Science of God Truth in The Age of Scien

T H E O L O G Y, E T H I C S A N D
PHILOSOPHY
On Emptying Kenosis
Philip McCosker
Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God,
C. Stephen Evans (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2006 (ISBN
0-19-928322-2), xii + 348 pp., hb £50.00
Of the many weasel words that are to be found in recent and contem-
porary theological vocabulary, kenosis is surely one whose popularity
is inversely proportional to the clarity of its definition. The very variety
of its multifarious deployments empty it of the content it might be
thought to have had. One of the virtues of this highly significant col-
lection of essays by contemporary biblical, systematic, and philosophi-
cal theologians is that it helps cut to the heart of this so-called ‘doctrine’
and thus clear away many layers of obfuscating flab, though it does not
– it has to be said – always do so knowingly or in concert. The collection
of diverse essays comes from a conference held at Calvin College in
2002. On the whole, kenosis is strongly commended in these essays, but
the two essays of critique (by Sarah Coakley and Edwin Christian van
Driel) are, in my view, particularly significant, and one might have
wished that the negative voice had more representation and indeed
been properly engaged.
After a useful introduction by the editor, the first substantial essay is
by Gordon Fee and looks at the biblical basis for a doctrine of kenosis.
Most of his attention is directed to the Christological hymn in Philip-
pians which gave the doctrine its name. It is very odd that this text is
never printed in full and in Greek in the book. Fee argues strongly for
a metaphorical rather than literal understanding of the crucial verb,
ekenosen, and strongly critiques those who think this hymn evidence of
Paul’s Adamic Christology (notably J. D. G. Dunn) – though one might
Reviews in Religion and Theology, 14:3 (2007)

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Theology, Ethics and Philosophy 381
note that the Adamic link is one often made by patristic and medieval
authors. He then looks rapidly in turn at the letter to the Hebrews, the
Synoptics, and John. Fee emerges as a critic of the strong kenotic doc-
trine, but commends instead a multivalent kenotic motif, whereby the
Son is said to give up some divine prerogatives, thus in fact not quite
managing to unravel motif from doctrine.
The next essay by Bruce N. Fisk explores the Hellenistic literary
context in which the Philippians hymn would originally have been
received. He does this by looking at commonalities and differences
with three novels from the first two centuries AD. He argues that
common to these stories and the hymn of Philippians is a ‘V’ shape,
katabasis followed by anabasis. The most striking differences are that the
emphasis on self-humiliation in Philippians would have been incom-
prehensible in the novels he studies, and same goes for the role played
by God in the hymn.
T. R. Thompson’s essay, which follows, is perhaps the most useful in
the book, for it is here that we start to get a clearer idea of what is being
talked about. He looks first at Gottfried Thomasius who assumes the
pre-existence of the Son, and tried to maintain what Thompson calls his
‘Three Pillars’, namely: fully divinity, full humanity, and unity of
person. According to Thomasius, some form of kenosis is necessary in
order to be able to affirm the three pillars coherently. In fact, Thompson
notes that Thomasius was furthering a debate of the 1620s between the
theological schools at Giessen (following Johannes Brenz, which cham-
pioned kenosis) and Tübingen (following Martin Chemnitz, which
emphasized krupsis), though in these cases the subject is the ubiquitous
humanity of the logos ensarkos. It is a shame that debate is not given
some space in this book, and indeed that this last idea of krupsis, hiding,
of divinity is not explored, classical as it was. At any rate for Thomasius
talk of the assumption of humanity is not sufficient, there must be a
sense of the self-limitation of the divine, kenosis, for Incarnation to be
thinkable. Thomasius used three different, though not necessarily
exclusive, strategies to think this through. First, he absolutized one
attribute of God, namely will, so as to make it the source of the others.
In this way, divine self-limitation can be seen as an exercise of the divine
will and therefore of divinity. Second, he distinguished between
attributes being held in potentiality and in actuality. During the kenosis
of the Incarnation, the Son withdraws into potentiality the offending
divine attributes. Third, he proposed a distinction between the imma-
nent (power, truth, holiness, etc.) and relative (omniscience, omnipo-
tence, omnipresence, etc.) attributes of God, the latter, importantly,
being attributes which arise in relation to creation, by differentiation
from creaturely attributes. For Thomasius, a strict view of divine immu-
tability leads to divine imperfection, for it bespeaks God’s lack of
freedom.
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
382 Theology, Ethics and Philosophy
After looking briefly at the responses to Thomasius of J. H. A. Ebrard,

Bishop H. L. Martensen, and W. F. Gess (the latter argued for a relin-
quishing of all divine attributes: the Word becomes flesh, literally, and
without ‘remainder’), Thompson turns to the British reception of these
ideas in H. R. Mackintosh, a response which was less interested in
speculative metaphysics and more in the ethical implications of the
views, though to his credit, Mackintosh wrote: ‘between the ethical and
metaphysical view of Christ, then, there is no final antagonism’ (p. 89),
though one senses there might be a substantial penultimate antago-
nism. Mackintosh was attracted to the packaging of sacrifice and love
which kenosis could be wrapped in, and so he effectively redefined
divine immutability as an immutable love. Committed to, but critical of,
Chalcedon (for it imports pernicious dualism), Mackintosh insisted that
‘no human life of God is possible without some prior self-adjustment of
deity’ (p. 91). And this he thought was consistent with the maintaining
of his four axioms of Christology: deity of Christ, personal pre-
existence of the Son, true humanity, and unity of person. He did
not accept Thomasius’s distinction between absolute and relative
attributes, for the omni-attributes are essential to God, and yet,
Mackintosh argued, there is no clear evidence that Christ possessed
these attributes. He argued then for a transposition of the attributes into
concentrated potency rather than full actuality, dunamei rather than
energeia, as he put it. As Thompson comments, one cannot avoid the
conclusion that this position is ‘ultimately incoherent’.
Stephen Davis writes next on whether kenosis is ‘orthodox’, which
he takes to mean ‘acceptable for belief by the people of God’, and not
‘required’. He understands kenosis as God giving up/laying aside/
divesting/emptying itself of certain properties that normally belong
to it (p. 113). He sees kenosis as one way of interpreting Chalcedon,
and distinguishes between the essential and accidental properties, the
former being ones the loss of which stops one being what one is,
unlike the accidental properties which can be added to or subtracted
from. In reflecting on what are the essential properties of being human
he suggests they are the properties of being ‘merely human’. Chris-
tians believe that in the Incarnation Christ was truly man and truly
God – Davis usefully suggests that ‘truly’ should be explored. In
this light, kenosis means giving up those divine properties which
are inconsistent with being truly human while retaining a sufficient
number to remain divine. I fail to see how one can distinguish
between losable and unlosable divine attributes. Davis points to the
useful redefinition of divine attributes developed by T. V. Morris
whereby omniscience, for instance, becomes ‘omniscient-unless-freely-
and-temporarily-choosing-to-be-otherwise’. He notes though that one
cannot give up time-indexed properties without falling into toxic con-
tradiction. Another strategy for thinking through Chalcedon is that of
reduplication, saying that Christ suffered as man, and worked miracles

as God, an approach explored by Peter Geach in his Cambridge
Stanton Lectures of 1971–1972. However, I agree with Davis that this
must surely lead in a Nestorian direction and does a poor job of
reflecting the unity of Christ’s person. Davis includes a most interest-
ing discussion at this point of the differences between Protestants and
Catholics on the criteria and sources of orthodoxy. He argues for a
strong role for tradition within an overall position of prima scriptura.
Significantly, he notes that sola scriptura cannot make sense because
‘scripture does not tell us what scripture is’, a task which the church,
and tradition performs. He concludes that a doctrine of kenosis is
‘allowed’ by scripture and is consistent with Chalcedon.
The next essay, by R. Feenstra, links the discussion of kenosis to the
communicatio idiomatum: the rules of predication of the divine and
human characteristics of Christ to the one person of the Son, grammati-
cal rules which reflect ontological convictions. He looks at various ways
of working out the metaphysics of such predications, strategies of
krupsis, ignoring the problem, reduplication, rejection of the terms of
the debate (as John Hick), kenosis. He explores the ways in which
divine attributes might be reconfigured in the light of kenosis, along the
lines of Morris’s suggestion alluded to above. He counters criticisms of
these approaches, like that of Morris himself who suggests a recon-
ceived attribute of omniscience goes against a natural Anselmian
instinct for perfection and omniscience simpliciter vis à vis God, or
Richard Swinburne’s criticism that the kenotic theory is overly complex
and incompatible with the properties one would expect of a Creator (i.e.
natural theology). Feenstra argues, however, that we cannot have an
idea of God prior to looking at the Incarnation, it is the latter that must
show us what God is like. God is as God does, and if Christ is the
revelation of God in the world, it is he who should determine our
doctrine of God. He bases himself on Tertullian, Barth, and N. T.
Wright.
The following essay, by Thompson and Cornelius Plantinga, argues
that a kenotic Christology most naturally goes together with a social
conception of the Trinity: there is a structural link. A kenotic Christol-
ogy differentiates the Son more from the other persons of the Trinity
and thus leads to a social understanding of the Trinity, but stops short
of tritheism, or so they argue. Surprisingly, the authors argue that one
must have an univocal understanding of human and divine person-
hood. They reject the static metaphysic of the past in favor of a person-
alist conception upon which a social Trinitarianism relies. They do not
see a need to square this with a doctrine of divine simplicity; indeed
they suggest such a doctrine is evidently not true today, and further that
there is no text in the Bible from which it can be inferred. There is much
that is questionable in this essay in my view.
C. Stephen Evans carries forward the theme of the structural linkage

between Christology and the nature of God in the next essay. He notes
that recent discussion of kenosis is principally concerned with the rela-
tion between God and the creation, rather than in the Trinity or in
Christ. He wonders how the doctrine of God is affected if one construes
Christ kenotically. A timeless/immutable God does not seem natural if
one starts out from the Incarnation. He argues for an account of kenosis
which is limited to Christ’s time on earth, as the resurrection body
clearly has certain divine attributes. He suggests the strengths of a
kenotic Christology are its emphasis on the unity of Christ, as well as
the idea’s religious force, and its ability to map onto notions such as
love, and relation to the question posed by evil. He explores notions
and paradoxes of omnipotence (particularly as formulated by Mackie)
in order to argue that it is not evident that an inability to limit oneself
is a perfection: true omnipotence must include the ability to limit itself
without thereby implying its own loss. He concludes with some
considerations on the connections between incompatibilist views of
freedom and gender construals, in dialogue with Sarah Coakley. A
thick, textured account of human freedom matches the freedom of a
God involved in the world.
Edward Oakes SJ explores the theology of kenosis of the Roman
Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of kenosis’ most
recent major (and controversial) advocates, in the next essay. After some
initial reflections on theology, Incarnation, and paradox, he turns to
look at one of the most paradoxical articles of the creed: Christ’s descen-
sus ad inferos. Oakes notes and charts a discomfort and consequent
decline in interest in this article of the creed across the Christian bodies.
The twentieth century (because it was so ‘hellish’, suggests Oakes) saw
a reversal of this trend though in the work of Presbyterian Alan E.
Lewis (Weinandy’s criticism of Lewis [IJST 5, 2003] would have helped
here), but also in von Balthasar’s theology, who, particularly on this
topic, is inseparable from the influence of the doctor-mystic Adrienne
von Speyr, though Oakes chooses not to explore her role. He states that
John’s text ‘I am the Truth, the Way and the Life’ is more central to von
Balthasar’s theology and Christology than the ‘knotty issues of two
natures’. In exploring von Balthasar’s account of kenosis, he suggests
that it is both radical and limited. In line with the focus of the Johannine
text, von Balthasar is concerned with how one individual, Christ, can
also be of universal significance, how he can be both wave and sea now
as well as in the past and the future. Von Balthasar – in contrast to
earlier theologies of the descent, which stress that Christ descends in
glory to preach to the dead – emphasizes Christ’s passivity in the under
world, for in this way he completes his solidarity with humanity, being
with us even in the tomb. This means he is totally alienated from the
Father because he is truly dead (because truly human). This is the
‘rock-bottom’ of kenosis which is coterminous with redemption: Christ

cannot trample death by death unless he truly dies. Oakes argues that
von Balthasar can both have his cake and eat it (or even vice versa), and
this is why he argues that von Balthasar’s account of kenosis is limited:
it alters divine immutability without including temporal change in
eternity in a ‘mythological’ way. Quite how it can do so is not clear, nor,
perhaps, should it be.
The next essay, by Sarah Coakley, tackles patristic views on kenosis –
a sorely needed perspective in this book. She notes, importantly, that
the contemporary Christological debate about kenosis is entirely con-
cerned with its coherence, but that patristic authors were not concerned
with revising divine immutability. She briefly examines the Christolo-
gies of Cyril of Alexandria (assumption), Nestorius (conjunction), and
Gregory of Nyssa (gradual transfusion). For Cyril the personal identity
of Christ is firmly located in the Logos. The assumption of human
nature involves no change to the Logos, but rather its extension for the
purposes of salvation. Kenosis involves a loss of stature, but no onto-
logical change to divinity, though there is a one-way ontological com-
munication from divinity to humanity, without, however, any mixture
or backward movement. With regard to Christ’s suffering, Cyril ‘plays
the paradox card’ by saying Christ ‘suffered insufferably’, or else uses
the tactic of reduplication. Nestorius sees the person of Christ located
in the conjunction of the two natures; he is thus concerned to guard
divine immutability which he thinks Cyril’s model threatens. Nestorius
manages to combine ontological concerns with existential ones, by
linking his account of kenosis to an Adamic Christology, and the whole
package relying on a strong sense of the distinction of the two natures.
Gregory of Nyssa, however, has a more developmental view of the
union seeing a progressive transfusion from divinity to humanity, thus
allowing for more of a sense of a growth in knowledge of Jesus, all
the while stressing the incompatibility of humanity and divinity. The
personhood of Christ for Gregory is not preidentified, but emerges
gradually.
Coakley goes on to argue that attention to the doctrine of communi-
catio idiomatum would show that the current discussion of kenosis is
singularly misconceived. She is right. It tries to understand the Incar-
nation as God turning into a man, and understandably has difficulties
in doing so. Patristic Christology, however, did not understand God
and humanity as occupying the same ontological genus, as being chess
pieces on the one chessboard, as it were. Thus, the problem is not how
to cram two chess pieces into one square on the board, but how to
conceive of a union of two ‘things’, the radical difference between
which is one of kind not degree. The relation is thus noncompetitive,
says Coakley, echoing Kathryn Tanner. She suggests in conclusion that
the Christology of Gregory of Nyssa merits further attention, and
argues briefly that the ‘trumping’ view of divinity has masculinist

overtones, and that kenotically construed it misses the point of the
Incarnation that kenosis is the sign of Christ’s power, not its loss.
The next essay, by Edwin Christian van Driel, moves to the medieval
period. He argues that most of the essays in this book are implicitly
critiquing classical, two nature, Christology. The latter he argues is
a Christology of addition: Christ has two natures, and thus has two
sets of properties (‘power-packs’, a term coined by Marilyn McCord-
Adams). It is maintained, he suggests, that a kenotic Christology better
accounts for Jesus’ nescience, growth in knowledge, and human
limitations, as well as emphasizing the unity of his person, which
the classical Christology supposedly divides. It is assumed, van Driel
argues, that classical Christology attributes, of necessity, maximal grace
and the beatific vision to Christ. It is this assumption that van Driel
effectively dispenses with in this essay: when theologians do attribute
these properties to Christ, they do so on grounds extraneous to the
classical theory. He explores in detail two strategies for relating the
person of Christ with his two natures current in the medieval debate.
Aquinas and his followers thought the two related in the manner of a
whole and its parts. The advantage here is that the parts share the esse of
the whole, and do not have their own esse (van Driel does not consider
Thomas’s complicating position in the De Unione Verbi Incarnati). Duns
Scotus and his followers, on the other hand, conceived of the relation as
that of a substance and its accidents, whereby the accidents do in fact
have their own esse. It is seen that for the classical exponents, Christol-
ogy is about ontological dependence and how to conceive of that, not
about the communication of some power or other (I disagree with this
latter point), nor an account of cognitive or voluntary influence. Van
Driel’s argument for rejecting the connection between Incarnation and
maximal grace and the beatific vision is neat. According to Duns Scotus,
the creation must be such that God can intervene in it; this means that
all individual substances (and not just rational ones, like humans) are
assumable: every human nature is therefore a fortiori in obediential
potency to depend upon the Word. Now if nonrational natures can be
assumed, this necessarily implies that maximal grace and beatific vision
are not part of assumption by the Word. Aquinas, however, introduces
the notion of Christ’s perfection, which leads to the maximal attributes,
but this is not necessitated by the classical theory. Van Driel concludes
by noting that, however, many attributes of divinity one declares non-
essential eventually one comes back to what are perceived as mutually
exclusive properties of humanity and divinity. He wonders what the
psychological and other consequences of total ontological dependence
are, and suggests that one’s perception of one’s ‘I’ would be affected.
The final substantial essay, by Ruth Groenhout, tackles the frequently
antagonistic nexus of kenotic Christology and feminist theology. Does
kenosis, conceived as ‘self-emptying, self giving, self sacrificing’,

condone or encourage self-sacrificial roles for women? She undertakes
a useful taxonomy of self-sacrifice, differentiating between self-
limitation, the giving up of prerogatives, sacrifice, self-giving, self-
sacrifice, and annihilation. She regards the last, implying the complete
loss of self, as too strong for kenosis (though I think it bears explora-
tion), but sees positive roles for the others, as long as the kenosis is
teleologically ordered. She finds that any feminist theology must find
some space for kenotic themes such as self-sacrifice; indeed she says
that to reject self-sacrifice for women is to imply that they are weak
moral agents. She engages critically with Marta Frascati-Lockhead’s
Kenosis and Feminist Theory: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo (SUNY,
1998). She effectively criticizes the notion that metaphysics necessarily
leads to violence (as it does for Vattimo and others), and suggests that
a lack of metaphysics leads to nihilism. Kenotically speaking, it is
important to note and emphasize the self that is being emptied, not to
dissolve it. This essay is only obliquely related to the narrow main focus
of the book on construals of kenotic Christology.
It should be clear by the end of this book that kenosis is in fact
many things in contemporary theological parlance and these different
connotations – principally between kenotic motifs and ‘doctrines’, vari-
ously related – should be more than sufficiently different to give one
significant pause for thought before employing the term. We should be
clear: there is no one doctrine of kenosis. We should also be clear that
the majority of the theological tradition until the sixteenth century only
employed of kenotic motifs, principally for holding up the existential
ideal, exemplified in Christ, of self-giving love. This need not have
metaphysical consequence nor implication. Augustine can stand for the
tradition here: ‘Non ergo se exinanivit amittens quod erat, sed accipiens quod
non erat’. (Therefore, he did not empty himself by giving up what he
was, but by taking on that which he was not. Trac. in Ioannis, 17.) It
would be interesting historically to ask why kenoticism first arose
when it did, in the seventeenth century. Are the reasons the same as its
later promotion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany
and Great Britain, a new sense of historical consciousness? I suspect
not.
As we have seen some of the authors of these essays argue that a
kenotic doctrine is a way of maintaining Chalcedonian Christology
(think of Thomasius’s three Pillars, or Mackintosh’s four Axioms)
coherently. What becomes clear – and Coakley’s critique is very useful
here, though it could be expressed more strongly – is that a kenotically
‘coherent’ Christology depends on an odd doctrine of God, one in
which Creator and creature compete for the same space, with the impli-
cation that they are the same kind of thing. The God of the kenotic
doctrine is too human and insufficiently divine. To borrow an example
from Denys Turner, humanity and divinity in kenosis are rather like the
chalk and cheese we like to use as an example of ‘complete’ difference:
in reality, regardless of where one shops, they are in fact of the same
kind, namely created reality. It is thus no surprise that a strong kenotic
doctrine goes together with social Trinitarianism: both feed on divinity
conceived in the imago hominis (no doubt virilis too). Language of (inex-
haustible) outpouring avoids this problem much better than that of
self-emptying, which implies a (creaturely) limit. More attention needs
to be given to God’s eternity and simplicity and what relation these
might have to created realities, which in turn means giving attention to
the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.
There are very few misprints in this book (Apollonarian, 26; ekenosin,
115; obvious, 165). The registers of the essays differ considerably and
much repetition results from the book’s origin in a conference, which
means its cumulative impact is not as great as it might otherwise have
been. Attention might have been usefully given not only to other
modern theologians who engage with kenosis in differing ways, such as
Moltmann and Barth, but also to the spiritual or mystical tradition
which is almost entirely absent (though, interestingly, one could note
that Hans Martensen was an avid reader of Meister Eckhart, Tauler and
Dante). It would have been helpful to know more about the seventeenth
century discussions of kenosis. For those interested in this topic, there
are other recent discussions of it in Graham Ward’s Christ and Culture
(Blackwell, 2005) and Marilyn McCord Adams’ Christ and Horrors
(Cambridge University Press, 2006), as well as the fifth chapter of
Oliver Crisp’s recent Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsid-
ered (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The writings of Thomas
Weinandy might also be of use. Older works on kenosis, such as those
of Francis Hall (a stinging critique) and Alexander Bruce, are still
valuable.
This is a most stimulating and pregnant book that will hopefully start
and goad many conversations. I found it hard not to conclude,
however, that to promote a doctrine of kenosis is to have a failure of
theistic, and therefore properly Chalcedonian, nerve.

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof
of Life after Death, Deborah Blum, Penguin Press, 2006 (ISBN
1594200904), 371 pp., hb $25.95
It would be gratifying to assure everyone that after they read Ghost

Hunters, they will be convinced about the possibility of life after
death, but alas, they probably will not. But that is all right, really. The
aim of this book is not to evangelize for the possibility of the super-
natural, but to mine information regarding a largely unknown chapter
in the life and career of William James, namely, his involvement with
the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). And in this aim, the book
succeeds.
The Victorian and Edwardian eras witnessed probably the greatest
flowering of ghost and supernatural literature ever recorded, on both
sides of the Atlantic. In addition, this time period saw a widespread
fascination, almost an obsession, with spiritualism and the occult.
Why then? A number of reasons – rapid industrialization always
raises insecurity and brings with it a breakdown of traditional social
structures. Furthermore, the shocks sustained by religious institutions
in the face of the sweeping social movements of Darwinism, Freudian
psychology, and Marxist economic critiques led to ongoing human
yearning for a satisfying sense of spirituality and connection.
Spiritualism brought a sense of comfort to a shell shocked world by
providing people with a promise of life after death, a life characterized
by peace and tranquility. And ghosts? These gave people the assurance
that even in the midst of a world characterized by change and chaos,
something endures, even after death. True, what endures might or
might not be good, but that is a different story.
Into this maelstrom stepped William James, American Renaissance
man, neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, ghost hunter.
The strengths of the book are many. First of all, in terms of style, it is
well written and readable – according to the liner notes, Blum teaches
scientific journalism, and obviously knows the journalistic rules of
keeping the material simple for the lay reader. This is writing written by
a journalist, lean, descriptive, and concise.
Furthermore, the book describes the characters with precision and
personality – we really get to know these people as people. The story
reads like adventure journalism, with a rich cast of characters, the
(obviously) pragmatic James, the doomed Edmund Gurney, the intense
and methodical Henry and Nora Sedgwick, and a fine supporting cast
of scientists and supernaturalists, skeptics and mediums, heroes and
cranks. In truth, though, the most fascinating character in the colorful
Reviews in Religion and Theology, 14:3 (2007)

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
history of the SPR is no doubt the uncanny Leonora Piper, whose life
probably deserves a book length treatment all its own.
The book marks the boundaries between institutional science, insti-
tutional religion, and psychical research with clarity. Blum is scrupu-
lous about drawing the religious, empirical, and spiritual battle lines.
Finally, the reader cannot help but come away hugely impressed with
James, possibly the greatest American academic ever. His interests
were wide, his experiences were varied, and his mastery of diverse
subject areas was nearly encyclopedic. Plus, he was a family man, a
diplomatic friend, an able writer, and just seemed to be a lot of fun to be
around.
Nonetheless, the book suffers from some serious weaknesses. Many
questions are left unraised or unanswered. First of all, and most dam-
aging, it never really defines the aims of the SPR. What actually brought
these people together? Is the handful of characters in the book the only
people interested in this research? If not, how big does this net extend?
If so, aren’t these just a group of crazies?
Second, the composition of the American branch of the SPR is truly
puzzling. How is it possible that there could be so many people in the
ASPR that did not share the aims of psychical research? Especially, how
did Simon Newcombe, who specifically argued against everything the
ASPR stood for, get selected as president? Wasn’t the group sabotaging
itself?
Furthermore, Blum never raises any of the larger issues. For instance,
why was psychical research of such interest in that particular time
period? What is the larger connection in the Victorian and Edwardian
eras, in both England and America, between religious sentiments, rapid
industrialization, and obsession with the hereafter?
And what about the ghost stories? The Victorian and Edwardian ages
were the flower of literary ghost stories – what is the connection between
this desire to understand the afterlife with the desire to produce a chill of
otherworldly fear? This omission is especially puzzling in light of the fact
that William James’s brother Henry wrote what is quite possibly the
greatest ghost story of all time, The Turn of the Screw. Blum does make a
brief reference to Henry James and Turn of the Screw, but provides no
insight into which questions drove him as he wrote.
Ultimately, the book sharpens but does not satisfy the appetite. Blum
helps cement James’s reputation as possibly the greatest of American
thinkers, but provides scant insight into his motivations and ideas.
Philip Meckley
Kansas Wesleyan University
夹夹夹
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Christianity and Process Theology, Joseph A. Bracken, Templeton

Foundation Press, 2006 (ISBN 13-978-1-932031-98-0), xx + 155 pp., pb
$19.95
There is no doubt that this is true theological writing – God talk. It starts
off with posing the age-old question ‘Where is God?’ This is reminiscent
of the 1964 watershed publication of the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr JAT
Robinson, and his Honest to God. I remember encountering him in
Rochester Cathedral at that time and subsequently in the USA when a
female theological admirer was trying to tempt him to come home for
lunch and he was politely declining! What is not quite so clear is how
many people may wish to tune into this theological reflection. It is
idiosyncratic. The conclusion indulges the writer’s nostalgia for his
novitiate as a Jesuit Priest when he encountered the Spiritual Exercises
of St Ignatius of Loyola. This is scarcely likely to be of widespread
appeal. The title may not be the most compelling to attract the wider
audience the author desires. The book is based on the work of Alfred
North Whitehead (1861–1947), the Cambridge mathematician and theo-
retical physicist who ended up in Harvard. A website on prophetic
voices describes him as ‘. . . one of the most underrated philosophers
in the twentieth century’ (http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/resources/
ANWhitehead.htm).
He invented a new vocabulary to express his philosophical ideas,
often based on etymology, and this adds to the problem of unravelling
them. Indeed, his obituary in the Times said no man expressed such
profound thoughts in such obscure language. It is a great pity that such
a seminal writer is shrouded in such impenetrable language. Hence, an
interpreter does not go amiss. From the list of references, it is clear that
the author sticks close to the original key writings of Whitehead relating
to the theme, but ignores the earlier mathematical writings which do
have a connection toward a general understanding of Whitehead as a
whole: ‘The science of pure mathematics . . . may claim to be the most
original creation of the human spirit’, Science and the Modern World.
The reviewer feels a remote connection with Whitehead in the sense
that Whitehead’s student and subsequent collaborator on Principia
Mathematica toward the end of 1900, Earl Bertrand Russell, lived on a
seventeen-acre plot on the Duke of Marlborough’s estate on the out-
skirts of Oxford. This is now owned by my partner’s brother-in-law and
it has been my privilege to stay there every so often and to sit in
Russell’s study with its stunning views over the gardens.
In addition to ignoring vast tracts of Whitehead’s writings, very little
is said of Whitehead the person, which is a pity since it can shed light
on his thinking, but possibly does not suit the author to mention it.
Whitehead was brought up as an Anglican and his father was a clergy-
man in Ramsgate, Kent, England. Around 1889–1890, he began to show
leanings toward the Roman Catholic Church. For seven years, he could
not decide whether to remain an Anglican or join the Roman Catholic
Church. Eventually, he chose neither and became an agnostic in the
mid-1890s. He stated that the most significant factor was the rapid
developments in science.
So it is no great surprise that the author modifies Whitehead so as to
make it more compatible with traditional Christian beliefs such as
creation out of nothing, the doctrine of the Trinity, and eschatology. The
publisher’s website indicates three highlights for the book:
• accessible introduction to the philosophy of Alfred North
Whitehead,
• reconciles the views of traditional Christian doctrines and the
modern scientific world,
• cuts through highly technical material and presents it to a general
audience.
The first is certainly not achieved. This is scarcely an introduction to
Whitehead. Selected general concepts only are introduced from White-
head which suite the convenience of the author. Whitehead is simply a
background factor on which Bracken’s thoughts may be hung. Often
the result of using Whiteheadian terms is one of pomposity and the
feeling that a more common-or-garden expression would be preferable.
For vast tracts of the book, we are presented with the writer’s views on
this, that and the other with the thinnest veneer of Whitehead. This is in
a conversationalist mode, and is superficial and lacks polish and
authority when put side by side with those more noted for commen-
tating on issues dealt with almost in passing.
On the second count, the author does not appear to be well
acquainted with science and so this too is superficial. The discussion of
cancer (pp. 25–6) is close to home since the reviewer is a bowel cancer
survivor and there is no better way to understand cancer than experi-
ence it. Having been told it results from normal division of cells gone
awry, we are then told there is no rational explanation, and that chance
plays a role in both favorable and unfavorable mutation. Oncologists
would have much more to say that this simple analysis, since there is
genetic code analysis, and there can easily be cause and effect, including
human culpability. The ‘divine initial aim’ is to slow down the early
growth of the cancer so that it is possible to detect, retard, and even
eliminate it. Even though medical miracles do happen, this partnership
of the divine and the medical is seen as restoring to health. This is all
beautifully theoretical and has no contact with the oncology ward, the
chemotherapy suite, or the hospice. The evils within nature discussion
(p. 31) are also open to challenge.
On the third count, it is unclear what this highly technical con-
tent might be. There is not the evidence within the book of wider
engagement with Whitehead’s thought, and since Whitehead’s con-

cepts are partially twisted to suit the author, one doubts that this claim
can be hugely sustainable. Opinions may vary as to the attractiveness of
stating abstractly about the Trinity that each divine person is neither
male nor female but rather a subject of experience with an infinite or
totally unlimited field of activity proper to its own form of existence (p.
xix). Maybe this is a valuable footnote, but not terribly worship-
friendly?
It is certainly valuable to indicate that we may be dealing with various
models of reality for the God–world relationship. The traditional static
model for the Trinity by Aquinas is compared with the improvement in
the model suggested by Sallie McFague in her book Models of God. She
conceives of God as the Soul of the universe and the universe as the
body of God. However, limitations with her model are claimed to be
overcome by Whitehead and the process theology. It is a pity the author
does not draw parallels in other disciplines to the process approach. The
arid way that this further improvement is expressed (p. 9) may not
win too many hearts, minds, and souls, and is unlikely to enter into
too many creeds. Professional theologians may take to it in greater
numbers. The author also indicates the value of his approach to inter-
religious dialogue, whereby no religion represents the whole truth
about ultimate reality, so much so that this encourages dialogue when
in Islam it would be close to a stoning offence. The author should not
believe in the power of pure theology, especially one as idiosyncratic as
this, to overcome the barriers that become all too apparent when one
looks at sociology and politics.
Gerald Vinten
Royal Society of Health
夹夹夹
Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community, Simon

Chan, InterVarsity Press, 2006 (ISBN 13: 978-0-8308-2763-3/10:
0-8308-2763-3), 207 pp., pb $22.00
A few years back, there was a (welcome) plethora of agreed statements

on various aspects of the church’s life. They helped different deno-
minations to move closer together, and it became possible – and
fashionable – for ‘protestants’ and ‘catholics’ to speak more openly and
frequently of common ground. In many cases, however, the one group
which was left untouched were the Evangelicals. This book is an
attempt to address that.
It is the aim of the author, who describes himself as an Evangelical, to

lay before his fellow Christians an understanding of theological method
and practice which would enable them to join more closely in (what he
sees as) the mainstream tradition of the Christian church down twenty
centuries. As he writes from ‘within’, he may perhaps have influence
which has been denied others. Chan’s thesis is, lex orandi lex credendi.
‘Worship . . . makes or realizes the church’ (p. 46 and elsewhere).
The book is in two parts: Foundations and Practices. The first part
opens with a chapter which describes the ontology of the church: is it
an instrument of God with regard to the creation, or is it the fulfillment
of creation in God? Chan clearly has a very high doctrine of the church
and more than once I found myself remembering the words of J.A.T.
Robinson, ‘You can have as high a doctrine of the church as you like,
provided your doctrine of the kingdom is higher’. The kingdom gets
very little mention in this book. Perhaps because I had just been reading
Ken Leech, I also missed the sense of the brokenness of the church on
earth – though on page 33, Chan does refer to the church as ‘the
epiphany of the crucified body of Christ on earth’. He understands
‘Ecclesiology [as] an intrinsic part of the doctrine of the gospel of Jesus
Christ, not an administrative arrangement for the sake of the securing
practical results’ (p. 36). In a following section, headed The Spirit’s
Mission in the Church, he writes, ‘The essential nature of mission is for
the church to be the body of Christ’ (p. 39). I found no reference to A.M.
Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church: perhaps it is too dated to be
cited now. But nor did I find reference to Avery Dulles’s more recent
stimulating book, Models of the Church.
In the light of this foundational chapter, Chan then turns to The
Worship of the Church. ‘In the very act of worship we are participating
in the God who is truth’ and this participation is ‘doing primary theol-
ogy’ (p. 48). So worship gives shape to doctrine. If worship is our
response to God’s glory, it can never be something we do for God; it is
its own end; and it is a response to the triune God (p. 53 ff.). Therefore,
he argues, it is important to discover and stuck to a basic ordo, rather
than ‘orders of service’. We begin to see where this is going.
The third chapter then turns to the Shape of the Liturgy – and
Gregory Dix immediately (and appropriately, as we see) comes to mind,
for by the end of this chapter he has arrived at what most mainstream
Christians would recognize as their Sunday fare. He draws from von
Allmen the suggestion that the two words commonly used for
the Sunday service describe the two poles of the liturgy: ‘Eucharist
connotes . . . a movement . . . of gathering together. Mass . . . is the
movement of going into the world’ (p. 83). (The second point is pre-
sumably based on ‘Ite: missa est’.)
‘The Liturgy as Ecclesial Practice’ follows. Chan sees the liturgy as
being of the esse of the church. He cites hospitality as an example of
something which is of the bene esse and having just read Ken Leech’s
book, this contrast struck an odd note. In passing, he compares ‘cathe-
dral’ and ‘monastic’ ways of praying (p. 90), but sees them the opposite
way round to the way I am used to. The chapter concludes with the view
that ‘as long as Christians are practicing a normative liturgy . . . one
may rightly assume that spiritual formation is taking place’ (p. 98).
He is now ready to turn to practicalities. He does this in three chap-
ters headed, The Catechumenate, The Sunday Liturgy, and Active Par-
ticipation. His views and advice read entirely sensibly to someone like
myself who is used to what he describes. I fear, though, he may have an
uphill struggle to convince some of the more charismatic churches that
a set ordo is desirable Sunday by Sunday. He allows that charismatic
Christians will look for freedom within the service for someone to give
a word of prophecy – but he shrewdly notes that even that is unlikely to
be allowed during the minister’s sermon!
Although Chan is writing from within the constituency, he is a high-
church Evangelical. His is a scholarly, rather than exciting, way; a way in
which the clergy have a central, but collaborative role, rather than a
showman’s; and his (understandable) insistence on a set shape for the
liturgy may be perceived (too quickly perhaps) as clipping wings. And
although things have moved on since I was a student, I still recall the
Anglican vicar of the parish to which my family moved writing in his
magazine, ‘One of the most grievous of my duties is to have to celebrate
the Lord’s supper each week . . . ’. There are still (sadly, in my view, and
I imagine in Chan’s) such church leaders about: they are unlikely to be
swayed by his scholarly arguments. But then, nor are the marginalized
folk of whom Leech writes. So perhaps there is room for more variety
than Chan allows?
John Armson
Herefordshire
夹夹夹
God’s Wrong is Most of All: Divine Capacity: Per Necessitatum

Christianus, Kenneth Cragg, Sussex Academic Press, 2006 (ISBN
1-84519-140-4), x + 204 pp., pb $29.95/£14.95
In God’s Wrong is Most of All, Kenneth Cragg reflects on a wide range of

interconnected theological issues, from theodicy, to omnipotence, to
divine and human action, and much else besides. Cragg and his work
straddle numerous divides. He inhabits both church and academy,
having served as an Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, as well as a professor
of philosophy. He was born and raised in the West, attending Oxford;

yet he also lived forty-five years in the Middle East. A committed
Christian theologian, he has also been continuously involved in con-
versations with Muslims, and exhibits a deep familiarity with the
Qur’an, its stories and teaching. In the present work, he draws prima-
rily on the Old and New Testaments, but also judiciously from the
Qur’an and Islamic tradition. His theology is deeply engaged with the
Bible and its inner logic, yet seeks to take quite seriously the world and
its cares and grievances; this book in particular converses far more with
literature, poetry, history, and science than with fellow theologians. The
effect is a theology which slips neither into the hermetic discourse of
insiders, nor into a bland pusillanimity which by affirming everything
affirms nothing. To put it more positively, Cragg provides a fascinating
and provocative reexamination of divine agency in and for the world,
and the sort of Christian life in and for that world that such divine
action calls forth.
Cragg begins by noting the practice of oath-swearing, particularly the
way in which God is used as a guarantor of truth. Yet, God is also
considered ‘blame-worthy’ in the sense that God is taken to task for the
way that things are in the present (raising issues of theodicy and omnipo-
tence). Moreover, these ‘blames’ call into question biblical teaching and
Christian theology, so they cannot be merely skipped over. This means
that the church both tells of God’s integrity (and power, etc.) while
simultaneously being susceptible to the ‘blame’ due to this same God.
The church, further, is culpable for ‘God’s wrong’ to the extent that they
disserve God. The theme of ‘God’s wrong most of all’ (a phrase taken
from Shakespeare) is explored further through several tragic plays of the
Bard, and the view of the world which results.
The author then turns to divine unity and related considerations,
discerning the way in which God is present in and with the creation.
Cragg notices within scripture a relational quality to God, seen most
clearly in the implied mutuality of divine–human covenants: there is a
‘reciprocity’ in divine and human agencies (p. 32). Divine unity is thus
determined to be not merely a matter of number, but rather is about
sovereignty and omnipotence. Specifically, omnipotence in God allows
God to embrace a certain sort of self-limitation (at God’s initiative), and
a sovereignty spelled out as ‘self-expending love’ (p. 36).
From there, Cragg picks up the issue of divine integrity in three
further chapters. Christian theology, in affirming the sacramental
nature of creation, discerns an ‘intendedness’ in creation, which gives
rise to and sustains human life and caretaking. Cragg explores this
theme particularly through the lens of covenant between the divine and
human. Given the very real wrongs of life in the world – might God
regret creating, given human failure in caretaking? – Cragg then turns
to expounding the theme of divine integrity through the cross. ‘God’s
wrong is most of all’ is then seen in two related ways: in the cross, first,
God is ‘wronged’, suffering the entirety of human sin through the ages.
Second, it is a point of focus and radical questioning of all human
claims of God having done ‘wrong’, claims which accrue falsely to God
because falsely disavowed by humans refusing to take responsibility for
their resisting creation’s ‘intendedness’ and thus perverting a good
creation. But God’s suffering in Christ because of human sin becomes a
suffering in Christ on behalf of humanity and for our salvation.
Given this account of vicarious and vulnerable divine agency with
and on behalf of humanity, Cragg then turns to the appropriate (Chris-
tian) human response, considering in the remainder of the book several
issues relevant to the ‘kindred servants’ of Christ. He begins by explor-
ing the difficulties that Christians run into in trying to guarantee the
veracity of their witness to this God, through infallible church, inerrant
scripture, through miracles or sacraments, and how the abuse of these
otherwise salutary means ends up ‘swearing an oath’ to God’s veracity.
Since these are means to God’s action, they cannot provide veracity
over against God, but are merely a (derivative) part of God’s own
witness. Related to this issue, Cragg also explores the care and imagi-
nation needed in the responsible use of words, and the value of doubt
to the life of faith. Parsing out the role of faith in terms of politics, he
maintains that faith must not coerce another; yet faith is also quite
valuable in the tutoring of the conscience. In his penultimate chapter,
Cragg explores the nature of faith as willed, as a willing response
reciprocating the will found ‘behind it all’ in creation. A chapter
drawing together the threads of argument about Jesus Christ and the
continuing significance of his disciples for the ongoing vulnerable and
vicarious ministry of God in the world closes out the book.
While this volume offers much to appreciate, it brings with it some
serious liabilities as well. First and foremost, the style of writing will
most likely turn off all but the hardiest soul. A dense, evocative, some-
times labyrinthine prose style haunts these pages. No doubt this is in
part due to the richness of the subject matter, and attempting to do
theology faithfully without slipping into the (potentially dangerous)
neat, predetermined molds of conventional theology. This can be seen
particularly in Cragg’s using the likes of Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy,
and Friedrich Nietzsche as conversation partners. Yet, there is also a
fundamental density, even obscurity, to the prose which seems most
fairly chalked up to the author’s own style of expression. It would
certainly make heavy weather for undergraduates, many seminarians,
or anyone reading theology at an introductory level.
A second liability, oddly, is also a strength when considered from a
different perspective. As mentioned above, Cragg does not interact
widely with other theologians. This is certainly a strength to the extent
that it does not reduce his work to yet another insider’s account for
insiders. Unfortunately, it also risks being relegated to the margin in

theology for the same reason, that it seems to stand free of any prior
conversations which it might qualify or otherwise interrogate. The
effect may be to mitigate the force of the case that Cragg makes, allow-
ing it to be dismissed as merely idiosyncratic, rather than recognizing
its real generative potential. One suspects that this combination of
inaccessibility to theological nonspecialists and lack of engagement
with other theological specialists may lead to a thinner reception of this
book than it deserves.
A third, more substantive concern flows from the book’s Chapter
10, entitled ‘Expediences of Politics’. Here, Cragg discusses the his-
torical and theological difficulties of faith being combined with law
and politics, which were then employed to ‘enforce faith’. Cragg’s
rather conventional suggestion is to emphasize the importance of
keeping the synagogue/church/mosque separate from national poli-
tics and law. This was particularly disappointing because in previous
sections Cragg showed himself willing to think deeply and creatively
about the issues presented. In this chapter, he (in effect) simply rein-
forces the Modern notion of the privacy of faith, shorn from any prop-
erly public or political expression, and merely making its presence
known quietly through ‘hearts’, and ‘consciences’ and other invisible
(fictional?) organs. Particularly given his creative and subtle account
of divine and human action, this seems to be just the occasion to set
forth what a political community of self-expending love, devoted to
loving patience and vicarious redemption might look like (whether
conceived along the lines of the modern Western nation-state, or,
more likely, not). How might this community encourage and give rise
to genuine human flourishing socially and politically, even recasting
conventional politics or nurturing alternative political processes? Par-
ticularly post-9/11, these are urgent questions. A great deal of the
politics of nation-states specifically exalts strength over any hint of
vulnerability or doubt; in general, nations seem content to inflict suf-
fering on others in order to maintain their own security and lifestyle,
rather than embracing suffering on behalf of others. Moreover, it is
becoming increasingly clear that our world (including the West) is not
merely a secular one which allows religion to persist, but is in fact
complexly religious and secular at once. In light of this, might not
the Christian story, specifically as Cragg expounds it, present certain
choice resources for a world which better gives rise to genuine
human flourishing, resources offered not above other religious and
secular options, but alongside them? The missed opportunities in this
chapter particularly mar an otherwise challenging and rewarding (if
not terribly accessible) volume.
In God’s Wrong is Most of All, the reader is treated to the creative,
mature reflections of an accomplished theologian on the vital issues of
divine and human agency, and genuine Christian, human existence.

Although there are some significant factors which will stand in the way
of a wide dissemination of this volume (and perhaps its ideas), one still
hopes that it may stimulate discussion and a renewed approach to these
crucial theological issues.
Jason A. Fout
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
夹夹夹
Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic

Response, Daniel A. Dombrowski, Cambridge University Press, 2006
(ISBN-13 978-0-521-86369-8, ISBN-10 0-521-86369-4), vii + 180 pp., hb
$70.00
Most criticisms against Anselm’s traditionally labeled ‘ontological

argument’ for the existence of God as quo maius cogitari non potest
(that than which nothing greater can be conceived) have focused on
either its logical (in)validity or (un)soundness. Dombrowski argues
that such a focus is too narrow. A broader view of the argument and
of its place in the history of Western philosophy sees its usefulness
and its relatedness to other logical, theological, moral, and even
political considerations. Dombrowski states from the outset that he
thinks several versions of the ontological argument are both valid and
sound. He is especially persuaded by the reasoning of the twentieth
century American philosopher Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne, the
line of whose innovative thought Dombrowski weaves throughout the
book, was convinced that there is an inherent contradiction between
classical theism’s conception of God and the notion of perfection
around which the ontological argument turns. More specifically, in
order for the notion of perfection to make any definitional or syllo-
gistic sense in the argument, God’s existence and essence must not
only be reconcilable, but indeed completely compatible with all events
occurring in the world. In effect, this means that any contradiction
between God’s goodness and evil in the world as envisioned by clas-
sical theodicy must be utterly reformulated.
Dombrowski opens the book with a historical overview of the three
main phases in the development of the ontological argument: Anselm’s
cogent formulation of it, the Humean and Kantian critiques of it, and
the stronger reformulation of it by thinkers such as Hartshorne, Normal
Malcolm, and John Findlay. Dombrowski demonstrates his keen under-
standing of each of these phases, providing the reader not only with
a diachronic summary, but a synoptic comparison of each of these

phases with contemporary interpretations of the argument. The author
believes that Graham Oppy, for example, an accomplished young
scholar at Monash University, bases his whole-scale rejection of the
argument on later scholastic simplifications of it as found in the works
of Duns Scotus and Bonaventure. Oppy, Dombrowski explains, believes
that the force of the ontological argument can only be strengthened to
the extent that there is an element of existential contingency in the
notion of God.
Oppy’s reasons for rejecting the ontological argument occupy
Dombrowski’s attention throughout the book, but are at the forefront
in Chapters 4 and 5. Oppy, according to the author, mistakenly criti-
cizes Hartshorne’s defense of the argument as based on a classically
theistic notion of God. (We must remember that Hartshorne held the
idea, popularized by Alfred North Whitehead, of a continually chang-
ing and developing deity.) Even if Dombrowski’s observation is accu-
rate, the question remains as to what notion of perfection exactly
corresponds to the neoclassic theistic conception of a continually
evolving God. What seems to distinguish Dombrowski from Oppy is
the former’s willingness to accept a notion of noncontradictoriness
between necessary existence and continual change – an idea that the
latter finds nearly impossible to maintain. Dombrowski argues that
Oppy’s general objection to the ontological argument ignores a key
distinction made by Hartshorne between existence and actuality, a
distinction that Dombrowski believes to lay the foundation for its neo-
classical formulation.
Dombrowski also includes a chapter on Richard Rorty’s preference
for poetry over metaphysics in regard to theistic discourse. Rorty,
perhaps the most notable student of Hartshorne, has grown increas-
ingly critical of the Platonic streaks passing through Aristotle and into
the entire Western tradition. Aristotle, Rorty maintains, mistakenly
clung to an ontology in which form was the actualization of the com-
posite substance, not of matter per se. Rorty believes that Hartshorne
did much to remedy this situation, but not enough. Hartshorne’s
support of the ontological argument revealed the enduring influence
of classical metaphysics in his thought. As Dombrowski writes, ‘Rorty
is opposed to metaphysics and the ontological argument and Hart-
shorne is primarily a metaphysician and a defender of the ontological
argument’ (p. 39). Unfortunately, Dombrowski concentrates almost
exclusively on Rorty’s rejection of metaphysics and offers us little by
way of discussing Rorty’s preference for poetry. He briefly summa-
rizes Rorty’s position that Wordsworth’s metaphysics matter little
to his poetry, but his treatment of the ‘split between poetry (as
Rorty uses the term) and metaphysics’ (p. 60) is rather truncated and
superficial.
The third chapter is dedicated to deconstructionist assaults on the

ontological argument. Dombrowski offers an interesting analysis of
Mark Taylor’s apophatic position and its implications for the possi-
bility of negative theological discourse. The author’s careful analysis
of Taylor’s distinctions unmasks the presumed powerlessness of an
absolute via negativa. According to Dombrowski, negative theology
has rather heavily depended on certain divine attributes which have
played a key role in traditional positive theology. ‘The deconstruction-
ist via negativa’, Dombrowski concludes, ‘both tries in vain to extricate
itself altogether from the via positiva and relies for its best insights on
criticizing the many silly things said by traditional theists over the
centuries’ (p. 76).
Later, Dombrowski turns to the ever-daunting topic of the notion of
perfection and the predication of existence. This, of course, was the
original Achilles’ heel of Anselm’s formation of the ontological argu-
ment, as famously codified in the concise critique made by Anslem’s
monastic contemporary Guanilo. Dombrowski covers the major varia-
tions of this critique, from the logical analysis of Frege and Quine to the
ordinary language approach of Oppy. The author once more draws
attention to Hartshorne’s operative distinction between existence and
actuality which he believes helps clear the clutter surrounding the
predication debate. The latter entails that God exists in a certain way,
whereas the former refers to the ‘thatness’ of God’s existence.
Indeed, it is this very Hartshornian distinction that raises some
important questions regarding Dombrowski’s exposition of the onto-
logical argument’s effectiveness. Though a distinction between exist-
ence and actuality is not out of order, the Aristotelian notion of
existence as a type of actuality, which seems to have borne much fruit
up until Hartshorne’s rejection of it, is generally left unprobed by this
book. Dombrowski seems to take Hartshorne’s ‘remedy’ for Aristote-
lianism’s Platonic infections as definitive. With all due respect to Dom-
browski’s thorough and penetrating analysis, it is difficult to accept the
once-and-for-all neatness of an absolute distinction between the that-
ness and whatness of God’s existence. It would not be healthy, nor
indeed possible, for philosophers to ignore just how the two are inex-
tricably related. Be that as it may, Dombrowski admirably demon-
strates, contra Oppy, that the ontological argument is indeed of infinite
worth when it comes to exploring the power and limits of logic in
theological discourse.
Daniel B. Gallagher
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
夹夹夹
Christology in Context: The Christian Story – A Pastoral Systematics,

Gabriel Fackre, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006 (ISBN 0-8028-6314-0), xiii + 265
pp., pb $24.00 (£13.99)
This volume is the fourth in a series of books on topics in pastoral

systematic theology by Gabriel Fackre. This is actually the second
volume which addresses the person and work of Christ; the first
volume in the series includes a treatment of Christology in light of
the classical debates surrounding Chalcedon, the creeds, and the tradi-
tional formulations of atonement theory. This volume assumes the
investigation found in the first volume, and draws implications from
the themes found there on a variety of pastoral questions and situations.
Much of this volume includes work that Fackre has previously pub-
lished in other journals or books, in substance, and as such, some
sections may seem a little dated in their concerns – yet not without
contemporary applicability.
This volume is divided into five parts, each of which deals with a
distinctive topic. While there are some themes which run throughout
the book, each of these parts can easily stand alone. Part One, ‘Narrative
Christology’, proposes to show the reader how the narrative frame-
work used throughout the series operates with the Christological
theme addressed in this volume. This task, however, is not clearly
accomplished in this part of the book. What Fackre does offer in Part
One, though, is a helpful discussion of a variety of current pluralist and
particularist views on who Christ is for us in today’s world. One of the
dominant themes of this volume, the Noachic covenant, is introduced in
this chapter. Fackre uses the imagery of the rainbow and its arc in a
variety of ways throughout the book, and here he uses it to describe the
pluralism that comes with the current trend toward globalization.
Within the range of possibilities Fackre presents, he describes his own
position as ‘narrative particularity’. He is interested in offering a more
rigorous Christology than is typically expressed by pluralists, while at
the same time embracing the wideness of God’s mercy. In this part,
Fackre also introduces another theme which will reappear throughout
the course of this volume, the munus triplex, that is, the threefold office
of Christ. He also suggests the replacing of the traditional terminology
of Logos with that of ‘vision’, referring not to our vision of God, but of
God’s vision of and for us. He sees this as a helpful move in an era
marked by use and appeal to visual imagery, and as a good way to
capture the content of idea of Shalom.
Part Two of this volume is entitled ‘Christology, Church, and Minis-
try’. Here Fackre proposes to address the way Christology relates to the
world of the pastor, the arena of church and ministry. He begins by
making use of the Mercersburg theologians, namely Philip Schaff and
John Nevin, to argue for the need to maintain both the subjective and
the objective sides of justification, which he claims is a position that can

help in the endeavor toward ecumenism. Next, he turns to the church
itself as the body of Christ, making use of the threefold office of Christ
as a means of describing the responsibility of the church to the world.
He emphasizes the ministry of both the clergy and the laity, naming
their particular roles ‘ministers of identity’ and ‘ministers of vitality’.
Special emphasis is put on laity serving as ministers of vitality in their
particular spheres in the world.
‘Jesus Christ and Parishioner Questions’ is the title of the third part of
this volume. This part provides a very helpful discussion of a number
of questions which are often on the minds of parishioners; namely,
angels, what happens to those who have not heard the gospel, and the
status of Israel in light of the coming of Christ. In addressing the
question of angels, Fackre relies heavily on Karl Barth, and organizes
the work of the angels around the munus triplex. He deals briefly with
the demonic, but does not dwell on this, with his position summed up
in the phrase: ‘Metaphor serves better here than metaphysics’ (p. 79).
Fackre next attempts to answer the question of what happens to those
who have not heard of Jesus Christ. He names his proposal ‘Divine
Perseverance’, akin to ideas like ‘eschatological evangelism’ or ‘post-
mortem evangelism’. Again, he relies on the covenant with Noah to
elucidate his position. Finally, Fackre turns to the question of the rela-
tionship between Christ and the people of Israel. This is a short section,
without a very definitive conclusion, though it does affirm the faithful-
ness of God to the promises to Israel. It serves as a contribution to the
ongoing conversation on this topic.
These first three parts are the most helpful parts of this volume,
especially with regard to fulfilling the purpose of this series, which is to
offer a more pastorally focused systematics. The next two sections are
somewhat more technical, and are primarily centered around engage-
ment with other theologians. They focus less on answering questions
that emerge in the church or on providing guidance for what ministry
should be than do the first parts of this volume.
Part Four, entitled ‘Christology in Dialogue’, offers a dialogue
between two contemporary movements, evangelicalism and ecu-
menism. Here Fackre offers an extended exposition of the work of
Donald Bloesch. He then offers criticism of some of Bloesch’s work,
offering his own perspective as a corrective. Their disagreement is
based on slightly different commitments. While both Bloesch and
Fackre see themselves as committed to evangelicalism and ecu-
menism, Fackre suggests that Bloesch’s primary concern is evan-
gelicalism, while his own is ecumenism. It is this difference that
funds the disagreement between them. Fackre concludes this section
with a discussion of the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic communions,
and explores the possibility of Reformed agreement with each com-

munion on this doctrine.
Part Five of this work is called ‘Christology in Pilgrimage’. Here
Fackre returns to the narrative focus of this work by addressing the
story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Again, Fackre engages in an
extended exposition of and dialogue with another theologian, Edward
Schillebeeckx. This interaction with Schillebeeckx focuses on what to
make of the work currently being done on the historical Jesus. This is an
important question in the contemporary church, as it has been latched
onto by popular media and thus information, for better or worse, is
accessible to most parishioners. In light of that, it would have been more
helpful had Fackre offered a somewhat less technical investigation of
this topic, addressing some of the popular media rather than the
lengthy work of a theologian who is likely not accessible to the typical
parishioner. Fackre does offer an evaluation of Mel Gibson’s film The
Passion of the Christ, which, while not necessarily timely anymore, is
exactly the kind of discussion which would be very helpful to the local
pastor. This volume concludes with a narrative, chapter-by-chapter
telling of the Christian story.
This volume, and the series overall, is designed for pastors, teachers,
and church professionals, to provide a systematic theology useful for
ministry in the church. For the most part it achieves this goal. Fackre
could make some of this work a little clearer by defining terms in
several places. At some points, he uses unfamiliar vocabulary or Latin
phrases, or uses vocabulary in peculiar ways which the reader has not
been alerted to. The footnotes throughout the book are very helpful,
and they direct the reader toward a number of other resources which
are both useful and interesting. Overall, this fourth volume is a nice
addition to Fackre’s series. We anxiously await the fifth.
Erin Keterson Bowers

Princeton Theological Seminary
夹夹夹
Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, Margaret A.

Farley, Continuum, 2006 (ISBN 0-8264-1001-4), xiii + 322 pp., hb $29.95
The book aims to be more practical than theoretical, although those

wanting theory will not be disappointed. The book eschews being a
comprehensive sexual ethic, and having briefly outlined what such an
ethic may entail, it restricts itself to Western values and particularly that
of Christianity. The book is written in a scholarly fashion and is certainly
not a popularized book. There is a ‘tip of the iceberg’ chapter on

historical perspectives, more ancient than modern, that presents the
sexual as a constant trend in thinking, which is unsurprising. Today’s
questions are not new, but are not just old either.
Some of the methodological discussion leaves one frustrated. This is
neatly put that it took several centuries to get matters wrong, but how
long will it take to get sexual ethics right (p. 12)? One accepts that there
are all sorts of problems in undertaking the endeavor, but then life is all
too short and if there is a purpose in the topic, then one must be able to
make something out of the subject matter. This is even allowing for
sexual ethical conversation still being in its early stage (p. 62), and that
‘older stereotypes as well as new biases make it an uphill climb who
wish to take cultural and ethical traditions other than their own into
account’ (p. 63).
The author never intended to engage with the topic, either in lectur-
ing or writing, but was compelled through the constant and urgent
questioning of students not to mention in wider society, and she
believes the contents are relevant to both albeit more so to Christians.
Through such encounters, she developed the notions of justice in both
love and sex. Latterly, she has been in touch with African women and
their own forced encounters with AIDS/HIV. The amount of infection
in some African states is so high that celibacy would be the option of at
least expediency.
The chapter which explores insights from other religions and cul-
tures, including anthropological insights, has the right amount of inevi-
tably superficial detail to still be valuable. This examines colonialist
research and its postcolonial critics, The South Sea islands and Mali-
nowski, African cultures, the Kamasutra, and Islam. In the case of the
Kamasutra, reliance is placed on the latest translation and the added
realism that this permits. The narrative is peppered by the realization
that the adherents of each of these traditions is not often characterized
by profound reflection, and it is only when such traditions are being
challenged that their adherents may conjure up some rationale as to
why they behave as they do. Indeed, some religions are bounded in
paradox, such as in Hinduism, which combines intense eroticism with
a tradition of asceticism. There is also the issue that there is ‘no stable,
essential reality that is the East’ (p. 65). The end point of this exploration
is that there is insufficient knowledge to propose policy for cross-
cultural interaction. All we have is insight into the flaws inherent in
each tradition, including our own. This does not appear the most posi-
tive or auspicious basis on which to proceed.
Is it not strange that the word pedophile crops up only once (p. 218)
in a book on sexual justice? This is in the middle of various practices that
are regarded as harmful, but the author states that they are controver-
sial but not to be rejected out of hand, without assessment of their
injustice or justice. Many would feel that she treats the issue too lightly
both in terms of the relatively noncommittal statements she makes as
well as the limited almost en passant coverage of the topic. It may be
that emotion should be kept at bay, but even on this basis it is surprising
that she considers that there is any justice inherent in this practice, and
victims would need a lot of convincing. If the book is truly practical,
then it needs to allow the voice of victims to be heard, rather than
retreating into philosophical discussion. Several religions and groups
within religions have been guiltier of pedophilia than others, and one
would have thought that an exploration of this was part of the essence
of the text.
The author has warned against bias that enters into consideration of
this topic. One assumes that she is Roman Catholic, given her past
presidency of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and she
should have stated her own biases in writing the text. Indeed, the
Catholic view does creep in at the expense of other views on a few
occasions, and it seems that the author is tied to it rather than adopt-
ing a totally independent view. Contraception is barely mentioned
and this in the context of the Catholic Church’s historical teaching on
the subject, that many have argued has a large burden of responsibil-
ity for fueling the population explosion. If one is not careful, this
turns into a Catholic Christian Sexual Ethic, and so the author has not
even fulfilled her objective of supplying an ethic for the whole of
Christendom.
Her overall conclusion is that sexuality is to be creative and not
destructive and so it is necessary to evaluate the justice elements of
every manifestation of it. Those who have been subjected to the legal
system will probably agree with her that justice without love (which
is not famously present in the legal process) is an arid notion.
Although a cookbook solution will not be to the author’s liking,
insights from this book are unlikely to reach the average person in the
pew. If one favors jobbing theology, then one may consider that there
ought to be such communication. This is where the theology in action
takes place.
One example of this is that when a marriage has irretrievably broken
down. Is it realistic to suggest the divorced couple should still have a
vestige of love – and this is the same as the love owed between any two
human beings? First of all, this can often be a love of indifference, so no
love at all. Agrarian societies may have suggested some such love, but
what form is such love in an urbanized not to mention globalized
society? In the context if divorce, some couples manage some kind of
generalized love, and some even remain good friends. Others do not
manage any such thing, and it is best that they remain strangers. Future
partners are often not at all happy about attempts to retain contact with
an ex, and their feelings need to be considered. This is where the
author’s early list of disciplines that need to be invoked suggests that

she may have chosen an insufficiently narrow range, and that a socio-
logical perspective is one that should have been more in evidence.
Gerald Vinten
British Accreditation Council
夹夹夹
In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South

India, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Indiana University Press, 2006
(ISBN 0-253-34721-1), xix + 294 pp., hb $65.00
As I read this book I thought, ‘I wish someone would do a study like

this of my community’ for Joyce Flueckiger’s study of a Muslim woman
healer in a poor district of Hyderabad, India, who heals men and
women, Muslim and Hindu alike is loving, sensitive, remarkably obser-
vant, patient, and consistently attentive to gender issues at the intersec-
tion of two patriarchal cultures.
Flueckiger is a specialist in performance studies and, so, she
diligently tells the reader what she saw and heard, systematically avoid-
ing the theological and philosophical categories to which those trained
in texts are accustomed. As a result, the reader had a wonderful picture
of Amma, of those who come to her for healing, of the prescriptions she
gives, as well as of Abba (her husband), of celebrations that are his
domain, and of the very subtle negotiation by which Amma asserts her
presence amidst the authority of Abba while he garners his followers
among her patients.
In Chapter 1, Flueckiger describes Amma’s healing room, her
patients, and her prescriptions. One can almost see the bright green
flagpole, the horse carrying an open human hand, the colorful posters,
the plethora of photographs, and the green and orange Sufi flags –
images common to vernacular Islam in India. One can almost visualize
the people, hear the noise, and watch them look at Amma as she tells
stories and writes prescriptions.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the healing system. This is not a Western,
sterile clinic; it is a semi-public space in which patients share their
troubles, listening and talking. It is a space where infertility, stomach
cramps, unfaithful husbands, misbehaving children, failing businesses,
problems with neighbors, and lost goods are diagnosed. The causes of
these illnesses include the evil eye, sometimes caused purposely and
sometimes inadvertently; spells cast by the shaitan (evil spirits) or other
human beings; and possession, mental illness, and restlessness. The
diagnostic technique consists, first, of listening carefully but also of
assign numerical values to the letters of the name of the ill person and,
then, doing a very complicated numerological analysis (abjad), together
with complex dream interpretation. The cures consist of amulets –
words written in Arabic – on leaves to be burned and whose smoke is
inhaled, or on leaves which are washed with water and the water is
drunk, or on bread which is eaten; of fruits or vegetables to be cut and
squeezed or eaten; of animals to be whirled about the ill person; of
verses to be recited; and, of course, of herbs. Often patients are given
many amulets and, as a result, the prescriptions are very, very detailed,
almost impossible for the reader – and the patient and his or her family!
– to follow. Sometimes, laying on of hands and prayer is used; some-
times, exorcism is needed. Always, there is the telling of the narrative
and the comparing it with other similar stories. Always, the patients
come to get Amma’s barkat, to be in the presence of her blessing.
Amma says that there are only two castes: male and female. Women
bring their own cultural burdens which are dealt with in Chapter 4:
menstruation, childbirth, household duties, segregation, and veiling.
Flueckiger also deals with Amma’s status as healer, as a woman healer,
and as a piranima (spiritual teacher) whose status is, however, very
much dependent upon the status of her husband as a pir. This status,
which Flueckiger finds unique, must be continually renewed by narra-
tive and spiritual discipline.
How do both Muslims and Hindus come to a Muslim healer? In
Chapter 5, Flueckiger proposes that, while gender boundaries are
impermeable, religious boundaries are the opposite. Thus, Amma’s
clientele accept that there is a common cosmological and ritual uni-
verse; that Muslim amulets work for everyone; and that a Hindu can
even be a disciple of Abba, though full discipleship would require a
gradual conversion to Islam (Chapter 6). The stories and dialogues
confirm this very Indian view of Islam.
Chapter 6 is another wonderfully thick description of the sama`, the
public ceremony in which Abba is the center, as well as an accounting
of the nature of discipleship to him.
During the course of Flueckiger’s work, first Abba and then Amma
died, severing the intense personal relationship they had with her.
Flueckiger handles this marvelously throughout the book, sharing with
the reader her own evolving relationship with Abba and Amma and the
sense of loss she felt on their passing. She mixes past and present tense
in the narrative with great skill.
I conclude as I began: ‘I wish someone would do a study like this of
my community’ – of the clothing and the décor, of the sounds and the
smells, and of the talking and the listening.
David R. Blumenthal
Emory University
夹夹夹
Barth for Armchair Theologians, John R. Franke, Westminster John

Knox, 2006 (ISBN 0-664-22734-1), xi + 183 pp., pb £7.85
It is notoriously difficult to summarize the contribution of any truly

great theologian. This is especially true of Karl Barth on account of the
quantity and complexity of his work. And yet John Franke has
managed to produce a short overview of Barth’s life and thought that is
both accurate and accessible. The book’s accessibility is aided by its
remarkable brevity and amusing illustrations.
Franke wisely places Barth’s theology within its historical context. He
provides just enough biographical data to coherently narrate Barth’s
development without getting lost in minutia. In the first chapter,
Franke describes the liberal theological tradition into which Barth was
immersed as a student. Franke outlines the responses of Schleiermacher
and Ritschl to the theological challenge of the Enlightenment and
explains how Barth was initiated into a particular form of this tradition
through his teacher, Wilhem Herrmann. Conspicuously absent from
Franke’s narrative are Troeltsch and Harnack, both of whom are crucial
for understanding Barth’s break with liberalism. This chapter also runs
the risk of perpetuating unfair prejudices against protestant theology in
the nineteenth century. But as it stands, this chapter is an adequate
introduction to Barth’s liberal heritage from the vantage point of Barth’s
own understanding of it.
In the two following chapters, Franke tells the story of Barth’s break
with liberalism and the beginnings of his new theology. Franke shows
how religious socialism and the Great War occasioned Barth’s discov-
ery of the strange new world of the Bible. He then discusses the sig-
nificance of Barth’s Romans commentary, especially regarding its
critique of religion and dialectical approach to theological language.
The next two chapters trace Barth’s development from his explosion
on the theological scene to his expulsion from Germany by the Nazis.
Franke treats Barth’s engagement with the Reformed tradition, his pro-
grammatic essays on dialectical theology, and his first cycle of dogmat-
ics lectures at Göttingen in a chapter bearing the title, ‘The Impossibility
Possibility’. This title is unfortunate because Franke uses this phrase to
describe Barth’s dialectical theology, whereas Barth uses the same
phrase to describe sin! Franke then tells of Barth’s interaction with
Roman Catholics at Münster and his courageous conflict with the Nazis
at Bonn.
Franke dedicates the remainder of the book to introducing Barth’s
Church Dogmatics and assessing Barth’s legacy. These last two chapters
contain Franke’s most significant contribution. In an appropriately
lengthy chapter, Franke offers what he aptly calls a ‘basic orientation

tour’ of the Church Dogmatics. After describing its method, shape, and
motifs, Franke deftly summarizes this 8000-page work in a mere thirty-
three pages. He then concludes his book with an equally impressive
tour of the contemporary reception of Barth’s theology. Franke identi-
fies two tendencies in Barth interpretation (the neo-orthodox and the
postmodern) and critically incorporates both within Barth’s own dia-
lectic of veiling and unveiling.
Franke’s book performs a nearly impossible task: introduce the the-
ology of Karl Barth without overwhelming its readers by complexity or
underwhelming its readers by simplicity. It is therefore an ideal text-
book for introductory courses in theology.
John L. Drury
Princeton Theological Seminary
夹夹夹
Beyond Idealism: A Way Ahead for Ecumenical Social Ethics, Robin

Gurney, Heidi Hadsell, and Lewis Mudge (eds.), Eerdman, 2006 (ISBN
0-8028-3187-7), xxv + 223 pp., pb $25.00
The book is concerned with the ethical proclamations of the World

Council of Churches (WCC). It came out of an interdisciplinary discus-
sion group which started in 1999 considering the accelerated globaliza-
tion process. It was held under the aegis of the WCC Ecumenical
Institute in Bossey, Switzerland. There are eight contributors and there
were an additional seven participants.
My own connection was initiated by the local Church of England
minister, who became Bishop John Bickersteth of Bath and Wells. He
had close associations with WCC international meetings, notably
Uppsala, and used to report back on his enthusiasms from the pulpit.
Chronologically, I then held a WCC scholarship at Union Theological
Seminary in Virginia. Then I overlapped with Pauline Webb, a Vice
President, who was enjoying as I was the hospitality of the Rev Kevin
Green in Melbourne, Australia. Their terrifying blue healer dog was
kept under wraps until she left and unfortunately then I had to enjoy it
in all its ferocity. Finally, my friend Rev Liz Welch was another Vice
President. So the book was of more than passing interest, since I have
lived through its various eons.
The WCC has been contested territory and has become more so as
it tries to encompass liberal and more traditional churches, such as
the Orthodox, much of it now out of its chains during the Iron
Curtain era, as well as the increasingly preponderant and vocal

African churches.
This is one of those books where the Introduction in Roman numerals
is an integral part of the book. Indeed, this section would have more
sensibly been included in the main numbering system since it contains
an impressive density of argument. The title indicates that we are at a
watershed period historically when idealistic assumptions once held
dearly have failed us, and we need to adjure dependence on the high
sounding moral generalizations of the past. They sounded fine at the
time, but now they are considered arrogant and platitudinous. If gen-
eralizations are to be decried, there is the contravening tendency of
reduction to convenient contextualizations of professional rule books of
‘miniature idealities’. I have encountered these. They are high sounding
until anyone tries to use them, and then they are full of contradiction
and paradox – effectively miniature generalizations. Market forces rep-
resenting the worldwide spread of the gospel is one generalization
that should be adequately discredited by now in the post Regan post
Thatcher universe. There is an incisive paragraph about money (p. xv)
displaying it as the modern substitute for Hegel’s geist or spirit. It is an
‘ideality’ that manages to shape our perception of reality to the extent of
taking priority over all else.
Holy cynicism is now recommended with ‘ideals polluted beyond
theological usefulness’ (p. xvi) and ecumenical language often exploit-
ing the words. The social gospel could not withstand the predations of
the crisis theologians. Idealistic shorthand, institutional solipsism, for-
mulaic, incoherence are among the ‘bons mots’ used, although it is
recognized that there may be generalizations among the route, which is
seen as embarking on the Biblical ‘way’ (‘odos’). Jeremiah and other
prophetic voices, including Muhammad’s, are extolled as those who
could see beyond the generalizations of the day. Of course, there is
always the danger of thinking that the present time is hugely less certain
and more fragmented than previous times. On the other hand, the
WCC was born of the interwar period, and as it nears sixty years old in
a year’s time, some of it can sound distinctly dated. Perhaps it does not
bode well that the Life and Work movement, that was given impetus in
the Stockholm meeting of 1925, continued under the Church and
Society rubric of the WCC.
The book contains a thorough examination of the distinct elements of
globalization, modernization, and ecumenism, and it is characteristic
that the book is well informed in its argument. Part One introduces
contemporary challenges to ecumenism, very much in the context of
globalization, which is one of those weasel words that is often the
occasion to spout vacuous expressions. The book commendably avoids
this and draws on a range of sources. Part Two gets stuck into ‘global-
ization and its discontents’ taking in turn the economic, political, and
civic aspects. Part Three takes the Abrahamic religions on the path of
hope that is necessary in the light of the discussion so far.
Simplistic and monochrome exegesis will no longer work. The ecu-
menical movement has to accept many voices, including the traditional
and the liberal. Experimental and tentative will be the hallmarks of one
aspect of the ‘ethics’, shadowing the wider world of which it is part.
New frames of reference are suggested in the light of those who his-
torically also brought about reframing. Old ideas of church mergers,
and was it acquisitions sometimes?, are not sustainable any longer.
Global notions such as ‘the responsible society’ are equally not so
sustainable. There is vision within the book. For example, it is recog-
nized that other international forums, such as the UN, can sing to the
tune of one or two global powers and so perpetuate inequality. The
WCC at one time was less attuned to all its constituents at one time, but
has been on a learning curve latterly. It does, however, avow making
proposals for specific action, citing the overriding dictate of the context.
For those wishing for cook book solutions, this will be intensely disap-
pointing, but then this is not a book for such people, other than to shock
them and perhaps modify their world view. It is interesting that the
book ends on an extended quotation from Deuteronomy which may be
taken as a warning if the WCC should head in the wrong direction and
contribute to the apocalypse which is outlined. The one insight which is
missing is the role this discussion group performed within the sacred
corridors of the WCC, which may give an indication as to whether the
WCC is likely to perform adequately, or whether the book is no more
than a pious hope. Otherwise another discussion group will be writing
a similar analysis in fifty years’ time, and the apocalypse will be even
close if it has not happened, with the WCC having been an unwitting
contributor. Back to Deuteronomy!
Gerald Vinten
夹夹夹
The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the

Construction of the ‘Arian Controversy’, D.M. Gwynn, Oxford
Theological Monographs, Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2007
(ISBN 0-19-920555-8), ix + 280 pp., hb £55.00/$99.00
Gwynn’s The Eusebians is a reworked doctoral thesis, which was origi-

nally written, defended, and then edited under the watchful eye of the
‘heavy-weight’ scholars of ‘Arian’ controversy (M. Edwards, C. Stead,
R. Williams, M. Wiles, and S. Hall). His book is a ‘systematic literary,

historical, and theological re-evaluation of the polemical writings of
Athanasius . . . and “Arian Controversy” ’ (p. vii; for a comprehensive
thesis statement see p. 5). Gwynn’s project is daring but fortunately not
disappointing. The author does a wonderful job in showing how the
assumptions coming from Athanasius’ polemic still influence our per-
ception of the fourth century events. True, his search for and promise of
a revised understanding perhaps raises expectations too high. Namely,
the aspiration to understand ‘fully’ the emerging Trinitarian orthodoxy
after adopting his reevaluations – which function as an inclusio to the
whole book (p. viii, p. 249) – may go partially unfulfilled.
Part One, Chapter 1, assesses critically Athanasius’ fourteen polemi-
cal writings in order to establish their chronology. Much is controversial
about these treatises, but Gwynn defends his well-informed findings
convincingly and clearly. The author also discusses the purpose of
Athanasius’ polemical writings and their intended audience(s). Part
Two, Chapters 2–4, investigates the origin and the elaboration of the
group-designation ‘Eusebians’ at the time of the Council of Tyre (AD
335). Part Three, Chapter 5, attempts to determine who the alleged
‘members’ of the ‘Eusebian party’ actually were. Chapter 6 takes a look
at what these people did (an analysis of the ‘anti-Nicene purge’ after AD
325, including the many exiles of Athanasius). Chapter 7, in turn, takes
a look at what these people believed. Gwynn contends that although
some of the Trinitarian doctrines of ‘Eusebians’ had at least a ‘family-
resemblance’ with the Trinitarian doctrines of Arius, their theologies
were not identical (a convenient summary-list of differences is found
on p. 226). Gwynn’s Conclusion beautifully reinforces his claim made in
the Preface, namely that ‘ “Eusebians” . . . were in fact neither a “party”
nor “Arian” ’ (p. vii).
Gwynn’s argument for diversity is in sync with the contemporary
tendency to discover diversity in various parties and movements by
deconstructing the metanarratives (e.g. Athanasius’ polemical accounts
of the events) which have imposed such unity in the first place. Even if
there was something like a group of likeminded anti-Athanasian eccle-
siastics, this group was definitely not a monolithic ‘party’. Gwynn also
points out how the assumption of the existence of ‘party politics’ in the
fourth century is convenient mostly for those authors who depict the
‘Arian’ controversy merely in terms of a power struggle. (On the other
hand, already an early critic of Christianity, Celsus, witnessed to the fact
that Christians were ‘divided . . . because each wants to have his own
party [stasis]’ [Origen, C. Cels. 3.10].)
The author further demonstrates that even if one considers Athana-
sius’ reconstruction/invention of ‘Arianism’ (= ‘Eusebian’ theology)
suspect, he or she probably continues to be a victim of Athanasius’
polemic. Curiously, the scholars most critical of Athanasius, too, have
adopted Athanasius’ theological categories (e.g. the distinction between

the Creator and the creation [p. 231]) and, for sure, the majority of less
critical scholars share the Athanasian ‘polarized vision of the fourth
century Church [which is] divided into two distinct factions’: the ortho-
dox (Athanasius) and the heretical (Arius) (p. 6). Since Athanasius’
writings are overwhelmingly the most important source of information
for ‘Arian’ controversy, almost everyone seems to be on the diet of
‘Athanasian Arianism’ (pp. 169, 178). Of course, Athanasius invented
neither the categories of Creator/creation (e.g. Athenagoras, Leg. 10)
nor orthodoxy/heresy, but he deliberately depicted the fourth century
theological and ecclesiastical controversies in these exclusive catego-
ries. The contemporary assessment of patristic Trinitarian theology is
further complicated by the fact that, to the extent one is orthodox and
confesses the Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed, he or she continues to
share, at least partially, Athanasius’ point of view.
To recapitulate, Gwynn argues that the designation hoi peri Eusebion is
first found in the writings of the opponents of the so-called ‘Eusebians’
in 320s–330s: in Alexander of Alexandria’s Encyclical Letter (arguably
coauthored by Athanasius) and in Athanasius’ own Festal Letters. This,
in turn, verifies that the designation ‘Eusebians’ is a polemical construct
which attempts to group Athanasius’ opponents into one hostile and
heretical ‘party’. In order to gain the support of all the orthodox, Atha-
nasius presented ‘Eusebians’, which consisted of both Melitians and the
anti-Athanasian bishops under the leadership of Eusebius of Nicome-
dia, as nothing but ‘Arians’. Athanasius attempted to convince the
whole world that not only the deeds of ‘Eusebians’ were misguided, but
also their theology. ‘Eusebians’ were not only evil but heretical.
The Eusebians is a distinguished study and worthy of being published
in a great series. However, why Oxford Theological Monographs (apart
from the fact that the supervisor of Gwynn’s doctoral thesis is one of the
editors of the series, professor Mark Edwards)? Gwynn’s book is pri-
marily about ecclesiastical history. Theology is engaged only from page
178 onwards. And even then, theology seems to be in the service of a
larger historical goal of deconstructing the ideological unity of the
‘Eusebian party’ and demonstrating that ‘Eusebians’ were not ‘Arians’.
In addition, footnotes tend to proliferate when the historical circum-
stances of individual fourth century theologians are discussed (e.g.
Eusebius of Nicomedia, pp. 116–120; Asterius, pp. 120–122; Eustathius
of Antioch, pp. 141–143, and Lucian of Antioch, pp. 202–205). I guess
this, too, indicates where the real strength and scholarship of this
monograph lies.
Gwynn’s verdict is that Athanasius was wrong and deceiving about
‘Eusebians’. But since Gwynn’s work is indeed published in a series of
theological monographs, it is perhaps not entirely unjustified to ask
about the theological implications of establishing this historical fact.
Does it follow that Athanasius was wrong about theology? Was his
Trinitarian doctrine wrong and deceiving because the postulation of the
‘Eusebian’/‘Arian’ ‘party’ was wrong and deceiving? Or were there
some legitimate theological reasons why Athanasius’ pro-Nicene the-
ology ultimately prevailed as orthodoxy? It could well be that Athana-
sius’ theological arguments were legitimate indeed, despite the fact that
his handling of his opponents and their theology was not.
Finally, those authors who write about the fourth century theological
controversies seem to have a problem: soon they will run out of words/
names which are not put in quotation marks – ‘Arianism’, ‘Eusebians’,
‘modalists’, ‘eastern/western’, ‘pro-Nicene/anti-Nicene’, ‘party’,
‘movement’, ‘heresy’, ‘orthodoxy’, etc. Is it not getting to be a bit
clumsy? As Gwynn acknowledges, it should be possible to speak about
persons, groups, and even movements without going crazy from the
lack of satisfactory names. At the same time, he urges his readers to
avoid at least the polarization that the polemical writings of Athanasius
suggest while talking/writing about the fourth century Trinitarian
controversy (p. 228).
The Eusebians is recommended primarily to scholars who are already
familiar with the literature about Athanasius and the ‘Arian’ contro-
versy; in short, to those who have something to reevaluate. The mono-
graph is definitely worth reading!
Tarmo Toom
The John Leland Center for Theological Studies
夹夹夹
The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages,
Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (eds.), Princeton
University Press, 2006 (hb 0-691-12475-2, pb 0-691-12476-0), xvi + 447
pp., pb $49.95/£32.50, hb $95/£62
This large and sumptuous volume contains essays from a conference

held at Princeton in 2001. The essays are copiously illustrated and each
comes with many pages of notes: there is enough here to keep one going
(and interested) for a long time. The volume as a whole offers rich and
suggestive explorations of the visual economy of theological images in
the Middle Ages. I found its repeated resonance with apophatic theology
its most interesting, yet ultimately tantalizing, feature. Its bulk means
that my foraging is necessarily selective and telegrammatic.
The volume opens with an introductory piece by Jeffrey Hamburger
arguing for the continued relevance of theology for the history of art,
despite it being a term that has – so he says – no current critical

currency. The comment sticks in my theological throat, but is well taken,
I hope. He emphasizes, as does the whole book, that theological images
should not be seen merely as illustrations of doctrine, but as active
social agents in their own right. He goes on, in the first substantial essay,
‘The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Problems, Positions,
Possibilities’, to explore different modern construals of the relation
between art and theology in the middle ages, from Hans Belting who
thought theologians were passive vis à vis images, merely roused to
criticize them, to the view of David Freedberg that theologians used
images as propaganda. Hamburger convincingly argues that top-down
and bottom-up approaches need to be seen as complementary and not
exclusive. He explores how ‘meaning is orchestrated’ in the test case of
cathedrals.
Karl F. Morrison goes on in, ‘Anthropology and the Use of Reli-
gious Images in the Opus Caroli Regis (Libri Carolini), to explore the
arguments of Charlemagne, or rather Theodulf of Orleans his ghost
writer, against the use of images written in response to the decrees
promoting their use at Nicaea II’ (p. 787), and in particular the inter-
twinings of knowledge of self and God implicated in those views
which allowed for mediation apart from that of Christ. Ironically, or
perhaps poignantly, Theodulf was arguing against a faulty translation
of the decrees of the council. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak explores
the theories of image in prescholastic France in the next piece, tracing
the complex interactions of identity and difference in images and
their uses, and notes connections with theological deployments of
such theory in the theology of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. In
particular, she looks at ‘imaging’ in the mirror motif, and also in the
impress motif, investigating how their ‘mimetic economies’ compare
and contrast in various contexts, linking the theological uses of these
themes with the practical action of authoritatively sealing documents
with an imaged seal.
Andreas Speer returns to the theme of the cathedral in, ‘Is There a
Theology of the Gothic Cathedral? A Re-reading of Abbot Suger’s Writ-
ings on the Abbey Church of St Denis’. He argues that Erwin Panofsky’s
reading of Suger’s texts is misleading and imputes far too strong a
connection between Suger and the theology of the Pseudo Denys. There
is no evidence, he goes on to argue, that Suger even read Denys (though
this does not necessarily prove the point). Much more important for
Suger, and Speer provides ample evidence for this, is the liturgical
context and roles of the church, for to quote Suger, it is in the liturgy
that ‘the material conjoins with the immaterial, the corporeal with the
spiritual, the human with the Divine’ (p. 69). He concludes by noting
that we and, say, the medieval monk, approach what we now call
‘medieval art’ in very different ways. It is one of the virtues of this book
that it highlights those very different optics, though surely not

exhaustively.
The next essay by Celia Chazelle, ‘Christ and the Vision of God: The
Biblical Diagrams of the Codex Amiatinus’, considers the Codex
Amiatinus produced at Wearmouth-Jarrow under the direction of Bede,
with the Codex Grandior which we know by its description by
Cassiodorus in his Institutiones. Chazelle highlights the differences
between the images in the two codices and argues that the intention
between the selective borrowing between the two which moves the
emphasis from the Trinity to Christ and his unity is doctrinally moti-
vated and to do with theological controversies of the day. Christian
Heck explores the conjunction of the material and immaterial in theo-
logical images in a careful study of images in texts by Rabanus Maurus,
Bernard of Clairvuax and Bonaventure. In each he carefully notes the
fascinating apophatic strategies in play which emphasize that theologi-
cal images use imagery to portray that which is beyond image, both the
divine and the human soul.
Christopher Hughes explores the use of typology in Moralized
Bibles, arguing that we need to question our simplistic understandings
of typology, and realize that for our medieval forebears it constituted a
forma intellegendi, a way of knowing, an epistemology. He fills out the
argument in detail by looking at the example of Moralized Bibles and
their use of various rhetorical strategies such as complexio, irony, and
hyperbole which were part of the visual and textual culture which the
creators and readers of these books shared. He suggests that it was
the artist’s job to ‘accommodate – and then control – the vagaries of
the scanning eye’ (p. 148). Jean-Claude Schmitt turns to Mary next in,
‘L’Exception corporelle: à propos de l’Assomption de Marie’ and looks
at the creative role of images in relation to theology by tracing the
different images and theologies of the Assumption of Mary, from the
Dormition or koimesis, to the full Assumption and Coronation and their
relation in a complicated chronology and links the whole to varying
estimations of bodiliness. Mary is an interesting test case for the para-
doxical conjunction of human and divine in image, and Schmitt nicely
notes how artists, as theologians, sometimes erred (and worried about)
landing on one side rather than the other.
Bernard McGinn writes next on ‘Theologians as Trinitarian Iconog-
raphers’, looking at the trinitarian images of Hildegard of Bingen and
Joachim of Fiore, emphasizing that the images are not illustrations of
theology but theological argument itself. In Joachim’s case, the line
between image and text is transgressed as his figurae are quite textual.
McGinn also looks at Henry Suso’s use of images, and its dependence
on Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology. He emphasizes that these
images conceal even as they reveal. Caroline Walker Bynum next
explores seeing and not-seeing in a group of fifteenth century images
which depict the Mass of St Gregory. Again she emphasizes that our
understanding of visual piety and the use of images is much more
complex than a mere illustration of doctrine. She argues that these
particular images are not about reinforcing belief in transubstantiation
as has often been argued. She sees them as representations of the
‘presence beyond’ of the Eucharist, and the ‘seeing beyond’ which it
requires, and again traces the strategies by which the artist lets us notice
this. The images are about the presence and absence of Christ, and
indeed as she puts it, ‘unseeability guarantees presence’ (p. 215),
though it should be emphasized why this is so: because of the nature of
that which is present – in other words you need a strong doctrine of
God to undergird such a sense of apophatic presence. She argues that
these images were created in a theological context of a concern to
maintain God’s immutability as distinct from creaturely mutatio, and
yet keep some kind of real union between the two. These images are in
fact then complex figurations of understandings of mediation.
In the next essay, ‘Porous Subject Matter and Christ’s Haunted
Infancy’, Alfred Acres looks at the inclusion of traces of evil, demons,
and death in portrayals of Christ’s birth and infancy. The Cross of
Calvary overshadows Bethlehem in subtle ways. Barbara Newman con-
siders a particular instance of ‘crossover’ (where courtly images are
borrowed for devotional purposes and vice versa) in cases where Christ
is portrayed as Cupid and Cupid as Christ. In these transformations, we
see that when portrayed as Christ, the Son of Amor, Cupid is not only
(as he usually is) the agent or bringer of eros, but also the subject and
object of it too. She considers this theme in texts and images. Mary
Carruthers considers the images which preachers asked their audiences
to create in their minds as organizational aids, and looks in particular at
the rhetorical strategies in which these were utilized. She goes on to
look at images of six-winged seraphs used to organize summaries of
textual material on the feathers of the wings as aides mémoire.
Anne-Marie Bouché considers in gripping detail the presence of irra-
tional features in the Florette Bible and in the Last Judgement Tympa-
num at Sainte Foy, Conques. This essay is mercifully free of the jargon
that occasionally clutters some of the other essays. With both sets of
images, she carefully explicates how the anomalies would have been
seen in context, and emphasizes in particular with the sculpture in
Conques the importance of the liturgy-rich world its viewers would
have been familiar with. I am not convinced by her argument, however,
concerning the ‘dangling cum’ (p. 321). Katherine H. Tachau provides a
most useful unfolding of the various theories of perception in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries next, and I found particularly interest-
ing the various ideas which placed perception on a spectrum between
action and passion, actuality and potentiality, particularly the possibili-
ties of seeing as ‘extramission’ when the eye sent out something ‘to see’,
or ‘intramission’ where the eye was the passive recipient of something

in seeing. She looks principally at texts of Grosseteste and Bacon.
Thomas Lentes looks at what he calls ‘gazing’ in the Middle Ages:
how does ‘visual piety’ actually work? He teases out well the complex
relation of images and their viewers, and notes the importance of
linking that economy to contemporary anthropologies. He emphasizes
that gazing walks a ‘meandering’ path on the spectra of objective/
subjective, private/public (p. 367). He emphasizes, significantly, the
important context of sacramental theology. Jeffrey Hamburger writes in
the penultimate essay along similar nonexclusive lines that art should
not be opposed to image, nor production to reception: images structure
their own reception. His essay comprises the best exploration in the
book of the complex relation between visible and invisible in theologi-
cal images, veiling and unveiling, the ‘oxymoronic pictorial rhetoric’ (p.
379) of what one might term re/velatio. He also includes an important
discussion of how supersessionary views of Judaism are pictorially
enacted via portrayals of Jesus and the Tabernacle. He usefully reminds
us that we need to be alive to the signs of ‘real absence’ (p. 403). Finally,
Herbert L. Kessler in an investigation of the dynamics of contemplation
reminds us that much modern discussion of medieval art relies on
photographs or digital images and thus brackets out the crucial inter-
action between material and mental images which the medievals were
much more aware of than us. The goal, one might say, was per visibilia ad
invisibilia, through visible things to the invisible. We need to consider
the processes of these interactions and not just their products. He notes
usefully the importance of construals of Christ’s hypostatic union of
human and divine natures for the potrayal of the relationship between
human and divine, though he suggests that Christ is an ‘amalgam’
of human and divine (p. 421): precisely, but interestingly, wrong.
This is a very rich volume. On the whole, I formed the impression
that theology itself was under-represented and often presented in a
rather ‘thin’, ancillary, way. It is a shame that an artistically literate
systematic theologian was not asked to contribute. I think the volume
would have benefited from a more substantial engagement with apo-
phatic theology, and, as we have just seen, with the theology of the
Incarnation. It would have been interesting to ask in a more sophisti-
cated way whether the many different construals of the paradox of the
differentiated unity of the God-man find their counterpart in images.
Theologies of the icon, not only of Theodore the Studite, might have
been interesting resource in this regard.
There are very few misprints that I noticed (pp. 15, 23, 33), though
Gilbert of Hoyland has a schizophrenic existence in text (p. 51) and
index. Although the book is beautifully produced, it is of course a
shame that the 198 images contained in it are reproduced in mono-
chrome, thereby regrettably closing one avenue of their visual economy
to the reader. Color would be expensive of course, but I cannot help

noticing that Yale have produced Eamon Duffy’s latest (and admittedly
shorter) book Marking the Hours, with 125 color illustrations for less
than half the price of this book. That said, compared with most theo-
logical monographs, this book is a bargain, and well worth reading.
Philip McCosker
Peterhouse, Cambridge
夹夹夹
Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, S. Mark Heim, William

B. Eerdmans, 2006 (ISBN 0-8028-3215-3), xiv + 346 pp., pb £15.99
Mark Heim has provided a masterly and elegantly written addition to

the burgeoning number of recent studies in Western atonement theory.
Unlike many of them (e.g. Schwager, Williams, Weaver, Hamerton-
Kelly), this is not a wholly ‘Girardian’ contribution, although it certainly
reflects the widespread and growing discontent with theories which, it
is argued, portray God as a cruel demander of sacrifice, Jesus as the
bearer of God’s punishment, and the church as implicated in the desire
to maintain structures of communal violence. The plan of Heim’s book
follows the same threefold pattern.
Part One offers a constructive critique of substitutionary atonement
theories, examining scripture and the history of its interpretation, the
mythical background of ancient sacrificial practice and its cultural out-
working in ritual violence. Heim’s recurring theme is the essential
paradox of the cross, construed in a variety of ways: ‘the violence that
saves the world but ought not to happen’, ‘the sacrifice to end sacrifice’,
‘a profoundly destructive ideology that becomes for many the vehicle
of life-changing grace and health’ (p. 33). Throughout this discussion,
Heim draws on the innovative work of René Girard, and provides a
brief but brilliant summary of his mimetic scapegoat theory (pp. 40–63).
Heim’s chief purpose, however, is not to critique Girard’s totalizing
anthropological scheme, but to weave insights from it into a broader
approach to the central aspect of Christian understanding – the
meaning of the crucifixion. A range of biblical passages is discussed,
and splendidly illuminated from this perspective, not least the book of
Job, brilliantly represented as ‘an interview with a scapegoat’. Heim
demonstrates how the Girardian theme of sacred violence is endlessly
and consistently repeated throughout the Bible, so that the voices of the
innocent, silenced by the myth of sacred violence, come to be heard in
it more and more strongly. What is violence doing in the Bible, he asks?
It is telling the truth without averting its eyes from those who are
victims of the system.
Part Two begins to read those victims’ voices through a detailed
exploration of the passion narratives in the gospels. Picking up once
more his central theme, Heim presents paradox and contradiction as
the deliberate point of those narratives, making the hidden scapegoat-
ing mechanism fully explicit. With some well-chosen quotations from
Girard (see p. 114), he reads the passion of Christ as a documentary of
the sacrificial process from the scapegoat’s own perspective, thus
making clear what is actually happening. An historical event explodes
the myth even as Herod, Pilate, and Caiaphas unwittingly reveal the
extent of their deception. The resurrection is the key to understanding
this failed sacrifice, because a victim who does not stay dead has no
part in the ancient logic of sacrifice. Heim might have said more here
(he offers a few pages only on Pauline theology of resurrection), as he
too easily slips into discussion of the qualities of living in the Chris-
tian community. Nevertheless, he exhibits the variety of ways by
which the New Testament comes to terms with the overthrowing of
sacrifice by sacrifice, using the language of sacrifice to proclaim the
end of sacrifice, and showing how God undergoes the process of sac-
rifice in order to turn it inside out. He then details how much of the
Christian tradition has tended tragically to revert to the ancient
system, and Heim investigates this predominantly Western tendency
to commend rather than resist scapegoating as the meaning of the
Gospel, viewing Jesus as going willingly to his own execution,
endorsing his own killing and so disastrously undoing the painful
paradox of the cross. It is clear that what lies unspoken in the back-
ground of Heim’s carefully eirenic treatment is the shadow cast by
the American religious right who have allied political commitments
and support for military solutions too closely to the inherent violence
of penal substitution and God’s presumed demand for violent sacri-
fice. Heim does not draw this out, but confines his strictures to the
history of Christian anti-Semitism, which he sees as the supreme test
of atonement theory.
In his third part, Heim comments further on the church’s historical
failure to live without sacrifice. To ‘see through’ the myth of sacrifice, to
identify with its victims, and to commend nonviolence, is not in itself
the Christian good news. The Gospel is found in the remaking of
human community on a fresh basis – God’s new creation. It is here I
find a theology of resurrection implied but not sufficiently carried
through. What remains, then, is the objective difference the death of
Christ makes to the world. Any satisfactory answer to that decisive
question must preserve, Heim suggests, the essential paradox of the
cross. Sacrifice cannot be ended without sacrifice. If we seek to exclude
sacrifice altogether, as liberal Christianity has sometimes seemed to
suggest, we risk its reemergence in even more deadly and distorted

forms, such as Nazism and Stalinism (discussed at length in Chapter 9).
How is the cross more than a salient illustration of a given truth? How
does it change the human situation decisively? The answer must lie not
in theory but in practice, and must flow from an antisacrificial starting
point. We are not reconciled with God because of a sacrifice offered to
God, but because God rescues us through his own involvement in a
violent practice to which God stands unalterably opposed.
This is a big book in every sense – lengthy, demanding, scholarly,
comprehensive in its treatment, constructive in its critique and ecu-
menical in its approach. It demonstrates how a theology of the cross can
and should reject the unhelpful sacrificial formulations to which much
of Western Christianity has acceded, and shed new and positive light
on the Christian and universal search for the true meaning and purpose
of human community. ‘For a church or any human community, to
surmount a moment of crisis without turning to sacrifice is one of the
true, simple signs of the reign of God’ (p. 328). Touching on a wide
range of disciplines, Heim brings illuminating insights and stimulating
reflections to bear on a central concern for contemporary Christian
theology. A great deal more than a textbook in soteriology, it is a
much-needed contribution to a wide debate, and will certainly repay
careful rereading.
Trevor Pitt
North East Institute for Theological Education
夹夹夹
Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park, Kenneth Leech, Darton Longman

& Todd, 2006 (ISBN 0-232-52571-4), 252 pp., pb £19.95
Shortly before his martyrdom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘Our earlier

words [will] lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today
will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men’.1
The author of this more recent, autobiographical, book writes very
much in accord with that prophecy.
Ken Leech is clearly someone with those two passions: prayer and
righteous action. This pair is not always seen as belonging together:
speaking on racial violence in Chicago on one occasion he was
approached afterwards by someone who said, with some surprise,
1
Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of D. W. R. Bethge, May 1944: Letters and Papers from
Prison p. 300.

‘ “You must often get confused with the other Kenneth Leech who
writes books on prayer and spirituality.” I managed to keep a straight
face, and said, “Yes, I am often confused with him” ’ (p. 91).
In this book – his latest in a long line of many well-received works –
he writes of each, honestly and openly. He offers a ‘record of failure and
disappointment, of uncertainty, confusion and frustration, of darkness
and perplexity, as well as of joy, fulfilment and creativity, excitement,
stimulation, solidarity in struggle, and . . . growth . . . in the love of
God’ (p. 1). (So, ‘passion’ may well be the mot juste.)
Ken Leech describes himself (as do others) as a Christian socialist and
a community-based theologian. From 1990 to 2005, his community base
was the East End of London. His church link was with St Botolph’s,
Aldgate, which lies on the interface between the City of London (Brit-
ain’s super-affluent financial hub) and Whitechapel, part of London’s
battered East End. This latter area, famed for the amount it suffered from
bombs during the Second World War, is now an area of mixed nation-
alities and faiths, with more than its fair share of poverty. The Altab Park
of the book’s title is a park dedicated to the memory of a young Bengali
murdered there in May 1978. (The park was previously the churchyard of
the original ‘white chapel’; when this was bombed, the space became
known as ‘itchy park’ – so-called because of the numbers of homeless
people who slept there. Leech’s flat overlooked it.)
Leech’s account of his last full-time job reflects the two poles of
Bonhoeffer’s words above. Chapter by chapter, he gives us an account
of his ministry. He opens by telling us of his background and previous
work: he writes as a ‘high church’ Anglican priest. He then describes
the East End for us: the ministry of St Botolph’s, its contact with drug
abusers, gay people, those with HIV/AIDS, and prostitutes: a church of
service to people on the margin. As such, it was a church with two
aspects: for Leech, participation in the daily liturgy of the home team
was crucial for him (he writes of the importance of worship and of
liturgy as a social act); on Sundays the church hosted a gathered con-
gregation of many from without the parish. This rang bells for me. My
own first parish in West London was comparable. On Sundays we were
like a restaurant – which was OK because there was a strong life in the
kitchen.
The fourth chapter deals with his personal struggles. Anyone trying
to hold together both ‘prayer’ and ‘righteous action’ can be stretched.
Many church people and structures are conservative, and social justice
is not top of their agenda. Leech set up for himself a support group and
clearly has a wide circle of supportive friends (he frequently quotes
them, and some of them famous – but they are mentioned without
hubris). Such support was essential and mostly positive. He writes
openly of the hurt he felt when criticized, but how he endeavored to
‘hear’ it.
The following chapter speaks of the ‘politicisation’ of the church.

He writes of the tradition of social theology in Anglicanism (not
least among Anglo-Catholics, but more recently among Evangelicals
also). He makes the telling point that the ‘politicisation’ of the church
is OK and unnoticed by many people since it is ‘Constantinian’ – that
is, on the side of the Establishment; but that this is far removed from
the church’s own beginnings – and calling. Leech is formidably
well-read in social theology (and other kinds too) and apart from any-
thing else his book is an excellent mine of references for others to
follow up.
For Leech, theology and prayer are as tightly woven as the two
strands of DNA. Each feeds the other. The chapter ‘Doing theology on
our knees’ makes clear his debt to various religious communities,
including an enclosed Carmelite convent of very sane women, for
which this reviewer also has reason to be grateful. He challenges the
commonly held view that the ‘city’ is a secular place and describes the
resurgence of religion in East London. From prayer he then turns again
to ‘righteous action’: to homelessness, its causes, and parameters. He is
honest enough to spot and mention weaknesses even in the ministry
from St Botolph’s – a church generally supposed to be as engaged as
any.
We then turn back again to theology – the theology of Cross. Leech
readily owns the criticism made of him that he is more of an ‘incarna-
tion’ man than a ‘cross’ man; and it is interesting that this chapter is
indeed one of the briefest in the book. But to know is to begin to
address. And his searching remarks will prompt others to think more
deeply about what a cross-shaped church would look like.
A (not surprisingly) longer chapter on koinonia and the common life
follows. Leech has no desire to become an academic theologian; he is a
‘community theologian’ and as such it is important for him to know
what of community he is the theologian. He asks whether ‘city’, as we
use it, is a biblical term. He notes that many communities are based on
the exclusion and rejection of others. ‘Yet so much of what we call
theological debate goes on in compartmentalized groups, often elitist,
and most of humankind is left out’ (p. 164). (I would add that one of the
hardest aspects of the gospel to get right in daily life is the hostility of
Jesus to some.) Leech quotes Donald Nicholl who once said that theol-
ogy should always be done in the presence of children. (Brother Roger
at Taizé comes to mind.)
This discussion leads naturally into a long one on ‘discerning the
body’. Leech is open about having to rethink his position in the light of
perceptive criticism of how, in his writings, ‘the church as a material
reality seemed to disappear’ (p. 174). For an Anglo-Catholic this was
serious, and Leech identifies two dangers: that of having too high a
doctrine of the church, and that of confusing the kingdom with the
church. He follows this through with robust views on the establishment

of the Church of England. He also contrasts the nature of ‘parish’ at St
Botolph’s with the classic write-up of an ‘old-fashioned’ Anglican
parish (for instance, that famously written up by Alan Ecclestone, in
Sheffield).
The book closes with chapters on prayer and one more on church.
Again, the two are held together. The former touches on the darkness
that prayer can bring, and its meaning for theology. (‘When we speak of
God we do not know what we are talking about’. Fr Herbert McCabe,
cited on p. 203.) Leech had found a comparable darkness in the East
End: ‘a sense of impasse, of paralysis rather than apathy, the fruit, in
many cases, of struggle, of banging one’s head against a brick wall.
Much urban life is shaped, distorted, and at times crushed, by darkness
– the darkness of physical and mental illness, isolation, perplexity,
exhaustion, insecurity and death. Only a theology which has con-
fronted and not avoided such darkness can be a healing force’ (p. 206).
None of Ken Leech’s writing is bland: he has much trenchant criti-
cism to offer. He is well-known in both the UK and the USA as a
provocative thinker, writer, and speaker. Insofar as this book is story, it
may not be gainsaid. Rowan Williams notes this in the blurb and says
Leech writes of ‘the concrete cost of fine phrases and large policies’.
Leech is a one-off: a passionate, angry man, possibly a loner, a difficult
person to work with? But thank God for him. To call him prophetic
would not be inaccurate. One hopes it will be widely read by those with
influence. But I wonder if it will be: the title is hardly a winner.
John Armson
Herefordshire
夹夹夹
Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its
Future among Religions: A Systematic Theology, James P. Mackey,
Continuum, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-8264-1907-1), xix + 403 pp., pb £30.00
This is a masterful and in many ways delightful piece of work, which

challenges preconceived ideas, and will stimulate the open-minded
reader to wonder why nobody has ever before suggested these things
to us. On the other hand, one suspects that a blurb-writer is being
perceptive when he suggests, ‘Many churches, and particularly the
Roman part of the Catholic church, will hate and fear this book (back
cover)’. Indeed, many of the churches most vehemently opposed to
Roman Catholicism will hate and fear it from their own entrenched
positions. And this book is by an Irishman who was the first Roman
Catholic since the Reformation to hold the chair of theology at
Edinburgh.
Mackey’s written style, often made up of incomplete sentences, takes
a bit of getting used to. I wondered initially whether lectures had been
badly transcribed, but found that the style, once accepted, assists the
reader to follow the arguments by avoiding long, complicated, gram-
matically constructed sentences. Yet, the book still feels designed to be
heard rather than read, and I felt that had I ever listened to the author
speak, I would be able to hear his actual voice again in these pages. And
yet I do hear him: I hear his Irishness, and I hear his dual expertise in
philosophy and theology. Two features of the body of the book are the
contribution of the old Irish religion (pre-Christian and early Chris-
tian), and the chapter-heading quotations from Nietzsche. The former is
used to illustrate this particular natural theology by juxtaposing it with
another, in acknowledgment of the author’s indebtedness to John
Scotus Eriugena (‘John the Irishman from Ireland itself’) whom Mackey
acknowledges as ‘the greatest Irish theologian (after Pelagius, who was
probably a West Briton anyway’) (p. xvi). Nietzsche introduces the
chapters because Mackey has argued elsewhere (The Critique of Theo-
logical Reason, 2000) that this supposed arch-critic of Christianity not
only preserved important truths of which Christianity had lost sight,
but also understood cosmic creation ‘as no Christian theologian or
preacher of the time did’, making it central to his whole philosophy
(ibid.). These two features should, in themselves, be enough to intrigue
the critical reader and to whet the appetite.
What you will not find is the customary multiplicity of footnotes and
references, since it is the author’s opinion that far too much of the study,
teaching, and writing of theology is the study/teaching/writing, not of
theology, but of theologians, so that theology simply feeds on its own
substance, repeating and narrowing the hostilities of the past. Instead,
he appends to the preface a list of some of his own publications, invit-
ing readers desiring a critical apparatus to examine his fifty years of
work in order to discover how the topics of this book came to their final
form. One suspects that Mackey (born 1934) regards this book as a
culmination to a lifetime of doing theology.
In the Preface, Mackey advises readers to pass over the Prologue if
they have broader interests in theology, or are looking for a short
history of Christian thought, or are interested in Christianity’s belea-
guered situation, declaring the Prologue to have been written for theo-
logical practitioners and students who either want ‘an undemanding
overview’ or ‘a concise aide memoire’ of the theological movements of
the last century. This theological practitioner appreciates Mackey’s
selective summary of the various theological movements which prom-
ised so much and fizzled out before achieving their promise, leaving
aside some of the headline-grabbers of the twentieth century, and I

found it helpful to return to the Prologue after reading the rest of the
book.
The Prologue itself summarizes what Mackey takes to be the main
movements in Christian theology in the twentieth century, and within
which he detects a pattern: each set out as if to progress from its
predecessor, and each faltered (or even retreated) ‘before its fullest
promise could be redeemed’ (p. 3). Mackey identifies: the Quest of the
Historical Jesus; Revelation and History; the Bible as Revelation,
History, Literature; Sin and Salvation in Nature and History; Nature
and Grace. He concludes that each of them began by reaching toward
the natural world, but settled instead for supernaturalism. Even the
movement concerned specifically with the theology of creation settled
merely for a repositioning within the overall theological prospectus.
Indeed, Mackey perceives that they ‘all ended . . . by inviting back what
can only be called a centuries-old franchise theology, with all its limi-
tations and potentially damaging outcomes’ (p. 19). Indeed, some
churches consider they have the sole franchise, and this exclusivism
defines their attitude not only to other religions, but to other Christian
churches. Mackey is only too aware of the contribution such exclusiv-
ism has made to Catholic-Protestant divisions in Northern Ireland,
where both ‘sides’ assume a monopoly on theological truth, condemn-
ing each other as sinful and faithless. In the final pages of the Prologue
(pp. 21–26), he makes the case for ‘a full-blown Christian theology of
creation’ (what would traditionally, and unfashionably, have been called
‘natural theology’), which could avoid the mistakes of the last century,
together with their tragic consequences – indeed, a Christian theology
in all its constituent parts construed as a whole as a theology of cre-
ation. This is how a single volume of a mere 400 pages can be (as the
sub-sub-title declares) a ‘systematic theology’: having established a
‘creation theology’ Mackey relates everything to it – all the major
themes one would expect to find.
It is the working out of this program that comprises the body of the
book, falling into two parts, the first being entitled ‘The Essence of the
Faith of Jesus the Jew’. The four chapters in this part begin, as might be
expected from the above, with a biblical theology of creation, including
an overview of the development of the doctrine of creation in dialogue
with Greek thinking, and also a review of the modern debate, with an
understanding of how continuous creation ceases to find evolution to be
a theological problem. The Fall, Salvation, and God follow as chapter
headings, fairly predictably. The second part, ‘Christianity: The Religion
that Developed from the Faith of Jesus the Jew’, deals with the four
structural elements that define a religion: Credo, Code, Cult, and
Constitution – a clear critique of what has been done to Christianity in
the two millennia since the time of its founder.
Although the Christian faith’s future among the religions features in

the subtitle, this issue is specifically considered only in the forty-page
Epilogue, in which Mackey invites his readers to be open to the idea
that the primacy of ‘divine creation’ imagery in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam may ‘raise the same or similar questions for other religions
also’ (p. 369). The question is whether there is in fact any need for
institutional religion, especially in the light of the number of things
identified which are perceived as contrary to the faith of Jesus, but
which now characterize the Christian religion. Indeed, ‘the possibility
of avoiding ecclesiastical allegiance is widely verified in practice today’
(p. 393), especially in the number of people leaving the churches
because they have intellectual or moral objections to what is imposed,
and which they take to be alien to the spirit of Jesus. Mackey concludes
that the one who feels called to ‘recall religion to the purest form of
faith’ (p. 402) must begin with her own church, and then with the
Christian religion, having ‘no business starting with other religions
before she has tackled her own’. Those who feel called to spread the
faith of Jesus to others, of other religions or none, must do so in
the conviction that the Creator of Life offers the same covenant to the
benefit of all, and indeed that the other is as likely as she to know it. In
other words, Mackey argues from a theology of creation for real inter-
faith dialogue in which both protagonists are open to their faith being
improved or corrected.
Right at the beginning of the book, at the opening of the Preface (p.
xi), Mackey asserts that the audience for whom he has written this book
is (in a grammatically structured sentence untypical, at least in this
book of his written style)
those who still maintain a thoughtful and preferably critical interest in

religion, whether they still retain any allegiance to Christianity, or
indeed to any other religion in a world in which all religions are
increasingly thrown together, sometimes violently, or their interest lies
rather in the decline of religions they have personally left behind, some
with a sense of loss or betrayal, others with a more positive intent to
contribute to the loss to the world, again either of Christianity or of any
and all religions.
I hope they will find this book and read it, and be encouraged by it. I
hope it will keep for Christianity some of those who find the present
manifestations of church problematic and troublesome, by articulating
their misgivings and encouraging a lively and intelligent faith, despite
the church if necessary.
Michael A. Chester
The North East Institute for Theological Education
夹夹夹
Faith Through Reason, Janne Haaland Matláry, Gracewing, 2006

(ISBN 0-85244-004-9), xii + 207 pp., pb £9.99
The title of this book, together with the facts that it has a preface by
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict 16) and a picture on the
cover of the inside of a wonderfully serene cupola, may lead one to
think that this is a book about reaching faith through reason. It is not. It
is a book about the joy of faith, told with evangelical fervor by a highly
intelligent woman. So caveat emptor.
Jaane Haaland Matláry is a professor of international politics at the
University of Oslo. She has also served as a diplomat to the Holy See
and sat on the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. It is in these
latter positions that she got to know the (then) Cardinal Ratzinger, who
writes glowingly of her and her work.
Matláry was brought up in Norway, a country with a Lutheran state
religion. Her quest for ‘truth’ led her to study philosophy, which she
did in the context of her own concern for politics and human dignity.
During her studies, she became acquainted with a Roman Catholic
philosopher who introduced her to the philosophical structure of
Catholic faith. This served to counteract her previous anxiety about
subjectivism. She also encountered Aquinas for the first time and
seems to have been bowled over by him. It seems he offered her intel-
lectual security. Further tutoring by a Dominican brought her to
understand that ‘Truth is a person and that person is Christ’ (p. x) and
she entered the church when she was twenty-five – some twenty-five
years ago. As the cardinal says in his Preface, this book is really a
witness to the fact that it is possible to regain the ‘first love’ and joy
of faith.
So it is not really so much an analytic, systematic account of ‘faith
through reason’ as the descriptive account of a ‘love affair’ told with the
passion, naiveté, and enthusiasm of an intelligent and experienced
Christian convert.
Her writing is eager. Her story, which has included many big events,
is simply told. Her work has concerned her in social and political issues
at high level, and her concern for social justice and human dignity
frequently shines through. Having said that, her position could be
described as conservative and ‘right wing’. Having adopted the philo-
sophical position that Truth is objective leaves her free to castigate those
who see things differently as ‘subjective’ (e.g. p. 9).
Her narrative is easy to read, but does wander a bit. She sometimes
reads more like a journalist than a professor of philosophy. This
makes her writing accessible, but will also leave many dissatisfied.
Huge topics are touched on – sexuality, for instance on page 15 – but

in a way which would lead those who see things differently very
dissatisfied.
A lot of her book is autobiographical. She records many personal
stories which help us to get to know her better, and so understand,
too, what has moved her, and made her take some of the decisions
she has taken. But it is questionable that they really advance or under-
pin her argument or faith – unless we take the view that our stories
make us who we are, in a way Matláry would presumably deny. For
instance, the Norwegian countryside clearly means a very great deal
to her, and she writes of a highly significant (because dangerous) walk
she once took through the mountains (p. 129 ff.): we can readily
understand that this taught her about perspective, risk taking, and the
power of silence. She records a tour in Italy when she encountered
Rome with its historical continuity (but it adds colour rather than
substance to know she arrived in Venice at 2 am and slept on the
pavement – p. 27). We can readily believe that a visit to oppressed
Communist Hungary affected her, not least when she saw how the
Roman Catholic Church was a counter-force to Communism. (Her
husband had fled Hungary having fought the Communists in 1956.)
These and other episodes in her life no doubt strengthened and clari-
fied her faith – but it was not faith through reason. Quite the reverse:
such incidents make for faith through excitement, through danger,
through romance. (And why not?)
I did not finish up thinking I would like to have dinner with this
woman. I fear she would browbeat me. But that says as much about me
as her.
John Armson
Herefordshire
夹夹夹
Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology, A.T.B.

McGowan (ed.), Apollos, 2006 (ISBN 978-1-84474-130-4), 365 pp., pb
£19.99
Any collection of essays will be something of a mixed bag, even when

the authors are not so very disparate, as is the case here. That the essays
are written from a Reformed/Evangelical position and published by an
imprint of the Inter-Varsity Press warns the more liberal reader what to
expect, but such readers will find encouragement and an unexpected
openness in some of the contributions, while having their expectations
fully met by others. The order of the essays could have been more
helpful, with those on a similar theme grouped together (two, four, and
six belong together, as do three and nine).
Andrew McGowan, in his editorial introduction, sets out the semper
reformanda principle, acknowledging that this commitment has not
always been maintained. Some have abandoned ‘the core of Reforma-
tion theology and departed from received othodoxy’, while others have
retreated into ‘rigid confessionalism, giving the impression that the
final codification of truth has already taken place’. One might wonder
just how much room there is in Reformed evangelicalism between
‘received orthodoxy’ and ‘rigid confessionalism’, but McGowan’s
intention is that this volume of essays will set out a via media, indicating
not so much what Reformed theology will be like, as what it ought to be
like in the future. Despite a premature obituary for liberal theology, and
warnings about feminist and postmodern theologies (p. 15), the inten-
tion is attractive.
In the same way, American Calvanist theologian John Frame says
many of the right things in the preface: ‘we cannot understand or
properly use biblical texts without relating them to ancient language
and culture, church creeds and tradition, our present community and
the working of the Spirit in our hearts’ (p. 11); ‘the Bible, and theology
rightly done, are more than merely propositional’ (ibid.) – and yet there
is a theological overconfidence in places which misses something of the
point of semper reformanda, that all theology is transitional, and that a
certain humility is therefore appropriate in theologians. Frame regards
it as ‘significant that three of these [essays] . . . deal with a potentially
divisive debate in American Presbyterianism today’ (p. 12). But the
potential schism in today’s church is certainly not confined to ‘Ameri-
can Presbyterianism’, nor is it over some theological issue or ecclesial
action, such as women’s ministry, the ordination of gay people, or the
blessing of same-sex unions. These are mere symptoms of a fundamen-
tal disagreement about the Bible, its status, and how it ‘works’. Some of
these essays demonstrate what McGowan calls ‘the mistake of sinking
into an unfortunate biblicism’ (p. 13); there is a level of devotion to
Calvin which I find inexplicable in a climate of semper reformanda; a
denigration of Arminianism which, as a Methodist, I find unfortunate;
and a dismissal of theologians whose evangelical credentials are gen-
erally regarded an impeccable (such as two of Durham’s resident theo-
logians, Professor James D. G. Dunn and Bishop Tom Wright) when
their work challenges what a Reformed evangelical essayist is set on
defending.
Each contributor was invited to take a different theme within sys-
tematic theology, assess the current state of scholarship in the field, and
indicate areas for further work. The radical agenda set by the editor is
spelled out clearly:
[D]o we need to restate a doctrine that is in danger of being neglected or

denied? Or is there a need to revisit a doctrine and look again at its
formulation, where perhaps as evangelicals we may have been working
with a weak or inadequate expression of the truth? Are there areas that
have not been properly tackled and where much more work needs to be
done? Are there areas where we simply have to hold up our hands and
admit that we have been quite wrong? (p. 18)
However, only the first of these questions seems to set the agenda for
some of the contributors. As a single review cannot do justice to ten
essays, I will be selective and mention three which seem to live up to
the promise, and three that fail to do so, beginning with the latter.
Robert Reymond’s essay on ‘Classical Christology’s Future in Sys-
tematic Theology’ presupposes an attitude to the Bible verging on
literalism, with reliance on proof texts. He reviews the literature of
‘Christology from below’, but sets up various ‘straw men’ (in each case
identified as ‘the problem’) in order to demolish each of them with ‘my
solution’, arguing for finality in the Chalcedonian Definition.
McGowan’s contribution, ‘The Atonement as Penal Substitution’,
argues for this particular theory of atonement to be recognized and
confirmed as ‘a central strand of Protestant theology’, asserting that it is
‘fundamentally sound’. Indeed, he urges the ‘near-universal agreement
of the church’ (p. 210) on this matter. Since 2000 years of theology have
failed to resolve the issue of the relationship of the death of Jesus to my
salvation, this would seem to indicate that no single ‘model’ of atone-
ment is entirely satisfactory, least of all (some would say) this one.
Besides, any discussion of the penal substitution theory today that fails
to give even a passing glace to Girard’s work and its development by
others is regrettable, to say the least.
Richard Gamble’s essay on ‘The Relationship between Biblical The-
ology and Systematic Theology’ makes explicit some evangelical
assumptions, defining theology as ‘the appropriation by the regener-
ated mind of the supernatural/natural information by which God has
made himself the object of human knowledge’. ‘[T]his information’, he
asserts, ‘is found in God’s holy Word’ (p. 213). The essay sets out an
evangelical view of the Bible that is, to say the very least, extreme, and
verging on verbal inspiration, with the bald statement, ‘Reformed theo-
logians agree upon the inerrancy of scripture’ (p. 232). That is not my
experience.
However, Gerald Bray considers how the doctrine of the Trinity has
once again become central to the theological enterprise, focusing on
Barth’s legacy in this area, and the exploration of the Trinity within
the ecumenical environment. After outlining some of what he perceives
to be the limitations of modern Trinitarian thought, Bray considers
the challenges posed for Reformed theologians in this field, and
demonstrates how wider theological questions depend on the conclu-

sions, before finally setting out six principles for a future Reformed
Trinitarian theology. Apart from his denigration of ‘open theism’ in
favor of a position that others might equally denigrate as ‘predestina-
tion’, it seems to me that this essay ‘does what it says on the cover’.
The ‘open theism’ debate gives Stephen Williams a way into his topic,
which is not a theme or doctrine as such, but is about theological
method: the question of ‘system’ in systematic theology. Of course,
many systematic theologians today are more modest than some of their
predecessors, and many of the philosophical systems that have under-
girded the systems of the past are no longer taken as read. His argu-
ment is for a new kind of ‘system’ on the basis that theology
(specifically ‘biblical theology’) is ‘less about the mutual relation of
doctrines than about the relation of particular doctrines to life’ and
that ‘systematic theology should follow its lead’ (p. 49). Following a
very interesting dialogue between Charles Simeon and John Wesley,
Williams distinguishes ‘the faith by which we believe’ from ‘the faith
which we believe’, and proposes something radical for Reformed
evangelicalism – the acceptance that there is theological truth beyond
‘the Reformed Faith’ (p. 62), and that theological minds need to think
outside their confessional box.
Perhaps the best has been kept to last, because Derek Thomas’s essay
on ‘The Doctrine of the Church in the Twenty-First Century’ challenges
the individualism rife in some many evangelical and charismatic circles.
He revisits the classical ‘Marks of the Church’, together with Calvin’s
later contribution in terms of biblical preaching and the right use of
the sacraments in a wide-sweeping ecumenical review. He considers
the ‘worship wars’ to be ‘testimony to much theological confusion,
indifference and a penchant for the bizarre’ (p. 344), and produces a
stimulating summary of ‘desiderata as prerequisites for any future
consideration of the doctrine of the church’.
Michael A. Chester
The North East Institute for Theological Education
夹夹夹
SCM Studyguide: Christian Ethics, Neil Messer, SCM Press, 2006

(ISBN 0-334-02995-3), xiii + 242 pp., pb £14.99
This book has grown out of the author’s introductory course in Chris-
tian ethics, with some omission of topics and detail. The relationship
between natural sciences and Christian ethics, not normally part of such
a course, is included as being both important and interesting. The book

aims to integrate theory and practice and believes such separation is
artificial, although not to the extent that it stops him supplementing the
general index with a list of ethical theory topics (such as deontological
ethics, liberation theologies, and womanist theology), and a list of
practical ethics topics (such as abortion, economics, and just war
theory).
It would have been instructive to produce a matrix which placed the
two elements together and thereby illustrated the extent to which
theory and practice are truly integrated, as well as which theories apply
in each subject topic and why? There is an important methodology
issue here. Are theories cited only applicable to one area, or if they are
not, why is their use restricted to one area rather than another, and is
this entirely arbitrary?
In fact, any matrix would be quite bare, since cross-referencing the
list of practical ethics topics with the ethical theory topics reveals a
failure to match up at all in most cases. In other cases, the match is one
to one, which is strange if these are in any sense general ethics topics.
One of the reasons for this is that chapters follow themes such as the
Bible in Christian Ethics, Natural Law, Virtue Ethics, Liberation Theol-
ogy, and Feminist Theology. Within these are case studies. This leads to
the appearance of a one-to-one relationship, which is highly unlikely in
real life. Returning to the matrix idea and methodology again, the
author should suggest a fuller treatment about the full set of ethical
tools that could be utilized for specific ethical situations. As it stands,
his two lists add nothing to the existing general index, and tend to draw
attention to the methodological weakness of the text which would
otherwise not be so apparent, or could be presented in such a way that
it was more justified.
My own suggestion is to bolster up the discussion, mostly in areas
that have a clear organizational context and which are thereby less
thoroughly treated. Other areas are much stronger because there are
fewer variables involved and issues are more amenable to the sort of
discussion on which the author thrives. Although the author argues that
each topic is self-contained and so can be taken discretely, it would be a
pity to proceed like this. The book should be read through from cover to
cover and then there should be occasion for overall reflection.
This mirrors the approach in several chapters of initiating with a case
study and then returning to it after ethical theory and considerations
have been introduced. The concluding chapter now becomes a lot more
important and deserves more than the four to five pages allocated to it.
It is true that it encourages further reflection in the light of the journey
the student has undertaken. However, the occasion can be taken for
more in-depth consideration of the material, and a much more pro-
found endpoint than passing examinations. One would expect that
students would have formulated a framework that would place them in

good stead for the rest of their lives. This is a very good book with a
wealth of material and students will be all the better for having stayed
the course. It is also well written, and communicates superbly material
that in other hands can achieve high on the fog index. It would certainly
have enhanced my own experience as an undergraduate/postgraduate
in theology. My suggestions are aimed at turning the very good into the
excellent. This deserves to become a standard text, and the author and
publisher might consider how to improve for a second edition, and
even one that incorporates web resources, and possibly interaction. It
might also be possible to produce a text that will suit the larger US
market, since it is a tad UK-based. A global text is something that the
author can achieve.
The argument around healthcare rationing is apposite. The author
picks a life and death type scenario involving children – ‘Child B’ and
‘Baby Ryan’. As far as the analysis is concerned, the author does not
mention that the first is within a National Health Service in England,
and the second is within presumably private medicine in the USA. This
makes a huge difference as to how to tackle the two situations. The
author then treats us to an interesting treatise on virtue ethics before
returning to the two situations again for now more refined analysis.
This is all fine as far as it goes, but anyone working in these two health
systems would encounter a much wider set of considerations than is
presented here. One is concerned in the UK with public finance alloca-
tion generally and then how funding works within the elements of the
health service.
The health economists’ Quality Adjusted Life Year (QUALY) is intro-
duced, and it is inferred that this is used for decisions of one individual
patient against another. This is not how the QUALY operates. It is one
decision-making tool, and it is to decide on macro resource allocation,
certainly not micro decisions at the clinical level. The analysis presented
is partial and lacks full authenticity. One cannot say that it is totally
inappropriate in an undergraduate theology course, but since the author
wishes to achieve realism, it would be advisable for him to consult those
who have to make such decisions, and determine the ethical issues
involved and how a Christian ethic may assist. There happen to be
hospital chaplains available to such situations, so one wonders what
perspective they may adopt. Their more enlightened voice is not heard.
Overall, this is a solid text as it stands with questions for the student to
ask interspersed, case studies and suggestions for further reading. One
hopes this is the beginning of standard and global text on the subject, and
a series published by SCM that can establish a leading position.
Gerald Vinten
夹夹夹
Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the

Land of Prophecy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, SUNY Press, 2006 (ISBN
0-7914-6800-3), ix + 380 pp., pb $25.95
The opening quote immediately following the title page is by Mulla

Sadra, indicating one of the peaks that Nasr drives his audience toward.
Indeed, the chapter on the great philosophical synthesizer from Shiraz
is, in some ways, the culmination of not only this book, but at least
one portion of Nasr’s career which has been dedicated to rescuing
Mulla Sadra from relative obscurity. But just as this prolific author’s
variegated professional endeavors cannot be limited to his having
championed only one particular philosopher, so too it is with this book,
which goes far beyond what the title merely begins to suggest.
In fact, there is so much going on between the covers here that
readers need not read it from start to finish, although earlier material
clearly illumines later issues. It is evident that some of the chapters, as
stated in the Preface, were originally stand-alones, and could be read to
certain advantage on their own. However, this reviewer found the
linear voyage from start to finish rewarding, if tough sailing at times,
despite a solid knowledge of Arabic as well more than a passing famil-
iarity with the dozens upon dozens of names that have graced Islamic
intellectual history over the centuries. Those with less linguistic train-
ing and/or little acquaintance with those who practiced philosophy as
well as the Islamic sciences for over a millennium will have some added
difficulties, to be sure.
It is for this reason that this work is, in reality, only for students of a
serious nature, and for those who are considered ‘practitioners’ in the
field. Nasr, being who he is, has very few (if any) peers to which this
material is addressed. But no matter. His familiarity with the subject,
which is more than just a passing interest, assures that this is a book that
only he could have written (on which more, below). And, indeed, this
book needed to be written.
Nasr’s abilities as a professor in particular and as a communicator in
general are clear from the teaching style which shines through these
pages. He has a felicitous approach to what are clearly difficult subject
areas: before a fully fledged discussion of, say, the Islamic take on
Quiddity, the topic is introduced earlier on as if to warm his students to
the upcoming examination. Once the full exploration is itself complete,
Nasr does not shrink from revisiting the subject area later in subse-
quent chapters. All this is done in a manner that is not at all repetitious,
but helps strengthen the reader’s grasp of some otherwise challenging
subject areas. Indeed, this book is not an easy read, but the topics at
hand are of such importance and the method so ‘user-friendly’ that

what many might consider to be too daunting a subject – the history,
role, and contribution of Islamic philosophy – should not be shied away
from.
In addition, Nasr does not pretend that he has exhausted the topic in
less than 300 pages, to which should be added the 60+ pages of foot-
notes, many of which are essential to fully understanding the text itself.
Nasr often points out where further research is necessary, and makes it
clear that many of the philosophers he mentions have done so much
more than philosophizing. Even those with only a limited knowledge
of Islamic studies realize that this civilization produced more than its
share of polymaths, many of whom were not only outstanding philoso-
phers, but also mathematicians, logicians, theologians, etc. In fact, the
affinity for the philosophical mind for other areas of study in Islam is
something to which Nasr’s repeatedly points.
Nasr contends that while philosophy and religion, generally speak-
ing, parted ways about the time of Descartes in the West, they remained
largely wedded in Islamic civilization. This is difficult for the secular-
ized Western mind to grasp, given that the West has come to under-
stand philosophy as basically an exercise in human ratiocination
divorced from the truths of revelation, the authority of prophecy as well
as scriptural tradition, and the consensus of the religious community.
This divorce, Nasr observes toward the end of this book, has led to what
is called modernity or postmodernism, imbued as it is with a secularist
outlook. That such a parting of the ways has not occurred in Islamic
civilization is a product of many factors which the Western mind has
difficulty understanding, given the Western embodiment of religious
studies as largely falling under the purview of theology, not philoso-
phy. In Islamic civilization, philosophy generally held the upper hand
over theology in the religious sphere, since philosophy was more com-
prehensive in its outlook, application, and mode of expression.
Indeed, while philosophy in the West is now sometimes confined to
the armchair, in Islam philosophy has almost always had practical
application (hence the polymaths of Islamic civilization, many of whom
wedded philosophizing to an interest in the applied sciences). While
the West currently sees philosophy as a mental activity, Islam realizes
that ‘knowing’ is not just a product of five senses plus intellectual
processing of the data fed from them, but it also a matter of the ‘heart’
– something which the modern West would dismiss as ‘mere’ intuition
at best, perhaps prejudice or backwardness at worst. In addition,
Islamic philosophy, according to Nasr, was less atomistic than kalam in
Islam. Hence, it was less difficult for the philosopher to entertain
notions of cause and effect than it was for the typical mutakallim. The
result was the ability of philosophy to wed itself to science fairly
successfully.
With this relatively narrow definition of philosophy since Descartes,

the West has viewed Muslim philosophers through a lens that is often
less than appropriate. In addition, the natural predisposition of any
culture to see in the ‘other’ only what relates to itself prevents a true
understanding of the ‘other’ per se. For example, the West has largely
studied Islamic philosophy only as it has related to the history of the
Western philosophical tradition. Accordingly, Islamic philosophy is
seen only as beginning with translations of Aristotle, and ending (more
or less) when Aristotle is reintroduced to the West from Islam. One is
reminded here of the Christian notion that ‘late Judaism’ defines the
period around the emergence of Christianity, as if Judaism ceases to
exist in any important manner once Christianity grew into one of the
major structures of antiquity.
Similarly, the West has come to see certain Muslim philosophers in an
inaccurate manner – cf. Ùmar Khayyam as the Muslim version of a
self-indulgent hedonist. Indeed, Khayyam is not even recognized in
some Western quarters as a philosopher at all. Such views have even
led to distorted views within the Islamic world itself concerning their
own philosophers. Nasr works to rectify such misunderstandings and
misapprehensions.
Another part of Nasr’s program is to demonstrate that Islamic phi-
losophy did not die out, or get mired in hopeless revisions of older
works with nothing new to contribute after a certain time. Instead, Nasr
points to a succession of Schools and philosophers from the classical
period throughout Islam’s Middle Ages and into the contemporary
period. Over the last few centuries, most of this activity has been taking
place in Eastern Muslim lands, with Persia and to a lesser extent
Muslim India and Pakistan hosting this continued flowering of Islamic
thought. By throwing light on Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tehran inter alia,
Nasr is keen to show that far from being a time of relative philosophical
darkness, the centuries leading up to our own time were filled with a
plethora of important figures, among whom can be counted Mulla
Sadra.
When approaching the present day by tracing lines of intellectual
descent from Islam’s classical period, names such as that of Ayatollah
Khomeini, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and even Seyyed Hossein Nasr
himself appear, almost in nonchalance. It is then that one begins to
realize the author knows many of the modern philosophers of the
Islamic world, and not just by reputation, but through personal contact.
His own role in the ongoing story of Islamic philosophy is not
inconsiderable.
While it would be unfair, in a way, to point to some chapters or
discussions as more brilliant than the rest, this reviewer would note
that after the chapter on Mulla Sadra as the great synthesizer of many
streams within Islamic philosophy, Nasr does not let the reader down.
Islamic philosophy continues to move from strength to strength in his

narrative: to stop when the discussion of Mulla Sadra ends would be
to miss a central part of Nasr’s thesis. Earlier, his chapter ‘The Question
of Existence and Quiddity and Ontology in Islamic Philosophy’ is
foundational to much of what follows. For those readers who are less
than intimately familiar with Islamic philosophy, the chapter entitled
‘Dimensions of the Islamic Intellectual Tradition’ will come as a very
welcome excursion into areas that even elementary students of Islamic
thought will find to be comfortingly familiar, with discussions of
Mu`tazilites, Ashàrites, and kalam gracing the pages.
One of the many talents of Nasr is his ability to discuss Islam in a
manner that does justice to the Shiìte aspect of Islamic civilization
without unduly highlighting it as a bizarre aberration on the one hand,
or relegating it to mere footnotes on the other. As a ‘traditional’ Shiìte
himself, Nasr need not worry about turning a blind eye to Shiìsm as if
it were not worthy of mention; nor does Nasr get overly defensive and
protective of his own tradition. He has a canny, natural feel for weaving
Shiìsm (along with Sufism, etc.) into his general discussion. In any
treatment of Islamic philosophy, of course, Shiìsm is perhaps a bit
more represented than its ten percent of the general population might
seem to warrant. This is especially the case as philosophical activity
moved toward Persia over the last few centuries. Be that as it may, Nasr
is careful not to pretend that philosophy is a ‘Shiìte science’ or that
there are no points of contact between Sunni and Shiìte philosophical
discourse. His approach is refreshing; the results are gratifying.
Thus, Nasr is successful in his endeavor to relate philosophy to the
whole of Islam, not just one particular facet of it. This, of course, is a
topic for more than a single volume, as suggested earlier in this review.
In any case, by the end of his discussion such early statements as
‘Islamic philosophy [is] . . . a philosophy that remains aware of the
realities of prophecy’ (p. 21), which at first might seem puzzling, are
now clear and readily affirmable. Having achieved that, Nasr then does
not shrink in offering some criticism of modernity as well as suggesting
what the advantages of ‘a philosophy that remains aware of the realities
of prophecy’ might be. Nasr’s claim that Islamic philosophy and
modernity are, at base, irreconcilable is not due to some supposed,
hidden affinity on his part with Islamic ‘fundamentalism’. Far from it:
Nasr has, over the decades, made it quite clear that he is a traditionalist,
not a fundamentalist. It is in such a light that his attack on Darwinian
thought should be viewed. However, that certain branches of Chris-
tianity and Judaism have made their peace with evolutionary theory
might suggest that the differences which Nasr sees are perhaps not as
irreconcilable as might appear at first blush. Darwin is not the only
Western thinker and evolution not the only intellectual current that
Nasr analyzes critically: Marx and modern Western utopianism, for
example, are measured and found wanting. While some might reject
Nasr’s definition of modernism, which he rightly sees as posing a real
challenge to the Islamic philosophical view, his often unflinching criti-
cisms of Western secularism serve as a reminder that perhaps the
world’s fault lines during the contemporary period are not between the
various Abrahamic religions themselves, but between Abrahamic faiths
on the one hand and secular disbelief on the other.
Steven Blackburn
Hartford Seminary
夹夹夹
The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places in Late Medieval Towns, Paul
Rio and Marjan de Smet (eds.), Leuven University Press, 2006 (ISBN 90
5867 519 X), xii + 247 pp., pb €35
This is the sort of book I had been looking out for, so it was delightful
to suddenly discover it. I had been visiting Leuven and taking a par-
ticular interest there and subsequently in Bruges and Antwerp in the
beguinage, the historic settlements of pious lay women. The publication
I purchased in Leuven by the University Press, itself one of the few
such accessible publications on the subject, led me to the present pub-
lication. My interest in the beguinage was not entirely irrelevant to the
subject matter of the book. The Begards, the male counterparts of the
Beguines, were often the preferred meeting place for the textile trades,
related to the fact that the Begards usually indulged in the textile trade
to earn a living. This University Press is performing a valuable service
in picking up on minority topics which nevertheless contribute impor-
tant dimensions to wider scholarship. The book was the result of a
colloquium at the university on December 4–5, 2003 which itself was
tied into two ongoing research projects.
It plugs a gap in the literature and permits examination of the earlier
late medieval period of what was later to be called civil religion with a
notable literature in the USA, albeit one which has ebbed and flowed,
and then resurfaced. There has been also in-depth analysis of Sienna
and rituals such as the palio which continue to this day. Although
medievalists may not feel it their responsibility to make all history
contemporaneous, quite wrongly in my opinion, the attraction of the
book to me was just that it provided an insight into later developments.
In addition, the secularization debate should take account of this
historical perspective and the insights it may provide for analysis of
later and modern periods. The old adage about not knowing one’s
history and being forced to relive it is apposite. Medievalists might find

a wider audience for their writings if they adopted such a stance, rather
than circulating incestuously among themselves. With a title in English,
the reader will be surprised to find two untranslated chapters in
German which restricts the audience slightly more.
This is a pity since one chapter is concerned with the sacred: profane
dichotomy and is the only one to draw upon Mircea Eliade. It also
addresses more explicitly than other chapters the question of misuse
which appears in the book’s title. The other chapter deals with the north
part of the Netherlands. Although it is a nuisance for non-German
language readers to have to miss it, the themes do crop up elsewhere.
The borders between the now Benelux countries, Belgium and the
Netherlands with Luxembourg being too small to count, were histori-
cally porous to the extent that the Dutch Parliament was once situated in
Mechelen which is now in Belgium. So unsurprisingly themes are rep-
licated. There is, however, certainly more than an adequacy of interest
and coverage in the remaining chapters to make it worthwhile to read
the book for the majority of English language chapters.
Thirteen pages of black and white illustration provide examples from
art history of the main themes emerging from the book. Graphic art
provides a significant means of exampling the balance of sacred and
secular. It is certainly not a dichotomy, and more of a synergy or
symbiosis. Despite the ‘clerical theory’ of a dichotomy, encapsulated in
the words of the mass at which a church consecration takes place,
in practice a multiplicity of ‘profane’ uses was considered perfectly
compatible. Religious spaces were not considered to inhabit a different
world, least of all when one ventures away from monasteries. The
Middle Ages had sacred and secular intertwined, and both permeated
the other. The US constitutional separation of church and state would
have made little sense then. A practical definition is adopted as to what
an ecclesiastical building is: ‘all buildings and lands within the imme-
diate jurisdiction of an ecclesiastical institution’.
Bob Scriber proposed a valuable threefold classification of urban
religious ritual, albeit with overlap at the boundaries. The inner circle is
ritual reserved to the clergy and in which the laity play a mere passive
role. The intermediate circle widens out to include more active partici-
pation of the laity while still being rooted in clergy-led ritual. Candles
on Candlemas, palms on Palm Sunday, and washing of feet on Maundy
Thursday provide the flavor. The outer circle involves ritual that was
outside the scope of the clergy and to which they oftentimes objected.
Folklore, weather rituals, magic, and mystery plays fall into this cat-
egory and the excess of merriment and humor was considered as irrev-
erent by many clergy. All three circles are reflected in the book. The laity
at this time had a much more porous view of sacred and profane. It was
the Counterreformation that asserted more rigid boundary lines
between sacred and profane. The Reformation in turn declared much

that had been accepted as congruent with the sacredness of ecclesias-
tical space as superstition and outside the pale.
The book roves over a variety of contexts, locations, and time
periods in illustration. There is the paradox of ‘heavenly quiet and the
din of war’ whereby sacred buildings were used for purposes of
safety, defence, and strategy. Then we have ceremonial peace procla-
mations, the role of patrons, with a separate treatment of the royal
patron, mayor making and other ceremonies, mendicant priories, and
a special study of St Mary Graces, a Cistercian House in late medieval
London. Churches often acted as communication centres for news
and even gossip. They could actually be paid to ring their bells to
celebrate peace and for other reasons. Municipalities could pay for
sermons to be delivered. Town accounts justified the casks of wine
delivered to monasteries as expenditure toward thanking God for
peace (p. 58). They might add other purposes behind prayers, such as
to achieve that disease and hunger would be kept out of the town.
There is a helpful series of indices which isolate written sources, the
libraries in which they are found, individuals, and a long list of geo-
graphical locations, which itself readily proves the wide spread of
coverage among townships. It is a delight that such a book has at long
last been written.
Gerald Vinten
夹夹夹
Science of God: Truth in the Age of Science, Kevin Sharpe, Rowman

& Littlefield Publishers, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-4267-9), x + 286 pp., pb
$24.95
The scientific approach to the knowledge of God lies in proposing a

theological arrangement founded upon the emulation of the method
of science. Scientific methodology is the best way to understand both
nature and the spiritual dimension of the universe. Therefore, there is
the need for theology to become an empirical discipline in order to be
a real ‘Science of God’. The application of the scientific method to the
theological discourse is the core of this publication by Kevin Sharpe,
Professor at the College of Graduate Studies of the Union Institute and
University.
The author begins focusing on some wrong theological attitudes to
science. Theology often relies on science as a confirmation of its own
traditional principles. Holmen Roston’s opposition against evolution-

ary psychology can be deemed to be among the clearest instances of
that ‘monoculture of mediocrity’ (p. 1). Therefore, Sharpe’s critique of
contemporary science–theology interaction is outlined in order to
make theology aware of the importance of a new kind of relationship.
In his mind, most of theologians and philosophers, dealing with the
science–theology dialogue, uphold a clear-cut separation between
God and the world. That is the case of Gordon Kaufman’s idea about
God’s absolute otherness, according to which human beings cannot
know anything about the nature of divinity. Kaufman’s approach,
founding upon principles such as the functional and not descriptive
role of God’s language, is only able to remove the spiritual dimension
from our everyday life. The convergence between scientific and theo-
logical method is also rejected by an atheist thinker such as Kai
Nielsen who establishes the weak point of theology: it always makes
assumptions about the world and its assertions devoid of confirma-
tion and/or information.
According to Sharpe, an opposition such as Nielsen’s must be the
starting point to build a new kind of theology. It must be based upon
both empiricism and monism, excluding the excesses of both dogma-
tism and dualism which respectively brought about fideism and other-
wordliness. In other words, the trust in God’s responsibility toward
human life and natural phenomena is a fundamental step to the con-
struction of a suitable scientific theology which is able to answer the
challenge of contemporary age. Namely, we need a kind of theology
which accepts the spiritual dimension of traditional religious belief and
science as the clearest example of truth belonging to the everyday
existence. Professor Sharpe calls it a key-theology, ‘in the sense of
the key in the door opening into a new vista for theology to explore’
(p. 148). The scientific model upon which the author builds his own
science–theology convergence is the one affirmed by the philosopher
Ian Barbour. Key-theology, as science does, includes metaphysical
claims and research traditions, encompassing theories, paradigms, cri-
teria to evaluate theories too. The distinction between scientific and
theological objects is well-known, as science investigates physical
reality while key-theology aims at achieving the knowledge of God.
Notwithstanding that difference, both science and key-theology are
all-encompassing disciplines in which God and physical reality are
considered the essential cognitive tools. Namely, they describe the
world according to their own ‘lens’ but both they try to show their
respective object through an empirical way. Indeed, the whole of reality
and people experience in it form part of the key-theology discipline
which proves to have got a broader aim than science’s. It is easy to grasp
key-theological assertions fall within the contents of different matters
and one can establish a common ground pertaining to science and
theology without affirming their identity. Thus, key-theology ‘consid-

ers their differences to represent variations in degree rather than abso-
lute distinctions’ (p. 203). The explanation of a suitable key-theology
makes the reasons why contemporary scholars failed clear. The author
pays attention to those thinkers whose viewpoint is linked with the
novelties introduced by Thomas Kuhn. A common wrong attitude can
be singled out in the position held by those researchers: their views
‘end with the theology with which they started’ (p. 233). The principles
in which they trust do not vary in different milieus and, in the opinion
of such theologians, the mere role of science consists in strengthening
or elaborating their immutable beliefs. Among the authors discussed by
Sharpe, for example, Arthur Peacocke ‘posits a God quite distinct from
the world’ (p. 213). In the last chapter of this book, Professor Sharpe
highlights the right way toward key-theology. A correct theological
approach lays stress on the empirical reality to discover something
about God. For instance, the search for happiness is the most distinctive
feature of human beings; thus, science and key-theology should deal
with those aspects closely linked with happiness. ‘The study of happi-
ness and other human qualities should offer the opportunity to learn
about people’s spiritual selves and the nature of God in relationship to
them’ (p. 237). The search for happiness forms part of a broader activity,
belonging to our self-awareness, which lies in a continuous decision
making; the balance between different aspects of our personality can
be judged to be the core of our spiritual dimension. Therefore, ‘self-
awareness constitutes the human image of God’ (p. 245). Happiness is
a clear instance to show the fundamental interaction between theology
and scientific research. The nature of God can be understood from the
spiritual dimension of human beings and our spirituality, at her turn,
can be investigated with science.
The arguments of this publication are explained in a language
without many technicalities, even if its contents make it to be not
suitable for common students. As a publication regarding contempo-
rary science–theology relationship, the whole of its arguments can be
understood only by expert readers. As regards Sharpe’s vision, to con-
sider scientifically the human spiritual dimension as a starting point to
practice the Science of God could be a useful way to enjoy the beauty of
creation, which has been an often disregarded aspect. Some theoretical
structures of this book, however, can raise objections. The ascertain-
ment of the division among theologians does not justify a statement
such as ‘objectivity does not exist across current theologies’ (p. 194). The
idea of a natural knowledge of God plays a relevant role in contempo-
rary theological thought. It consists in the metaphor of the two Books,
coming directly form the creating work made by God’s Word. The
listening to the divine page, namely the book of the universe, which
is readable even by illiterates, as Saint Augustine emphasizes in his
Enarrationes in Psalmos (XLV, 7), can be arranged within traditional

theological arrangement. Although some historical events and the
specificity of scientific investigation brought about a separation of the
two fields in the modern age, the notion of God as the only guarantee of
natural order does not imply the adoption of a new kind of theology.
The consideration of the Book of Nature can be helpful for human
beings to reexamine the core of that theology which, through the cen-
turies, led to the achievement of exact science.
Alessandro Giostra
Accademia Georgica, Treia
夹夹夹
Covenant of Peace: The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology

and Ethics, Willard Swartley, Eerdman, 2006 (ISBN 0-8028-2937-6),
xviii + 542 pp., pb $34.00
‘The peace that passeth understanding’ would seem to be another apt

subtitle for this text. Despite the fact that the word peace occurs about
a hundred times in the New Testament (NT), it has failed to maintain a
place of prominence in either theology or ethics. One exception was the
text of 1970 which needed to be translated from German and which was
edited by the author in its translated version. It was about the under-
standing of the concept of peace in the NT, and was volume four of a
series on peace research. This is compelling, since the NT needs to be
restored to a rightful place in peace studies, rather than left to theolo-
gians who have arguably allowed neglect to creep in.
This is part of a series entitled ‘Studies in Peace and Scripture’ spon-
sored by the Institute of Mennonite Studies and curiously published by
a variety of publishers of which equally curiously no further details are
supplied. The author is well aware of the vital contemporary signifi-
cance of a peace agenda and names several examples. His aim is to
outline the NT contribution to peacemaking rather than write a political
science text for which he is not qualified. After the initial scene setting
chapter and a following one on the Hebrew scriptures and the Greco-
Roman world, the author follows the order of the NT canon with the
exception of the Johannine corpus and St John’s gospel which are
placed together. The final three chapters depart from this and are
thematic.
From this source the author extracts in Appendix 2 Peter Stuhl-
macher’s Twelve Theses on Peace in the New Testament. These are of huge
interest since hypothesis testing has not been so common in literary
criticism. The theses are not without their drawbacks since they place
emphasis on St Paul and neglect related notions and peace ethics. They
do suggest a chronology of the development of ‘peace’ in the NT which
not all would agree with. However, they are a way of shedding valuable
perspective on the material, which one could say is the byword of the
present text.
Appendix 1 provides forty-two pages of critical analysis of twenty-
five important contributions to NT theology and ethics over the past
fifty years. This includes an overall and a content analysis, and this is
put in tabular form. The author treats the reader to a full-length treatise
on peace in all its biblical and exegetical manifestations plus more
besides. Using smallish print, there are thirty-two pages of bibliogra-
phy, seven pages of index of authors, fourteen pages of index of sub-
jects, and fifteen pages of index of scriptures and other ancient writings.
The latter includes the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, extra canonical
Jewish sources, the Mishnah and Talmud, early church authors, Greek
and Latin sources, and Qumran. This is plainly not a book for the faint
hearted.
A fascinating Chapter 14 is on God’s moral character as a basis for
human ethics. This is particularly fascinating since the apparent violence
of God in the Old Testament is frequently cited as evidence of the lack of
moral imperative of Judaism/Christianity. Violence is seen to enter into
the crucifixion and the consequent atonement. Content analysis demon-
strates that discussion of the ‘violence of God’ is a category fallacy. The
Hebrew term ‘hamas’ occurs quite often in the Hebrew Scriptures, and
less frequently in the NT. However, it does not denote God’s actions
against humans but the contrary. God is against violence and it is human
violence which incurs his wrath. Any other view is to confuse human
malevolence with the divine prerogative to establish justice. Of course,
the grand finale is the incarnation which ‘exposes the mimetic desire
syndrome with its scapegoat and violence mechanism’ (p. 397), and
introduces the Christian ethic of non-retaliation and peacemaking.
There are fascinating tabular presentations to further understanding.
An early example is the tripartite clustering of complementary NT
emphases with peace as a focal motif (p. 14). Another is a conceptual
diagram with terms carrying corporate and relational significance (p.
41). Another still gives us the entire semantic component of John 4 on a
single square (p. 321), which seems akin to putting a major philosophi-
cal work on a postage stamp, or feats such as putting a model ship in a
bottle. Fourteen triads present the Sermon on the Mount (pp. 65–66). A
Venn diagram is used to portray the three distinctive Matthean themes
of Shepherd; my/your/our father; and Son of David/Healer (p. 84).
There is even a worship service in seven acts based upon the Book
of Revelation, so that the themes can be made in dramatic form
(pp. 345–355). Paul’s virtues are placed in parallel with the Beatitudes
and then listed separately (pp. 411–412). There is even a black and white
picture if the goddess Eirene carrying Plutus (p. 36). The overall effect
is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the topic that can be
imagined in a style that is as far from monochrome as possible.
The book concludes over two chapters. Chapter 15 summarizes the
NT message and its use in moral formation. This is followed by
Summary and Conclusion, Reflections, and Directions. Perhaps this
could be snappier than a scholarly listing of rather belabored points,
especially since one aim of the book is to be devotional. It would also be
the opportunity to explore the scope for producing some of the peace
elements of the Kingdom on earth. The author is true to himself in
maintaining his scholarly stance to the end. Characteristically, the book
ends with a 1552 Mennonite hymn reflecting the sponsoring organiza-
tion for the book; the only thing missing is the musical rendition, but in
this multimedia book I am sure the author will think of a way of
overcoming this in the future. This is a worthy work for this professor
emeritus which demonstrates that retirement can be a most fertile
period. One hopes that others who write and reflect upon the peace
agenda will have the patience to extract the kernel of the book for their
own purpose, rather than perpetuate the neglect of this source of
wisdom, which after all mirrors a substantial slice of human/divine
experience.
Gerald Vinten
夹夹夹
Schleiermacher, Terrence Tice, Abingdon Press, 2006 (ISBN

0-687-34334-8), ix + 95 pp., pb £5.99
In the newest installment of Abingdon Press’ Pillars of Theology series,

Terrence Tice, a leading figure in Schleiermacher studies, has provided
a concise introduction to the life and thought of the ‘father of modern
theology’. Coming in at just under 100 pages, the work proves to be not
only clear and concise, but also introduces the reader to the debates
surrounding the translational equivalents, and therefore the meaning,
of key concepts in Schleiermacher, such as Anschauung (i.e. ‘perception’
or ‘intuition’) and Gefühl (i.e. ‘feeling’). Though these discussions pre-
suppose a modicum of prior knowledge, Tice presents them in such a
way that the reader can follow the discussions without much Familiar-
ity of the lively debate over these concepts that populates the secondary
literature of the past fifty years.
Tice begins with a helpful overview of Schleiermacher’s life and

context. He does an admirable job of guiding the reader through
Schleiermacher’s childhood, as well as the theological and spiritual
struggles that the young Schleiermacher experienced during his edu-
cation under the auspices of the Moravian Brethren. In fact, much of
Schleiermacher’s life was overshadowed by a dialectical tension
between the intellectual currents of the German Enlightenment and the
deep piety of Schleiermacher’s upbringing.
For instance, from 1796 to 1802, Schleiermacher served as chaplain at
the Charity Hospital where he, ‘talked with patients from all walks of
life whose ailments, accidents, and mental breakdowns had brought
them there and with whom he shared prayer and worship’ (p. 20). This
extraordinary and challenging pastoral experience occurred concur-
rently with Schleiermacher’s engagement with the Salon culture of
Berlin that introduced him to key figures in the budding German
Romantic movement. Tice’s discussion of these contexts is evocative
for the reader, as he implicitly argues that the dialectic between the
intellectual and cultural life of Berlin society on the one hand and
the pastoral and existential context of the Charité Krankenhaus on the
other, formed a powerful tension capable of producing the ‘rhapsodic’
Speeches on Religion and Soliloquies, both written in 1799.
Chapters 2 and 3 are comprised of helpful and illuminating discus-
sions of key themes in Schleiermacher’s early and later works. Chapter
2 is exclusively concerned with Schleiermacher’s famous conception of
‘the feeling of absolute dependence’, focusing on the use and multiple
meanings of Anschauung and Gefühl and their interrelation. What
emerges is a sketch that renders Schleiermacher as the Quelle of the later
school of the psychology of religion. Tice masterfully expounds the
complex internal–external dialectic that creates the ‘feeling of absolute
dependence’ and shows that though Schleiermacher’s religious
psychology was profoundly concerned with the internal workings of
human consciousness, it can not be described as merely an anthropo-
logical projection, at least insofar as Schleiermacher himself was
concerned.
Anschauung refers to the precognitive ‘perception’ of the object of
religious faith, i.e. God, while Gefühl refers to the subjective connection
of this perception to the internal life of faith. In ‘feeling’ the objective
reality of God’s grace is experienced and extended into the life of
humanity, both communally and individually. Through his construction
of the basis, genesis, and internal development of ‘the feeling of abso-
lute dependence’, Schleiermacher managed to obviate a key problem
created by Kant’s critique of religion, while also bridging the objectiv-
isit and subjectivisit strands of Christian theology. Though less well
developed, Tice also highlights Schleiermacher’s commitment to a form
of Christian theism that sought to integrate all of creation together with
its Creator such that Schleiermacher can clearly be seen to gesture

toward panentheism.
Chapter 3 concerns itself with Schleiermacher’s groundbreaking
Glaubenslehre (The Christian Faith). Tice’s overall approach is to empha-
size the continuities between the early thought of the Speeches and
Schleiermacher’s later reconstruction of Christian doctrine which many
have, wrongly, considered more conservative and less revolutionary.
This chapter is particularly helpful, as Tice moves through some of the
major doctrines and concerns that occupied Schleiermacher in his
magnum opus (such as, ‘God’, ‘The New Life in Christ’, ‘Election and the
Holy Spirit in the Church’, ‘Revelation’, and ‘Christian Ethics’), giving
a succinct explanation of both the critical and constructive elements of
Schleiermacher’s theology. Many will find the final chapter, entitled,
‘Definitions from Schleiermacher’s Discourse’, to be the most helpful as
Tice brings to bear his considerable knowledge and scholarly acumen
to illumine many of the most complex aspects of Schleiermacher’s
thought. All of the chapters include helpful ‘Questions for Reflection’
placed at regular intervals which makes the text ideal for upper-level
undergraduate students.
When engaging a figure as complex and controversial as Schleier-
macher, it is best to be guided by one who not only understands but
is also sympathetic to their theology. Tice’s book reveals a lifetime of
careful scholarship and a genuine care that Schleiermacher be under-
stood as not only a figure in the history of theology, but also a live
conversation partner who is neglected at our own peril and theological
impoverishment.
Christian T. Collins Winn

Bethel University

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

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 14:3 (2007)

After looking brieﬂy at the responses to Thomasius of J. H. A. Ebrard,

reduplication, saying that Christ suffered as man, and worked miracles

C. Stephen Evans carries forward the theme of the structural linkage

‘rock-bottom’ of kenosis which is coterminous with redemption: Christ

argues brieﬂy that the ‘trumping’ view of divinity has masculinist

kenosis, conceived as ‘self-emptying, self giving, self sacriﬁcing’,

© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

It would be gratifying to assure everyone that after they read Ghost

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 14:3 (2007)

Christianity and Process Theology, Joseph A. Bracken, Templeton

engagement with Whitehead’s thought, and since Whitehead’s con-

Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community, Simon

A few years back, there was a (welcome) plethora of agreed statements

It is the aim of the author, who describes himself as an Evangelical, to

God’s Wrong is Most of All: Divine Capacity: Per Necessitatum

In God’s Wrong is Most of All, Kenneth Cragg reﬂects on a wide range of

of philosophy. He was born and raised in the West, attending Oxford;

insiders. Unfortunately, it also risks being relegated to the margin in

divine and human agency, and genuine Christian, human existence.

Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic

Most criticisms against Anselm’s traditionally labeled ‘ontological

a diachronic summary, but a synoptic comparison of each of these

The third chapter is dedicated to deconstructionist assaults on the

Christology in Context: The Christian Story – A Pastoral Systematics,

This volume is the fourth in a series of books on topics in pastoral

the objective sides of justiﬁcation, which he claims is a position that can

and explores the possibility of Reformed agreement with each com-

Erin Keterson Bowers

Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, Margaret A.

The book aims to be more practical than theoretical, although those

not a popularized book. There is a ‘tip of the iceberg’ chapter on

author’s early list of disciplines that need to be invoked suggests that

In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South

As I read this book I thought, ‘I wish someone would do a study like

Barth for Armchair Theologians, John R. Franke, Westminster John

It is notoriously difﬁcult to summarize the contribution of any truly

lengthy chapter, Franke offers what he aptly calls a ‘basic orientation

Beyond Idealism: A Way Ahead for Ecumenical Social Ethics, Robin

The book is concerned with the ethical proclamations of the World

Curtain era, as well as the increasingly preponderant and vocal

The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the

Gwynn’s The Eusebians is a reworked doctoral thesis, which was origi-

R. Williams, M. Wiles, and S. Hall). His book is a ‘systematic literary,

adopted Athanasius’ theological categories (e.g. the distinction between

This large and sumptuous volume contains essays from a conference

despite it being a term that has – so he says – no current critical

that it highlights those very different optics, though surely not

or ‘intramission’ where the eye was the passive recipient of something

to the reader. Color would be expensive of course, but I cannot help

Saved from Sacriﬁce: A Theology of the Cross, S. Mark Heim, William

Mark Heim has provided a masterly and elegantly written addition to

suggest, we risk its reemergence in even more deadly and distorted

Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park, Kenneth Leech, Darton Longman

Shortly before his martyrdom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘Our earlier

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The following chapter speaks of the ‘politicisation’ of the church.

church. He follows this through with robust views on the establishment

This is a masterful and in many ways delightful piece of work, which

aside some of the headline-grabbers of the twentieth century, and I

Although the Christian faith’s future among the religions features in

those who still maintain a thoughtful and preferably critical interest in