In the act of faith, gentile believers recognize themselves as those who have worshiped or might worship Moloch the baby-killer or Astarte the universal whore or Deutsches Blut or the Free Market or the Dialectic of History or the Metaphor of our gender of ethnic ressentiment, and on through an endless list of tyrants. Only a naiveté impossible for the apostolic church, which fully inhabited the religious maelstrom of late antiquity, can think that religion as such is a good thing or that gods are necessarily beneficent.

—Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (OUP, 1997), p. 51