Recovering Theological Hermeneutics

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 8Number 2April 2006

Reviews

KhaledAnatolios, Athanasius. London: Routledge, 2004, viii + 293pp. £19.99

One can divide the current field of study concerning the life and thought of Athanasius into two general categories. Scholars who practice modern forms of historiography tend to view Athanasius in light of his leadership as the Bishop of Alexandria and the relationship he shared with the leadership of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, scholars whose theological perceptions are shaped by the church’s early creeds tend to view Athanasius in light of his contributions to trinitarian theology and Christology. Khaled Anatolios’s Athanasius is part of a larger intention to re-shape at least this second category. As a continuation of the project he initiated in Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998),Anatolios confirms that Athanasius was first and foremost motivated by theological convictions. However, Anatolios also maintains that these convictions prove to be part of a theological system of thought that even goes beyond Athanasius’s contributions to concepts as foundational and as significant within the Christian tradition as trinitarian theology and Christology. In the end, Anatolios brings to light the ‘remarkable consistency in his [Athanasius’s] theological vision and even vocabulary, albeit with some notable developments and variance of emphasis’ (p. 39).

As part of Routledge’s larger series of works concerning the early church fathers (edited by Carol Harrison), Anatolios’s Athanasius demonstrates this consistency through a mixture of Anatolios’s own remarks with selections from Athanasius. Similar efforts concerning the life and work of Athanasius include John Henry Newman’s Select Treatises of St Athanasius in Controversy with the Arians and Robert C. Gregg’s Athanasius: The Life of Antony and Letter to Marcellinus. Newman’s two-volume work, centred as it is on the Arian controversy, natually presents an Athansius focused almost entirely on matters of Christology. Gregg’s work, for different reasons, offers the same emphasis: by focusing on Athanasius’s sense of spirituality through the two works he selects, Gregg’s portrait of Athanasius is of one seeking to be an imitation of Christ. Anatolios’approach does not diminishes the points made by Newman and Gregg, but places them within a larger context.

Despite the sense of coherence Anatolios sees in Athanasius’s thought, he also acknowledges that Athanasius’s thought does undergo ‘some notable developments and variance of emphasis’(p. 39). The most obvious point of division inAthanasius’s work appears to occur between the early Against the Greeks – On the Incarnation

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and his later works. The earlier works make almost no mention of Arius and his followers. By contrast, the later works are almost defined by Athanasius’s attempts to refute their efforts. Anatolios argues, however, that what emerges across the span of these works is a concern with ‘the relation between God and creation [which] may thus be considered as the architectonic center of Athanasius’s theological vision’(p. 39). Such an understanding in turn provides ‘the overarching framework in which his various doctrines acquire their distinctive resonance’ (pp. 39–40).

The volume is organized into two sections. The first, approximately a third of the book, includes an extensive introduction to the life ofAthanasius and to his work. The second section offers an edited collection of the works ofAthanasius. The largest component is a series of selections from the Orations Against the Arians. Other works present in this volume include Athanasius’s On the Council of Nicaea, his Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit (1:15–33), and his Letter 40: To Adelphius, Bishop and Confessor, against the Arians. Anatolios’s introduction includes attention to matters of history and theology. Any significant attempt to identify the key historical components of Athanasius’s life will likely include not only a discussion of schisms and councils but also the four exiles which Athanasius endured during his life. Some modern historical efforts conclude from these that Athanasius was a tyrant ‘who only lusted for power and used doctrinal debates as a means to that end’(p. 34). Anatolios rejects these charges and suggests that even the most ‘vehement of his modern critics’acknowledge that Athanasius ‘eventually gained the overwhelming support and admiration of his own people’(p. 35). This argument may be the weakest point in what otherwise proves to be an impressive effort by Anatolios. However, the discussion of the historical details of Athanasius’s life is part of a larger attempt to portray his theological vision.

In addition to the general introduction that Anatolios provides to the life and work of Athanasius, each of the four selections is preceded by its own introduction. Although these are only two to three pages, they provide important details in relation to both the context and the significance of each selection. For example, in his introduction to Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit (1:15–33), Anatolios maintains that the letter was written during Athanasius’s third exile and was addressed to Serapion of Thumis. Serapion had alerted Athanasius to a growing hesitancy within the Christian community to recognize the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. As a result, Anatolios contends that Athanasius’s response to Serapion is not only ‘the first thorough attempt to deal with the question of the divinity of the Spirit’ but also proves to be highly influential on similar lines of thought developed by Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus.

The selections Anatolios makes from the works of represent a span in the life of Athanasius stretching from approximately the year 340 to the year 370. The collective weight of these selections helps to confirm Anatolios’argument concerning the overarching framework of Athanasius’s thought. The relational nature of this overarching framework transcends the particular doctrinal assertions

The author 2006

Athanasius makes in each of these texts. For example, Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit (1:15–33) makes the point concerning the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. However, such a point is essential in terms of the larger relationship God seeks to have with humanity. In the words ofAthanasius from these letters, ‘For it is by our participation in the Spirit that we have the love of the Father and the grace of the Son and the communion of the Spirit itself’(p. 230).

In the end, the real strength of Anatolios’s volume is the way it represents the theological vision of Athanasius. The particular doctrinal arguments made by Athanasius are significant in their own sense. One clearly walks away from Anatolios’s volume with a greater appreciation for the contributions Athanasius made not only to Christology and trinitarian theology but also to pneumatology. However, Anatolios also helps one to appreciate how these matters of doctrine are not simply intellectual exercises but also exercises which possess real soteriological ramifications. Part of the genius of this volume, and of Athanasius’s work as a whole, is in showing that debates concerning right doctrine, on the one hand, and the relationship God and humanity share, on the other, are in fact inextricable.

If the enduring value of Anatolios’s volume is the way it represents and expands upon the significance of Athanasius’s efforts as a theologian, its weakness lies in its efforts to contend with the concerns launched by modern critics, the preponderance of whom are historians. It may be true that by coming to terms with the theological nature of Anatolios’s argument, one can recognize the ill-constructed nature of the research questions that many of these critics are seeking to answer. One example of such an effort is found in the works by Timothy Barnes – Constantine and Eusebius and his Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Despite the assumptions inherent in Barnes’s methodology, however, one cannot deny the complexity of his arguments and the details he provides in support of them. Anatolios seeks to dismiss such efforts in a couple of pages. If Anatolios truly wants to pursue this line of argumentation, he would need to offer more than what essentially amounts to the assertion ‘that the application of historiography to rendering moral judgments of personal character is a complex and perilous matter’ (p. 34). Theology, perhaps especially the theology of Athanasius, can marshal the resources needed to bring the flaws of modern historiography to light, but one would need to allocate more than a few pages to such an effort.

Regardless of any deficiencies, Khaled Anatolios’s Athanasius may possess in relation to the arguments made by Athanasius’s modern historical critics, the theological efforts that prove most germane to understanding Athanasius and may, in time, also prove to be the foundation needed for a more elaborate response to such critics.Anatolios’s effort represents an impressive attempt to not only introduce the significance of Athanasius’s work but also the overarching framework that defines it. One clearly sees that what is at stake in the work of Athanasius is not simply a development and a defense of right understanding concerning God for its own sake, but an abiding belief in the fact that such a form of right understanding is inextricable from the relationship God and humanity share. Whereas the church

is indebted to Athanasius for this contribution, Anatolios is to be commended for renewing the church’s awareness of its significance for its very life and work.

Todd C. Ream Indiana Wesleyan University Marion, Indiana

Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, xv + 334pp. £40.00 hb.; £16.99 pb.

In 1937 Karl Rahner wrote that out of the ‘ultimate attitude’of Ignatian indifference ‘there springs of itself the perpetual readiness to hear a new call from God to tasks other than those previously engaged in, continually to decamp from those fields where one wanted to find God and to serve him... the courage to regard no way to God as being the way, but rather to seek God on all ways’(‘Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World’, Theological Investigations 3, p. 291). It is precisely the practitioner of this spiritual exercise who emerges on almost every page of the nineteen essays in this Companion. The editors, Declan Marmion, Lecturer in Systematic Theology in Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology in Dublin, and Mary E. Hines, Professor of Theology in the Religious Studies Department at Emmanuel College in Boston, claim to have imposed no unified vision upon the essays (p. 10). We can nevertheless assume that Rahner scholars have reached a new consensus, at least among those assembled here: Rahner is best read in light of his Ignatian spirituality, or, perhaps more accurately, his mystagogy, which ever avoids the definitive grasp of God, self and world. This postmodern and liberationist portrayal of Rahner has the benefit of being truer to the overall thrust of his life’s work, and the added advantage of appearing more provocative to a searching student audience.

Prior to the editorial introduction, the reader first encounters a Rahner bio followed by three pages of an equally useful glossary of terms (pp. xii–xv). Nonspecialists are greatly aided by such simple gestures. Marmion and Hines then introduce the essays with a quote from Rahner’s Prayers for a Lifetime, thus inaugurating one of the recurrent themes of the Companion: ‘God with us’. The reader also becomes quickly privy to the varied reception of Rahner’s Werke

The essays are then broken into four parts. Part 1 is entitled ‘Spiritual, Philosophical, and Theological Roots’. Harvey D. Egan of Boston College first presents Rahner as a ‘sapiential theologian’, a title he argues most aptly captures the ‘indissoluble marriage of theology and spirituality which runs throughout almost all the Rahnerian enterprise’(p. 13). Chapter 2, ‘Rahner’s transcendental project’, places the reader in the able hands of Stanford’s Thomas Sheehan, who offers a reading of Geist in Welt (1939). He charts the transition from the categories associated with being (ens) to those associated with meaning in order to show that Rahner’s type of transcendental philosophy is concerned not simply with the subject,

but with the very relatedness of subject and object (p. 32). Stephen J. Duffy at Loyola, New Orleans, ends Part 1 with ‘Experience of grace’, a rapid-fire excursion through divine self-communication, the supernatural existential, graced humanity, the relationship between nature and grace, anonymous Christianity, and, with a nod to Kant, the ‘crooked timber’of humanity! Duffy’s treatment contains helpful hints and catchy phrases (‘the murkiness of self-reflection’, p. 56), but a non-specialist might leave the de Lubac–Rahner relation, for instance, somewhat befuddled. One would have to know the debate rather well to sort out who is supposed to be saying what.

‘Theological Investigations’is the title of Part 2 and it comprises the largest number of essays (eight in total). Harvard’s Francis Schüssler Fiorenza first addresses various critiques of Rahner’s method, for example, that it is foundationalist, that it neglects the historical and specific, and that it is insufficiently political. He proposes that Rahner not be interpreted primarily as a philosophical epistemologist, but in light of his concrete writings in theology and the church, their diverse literary forms, and their ad-hoc rhetorical situations (p. 68). Daniel Donovan, Professor Emeritus of Theology at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, turns next to revelation and faith, ending with a similar emphasis by way of Rahner’s polemic against extrinsicism and the understanding of faith as the whole person’s response to God’s self-communication, whether consciously or anonymously achieved. Any teachers interested in another sketch of Rahner’s The Trinity ought to consider the next essay by David Coffey of Marquette; it is short and clarifies important terms for beginners approaching this doctrine. Roman A. Siebenrock, director of the Karl Rahner archives in Innsbruck, then puts forth an historical sketch of Rahner’s development of a Chalcedonian, Ignatian ‘pattern’for Christology and usefully supplies the reader with a schematic representation of his findings (p. 123). The topics of ecclesiology and ecumenism follow on from the pen of Richard Lennan at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, who assesses that the fruitfulness of Rahner’s ecclesiology derives from his insight that the church exists as the symbol of the Holy Spirit, thus permitting an emphasis upon unity and catholicity neither paternalistic nor diffuse, but centred on the communio of conversion to Christ (p. 140). Jerry T. Farmer of Xavier University, New Orleans, delves into ministry and worship from various essays written by Rahner on the pastoral task, in order to argue positively for Rahner’s openness to the development of ministerial offices in the church (p. 154). Thereon Brian Linnane (recently elected president of Loyola College, Baltimore in Maryland) presents Rahner’s ethics from within the Ignatian framework of election so that the Rahnerian concept of ‘choice’is properly situated within a dual response to oneself and to God’s call, and not simply reduced to the postEnlightenment understanding that freedom is the capacity to select among various objects of equal value. Linnane then argues for the retention and furtherance of the ‘fundamental option’for Christian ethics. Finally, Georgetown University’s Peter C. Phan ends this section with a masterful essay on eschatology. Criticisms are noted (e.g., Rahner’s concepts of freedom and time prove troublesome for recovering an authentically biblical doctrine of the ‘Last Things’). Yet he characteristically leaves

the reader curious. The inclusion of a ‘futuorologist’creedal statement in Rahner’s Grundkurs usefully presents human persons as essentially eschatological beings on a journey into God’s eternal, trinitarian life, an insight, Phan argues, which is propitious for furthering interreligious dialogue (p. 190).

Part 3, ‘Conversations Ongoing’, is a smorgasbord of essays aimed at displaying the disparate theological schools which still creatively engage with Rahner. Michael Purcell of Edinburgh University chimes in first on behalf of a postmodernism inspired by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. He uses Blanchot’s concept of the fragment as a foil for reading Rahner as one who emphasizes discontinuity and particularity in order to critique ‘symphonic’views of the world. Additionally, the ‘other’is said to provoke the excessus-movement of the subject beyond itself. Nicholas Adams, also at Edinburgh, then arranges reflections on ‘Rahner’s reception in twentieth century Protestant theology’in lieu of George Lindbeck’s work. So although this may be a rather limited perspective, it is nevertheless another example of a brief comparative study helpful for educators due to its clever distillation of Lindbeck’s arguments. The reader next encounters the presentation by Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, based at the University of Wales (Lampeter), of a Rahnerian theological aesthetics: the validity of approaching the arts as loci theologici is here grounded in God’s radical self-communication to all persons (at least as offer). Jeannine Hill Fletcher of Fordham University in New York City follows with an examination of religious diversity and her enquiry into what we can learn from Rahner’s comments on religious pluralism. Her answer? Christians can profitably apply the term ‘anonymous Christian’to other religious persons provided the purpose is principally self-critique promoting dialogue and not a platitudinous dismissal of otherness. Gaspar Martinez from the Diocesan Institute of Theology and Pastoral Studies in Bilbao, Spain, focuses attention primarily on Johann Baptist Metz and Gustavo Guitiérrez in order to highlight Rahner’s decisive influence upon them as well as their developed critiques of his shortcomings. Martinez weaves a narrative of the decline and fall of Rahner on historical, economic and social matters, yet he concludes by noting an unexpected convergence of the different approaches of political, liberation and transcendental theology: awareness that the hiddenness and incomprehensibility of God drives the theological enterprise. Nancy A. Dallavalle of Fairfield University (Connecticut) concludes this section with a look at feminist theologies. Though she notes that Karl Rahner was no feminist, Dallavalle rightly argues that he nevertheless proved to be a rich resource for Catholic feminists with his ‘twin expositions of the hearer of the word and the mystery of God, his searching method, and, perhaps most importantly, his insistence that these ground a dynamic re-framing of the Christian, and particularly the Roman Catholic, tradition’(p. 264). The mystery of ‘God-with-us’appears here, and often throughout this section, as a principal Rahnerian resource worth exploring in greater depth (p. 276).

Part 4, ‘Retrospect and Prospect’, consists of two essays. The prospect is by Philip Endean, the retrospect by Rahner himself. Endean, of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford, asks whether Rahnerian theology has a future. He summarizes his point in terms of what Chesterton once said about Christianity: ‘It is not that

Rahner’s theology has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and therefore not really tried’(p. 282). Endean is no triumphalist but proceeds with welcome sobriety and does not shy away from the problems associated with using Rahner for the future. In fact, it might prove instructive for some to begin here and test the essays against Endean’s proposals. Rahner’s ‘Experiences of a Catholic theologian’, an address given at a conference celebrating his 80th birthday, ends this section. It is followed by an appendix meant to serve as a readers’guide for students first encountering Rahner’s theology.

There is much to argue with in this book, which makes it particularly useful for the classroom. The editors clearly know their student audience and ought to be commended for providing us with essays that strike the proper balance between instruction and suggestion.

Cyrus P. Olsen

Regent’s Park College Oxford

David F. Ford, Ben Quash and Janet Martin Soskice, eds., Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, xvii + 230pp. £48.00

This book arises from two sources: the Cambridge Divinity School’s concerns with the study of different world religious traditions (which has received such driving force under David Ford’s leadership) and the influence of Nicholas Lash within that School, to whom the book is dedicated. Ford sees Lash’s ‘The Beginning and the End of Religion’as ‘offering the historical, philosophical and theological rationale for the claim that in university settings both Theology and Religious Studies flourish best together’(p. xvii). This claim, one of Ford’s major themes in his inaugural lecture in Cambridge back in 1992, is both contentious and stimulating and the essays can be seen, in part, as interventions on this matter. It is safe to say that there is no unanimity, although the general drift of the essays might seem to support the contention. The question thus addressed in this volume is: ‘How is the study of theology and religions in higher education to be shaped in the coming century?’ (Ford, p. xiii).

For readers of this journal who might be intellectually more concerned with the nature of ‘theology’, the book is particularly fruitful, for most of the writers are Christian theologians or historians, with three exceptions. However, for readers from the ‘religious studies’angle, apart from Gavin Flood (and to some extent, Sarah Coakley), there is very little real engagement with the complex and heated debates going on within that discipline. This weakens the project. But there is both a theoretical and performative aspect to the book’s strength: the first part discusses the theoretical issues surrounding the two disciplines, and the second and third exemplify the fruitfulness of this multi-disciplined conversation (with a lovely exception).

Part 1, ‘The End of the Enlightenment’s Neutral Ground’contains four excellent essays from Michael J. Buckley SJ, Denys Turner, Sarah Coakley and Gavin Flood. They certainly agree on one thing – the disciplines need to move on from the dominant assumptions of modernity regarding neutrality in the study of ‘religion’–but that’s where their agreement ends. One consistent problem is that there are no commonly agreed definitions of what ‘theology’and ‘religious studies’denote –compare Julius Lipner who argues that confessional theology has no place in the academy and Turner who thinks that religious studies is incoherent and rationally argumentative confessional theology is all one can do in the academy.

The two essays that most rigorously challenge the picture of the harmonious interaction between these two disciplines are Buckley’s and Turner’s contributions. Buckley brilliantly traces the origins of the scientific study of religion (recall his book on the origins of atheism) and follows Eliade in claiming 1912 a very eventful year. This was the year when five stars rose in the firmament, all of whom would crucially shape the discipline: Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Raffaele Pettazoni and Wilhelm Schmidt. Thus a great reversal was instigated. From ‘religion’in the medieval period, understood as virtue and sanctity, focused on the proper worship of God, he traces a slow U-turn through the introduction of the sociological, psychological, ethnological and historical methods. Buckley puts it nicely: ‘Like “science” and “art”, “religion” changed from a quality of the human being or of a community to a territory of particular things, external things that could be studied by sciences such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and ethnology to determine a specific culture or cast of human character.’Buckley develops the plot through to the great classical atheists of the nineteenth century, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche to prompt the conclusion that perhaps what got lost between the Middle Ages and contemporary study of religion was ‘God’(p. 22). Unless this genealogy is engaged with and the study of religion challenged, Buckley’s essay casts a deep shadow over the project of this book.

Turner, with immense wit and very few footnotes, pushes this challenge even further by questioning whether ‘religious studies’or ‘religion’is even a coherent discipline or subject-matter. The nub of his critique is that however religion is defined it is either a mere stipulation, conceptually neat but empirically inadequate; or else is empirically satisfying and conceptually loose. The trajectory of the argument isn’t followed through, and as Coakley points out in a footnote in her essay, Turner nevertheless resorts to the notion of ‘faith traditions’almost immediately. But Turner’s point still stands: theology is confessional and rational, unlike a contention as to which sausages are the best, that is a matter of taste. Theology, however, is primarily concerned with questions of truth. Hence, its vital role in the university where it can critically engage in debate with other views of truth (from other ‘faith traditions’). Whether this justifies dogmatics or fundamental theology within the university is not entirely clear, but one might assume these disciplines are required if theology is able to take on this argumentative role in the public pluralist square.

Coakley wants to retain the creative frisson between the two disciplines, despite a very clear view of the difficulties highlighted by Buckley and Turner. On the one

hand she is worried about elements from American liberalism (and potentially found in Lash and Ford) which might threaten to collapse the distinctions between ‘theology’and ‘religious studies’. On the other hand she is concerned at John Milbank apparently evaporating religious studies into theology and thus robbing theology of the very tools it might use to engage with the ‘other’to find peaceful harmony. It is a finely nuanced essay and in one sense the most constructive, from a theological point of view regarding the vexed relationship between theology and religious studies.

Gavin Flood’s piece reminds us that there are those in the discipline who are not theologians but professional students of religion who see themselves as working within a ‘tradition’that is both distinct from their subject-matter (the religion being studied) and thus capable of ‘corrective readings’, both of its own religious studies tradition (post-phenomenology for Flood) and possibly, the religious tradition being studied. Flood’s argument is persuasive; its potential Achilles heel lies in the type of philosophy of consciousness to which Flood’s religious studies’is allied, but he is clearly open to this type of challenge.

If the theoretical discussion of Part 1 leaves us tied in knots, the following two parts simply gets on with the job of thinking theologically in the company of another religious tradition either thematically or in terms of a question of practice. (The section dividers in the book are not entirely appropriate, especially as one writer declares (p. 137) that what he is doing is what the previous section is entitled, and the editor calls this section by another name (p. xiv)!) Nevertheless, the fruits of these sections are richly scented, multi-coloured and very attractive. Whether they contain a poisoned apple is a matter to which I shall return. I cannot summarize all essays and all are extremely good.

In ‘Meetings on Mutual Ground’various themes and topics are explored. Rowan Williams, in a typically sensitive and eclectic manner, explores the question of God within the Abrahamic traditions in engagement with Michel de Certeau, whereby the traditional denotation of God as ‘pure act’is transcribed into de Certeau’s notion of the real always characterized by ‘lack’. Janet Martin Soskice elegantly explores the concept of friendship in Jewish and Christian sources, showing how Jewish sources can help correct imbalances within her Christian sources. This essay exemplifies the fruitful engagement of Christianity with another tradition. The Jewish tradition gets a lot of attention, not least in a key piece from Peter Ochs. Ochs, who clearly exerts a spell on a number of the contributors, outlines his project for scriptural reasoning based in this paper on an intra-Jewish debate about the relationship between the Written and Oral Torah. He follows David Halivni, rather than Jacob Neusner’s notion of a dual Torah, whereby ‘the Oral Torah reads the Written Torah, alone, but between its verses’(p. 111). This model of scriptural reasoning allows for two exercises, the first the arena of religious studies, namely, the attempt to objectively and scientifically engage with the text; the second (between the verses) is ‘theological’, the community’s relating these verses to their present situation as engaging with revelation for the survival and healing of the tradition. At times it would appear that Ochs seems to accept a modernist definition

of religious studies (that has been called into question in this volume) and grants a certain contentious autonomy to historical critical studies and other disciplines that are surely not quite as benign. Ochs is aware of this when he speaks of Halivni’s Orthodox colleagues being suspicious of Halivni’s subjection of rabbinic discourses to the methods of a non-Jewish culture. His answer seems to be that this is what the rabbinic sages have done throughout history (p. 114). I’m not so confident. I am also slightly suspicious that a tradition-specific hermeneutic is then given such a tradition-less role whereby it controls the way in which different religions might read their texts together. This is possibly a tension, rather than a problem, as Ochs seems to be aware that religions read their texts very differently, even if there is overlap in hermeneutical strategies.

The one essay that directly deals with a non-Abrahamic tradition is Julius Lipner’s. It is a passionate assault on Nygren’s assumption that agape belongs to Christianity and eros to the non-Christian. Engaged religious studies is the only way one can test such claims and Lipner has clearly tested them in regard to Hinduism (in other publications). Nygren’s case cannot survive. (It is a shame that we do not get a little more of the actual evidence, for there is a danger of this turning into an essay that belongs strictly to the first part of the book.) Lipner’s point is well made, but I wonder whether Nygren’s claim actually touches the truth claims made in orthodox Christianity regarding the truth of God’s love in Christ. It is rare to find Christian theologians today claiming that Christians are best at love or the only ones capable of selfless love, but rather that Christ is the sole norm for what the very term love might mean – which is surely another matter.

There are two essays showing the practical implications of the fruitful interplay when religions are studied seriously: in bringing about reconciliation in SouthAfrica (a fine piece by John W. de Gruchy); and on the role of religions in the public arena (by Maleiha Malik), defending a version of liberalism that facilitates and desires public religious intervention in matters of justice and peace. Two other essays merit comment. Nicholas Adams attends to the importance of argument in engaging with religions, especially when argument is at the service of wisdom. Eamon Duffy’s essay is superb, even if it is entirely misplaced in this volume, in which he argues that Jungmann’s tendentious account of liturgical development (through its acceptance at the time of Vatican II) led millions of Catholics into problematic liturgical practices. There is a response to the essays by Nicholas Adams, Oliver Davies and Ben Quash that nicely rounds off the collection. And now, to return briefly to the apple. We are offered here an undeniable rich fare which suggests the sympathetic and intelligent study of one religion by another will help both the disciplines which we use to study religions, as well as enrich the religion to which we belong (consciously only two contributors do not indicate their ‘belonging’). However, this general thesis can only be elaborated from within different religions if it is to be persuasive to adherents within each tradition, and thus requires intra and inter systematic elaboration. We do not find this in any systematic fashion in this collection. If we judge this book as a Christian elaboration of this task, it is possible to say that the fruits taste good, as found in Parts 2 and 3. But in

the beginning, there are some thickets and trees that need far more pruning before we can find a Christian theological rationale for how ‘religious studies’, both as method and subject-matter, relates to theology, if at all. This collection raises more questions than it answers, but that in itself makes it so worthwhile. Readers may also like to know that the reviewer’s Theology in the Public Square: Church, University and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) attempts to address the questions discussed here.

Gavin D’Costa University of Bristol

Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, x + 246pp. £60.00 hb.; £19.99 pb.

Theology in postmodernity has overwhelmingly adopted a moral voice against which it constantly holds up its best efforts to assess and prove their correctness and through which its finest hopes for the future come to be expressed. This book by a young theology lecturer at the University of Exeter shares in that persuasion. As a further contribution to the Challenges in Contemporary Theology series, it is written to urge a new attentiveness to silence as disclosive of the being of God and as the basis for a renewed ethics of interpersonal communication.

As a Quaker, Muers cares for the tradition of silence in the worship of God which she has inherited and which her teaching here hopes to hand on to others. And as one who is particularly sensitive to feminist critiques of the conditions for and the regulation of the power to speak, she also writes in response to a certain suspicion among women of silence and of its gender-specific cultural baggage. Muers’s theological guide in this endeavour is Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose references to silence, and whose reflections, albeit in places fragmentary, on its christological and trinitarian significance inspire her to investigate the silence of God disclosed in the person and work of Christ and most completely revealed to and encountered by us in his resurrection. The overall aim of the book is to direct us to hear God’s silence and to learn to keep it in our interpersonal relationships, in worship, and in the special work of spiritual care for others.

Muers reports in the preface that while it was handy to have a one-word answer to those who asked what her research was about, she did have to put up with some not very funny attempts to be funny about the subject of silence. At the risk of entering into this game myself, it nevertheless became more plain as I read through her text that there were things she determined to put to one side, thereby rendering silent what she might have heard there, and that these are in fact the very things that most disturb her argument both philosophically and theologically. The questions with which her two opening chapters are concerned illustrate very well the philosophical difficulties, for silence here is taken to be something that can be

assessed, and this entirely on pragmatic grounds, on grounds in other words of its usefulness. Fiumara’s investigation of the phenomenon of listening as a way of keeping silence gives the lead here. For Fiumara herself writes of the ‘function’and the ‘strategies’of listening, of how it works to break down personal defences and put the one who listens into a receptive frame of mind, of how it produces a renunciation of self and an openness to what is different or new, and finally how it becomes then ‘a very fertile way of relating’to others. All of this suggests a framework according to which silences can be measured as effective, correct and fruitful in moral terms.

Such an approach to the subject of silence relies upon an assumption of the human being as itself a subject, a self, an ego, ‘one who’reflects and acts, speaks and keeps silence, determines and evaluates, and above all ‘one who’uses language with intention and who can decide to be or not to be silent, ‘one who’communicates. So it is significant that Muers does not attend to what is said in social constructionist feminism about the appearance and determination of subjects, not in their characteristics only but in their essential being-as-subjects, and firmly sets aside the work of Judith Butler on this matter as in some way beyond the pale of what Muers herself wants to show. (Her note on p. 40 is indicative.) While at first I was prepared to think that many of Muers’s own assertions, ‘I claim’, ‘I privilege’, ‘I am using’, and so on, are efforts of a research student quite properly to find an authorial voice, they reflect I think a deeper and more pervasive phenomenon of intensification of the will of subjects to determine and make effective what is said in the saying of it.

What is missed here is that it is words that speak and that fall silent, not the agents who use them, for words themselves fall dead on the ground or uplift the soul whatever intentions of the speaker may accompany them. It is language itself that communicates and bears forth meaning entirely in excess of what any one individual might wish or grasp. And because there is in speaking both the said and the unsaid, persons come to be formed in the midst of an already ongoing discourse and learn their way around it. Language makes the space in which we come to be, not the other way around. We find ourselves speaking and listening, for these are of the essence of distinctly human being and thus we are brought into being and become disclosed to ourselves. So the question of ‘who speaks’is already a secondary issue, derivative of the phenomena of speech and of silence rather than the source of their power or correct use. Thus I am not persuaded that the question, ‘Who keeps silence?’has to be ‘central to the treatment of silence in the theological ethics of communication’(p. 10). To claim so is already not to hear what is going on in the claim itself.

That Muers’s argument also presents theological difficulties follows on from this. Her attempts to draw upon Bonhoeffer are constrained by this same assumption of an agent subject who uses language to communicate. Bernd Wannenwetsch is one theologian at least who has argued that Bonhoeffer is not so much concerned with the question of ‘who’does or does not do what, but rather with the question of ‘how’, of the manner of a doing or not doing, or indeed of an undoing, so that to press him into the cause of this kind of ethics is to mishear him. Wannenwetsch suggests that

The author 2006

the prevailing Niebuhrian emphasis on ‘the responsible self’has displaced Bonhoeffer’s own primary concern for ‘responsible living’, which is altogether a different subject. And in turning towards the manner of living as the central phenomenon of discipleship, the self – its identity and its standpoint – the self-initself is no longer found to be of the essence. No doubt there is a fuller debate to be had here amongst scholars of Bonhoeffer.

The central theological concern I would raise is that with which I began this review. Afamiliar pattern of argument in theological ethics is to begin with what is claimed to be the right understanding of the nature and being of God and then to move on to consider the implications and application of this knowledge in the disciplines of the self and of selves together. Two things only can be said about this in the space remaining here. First, that this way of thinking, this logic of Christian ethics, has developed through time, has been given a particular shape and significance by Leibniz and later in German idealism, and has today become notably troubled in consequence of Nietzsche. Bonhoeffer was well aware of his own work as a further development within this tradition and to learn from him is to find one’s way through it too. Asking about what is happening in theological ethics in our time is one way of attending to what is said and unsaid within this discipline, and it is this deeper reflective exercise that I would encourage Muers to embark upon.

Her book follows the familiar pattern, taking it for granted and without question, so her argument too hinges on being able to make the transition from God’s ‘is’to our ‘ought’. She finds the middle term in silence, especially in God’s silence in the resurrection of Christ. Her scriptural exegesis suggests that this resurrection silence is twofold, telling us first something about the being of God as the silent One and then asking of us that we too ‘keep God’s silence’. The unfortunate resonance of ‘hearing with God’s ears’, to which Muers exhorts us, with ‘having a God’s-eye view of things’, a grand all-encompassing perspective to which endless postmodern critiques have alerted us, draws attention to the difficulty here. Not only does it make her argument sound very much like an attempt to trump the critique with a better way of claiming the same thing, namely to know how it really is with God, and her reliance upon a correspondence theory of truth doesn’t help her here (see esp. p. 212). It also reveals her fundamental drive, throughout this chapter and its exploration of Bonhoeffer’s Christology, to make claims about who God is in order that the moral consequences of this knowledge for human behaviour can be determined or made to serve as the basis for specifying a way of life.

Yet this surely is to miss the essentially performative character of scriptural rhetoric. It comes to us as proclamation. It is proclaimed in worship and in prayer and in that way is formative of a people. For its proclamation of this mysterious event of the resurrection of the Lord is itself event-ual, which means that in the saying of what has happened what has happened becomes a real possibility for the hearer as the words of the speaker perform it. There is simply nothing to be said about what it speaks of. The hearer finds herself brought before a happening, drawn by what is disclosed there and pulled into its texture, just as the speaker puts herself

entirely into the service of that which she would never be able to say or devise of her own accord. To listen at this point is not to pick up any new knowledge but is already to comport oneself to that which is proclaimed as the words are planted in the soul, and so it is for oneself in one’s own manner of being to become the place where this event happens. The theologian is under a most peculiar demand at this point, for remaining true to what scripture proclaims and what faith knows is at once to decline any proof of correct knowledge and at the same time to be utterly vulnerable to what one is overcome by, and in this, no good or bad behaviour is at all determinative. Is it time for theologians to enter again into what is of the very essence of the Gospel?

One final comment. As this author seems to be at ease in the use and citation of German texts, it would make for a finer scholarly presentation to have full quotations in the original languages, and for Muers herself to give her own translations of these, especially as this would be performative of the particular manner of her listening. No doubt this will put additional strains on the copy-editing and publishing process, evidence for which in this book is the number of spelling mistakes in both German and Greek and the absence of accents and breathings in the Greek for which there is no longer any technical excuse. In the world of international scholarship and debate, this is surely no time for theologians to abandon the best practices of serious academic publication.

Susan F. Parsons Nottingham

Heather Eaton, Introducing Ecofeminist Theologies. London: T. & T. Clark International, 2005, 137pp. £19.99

The very magnitude of the ecological crisis and what might be contributing to it, Heather Eaton points out, raise enormous questions about our worldviews, methods and assumptions. While ecofeminism is now established as a discipline it requires deep searching, if not convincing answers, of traditions (including theology) because of its a priori and radical stance for women and the natural world. Thus what exactly has been going on in ecofeminism needs clear articulation and a certain amount of order imposed in it, something which Eaton has delivered in this book. The reader senses that Eaton appreciates the value and potential of ecofeminism but longs for it to become more coherent and effective.

Resisting temptations to oversimplify, Eaton delineates the complexities of a movement that has a variety of sources, inspirations and expressions. She suggests the image of a busy traffic intersection or roundabout with ‘many roads coming in and out where one meets academics and activists, environmentalists and feminists, religious and non-religious types, and local and international groups’. She begins with an overview of ecofeminism and its development from a beginning in the 1970s

and 80s through to the present. She then sets out ecofeminism’s main theoretical constituents, carefully outlining the links between the domination of nature and the domination of women. She gives examples of the numerous ecofeminist practices and expressions. She then takes a broad view of the ecological crisis in relation to women. Later the perspective is narrowed to the ecological challenge to theology, including a discussion of ecofeminist theology itself. She isolates two examples to examine in greater depth. These are the use and role of science in some ecofeminist theologies, and ecofeminist connections with liberation theories and theologies. She ends with some challenges of her own to ecofeminist theology, stressing that this is in order to make it more ‘compelling, nuanced and transformative’.

Eaton defines ecofeminism as ‘an insight, an exposition of current problems and an eco-political strategy’. Ecofeminists address topics such as militarism, biotechnology, economic globalization, and the abuse of the earth’s resources in an attempt to unmask the implicit values hidden in past and present world views; for example, they assess the emergence of patriarchy and the origins of domination. For Eaton, one of the most significantdiscoveries of ecofeminism is that domination, as a mode of relating, is pervasive in many cultures and is represented in social patterns the world over. The characteristics of domination and the explicit links between the domination of women and nature are thus worked over by ecofeminists. For example misogyny, hierarchy, dualistic thinking and anthropocentrism are exposed and disputed. Within her analysis of ecofeminism she includes the contributions of various ecofeminist theologians, particularly those that have turned their attention to sources of the domination of nature within patriarchal Christianity.

Eaton reviews some of the contested ground, such as the clash between ecofeminists who assert that the women–nature link should be deconstructed and challenged and those who call for its reclamation and celebration. An important distinction that Eaton makes is between the empirical approach, based on daily material and lived experiences of women, and cultural-symbolic approaches, as in ecofeminist theory. Classically, in ecofeminist history, those working at a theoretical level were criticized for ignoring the severe realities of women in impoverished or powerless circumstances. Eaton concludes that at times ecofeminist theory is genuinely helpful in exposing an issue and is therefore transformative, but at others its inadequacies, particularly when faced with entrenched global issues such as corporate globalization, are all too evident.

One of her aims is to understand ecofeminism’s significance, contribution and challenge to theology. Eaton tackles the complexities of Christianity’s encounter with women and nature, what she terms its ‘degrading legacy’and its ‘liberatory potential’. She begins her discussion of the impact of the ecological crisis on theology with the view that a crisis of this magnitude, and ‘with such enigmatic causes within human ideologies and worldviews, has never existed previously’. Thus the usual starting-points for theology such as scriptural texts, doctrines, symbols and ethics are, in her opinion, ‘insufficient to deal with this level of crisis’. Existing frameworks are inadequate because they have their origins in the complex

inheritance of Western thought. While the challenge of feminism to Christianity has been massive, the challenge of ecofeminism is even greater.

Ecofeminism, she points out, is often more radical than other voices in ecotheology due to its prior rejection of hierarchical dualisms and its deep probing and methods of analysis. When ecofeminism encounters theology there are ‘no facile rearrangements’and ‘no straightforward solutions’to developing ecofeminist theologies. This is because ‘core issues are raised’, such as questions of truth, dialogue partners and epistemology. Whilst it is true that such questions are prevalent concerns in other contemporary theologies, one gets the sense from this book that the reality of ecological collapse and the maltreatment of women leaves theology straining in its authenticity.

This is why the small but steadily increasing voices of ecofeminist theologians are significant. Women such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, Anne Primavesi, Elizabeth Johnson, Catherine Keller, Dorothee Soelle, Mary Grey, Anne Clifford, Ivone Gebara and Aruna Gnanadason, and a few men, bring ecofeminist analysis to bear on religious histories, systematic theologies, scriptural interpretations, spiritualities and ethics.

Whilst it is true that the writings these women have produced have much to say to theology, they remain in a minority and there is always the possibility that they will not be heard. This raises the question of how many works are needed before the minority impacts sufficiently on the majority. In other words, what changes in the climate of a discipline have to take place before significant shifts are made? How many universities, theological or Bible colleges make space on the curriculum for ecofeminism or ecofeminist theologies? What would have to happen for them to do so? One aspect Eaton does not explore is possible opposition to ecofeminist theologies. Though she admits that much more could be presented in her chapter on ecofeminist theologies, this was the one section that feels rather thin, given its pivotal role in the book.

Her suggestions for improving ecofeminism form a strong section of the book. It is clear that these come from a long process of reflection and teaching on the subject and are borne out of a respect for it. Eaton concludes with a plea for more knowledge, more awareness about ecofeminism itself and about the ecological crisis, the science and religion interface, the theory and praxis dialectic. She appeals for a thoroughgoing element of critique and a thorough engagement with epistemological concerns. There is also a fervent call for religious thinkers to be politically and socially engaged, and to be realistic about the reality of many women’s lives and the state of the earth. She makes a particularly poignant point about water being continually declared sacred in Christian liturgies whilst the actual state of clean water provision globally is appalling.

The potential of ecofeminism and its possible transformation of theology clearly drive Eaton. How far it is allowed to be effective is a question for the wider theological community. Ecofeminism has far-reaching implications beyond this book’s status as an introduction to the subject. It should be read widely by

students and theologians and not just by those who have a special interest in the subject.

Lucy Larkin Adelaide, Australia

William Placher, ed., Essentials of Christian Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, 416pp. $20.00

William Placher’s Essentials of Christian Theology is a textbook for Christian theology pitched at first year students of theology. It adds to just a small handful of books on the market designed for this purpose. Placher’s approach is a novel one. He has assembled an impressive and diverse array of scholars to write essays in response to nine basic questions of theology. Following an Introduction from Placher himself entitled ‘Why Bother with Theology?’, two scholars have been invited to respond to each of the nine questions: How do we know what we believe? (Revelation and Authority); What do we mean by ‘God’? (The Doctrine of God); Is God in charge? (Creation and Providence); What’s wrong with us? (Human nature and human sin); How does Jesus make a difference? (The person and work of Jesus Christ); Why bother with the church? (The church and its worship); How should we live? (The Christian life); What about Them? (Christians and non-Christians); Where are we going? (Eschatology). Each section is preceded by an introductory essay from Placher in which the theme is outlined and a sketch given of the key landmarks in the church’s handling of this theme. These are consistently clear and helpful and serve as an excellent orientation in the subject for the target audience. Each section concludes with questions for reflection and suggestions for further reading.

As is typically the case in any anthology, the quality of the solicited essays varies. Some of them are very good indeed, and will repay study by seasoned theologians well beyond introductory level. For this reader, the essays by Stanley Grenz, Robert Jenson, Kathryn Tanner, Ellen Charry and J.A. DiNoia OP, are among those that stand out in this regard, but one or two others lack the clarity and wellstructured argumentation that is necessary both in an introductory text and, indeed, at any level. That is a technical weakness apparent in some essays. The relative merits of the theology set forth in each of the essays is another matter and one that I would expect teachers using this text to take up with their students. Critical engagement with theological texts such as are assembled here is a considerable skill that develops alongside a growing understanding of the subject-matter of theology itself. Placher and his team of essayists have provided students with a resource that, under the guidance of good teachers, will serve well in the development of such skill and understanding.

The essays collected in this volume are deliberately diverse in their theological orientation. There is no attempt to develop or promote a single theological vision. Placher sets out, rather, to represent a range of approaches to fundamental questions

of Christian faith within a broadly orthodox conception of the task and subject matter of theology. Commenting in his ‘Introduction’on the diversity of approaches, Placher advises that ‘some readers will probably like best the essays you most dislike’(p. 5). That is undoubtedly true and readers will, accordingly, form their own views on the theological merits of the individual essays. I will resist extensive comment on this matter but permit myself a couple of brief observations. It is disappointing to find in a collection such as this insufficient attention to hard-won theological advances made in the tradition, and, elsewhere, the misrepresentation of the views of others. An instance of the former occurs in David Cunningham’s account of the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit in which it is claimed, ‘First God produces God...In addition, God produces the world’(p. 81). The surrounding qualifications don’t sufficiently recognize, in my view, the care theologians have generally taken to deny that the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are the same kind of thing as the creation of the world. The distinction set out in the credal claim that the Son is ‘begotten not made’surely warranted Cunningham’s attention in this context.

A similar failure to recognize the ontological distinction between God and the created order is apparent in Sallie McFague’s promotion of the view that Christians should understand the world as God’s body.Acitation fromAugustine’s Confessions is adduced in support of this pantheistic model, but mistakenly so, for in confessing that God is present in all things, Augustine is by no means suggesting, as McFague supposes, that God is all things (pp. 109–10). First year theology students, I hope, will readily spot this misrepresentation of Augustine’s views.

There are one or two oddities about the book. The blurb on the back claims that it presents ‘two dialoguing essays on each of nine foremost theological questions’, but in fact there is no dialogue. None of the essays shows any awareness of its partner essay in each section. This doesn’t constitute a weakness necessarily; it just means that the book isn’t quite what it presents itself to be. Or again, Placher identifies in his opening chapter ‘five factors that shape the doing of Christian theology in North America at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Among these are ‘the Barthian challenge’. Barth’s theology is indeed a factor of growing importance in contemporary North American theology but there is not much sign of it in this book. Neither of the two opening chapters on ‘Revelation andAuthority’and ‘The Doctrine of God’respectively, mention Barth. Surely it is in respect of these themes, above all, that his challenge ought to be reckoned with. Nothing thus far discussed in the book, therefore, has equipped the student to reflect on the question Placher poses at the conclusion of chapter 1, namely, ‘What is “natural theology”? What did Barth identify as its dangers?...’ (p. 48). Nor do any of Placher’s suggestions for further reading offer any guidance for students who may be interested in pursuing the question.

Despite weaknesses and some oddities of this nature, Essentials of Christian Theology is a book that could be employed very fruitfully in the course of theological study. Placher’s own introductions to the thematic chapters are consistently of a high standard, and the majority of essays provide thought-provoking and clear discussions

of the theme in question. No single source is ever likely to suffice in a first year theology class, but this volume is worth inclusion among the books that students might be encouraged to read. It will serve best, I suggest, when teachers encourage and guide students toward critical engagement with the views advanced therein.

Murray A. Rae University of Otago

Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004, 345pp. $32.99

This volume pursues several distinct arguments, some of which may not appear immediately to cohere too readily with others. Dr Zimmermann teaches English, German, literary theory and hermeneutics at Trinity Western University, but his fundamental thesis is one of Christian theology. He writes: ‘Hermeneutics is all about self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is impossible without knowledge of God. This, in short, is the main argument of this book’(p. 7). ‘The main goal of interpretation before the Enlightenment was communion with God’(p. 18). In particular, for John Calvin, ‘the whole purpose of reading scripture is the restoration of our humanity to the fullness of the image of God in us’(p. 33).

The best and least controversial part of this volume is the author’s careful rehabilitation of the nature and goals of biblical interpretation formulated in the pre-modern or pre-Enlightenment era, by Luther, Calvin and Puritan and Pietist exponents of interpretation. He shows convincingly that Luther and Calvin approached hermeneutical issues with a greater depth and subtlety than is often recognized, although this claim is marginally marred by an over-insistent and arguably dated over-drawing of a distinction between ‘Hebrew’and ‘Greek’ traditions of conceptualities. Only some examples of ‘Greek’thinking were explicitly Aristotelian or Platonist, just as ‘Hebrew’thinking was multiform rather than unitary. Zimmerman uses standard secondary sources on Luther and Calvin (for example David Steinmetz and Richard Muller), which is perhaps more impressive than his more selective if not minimal use of theological writers on hermeneutical theory. His exposition of Flacius and Puritan ‘relational epistemology’deserve careful study, together with their emphasis on the heart, and ‘walking’in communion with God. He adds a constructive and distinctive discussion of Philipp Jacob Spener andAugust Hermann Francke, in which Spener’s model of interpretation is described as text-to-action under the broader heading ‘Understanding Is Application’(p. 110; cf. pp. 119–32).

Part 2, ‘The Silencing of the Word’(pp. 135–273) embodies two main theses that may appear to stand in tension with each other. An attempt to ‘re-read’ the history of hermeneutics from Kant through Schleiermacher to Heidegger and

Gadamer largely rests on the thesis formulated in the Introduction that ‘philosophical hermeneutics suffers from the illusion that secularisation is a purely positive development because it does away with the pre-modern universe and allows for an interpretive approach... without reference to God’(p. 18). In particular this is bound up with a partly negative reading of Schleiermacher that to my mind remains open to serious question.

Zimmermann traces the downward slope first, understandably, from Kant, where his diagnosis that Kant exchanges a living relation to God for moralism carries conviction. However in criticizing Schleiermacher’s notion of the ‘universality’of hermeneutics Zimmermann seems largely to miss Schleiermacher’s main point that this signals a move from hermeneutics as an instrumental discipline to test interpretation retrospectively to a transcendental discipline to establish conditions for the possibility of understanding. The word ‘universal’does not denote an attempt to imperialize theology under hermeneutics. Indeed Zimmermann’s selection of quotations from Barth that disparage Schleiermacher on ‘proclamation’(e.g. p. 156) may tempt us to forget Barth’s admiration for Schleiermacher as one for whom preaching was his ‘proper office’or vocation, as well as Schleiermacher’s view of Christian proclamation from the pulpit Sunday by Sunday as ‘striking up the music’ or kindling fire in the heart. Did Schleiermacher really sacrifice ‘genuinely relational categories’(p. 146), when he saw religion as a matter of personal relationship with God? Did he actually encourage ‘an authoritative stance toward the text’(p. 157)? Is it true that ‘he pursued Dilthey’s dream of establishing a universal basis for both human and natural science’(p. 146)? Zimmerman acknowledges that this polemic does not have the last word: ‘It is wrong to view Schleiermacher as an intentionally secularising thinker’(p. 146). Schleiermacher anticipated Gadamer in the shaping power of language and even historically effected consciousness (p. 158). At the same time ‘the interpreter’s superiority over the text’emerged ‘under the guise of neutrality’and this became the ethos of ‘Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing’(p. 152). In view of many specific observations from both Schleiermacher and Bultmann about subjectivity and pre-understanding, some readers will find this statement incredible.

After all this we might expect a damning account of ‘philosophical hermeneutics’after Schleiermacher. Yet this is not what we find. The thought of Heidegger and Gadamer ‘contains resources for a workable theory of interpretation’ (p. 160). Zimmermann writes, ‘Gadamer is a helpful ally in recovering theological hermeneutics’(p. 161). Gadamer’s ‘fundamental insight’is ‘the universality of hermeneutics’(p. 161). Here we encounter a range of affirmations that many theological and Christian writers on philosophical hermeneutics would affirm without hesitation. He rightly observes, ‘Theology must historicize the intellectual horizon within which it operates’(pp. 164–5). ‘Disembodied’knowledge relates to an idolatrous desire for independent knowledge. Gadamer offers a critique of Cartesian abstraction, of Enlightenment rationalism, and modernist individualism. ‘We can learn much from Gadamer. His philosophical hermeneutics presents the best possible starting-point for a recovery of theological hermeneutics’(p. 179).

Why does Zimmermann seem to think that such claims will be resisted among theological writers, especially those in an evangelical tradition? Why does he appear to reject philosophical hermeneutics as ‘secular’while making such positive comments about Gadamer as a resource? I suggest that there may be several reasons.

1.He seems unaware of a growing stream of writing on philosophical hermeneutics from Christian, theological and broadly evangelical authors. He never mentions, as far as I can see, Vanhoozer, Wolterstorff, Lundin, Osborne, Thiselton, Bartholomew, or Stiver, to cite seven. He does not mention or engage with the Roman Catholic Pontifical Biblical Commission’s The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994), which warmly commends philosophical hermeneutics.

2.The argument seems to me to embody what Gilbert Ryle called a ‘category mistake’. Why is reading the Bible to nurture communion with God a supposed alternative to hermeneutics after Schleiermacher? Why is it only the Reformers, Puritans and Pietists who perceived ‘Understanding as Application’when the later Wittgenstein, as well as Gadamer, expound this theme so incisively as part of their philosophy of language and meaning?

3.Since he rightly sees that hermeneutics deals in historical particularities, why does he reify abstractions so regularly in such generalizing abstract assertions as ‘Theology laments... Philosophy has eagerly welcomed...’ (p. 157), or ‘Philosophical hermeneutics suffers from the illusion that...’ (p. 18). I try to encourage my students to avoid such statements as ‘Theology says.. .’, or ‘Science says.. .’, and to specify what exponents within what specific traditions are under discussion. Shorthand may have a place, but only after we have made such particularities clear. Here we are never entirely certain which brand of philosophy is being ground under the heel of a theological writer.

Nevertheless this book deserves a review that ends on a note of commendation and, albeit with serious provisos, warm appreciation. There are thoughtful and incisive chapters on the contributions to these issues of Levinas and Bonhoeffer, and a constructive emphasis on embodiment or ‘incarnational’hermeneutics. We might have hoped to see something on Wittgenstein or on Käsemann in this context of embodied public domain. But the point is nonetheless crucial and well made. There is much here that deserves attention and that stimulates thought. The chapters on the Reformation, Puritans and Pietists well repay study and redress a balance. Apart from the attempt to re-read the history of hermeneutics after Schleiermacher, those on Gadamer, Levinas and Bonhoeffer are also helpful and constructive.

Anthony C. Thiselton University of Nottingham and University of Chester

Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland, eds., Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005, xiv + 309pp. and CD-ROM, $30.00

Tyron Inbody, The Faith of the Christian Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005, xxvii + 374pp. $24.00

Jonathan R. Wilson, A Primer for Christian Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005, xv + 127pp. $10.00

Any new entrant to the crowded field of introductory textbooks in Christian theology has a job justifying its existence. The authors of each of these three new offerings from the United States argue that the necessary justification is provided by the changing needs of students. The authors of Constructive Theology suggest that they no longer find themselves teaching students who need ‘liberal and liberationist critiques of an overconfident, complacent, but well-formed faith’; rather, ‘we are required to teach our students the basics of Christian theology while at the same time trying to teach them to be creative and critical with respect to its rich and conflicted heritage’(p. 4). Tyron Inbody has found as a teacher in a theological seminary that his students today differ from those he began teaching in 1969 in being far more diverse (in gender, ethnicity, social background and denomination), in being ‘relatively traditionless’, and in having little or no liberal arts background, as well as in tending to be mature, second-career students (pp. xii–xiii). And Jonathan R. Wilson aims to provide a primer for students who can no longer be assumed to have taken in basic theological language and patterns of thought ‘around the dinner table, in church parking lots, in kitchens and on fishing boats’– not necessarily because they have grown up far from ecclesial precincts, but because ‘Today, the church seems generally to be less interested in “doctrine”’(p. xi). The books are united in their attempt, then, to introduce students to the unfamiliar basics of Christian theology, and to the still more unfamiliar practices of thinking with and beyond those basics.

The first book, Constructive Theology, is a collaborative venture by the Workshop on Constructive Christian Theology – an evolving group of theologians, earlier generations of which were responsible for the well-known 1982 textbook, Christian Theology, edited by Hodgson and King, and the 1997 Reconstructing Christian Theology, edited by Chopp, Taylor and Taylor. For its latest effort, the Workshop has expanded to include 49 authors drawn from universities and seminaries across the States (with one participant from a Canadian institution and one from a Scottish), with a concentration of five from Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. There are six chapters (God, Human Being, Sin and Evil, Jesus Christ, Church, and Spirit) each of which includes (i) a selection of quotations or sketched scenarios demonstrating how the issues of the chapter arise with urgency in real situations; (ii) an analysis of the ‘State of the Question’which

suggests various sub-themes that need investigation; (iii) a historical survey of the doctrine in question; and (iv) a range of ‘Constructive Proposals’by individual authors, sketching particular trajectories that constructive theology might take through this material. The book finishes with a glossary, and the whole thing is –somewhat superfluously? – available in electronic, searchable form on the accompanying CD-ROM.

‘As theologians’, the editors say, ‘we are committed to speaking boldly about a faith we passionately hold; as scholars and activists we remain aware of the complexity, multiplicity and indeterminacy of our project and its claims’(p. 1); their aim is to enable students to write ‘new scripts for the deep wisdoms’that they find in their faith (p. 2) – charting pathways through beliefs that are ‘so fluid, incoherent and often inarticulate [that] they are almost impossible to pin down and then precisely map out’. Constructive theology, they say, aims to ‘impose calculable form upon a messy, indeterminate terrain and thereby impose enough order that we can reflect on it’(p. 12).

Although the co-authored sections of the chapters differ considerably, and the individual constructive proposals even more so, the dominant impression given by the book is of theologians faced by a swirling cloud of Christian symbols, narratives and practices, keeping a sharp eye out for materials with which they can build a habitable contemporary structure. There is, in other words, a pervasive voluntarism to the book, with the theological tradition providing a source of optional building materials for the theologian’s creative activity. There is little sense with too many of the authors that they feel constrained to allow their wills to be interrogated by the tradition, challenged and remade in a struggle to understand and work carefully and reparatively within it: they and their students, it seems, are to become virtuosos of the tradition, not labourers within it.

This sense is, sadly, reinforced by a representation of the tradition in the historical sections that is distinctly uneven, marred as it is by significant errors, dubious judgements and misleading claims. All too often, all that is provided is a hasty summary of all-too-familiar textbook versions of theological history – the kind of history in which, for instance, the term homoousios is thrown at students with a scant seven-word definition, and Hegel’s Christology skips past in twenty-six words.

The worst chapter is that on God, edited by Laurel Schneider. We are told that Nicaea represented the victory of Athanasius’Christology, and (implicitly) that the term homoousios was introduced at Chalcedon; Anselm’s ontological proof flashes past in five lines, and Aquinas on analogy in twelve; we are told that ‘By the end of the medieval period, revelation had superceded reason as the criterion of theology’ a fact apparently reflected in the slogan fides quaerens intellectum (p. 36); we are also told that ‘the orthodox doctrine of God did not change substantively in the Enlightenment’(p. 38). Perhaps most astonishingly, in twenty-one large format pages of historical material, the doctrine of the Trinity is dealt with in a bare and uninformative eighteen lines.

This dreadful muddle leads into muddy and unconvincing constructive proposals. Ellen Armour asks ‘what concepts of God might support practices that

we want to invite and sustain’(p. 48) – concepts that ‘are more suitable for our time’ (p. 49) – and comes up with a proposal whose connection with any aspect of the tradition presented earlier in the chapter is radically unclear. Don Compier, whose proposal finishes with some unobjectionable if unoriginal thoughts on theodicy, begins with the surprising claim that a commitment to respond to ‘the voices, the questions, and the yearnings of young adults’will allow us to ‘overcome the supposed incompatibility among theological schools such as Barthianism, correlational methods, and theologies of liberation’(p. 53). Paul Capetz, who claims to stand within the Reformed tradition because he is ‘theocentric, rather than Christocentric’(p. 62), trots out the old exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism triad and declares himself, with qualifications, a pluralist – without any hint that he is aware of the criticism which this formulation of the question has sustained. Laurel Schneider argues for dispensing with an exclusive incarnation in the male Jesus Christ, because it offends against feminist principles – again, without any suggestion that she is aware of the extended and sophisticated critical discussion that this sort of argument has received in recent years.

There are, of course, many better things in the book. The historical section in the chapter on ‘human being’, edited by Ian McFarland, draws on Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine in a genuinely thoughtful and nuanced way – using them to introduce some important central themes, while also suggesting ways in which they escape standard textbook portrayals. M. Shawn Copeland’s constructive proposal in the same chapter, which shows how thinking through the Eucharist provides grounds on which to reject racist anthropologies, is powerful and intelligent. I could also imagine using in teaching the chapter on Sin and Evil, which succeeds (to some extent despite itself) in showing how insights into freedom, desire and sin from Augustine, which at first sight might seem to leave us focused on individual transgression, can in fact be used to think through the problems of capitalism and some environmental issues – though, characteristically, the chapter eventually has to turn to Foucault for a level of serious theoretical engagement that it has been unwilling to find in the Christian tradition. None of this – nor of the other worthwhile sections – makes up for the slipshod and confused theology to be found elsewhere in the book. Those interested in a multi-author textbook in theology that shows some of the variety and creativity of American theology would be better placed turning to Essentials of Christian Theology, edited by William Placher (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

Tyron Inbody’s book, The Faith of the Christian Church, is the product of many years teaching in seminaries. It is long – 368 densely covered pages, with chapters covering prolegomena, sources, revelation, God, creation, evil, sin, Jesus, salvation, church, sacraments and eschatology. From the start, we are in very different territory from that covered in Constructive Theology: Inbody is a very careful guide, whose characteristic approach is to collect a range of apparently opposed opinions from the tradition and contemporary discussions, and then to argue for some balancing act or dialectical solution which enables the best of each option to be preserved. Inbody

produces a distinctive amalgam of process, postliberal and evangelical thinking –very different from the largely liberal and revisionist thinking behind much of Constructive Theology.

The character of the book can best be illustrated by once again looking at the chapter on God. It begins with a characteristic ‘balancing’of apparently opposed positions: ‘God is both transcendent and immanent. God is absolute and related, impersonal and personal, eternal and temporal, changeless and changing, selfsufficient and dependent’(p. 83). Inbody then moves on to a rather flat-footed presentation of apophaticism, which he rejects with the unconvincing help of Gordon Kaufman and Clark Williamson in favour of an approach which will ‘balance’ the apophatic and the cataphatic, the abstract and the concrete, the equivocal and the univocal (p. 85). As the chapter proceeds, it becomes clear that Inbody sees his task to be the construction of a ‘concept of God’– or, more fully, ‘a coherent, plausible and compelling picture of God’(p. 91) – that will be adequate to the biblical data even if it must of necessity fail to be a perfect representation of God. And there are, apparently, three main candidates for such a conceptualization: ‘classical theism’, ‘dialectical theism’and ‘Trinitarianism’. Inbody rejects classical in favour of dialectical theism, and uses the latter as a more appropriate metaphysical soil in which a healthy biblical trinitarian structure can properly be grown – that is, in his words, a structure that will allow us to do justice to the biblical witness that the living God ‘exhibits distinct centred personal ways of acting and being’ (p. 104).

There are several problems with all this. We might be dissatisfied with the rather thin account of the Trinity provided, or we might object to the idea that the theological task is to build a coherent conceptual picture of God – a theory of God, in effect – and so regret Inbody’s presentation of apophaticism as simply an abstract (and unconvincing) method for generating concepts. But a more intractable problem with Inbody’s argument is his deeply misleading invocation of that chimera, ‘classical theism’. Inbody conjures this mythical animal with the usual incantations: misleading claims about the takeover bid launched for the biblical God by Greek philosophy, funded by Philo and secured by Augustine. If we want a contemporary spokesperson who can give a clear summary definition of the whole tradition – one which, we are led to believe, fairly represents that whole Western tradition – we can turn to (of all people!) Richard Swinburne.

It is probably significant that the range of conversation partners with whom Inbody engages is very largely American. That may explain how he can describe his rejection of ‘classical theism’and adoption in its place of ‘dialectical theism’as representing something very close to a consensus in contemporary theology. This seems extremely strange from a British perspective where one of the most prominent strands in contemporary discussion is a revival of Barthian theology associated with such writers as Colin Gunton and John Webster (and well known to readers of this journal), and another is a Catholic and Anglo-Catholic strand inspired by von Balthasar, and associated with such writers as Donald MacKinnon, Herbert McCabe, Nicholas Lash and Rowan Williams. Neither strand makes any impact on Inbody’s

footnotes or lists of available options; neither would accept that ‘classical theism’ (as Inbody presents it) ever existed until critics and unwelcome friends invented it in the last couple of centuries.

Unfortunately, the rejection of ‘classical theism’is too much a constitutive structure of the book for me to be able to recommend it: students would learn from the book a very distorted picture of the pre-modern theological tradition. There is plenty of value in Inbody’s discussions, once that central error is ignored, but students would do better with the less wordy, more engaging textbook by Daniel Migliore (Faith Seeking Understanding, now in its second edition: Eerdmans, 2004) – although Inbody’s presentation is perhaps a notch or two more accessible to an evangelical audience.

Jonathan Wilson’s book is not only the shortest of the three I have been examining (125 fairly short pages), it also has the most modest ambition: to provide a book that students can read before starting a course in Christian doctrine, simply to familiarize themselves with some of the terminology and types of argument that they will be meeting, and to help them know what to look out for when reading larger works. It has chapters on the nature of theology, God, the person of Jesus Christ, the work of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, creation, humankind, sin, salvation, church, and the last things. Like Inbody’s book, it assumes that its readers will be practising Christians, seeking to understand and deepen their own faith.

If we look at the chapter on God, we find Wilson introducing the question of God’s existence, noting the debate about whether that is an appropriate place to start, briefly introducing Aquinas and Anselm and noting the debate about whether ‘proving God’s existence’was really what they were up to. He then moves on to God’s attributes, discusses the difference between communicable and incommunicable attributes and relates that to Barth’s discussion of love and of freedom, noting debates about whether the analysis of attributes discussion is the right way to proceed. He briefly discusses the via negativa, via affirmativa and via eminentia, and then moves on to discuss analogy, story and images. The chapter then moves on to the doctrine of the Trinity, with a brief historical account, a gesture towards regulative or grammatical accounts, and then brief discussions of the distinction between immanent and economic trinities, the differences between West and East, and debates about the definition of ‘person’. The chapter finishes with brief discussions of the problem of gendered language, and the impact of social location on theological construction. All this is crammed into 22 short pages, and whilst it occasionally loses clarity in its brevity (as in the gesture towards regulative accounts of trinitarian language), and whilst the account is occasionally a little flat-footed (as in its account of the via negativa), the chapter is largely very clear, readable and accurate.

Of course the simplicity of the book at times verges on the simplistic; of course some lines are rather too easily drawn, and of course there is much that I would not present quite as Wilson does. Nevertheless, as a first introduction to a wide range of topics, something to provide students with a framework that they will find

amplified, qualified and revised in their subsequent study, it is a very good little book. I will certainly be recommending it to students new to the study of theology, to read before their courses start, with fair confidence that they will not be seriously mislead.

Mike Higton University of Exeter

Mikael Stenmark,

How to Relate Science and Religion: A

Multidimensional Model. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, xx + 287pp. £18.99

Mikael Stenmark’s work on the relation between science and religion is a fine example of how scholarship should proceed amid such complexity. He refuses simplistic answers, is admirably patient with his subject matter, and diligently performs the task to which he is commissioned. He answers the central question through his construction of ‘a multidimensional matrix’, which takes account of at least four different dimensions (p. xv). First, the social dimension: people within particular historical and cultural settings practise science and religion. Therefore a proper analysis of these traditions will include a close study of their similarities and differences as social practices. The second dimension is rooted in this insight. As social practices, both science and religion have a teleological dimension. That is to say, both practices have goals, and these goals can be analysed, contrasted and closely compared. Third, and with the first two dimensions still in mind, Stenmark categorizes an epistemological dimension, the dimension in which the methods of attaining these goals are identified. Finally, the theoretical dimension: how do the products of these social practices relate to each other?

Throughout the book, Stenmark engages with both ‘sides’in the contemporary science–religion debate (roughly speaking, those who want to expand one into the territory of the other, and those who want to restrict both practices to their own designated field). By carefully charting the various alternatives, Stenmark shows thelimitedlogicalpossibilitieswithinthissituation.Inshort,scienceandreligionmay beunited,enjoyadegreeofoverlap,beseparate,orhaveonepracticeasasubsetofthe other. Stenmark identifies, illustrates and examines exhaustively each possibility within the four dimensions. This analysis is not abstract; rather Stenmark provides concrete examples of each of the possible relations. In this way, Stenmark introduces the reader to a myriad of permutations in the relation between science and religion. But complexity is not confined to the possible relations within each of the four dimensions. Stenmark introduces the notions of expansion and contraction to classify the various protagonists further. These are important concepts in the multidimensional model, allowing the social practices of science and religion to be conceptualized as dynamic and transformable. Stenmark thus resists any static conception of how the two practices really (and always) relate. Instead he brings the

limited possibilities of relation, on each and every level, into an account that is dynamically flexible and therefore durable. Using Stenmark’s model, we can say: science and religion relate like this at this particular level and time, but may relate like that at another level and time. This dynamic flexibility means that Stenmark’s model is a model that will last.

Two quick points will illustrate the strengths of this book. First, Stenmark engages with all the major players in this field. Barbour, Dawkins, van Huyssteen, Kaufman, Plantinga and others are located within the matrix, along with examples from Marxist, feminist and Islamic thinkers. In every discussion, Stenmark is adept at unpicking complex issues, often employing helpful metaphors and illustrations to establish conceptual clarity, with difficult problems defined by everyday illustrations. For example, Stenmark shows that a partisan (or un-neutral) person is different to a biased person by recounting a story about his son playing for a local football team. One week a referee fails to show up, and Stenmark is called to referee the game in question. Within this event, Stenmark wants his son’s team to win (and is therefore partisan, not neutral), but manages to do a good job at refereeing the game which is acceptable to the other team (he is unbiased ). That is to say, as a referee, Stenmark makes the odd mistake (he even fails to award a definite penalty), but these mistakes are not a result of any bias, rather they stem from simple human limitations (he was not quick enough to keep up with the play); in short, Stenmark does a good neutral job as a partisan supporter. This distinction is then introduced to various discussions within the science–religion debate. It is shown to remove various problematic misconceptions, allowing a proper perception of the relation between science and religion.

Second, and related to this particular merit, Stenmark’s patient flexibility, and his concern for precision, allow him to present a balanced and fair account, one which actually seems workable in everyday life. His discussion of human rationality illustrates this strength well. Stenmark resists any notion of ideal rationality, preferring instead to root everything in our day-to-day lives. Rationality thus becomes ‘the intelligent use of our intelligence’, with Stenmark excluding any unreasonable demand for scientific or religious practitioners to do what people realistically cannot do (p. 87). In other words, rationality becomes a matter of doing the best we can as finite creatures with limited cognitive resources and time. This everyday rationality denies excessive scepticism, qualifies evidentialism, and avoids the risk ‘of becoming epistemically paralysed’(p. 93). Stenmark instead advocates a form of presumptionism: we can believe what we believe until such time as we have good reason not to.

It is perhaps a sign of how wrong we have been that we need to rehabilitate such everyday beliefs. But, in contrast to various fundamentalisms, the whole tone of this book is good news for those of us who suspected we were reasonable (but were too afraid to ask our epistemologist friends). In both form and content, Stenmark’s book represents a fine, balanced and exhaustive survey of the relation between science and religion, but this brings us to a potential problem. Perhapsthis book is too good to be true. That is to say, what are we to make of such a balanced

survey in this day and age? Forgetting current postmodern suspicions, what can a theologian do with an account that is not theological? Aside from Stenmark’s sin of omission (in not mentioning sin), something about his exhaustive description sits uncomfortably with this reviewer. For example, Stenmark writes:

The problem is that the religion that is married to science today will be a widow tomorrow because scientific methods and theories come and go. But the religion that is divorced from science today will leave no offspring tomorrow. (p. 266)

Does this second conclusion really follow in a universe created out of nothing? Does it follow when Jesus was born of a virgin and raised from the dead? Why should a divorce from science mean sterility and barrenness for a true religion?

These theological questions bring me to my final point. Can an account of the dynamic relational dimensions within historical culture be adequate if the dynamic of creation, fall and redemption is avoided? If an account misses this complex dynamic, will it fail necessarily? Undoubtedly Stenmark does a brilliant job, but, as Albert Einstein cautioned, though everything must be made as simple as possible, it should not be made any simpler.

Lincoln Harvey King’s College, London

Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II. London: Routledge, 2003, xiv + 226pp. £20.99 pb.

Much commentary on the current cultural situation in the West is caught up in a rhetoric of crisis and of moral demand that sits heavily in the atmosphere. It may be this is a symptom of things coming to an end – faith in a redemptive politics, a millennium, modernity itself – and so is only to be expected, but the sense of distress and urgency is palpable. Something seems to have happened that renders us both suspicious and gullible at once, unable quite to believe in what nonetheless enthralls, and so we are caught between the times as it were.

In keeping with the overall aim of the Radical Orthodoxy series within which it is published, Rowland’s book presents a critique of contemporary culture especially as it is informed by modern liberalism and offers an alternative available in ‘the culture of tradition’. An appreciative but not uncritical foreword written by Fr Aidan Nichols OPsets the tone of serious investigation that Rowland undertakes in order to show the impoverishment of life besetting Western society and to suggest its remedy. Her book shares with a number of others, including popular works by secular authors such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, a sense of crisis in the optimistic spirit that inspired modern political developments and, like them, she intends to set out the firm ground on which a renewed society may be founded, a project of which St Augustine is deemed to be the forerunner.

Dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne, she describes herself as ‘part of the international Communio school of post-Conciliar Catholic theologians’. Indeed the book owes much of its inspiration to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s exposure of the ‘Battle of the Logos’(cited p. 160, no original reference given), and to others whose reception of the Second Vatican Council’s accommodation to secular assumptions has been rather less than enthusiastic. Her analysis of the aggiornamento at work in Conciliar documents is careful and nuanced, providing a glimpse of the perplexity that has affected Catholic theology ever since.

Rowland’s own work is a response to the lead given by Gaudium et spes that everyone has ‘the right to culture’(§60). She explains how two forms of reason with their accompanying principles are in contention with one another in the contemporary world, each realizing itself in a fundamentally different polity. On the one hand is secular culture ordered to a self-centred and increasingly bureaucratic and litigious liberalism; on the other is that culture centred on the work of praising God which is the liturgy of the church. Because Rowland considers the ‘human political community’to be among the things that secularity has ‘most ruined and actually denied’(p. ix), she is concerned to demonstrate the possibility for this ‘right to culture’to be made available by means of the recovery of ‘an ethos for the common good’which lies hidden in the Christian tradition (p. 165).

She proposes then a postmodern Augustinian Thomism as the constructive alternative, adding thereby a further qualifier to John Milbank’s agenda of postmodern critical Augustinianism of a few years ago, but now having to prove, and I think in the end unsuccessfully, that a correspondingly postmodern understanding of culture can be wrested out of the works of St Thomas.

She accepts with Alasdair MacIntyre a belief that the essence of the crisis of culture is ‘epistemological’, and so comes up against his formulation of the fundamental choice that is required between alternative traditions of knowledge, either Nietzsche or Aristotle. Yet Rowland hopes for more than the mere internal ‘rational coherence’of one position or other. Rather, her new intellectual construction is to be a synthesis of ideas that will guide us across this deepening rift, ‘a new and conceptually enriched scheme’that will simultaneously explain the sterility and/or incoherence of the secular way of knowing and provide the foundation for an alternative to its ethics (pp. 162–4). For Rowland, such a scheme must attend to the narrative that functions as the unifying framework of the Christian life and that must be remembered and re-enacted for that life to be sustained. Furthermore it should consider the natural law as a still valid ontology of the human person and so as a source of those universal values that contribute to the proper flourishing of human nature. From this synthesis, composed of elements excavated and revalued from the tradition, the work of reformation of culture above and beyond its liberal embodiment can proceed and the church can once again be ‘the primary source, guardian and perfector of culture within persons, institutions and entire societies’(p. 168). This renewed vision of the whole will, she asserts, provide the conceptual apparatus necessary for ‘communicating’with culture in the midst of its crisis.

Two questions remain after Rowland’s analysis and proposal. What is the nature of this choice, this decision that is presented to us? For all its ostensible reference to the culture of liberalism against which the main argument of the book is conceived, this is nonetheless a work that relies upon and commends the positing by subjects of that transcendent reality to which they will be subject, which is believed to furnish the true pattern for their lives and the measure of moral action required for its attainment. The crisis has thus been turned into another occasion for getting a firmer grip on events in order to ensure the future of the subject and for insisting upon a disciplined resolve by which this end will be attained. Does this not then repeat the politics of modernity now being played out in consequence of nihilism? It is nihilism that requires at every turn of the argument a willed determination to redraw the now-missing horizon of thought and the choice of a conceptual scheme so that life within a heavenly city may once more be affirmed and proclaimed. What else is at work in Rowland’s demand that ‘the Church should ensure that her own institutions are governed by a thoroughly religious logic and sacramental ethos’ than a deliberate setting up of that which is intended to stand as the transcendent and so be victorious overall? This saving gesture of imaginative projection is a well-intentioned bid to retrieve a lost unity, but only exemplifies the very will to power it would critique.

Which leaves still the question of redemption. An effort such as Rowland’s draws attention, not so much for the fullness it promises as for the emptiness out of which it speaks, and this is a phenomenon that needs more careful consideration if the church is to teach the truth of Christ. For the distance that separates us from Augustine and Aquinas is only more painfully obvious in the midst of her attempts to press them into service of our difficulties. Is the way through this really by way of a new intellectual synthesis? Is this the path of our redemption? Concepts simply don’t do that work, the claim of Hegel notwithstanding, and it is von Balthasar himself who warns against the abstractions of conceptual unity and the kind of ‘humanitarian mysticism’in which they are sustained. Our Lord did not teach anything generally attainable by human knowledge for we are separated from the kingdom he proclaimed by our finitude. Nor did he expect that a bridge would be constructed of intellectual steps whereby one might cross over into it, for we are yet sinners. There is a crisis here to be sure, but it is not a problem to which concepts or moral resolve is any solution.

Because the church is called out of a crossing over already accomplished by Christ, it is founded in a transformation as the Word of God is received in faith. This is a transition which can only make its appeal as those who would speak of it, and this includes theologians, undergo this same passage in themselves and as witnesses of this place of conversion become in their own way redemptive.

Susan F. Parsons Nottingham

Mark C. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, xvii + 198pp. $25.00

In this helpful book Mattes evaluates the role of justification in the theologies of five great systematic theologians: Jüngel, Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jenson and Bayer. He begins by asserting that justification should be the foundation of systematic theology and also its ‘hub’by which all aspects of doctrine and life are configured. Further justification is not only the basis for theology but also its boundary. Hence Pannenberg comes in for criticism in that he understands God to be the object of theology whereas for Luther the object is ‘the sinful human and the justifying God’. Truth is not ultimately to do with ‘the coherence of all propositions in an overarching metaphysical or ethical system, nor the correspondence of all statements to reality as such’. Rather truth is fundamentally agreement with God’s judgement with respect to humans (p. 7). Reason must be dethroned and justification is ‘the discrimen by which all theological loci are to be evaluated’(p. 15).

Mattes finds that the first four theologians he discusses employ ‘extraneous and even false assumptions’with respect to justification, subordinating justification by faith to some comprehensive system. Readers will probably find his Lutheran objections to Pannenberg and Moltmann relatively straightforward. I deal therefore with his objections to Jüngel and then briefly discuss Jenson. Then I turn to Bayer who is given almost unqualified support.

Mattes finds a number of problems with Jüngel’s approach. However, I wonder whether he has fully understood Jüngel idea of ‘experience with experience’. Jüngel ‘risks structuring theology within the horizon of experience’(pp. 29–30). It should be noted however, pace Mattes, that Jüngel’s ‘experience with experience’does not parallel Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling of absolute dependence’. Jüngel is further criticized for working within an ‘Augustinian and Cartesian “I–Thou” personalism, not Luther’s framework where nature both masks God and sacramentally delivers his grace’(p. 38). Mattes wonders how Jüngel’s ‘existentializing and theorizing’ lends itself to proclamation. ‘How does the preacher “deliver the goods,” the forgiveness of sin, life and salvation in word and sacrament, on the basis of Jüngel’s thinking?’I myself would have thought it all worked rather well. The word of God transforms the human person such that he finds himself taken out of himself. The ‘I–Thou personalism’coheres well with both Paul and Luther if, with Jüngel, one adopts an anti-Cartesian view. Further, the natural order for Jüngel can become a parable! Is this so distant from Luther’s idea of the world as a mask of God?

Jüngel is further criticized for what is called a ‘natural theology of the cross’, the cross as God’s ‘self-definition’. But again this coheres with Luther even if Jüngel is indebted to Hegel at this point. So Jüngel argues that ‘this distinction between God and God based on the cross of Jesus Christ has destroyed the axiom of absoluteness, the axiom of apathy, and the axiom of immutability, all of which are unsuitable axioms for the Christian concept of God’(God as Mystery of the World, p. 373) and adds: ‘Theology is indebted to the philosophical work of Hegel for this

decisive breakthrough, and it should not be embarrassed to express that debt’(p. 373 n. 19). Further, Mattes is concerned about Jüngel’s discussion of God’s ontology. ‘Should we not be skeptical of our ability to schematize the divine, not only because it transcends human imagination, but also because God is hidden outside Christ-aspromise?’(p. 44). He asks: ‘Is defining the proper relationship of the human to God nearly as important as delivering the words of law and promise that actually establish the right relationship of fear, love, and trust?’(p. 45). He believes that the ‘ontological attempt to map deity by following in the deity’s footsteps and inferring thereby the langscape of the deity’s interiority is a closeted attempt to walk by sight, and not faith’(p. 45). However, I wonder if it is helpful to polarize ‘defining’and ‘delivering’in this way (just as Austin was concerned about separating constative from performative utterances). Further, Jüngel, building upon Fischer, suggests that the priority in theology is precisely in ‘praktische Erkenntnis’rather than ‘theoretische Erkenntnis’, again a view which coheres with Luther’s theology.

Mattes correctly argues that for Jüngel forensic and effective forms of justification are not to be separated. For when God declares someone to be righteous this surely makes him righteous (as Mattes himself affirms in connection with Bayer). But Jüngel is criticized for seeing ‘their symbiosis by appealing to the existential aspect of forensic justification as a word event, happening within interiority. Luther’s view of creation as mediating word and word as mediating creation is bypassed’(p. 47). However, I am again puzzled since the Bible itself is concerned with ‘existential’and ‘ontological’questions. It is to Jüngel’s credit that he, like other Tübingen theologians, has related justification to questions of sacrifice and participation in Christ (see Rechtfertigung, pp. 131–43).

This brings me to Jenson. Mattes questions his idea of the ‘real–ontic’bond. Jenson, echoing the new Finnish view, argues that ‘God’s forensic justification is one of fact, not fiction’(p. 128). Quoting Luther’s phrase in ipse fide Christus adest, Jenson argues that justification is a mode of deification. ‘Christ with whom the believer is one, unifies the believer likewise with the life of God, since Christ is fully human and divine’(p. 128). But Mattes believes that ‘only the logical and rhetorical prioritizing of forensic over effective justification... can address Luther’s chief pastoral concern to console the anxious conscience’(p. 130). Mattes argues that ‘forensic imputation is effective’(p. 139). The new being is daily remade. There is a fresh dying and rising with Christ. We participate in God not as we are elevated in higher, seemingly inclusive patterns of triune sociability but as incarnated in concrete act of service to others.

Finally I turn to Bayer. He believes truth is found in a performative act (cf. J.L. Austin) in which the promise of the gospel is efficacious. This sounds very much like Jüngel’s approach but Bayer ‘seeks to correct the existentialist matrix’that has shaped views of justification, particularly those of Ebeling. Bayer wishes to stress the social and cosmic breadth of justification as well as its existential depth. He does this by arguing that justification embraces physical reality, history and culture which are mediums of God’s hiddenness and self-disclosure. He relates Luther’s promissio toAustin’s speech acts. He sees forensic justification as effective. Further he supports

Hamann’s view that God ‘speaks to the creature through the creature’. ‘Focused through the lens of Jesus Christ, all things in creation are capable of mediating God’s address. Creation is therefore an arena of God’s justifying word, not a theatre of Heilsgeschichte. It subverts the fact-value split that has dogged the previous four thinkers’(p. 153).

At the outset Mattes puts forward a laudable aim: ‘One purpose of this volume is to bring both theology and proclamation, as public endeavours, into greater alignment. Theology needs to take leave of the quest for system and affirm its role as the art of discerning how to deliver the promise’(p. 3). However, if this is a serious concern why is it that Luther becomes the measure of all things? Very occasionally it is conceded that there may be a weakness in Luther’s theology. But one gets the impression that the author’s theological concern is ‘what urges Luther’. (Mattes admits that Luther’s writings are not to be thought of as a second revelation alongside scripture but he believes ‘he may well be that messenger of the “everlasting gospel” (Rev. 14:6) foretold in Scripture’(p. 15)). The book appears in the series ‘Lutheran Quarterly Books’with the motto Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum. But surely one is going to be more faithful to the great principles of Luther’s reformation by returning to scripture, even if one eventually disagrees with Luther. I happen to think that Luther was one of the greatest theologians ever and that his basic understanding of justification by faith was correct. However, there are points where he may have got it wrong. Agood example here is the use (or rather misuse) of Romans 7 in relation to the law/gospel dialectic. Mattes considers this text briefly in relation to Pannenberg’s objection to Luther’s law/gospel dialectic. Pannenberg argues that it is epochal. I would say it is epochal in relation to the old/new person for even now, after the coming of Christ, the law continues to accuse the unbeliever; the Christian though is free from the condemnation of the law. Luther may even have misunderstood the meaning of dikaiosune ¯ theou. Neither this fundamental term nor the fundamental text Romans 1:17 are discussed in the book! No doubt one can make criticisms of theological systems as Mattes has done. But let those who have seriously studied the biblical texts be given credit for that; for surely they are the ones who have been faithful to Luther’s great legacy.

Richard Bell

Nottingham University