This book is really just a long essay on the theological characterization in Goethe's Faust. It's not what I'd call an exciting read. Author Jaroslav Pelikan, a noted historian of religion, avers to have read Faust annually for his entire adult life, and he's clearly intimate with the text. But he festoons his readings with many quotes from critics and other secondary sources, so that I never felt like I was getting the benefit of his unalloyed opinion.

The essay is divided into four parts: a preliminary overview on the characterization of Faust as a theologian, a section on "The Natural Scientist as Pantheist," one on "The Poetic Artist as Polytheist," and last "The Moral Philosopher as Monotheist." Pelikan emphasizes that these are never mutually exclusive in the text, and that Goethe's construal of the three placed them as informing and enhancing one another.

Goethe was nothing like a conventional Christian of a well-defined creed, and his own theological perspective is an issue in the book. But the primary focus is not on Goethe, but on his fictional character, and what ideas and perspectives can be attributed to Faust within Goethe's poem. Although Faust the Theologian was written with the aim of accessibility to casual readers as well as persuasiveness to literary scholars, I suspect it is mostly the latter who would be able to sustain their interest through the course of this book.