Theology, Ethicsand Philosophy: For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry

T H E O L O G Y, E T H I C S A N D
PHILOSOPHY
For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and

Christian Ministry, Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra (eds.),
Eerdmans, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-8028-3744-8), vii + 372 pp., pb $26.00
Practical theology has undergone a vibrant revitalization over the past

three decades and now has established a solid place in the academy.
This volume offers a refreshing point of entry – an inviting vision of the
aims and tasks of practical theology, teased out in essays that bridge the
contexts of church and academy. The book makes an important contri-
bution to the field.
For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and
Christian Ministry is a wide-ranging collection of essays by a number
of key voices in the field, both academics and active pastors. The
collection is structured around four major sections: ‘Envisioning
Practical Theology’, ‘Practical Theology in the Classroom’, ‘Practical
Theology in the Wider Academy’, and ‘Practical Theology in Minis-
try’. Fortunately, a keen attention to the interrelationships between the
academic and the pastoral informs many of the chapters, so the book
has a far more fluid and integrative character than the headings might
imply.
Emphasis on the telos of practical theology – rather than its meth-
odology or exclusive concern with the traditional arts of ministry –
runs throughout the volume. According to Bass and Dykstra, practical
theology ‘seeks to clarify the contours of a way of life that reflects
God’s active presence and responds to human beings’ fundamental
needs. It also seeks to guide and strengthen persons and communities
to embody this way of life’ (p. 13). Thus, practical theology is about
carefully identifying and creatively forming persons in a faithful way
of life – through scholarship, teaching, and various forms of ordained
and lay ministry. The emphasis on a ‘way of life’ flows from previous
work by Bass, who directs the Valparaiso Project on the Education
and Formation of Persons in Faith, and Dykstra, senior vice president
Reviews in Religion and Theology, 16:3 (2009)

© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
400 Theology, Ethics and Philosophy
for religion at Lilly Endowment (a major supporter of practical

theology in the United States). While Bass and Dykstra clearly respect
the role of academics in this work, they do not see practical theology
as exclusively the work of scholars. Indeed, Dykstra writes passion-
ately about the necessary connection between practical theology and
the ‘pastoral and ecclesial imagination’. The book is addressed to a
broad audience to include pastoral leaders as well as theological edu-
cators. Its highly readable style makes that broader audience a real
possibility.
Various authors give their own spin on the aim of practical theology.
In their chapter on ‘Mapping the Field of Practical Theology’, Kathleen
Cahalan and James Nieman argue that the ‘promotion of faithful
discipleship’ is the basic orienting task of practical theology (p. 67).
Gordon S. Mikoski writes about his experiences in leading church
youth pilgrimages to Israel and the West Bank, and makes a convincing
case for the public orientation of practical theology (which he does not
see as competing with a ministerial or ecclesial paradigm for practical
theology).
What exactly is practical theology? This basic question – familiar to
most of us in the field – does not elicit an uncomplicated response. One
of the recurrent questions in the literature in practical theology is this:
what defines the field of study? How does practical theology relate to
the classical areas of biblical studies, church history, and systematic
theology? Is practical theology a distinctive academic discipline within
the theological curriculum or a good way to express what should be the
orientation of all theological education? Serene Jones, systematic theo-
logian and now president of Union Theological Seminary, carefully
explores these questions as a ‘visitor’ to the field. She argues that in
some sense, all theological educators (including those in classical dis-
ciplines) must consider themselves practical theologians – engaged in a
‘mission to serve abundant living in and for the world’ (p. 198). At the
same time, that broad sense of practical theology depends upon spe-
cialized expertise of a segment of faculty specifically trained in the
discipline of practical theology. Jones wisely upholds this ‘dialectical
interplay’ between the broad and the specialized work of practical
theology (p. 198).
One of the strengths of the book is its attention to questions of
pedagogy. Bonnie Miller-McLemore notes that while practical theology
has established a place in the academy, still scholars have yet to give
sufficient attention to how we teach. She argues that intrinsic to teach-
ing in practical theology is a form of phronesis that she calls ‘theological
know-how’ (p. 171). Practical theologians possess ‘pedagogical
wisdom’ that stands to inform not only the discipline of practical the-
ology but more theological education more broadly: ‘In short, some of
the means and goals of practical theological pedagogy are worth wider
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Theology, Ethics and Philosophy 401
emulation. . . . Theoretically, theologically, and pragmatically, such

teaching is a resources both for enriching seminary education as a
whole and, perhaps more importantly, for understanding the ways of
knowing intrinsic to ministry and faithful living’ (p. 190).
John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship,
illustrates this kind of ‘theological know-how’ as he gives a nuanced
description of the multiple layers of engaging in a worship course –
from case studies to art to worship planning exercises. He imagines
theological education in some ways akin to the training of musicians or
athletes, developing in students the skills and artistic sense to ‘engage
in the inherently improvisatory nature of Christian ministry’ (p. 142). In
their chapter ‘History, Practice, and Theological Education’, David D.
Daniels III (church historian) and Ted A. Smith (ethics and preaching
scholar) creatively explore an approach to pedagogy that draws out the
interplay between classical and practical fields of study. Specifically,
they explore how historians attend to the development of practices over
time, while a practical theologian seeks historical understanding of the
inherited practices they teach. Daniels and Smith make a good case for
interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching that respects and furthers
the core commitments of each discipline.
One area that would merit deeper analysis in the book is the very live
question about how practical theology relates to multiple religious
traditions. Is it a Christian discipline? If so, what is its place within a
pluralistic university and society? Cahalan and Nieman write: ‘Rooted
in Christian tradition, practical theology focuses on a called people who
manifest a particular faith through concrete ways of life’ (p. 67). Emory
University scholar Thomas G. Long also acknowledges: ‘To be sure,
there are forms of practical theology outside of Christianity, but Chris-
tians have essentially operated the franchise’ (p. 247). Mikoski seeks to
hold together ‘Christian identity formation . . . and radical openness to
non-Christian others through the practices of democratic conversation,
creative collaboration, compassionate activism, and advocacy for
human rights’ (p. 345). What remains to be seen is exactly how practical
theology will engage religious pluralism in the future – a question with
enormous implications for the identity, telos, and ecclesial grounding of
the discipline. This is already playing out in university doctoral pro-
grams in practical theology: how invite students of many religious
traditions to learn and shape practical theology? It has immediate
implications for the formation of religious leaders – and a professoriate
equipped to form those leaders – in religiously pluralistic societies.
While For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and
Christian Ministry hints at such questions, practical theology still awaits
a full engagement with these issues.
This book clearly makes a substantial, creative contribution to the
practical theological work of the church and the academy. It is an
excellent resource for students, pastors, and theological educators –

highly recommended.
Claire Wolfteich
Boston University
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Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith,

Imperialistic Discourse, and Abraham, Chris Boesel, Cascade Books,
2008 (ISBN 978-1-55635-523-3), xx + 286 pp., pb $33.00
Had I not been commissioned to review this book, I would have given
up on it before reaching the end of the Preface. However, that would
have been a great pity, because Boesel has an interesting and important
contribution to make to the encounter of Judaism with Christian the-
ology. The book should be persevered with for the sake of the final two
pages which, although Boesel accepts they offer no ‘argument [the
reader] cannot refuse’, do leave the reader with a kind of Kierkegaar-
dian predicament, except that no leap of faith is to be faced, since it is
God ‘who does the initial and decisive leaping’, and who promises to
be with us in ‘our problematic, creaturely reality’ (p. 272). But to reach
that point the reader has to face long and convoluted sentences, often
containing a number of asides in parentheses, taking as many as eight
lines of text. In most cases the parenthetical material can be omitted
without in any way detracting from the argument. The text appears to
have been dictated, or even to be transcribed lectures (since it certainly
makes more sense when read aloud), and, without having been rewrit-
ten to be read rather than heard, it is less than helpful to the reader
attempting to concentrate on the argument. Now, I consider it good
practice when reviewing to read the book through at least twice, in
order to be as fair as possible to the author, and I was relieved to find
the second reading of this book less problematic. In this case, however,
the second reading had to come before the writing of a first draft of the
review rather than, as is my usual practice, after.
Boesel describes the book as an attempt ‘to address the issue of
theological reformation in response to self-examination and repentance
with regard to the Church’s past and present relation to the Jewish
neighbor’ (p. ix). However, having been convinced by others of the
need for such a response, he has been less than convinced by their
suggested remedies.
Boesel came to the study of theology from the kind of evangelicalism
that considers Barth to be a dangerous liberal. Fortunately, liberation
theology and holocaust studies opened to him a wider theological

perspective, so that, in doctoral studies, he found himself seeking an
ethically viable, radically constructive transformation of what it means
to be Christian in relation the Jewish experience of living as neighbor to
a Christian majority culture. However, challenging encounters with
Jewish people alerted him to the complexity of modern Judaism
(assumed by many Christians to be monolithic), and to the self-
understanding of Judaism to be a faith not of orthodoxy (defined
beliefs) but of orthopraxis (observance). His interfaith assumptions
unraveled in the light of the self-understanding and self-definition of
the ‘religious other’. He became all too aware of the cultural chauvinism
of the educated West toward religious neighbors who do not meekly
succumb to the categories defined for them by Christian theological
imperialism.
The work falls into four parts, the first two revealing ‘The Problem’
and the latter two seeking ‘The Remedy’. Asking ‘Is the good news of
Jesus Christ [inevitably] bad news for the Jewish neighbor?’, Boesel
relies heavily for evidence on the first edition (1966) of Rubenstein’s
After Auchwitz. He seems unaware that a much revised second edition
appeared in 1992, essentially a new work written after a quarter
century’s reflection on the original. Outlining the ‘imperialism’ of
Christianity vis-à-vis the Jewish neighbor, whereby Jewish people are
inevitably seen through the lens of Christian faith, Boesel identifies a
consensus among Christian theologians as to the remedy: to somehow
‘make room’ for Jewish self-definition and self-understanding. This is,
of course, problematic in terms of Christianity’s traditional universal-
ism. Indeed, here is the ‘scandal of particularity’, although Boesel does
not identify it in quite such words. However, he suspects that this
‘offence’ might itself contain the key to the possibility of a truly ethical
relationship of Christians and Jews. For that to be so, Boesel shows
how the context for analysis of the relationship is itself a consequence
of ‘the problem’, and brings Barth and Ruether, Darrida and Levinas,
to assist the search for an alternative discourse within the ethical limi-
tations which are also ethical possibilities for an evangelical church.
Kierkegaard and Hegel, in the confrontation between them, show how
the context in which a resolution must be sought emerges from the
problem itself. The problem (given these two protagonists and the
setting of Fear and Trembling) is spelled out in the story of Abraham
and Isaac and ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’. Boesel out-
lines what a Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model might
entail – one in which there is ‘a little something . . . to offend everyone’
(p. 56). There is in his analysis of Barth’s doctrine of election a sense
that Boesel blames Barth for being a pre-theology-of-religions theolo-
gian, suggesting that the bad news of interpretive imperialism is
inherent in Barth’s desire for ‘unalloyed Good News’. In Part Two he
spells this out in detail, showing how the affirmation of Abraham ‘in
the Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ’, while it is a displacement of Abraham
(thanks to Barth’s Christology), is not a replacement (in supercessionist
terms) (p. 86).
Having spelled out ‘the problem’ in ways both familiar and, I suspect,
unfamiliar to the informed reader, in the final two parts Boesel seeks to
find a remedy. He begins with Rosemary Radford Reuther’s attempt to
find in the Christian faith good news that is not bad news for anyone
else, contending that in diminishing the gospel so as to recognize it as
good news for some, Reuther undermines its very nature as ‘news’. An
historical review that includes Lessing’s ‘great ugly ditch’ between
historical and religious truth, and Kantian universal ethics, heralds
Boesel’s critique of Reuther as rooted in certain modern Western
assumptions amounting to an interpretative imperialism that casts ‘a
particular shadow over the Jewish neighbor’ (p. 178). Indeed, he
believes her ethical intentions toward the Jewish neighbor to be doubly
compromised.
In the later chapters Boesel, having taken Reuther to be representa-
tive of ‘the extent to which our best remedies of Christian faith are
both grounded in a modern ethical desire and its assumptions regard-
ing faith and the ethical, and are thereby undermined in their ethical
intention’ (p. 197), seeks to make explicit this representative function.
In the final part (IV) he brings in the postmodern thought of Levinas
and Derrida to provide possible criteria for the interpretation of the
predicament. In the penultimate chapter he then returns to the
possibility that the remedy might be contained in the problem itself,
and proposes ‘an [alternative] interpretative imperialism “without
weapons” ’ (p. 222f). He focuses on the four ‘marks of Christian
speech’ as determined by Barth’s understanding of revelation, Chris-
tology and election, namely: prayer (‘the doxological response to the
divine address’), personal address (Christian speaking to the neigh-
bor), news (addressing the neighbor as witness and testimony), and
the particular piece of news (prophetic and apostolic witness to the
‘Jesus event’). However, Barth also lays down strict conditions under
which this Christian speech can be understood to be true, since ‘only
God Himself can provide the proof that we are really talking about
Him when we are allegedly doing so’ (p. 248). This then undermines
all interpretive imperialism, freeing the church for a much more
modest, much less presumptuous self-understanding with respect to
its neighbors. Rather than claiming and competing for ‘superiority’
among the religions, ‘it cannot even claim the partial and provisional
relation to and capacity for truth conceived as symbolic (or analogical,
or metaphorical) expression of religious experience. Of itself, it pre-
tends to nothing but a repetition of a particular piece of news’ (p. 251).
As such, therefore, it has nothing of its own with which to browbeat
its neighbors. What it has is a way of speaking – a personal address

witnessed to as a piece of news, fundamentally structured as prayer.
This is speech ‘without weapons’, in contrast to the ‘knowledge’ of
interpretive imperialism, and yet it remains ‘for the sake of all’. This,
in the title words, is what Boesel calls, ‘risking proclamation, respect-
ing difference’.
This is by no means a simple book clouded by rather obtuse language
and sentence construction. This is, rather, a complex book dealing with
complex issues, invoking difficult theological positions, and offering no
easy answers. Instead Boesel takes up a faith position from which it
might well be possible to share good news for all without it inevitably
being heard as bad news for some. I suggest that this is a book for those
already committed to a theology of religions that not only is prepared to
‘make room’ for the religiously ‘other’ but which also longs to treat the
other truly as neighbor.
Michael A. Chester
The North East Institute for Theological Education
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God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary, David Brown, Oxford

University Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-19-923182-9), xii + 446 pp., hb $75.00
In this book Brown continues his work of reclaiming a wide range of

human experience as religious, even ‘sacramental’ – meaning thor-
oughly imbued with the ‘divine presence’. Brown contends that God’s
activity ‘is everywhere in the material world’ He has created (p. 4). For
Brown the word ‘grace’ indicates God’s gracious offering of Himself to
the broad range of human experience with specificity to the human
body (p. 7). This book is the second in a trilogy of works – God and
Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience and God and Mystery
in Words.
These books attempt to reclaim a sense of God’s imminence in the
world, since God is often marginalized if recognized at all. In past times
religion was understood to have a bearing on all of life and creation.
Brown wants theology to engage the world with its beliefs and values
rather than attempting to defend God’s existence.
The first part of Brown’s book sees the divine in human bodies. For
many Christians divinity would be located in the body of Christ –
God’s Son incarnate. Brown emphasizes the fact that in Christian the-
ology, Christ died and rose again to redeem human beings body and
soul; there is the reality of the resurrection of the body. Brown expands
the view and emphasizes the fact that other religions also see the divine
working through human beings and their bodies. ‘The graced body is in
fact a recurring theme across religions’ (p. 13).
Brown sees certain key moments in Christian history and theology
when the sacramentality of the body was emphasized. The Renaissance
revived the Greek view of beautiful bodies being graced by the divine.
Such embodied beauty was ‘used as a metaphor for divinity and for
humanity’s ultimate triumph over sin and death’ (p. 186). The potential
‘of sexuality as a religious metaphor’ is studied in the art of Bernini and
Caravaggio. The Baroque era understood sexuality as ‘an important
religious metaphor’ which spoke of ‘the fruitfulness of relationships
with the divine in intimate generosity and giving’ (p. 14). The beauty of
the created world is a reflection of the Creator who has put part of
himself in his creation. Brown is concerned that there has been a mis-
understanding which has led to a rejection of beautiful and sexual
religious art. Brown believes this is a result of Christianity’s failure to
have a ‘serious engagement with symbolism’ (p. 57).
Dance is one of the bodily expressions which Brown believes reflects
communication between the divine and the human. Though some see
dance as a human attempt to fly from the earth to God, religious dance
at its heart waits for God’s gracious initiative, often in the form of a
divine trance. Even today dance is described as graceful. And those
who dance well are often described as being gifted (graced) rather than
succeeding through hard work.
Brown examines dance separately since it involves the ‘total integra-
tion of of body and mind’ and of ‘divine gift and human pursuit’ (p. 15).
Dance also receives attention since Brown believes that dance has been
improperly relegated by the church to the secular realm (p. 119). Brown
sees modern dance and ballet as having a more sacramental and graced
nature even though both are viewed as secular.
For Christians a sacramental eating and drinking exists in the
Lord’s Supper. Brown stresses the life-giving symbolism of bread,
water, and wine. Brown also sees divine sacramentality for eating and
drinking in other contexts. Brown decries the fact that many Chris-
tians no longer say grace at meals. This bespeaks a failure to see God’s
gracious giving and the gratitude that should follow his giving of
material gifts. Feasting involves a communal aspect of life, a life open
to others, and an understanding of interdependence with God and
other human beings. This contrasts with the excessive individualism
of the modern age.
These first chapters look at beauty and giftedness. But not everything
in life is beautiful or very gifted. So Brown examines what is ugly,
tattered, and torn. Christianity has throughout its history struggled
with suffering and issues of the body, at times rejecting the fleshly and
material by encouraging fasting, celibacy, and asceticism. Brown brings
forward a refreshing analysis of such ideas, encouraging readers to see

them as gifts that empowered, transformed, and helped individuals
experience or be pointed to the divine. The suffering and broken Christ
on a cross helped those suffering to experience godly gifts of patience,
endurance, and the power of God to help even if not to heal. Bearing
the cross with Christ is a recurring theme for Paul. Christ’s suffering
and death also emphasized the fact that for the living there was always
‘the possibility of forgiveness’ (p. 192).
The second part of God and Grace of Body is devoted to music. Brown
sees music, especially its performance, as a total involvement of the
body. Anyone who has attended a musical performance, be it classical,
folk, rock, blues, or rap has seen the musicians’ and singers’ bodies
move as the music is being played and sung. Often this is also the case
with those listening as their toes tap, their hands clap, and their bodies
sway to the sound of the music.
Brown wants to emphasize the fact that the God who is experienced
in music (just as in sexual human bodies and in eating and drinking) is
the God who is always imminent. He is the God who is already present
and ‘waiting to be experienced’ (p. 222). Like certain human bodies and
experiences, some music may also reflect the ugly as well as the beau-
tiful, be sorrowful and grieving as well as uplifting.
For Brown the gifted sacramental nature of music is not found only in
religious music or composers. He specifically excluded hymns and
liturgical music from this book. Many will agree with Brown’s inclu-
sion of Bach and classical music as gifted and sacramental. For those
who would question the sacramental or gifted nature of music by Bob
Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Jimi Hendrix, Chet
Atkins, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and the Doors, Brown offers the
performance of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page which has ‘been compared
to the priest’s sprinkling of the faithful with holy water at a traditional
mass’ (p. 333). Brown examines the sacramental and gifted nature of
pop music, the blues, musicals, and opera. Brown sees all such music as
both ‘etherial and material’ (p. 384).
God and Grace of Body concludes with a preview of Brown’s next book
God and Mystery of Words. Brown challenges the view that church music
is ‘merely a useful adjunct to words’ (p. 389). He wants Christians to
move beyond seeing their faith ‘as exclusively a religion of the word’ (p.
390). More experiential bodily involvement with Christ in the liturgy of
the church and the Eucharist is encouraged.
The book’s illustrations are intimately tied to Brown’s words. This
challenging book will interest all studying the interaction of religion
and culture.
Armand J. Boehme
Trinity Lutheran Church
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Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things, J. Daryl

Charles, Eerdmans, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-8028-2594-0), x + 346 pp., pb
$34.00
J. Daryl Charles was educated at West Chester State University,

Southern California College, the University of Siegen (Germany), and
Westminster Theological Seminary, where he received a PhD in herme-
neutics. He currently teaches Christian Studies at Union University in
Jackson, Tennessee. This series of books, Critical Issues in Bioethics,
brings thoughtful, biblically informed perspectives to contemporary
issues in bioethics, which is the interdisciplinary study of the issues
regarding life and health. In this title, Charles restates what all people
intuit by what theologians call ‘natural revelation’ and what this means
in moral, specifically bioethical, discourse. He argues that a traditional
metaphysics of natural law lies at the heart of social renewal, and that a
revival in natural law thinking is of the highest priority for Christian
doctrine in the contemporary public scene. Perhaps this is nowhere
more evident than in the realm of bioethics, where the most basic moral
questions – for instance, human personhood, human responsibilities,
the reality of moral evil, and the basis of civil society – are being
debated and even denigrated. Charles argues in part that the Protestant
view of ethics and morality lacks relevance in today’s society due to its
willful ignorance of this tradition. In what follows, salient points shall
be highlighted in an attempt to grasp the fullness of this book’s rel-
evance and import to readers of this journal.
Charles notes that in contemporary discussions of ethics, people
typically seek to balance ethical considerations with social and medical
benefits (p. 7). He argues that this consideration is largely misplaced, as
contemporary society has displaced the supervienence of God and the
divinity’s wisdom upon subjects of ethical inquiry, foundational to our
forefathers, opting instead for a positivist conception of law. This posi-
tivist position holds that the state, as a collection of equally autonomous
wills, constructs law qua law, rather than discovering it or preserving it
(pp. 16–17). Charles contends that this positivist conception has its roots
in the Protestant dislike of natural law, as well as the prevalence of
existential and historicist thinking in the last 200 years. But by remov-
ing ethical intuition from universal knowledge and reason, Protestants
have eliminated the theological basis for a common moral grammar
with which to enter discourse with non-Christians in a pluralistic
context (p. 21).
After an introduction to the volume, Charles offers a critique of
(post)modern Christian social ethics and the ‘postconsensus culture’,
which could be said to be post-everything (cf. 27). In Chapter 3,

‘Natural Law and the Christian Tradition’, he briefly analyzes the pre-
Christian precursors to natural law thinking, including the contribu-
tions from Plato and Aristotle. Building upon the ethical foundation
laid out by the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, he argues that the
early church, almost in one voice contends that even though human-
ity is marred by sin, they nonetheless posses in themselves a guide
toward things moral (pp. 86–9). He acknowledges that natural law
thinking reaches its pinnacle in the theology of Aquinas, and that
Catholic and Protestant alike look unto him even today as a source of
moral authority (p. 91). Based on the thought of Aquinas, Charles
asserts that natural law is grounded in both nature and scripture, the
two complementing each other, due to the providence of the divine
(p. 106, cf. 109).
In Chapter 4, ‘Natural Law and the Protestant Prejudice’, Charles
argues that theologians who reject natural law chiefly for Christocen-
tric reasons, erect a false dichotomy between nature and grace,
which in effect undercuts the very basis for ethical discourse with
non-likeminded patrons (pp. 151–2). In the fifth chapter, ‘Moral Law,
Christian Belief, and Social Ethics’, he asserts that since humans bear
the divine image, and if there is such a thing as natural law, it is at
least reasonable for Christians to work toward consensus regarding
moral issues in our culture (p. 190). Chapters 6 and 7, both, identify
critical categories in contending for moral first things in ethical and
bioethical debates. Therein he argues that most all of our critical con-
temporary ethical and bioethical issues are related directly to the
notion of personhood, whether it be murder, abortion, euthanasia,
assisted suicide, or the production of zygotes for medical research. In
part, he asserts that natural law reveals that we as creatures have no
legitimate jurisdiction over the gift of life (p. 266). In the course of
discussion in these two chapters, he also notes that a fusion of
freedom and responsibility permits a genuinely free society to remain
truly free.
Chapter 9 constitutes a case study on the perceived morality of
euthanasia, yesterday and today. He contends that the so-called ‘right’
to end one’s life perverts and vastly exceeds the scope of common-law
‘rights’ as traditionally understood. However, in an interesting conces-
sion, he notes that letting die is not necessarily wrong, as death is
inevitable biologically speaking (p. 288). The last chapter discusses
natural law and public morality. Therein he affirms the ‘rightness’ of
retributive justice, as it is a foundation stone of sorts for a civil society
(p. 311).
With his application of natural law thinking to the field of bioethics,
Charles breathes new life back into this key debate. One of his
accomplishments in this title is his reframing of natural law as an
2indispensable bridge for creating moral consensus on public policy

in a pluralistic society. He contends that ultimately, the extent of our
affirmation of natural law thinking will determine our ability to relate
to and address the surrounding culture. This asseveration of natural
law, he notes moreover, is both necessary and timely, especially con-
sidering the near wholesale destruction of metaphysical foundations
in contemporary society. This title will be extremely useful to stu-
dents, scholars, and general readers alike. In the closing pages of this
title, Charles argues that contributing to moral consensus within
society is Christianity’s fundamental task. May we delay this task no
longer.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA
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The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter

with Modernity, Luis Cortest, Fordham Press, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-
8232-2853-9), xvii + 136 pp., pb $55.00
Luis Cortest is Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Medieval

and Renaissance Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In this title, he
makes a significant contribution to the study of natural law, especially
regarding its relation to the Thomistic tradition. It chronicles the
forming of natural law theory from Thomas himself, through the Neo-
Thomists of the sixteenth century, its encounter with secular philoso-
phy, and its ultimate survival as attested to by numerous papal
encyclicals, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to
the present day.
Cortest notes that for Thomas, natural law constitutes the first prin-
ciples of practical reason (p. xi). In fact, the reason why one may refer
to justice in the normal sense at all is because nature and morality
conform to an immutable ontological order (Chapter 1), insomuch as
nature itself is a reflection of the order of ‘being’ (for Thomas, exist-
ence is the most basic principle of reality). So then, for Thomas, the
author whose conception of natural law forms the foundation for
this book, the ontological and ethical orders are not autonomous but
inseparable – in effect, his ethical system is an ontological morality
(Chapter 2). Cortest highlights the links between the Middle Ages and
Renaissance views on natural law, with particular emphasis being
placed on the influential role of Francisco Suárez (Chapters 1 and 3).
He contends that without Suárez, natural law theory would have been
exceedingly malformed, for he was the most influential philosopher in

the Thomisitic tradition for some time.
Moreover, he traces the development of natural law theory through
the seventeenth century and indicates that by that time, it had assumed
a new meaning, one that dealt with the discerning moral principles. In the
modern period, Cortest shows how traditional natural law was trans-
formed by thinkers like John Locke and Kant (Chapter 4), who both
approached nature more empirically, into a doctrine compatible with
early modern notions of general moral principles.
Beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical of 1888, Thomistic thought
once again reasserted itself in philosophy and religious thinking
(Chapter 5). Leo was convinced that Thomas’ principles could provide
guidelines for Christians ion their pursuit of solutions to problems even
centuries after Thomas’ death. In keeping with Thomas, Leo strongly
defended the notion that all law and freedom came from God, and not
mankind. Cortest tracks the survival of the tradition such names as
Mercier and Maritain in Chapter 6, highlighting their recovery of
Thomistic views on natural law.
A central argument in this book is that the traditional notion of
natural law has almost disappeared from ethical and moral discourse in
our (post)modern age. For Thomas, the ethical (or practical wisdom)
must be understood as an extension of the metaphysical (or speculative
wisdom). Most (post)modern philosophers, in contrast, consider these
orders to be separate. Moreover, for Thomas, humanity is led to God by
his or her nature because we were created in the image of God (p. 100).
Furthermore, for Thomas, the relation between God and humanity is
not merely one of creator and creature, but is of an ontological status
instead, as humanity participates with God (ibid.). Rather than attempt
to make the traditional doctrine compatible with modern rights theory,
Cortest argues that traditional natural law must be understood as a
form of pre-Enlightenment ontological morality that has weathered the
onslaught of modernity, although with a disfigured face.
All in all, I was challenged and energized by this book. I found it
to be a challenging read, however, as it seems that Cortest did not
guide his readers very well in the text, especially in tying up the ends
of the argument as he progressed through each chapter. This lack,
though noticeable, does not detract from the immensity of value to
be gained from this book by scholars with interests in the Thomistic
philosophy.
Bradford McCall
Regent University
夹夹夹
Briefly: Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, David Mills Daniel, SCM
Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-334-04122-1), viii + 130 pp., pb £7.99
Briefly: Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David

Mills Daniel, SCM Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-334-04124-5), viii + 119 pp.,
pb £7.99
Briefly: Moore’s Principia Ethica, David Mills Daniel, SCM Press, 2007
(ISBN 978-0-334-04040-8), viii + 120 pp., pb £7.99
Briefly: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, David Mills Daniel and

Megan Daniel, SCM Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-334-04118-4), viii + 131,
pp., pb £7.99
Brief summaries of classics in philosophy run the risk of glossing over

complex arguments, thus equipping young minds with pithy but unex-
amined aphorisms like ‘Everything is in flux’, ‘I think, therefore I am’,
and ‘God is dead’. David Mills Daniel, however, seems to tackle the task
with the right attitude. The ‘Briefly’ series aims to help students wrap
their minds around original texts without sacrificing either the subtlety
or completeness of the arguments therein. Each volume presents the
material at three basic levels. The ‘Context’ section introduces the
author and provides background information so the reader can situate
the book within its time period and in the history of philosophy as a
whole. The ‘Detailed Summary’ synthetically presents the entire book
including parenthetical citations of page numbers corresponding to a
readily available and inexpensive edition of the classic. The ‘Overview’
section condenses the work even further for quick reference and later
review. Key terms initially appear in boldface and are cross listed in a
handy ‘Glossary’. All of this makes for a unique introduction to chief
works in the philosophical canon by exposing the reader to the actual
flow of the original text rather than reformulating it. Maximal benefit is
derived when one has the original work at hand to study passages of
interest more thoroughly.
Briefly: Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a good
place to start for those wishing to test Mills Daniel’s technique. Most
readers with a basic training in philosophy and theology will know
enough Hume to engage the book as a review of his empiricism. In fact,
one might first want to glance at the ‘Some Issues to Consider’ section
to get a general idea of Mills Daniel’s scheme.
The effectiveness of Mills Daniel’s approach, however, is particularly
showcased in three volumes dedicated to works in analytic philosophy
which readily lend themselves to abbreviated introductions: G. E.
Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), Bertrand Russell’s Problems in Philoso-
phy (1912), and A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936). Mills
Daniel’s brief summaries quickly orient the reader to the fundamental

problems and methods of analytic philosophy but leave room for a
critical assessment of its shortcomings. Given that Mills Daniel himself
is interested in theology and the philosophy of religion, these are also
valuable guides to analytic currents that still feed theological thinking
today.
G. E. Moore’s (1873–1958) Principia Ethica was released at a critical
moment when Bertrand Russell and he made a definitive break from
the prevailing idealism of F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart. Gran-
diose claims to metaphysical system-building and knowledge deemed
to have no basis in empirical observation were to be purged from
philosophy, while Frege’s logic was to be given free reign to clarify
language, reality, and the relationship between them. In the Principia
Ethica, Moore’s immediate concern was to elucidate and resolve ethical
problems by subjecting traditional moral philosophy to close analytical
scrutiny. He boiled ethics down to two fundamental questions: what
things are good in themselves? What actions are we to perform? Mills
Daniel explains that with regard to the first, Moore taught that goodness
is a nonnatural property of a particular thing or state of affairs which
can only be identified by intuition. With regard to moral action, Moore
took the consequentialist position that one must decide, on the basis of
observation and experience, which actions will lead to the best possible
outcome. Mills Daniel critiques the eccentricity of Moore’s claim that
human relationships and beautiful objects are the ultimate rational basis
for human action and his highly individualistic and mystical nonnatu-
ralistic intuitionism.
Firmly entrenched in empiricism, though mesmerized by the eternal
and unchanging realm of mathematics, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
continually exhorted his disciples to focus on the facts and only the
facts. Accordingly, Problems in Philosophy lays out the most general
questions for epistemology: What do we know? How do we know it?
What are the limits of knowledge? That which is immediately known to
us, Russell argued, is that which is given to the senses, from whose
data we form beliefs about external objects. Mills Daniel gives a concise
presentation of Russell’s notion of truth before fittingly challenging it.
Russell, he explains, did not accept Kant’s attempt to harmonize ratio-
nalism and empiricism as a solid basis for the certainty and universal-
ity of mathematics and logic, since our nature belongs to the existing
world which could conceivably change tomorrow. Russell’s conviction
was that a priori knowledge must apply to whatever possible world(s)
we might happen to find ourselves in. Mills Daniel draws attention to
the difficulty of Russell’s goal of maintaining the objective realty of
an external world existing independently of our perceiving it, while
simultaneously holding that our experience of the world is private or
subjective.
Perhaps no one took up the analytic crusade with more vigor than A.
J. Ayer (1910–1989), whose Language, Truth and Logic quickly became a
manifesto for the ‘trial and execution’ of metaphysics. Encouraged by
Isaiah Berlin to write down all he had absorbed from the Vienna Circle,
Ayer wrote this book as a passionate appeal for philosophy to confine
itself to analysis and avoid metaphysical and theological speculation.
The weapon of choice was the verification principle: anything that
could not be verified empirically had to be dismissed as meaningless.
This principle was to undergo several revisions in subsequent years,
though Ayer humbly admitted that none of its formulations proved
entirely satisfactory. The venture of subordinating philosophy to the
rigorous discipline of empirical science, however, never veered off
course. Mills Daniel gives a lucid summary of Ayer’s argument that
sentences can only express genuine propositions about matters of fact if
the facts themselves are empirically verifiable: that is, if it is known
what observations are relevant for determining whether the proposition
is true or false. In Ayer’s estimation, this reduces a priori statements to
tautologies and ethical statements to mere expressions of emotion.
These four volumes live up to the ‘Briefly’ series promise to provide
clear, readable, compact summaries, but they also exemplify the seri-
ousness of Mills Daniel’s recommendation to engage the original works
directly before, during, and after one’s enjoyment of the summary. With
regard to the analytic school, the three respective summaries confirm
both the truth and the naiveté of Thomas Reid’s remark that ‘there is
no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the
ambiguity of words’.
Daniel B. Gallagher
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
夹夹夹
Eco-Theology, Celia Deane-Drummond, Darton, Longman & Todd,

2008 (ISBN 13-978-0-232-52616-5), 240 pp., pb £14.95
For persons who have always wanted to teach an undergraduate survey

course in Eco-Theology but felt the material was too difficult or the
corpus too large, Celia Deane-Drummond’s book Eco-Theology will be a
Godsend. Rarely does one find such a sweeping survey which does not
glaringly misrepresent vast quantities of literature by oversimplification.
Deane-Drummond’s distillation of Eco-Theology and its resources from
Aldo Leopold and Teilhard de Chardin to Sallie McFague is epic in its
scope, and does not fail to acknowledge traditions of Eco-Theology
which the Western conversation typically ignores – most notably contri-

butions from Southern continents and Eastern Orthodoxies. One of the
book’s most valuable contributions may be its mammoth bibliography.
Deane-Drummond’s approach is to first of all situate the eco-
theological project in the context of natural sciences’ statistics, ensuring
that the novice reader is unable to dismiss eco-theology as unwarranted,
unjustified, or uninteresting. Citing research not just on global warming
but extinction, distribution of resources, economic theory, and land use,
Deane-Drummond quickly convinces even the skeptic that the trends
she cites require attention, and theological attention at that. Her astute
assessments about ways of addressing problems – for example, that
concerned persons might well understand free market economics to be
the problem or believe that giving free-market value to natural resources
is exactly the solution – are sure to get students thinking.
The second project of the book, reviewing the body of literature in
eco-theology, is what the book will surely become known for. Begin-
ning with the conservationist movement in the United States as far back
as the beginning of the twentieth century, Deane-Drummond moves us
on to the Deep Ecology movement, situating all subsequent figures and
movements in relation to Deep Ecological concerns versus Creation
Spiritualities. Eco-Theology aptly shows the progression from anthopo-
centrically oriented modes of concern for the environment to Gaia or
holistic approaches in which human life may not take pride of place
over the being of other creatures and forms of life. The tensions
between these two approaches and the value to many of remaining
Christian yet affirming the equal and holistic standing of the entire
creation before God is what sets the state for her survey of Eco-
Theologies North, South, East and West.
Deane-Drummond’s treatment of theological topics from Christol-
ogy and the Bible to Pneumatology, Wisdom and Theodicy is brilliantly
informed by her framing of approaches in terms of these anthropocen-
tric and holistic models. Eco-Theology surveys how the Bible can be not
just a source of inappropriate attitudes, but a resource for ecological
thought. Her overview of the notion of stewardship and the Sabbath is
especially rich, pairing close textual citations with the ways in which
these have been used by theologians to affirm our place within and our
humility before the whole creation of which we are a part. The book’s
survey of Christology also makes something clear which many readers
will discover they are unaware of: Christology’s generally anthropocen-
tric significance. To be introduced to the idea that Jesus’ importance
may be cosmic – universal – not just related to human beings is like
having a veil lifted from one’s eyes. Indeed, a renewed understanding
of Jesus’ significance for the whole of creation may be at the heart of the
term ‘eco-theology’, at least for Christians. If even the significance of
Jesus is for the entirely of what is, then our understandings of sin and
grace, redemption, ethics, ecclesiology, theological anthropology – all

theological subjects – cannot help but be radically transformed through
reevaluation.
For those readers especially interested in eco-theology and feminist
theology, Deane-Drummond’s summary of trajectories in the move-
ment will be welcome. Even those readers who are not feminists will
have read Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sallie McFague’s work, but
few will be familiar with Anne Primavesi, Lawrence Osborne and Mary
Grey. Primavesi in particular is an excellent author to include, as she
radicalizes McFague’s thought by refusing the unique necessity of the
Christ event. Mary Grey’s commitment to political activism on behalf of
the poor, vulnerable and marginalized is also a significant contribution
in a movement sometimes accused of not caring for the plight of indi-
viduals who are then included in these groups. Deane-Drummond’s
assessment of what is at issue and what is at stake in radical feminist
revisionings of the creation is incisive. Her appreciation of the success
of McFague in not only revisioning the creation but working creatively
from within and on behalf of the Christian Tradition is welcome.
Deane-Drummond’s constructive segment, Towards Theological Eco-
Praxis, is a refreshing conclusion to the book. It is not simply full of
directives to recycle, bicycle to work or grow one’s food organically.
Instead, one is here called to a conversion of attitudes: attitudes which
are surely the compost from which proper ecological concerns and
behaviors will naturally grow. We are called to balance activity and rest.
We are called to develop our sense of wonder. We are called to love
creation as expressing the love of God. We are called to reaffirm the
covenant between God, humanity and creation.
Eco-Theology is a sweeping text. Readers are given an enormous,
careful overview of much of the conversation which emerges when
Theology coincides with environmental concern. A word of caution:
novice readers will not have the wherewithal to know that Deane-
Drummond is consistently advocating a moderate position. Even her
language in the closing in which she urges the renewal of covenant
smacks of human existence as something different that creation. That
covenant might have been revisioned in this book as between ‘God and
creation’. Instead, humanity is still considered as somehow outside the
rest of God’s work. Along with her treatment of economics as a poten-
tial inroad to ecological work, we should see the book for what it is: a
reforming rather than a radical vision.
Aimée U. Light
Duquesne University
夹夹夹
Creation’s Diversity: Voices from Theology and Science, Willem B.

Drees, Hubert Meisinger, and Taede A. Smedes (eds.), T&T Clark, 2008
(ISBN 0-5670-3329-5), xi + 186 pp., pb $60.00
This book is a collection of essays, each written with an eye toward

offering a theological interpretation of the natural world. The authors
seek to help us understand ‘nature’ as ‘creation’, with an eye for how
this understanding might then encourage and underwrite continuing
care for nature as a theological task and moral responsibility.
The title is extremely apt; the essays contained in the book are
‘diverse’ in all kind of respects. They are written by theologians, biblical
scholars, professional scientists, and church leaders. They vary so much
in subject matter, and quality, one from another that only as broad a
theme as ‘creation’ itself could hope to encompass the material. This is
a problem that besets many books that are compilations of conference
proceedings. But in such collections, there are often a couple or more
essays that make the book worth the purchase price, and such is the
case with this one. A caveat must be inserted here, however. As is so
often the frustrating reality in religion and science books, authors tend
to have expertise in one of the two fields, and exuberance for the other.
Rare indeed is the scholar who is equally at home in the laboratory and
the library. Keeping in mind the expertise of the authors in this text will
provide the necessary grains of salt for getting the most out of it.
The first part of the book comprises essays loosely related to the
theme of the human’s place in nature. D. Goodin’s essay, for example,
on the interpretation of Leviathan in the Old Testament provides a
critique of human-centric views of nature by showing that even its
threatening elements have been declared good by God. C. Southgate, in
his essay, crystallizes previous work on the meaning of ‘suffering’ in
nature by exploring the notion of creation as a divine kenosis. Kenotic
self-giving requires a kind of divine self-limitation, allowing space for
the development and evolution of living creatures. Southgate urges
humans properly to conceive of their relation to nature such that further
destruction and degradation are minimized, and the potential role of
humans as ‘co-redeemers’ is lifted up. T. Watling’s contribution contex-
tualizes different approaches to remedying the ecological crises by
describing three ways humans have ‘mythologized’ cosmology. These
are the Gaia hypothesis, deep ecology, and the epic of evolution.
Veteran science and religion readers will find little new here, but the
discussion is cleanly summarized and well-presented. One key aim of
many authors in Part One has been to bridge the gap between fact and
value. Many of them compellingly show that no description of nature is
purely value-neutral, and thus the construal of the description itself –
such as the choice to call it ‘creation’ – both necessitates and profits from
interaction between scientists and religious thinkers.
The book’s second part contains various attempts to analyze theologi-

cally the notion of ‘sustainability’ as a potential resource for addressing
our urgent ecological situation. Here as well some essays disappoint,
but others show their value. R. J. Berry tirelessly makes the small, but
well-taken, point that diversity is not to be ‘sustained’, if that means
the simple perpetuation of a static status quo. Rather what is needed
are ethical policies governing development which are themselves
sustainable. P. Kirschenmann asks the question whether present policy
approaches to safeguarding biodiversity are rooted enough in moral
and religious commitments to ensure their continued viability. He
wonders this aloud so loudly that there can be little doubt of his advo-
cacy for bringing explicitly religious language to bear on the issue.
D. Evers’ reliable pen points out in a brief essay (puzzlingly departing
from the book’s theme, however) that Christian theologies, rightly
understood, always welcome and in fact have much to gain from a
diversity of religious and scientific viewpoints on any given issue,
including approaches to the ecological crisis.
This book will be of some interest to people with fairly extensive
familiarity with the ever-growing science-religion literature. Most of
the authors presume a thorough knowledge of many of the current
debates in the field, much technical jargon is left undefined, and numer-
ous essayists (particularly Watling and Southgate) invoke very much in
the way of secondary, and even tertiary, literature from the field.
Increasingly, people of faith in the Western world are coming to grips
with the ambiguous relationship their faith tradition has had to the
natural world. Also increasingly, many want for their faith to inform
their action in support of that environment. If such people are willing to
work through some difficult, wide-ranging material with a discerning
eye, they will find material enough to consider for a long time in
Creation’s Diversity.
Derek Nelson
Greenville, PA
夹夹夹
Stories from the Edge: A Theology of Grief, Greg Garrett,

Westminster John Knox Press, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-664-23204-7), xx + 131
pp., pb £9.99
Garret’s book, largely a recounting a unit of his unit of Clinical Pas-

toral Education, is an uneven title that is difficult to easily evaluate.
From a literary point of view, the book contains artfully rendered and
beautifully told stories of patients and their lives. Garrett narrates the
individuals he encounters, he and his feelings about their lives in rich,
lucid ways. One is left haunted by his characters.
Yet, that literary strength makes the theological part of the book
seem all the less artful. Sometimes, one wishes that Garrett could
simply have left the reader with these moving narratives. However, he
attempts to move from narrative to theology in somewhat uneven
fashion. At points Garrett connects the two insightfully at others it is
clear that he is awkwardly ‘popularizing’ insights found on any basic
theology and pastoral care class. While Garrett talks mainly about his
experiences as a hospital chaplain, he undertakes unhelpful autobio-
graphical detours into his own journey with depression. The conflation
of his story and those of his patients seems grants neither very much
justice. Suffering from depression is different than suffering from a
another illness. For those with chaplaincy experience, the book will
probably not offer much insight. It recounts experiences and feelings
that those who have done hospital chaplaincy or pastoral work wrestle
with. For those who are looking for an accessable introduction to suf-
fering and the Christian life this book has moments of real insight
amid beautifully crafted stories. All ask the central question, ‘Where is
God in the midst of the sorrow?’ Garett makes one wade through some
rather unhelpful autobiography and clumsy theology to get there, but
there are moments of artfully crafted wisdom in this work, which
makes it worth reading.
Aaron Klink
Duke University
夹夹夹
Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

by G.E.M Anscombe, Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (eds.), Imprint
Academic, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-845-40121-4), 250 pp., pb £17.95/$34.90
Elizabeth Anscombe’s major work, Intentionality, had a deep and

lasting effect on the philosophical world. She was Wittgenstein’s dis-
ciple and trustee, but developed an original approach and made
contributions to many areas in philosophy. The three volumes of her
collected articles (1981) show her staggering range, her fierce and
dogged intelligence, and her ability to think originally. In 2005, St
Andrews Studies published a collection of essays (the majority of
which were unpublished) Human Life, Action and Ethics which was
lovingly and well edited by Anscombe’s daughter and her daughter’s
husband. This present book, edited by the same team, contains twenty-
five articles and brings an enormous amount of unpublished materials
kept in Anscombe’s files into the public realm. The technical apparatus
provided by the editors is very helpful, including the almost Herculean
feat of trying to establish the context in which each article was deliv-
ered. The collection also contains some previously published essays
included for thematic coverage. This book will be of great interest to
philosophers, ethicists, and theologians, and Anscombe is always chal-
lenging and tends to swim against the tides of modernity and fashion.
She covers a wide range of topics: the nature of faith, miracles, tran-
substantiation, the soul, the nature of authority in morals and the nature
of morality itself, sin, contraception and chastity and wisdom and
usury – to name only some. What becomes clear from these essays is
Anscombe’s deep Thomist orientation, and her profound fidelity to the
Roman Catholic Church, not in any unthinking manner, but in a con-
stant attempt to explicate Catholic doctrine against shallow misunder-
standing (often by Catholics). So she is happy to criticize Catholics for
abandoning their teachings on usury which had been formally con-
demned as late as 1745, as well as chide those Catholic missionaries in
Africa who request money as a mark of commitment and upkeep for
the new growing church to those who are to be baptized. Not that
Anscombe fails to see the reasons for why they did these actions, but
she is equally clear that under no conditions can salvation be predicated
upon payment for profoundly theological reasons.
What is also interesting is the way intentionality, drawing on
Anscombe’s early groundbreaking work, illuminates topic after topic.
For example, in defending Humanae Vitae she explains the difference
between contraceptive intercourse (the use of the pill) and noncontra-
ceptive intercourse (the use of the rhythm method) in terms of inten-
tionality. The description of the first is that it is an act of sexual
intercourse deliberately rendered infertile and the second is the perfor-
mance of a generate act in which the couple have done nothing to
change it from that. It is a shame that the editors excluded the brief
philosophically astute and somewhat irate criticisms of this position by
Peter Winch and Bernard Williams with Michael Tanner when it was
first published, along with Anscombe’s terse reply. This would have
helped the student grasp Anscombe’s singular concern as well as her
refusal to engage with what she considered polemics. Anscombe in
these essays also interestingly comments that once artificial contracep-
tion is permitted then logically, any form of sexual activity might be
permitted. This shows both her ability to lack balance as well as see the
wood for the trees! I recommend this collection highly.
Gavin D’Costa
University of Bristol
夹夹夹
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sino-Theology/Dietrich Bonhoeffer und

Sino-Theologie, Clifford Green and Thomas Tseng (eds.), Chung Yuan
Christian University, 2008 (ISBN 978-986-7021-93-9), 398 pp.
This bilingual volume consists of a collection of eleven essays each of

which (except the one by Moltmann and the two by Welker) is followed
by a brief response by Bonhoeffer scholars from Germany and one from
the United States. All the essays were presented in March 2006 at ‘Christ
and the World – International Conference of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and
Sino-Theology’, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan, as one of the
many events around the world to commemorate Bonhoeffer’s 100th
birthday; Moltmann’s essay was also presented in Taiwan, but at a
different occasion in October 2005.
The essays collected in this volume are as follows: Jürgen Moltmann,
‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Theologie. Eine persönliche Würdigung’,
Michael Welker, ‘Bonhoeffers geniale frühe Ekklesiologie’, Michael
Welker, ‘Bonhoeffers theologisches Vermächtnis in “Widerstand und
Ergebung” ’, Zhang Xu, ‘On the Concept of Revelation in Bonhoeffer’s
Theology: An Interpreation of Act and Being’ (with a response by
Christiane Tietz), Andres S. K. Tang, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Mou
Zhongsan’s Reading of Martin Heidegger’ (with a response by Clifford
Green), Jing-Jong Luh, ‘Sein, Subjekt und Akt. Ein kritisch-
hermeneutischer Dialog zwischen dem deutschen Idealismus und der
ethischen Theologie Bonhoeffers’ (with a response by Jürgen Boom-
gaarden), Li-Jen Ou, ‘Christ of Redemption and Creation: Dietrich Bon-
hoeffer’s Christocentric Exposition of Genesis 1–3’ (with a response by
Rainer Mayer); Samuel Chiow, ‘Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity’
(with a response by Ralf Wüstenberg), Chin Ken Pa, ‘Love Letters as a
Theological Text? Bonhoeffer’s Theology of Kissing’ (with a response
by Renate Wind), Thomas Tseng, ‘Christologie und Eschatologie. Das
Letzte und das Vorletzte bei Dietrich Bonhoeffer’ (with a response by
Rainer Mayer), Tang Sui Keung, ‘An Ethical Case of “The Son Conceal-
ing the Misconduct of the Father”: The Postmodernity of Bonhoeffer’s
Ethics’ (with a response by Christiane Tietz). Regrettably, the volume
does not have a bibliography or an index.
It is refreshing to read a collection of essays on Bonhoeffer that goes
beyond the interests and confines of European and North American
Bonhoeffer scholarship while at the same time engaging with it. None-
theless, as is the case in any collection of articles, there is unevenness
in matters of substance, length, style, spelling, and cohesiveness.
Given the limited space, I will comment only briefly on the essays.
Moltmann’s essay provides a retrospective appraisal of Bonhoeffer’s
theology on his own theological development. He admires in Bonho-

effer that he did not leave us a ‘Lehrsystem’ nor a dogmatic, but
‘gelebte Theologie und Theologie im Werden’ (p. 21). In particular, he
was inspired by Bonhoeffer’s genuine worldliness, his faithfulness to
the earth, the idea of a world come of age and his conviction that only
a suffering God can help. Given Moltmann’s own experience as a pris-
oner of war, he has a high regard for the later prison writings, but is
less enthusiastic about the early writings Act and Being and especially
Sanctorum Communio. Interestingly, Welker takes up that very work in
his first essay and characterizes it contra Moltmann as perhaps ‘die
scharfsinnigste und vielleicht tiefsinnigste Behandlung der Frage nach
der wesenhaften Struktur der Kirche’ (p. 37). For Welker, Bonhoeffer’s
genius lies in his ability to integrate concepts of personhood, God,
interpersonal structures and complex socials structures in the concrete
theological-social matrix of the church. In his second article, Welker
articulates Bonhoeffer’s theological legacy in the prison writings, the
most important aspects of which are: spiritual and theological realism,
eschatological realism embedded in the totality of life, religionless
Christianity, and the suffering of God. Zhang Xu’s study focuses on
Act and Being and argues convincingly for the crucial place of revela-
tion in Bonhoeffer’s thought. His discussion unfolds against the back-
drop of the Greek, Latin and modern German intellectual traditions
vis-à-vis Bonhoeffer’s appropriation of these traditions. In his essay,
Andres Tang compares the two contemporaries Bonhoeffer and the
Chinese neo-Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan and their interpre-
tation of Heidegger. In many ways, this is an intriguing discussion of
the question of ontology in theology. The author concludes that even
though Bonhoeffer attaches priority to being over act and Mou took
the opposite path, they are united in their attempt to unravel the issue
of temporality and finitude. The longest and one of the most stimu-
lating essays is that by Jing-Jong Luh. Luh deals with three basic ques-
tions: is Bonhoeffer’s critique of German idealism justified, the issue of
whether Bonhoeffer’s theology is systematic and the hermeneutical
relation between philosophy and theology as such. Focusing on Sanc-
torum Cummunio and Act and Being, there is hardly a topic that is not
addressed in one way or another. This essay is simply a goldmine that
needs to be explored further. Li-Jen Ou argues in his study for the
soteriological importance of the Christ of creation. He proposes that
‘creation is the form of redemption while redemption is the materials of
creation’ (p. 233).
In his essay, Samuel Chiow contends that Bonhoeffer desired a
Christian faith that was not ‘anti’ but ‘a’-religious in nature. Chow
argues that concretely this faith entails a ‘profoundly worldly Chris-
tianity’ that seeks a person’s full humanity. Chin Ken Pa’s essay is
unique in that it addresses a topic that has been largely neglected in
Bonhoeffer scholarship. No doubt, it is important to look at the love

relationship between Bonhoeffer and Maria, not so much from the
perspective of theology as that of love. Chin does the latter. That such
an examination is not as easy as it may seem is obvious in the essay.
Given the distance between the correspondence of the love letters and
our own time and cultural assumptions, what does love mean for
Dietrich and Maria? For example, Chin uses the expression ‘erotic
love’ – but what does the expression mean, for Bonhoeffer and Maria,
for the Asian context and the Western reader? In often poetic lan-
guage, the author plays on the presence of being in writing. ‘Writing
is regarded as ‘co-presence’, for it overflows the boundaries of mere
writing . . . Distance claims its presence in love by giving love as a gift
of the absence’ (p. 299). Thomas Tseng’s study examines the nexus of
Christology, eschatology and ethics in Bonhoeffer. In a well-argued
essay, Tseng demonstrates convincingly that Bonhoeffer’s distinction
of the ‘ultimate and penultimate’ has a firm Christological foundation
and important ontological implications. In the final essay, Tang Sui-
Keung makes the case that Bonhoeffer’s ethics is postmodern to the
extent that it does not begin with a fixed code of ethical behavior or
a rational system of the ego, but with the concrete reality of the world
and the respect for the ‘otherness of others’ (p. 387).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sino-Theology amounts to an intriguing
contribution to Bonhoeffer scholarship. The essays are very important
in that they originate in the context of Asia, in countries such as
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, and thus throw a new light on Bon-
hoeffer. Perhaps most significant, Bonhoeffer is not merely dealt with
as a person who is interesting for biographical, political, or social
reasons. Quite to the contrary, these essays demonstrate a very pro-
found and substantive philosophical and theological engagement
with his writings and thought, often vis-à-vis that of a Chinese
thinker. Almost all of the studies discuss issues relating to the ques-
tions of method, methodology, epistemology, ontology, hermeneutics,
and so on. The philosophical interest throughout the book is indeed
obvious. To provide but one example, it is astonishing how often
the authors refer to Heidegger, either explicitly discussing him or
implicitly building on one of his ideas. I can only hope that Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and Sino-Theology will rouse the interest of Bonhoeffer
scholars in both East and West to engage in fruitful dialogue for years
to come.
Peter Frick
University of Waterloo
夹夹夹
Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition, Trevor A. Hart

and Steven R. Guthrie (eds.), Ashgate, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-7546-5525-1),
viiii + 288 pp., hb $99.95/£55.00
Faithful Performances is the first multiauthor work to be issued in

Ashgate’s new series of Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts,
edited by Trevor Hart, Roger Lundin, and Jeremy Begbie. The series
borrows its name from the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the
Arts (ITIA), founded in 2000 at the University of St. Andrews, which
together with the Theology Through the Arts Program (TTAP) forms
the context for much of the work published under this aegis. (TTAP was
until recently based at the University of Cambridge and is now affili-
ated with Duke University.) The series as a whole seizes the opportu-
nity presented by increased scholarly interest in the intersections of
religion, creativity, art and aesthetics to publish first rate works exam-
ining this emerging discourse. The articles underlying the book’s chap-
ters were originally delivered between 2001 and 2004 in various settings
associated with ITIA in St. Andrews (although final editing, including
bibliographies, was completed more recently), and focus on artistic
performance as a potent metaphor for thinking theologically.
One might well wonder why performance should be of interest to
theologians. Trevor Hart explains in the introduction that, over the last
fifty years, performance has come to be seen as a particularly fruitful
avenue for ‘modelling human life’ (p. 3). In more recent decades, this
approach has been appropriated in theology as well, beginning with
theologians’ and patristic scholars’ work with biblical interpretation,
coming in part as a corrective to the biblical guild’s over-reliance on
historical-critical methods (p. 5). More broadly, performance-related
metaphors, particularly from the world of drama, have been found to be
particularly helpful in talking about the interface of the sources of
Christian faith (scripture in particular), and the actual lives of Chris-
tians. Texts such as musical scores or scripts are not themselves works
of art apart from human engagement, but are meant to be worked out
in performance, a public inhabiting of the texts (p. 6). As a musician or
actor would attest, these performances are never identical, and any
performance always requires a measure of judgment and interpretation
on behalf of the performer: it is never as simple as doing neither more
nor less than the text says, in accord with the author’s intention.
Thus, the move to consider performance more fully, particularly
through the lenses of drama and music, constitutes a helpful move
away from a preoccupation with literature, painting or poetry, all of
which as art might seem self-contained, complete on its own. (This is
not to say they are self-contained, but that drama or music are more
clearly seen as art forms needing human performance for their fulfill-
ment.) But even more, this move toward consideration of performance
makes explicit what has been present (if sometimes veiled) in the Chris-
tian tradition from the beginning: that human agency is involved in the
engagement with the sources of Christian faith, and that judgment and
interpretation are inextricably bound up with that. In shedding this
light, performance as a metaphor allows for closer and more careful
consideration of the judgments and interpretations made and the
reasons for doing so, even if it does not in itself clear away the future
need for making further contingent judgments.
The collection falls into three sections. The first dwells on the possi-
bilities of theological appropriation of metaphors related to dramatic
performance. Each of these chapters finds great potential in this appro-
priation, and in various ways pushes earlier theological uses of theatre
to go further; the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Kevin Vanhoozer
are particularly queried here. Ben Quash examines von Balthasar’s use
of drama in his theology, highlighting its promise while also pointing
up some ways in which, in von Balthasar’s work, this promise is not
always fulfilled. Ivan Khovacs then picks up the baton, cautioning that if
theologians are to make use of drama, they cannot do so for mere
ornamentation, but must be willing to learn from drama as a discourse
with its own integrity. Joshua Edelman continues this theme as he
critiques Vanhoozer’s use of drama, claiming it does not go far enough
in its engagement with contemporary drama and therefore misses
important resources.
The second section turns to broader questions of how the scriptures
or Christian tradition might be ‘performed’. Michael Partridge exam-
ines the everyday nature of ‘performance’ of religious traditions, with
special consideration of issues of inculturation. The intrinsically embod-
ied and kinetic aspects of worship practices are looked at by Steven
Guthrie in his essay. Cardinal Cajetan’s exegesis of scripture and the
broadly literary (as well as historical-critical) character of it is presented
by Michael O’Connor. Of immediately practical concern, Jolyon Mitch-
ell explores how Christians might reframe the presentation of violence
in the world by the news media. Sam Wells discusses improvisational
theatre in his chapter, and the section closes with a chapter by Trevor
Hart in which he investigates the relationship between the shape of
dramatic performance and life.
Finally, the third section considers how various forms of art ‘may also
constitute a set of Christian practices in which the tradition is, as it
were, authentically “performed” ’ (p. 87). In this section, Patrick Sherry
looks at what he calls the ‘arts of redemption’, works of art which show
the fallenness of the world without filter, but in doing so intimate the
possibility of salvation. Malcolm Guite turns to serious considerations
of playfulness, arguing against the commonplace notion that fiction is
unconcerned with truth. William Dyrness’ chapter examines the devel-
opment of the Protestant imagination. An essay by Rosemary Muir
Wright and another by David Brown close out the volume by taking up
the possibility that art might not only be used by theology for its own
ends, but itself be a generative conversation partner for theology.
Interestingly, the chapters by Hart and (especially) Wells somewhat
push at the boundaries of the metaphor of dramatic performance of
texts, as they each commend improvisation as a particularly fruitful
analogy for ecclesial ethics. Hart suggests that, because no ‘precise
script’ exists for life, a musical improvisational cadenza might be a
better metaphor for life than following a script (p. 185). Where Hart
leaves off, Wells picks up, endeavoring to give an account of the Chris-
tian life in terms of improvisational theatre. This essay anticipates his
book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Brazos, 2004).
In a final coda, Jeremy Begbie draws together several strands of
commonality he finds running through the collection, namely a com-
mitment to theological realism (the notion that the subject of theology
precedes and exceeds thought), as well as a commitment to the integ-
rity of the arts (rather than employing them crudely as mere ornamen-
tation or to illustrate truths arrived at on entirely unrelated grounds).
He also notes the growing sense among theologians of the heuristic
potential of the arts, that engagement with them may well bring to light
insights which might not otherwise be had. With these observations, he
has hit upon the greatest value of this work considered as a collection.
In closing, he highlights a challenge, partly anticipated by the essays, for
the development of an ‘appropriate rigour when working with the arts in
theology’ which can maintain the dialectical tension of the two dis-
courses’ integrities, slipping neither into ‘anti-aesthetic rationalism’ nor
‘undisciplined aestheticism’ (p. 278).
Because the original articles were composed between 2001 and 2004
– as I write in 2009, between five and eight years ago – some of the
articles seem slightly dated. For example, the essay by Wells might
serve for some readers more as review of his later, more substantial
work than anything. But other readers, unfamiliar with his book, might
find this chapter to be a helpful introduction, and a spur to deeper
engagement.
On the whole, this is a welcome, well-balanced volume of essays on
a topic of emerging interest in theology that would be of interest to
those working in aesthetics, art, theological ethics or ecclesiology.
Ashgate’s decision to issue this volume in hardback rather than paper-
back most likely ensures that it will be found primarily on the shelves of
theological libraries. Nevertheless, one hopes that the issues and ideas
raised in this collection receive a wide hearing within this emerging
conversation.
Jason A. Fout
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
夹夹夹
Can These Bones Live? A Catholic Baptist Engagement with

Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory, Barry Harvey, Brazos
Press, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-58743-081-7), viii + 318 pp., pb $24.99
Barry Harvey, a professor of theology at Baylor University, has divided

his book into two parts. The first and shorter part deals with the current
state of Christianity as divided, dispirited, and desiccated – hence the
reference to Ezekiel’s dry ‘bones’. He surveys how Christianity has
come to this sorry point where its unity has long been shattered and its
influence on the culture of our world sharply reduced. He then turns, in
the second and longer part, to reflect on the resources across the Chris-
tian tradition – scriptural, patristic, Protestant, Catholic, and occasion-
ally Orthodox – with which some Christians today may wish to equip
themselves in the struggle for unity and relevance in the world. Harvey
rightly reminds Christians of all traditions that the problems we face
today are not denominationally discrete. He commendably exemplifies
an ecumenically open method of searching for answers across the
breadth of Christian tradition, paying special attention to areas –
sacraments and liturgy – which have not been as prominent among
Baptists as they have among Catholics and Orthodox. This book thus
clearly demonstrates an impressively catholic reading of diverse theo-
logical and philosophical sources, among whom the moral philosopher
Alasdair MacIntyre, the ‘high church Methodist’ Stanley Hauerwas, the
‘radically orthodox’ John Milbank, and the Protestant theologian James
McClendon are perhaps most prominent.
Harvey’s argument, in sum, seems to be that Christians must be
Christians, that the church must be the church – here one detects a clear
Hauerwasian influence – and as such the church must resist the ‘fun-
damental misconception – that Christian faith subsists in a worldview,
that is, a set of beliefs that can be understood and embraced by virtually
anyone apart from the other practices and habits of God’s pilgrim
people’ (p. 24). Harvey is not going to construct a theological world-
view but instead investigate the theological nature of those practices by
which Christians may be faithful Christians in the world today. If the
temptation of having a ‘worldview’ is to be resisted, he also makes it
clear that the temptation for the church to be a politically powerful
agent in the world must also be resisted. Following Augustine, Harvey
argues (p. 25) that libido dominandi is a perpetual danger which every-
one, Christian or not, must seek to resist. The Christian Church, in sum,
must resist these temptations and instead remain ‘on pilgrimage
toward the city whose architect and builder is God, serving the places
in which we now find ourselves as both sign of the age to come and
vehicle of passage for this world through time’ (p. 286). The church
must therefore resist the temptation to imitate the all-encompassing
modern nation-state and instead content itself with being a ‘particular
community and tradition’ (p. 35) no matter how much such a ‘scandal
of particularity’ may rankle modern sensibilities. Here MacIntyre’s
influence is obvious.
Harvey has clearly joined Hauerwas’s company of the ‘ecclesially
homeless’. This is of course evident in the subtitle (‘Catholic Baptist
engagement . . . ’) but even more so in the wide sources upon which
he draws. There are more and more such people today (the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey early in 2008
showing that more than a quarter of adult Americans were raised
in one religious tradition but have migrated toward another), and
Harvey and Hauerwas stand alongside such as Catherine Pickstock
and John Milbank, both Anglicans who have done more insightful and
important work on Catholic themes and sources than many Catholic
theologians can bestir themselves to do. Any Protestants feeling
homeless in their own ecclesial tradition may very well and possibly
gratefully come to appreciate Harvey’s peregrinations and all the
permutations of his argument.
It is not, however, an easy argument to follow. Homeless status, it
must be said, is at once a liberation and a burden. It liberates Harvey to
follow his argument into all sorts of interesting places, but it also makes
‘discerning’ (a favored verb of Harvey) both the purpose of this book,
and also the coherence of his argument, very difficult. I am still not clear
why he wrote this book, which reads in its looser moments like an
omnium gatherum masquerading as a monograph. Are we to regard this
book as prolegomena to his own move toward entering full communion
with the Catholic Church? Is this book, in other words, an apologia pro
vita sua, and should we stay tuned for news of Harvey’s conversion? Or
is this book an essay in wider ecumenism and so a contribution to a
Catholic-Baptist rapprochement leading hopefully and eventually to full
union between those two bodies? Or perhaps it has a different purpose
altogether? Both the purpose and the intended audience of this book
remain unclear.
Homeless status means that such questions as these are never satis-
factorily resolved, which is not necessarily fatal. As MacIntyre notes in
his most recent book Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913–1922
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), Stein’s life is still of great
philosophical interest not for her answers – many of which she did not
live long enough to give – but precisely because she left us with philo-
sophical and theological questions that continue to merit attention. So
questioning and exploring are of course very good but usually only if
one is clear about the significance, the worth, of asking the questions in
the first place.
Questioning and ‘cross-border’ searching entail a further risk to

which Harvey’s book is prone, viz., that of not fully understanding the
various traditions he uses to construct his bricolage. Harvey’s treatment
of such issues and persons as the revolutionary Pope Gregory VII (pp.
106–10) lacks crucial familiarity with primary literature or the irreplace-
able scholarship from such distinguished historians as Ian Robinson,
Brian Tierney, and Gerd Tellenbach. His section on ‘Doctrine and Eccle-
sial Authority’ (pp. 196–8) is barely two pages long and is notable only
for its superficiality and also – once again – its ignorance of such major
scholars as Klaus Schatz, Hermann Pottmeyer, and Jean Tillard, inter
alia.
In sum, then, this book is valuable for its wide (though not always
satisfactorily deep) learning and its commitment to Christian ecu-
menism on the most important question of our time, viz., ecclesiology.
As one whose own work is in ecumenical ecclesiology, I must say that
notwithstanding my concerns above, we need more scholars like
Harvey extending themselves to investigate different Christian tradi-
tions to discover what riches we share in common. Until and unless we
first know the distinctive beliefs and constitutive practices of our fellow
Christians, the hopes for the unity of the church will remain just so
many dry bones.
Adam A. J. DeVille
University of Saint Francis
夹夹夹
Aquinas, Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and

Practise, Thomas Hibbs, Indiana University Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-
253-34881-4), xvi + 232 pp., hb $39.95
From a book with such a wide title, the only thing one can be certain
of from the start is that a large number of topics will be considered
from the point of view of Thomas Aquinas, who serves as the lens
through which Thomas Hibbs surveys the philosophical landscape.
And indeed, the book lives up to its all-embracing title, covering such
topics as virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, practice and tradition-
based rationality, metaphysics and the nature of philosophy, aesthetics
and literary critique. Add to this that issues within these broader
themes are tackled from historical, analytic and continental perspec-
tives alike and you have an idea of the scope of this book. However,
if it sometimes reads as a series of independent articles – and some of
the material has been published in article form – let me hasten to add
that the constant appeal to Thomas Aquinas, as well as the overarch-

ing aim of connecting metaphysics with practice in a stronger and
more fruitful way than has often been the case, adds a needed sense
of coherence. And Hibbs proves himself to be a nuanced, knowledge-
able and amicable guide into the thought of Aquinas, mastering both
analytic and continental interpretations. Rather than a tightly woven
argument, this is above all a source of good and sometimes provoca-
tive ideas on the above mentioned topics from the perspective of a
nuanced contemporary Thomism. While it should be accessible to
an advanced undergraduate, some prior knowledge of the general
Aristotelian-Thomistic framework is probably needed to fully appre-
ciate the discussion.
The overall project of the book is to show forth the value of a practice-
oriented philosophy while supplementing it with a more robust sense
of the indispensability of metaphysics. After outlining this project in the
preface and in Chapter 1, Hibbs spends the next couple of chapters
discussing the recovery of the notion of practice in ethics and episte-
mology, respectively. In both disciplines this entails a salutary move
away from a procedural or rule-based way of thinking to an emphasis
on the character of virtuous persons in concrete real-life situations. In
the domain of ethics Hibbs discusses the often neglected virtue of
justice; drawing from Aquinas’ views on personal property he shows
that justice as a virtue is grounded in a specific metaphysic which
conceives of being as gift, such that human beings mirror the divine
‘ontological generosity’ in their willingness to give without any strict
obligation to do so. The chapter on virtue and knowledge is perhaps the
most interesting of all, as Hibbs tries to steer a way between contem-
porary epistemological models and to recover a sense of agency or
practice for human knowing. He argues that virtue epistemology takes
us far from the outlandish examples of theoretical scepticism to an
appreciation of the excellencies of the mind embodied in the wise and
prudent person. But such wisdom requires the ability to apprehend the
interconnectedness of things, which is one function of metaphysics in
the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. So once again we are returned
to the close relation between practice-oriented philosophy and meta-
physics, the central idea of the book.
Then follows a chapter on the properly ontological question of the
relationship between the mind and the world, where it is argued that
the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding does not fall prey to the
now mostly rejected dualism of subject and object. While highlighting a
few questions in need of further investigation, this is also the most
technical part of the book and it will be valuable mainly for the reader
already interested in the intricacies of philosophical ontology.
Chapter 5 serves as a bridge between what could usefully have been
constructed as Parts One and Two of the book. In it Hibbs takes a look
at metaphysics specifically viewed as a practice, answering to the

ancient philosophical pedagogy according to which metaphysical
inquiry was the culmination of the philosophical life. This leads on to
the question, pursued within the philosophy of religion, about phi-
losophy’s capacity to name God, or to attain knowledge of the divine.
Here one chapter is devoted to a critique of the work of analytic phi-
losopher Norman Kretzmann’s understanding of natural theology in
Aquinas. This is then contrasted in the next chapter with a somewhat
more sympathetic account of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Mari-
on’s postmodern reading of Aquinas, which sees Aquinas’ thought as
culminating not in knowledge but in bedazzlement and in the practice
of praise. It is argued that Aquinas, far from being the standard natural
theologian he is sometimes portrayed as, is actually acutely aware of
the limits of human knowledge of the divine and the pervasive pres-
ence of erotic and aesthetic categories in the ascent to God. This pres-
ence of the erotic and the aesthetic is further explored in the next
chapter, comparing Aquinas with Nietzsche and with Joyce in a text
that on a good day could be viewed as bold and creative, but on a bad
day appears to be rather far-fetched and too loosely connected to the
rest of the book.
Hibbs ends the book with a chapter on the virtue of hope grounded
in the metaphysics of creation, which is a very fine exposition of how to
hold together the idea of a radically contingent world, ‘predicated on
the void’, with the idea of the intelligibility of creation grounded in its
participation in the divine love and order.
It is clear that this book tackles many of the problems that are central
to contemporary philosophical debate, and does so from the perspec-
tive of a nuanced Thomism that has shed the excessive claims of tradi-
tional neo-Thomism in the twentieth century. As such it is fully capable
not only of entering into dialogue with many strands of Anglo-
American and continental philosophy, but also of bringing critique,
correction and valuable insights of its own. This book is a good example
of the versatility of Thomism in this respect. It does suffer, however,
from lack of a clear disposition and some things could have been
omitted: I confess I found the passages about Nietzsche and Joyce
distracting rather than illuminating. Be that as it may, Aquinas, Ethics
and Philosophy of Religion contains a number of stimulating ideas, chief
of which is its insistence on the close relation that holds, or should hold,
between metaphysics and practice.
Andreas Nordlander
Lund University
夹夹夹
The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism, John Hughes,

Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007 (ISBN 978-1-4051-5893-0), xii + 247 pp.,
pb $39.95
With the US and UK economies facing simultaneously a banking crisis,

a credit crisis and a downturn, and the rest of the world economy
suffering in proportion, the times may be thought propitious for a
theological critique of capitalism. The recessions of the 1980s and 1990s
provoked a degree of interest among theologians about the moral sig-
nificance of work, but most of it was pretty thin stuff. When people are
being made redundant at a rate of knots, and when mass unemploy-
ment casts its baleful shadow over every element of the social structure,
the temptation to pronounce all work good (or nearly all) is hard to
resist. John Hughes’s splendid book, conceived and written in the years
of plenty when ‘boom and bust’ had been hubristically consigned to
history is, perhaps, all the more significant for being driven by theo-
logical dis-ease rather than political urgency. One of the problems of the
present recession is that, just as governments have no viable economic
ideology to replace the failed paradigms of hyper-capitalism and are
drawing timidly on a kind of bastardized Keynesianism, so the
churches have little of substance to draw upon in their response to the
crisis except the consensual theology of the same period epitomized by
Temple and Oldham. Both Keynes and Temple deserve to be saved
from the scornful dismissal with which they have been treated for too
long, but neither offers economic or moral salvation for our times
without a great deal of further development. If we are to emerge from
this crisis as a better and wiser culture, we need some solid new work
on which to build – and John Hughes may be in the vanguard here. The
widespread sense that something has gone profoundly wrong with ‘the
system’ will have no purchase to prevent the reestablishment of the
status-quo ante unless the sheer wrong-headedness of our present eco-
nomic relationships are revealed and trumpeted. In this book, we have
a fine starting point for this most urgent calling and the beginnings of
a vision for what better work might look like.
This book is no futuristic prescription for a utopia (or a dystopia) in
which human work has lost all but a marginal meaning. The end of
work referred to in the title is, of course, the telos of work. What is work
for, and what do we think we are doing when we are working? Hughes
has emerged from the school of Radical Orthodoxy so, to some extent,
the trajectory of his argument is predictable, though the journey is
never dull. His writing is a good deal less opaque than that of some of
his mentors, but his depth and range of sources is as impressive as
theirs.
A detailed dissection of Weber allows Hughes to make considerable
inroads into the notion of the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Is that spirit
essentially ascetic or hedonistic: rational restraint or acquisitive greed?

Rather than getting caught on that dichotomy, Hughes helps us to see
that here are a number of different questions to do with the origins and
later behavior of capitalism, ‘[O]nce it is initially established, its extraor-
dinary successes can be attributed to its inherent instability . . . capital-
ism always seeks more and is without its own inherent checks, hence its
spread is virus-like, consuming all that stands in its way’ (p. 42). For
Hughes, the contrast between ‘rational’ capitalism and the ‘irrational’
traditions from which its stems misses the crucial point that there is no
single ‘Reason’ but a multiplicity of Reasons, all of which behave like
‘irrational’ traditions. And this distinctly MacIntyrean point is derived
by Hughes, surprisingly but convincingly, from Weber himself. The
rational foundations of utility as the spirit of capitalism are beginning to
be undermined.
Hughes’s treatment of Marx is distinctly sympathetic, not least
because he sees in Marx a latent aesthetic which stands over against any
fundamental principle of utility. While Marx owed much to the political
economists for his theory of labor, he was not, in the end, limited by
their frameworks because of his deep-rooted concern for real people,
their lives, and hopes. Because, for Marx, religion was another mode by
which power was concealed, and which needed to be unmasked for
what it was, the connection between religion and aesthetics is not one
Marx was inclined to pursue. What Hughes succeeds in doing is dis-
covering enough common ground for a conversation in which Marx
and Christian theology can together grapple with the fault-lines within
capitalism and the problems of making work worthwhile.
Not surprisingly, Ruskin and Morris offer much grist to Hughes’s
mill and there is also a valuable chapter on Adorno and the Frankfurt
school. Many readers may linger on these sections, but it is when
Hughes comes to consider the incorporation of the Catholic metaphysi-
cal critique of work into the English Romantic tradition, especially in
the work of Eric Gill, that the pace really picks up. Hughes’s position is,
in many ways, encapsulated in the title of this chapter: The End of
Work: Rest Beauty and Liturgy. It is the influence of both Morris and
Jacques Maritain on Gill which really sums up what this book is all
about, as Hughes establishes answers to the failings of capitalism and
the problem of good work. Could there be a more quintessentially
Radical Orthodox position than the synthesis of English romanticism
and Catholicism? Yet the arguments are so craftsman-like (no other
word will quite do) that they are deeply persuasive.
Or almost so. For it is a reflection from Gill, on Morris and the Arts
and Crafts movement, which raises what seems to be an unanswered
question. Gill noted an irony at the heart of the Arts and Crafts move-
ment, in that (in Hughes’s words), ‘Unable to escape the economic logic
of the surrounding society, the handicraft people were forced to sell
their products at prices which insured that they remained luxury items
for the rich, which were then mass-reproduced in factories anyway.’
And as Gill put it, ‘that was the main result of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society – to supply beautiful hand-made things to the rich,
and imitation ditto to the not-so-rich. But as for wrecking commercial
industrialism and resuscitating a human world – not a hint of it’ (p.
185). Nothing in Hughes’s thesis really gets us past this problem. And
I think the difficulty lies in Hughes’s opening words above: ‘Unable to
escape . . . the surrounding society’.
Is it not the case that the virus which is capitalism, quite rightly
addressed throughout this book as the problem to be overcome, has
nonetheless, at certain times, been perceived as the solution to other
problems – most notably, as a system which allows economic inter-
course among a society of strangers? Might it not also be the case that
the virus has run out of control, at least in part, because a retreat from
a society of strangers (Hayek’s ‘Great Society’) can no more be engi-
neered than (say) the knowledge to make H-bombs can be unlearned.
The question of plurality, with which capitalism and market economics
at least attempt to wrestle, however inadequately, seems to be missing
from a great deal of contemporary political theology. Yet, when the
theologian turns to examine questions of work and economics, the gap
between the vision of beauty and truth embodied in human activity,
and the question of which humans we are actually talking about, yawns
rather wide. The living out of a liturgical practice of work seems, on the
face of it, to demand isolation, or at least a distancing, from the stranger
and from incompatible belief systems which may be no less traditional
or transcendent but which cannot share the Christian vocabulary. In his
chapter on Weber, Hughes is hard on the mercantilists for their con-
ception of a spirit of capitalism which was value-free, unbound by
tradition and deemed to resemble the physical sciences. Of course that
was a dehumanizing process of which we are still reaping the conse-
quences. But was not mercantilism grounded upon the encounter with
the otherness of rival rationalities and traditions? One can see the pro-
cesses of globalization as continuing exponentially from that point and,
although the poverty of Enlightenment liberalism as the project of
finding a common basis for moral as well as material encounters with
otherness has been only too thoroughly revealed, the problem it sought
to address remains.
This difficulty surely translates into other aspects of the Catholic–
Romantic synthesis. Like Demant or D. Stephen Long, and like Gill
also, Hughes is attracted to the idea of the Guilds, or perhaps Unions,
as safeguarding the subordination of human work to beauty and truth.
But the Guilds and later the Unions exhibited a tendency toward the
closed shop, and thus to the stifling of aspiration among nonmembers
who might have concurred happily with their stated aims. How can the
good be secured, not only for those who perceive it now, but as a
properly evangelical virtue to be shared in all the world? In his discus-
sion of Gill, Hughes notes that: ‘Capitalism is to be condemned not
because the majority of people are dissatisfied with it . . . ’ (p. 191). So no
democratic mandate there, then. Hughes would doubtless argue, not
without justice, that theology and democracy are by no means comfort-
able bed-fellows, but it is the lack of any hint of a political program
(in the broadest possible sense) which disturbs me. The world is not
lacking visionaries who can see a better way, and often they ground
their vision, to a greater or lesser extent, in theological tradition. But
visionaries who get their hands on the levers of change often turn out
to be monsters.
The current economic crisis will throw up too many visionary mon-
sters, and some will no doubt come dressed as prophets of an old faith.
Since Hughes wrote his book, the capitalist world has been transfixed
by its own failures and it is not, perhaps, too extreme to say that it
teeters between a sort of hell and an inchoate hope of something more
heavenly. Somehow, from the treasure house of Christian theology
there must emerge not just a critique but a program to lead us toward
the one and not the other. Whether Hughes’s magisterial thesis has the
capacity to become a program, I am not sure. But it is, nonetheless, an
unparalleled excursion into precisely that treasure house. It should be
read, not only for its central thesis, but for its intricate dissection of
Weber, Marx, and all its main sources. Hughes has set a new criterion
for what a theology of work ought to be about.
Malcolm Brown
The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England
夹夹夹
The Lord and Giver of Life: Perspectives on Constructive

Pneumatology, David H. Jensen (ed.), Westminster John Knox Press,
2008 (ISBN 978-0-664-23167-5), xvii + 189 pp., pb $24.95
David Jensen has assembled ten essays by an ecumenical group of

theologians on the Holy Spirit in relation to the ‘world’s most pressing
problems’. There is a drawing upon the classical tradition to engage
with the contemporary, but there is no plot line that unites the essay-
ists other than their confidence that the doctrine of the Spirit has
something important to deliver. While that is admittedly enough, it
might have helped to have a stronger ‘party line’ navigating us
through the many controversies within pneumatology and to relate
the strengths and weakness of earlier tradition from this plot. There is
a slight party line: the Spirit loves bodies and works through them to
be the ‘giver of Life’.
I will briefly outline the scope of the collection making minor com-
ments. Any unified analysis is not appropriate given the wide range of
topics covered and the varying uses of the Spirit. Jensen provides a
historical introduction to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, emphasizing
throughout the ‘Spirit seeks bodies’. The tour is necessarily short, but
Aquinas and Orthodox pneumatologies are sadly missing as these
might have added uniquely to Jensen’s concerns. The next two essays
by Amy Plantinga Pauw and Molly T. Marshall are on the role of the
Spirit in biblical interpretation and show the necessity of the Spirit for
proper interpretation. In this sense they are both welcome balances to
the emphasis on historical-critical exegesis, but it would be helpful
to relate the Spirit to other exegetical strategies currently in fashion and
to premodern approaches. The next two essays address the question of
religious pluralism and the way the doctrine of the Holy Spirit might
help uncover fresh ground. Roger Haight develops an allegedly neo-
Rahnerian trajectory, following Croewe’s reading of Lonergan,
emphasizing the Spirit at work prior to the incarnation and as the
prime modality of the incarnation itself. Haight sometimes seems to
veer toward binitarianism, but he does so to avoid the Christological
impasse that he perceives as locking the debate into a form of exclusiv-
ism or triumphalism. The Spirit is at work in other religions and Chris-
tians should rejoice in this reality. Amos Yong addresses the question
from an evangelical perspective, but also wishes to push forward the
debate to emphasize practices that are usually said to accompany plu-
ralism in the theological typologies of exclusivism, inclusivism, and
pluralism. With a theological emphasis on the first two of the three,
Yong argues that the practices enjoined by pluralists can be fully inte-
grated by alternative positions through the theme of ‘hospitality’. This
essay is fascinating and would have been enriched by Luke Bretherton’s
remarkable book on ‘hospitality’. I am not entirely convinced by the
typologies of practices assumed in the essay and Yong is in danger of
pandering to the maps drawn by pluralists.
The next two essays by Eugene Rogers and Barbara Holmes turn to
the physicality of the Spirit’s work. Rogers focuses on the transgressive
nature of the Spirit’s physicalist economy, transgressive because always
excessive. Holmes meditates on folk piety: the Spirit’s work in the
normal, rather than traditional liturgical contexts. There is a chapter on
the environment, with Sallie McFague developing her ecological theol-
ogy, emphasizing not humans or nature as such, but the power of God’s
Spirit as the basis of hope. There is also a chapter on how the Spirit is
conceptualized in terms of the socioeconomic context of ‘Empire’ by
Joerg Rieger which is a kind of political theology that shows that while
theology is always partially culturally constructed, it is also always

called into question by the reality of God’s Spirit that refuses construc-
tion by human powers. The final chapter by John Cobb plays a different
variation of this same theme emphasizing the kingdom of God and
seeking the Spirit over wealth accumulation, even unto death. An inter-
esting collection.
Gavin D’Costa
夹夹夹
The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for

the Contemporary Church, Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, Baker
Academic, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-8010-3180-9), 240 pp., pb $21.99
Authors Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, both professors at Concordia

Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, have two objectives in this book: (1) to
exposit what they see as the ‘genius of Luther’s theology’; and (2) to
commend such to the contemporary Lutheran church. Accordingly, the
audience is not fellow scholars, though scholars will find Kolb’s and
Arand’s interpretation of Luther confirming and enriching at points,
but everyday theologians, so, pastors and laypeople. It is a lively, lucid
little volume, well-worth engagement by practitioners from various
traditions.
After an introductory overview, the authors divide their project into
two parts. The first looks at Luther’s understanding of the ‘two kinds
of righteousness’. This distinction shapes his theological anthropology
which, the authors believe, forms something like the structure of his
thought and ministry. The authors make much of Luther’s distinction
between human ‘righteousness before God’ and human ‘righteous-
ness before humanity’, both of which are constitutive of human being.
The former is entirely a gift established by Christ’s atoning work in
which we confidently rest while the latter depends upon and springs
forth from the former. It is important to keep these two clearly sepa-
rate, say the authors, for in order for our human activity to thrive, we
must have complete security in our identity-in-Christ and likewise, in
order for us to have steadfast faith in Christ, we must cling to him
alone (purely), not allowing our worldly status – vocation, reputation,
relationships, ability, health, etc. – to confuse our perception of our
status before God.
Having established the ‘anthropological matrix’ of Luther’s thought,
the authors proceed to explore how this informs his understanding of
human performance – family, government, vocation, and religious life –

of the subversion of human being through obedience without faith and
the relationship between faith and sanctification.
The second part expounds Luther’s theology of the Word of God as
the means by which God acts upon and is present among human
creatures. The first chapter gazes broadly at the various works of the
Word as it creates, sustains, and solicits human fellowship with the
Creator. Narrowing focus, Kolb and Arand next take up the two nor-
mative forms of God’s Word, Jesus, and scripture. This leads into a
discussion of the ‘means of grace’ sustained by the Word, proclamation,
spirituality, and the sacraments. The final chapter considers the Word’s
presence in the church.
The authors’ insights are regularly provocative and their pastoral
sensitivity, edifying. The Genius of Luther’s Theology is a fine basic intro-
duction to Luther’s theology and an even finer explication of its con-
temporary relevance.
Rev. James R. A. Merrick

King’s College, University of Aberdeen
夹夹夹
New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity, Frank J.

Matera, Eerdmans, 2007 (ISBN 978-0664230449), 520 pp., pb $49.50
Frank Matera (Catholic University of America) offers a contribution to

the question of how to approach New Testament (NT) theology in a
volume that comes almost a decade after his work on ethics (New
Testament Ethics [WJK, 1996]) and Christology (New Testament Christol-
ogy [WJK, 1999]). His unique approach to the subject is a mixture of
canonical interpretation and a (historically) chronological progression.
Thus, after a brief history of research in the introduction, he proceeds
through the NT in four mains parts and ends with a concise conclusion.
The main parts entail an examination of the Synoptic Tradition, the
Pauline Tradition, the Johannine Tradition, and Other Voices (Hebrews,
James, 1–2 Peter, Jude, Revelation).
Matera expressly describes his goal as identifying ‘the underlying
unity of the diverse theologies in the New Testament’ (p. xxix). In each
part he examines the individual NT books in subsections, offering a
summary of the document and explicating its main themes (such as
Mark: ‘A Theology of the Kingdom of God’; Philippians: ‘A Theology of
Imitation’; 1 John: ‘A Theology of Communion with God’). Also, in
the section on each NT book, Matera offers discussions of various
theological contributions on topics such as Christology, soteriology,

ecclesiology, and eschatology.
In the conclusion of the book, he draws the theological threads
together and detects those elements that can ‘account for the diverse
unity of New Testament theology’ (p. 478). He notes that the diversity
in the NT can be accounted for by the ‘different starting points of the
three great New Testament traditions’ (p. 480) which can be expressed
in terms of the death/resurrection of Christ as the commencement (i.e.
Paul), the incarnation (Gospel of John), or the proclamation of the
kingdom of God (Synoptic Gospels). But, Matera is insistent that unity
is still able to be found especially with regard to the centrality of
salvation in Christ and also a shared meta-narrative that ‘recounts the
story of salvation’ (p. 478).
Matera certainly demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the NT
texts. Though he rarely cites secondary literature, the reader still benefits
from insightful summaries and thematic connections. One is especially
impressed with Matera’s work on the Gospel of John, the general
epistles, and the book of Revelation. Also, drawing from his earlier work
in Paul, he aptly draws attention to the Apostle’s interest in the ‘sanctified
community’ – a view of holiness and election that offers a unique way of
approaching the relationship between Paul’s theology and ethics.
A number of concerns, though, are notable. First, given that I. Howard
Marshall and Frank Thielman have both recently written NT theologies
that argue for unity among diversity (Marshall’s subtitle is: ‘Many
Witnesses, One Gospel’), Matera does not do a sufficient job arguing for
how his work is unique. In terms of methodology and approach, it is
difficult, when reading the main chapters, to understand how he would
distinguish an NT theology book from an NT survey that has an interest
in theology. Due to the lengthy summaries of the individual NT books, it
reads more like a theological commentary of the NT with a heavy
amount of description and little synthesis. Also, though in one sense he
may be commended for fluidly integrating theology and ethics, the
subject matter of this book seems quite close to his book on NT ethics.
This work probably serves best as a textbook that both introduces
the NT books and also engages in the theology of them as well as the
overall unity of the NT. For others who have a specific interest in NT
theology, it is a bit too prolix and heavy on description. Additionally,
those unfamiliar with Matera’s previous work on the NT will find this
to be a helpful summary of his approach to exegesis and theology.
Nijay K. Gupta
University of Durham
夹夹夹
Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction, S. J. McGrath, William B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-8028-6007-1),
xii + 131 pp., pb £8.99
In a previous book entitled The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy

(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), S. J.
McGrath argued that Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology is obfus-
cated by Luther’s theology of the cross, according to which human
nature has been so corrupted by original sin that, far from enjoying a
natural desire to see God (desiderium naturale), it naturally sets itself
against God (aversio Dei). The cross thus confronts us with a choice
between God and reason: faith alone, not intellect, enables us to see God
in the crucified.
In this present book, McGrath continues the critique of Heidegger,
now focusing on Being and Time. McGrath argues that, try as he might,
Heidegger could not prevent the ‘two thorns in his side’ (as expressed
in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1935) – namely, his Roman Catholic training
and his involvement with the Nazi Party – from shaping his ontology.
Indeed, Heidegger deliberately employs ontological language in Being
and Time so as to reverse neo-scholastic theses. Dasein, for example,
whose essence ‘lies in its existence’, reverses the notion of God
espoused by the scholastics, according to whom God’s very essence is
to exist. Another reversal is found in Heidegger’s definition of Dasein
as ‘being held out into the nothing’, this time of the traditional defini-
tion of transcendence as being-toward-God qua absolute good. In short,
Heidegger’s attempt to adopt a ‘methodological atheism’ fails insofar as
it rests on notions acquired from Christianity which are simply inextri-
cable from their original theological context. This renders Being and
Time anything but theologically neutral. Neither is it politically neutral,
for Heidegger’s fascism is not unrelated to his ontology. His politics,
explains McGrath, ‘is the result of a deliberate move from the ontologi-
cal to the ontic and an application of the Dasein analytic to Germany’s
political situation’ (p. 100).
The philosophical crux of McGrath’s critique is that the religious and
political undertones in Being and Time throw the existential/existentiell
and ontological/ontic distinctions into a crisis. Heidegger wishes to use
them in a way both formal and applied. More specifically, ‘he wishes to
discuss structures that make no sense in abstraction, but without aban-
doning altogether the phenomenological project of describing rather
than prescribing’ (p. 37). For example, Heidegger clearly distinguishes
the existentiell (the personal search for self-understanding) from the
existential (one’s being-in-the-world in a formal sense apart from any
spiritual/ethical predicament), and yet insists that existentiell thinking
necessarily involves existential thinking. This raises a vital question for
McGrath: which existentiell ideals should be pursued (for presumably
not all are equal)? Similarly, despite his neat distinction between ontol-
ogy and the ontic, Heidegger cannot elaborate the former (the inquiry
into Being) without recourse to the latter (the inquiry into entities and
facts about them). Indeed, he freely and constantly moves back and
forth between the two. The discussion of authenticity, for example,
understood as the ownership of one’s being-unto-death, forces Heideg-
ger to make an excursus into the ontic to complete his ontology.
McGrath also critiques Being and Time from an axiological standpoint,
showing that, despite Heidegger claims to the contrary, the book is not
free of ethical and political considerations. To the contrary, it spells out
an ontology entirely consistent with Heidegger’s politics. ‘Inauthentic
concern’, for example, is defined by Heidegger as a ‘leaping into’ the
lives of others, whereas what is really needed is an ‘authentic concern’
that ‘leaps ahead’ and allows them to shoulder their own being.
McGrath points out that nothing could be more diametrically opposed
to Christ’s enjoinder to lay down one’s life for others. Moreover, in his
description of the authentic life, we find Heidegger once again needing
to take a detour into the ontic. Beyond the philosophical arguments,
McGrath states that Heidegger’s refusal to recant his political views
proves that ‘his political actions had an essential relationship to his
philosophy’ (p. 93).
Unsurprisingly, despite his admiration for much of what Heidegger
tried to accomplish, McGrath is not a Heideggerian. He acknowledges
a token indebtedness for awakening him ‘to the urgency of an ever-
present need to review, reappraise, repeat, or reject’ his deepest
convictions (p. 123), but he is convinced that Heidegger is guilty of
transgressing the ontological/ontic distinction on at least three counts:
‘by interpreting Dasein’s average everydayness through the lens of an
unnamed but sovereign “ontic ideal” ’, ‘by privileging a radical Prot-
estantism over his native Catholicism through foreclosing theological
options’, and ‘by political ventures, which only proved, in a humiliating
way, how far from the purity of a neutral ontological investigation he
was’ (p. 124). All of this paved the way to an antihumanism impelling
Heidegger to reject a priori any notion of human dignity.
The word ‘Introduction’ in the title must be read with a grain of salt.
McGrath admits that the book is not necessarily meant to be a compre-
hensive guide to Heidegger. Such resources are already in good supply.
Rather, bearing in mind that the best way to engage phenomenology is
through immersion rather than systematic linear progression, McGrath
aims to draw the reader into the thick of Heidegger’s philosophiz-
ing from several different directions. Accordingly, the chapters –
‘phenomenology’, ‘ontology’, ‘axiology’, and ‘theology’ – are not indi-
vidual, discreet building blocks, but complimentary profiles that lay
bear the central themes and main flaws in Heidegger’s work. McGrath
not only respects and parenthetically cites the German philosopher’s
highly specialized, if not arcane, vocabulary, but also notes how this
idiosyncratic language makes it quite difficult to critique Heidegger
from ‘outside’. The book pries open several doors to get ‘inside’ the
mind of a twentieth-century genius, though what we encounter is
frighteningly dark.
Daniel B. Gallagher
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
夹夹夹
Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Mark A.

McIntosh, Blackwell, 2008 (ISBN 978-1-4051-0271-1), xi + 252 pp., pb
£17.09/$37.59
So, another introduction to theology, perhaps another rewrite of the loci

communes, possibly another attempt to publish the materials of an intro-
ductory course, the teaching of which has slowly been turning into a
deadening academic routine.
McIntosh begins his book with a subtitle ‘Astonishment and Theo-
logical Virtue’ (p. 3). Wait a minute, introductions to theology are not
supposed to begin like this! Indeed, the author continues to surprise by
saying that ‘[t]he premise of this book is that the real teacher of Chris-
tian theology, in the deepest sense, is the author of everything that
exists’ (p. ix; cf. pp. 114, 179). So, McIntosh’s project seems not to be just
another introduction to theology! It does not survey Christian doctrines
and their history in a simplified, a little bit boring, and easily digestible
way. Instead, he writes that ‘[m]y aim is to give you a taste of what
Christians think it is like to do theology, that is, to learn from God’
(p. x). Hence the title: Divine Teaching.
But what on earth does this mean? Does the author have a pious but
delusional presumption that what he says is what God says? Does he
really believe the largely discredited epistemological doctrine of illu-
mination is the guarantee of true theology? No, not really! McIntosh
does not pretend to have ‘God’s point of view’ nor the ‘total perspec-
tive’ of God himself (R. Williams, On Christian Theology, 2001, p. 6).
Rather, the author realizes that ‘theology is constantly in danger of
getting carried away – from a respectable discipline managed by theo-
logians to a mysterious sharing in God’s way of life . . . That would be
theology in the most absolute and perfect sense’ (p. 7).
This book is, in fact, a beautiful example of how a good introduction
can teach even those who have, at times, the temptation to imagine
themselves as being irreversibly beyond introductions. It is erudite,
profound, eloquent, beautiful, entertaining, and as fancy as its magnifi-

cent cover.
The first three chapters, which constitute Part One, explain what the
author means by learning theology from God. While other parts of the
book are outstanding, the first three are even more outstanding.
Above all, McIntosh is interested in the impact the subject-matter of
theology has upon the students (pp. 5–6). ‘God . . . is far more involved
in the whole process than any other conceivable research subject could
ever be – and involved in way that will likely expose the theologian to
some risk of personal change as a result’ (p. 32). Once again, the author
wants to know ‘how theologians are formed by their encounter with
God’ and how this affects their understanding of reality (p. 7). McIntosh
understands the task of being a theologian in a deep sense as living a
life that participates in God’s re-creating the world, in God’s reuniting
of what has been lost to its ultimate Source. A life of a theologian is a
‘continual conversion, a continual sharing in this hearing of the living
voice of the author of life’ (p. 24). And put perhaps in a wonderfully
challenging way, ‘A test for theological legitimacy and integrity
. . . does not predetermine the forms of thought in which theologians
venture out, but rather examines the kind of persons their theological
journeys make of them’ (p. 50).
McIntosh contends that theology is not primarily about learning
concepts, the logic of arguments, and what great but dead thinkers have
said. Rather, doing theology is about being hopelessly captured into the
relationship with the ultimate ‘object’ of theology. ‘Are we open and
expecting the “object” of our study to become the active Subject who in
fact teaches us?’ (p. 142; cf. p. 219).
In Chapters 4–7, which constitute Part Two, McIntosh presents three
interrelated themes – the mystery of salvation, the mystery of God’s life
(both Trinitarian theology and Christology), and the mystery of crea-
turely life (including ecclesiology and eschatology) – which are studied
under three keywords: ‘orientation’, ‘landmarks’, and ‘pathfinding’.
‘Orientation’ provides the big picture, ‘landmarks’ invite readers to do
theology with the past and present masters (the goal is ‘to learn from
them about how to engage theologically with these mysteries our-
selves’ [p. 138]), and ‘pathfinding’ suggests acute and at times contro-
versial topics for further exploration.
McIntosh is a rare writer who actually reads patristic theologians and
contemporary patristic scholars, medieval theologians and medieval-
ists, and obviously the contemporary theologians too. For example,
when he considers the ‘landmarks’ of soteriology, he discusses the
theology of Irenaeus, Augustine, and Anselm (no Luther though!);
when he considers the landmarks of Trinitarian theology, he analyses,
among others, Augustine (in twenty dense pages!) and Barth; and when
he considers the ‘landmarks’ of the doctrine of creation, he assesses
Aquinas and Pascal. True, McIntosh’s presentation of the theology of

these ‘landmarks’ can be probed at times (e.g. discussing the issue of
God’s justice on the basis of Augustine’s De Trinitate only). Yet the sheer
scope and depth of his dialogue with historical theology is nothing but
impressive.
‘Pathfinding’ takes readers into the middle of contemporary discus-
sions and helps to make the historical informedness useful and relevant
for students of theology. In these sections, readers find some exciting
discussions about topics such as gender, relationality (Zizioulas’ rela-
tional ontology seems to be the key for McIntosh’s overall approach),
and the cosmic dimension of salvation.
For McIntosh, soteriology is ‘the lens by which everything else is
perceived and understood’ (p. 65). His approach to soteriology is neither
mere staurocentrism nor following exclusively a particular ‘model’, but
rather the holistic grand scheme of things in which the incarnated, dead,
and resurrected Christ reunites the fallen humankind to God. Empha-
sizing the relational, Trinitarian ‘deep structure of human existence’
(p. 82), McIntosh views soteriology as a renewal of relationships and the
participation of the redeemed humankind in the divine life. It is the
realization of the communicative nature of human beings as creatures
‘tugging towards the other, ultimately towards the divine Other’ (p. 201).
Having taught Introduction to Theology for several years, I wish that
McIntosh’s book had been available much earlier. In addition to its
theological insights, I have learned valuable lessons from this book
about creative pedagogy as well as new ideas for in-class theological
exercises. Last but not least, it is not only that the author knows Chris-
tian theology better than the average theology professor, but that he has
also discovered something that all those who want to be true theolo-
gians definitely have to discover. Namely, in the words of Hilary of
Poitiers, ‘We should learn from God what we are to think about God’
(Trin. 5.21).
Tarmo Toom
The Catholic University of America
夹夹夹
A Community Called Atonement, Scot McKnight, Abingdon Press

Nashville, 2007 (ISBN 13-978-0-687-64554-1), 177 pp., pb $17/£9.99
The teachers I remember from school are the ones who loved their
subject and taught it with enthusiasm. Scot McKnight comes over
rather like that. Indeed, his book often reads as if it were the transcript
of a spoken word. If so, his students (for he is a teacher) must have been
sometimes thrilled, sometimes furious, but never bored. His key point
is in the title: atonement has to do with community. Each of us is an icon
of God – but a damaged one. McKnight calls us ‘cracked Eikons’.
Restoration necessarily involves community.
His thesis is briefly set out in a preamble which centers round a
moving story of a nurse kneeling to wash a beggar’s suppurating feet.
The bulk of the book then follows in four parts, and opens up his
understanding.
The first part opens with his thesis: ‘atonement is only understood
when it is understood as the restoration of humans – in all directions –
so that they form a society (the ecclesia, the church) wherein God’s will
is lived out and given freedom to transform all of life’ (p. 9). What this
means (he says) depends on where you begin: for instance, with God’s
wrath, with death, or (McKnight’s preference) with the kingdom – a
place of perichoresis, which he understands primarily as the mutual
interdependence and reciprocal interiority of the Holy Trinity. Before
this mystery stand human beings, the imago Dei – whence McKnight
gets his use of the word Eikon. (It is not clear why he always gives us a
capital E, created and ‘cracked’ as we are.) He discuses various descrip-
tions of the nature of sin and comes down in favor of ‘hyperrelational’:
disrupted connections in four dimensions – ‘Godward, selfward, oth-
erward and worldward’ (p. 23).
Part Two really forms the core of the book and discusses different
images of atonement. Most likely readers will be familiar with
McKnight’s starting points, but probably stimulated by the lively style
of his discussion. (Of course, not all will agree with all. But then, we
never have.) He opens by recapitulating the main traditional ‘theories’
of atonement before considering key ‘atoning moments’: the incarna-
tion of the second Adam, the crucifixion of Christ at the center of
history, and the empowering of the ‘cracked Eikons’ at Easter and
Pentecost.
Part Three asks whose is the story of the atonement? First, he considers
it as the story of Jesus. ‘I ask two simple questions: How did Jesus
interpret his own death? Which of Israel’s scriptural stories did his
interpretation reflect?’ (p. 83). (I noted the word ‘simple’ with interest.
But it fitted McKnight’s enthusiastic style.) Second, he discusses the
story of Paul; third, the patristic stories of Irenaeus and Athanasius. In
the last chapter in this section, he draws out key themes – identification,
incorporation, recapitulation, satisfaction, and so on. He discusses and
accepts penal substitution – with caveats.
The final part of the book moves into topics more recently empha-
sized – atonement as ‘missional praxis’. (Some of his words are unfa-
miliar to English ears and grate a little. I think ‘missional’ almost means
‘missionary’.) ‘Missional praxis’ is then considered under headings of
fellowship, justice, missional, living the story, and Christian devotion

(Baptism, Eucharist, prayer).
In an introduction to Living Theology, the series of which this book is
but one, the Series Editor says they invited people ‘to write something
they’re passionate about . . . which will provoke conversation around
ideas that matter to the Christian faith . . . in the Emergent Village’ (p.
ix). Well, they scored with Scot McKnight. His style is conversational,
chatty, even jaunty at times. It would seem he has an eye to the younger
student as much as, or more than, the professional theologian. He must
be a golfer: he justifies his juxtaposition of different images for atone-
ment by comparison with the different clubs in a golfer’s bag, used as
the course requires. He loves his bible, and hops around it, citing Mark
alongside John, as it might be, without any apparent critical worries. He
writes as a liberal Evangelical, with much devotion and wisdom. But
still I wonder why it is that we humans worry so much about just
how Jesus achieved what we believe he did achieve. Is there too
much morbid fascination with clinical and forensic detail which,
Mother Julian might have said, is more properly part of God’s privities?
John Armson
Herefordshire
夹夹夹
Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vege-

tarianism and Theology, Rachel Muers and David Grumett (eds.), T&T
Clark, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-567-03284-3), ii + 274 pp., hb $130.00
Progress on the topic of theology, animals, and diet has stalled in recent
years, but this collection of essays should get it going again. Like any
social movement that is trying to save the world and change the way we
think about it at the same time, vegetarianism can become old and stale,
with the same arguments being recycled by the same group of people.
Part of the problem is that advocacy is not fertile ground for self-
reflection and critical thinking. Action precludes thought – or at least
the thinking that second guesses the possibilities of moral transforma-
tion. Anyone who has been to an animal rights conference knows the
tireless spectacle of dietary pronouncements followed by stories of
conversion (to veganism) and confessions of fault (of meat eating).
Fortunately, a new generation of primarily English scholars is bringing
a renewed sophistication to these conversations, and Muers and
Grumett should be congratulated for gathering in one volume some of
the best of this recent work. These essays are probably a bit too diverse
and scholarly to serve as an undergraduate text, but they deserve to be

in every university library and on the shelves of those committed to
wrestling with this noble cause.
I have one general reservation before summarizing some of the
articles. The spirit of Andrew Linzey hovers over many of these articles,
and rightfully so. Linzey is the father of animal welfare theology, and he
has been a dedicated global leader in raising awareness of the unnec-
essary suffering of animals. His thought deserves more attention than it
ordinarily receives – the editors rightly observe that his ‘groundbreak-
ing work . . . has established animals as being essential to the theologi-
cal agenda’ (p. 5) – and maybe this book will spur others to that end.
Nonetheless, this book also contains some weak and confusing criti-
cisms of him. David Horrell, for example, accuses Linzey (and myself,
I should add in the interest of full disclosure) of portraying Jesus as a
‘proto-vegetarian’ and argues that such portraits are historically inad-
equate and anachronistic (p. 49). This is unexpected, because Linzey and
I have actually gone out of our way to distance ourselves from polemi-
cists who seek to prove that Jesus was a vegetarian. Horrell also criti-
cizes us for suggesting that Jesus opposed animal sacrifices, arguing
that ‘recent scholarship has located Jesus firmly within a Jewish frame-
work’ (p. 48). That Jewish framework, however, is richly diverse, and
includes trenchant criticisms of animal sacrifices. Horrell is a professor
of New Testament, which probably accounts for some of his objections
to the way animal welfare theologians read the Gospels, but he is also
unmoved by biblical portraits of an original and forthcoming peaceful
world, arguing that ‘there was never a time when the animals, let alone
humans, existence in a pre-predatory herbivorous, paradise’ (p. 52). If
reading Genesis were so easy and simple, the Bible would hardly be an
important book for Western culture.
Christopher Southgate also criticizes Linzey for upholding the sym-
bolic value of the Garden of Eden in order to defend vegetarianism as
an eschatological sign. Southgate charges Linzey with ‘ignoring the
scientific evidence’ that violence has always been built into the animal
world (p. 252). This is unfair, but it is indicative of Southgate’s uncritical
assimilation of the evolutionary worldview for his attempts to revise
traditional theological teachings. Southgate is overly quick to give up
not only the historical fall but also the importance of eschatology alto-
gether, which is evidence, should it be needed, that it is hard to have
one (some idea of a fall) without the other (hope for global redemption).
He ends his essay with some fascinating suggestions about the appli-
cation of a kenotic Christology to ethics, and I look forward to more
elaboration of a ‘kenosis of appetite’ (p. 254). I am also sympathetic to
his argument that ‘certain sorts of community would be lost in a move
to strict vegetarianism’, but he does not explain why this loss would
constitute a ‘move away from the Isaianic vision rather than towards it’
(p. 258). I too would regret that loss of animal husbandry if the whole
world were to go vegetarian, but the peaceful kingdom is not an oblit-
eration of hierarchical and managerial relations between humans and
animals. Rather, it is the proper fulfillment of human responsibility and
authority. Peace and order are not opposites.
There are too many fine essays here to summarize, but let me
mention some highlights. David Grumett’s analysis of Irish Christianity
is especially illuminating. Anyone interested in the crucial but hidden
role that the dietary restrictions of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15: 29)
played in Christian history, as well as the perplexing ongoing influence
of the Noachide laws, should read this essay. Teresa Shaw adds to her
important research on diet by demonstrating just how tangled heretical
and orthodox dietary practices and their correlative justifications could
become. She recommends that ‘we need to find other ways to talk about
food piety that do not replicate the discourse of heresy or the theologi-
cal debates about antiquity’ (p. 87). That is an interesting suggestion,
but her position itself is symptomatic of the decline of theological
tradition in the modern world. Some theologians want to rehabilitate
vegetarian practices by overcoming orthodoxy, while others want to
demonstrate that orthodox theology can in itself sustain compassion for
animals. Personally, I think that any genealogy of vegetarianism will
show that battles over the ideas represented by various ancient heresies
are still very much alive and well in the church today. John Wilkins has
a helpful essay about the connection between vegetarianism and social
and economic privilege in the ancient world. One of the best essays is
by Nigel Pleasants, who tries to draw parallels between animal rights
and the antislavery movements. He concludes that economic practices
propel social change, not ideas. That might seem to be a bit one-sided in
its reading of history, but he draws this very pointed lesson. ‘The
historical irony is that the very social system that has turned animals
into a massively exploited resource has also generated feasible, plau-
sible and attractive alternatives to that exploitation’ (pp. 211–12). Only
capitalism can save us from capitalism.
Finally, there are two good essays on feminist issues. Erika Cudworth
rejects the idea that food production and consumption have gone
beyond gender stereotypes. This is a hard argument to make, since food
in the West today is such a luxury that it no longer needs to be tied to
production and consumption practices that are typically associated
with gender differences. Rachel Muers takes on the work of Kathryn
Paxton George, which should be better known in the vegetarian com-
munity. George argues that the universal message of vegetarianism
reproduces masculine gender bias and actually contradicts the embod-
ied (particular, pluralistic, personal) morality that feminism ordinarily
defends. That Muers is willing to engage such tough objections to
vegetarianism – indeed, the very existence of this book – is evidence
that vegetarianism can be both a movement and a legitimate academic

field.
Stephen H. Webb
Wabash College
夹夹夹
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Michael J. Murray

and Michael Rea (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2008 (ISBN
978-0-521-61955-4), 291 pp., pb $29.99
Michael Murray and Michael Rea’s Introduction to the Philosophy of

Religion is an excellent text for use at the undergraduate level or by
those persons schooled in Continental thought or theology. Anyone
who has yet to reckon with the mainly Dutch Reformed, Anglo-
American philosophical approach to God surely needs this book or one
like it to begin his or her education in the movement which is arguably
the most influential in the academy.
Whether considering this book for use in teaching a class or as a
personal introduction to what is here called ‘philosophy of religion’, it is
worth noting that what is here introduced is a very particular subfield of
the discipline. The contemporary conversation represented is one which
is always brings together the influence of Calvinist thought and Analytic
or Anglo-American philosophy. Were a beginning reader unaware of
this commitment and orientation, she would never know that one might
also study Étienne Gilson, Louis Dupré, Charles Taylor, or even Karl
Rahner as ‘philosophers of religion’. The issues most prominent in
the work of these authors – the relationship of essence to existence, the
nature of religious experience, reconciling religious multiplicity, and the
turn to the subject – will never be raised for a reader who takes An
Introduction to Philosophy of Religion as an adequate overview of the field.
The particularity of the text is both its weakness and its strength.
Because Murray and Rea entirely ignore the Continental conversation,
An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion can do an expansive yet
extremely detailed overview of the conversation to which it is account-
able. Though the book would do well to include an introduction situ-
ating itself in a larger conversation, it is a finely wrought summary of
most if not all of the perennial issues in Anglo-American, mainly Dutch
Reformed philosophy of religion.
Interestingly, most if not all the participants in this circle refer to their
work as ‘philosophical theology’ rather than ‘philosophy of religion’.
Indeed, Michael Rea is also the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook for
Philosophical Theology. The difference in terminology is hotly debated,

with most historical and Continentally trained scholars opting to call
what they do ‘philosophy of religion’, and most Anglo-American schol-
ars referring to ‘philosophical theology’. While at Yale Nicholas Wolter-
storff taught in a division of the Religious Studies Department called
‘Philosophy of Religion’. He nonetheless consistently argued that what
was being done there was properly called ‘philosophical theology’, as
the subject was primarily God and the thought was current and con-
structive. Whatever the reason, it is odd for those in the know to see a
book representing the work of thinkers generally referred to as philo-
sophical theologians labeled An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.
It is generally a more historical, Continental term. With the retirement
of Louis Dupré and the distant relationship between the Theology and
Philosophy departments at Notre Dame, perhaps this circle of scholars
is seeking to both further take over the field and respect semantic lines
across disciplines.
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion is divided into three sec-
tions: The Nature of God, The Rationality of Religious Belief and Science,
Morality and Immortality. In a theological conversation, we would say
the book is divided into sections on ontology, epistemology, and ethics.
The book’s approach to the nature of God is most clearly influenced
by the work of Thomas Morris, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolter-
storff, three of the greats in this conversation. Covering topics from the
tension between God’s omnipotence and the problem of evil to self-
existence and necessity, this introduction always raises objections to
whatever issue is at stake and resolves them summarily – sometimes
too summarily. Perhaps the strongest piece in this section is that on
‘perfect being theology’, or what it means that God is perfect. Rather
than revolving around Aquinas’ answer that God’s essence is God’s
existence and hence that all of God’s qualities are self-identical, Murray
and Rea here answer that the very concept of God demands that some-
thing is God only if it has the greatest possible array of great-making
properties. This claim is what they call the Greatest Perfect Being thesis
or the GPB claim. The GPB thesis is subject to four problems, each
surrounding what it means to be a great-making property which God
then has the most of. First, one might hold that qualities are good only
contextually, or in a relative way. Murray and Rea answer no by way of
a counterexample: there are qualities like happiness which are intrinsic
goods, which are not good because they refer to anything else or bring
anything else about. Intrinsically good properties are then those to
which we are referring when we talk about God’s great-making prop-
erties. Second, one might object that deciding which properties count as
great-making seems culturally or subjectively biased. Again, the authors
do away with this objection quickly, holding that just as we have fun-
damentally intuited value beliefs about the worth of human life or the
wrong-headedness of torturing someone for fun, we are entitled to

appeal to intuitions in analyzing our concept of God. The third objec-
tion to the GPB thesis is that God my have qualities underivable from
perfect being theology – having created the world fourteen billion years
ago, for example. Yet this has to do with the difference between intui-
tive judgments having to do with being versus intuitive judgments
having to do with persons. Murray and Rea address this difference in a
manner which will be more satisfying to historically oriented readers
by pointing out that at different times, different theologies have made
use of the concept of perfect person in analyzing God and others have
emphasized perfect being. Medieval Catholics and Muslims tended, for
example, to view God in terms of perfect being. Reformation-era Prot-
estants, on the other hand, emphasized personhood. These emphases
yield different results and different questions. If God is more like a
perfect person, can God then be unchangeable becomes the question. If
God is perfect being, then God must have perfect knowledge and
power: can he then act in time but be causally independent? These are
the difficult questions which the book always raises but which it some-
times answers too quickly. Certainly, the answers are representative of
the state of the debate, but it is in sections such as Perfect Being Theol-
ogy within the chapter ‘The Nature of God’ that we get the best sense of
the difficulty in answering some of them. In this case, the difficulty with
God’s qualities and what his relationship to the world must then be like
is resolved – yet not terribly resolved – in the maxim that because not all
great-making properties are compossible, God has the properties that
belong to the greatest set of compossible set of great-making qualities.
What is so wonderful about this book is the tracing of careful, clever
thought about the difficulties in the concept of God, what we can know
and how we should live. The answers provided to the questions are less
satisfying than the delineation of what is actually at stake in the answers
we frequently give.
While each section of the book is clearly written and presents the
distillation of the extremely detailed contemporary conversation, the
second section, ‘The Rationality of Belief’ is clearly the strongest. Dutch
Reformed thought is best known for its contributions to epistemology,
and this chapter reflects the state of the debate. Warrant and the basi-
cality of belief are the issues at stake, and without using technical
terminology or intimidating language, the authors map a clear land-
scape of the questions we must answer if we are to affirm that belief in
God is reasonable, or perhaps even more reasonable than atheism.
Without claiming as much, the book again gives an overview of the
thought of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, this time also
including William Alston. While the rest of us may be caught up in
whether or not to believe in God, these authors address the far more
interesting question of whether we are justified in doing so.
The section in ‘Rationality and Belief’ on theistic arguments is also

especially strong, as well as accessible. Not only are we walked through
Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God–God is that
than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it is inherent in this
concept that the thing be or it is not the greatest – but we are treated to
the current debate over whether being is even a predicate and whether
it adds anything to a concept. Philosophers from Yale to Notre Dame
are in conversation here.
An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion’s last section, Science, Moral-
ity and Immorality, is the conclusion to an extraordinarily detailed
beginner text. No definitive answer is offered to scientists’ claims that
religion is irrelevant, irresponsible or explained by evolutionary forces.
Instead, the section turns the tables, pointing out the lack of force in
several of these attacks by scientists against religious belief. Most
importantly, the section calls attention to the strawmen created by
recent authors in order to dismiss religion.
The recourse to misrepresenting one’s opponent, the strawman
move, is altogether too common in recent scientific and quasi-scientific
attacks on religion. From Richard Dawkins to Samuel Harris, authors
frequently reduce religion and religious belief to its most absurd,
simplistic elements, and give only a few, easily refutable reasons why
religious people believe as they do. Sam Harris mischaracterizes reli-
gious persons as hateful exclusivists who believe everyone who outside
their own system is slotted for damnation or some other detestable
religious end. Dawkins looks at religion only from an evolutionary
perspective, discounting the nonutilitarian reasons persons subscribe
to religious beliefs. This is not to say that these reasons are even valid,
but Dawkins fails to even present them, turning the religious person
into an absurd, knowingly irrational subject.
The section on Science, Morality and Immorality gives several excel-
lent examples of flaws in the presentation of arguments by scientists
against religion. Chief among the offenders is Richard Dawkins, who
holds that religion serves only an explanatory function, and that it must
thus be dismissed in favor of the scientific explanations for things which
we now have available to us. Certainly, people do turn to religion for
cosmological and sometimes even biological explanation. For those of
us who do not, however, Dawkins writes off the force of religious
experience or just the possibility of intelligent design entirely. Murray
and Rea are realistic enough not to try to tackle authors like Dawkins
head-on. Instead, they call attention to the lacunae in his arguments
which make their own positions possible.
As an introduction to an exceptionally difficult and specialized field,
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion is a great success. As acces-
sible as this esoteric material gets, Murray and Rea’s work will be a
great asset to those seeking to introduce students – or themselves – to
Anglo-American, primarily Calvinist thought about God, the world

and our place in it.
Aimée U. Light
Duquesne University
夹夹夹
Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Jean-Luc Nancy,

Fordham University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780823228362), x + 190 pp., hb
$60.00, pb $20.00
In the translator’s foreword to this text, Michael B. Smith comments that

the French word la Déclosion, which gives the book its title Dis-Enclosure
(and is the heading of the last chapter), is used by Nancy to designate
an opening up – a reversal of what was once closed. Indeed, this seems
to be Nancy’s goal in his insightful, if sometimes confusing investiga-
tion into how and why Christianity does and should continue to play
an integral role in Western thought. Nancy is a French philosopher
whose work has been influenced by Nietzsche, Lacan, and Derrida,
among others. In Dis-Enclosure, he is clear that his main interests are
political, not theological, in that he is interested in a deconstruction of
Christianity in order to somehow move toward a newly conceived
understanding of human political community. This is not new ground
for Nancy. His most noted works, such as The Inoperative Community
(Minnesota University Press, 1991), or the later The Creation of the World
or Globalization (SUNY, 2007), explore similar political themes.
In Dis-Enclosure, Nancy carries out his task most lucidly and substan-
tially in the chapters that come at the beginning and end of the text. In
an important passage from the first chapter Nancy reveals what he
believes to be at stake in the West’s reckoning with Christianity:
Perhaps democracy, as it expands its form to a global scale, reveals that
politics will only be capable of redefining or redrawing itself according to
one of the branches of the following alternative: either as democracy
founded anew qua religion . . . or as a determinate relationship with a
distinct element, or dimension, . . . and consequently as a redefinition of
the internal-external tension in politics between the governance of society
and the projection of its sense or its raisons d’être. (pp. 4–5)
In order to adopt the latter, and hence to avoid the hyperfascism he

sees the former to entail, Nancy asserts that politics must assume a
dimension that it cannot integrate – an exceedence that marks not the
limit of reason, but the ‘limitlessness’ (p. 1) and ‘piety of reason’ (p. 3).
In trying to think that which exceeds the human realm – the realm of
politics – Nancy is not turning to Christianity as a sinner to his savior,
but instead as a resource that may dis-enclose that which it seemed to
have enclosed so securely: ‘There remains the question of knowing
whether “God” or “the holy” can or do represent names (and on what
grounds) for this alterity of reason’ (p. 26). Nancy is not looking for a
god to save us, but for a means of thinking that which cannot be
thought in order to find the basis of politics.
In ‘A Deconstruction of Monotheism’ Nancy turns to the operation
of deconstruction:
I will call ‘deconstruction of monotheism’ the operation consisting in
disassembling the elements that constitute it, in order to attempt to
discern, among these elements and as if behind them, behind and set back
from the construction, that which made their assembly possible and
which, perhaps, still it remains, paradoxically, for us to discover and to
think as the beyond of monotheism, in that it has become globalized and
atheized. (p. 32)
Nancy’s goal is to disassemble the conditions of possibility inherent

to the logic of monotheism in order to dis-enclose the elements which
will enable the surpassing of such logic. He is hoping to uncover a
‘resource’ that might ‘bring to light . . . a future for the world that would
no longer be either Christian or anti-Christian, either monotheist or
atheist or even polytheist, but that would advance precisely beyond all
these categories (after having made all of them possible)’ (p. 34). This
resource is faith. For Nancy, the trinitarian nature of Christian monothe-
ism points to a self-alienation that propels all Christian thought – even
God – with a desire for ‘its proper identity’ (p. 38). This self-alienation
introduces a temporal element that points the self perpetually forward
in expectation – in the performance of a faith that expects the coming of
a stable, infinite identity for finite, temporal creatures.
Thus, it is natural that in ‘The Judeo-Christian Faith’ Nancy turns to
the Epistle of James for a biblical exemplar of the distinctive structural
core of Christian theo-logic. For Nancy, faith is an expression of trust in
an absence that is performed (worked) out of an excess that marks the
upper limit of reason: ‘Faith would thus be here the praxical excess of
and in action or in operation, and this excess, insofar as it aligns itself
with nothing other than itself, that is to say, also with the possibility for
a “subject” . . . to be more, to be infinitely more and excessively more
than what it is in itself and for itself’ (p. 53). In the penultimate chapter
‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, one of the most important if not
the most important essays of the book, Nancy defines faith further: ‘The
greatest spiritual and theological analyses of the Christian faith show
that faith is . . . the adhesion to itself of an aim without other’ (p. 152).
Faith looks beyond the limits of human reason, concepts, and
representations with a ‘pure intentionality’ toward an unnamed,

ungrasped God. It is not belief, but ‘is distinguished precisely and
absolutely from belief’ (p. 153). For Nancy, this ‘openness’ to the coming
of an other that promises parousia of the self-alienated self marks the
horizon of a finitude that recognizes its own limits, and in so doing,
allows its infinity to spring forth (p. 156). This is Christianity’s most
distinctive element, and also its most valuable bequeathement to
Western thought (and it is a bequeathement, since Nancy takes for
granted that the death of Christianity has already taken place).
Due to its specialist language and approach, Dis-Enclosure will not be
of interest to all readers. There is no doubt that Nancy’s difficult,
complex style of writing will cause unsympathetic readers to charac-
terize it as an example of a confusing and sometimes indecipherable
work of Continental philosophy. The middle chapters of the text are
especially open to this critique. Furthermore, Nancy does not contrib-
ute to any sort of systematic theological enterprise, nor does he aim to
irenicize the Christian tradition in any way.
The text will be of interest to readers, students, and scholars inter-
ested in the convergence of Continental philosophy and the Christian
theological tradition. In many ways, Nancy’s approach characterizes
this trend: similar to thinkers such as Derrida and Lyotard, he engages
Christianity as a resource for thinking through the basis of a new
politics after ‘death of God’ or the ‘end of metaphysics’. While the
first three chapters and the penultimate chapter are insightful and
very provocative, those familiar with Continental philosophy’s recent
engagement with the Christian theological tradition – such as Derrida’s
engagement with the via negativa or Marion’s postmetaphysical
approach to theology and the discussion between these two thinkers –
will not find anything startlingly groundbreaking in this text. Nonethe-
less, it will be useful for specialists in the field, especially those familiar
with Nancy’s previous work.
Bradley Onishi
University of California Santa Barbara
夹夹夹
God, Evil, and Design: An Introduction to the Philosophical Issues,

David O’Connor, Blackwell Publishing (ISBN 1405157712), vii + 226
pp., hb £45.00, pb £16.99
David O’Connor’s God, Evil, and Design is a witty, nontechnical survey

of many of the cardinal discussions in contemporary philosophy of
religion. While there is certainly no shortage of introductions to the

philosophy of religion available, O’Connor’s book notably diverges
from the standard model. Rather than attempting to introduce his
readers to the field as a whole, O’Connor focuses on two crucial issues
that confront the philosopher when she decides to think about God:
evidence for design, on the one hand, and the problem of evil, on the
other. By structuring the book in this more limited manner, O’Connor
is able to give space to the actual argumentative give and take that
marks real philosophy, thus allowing his readers a privileged insight
not only into what but also into how philosophers of religion think.
Perhaps, however, it would be better to say that O’Connor’s text
gives insight into how certain philosophers of religion think, for God,
Evil, and Design makes a number of crucial methodological moves at
the outset that largely determine the course of the subsequent text.
The most important and also most controversial of these moves is
O’Connor’s decision in the opening section of the book to submit the
entire inquiry to what he calls the ‘veil of ignorance approach’. In this,
O’Connor takes a cue from John Rawls’s famous thought-experiment in
which citizens are asked to work out the best possible living arrange-
ments for their families and friends but with the crucial caveat that
none of the participants know their own identity or life-circumstance.
This imagined temporary amnesia is meant to secure public fairness
and justice. Likewise, but now in the highly charged atmosphere of
questions about the origin of the universe and the problem of evil,
O’Connor invites his readers to enter behind a similar veil of ignorance,
a selective suspension of memory in order to secure impartiality. In this
way and apparently in this way alone, O’Connor thinks a genuine
philosophical inquiry into God and evil might proceed.
For O’Connor, the veil of ignorance admits of degrees. The second
section of the book deals with the logical problem of evil and the
coherence (or lack thereof) of theism. Such investigations merely
require that the reader suspend his knowledge of his own religious
belief (his preferences are bracketed but all of his ideas about God, the
supernatural, theology, and so forth are allowed into the discussion).
The questions at this point involve pure logical consistency, de jure
problems as it were, and O’Connor does an admirable job of presenting
the tête-à-tête between J. L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga in an engaging
and informative manner.
In the third section of the book, ‘God and Evil’, the reader is asked to
proceed further behind the veil of ignorance in order to forget entirely
all his knowledge about the subjects of religion or philosophy. All ideas
about the supernatural are gone, though the reader retains his general
and scientific knowledge. Now, this far behind the veil of ignorance,
O’Connor asks us to imagine how best to explain the order and coher-
ence of the universe, reaching at last the skeptical conclusion not that
God does not exist, but that the order of the universe gives no evidence
for God’s existence.
Section four, ‘Evil and Design’, considers a variety of skeptical argu-
ments regarding the problem of evil. William Rowe and Paul Draper
are called upon in order to present skeptical against the existence of
God, the gist of the matter being that since we have no inkling of how
evil could be justified, it is plausible that it cannot be justified, and thus
it is plausible that a good God does not exist. O’Connor, however,
points out that the skeptical stance can actually be deployed against
Rowe and Draper’s conclusions. Peter van Inwagen, for example, sug-
gests that we simply do not how to delineate precisely how much evil
would be incompatible with God’s existence given various free-will
defenses and that such ignorance prohibits us from drawing any skep-
tical conclusions about the probability of God’s nonexistence. Likewise,
Steven Wykstra (in his ‘noseeum’ defense) argues that our perspective
is too limited to make judgments about what may or may not be
justified – behind the scenes, invisible to our finite perceptions, may be
a myriad of operations in the light of which the evil we suffer is not
done away with, but rather takes on a different character and meaning.
O’Connor, however, argues that these skeptical defenses end up
placing God at such a remove from our religious intuitions that they
finally destroying the very faith they seek to preserve. Once again,
O’Connor concludes, the case for theism remains unlikely.
Finally, in section five, O’Connor considers various greater good
defenses, such as those put forth by Richard Swinburne, on the one
hand, and John Hick, on the other. According to this sort of argument,
evil in our world is explained (but not explained away) by its role in
promoting some greater good, chiefly our moral education and ascent
to maturity. In other words, the world is a vale of soul-making, as Keats
held; ‘pathei mathos’, says Aeschylus: one learns through suffering. But,
as O’Connor points out, this seems to work only for creatures like
ourselves that learn and achieve moral independence. What about the
countless sufferings of animals, or the suffering of children who never
achieve maturity? The verdict against God’s likely existence remains.
Such, in brief, is the substance of the book and as an introduction to
various key players and arguments in the field of philosophy of religion
it should be of great interest, especially to undergraduates and nonspe-
cialists who will welcome O’Connor’s knack for explanation and his
able use of ordinary language. Nevertheless, one ought to be careful
with the book, for the entire veil-of-ignorance method is immensely
controversial and, in this reviewer’s judgment, ill-conceived to boot.
Rawlsian proceduralism of this sort rests on the dubious assumption
that there is a body of public rationality that all philosophers (should)
accept and that good argument stems from the wedding of these prin-
ciples to public facts (e.g. the certainties of the natural sciences). But few
philosophers, even from within the analytic tradition, are very per-
suaded by such classical foundationalism any longer. Philosophers do
not retreat behind a veil of ignorance but tend rather to employ what-
ever sources they find true, compelling, and relevant, without first
submitting these to the litmus test of Rawlsian rationality.
It is all the worse when we apply such methods to religion. The veil
of ignorance approach effectively handicaps the inquiry from the begin-
ning by forcing the reader to consider theistic concepts detached from
their occurrence in a web of other beliefs, practices, communities, and
traditions. We never really meet with religion as believers understand it
but only in the abstraction of a thought-experiment. Evil, however, of
all things, demands that we confront it with the whole of who we are,
even if we happen to be philosophers. Likewise, the beauty and the
order of the universe demand not just inference but reverence. As an
account of much current literature in the field, O’Connor’s book is
admirable, but as a model for philosophy it remains finally all too
bloodless.
Jacob Holsinger Sherman

Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
夹夹夹
Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts, Stephen

Pattison, SCM Press, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-334-04149-8), xii + 292 pp., pb
$29.13
Seeing Things represents Pattison’s vision for deeper relationships

between us as humans and the objects we have made. While it is not
explicitly a theological or religious work, Pattison is a professor of
religion. This work represents a preliminary step toward his original
project, ‘Seeing God’ (forthcoming). He developed ‘Seeing Things’ in
preparation for the Gifford lectures, which he delivered at the Univer-
sity of Aberdeen in 2007. In doing so, he joined a long line of renowned
lecturers, including Barth, Polanyi, Tillich, Moltmann, Arendt, and
Ricoeur, all of whom were chosen for their potential to advance human
knowledge of God through the natural world.
With the rise of rationalism, sight became a privileged sense, paired
with reason and claims of objectivity. However, there are older models
of seeing, including those that integrate it with the other senses, with a
symbolic-spiritual awareness of the world, and which blur the bound-
ary between subject and object. Although images surround us, most of
us live a relationally and aesthetically impoverished existence in the
modern world because we take our visual context for granted. Some
works of fine art may receive greater attention, but most physical
objects remain unappreciated. This need not and ought not be.
Images have the potential to reflect the deepest realities of human
existence, to express ideas and ideals, and to hint at realities beyond the
strictly material. Western culture has prioritized linguistic expressions
of meaning and Western religions have tended to be wary of visual
depictions of the divine. Nonetheless, images possess great power.
Their individual histories, contexts, functions, and attributes shape
their potential to influence viewers.
Despite their power, objects created by humans are at the bottom
of the hierarchy of perceived importance in the Western world, far
beneath humans, animals, and plants, and even beneath naturally
occurring physical objects. Without decrying the significance of any
of these things, Pattison questions the hierarchy as such, noting the
blurred boundaries between humans and objects in some non-Western
and noncontemporary contexts. Gone are the days when the faithful,
such as St. Francis, might hear Jesus speak from a crucifix without being
marginalized by mainstream culture.
Moving beyond mere description, Pattison advocates communication
between humans and objects. We should strive to understand each
object’s significance and purpose, the meanings which it conveys, just
as we would for a person. ‘Maybe objects and artefacts will never be
human. Perhaps they will never originate their own words or articulate
their intentions in language. But the baleful record of people in con-
demning humans and nonhumans alike to mute objecthood suggests
that we should perhaps be more open to considering whether person-
like attributes and qualities might be discerned in things’ (p. 184).
In ways different from humans, objects do nonetheless speak. We can
listen by opening our eyes, our minds, and our hearts. The benefits of
listening to objects are manifold. Some might object that by entering
into deeper relationships with objects we will compromise our intellec-
tual advances; yet this betrays an outdated cultural imperialism. Others
might object that we would cheapen our relationships with other
humans, but the opposite is likely true: those who love the objects
around them better love their fellow humans. By loving the objects they
make, humans can fully celebrate their creativity.
By grounding his vision in general experience, Pattison appeals to a
broad, interdisciplinary audience. However, this lack of a specific target
audience creates vagueness in the text. Pattison renders himself a man
without a methodological country. The evidence he cites is largely
anecdotal, rather than rooted in the discourse of any particular disci-
pline. This is a significant flaw, given Pattison’s near-unattainable goal
of eliciting a paradigm shift in his readers. In order to do so, he has
presented a synthesis of Western history vis-à-vis relations between
seeing, humans, and the objects they make. His treatise is conceptually
rich, as any attempted intellectual leap forward should be.
However, what Pattison possesses in concept he often lacks in execu-
tion. Leaps of logic abound, such as the assertion that, because African
slaves were not treated as humans, inanimate objects should be consid-
ered for potential personhood. One significant historical inaccuracy is
that the Reformation discarded ‘the book of nature’, when in fact
Luther, Calvin, and most of the Puritan tradition valued nature and its
ability to reveal God highly, albeit not on the level of scripture (p. 160).
Pattison makes an argument from silence that because the New Testa-
ment writers do not exclude inanimate objects from the scheme of
redemption, they must thus be included. Pattison could have made a
stronger case with the same goal by drawing on traditions of restora-
tionist eschatology in Christianity, which speak of God’s renewal of the
entire created world and of humankind’s continued work in the new
heaven and new earth.
As an object, this edition of Pattison’s work has its visible flaws. There
is a bewildering combination of footnotes and parenthetical references.
The header ‘Book Title’ tops p. 262, while ‘Chapter Title’ tops p. 157,
evidence that Pattison’s manuscript did not receive the editorial atten-
tion it deserved. Pattison’s early advice to readers to seek out images for
themselves on Google, to supplement this image-centered text’s paltry
two illustrations and nine plates, presents further evidence of the same.
In its grand scope, Pattison’s argument was a difficult one to make
and, as an argument, it has failed. He is not entirely convincing.
However, as a visionary he succeeds. Though he consistently cautions
that a re-enchantment of the world is not necessary, he provides some
of the very tools by which such a re-enchantment might be possible. For
those hoping to reclaim a sacramental vision for the entirety of creation,
natural and human-made, Pattison’s work is a step in the right direc-
tion, however small and faltering.
George Faithful
Saint Louis University
夹夹夹
To Do Justice: A Guide for Progressive Christians, Rebecca Todd

Peters and Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty (eds.), Westminster John Knox
Press, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-664-23282-5), xxiv + 164 pp., pb $19.95
Recognizing that ‘Each era brings with it unique circumstances and

responsibilities that challenge Christians to consider deeply what it
means to be faithful in a time of crisis’ (p. ix), the contributors to

this volume – twelve self-professed ‘progressive Christians’ from a
range of Protestant traditions – offer useful analysis and suggestions
for that task. Inspired by a contemporary landscape in the United
States fraught with a wide range of injustices, the editors and authors
were ‘influenced’ (p. ix) by three relatively new faith statements that
seek to articulate the current situation in the world and the call of
Christians to respond appropriately, namely, the ‘AGAPE Document’
(Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth), by the
World Council of Churches; the ‘Accra Confession’ (Covenanting for
Justice in the Economy and the Earth), by the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches; and ‘A Social Creed for the Twenty-first
Century’, ‘developed by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) and the
National Council of Churches to mark the one hundredth anniversary
of the 1908 Social Creed that was part of the Social Gospel movement’
(p. x; all three statements are included as appendices in the back of
the book).
Most of the writers for the book, whom the editors describe as ‘an
intentionally diverse cadre of well-known, well-respected Christian
social ethicists who are actively engaged with local and ecumenical
church people and conversations’ (p. x), gathered together in May of
2007 ‘to discuss the book and outline the chapters’. By design, ‘The
subjects of individual chapters correspond to issues raised by’ the last
of the three documents mentioned previously (p. xi), and thus the book
addresses what it might look like ‘to do justice’ in terms of workers,
families, prisoners, public education, immigrants, affordable housing,
and the environment, among other topics. The short but incisive chap-
ters render this volume a valuable and highly readable resource for
those interested in a ‘progressive Christian’ articulation of current
social justice issues.
In the introductory chapter, the editors begin by defining what they
mean by ‘progressive’:
The term ‘progressive’ has long been used to represent an under-

standing of Christianity marked by an awareness of social sin, a con-
sciousness of institutional and human potential and shortcomings,
and an emphasis on the church’s mission to engage the world. While
progressive Christians support charitable actions to meet the immediate
needs of people in crisis, their deeper concern is to transform the social
systems and economic structures of society that marginalize people and
the natural world. Progressive Christians draw upon a variety of rich
resources (Christian teachings and tradition, science, experience, social
sciences, philosophy, etc.) to better understand society’s problems so
that we can work in collaboration with others to help our society,
our world, and the church move toward God’s vision of a new earth.
(p. xiv)
This definition provides an accurate summary of the approach each

contributor takes in addressing his or her topic. The chapters each
highlight the situation at hand, often illustrating the issue under con-
sideration by means of a story or anecdote designed to draw the reader
into something of an experiential engagement with the topic. The
dynamics of social sin are then vividly articulated, often by reference to
statistical data demonstrating that the various social problems being
examined have moved well beyond the realm of individual culpability
and localized implications. That is, the authors provide readers with
clear indications that all of society is implicated systemically in – and,
indeed, negatively affected by – the injustices and inequities that most
obviously affect the marginalized. In order to provide suggestions for
‘progressive Christian’ responses to these concerns, contributors draw
on a range of biblical and theological resources, such as the language of
Israelite prophets, Jesus’ teaching and example, and the notion of ‘cov-
enant’ so resonant in many biblical and theological traditions. The
analyses provided often supply helpful historical background and con-
textual insight, so that contemporary readers are able to understand the
ways in which Christians (e.g. Social Gospel activists; abolitionists)
attempted to address previous situations of injustice even as they seek
to determine how to respond in today’s milieu. Each chapter concludes
with helpful discussion questions, further reading suggestions, and
relevant websites to consult for more information.
This volume is unapologetic in its advocacy for concrete and specific
acts of justice, and therein is its great strength. The editors describe the
‘book as a form of activism that we hope will invite conversation,
discussion, and further action’ (p. x). On that score, the volume suc-
ceeds quite well. The authors encourage readers to recognize, decon-
struct, and move beyond much of the standard rhetoric and reasoning
that characterizes socio-political discourse on the topics addressed.
They challenge readers to confront and enact the much deeper and
more radical call of gospel values, which the authors think – rightly, in
my estimation – too often go relatively unexamined by North American
Christians themselves. In effect, this book seeks to assist in what might
be called the remapping of Christian assumptions and commitments,
a reorientation to a gospel worldview necessitated by the inexorable
seductiveness – and eventual injustice – of alternative societal values
and presuppositions. In a variety of ways that nevertheless manifest
significant consistency, the authors urge Christians to recover a sense of
the common good informed by biblical and theological affirmations of
social interconnectedness, mutual responsibility, and love.
Not surprisingly, the contributors consistently advocate policy
choices that reflect ‘progressive’ political commitments; some of their
specific recommendations, for example, may strike nonprogressives
as fairly transparent arguments for expanding the size and scope of
government, even if well-articulated on both religious and policy

grounds. In very many cases, of course, a notion of ‘social sin’ almost
necessitates such large-scale recommendations. Injustice festers when a
society does not commit itself to its eradication, and often only large-
scale institutions have the authority and resources to protect the
weakest. The book does not attempt to present all sides of a debate
dispassionately, and for that reason, it may be worthwhile to supple-
ment the use of this text with others in classrooms or other contexts
where highlighting multiple perspectives is necessary and appropriate.
At the same time, the thoughtful and accessible articulations of ‘pro-
gressive Christian’ perspectives in the book make it ideal for use in
classrooms or congregations in which vigorous argumentation of a
specific position is pedagogically desirable.
To Do Justice is an important book. While the volume may not con-
vert every committed political conservative to an alternative vision of
the common good, it goes a long way toward helping ‘progressive’
and other interested Christians understand what is wrong – socio-
politically as well as theologically, how to articulate the situation, and
how to go about seeking change. It represents a fine example of quality,
engaged Christian scholarship that seeks to further the church’s holistic
mission in the world. Given the many grave and unresolved circum-
stances of injustice in and among which we live, To Do Justice merits a
wide and careful readership.
Michael Barram
St. Mary’s College of California
夹夹夹
God’s Gift Giving: In Christ and through the Spirit, R. Kevin Seasoltz,
Continuum, 2007 (ISBN 0-8264-2816-9), 256 pp., pb £18.99/$29.95, hb
£65.00/$114.00
R. Kevin Seasoltz, OSB, well-known Roman Catholic liturgical scholar,

emeritus professor of theology at Saint John’s University (Collegeville,
MN), and long-time editor of the liturgical journal Worship, returns
with a wide-ranging reflection on God’s gift-giving. The result is, on the
whole, an admirable synthesis of philosophy, systematic theology,
sacramental theology, liturgics, and pastoral studies.
The book comprises six lengthy chapters. In the first, Seasoltz intro-
duces the reader to the ongoing multidisciplinary discourse on ‘the
gift’, starting with Marcel Mauss, continuing through Jacques Derrida
and Jean-Luc Marion, paying close attention to theological implications
of this discussion. He then sharpens his focus on the question of God’s

gifts and gifting, incorporating the related question of divine sacrifice,
moving through scripture and liturgics to talk about God’s gift of
presence. Chapter 2 examines in some depth the issue of sacrifice,
concluding that there is consonance between Christian teaching and
modern science on this issue (particularly as seen through the process
of evolution). Seasoltz maintains that sacrifice should be maintained as
a central Christian term, even broadened to refer to creation itself as
well as a dynamism within the Holy Trinity. In the third chapter, Sea-
soltz looks at God’s gift giving under the theme of Christ’s presence as
victim in the Eucharist; here, he draws on Marcus Borg to discuss three
large-scale stories which flow through the Old Testament, and he rein-
forces the importance of not allowing one to drown out the others (as he
senses has been done). He goes on to provide a nuanced reinterpreta-
tion of the victimhood of Christ in the sacrament. The next chapter finds
Seasoltz examining the relation of Word and Sacrament, both consid-
ered as God’s gifts to the church. In the penultimate chapter the author
provides a particularly helpful account of the gift of the Holy Spirit,
and he closes with a thoughtful chapter on pastoral implications of the
account he has given.
There is much to like here. Seasoltz is simultaneously deeply Catholic
in conviction, and yet also open to wise ecumenical conversation.
Alongside the Fathers and Doctors of the church and contemporary
Roman Catholic theologians are found such varied Protestant worthies
as Martin Luther, Jürgen Moltmann, and Fredrick Buechner, and many
others besides. The interdisciplinarity of the work is commendable,
particularly the connections which Seasoltz makes – seemingly
effortlessly – between theology on the one hand and worship and
pastoral concerns on the other. This constitutes one of the chief
strengths of the book and ought to be a model for others.
Nevertheless, I am left with two concerns about the book. First, there
is no bibliography. This is, admittedly, a minor criticism, but it seems to
me to be a missed opportunity as much as anything. Many of Seasoltz’s
readers will be familiar with one or two of the discourses which this
volume bridges, but may be intrigued to follow up a reference in an
area with which they are not as familiar, and a bibliography would
have facilitated this. (This is not, however, to say I am not grateful for
the publisher’s choice of footnotes over endnotes.)
Second, and more substantially, I find Seasoltz’s prose to be translu-
cent: it allows light to pass through, but without all the sharpness and
clarity which one may desire. This is not a criticism of his prose style per
se: he writes in a readable, jargon-free style and is able to explain
complex discourses on topics such as the gift or panentheism in ways
that most educated laypeople could grasp. But he is not entirely effec-
tive at signposting his argument over the course of the book. He
demurs from summarizing his chapters at their close, as well as from

providing an introductory or concluding chapter with an overview of
his case. More than this, he has a tendency to present a number of
positions on an issue without seeming to recommend one clearly, or
offer sufficiently incisive critique to leave another behind. A prime
example of this is Seasoltz’s discussion of patripassianism (pp. 61–8),
which I will present at some length because it is a clear instance of a
broader trend in the book.
After exploring a variety of biblical passages on the question of
whether God might be said to ‘suffer’ or ‘sacrifice’, he turns to contem-
porary theologizing on the topic. He states that God was traditionally
thought to be impassible, that God does not suffer, but then affirms that
this tradition began to be rethought in the nineteenth century, and
names a wide variety of theologians who have contributed (in different
ways) to this rethinking. Missing is any real explanation, here or later in
the section, of why the early church might have embraced impassibility.
At points, impassibility seems conflated with a denial of God’s imma-
nence. For example, Seasoltz states ‘Many contemporary theologians
are not satisfied with a God who presides in the heavens but refuses to
intervene to help suffering humanity’. Such theologians then push on
to talk about God choosing to ‘suspend various aspects of the divine
omnipotence’ (p. 63). Yet certainly most if not all Christian theologians
who would embrace God’s impassibility would vigorously deny that
God is therefore distant, only ‘presid[ing] in the heavens’ and ‘refus-
[ing] to intervene to help’. Certainly, Augustine (to take one example
only) could affirm God’s intimacy with humanity in the strongest terms
while also maintaining God’s impassibility.
Seasoltz then goes on to present Moltmann’s contention that God
does suffer, but without offering any assessment of it; he then turns to
summarizing the work of Edward Schillebeeckx, who differs from
Moltmann on the point of suffering in God. Seasoltz summarizes,
saying ‘Schillebeeckx’s theology preserves God’s impassibility while at
the same time affirming God’s compassion, which renders God pow-
erfully sympathetic toward the suffering of the world and discloses
God as the all-living One’ (p. 65). Seasoltz then briefly points out one
problem that Schillebeeckx has not confronted, only to dash on to
consider Thomas Weinandy’s recent robust defence of divine impassi-
bility. He presents Weinandy’s case sympathetically, but concludes only
that it ‘needs to be balanced with a sympathetic dialogue with modern
science, for nowhere does he consider Charles Darwin’s book or the
work of contemporary biologists and physicists’ (p. 68). There is no
indication of how or why Weinandy might be wrong, or how such an
engagement with science might change his stance, only the assertion
that this ‘might also encourage him to modify his positions’ (p. 68). The
section does not conclude so much as elide into a discussion of
panentheism. In this entire section, one is left wondering why one

would accept or reject any of these (mutually exclusive) accounts, or
indeed how they fit into Seasoltz’s overall case. The section on panen-
theism (with a special focus on Denis Edwards’ account) seems
intended to move these considerations ahead, yet suffers from some of
the same lacunae as the section on impassibility.
This lack of signposting and insufficient engagement is unfortunate, in
that it causes the author to lurk too much in the background, not allowing
his own voice to emerge in presenting his case. He provides helpful and
sympathetic summaries of thinkers, yet seems to demur from sharp (but
charitable) interrogations and incisive (but nuanced) critiques. The result
is an account which is ‘translucent’: illuminating, but with unfortunate
diffusion where one might hope for clearer statement and resolution. In
this way, the work does not completely fulfil its promise.
Despite these concerns, I still maintain that there is much to like
here, particularly in the connections Seasoltz makes across disciplines
as well as his ruminations on liturgical and sacramental theology. This
volume would be well suited for seminarians, the ordained, liturgists,
and theologians keen to explore ‘the gift’ and its multidisciplinary
implications.
Jason A. Fout
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
夹夹夹
Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith,

Andrew Shanks, SCM Press, 2008 (ISBN 978 0 334 04136 8), xiii + 203
pp., pb £17.99
I am deeply grateful to have read this book. It has introduced me – and

that significantly – to someone I had previously known only by name.
It moved me to check our local public library catalogue and get out the
only book by Gillian Rose they had – Love’s Work. Reading that revealed
powerfully what I had long believed: that truth is always bigger than
any one of us, and that when we attempt to set it down in words on
pages, or dogmatically in sermons, or aggressively in controversy, we
often fall short and, sometimes, even worse, do great damage; but that
nevertheless we can, and must try, to reach toward it even if our
attempts are so fallible. And we must do this with those who disagree
with us. In reminding me of this, and renewing my resolve to try and
remember it, Shanks has done me, and I hope has done, and will do,
many others a very good turn.
Although this is not made explicit, the ‘gift’ in the subtitle of the book
I like to think may refer to the fact that Rose, with her Jewish background,
received Christian baptism on her death bed. That it was only then, but
that it was then, Shanks sees as her making her philosophical work a ‘gift’
to the church. This observation is made in no triumphalist way.
In his book, Shanks has provided a commentary on Gillian Rose’s
works. The main six chapters are bracketed by his opening and closing
chapters. The opening one is primarily, and importantly, biographical
and contextual. Rose was descended from Polish Jews. Her grandpar-
ents perished in the Shoah. Her own parents survived, but divorced.
When she was sixteen, she took the surname Rose by deep poll. She
went up to Oxford, and ‘began to look beyond [her parents’] shared
disaffection from religion’. Shanks quotes at length a piece she wrote
sometime after Oxford in which she describes watching a wedding
party, and being surprised by a deep howling which, she discovered,
was coming from within herself. ‘In a sense’, writes Shanks, ‘all of her
thinking is a sublation of that howl’ (p. 5). Without repeating him here,
suffice it to say that when we read that Rose – I almost want to call her
Gillian, such affection does he raise – we are reminded powerfully of
the dictum, that we are so often right in what we affirm, and wrong in
what we deny. So Shanks’ review of Rose’s works deals with a crucially
important subject: the conscience of the individual versus the norms of
society – secular or religious.
His final chapter is a short but very moving testimony to Rose’s
influence on himself. He uses a beautiful poem by the great thirteenth
century Sufi Muslim mystic, Jalāluddı̄n Rumi, by way of summary of
all that has gone before in his book: that ‘ “absolute knowing” over-
whelms “the understanding” . . . in the sense that the latter is a mode of
thinking entirely orientated towards abstract, propositional truth-as-
correctness. For . . . what such “knowing” knows is the absolute moral
priority, far outranking any scholarly or dogmatic interest in the pure
truth-as-correctness . . . ’ And that surely is the case. But being the case
– and this is the burden of Rose’s work and of Shanks’ urgent plea – we
find ourselves in a place where nothing can be neatly set down, and
written off. Rather we find ourselves in ‘the broken middle’ (Rose’s
term, indicating ‘the location of true wisdom’, p. 32) where things are
not neat and tidy. And it is the willingness to try and remain and live
there that is what matters.
The intervening chapters are a philosophical discussion of various
aspects of ‘the broken middle’. The temptation, frequently succumbed
to, is for those who cannot agree, to go their separate ways, at peace or
at war. The burden of Shanks’ exposition of Rose is, it is more ‘true’
when people struggle to hold things together; that the truth is to be
found, if it is to be found, in continuing joint search. This sounds right
to me, though it has to be said it is a line more likely to be taken by a
philosopher than a factory manager. But Rose – and Shanks – would

insist it applies in both cases. Indeed, the name of the present
Archbishop of Canterbury crops up more than once in this book: a
practitioner who is currently struggling to hold together in dialogue
members of the Anglican Communion who would – and perhaps will
– fly apart over gay issues.
A middle ground is found only after hard heart-searching, and even
then it may be – will be – an incomplete, provisional stage. Hence Rose’s
term, ‘the broken middle’. This is not a place many find emotionally or
psychologically easy to occupy, and a phrase of the Orthodox staretz
Silouan, often quoted by Rose, provides the leading quotation for this
book too: Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.
If Rose is difficult (‘very heavy going’ says Shanks), so is Shanks.
Perhaps he had to be. But if the intention is to commend a thinker to a
wider public, then an exegesis has to make things clearer, more acces-
sible. But I found Shanks difficult to read. It was not just the ideas he was
so enthusiastically trying to convey (hard though some of them are),
it was his style. His prose is complex, his vocabulary technical, his
grammar idiosyncratic, even as his passion is great. Despite the adula-
tory comments on the back cover (one from a bishop, the other from a
theologian) I did not think he opened up the detail of Rose’s thinking to
any but those already well equipped with theology and philosophy. I
found him hard work. Harder than the Rose I read.
Originally the book was going to be a joint work of two authors.
However, although they remain friends, disagreements mean that one
of them, Giles Fraser, has finished up writing the Foreword only. This is
much more accessible, and worth reading in its own right. Fraser inter-
prets the ‘innocence’ of the book’s title as the ‘longing to be utterly
sure of our rightness’ (p. ix: words of Rowan Williams, whom
Fraser admires for his Rose-like stance). Rather than shutting disagree-
ing people in a room with a flip chart (which ‘mostly doesn’t produce
any significant meeting of minds’), Fraser sees the Rose/Shanks strat-
egy is to ‘dismantle our desire for innocence’, where all are at sea, and
content to be so for as long as it takes. ‘To put it at its starkest: peace is
better than truth’ (p. ix).
The book reminded me of Yeats: ‘The centre will not hold’. This book
argues that ‘the broken middle’ is the place of creative tension. It also
made me think of Chesterton’s ‘From all the easy speeches/That
comfort cruel men/ . . . deliver us, good Lord!’
John Armson
Herefordshire
夹夹夹
The Kindness of God. Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language,

Janet Martin Soskice, Oxford University Press, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-
19-826951-9), 203 pp. hb £30.00, pb £9.99
Soskice’s feminist concern in this book is to explore gendered language

in the Christian tradition in relation to major doctrinal themes: creation,
anthropology, Father, Son, Spirit, Trinity, atonement, and eschatology.
Throughout, she shows how doctrine both is a form of spirituality and
is incomplete in the sense that we must journey into the fullness of its
meaning. She does this in nine chapters, six of which have been pub-
lished between 1991 and 2001, but the book reads well as a cumulative
mediation by a sophisticated and elegant thinker who works through
very complex issues with learning, sympathy, and imagination. This
book can be read as a sequel to Soskice’s rightly celebrated Metaphor and
Religious Language.
If one was to try and locate Soskice on the feminist map, she might be
called a biblically faithful constructive philosophical theologian who
engages seriously with tradition and an array of modern philosophers.
She seeks to avoid: strategies that question the authority of the Bible –
which she shows is capable of generating a deeply liberative practice; or
those that want to gender the divine – for the divine is always in excess
of gender and can be metaphorically construed in different genders; or
those that want to transform liturgies radically – for she seeks deep
liturgical change amidst continuity; or those that essentialize gender –
for while there is biological fixity, gender roles are fluid and historically
contextual. This is a feminism that will endure and find root within
mainstream traditions, not by it being assimilated by patriarchal struc-
tures, but because of its persuasive and careful argument and its appeal
to orthodoxy on behalf of its central arguments.
It would be impossible to summarize each essay, so let me focus on
one major theme: the Trinity. Four central essays deal with this subject,
although sadly none is singly devoted to the Spirit, but two are given
over to the Father and Christ, respectively. Soskice starts with ‘Father’
and tries to address various feminist concerns regarding this patriarchal
name. Using Ricoeur, she shows how the Bible is transgressive in its
usage of the term such that ‘father’ does not indicate ‘origins’ and thus
patriarchal family, but is a name directed toward eschatological fulfil-
ment. (She forgets this valuable point in a later essay when she lapses
back into the language of origins – p. 123.) With the ‘Son’, she attends to
the deep taboo of blood: a man’s blood is seen to save the world, while
a woman’s blood is seen as polluting. How then, can a male savior save
woman without subordination? Soskice shows how the shedding of
Jesus’ blood need not be restricted to punitive and penal interpreta-
tions, but should embrace those of birthing and kinship, which are
deeply embedded in the gospels, and become central to the meaning of
atonement. Jesus gives birth, like a Mother, to a new community who

are related to each other as kin. The trinity is thus recovered as a
constant critique of idolatrous fixing of human attributes to God, male
or female, and an ‘all-powerful male eminence is not the favoured
picture of God for feminists, nor for Trinitarian orthodoxy’ (p. 111).
Atonement is the kindness of God. Here Soskice plays with Julian of
Norwich’s Middle English, where ‘kin’ and ‘kind’ are the same. In
Jesus, God is ‘kind’ in a double sense: good to us; and one with us, in
the incarnation he becomes one of our kin, though becoming one of our
kind. She offers a rich trinitarian reading of the Shewings which is
further nuanced for being read alongside Augustine’s De Trinitate.
While recognizing the different analogical bases, for Augustine the
interior self, and for Julian the normal worldly self, Soskice traces the
formal similarities of their projects, especially their spiritual integration
of doctrine, and the importance of bringing together these two accounts
for more fully attending to the human and the divine.
I have very minor criticisms of the book. References are sometimes
made with no sources given, appropriate for lectures perhaps but not
for published works. The essays that touch on the science and religion
debate are not so richly crafted and textured as are the philosophical
theological essays. Certain key ideas are left undeveloped: is the trinity
really technically about ‘relations’ (p. 117ff), rather than ‘love’ which ‘is’
relationship?; in what sense is Soskice’s kindness atonement a consti-
tutive Christology, or is the latter term inappropriate? Finally, it is odd
that amidst debates on homosexuality, women priests, and contracep-
tion, none of these topics is actually addressed in Soskice’s otherwise
very gritty sensibilities. But the book represents a rich fare that is well
worth savoring.
Gavin D’Costa
夹夹夹
The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil,

Christopher Southgate, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008 (ISBN
978-0-664-23090-6), xii + 196 pp., pb $24.95
The problem of natural evil is receiving renewed attention in recent

works of theology, and this is one of the best. Southgate, a Research
Fellow in Theology at the University of Exeter, knows all the literature
and is thoroughly steeped in the conversation between theology and
evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder if he
does not make the problem of natural evil go away too quickly by
affirming evolution as the means by which God created the world.
From an evolutionary perspective, natural evil is not evil at all, because
the suffering of individual creatures and the extinction of entire species
are simply the means by which nature is goaded into bountiful com-
plexity. In this sense, Darwinism is a theodicy without theology, but
Southgate adds to Darwinism the theological argument that God could
not have created the world in any other way. Far from resolving the
problem of natural evil, then, Southgate has merely shifted the locus of
explanation from God to natural selection. God’s hands are clean
because nature’s hands are so bloody, but nature is not to be blamed
because God had no choice but to deliver life in this gruesome manner.
What begins as a reflection on natural evil ends up as an apology for
Darwinism. Yet surely natural evil should be a problem for Darwinism,
and not just an opportunity for theologians to demonstrate how evo-
lution can be used to make God look good.
Crucial to Southgate’s position is his rejection of a cosmic fall. He
argues that there is ‘no scientific evidence that the biological world was
ever free of predation and violence’ (p. 5). This is true enough, but it
hardly exhausts the importance and nuance of various interpretations of
the doctrine of the fall. More importantly, Southgate argues that the
suffering of animals is instrumental to God’s purposes. Many other
theologians have taken this position in response to Darwinism, but
what sets Southgate apart is his candor about the magnitude of animal
suffering. He acknowledges that we frequently experience horror at
nature’s sheer waste of animal lives, and he acknowledges that the
evolutionary process targets the weak and less well adapted. He even
confesses that there is no single satisfactory response to the problem of
evolutionary suffering, which is why he calls his position a ‘compound
evolutionary theodicy’. His basic point is that, ‘The world is a package
deal’ (p. 12). Evolution, for Southgate, must have been the ‘only way’
that God could have created a complex, beautiful, sentient, and diverse
world; otherwise, God would be implicated in the involuntary and
unnecessary suffering that appears to be intrinsic to evolution.
Southgate is struck by the fact, to which he continually returns, that
the long record of biological struggle before the advent of humans
makes it hard (for Southgate, impossible) to believe that humans are the
cause of animal suffering (and he rejects out of hand the idea that fallen
angels could disrupt nature). The world for Southgate has always been
fallen; death is a thermodynamic necessity. He is not willing to consider
predation and disease as signs of cosmic disturbances not planned or
intended by God. Everything in nature, he insists, came to be by God’s
design, including the disruptions of natural order that, before Darwin,
seemed to serve no purpose. He admits that this means that ‘the God
who gave rise to this natural world . . . might not be a God worthy of
worship’ (p. 35). Consequently, the task of theology is to prove that God
had no choice in the matter of how to create the world.
The heart of his argument is the development of what he calls
good-harm analysis (GHA for short). A developmental GHA is a good
that can be achieved only through a process that includes the possi-
bility or necessity of harm. A property-consequence GHA is a good
whose existence raises the possibility of causing harms, and a consti-
tutive GHA is a good that is inherently inseparable from the experi-
ence of a harm. The upshot of these distinctions is that the excessive
suffering of animals is a necessary restraint on God’s creativity. The
‘only way’ argument ends up proving that evolution is also the ‘best
way’ God could have created the world. This comes perilously close to
saying that this world is the best of all possible worlds. It also, inter-
estingly, contradicts the Darwinian Theory that Southgate sets out to
support, because, as he says, ‘The scheme I am developing here is a
strongly teleological one’ (p. 71). Since Southgate argues that evolu-
tion is the necessary means by which God created humanity, he is
forced to argue that teleology is found not only in theology but also
in biology (see p. 74). But if evolution is a goal-directed process,
why is suffering intrinsic to it? Can’t the goal be separated from the
means?
God has a plan that makes sense of animal suffering, but if that is so,
doesn’t the very goal of redemption suggest that the suffering of the
world is not strictly necessary? That is, if God can recreate the world by
redemptive activity that saves us from our suffering, then how was that
suffering necessary from the beginning? Southgate realizes the impor-
tance of this objection, which is why he rejects the plausibility of ‘any
scheme of eschatological compensation’ (p. 90). If God redeems the
whole world, Southgate admits, then his argument about the necessity
of evolution fails; therefore, God must not redeem the whole world. The
only redemption God offers is to humans, and here Southgate revises
kenotic Christology to argue that, rather than emptying the divine self
to make room for us, God actively shares our suffering. It follows, for
Southgate, that humans are special animals, called not just to steward-
ship but to an active reshaping of the world – a kingly as well as priestly
role. Yet if evolution is so unbending, how can humanity hope to make
a dent in it? Southgate ends this book criticizing Andrew Linzey’s
eschatological vegetarianism and defending instead ‘healthy methods
of farming (including genuinely humane killing)’ (p. 121). Far from
concluding on a tragic note, however, Southgate argues that humans
should, ‘through a blend of prudential wisdom and scientific ingenuity,
cut the rate of natural extinction’ (p. 125). Evolution, it turns out, is our
enemy after all, and to save ourselves, we have to put our backs against
its terrible tide. There are confusions here, but not any more than in any
other theology that deals with this perplexing topic, and Southgate is to
be congratulated for trying to be both consistent and honest in facing

one of theology’s toughest problems.
Stephen H. Webb
Wabash College
夹夹夹
Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction, Linda Trinkaus

Zagzebski, Blackwell, 2007 (ISBN 1-4051-1872-5), x + 254 pp., pb $31.95
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski’s Philosophy of Religion is a clear and engag-

ing introduction to her subject, one that will serve instructors well both
as a survey of the field and as a springboard for student reflection. Her
historical approach is visible from the very first chapter. After a brief
discussion of the broad features of religion (which begins by setting
aside the task of a precise definition as unnecessary), she gives account
of the origin of philosophy, defined as ‘critic of all major human prac-
tices’ (p. 1), out of the religion of ancient Greece and then the origin of
philosophy of religion in the modern period with the work of Hume,
Kant, and Hegel (p. 14). In virtually every subsequent chapter, she
remains faithful to her historical approach, drawing upon a wide range
of ancient, medieval (including Islamic), modern, and contemporary
sources.
The first chapter is also emblematic of Zagzebski’s approach in
another respect: while she respects her mandate to provide a reliable
overview of the field as it actually is, she nevertheless provides indi-
cations of directions she might push her colleagues. Most notably, she
draws on her own previous work on the theory of emotions to claim
that belief is actually secondary to the ways of seeing and feeling that
religion cultivates: ‘Beliefs typically appear when a person becomes
reflectively aware of his or her emotion and trusts it, so beliefs are
consequent to the emotion’ (p. 3). Nevertheless, she follows the main-
stream of her field in placing the question of religious belief at the
center of her discussion, which can perhaps be divided into three parts:
attempted justifications for religious belief (Chapters 2–4), philosophi-
cal investigations of certain consequences of religious belief (Chapters
5–8), and the ethics of belief (Chapters 9–10). Though she begins with
the classical arguments for the existence of God (Chapter 2), she
follows it with a chapter on less traditional justifications for religious
belief, namely Pascal’s wager, Kierkegaard’s fideism, and arguments
inspired by Wittgenstein’s account of language games. A similar push
beyond traditional boundaries can be seen in her chapter entitled ‘Who
or What is God?’, which begins with a discussion of the classical

attributes of God but then turns to a discussion of God’s personhood.
There she acknowledges the origin of the modern concept of person-
hood in the debates surrounding the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
(p. 94), which she had earlier cited as an (implicitly very unusual)
instance of theology influencing philosophy rather than the reverse (p.
15), and argues that many of the classical attributes of God do not seem
to be compatible with the presumably more important personhood of
God. As always, she reveals her sympathies while leaving questions
sufficiently unsettled to provide space for the student’s own philo-
sophical reflection.
The middle of the book is taken up with narrower problems than the
existence and nature of God, including the problem of free will and
determinism, the link between religion and morality, the problem of
evil, and the question of the afterlife. In each case, Zagzebski continues
to put forward unconventional positions alongside her reliable exposi-
tion of the classic problems – for example, at one point suggesting that
near-death experience should be taken seriously, or at least not dis-
missed out of hand, as potential evidence for life after death. Some of
the most interesting parts of those chapters, at least from my perspec-
tive, are her discussions of her own work, particularly the Divine Moti-
vation Theory, which puts forward the view that the ground of moral
value is ‘God’s emotions, preferences, or will’ (p. 158). I assume that
her extensive work on virtue also underwrites the uncharacteristic-
ally declarative conclusion to her chapter on the links between morality
and religion, where she insists that ‘the days when moral relativism was
de rigueur are over’ and that whatever the importance of religion for
morality, it is absolutely urgent for human beings to develop a univer-
sal morality to defend against war, terrorism, and environmental
disaster (p. 141). This personal investment makes the concluding two
chapters perhaps the most compelling, in large part because she finally
allows her focus on emotion to take on a controlling role, arguing in
turn that a major problem in the face of religious pluralism is coming to
terms with our admiration of individuals with radically different views
and that religious belief is to a significant degree a matter of trusting
our own judgment, including our own emotions. This is not to say that
Zagzebski should have focused more on her own work or her own
opinions about the shape the field should take – she strikes what seems
to me to be a very good balance, allowing her to be reliable without
being impersonal.
I do have two reservations, however, both stemming from Zag-
zebski’s analytic point of view. The first is a relatively minor issue. As
one accustomed to reading modern European philosophy, I initially
found her clear argumentative style, including explicit division of argu-
ments into parts and subparts, to be quite refreshing. By the end of the
book, however, I found it exhausting to keep up with her continual

abbreviated references back to previous arguments, often consisting of
single numbers or letters. If I was frustrated by this, students likely will
be as well. The second is, to my mind, more serious. Though she draws
on a broad range of historical sources, her focus is much more narrow
in her discussions of contemporary debate. A brief review is obviously
not the place to rehash the seemingly endless debate over ‘analytic vs.
continental philosophy’, but as one whose loyalties lie on the continen-
tal side, I was struck by the lack of any discussion of the ‘religious turn’
in phenomenology. Perhaps some of it would have taken her too far
afield of the traditional topics, but surely Jean-Luc Marion’s God
Without Being could easily have found a place in her discussion of who
or what God is. Another major gap can be seen in her claim that the
concept of personhood, derived originally from the doctrine of the
Trinity, is a very exceptional example of philosophy taking a concept
from theology. Such a claim totally ignores the rich literature, spanning
several of the traditions usually grouped together as ‘continental phi-
losophy’ in American debate, devoted to tracing the theological origin
of many important philosophical and especially philosophical con-
cepts. (One thinks here particularly of the later work of Jacques
Derrida.) This genealogical work does not fit easily under any of the
traditional divisions of the field, yet it seems to me to be undeniably
‘philosophy of religion’ – indeed some of the most important work
being done in the field today. The problem I am getting at here is of
course much bigger than any one book, and I realize that it is probably
unrealistic to expect any introductory textbook to responsibly bridge
this philosophical divide – any introduction written from an analytic
perspective would have to be supplemented with continental materials,
and vice versa. With that in mind, then, I reiterate the point with which
I began: this is a very useful and engaging book. I encourage all instruc-
tors of introductory courses in philosophy of religion to consider it
seriously.
Adam Kotsko
Catholic Theological Seminary

Theology, Ethicsand Philosophy: For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry

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T H E O L O G Y, E T H I C S A N D

For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and

Practical theology has undergone a vibrant revitalization over the past

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 16:3 (2009)

for religion at Lilly Endowment (a major supporter of practical

emulation. . . . Theoretically, theologically, and pragmatically, such

excellent resource for students, pastors, and theological educators –

Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference: Christian Faith,

theology and holocaust studies opened to him a wider theological

its neighbors. What it has is a way of speaking – a personal address

God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary, David Brown, Oxford

In this book Brown continues his work of reclaiming a wide range of

forward a refreshing analysis of such ideas, encouraging readers to see

Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things, J. Daryl

J. Daryl Charles was educated at West Chester State University,

which could be said to be post-everything (cf. 27). In Chapter 3,

2indispensable bridge for creating moral consensus on public policy

The Disﬁgured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter

Luis Cortest is Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Medieval

exceedingly malformed, for he was the most inﬂuential philosopher in

Brieﬂy: Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David

Brieﬂy: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, David Mills Daniel and

Brief summaries of classics in philosophy run the risk of glossing over

Daniel’s brief summaries quickly orient the reader to the fundamental

Eco-Theology, Celia Deane-Drummond, Darton, Longman & Todd,

For persons who have always wanted to teach an undergraduate survey

which the Western conversation typically ignores – most notably contri-

grace, redemption, ethics, ecclesiology, theological anthropology – all

Creation’s Diversity: Voices from Theology and Science, Willem B.

This book is a collection of essays, each written with an eye toward

The book’s second part contains various attempts to analyze theologi-

Stories from the Edge: A Theology of Grief, Greg Garrett,

Garret’s book, largely a recounting a unit of his unit of Clinical Pas-

Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

Elizabeth Anscombe’s major work, Intentionality, had a deep and

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sino-Theology/Dietrich Bonhoeffer und

This bilingual volume consists of a collection of eleven essays each of

theology on his own theological development. He admires in Bonho-

Bonhoeffer scholarship. No doubt, it is important to look at the love

Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition, Trevor A. Hart

Faithful Performances is the ﬁrst multiauthor work to be issued in

Can These Bones Live? A Catholic Baptist Engagement with

Barry Harvey, a professor of theology at Baylor University, has divided

Questioning and ‘cross-border’ searching entail a further risk to

Aquinas, Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and

that the constant appeal to Thomas Aquinas, as well as the overarch-

at metaphysics speciﬁcally viewed as a practice, answering to the

The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism, John Hughes,

With the US and UK economies facing simultaneously a banking crisis,

essentially ascetic or hedonistic: rational restraint or acquisitive greed?

The Lord and Giver of Life: Perspectives on Constructive

David Jensen has assembled ten essays by an ecumenical group of

theology is always partially culturally constructed, it is also always

The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for

Authors Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, both professors at Concordia

human performance – family, government, vocation, and religious life –

Rev. James R. A. Merrick

New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity, Frank J.

Frank Matera (Catholic University of America) offers a contribution to

theological contributions on topics such as Christology, soteriology,

Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction, S. J. McGrath, William B.

In a previous book entitled The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy

Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Mark A.