations of religious experience consistently fail to withstand philosophical scrutiny. Against atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he argues that their critiques target only the idolatrous forms of religion, missing the legitimate core of religious life. Johnston particularly emphasizes how the prophetic traditions within Judaism and Christianity contain resources for this non-idolatrous understanding, though these insights have been obscured by supernatural overlays.

Johnston's methodology combines rigorous analytic argumentation with phenomenological attention to religious experience and practice. He draws selectively from process theology, panentheism, and mystical traditions while maintaining a distinctively naturalistic framework that rejects supernatural causation. The work's significance lies in its attempt to preserve what Johnston sees as religion's ethical and existential insights while abandoning its metaphysically problematic commitments. This positions him as offering a middle path that takes religious life seriously without accepting the ontological claims that typically accompany it. His vision of "saving God" from idolatry represents a bold attempt to reconstruct religious thought for those who find traditional supernaturalism untenable yet resist reductive materialism.