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This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought
edited by Thomas J. Davis
Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2008. 224 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-8010-3245-5.
In this collection of ten essays, largely grouped around eucharistic imagery in Reformation thought, Thomas Davis presents diverse reflections loosely connected to the interpretation of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. The book opens with two essays about the development of eucha-ristic theology within Martin Luther’s work. The next six essays cluster around Calvin’s eucharistic theology and draw widely on Calvin’s sermons and commentaries in addition to the Institutes. The final two essays offer broader thought on the social body of Christ and the role of signification in eucharistic thought in the sixteenth century. Along the way, Davis traces helpful distinctions between Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Several themes help to connect the essays: the central role of the Word, the place of proclamation, the role of the body (natural and social) and its relationship to eucharistic presence, and the place of metaphor and sign in Reformation theology.
As with most collections of essays, there is overlap and repetition. In spite of this occasional tendency, Davis is a thoughtful interpreter and critical guide to debates among Calvin scholars. Particularly noteworthy is the essay on Calvin’s homiletic legacy, where Davis demonstrates the continued importance of Calvin’s approach to making Christ present through preaching. The collection concludes with a thoughtful and creative rendering of the role of art in prefiguring a shift towards the literal signification of reality. While trying to fill in a more sympathetic and human portrait of Calvin, the work remains limited by its emphasis on theological thought (as evidenced by the book’s title). In particular, a broader exploration of the significance of theological practice could yield a richer portrait, especially in regards to Calvin’s eucharistic practice.
For pastors looking for a carefully nuanced articulation of Calvin’s eucharistic theology, this work provides a helpful guide to the literature. Davis addresses specialized themes in ways that remain largely accessible and is able to show their importance to broader debates within theological scholarship of the Reformation.
Paul Galbreath
UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
Person, Grace, and God
by Philip A. Rolnick
Sacra Doctrina. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2007. 280 pp. $28.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-4043-1.
Part of Eerdman’s Sacra Doctrina series, which publishes Christian theology for today’s church and takes seriously the challenges and responsibilities of contemporary postmodern culture, Philip Rolnick’s fine work investigates the possibility and promise of theological anthropology from this perspective.
The work begins with an historical and etymological development of the concept of the person. Through a close reading of early church councils and the work of Augustine, Boethius, and Richard of St. Victor, Rolnick helpfully traces early conceptual distinctions between person, substance, essence, and nature and argues for the importance of incommunicability. For Rolnick, persons are incommunicabilis, that is, something more than substance or nature; they are unique, unrepeatable, non-transferable, and particular. The intuition that persons are marked by being “something more” grounds his responses to the challenge of Darwinian biology, postmodern philosophy, and his constructive theological anthropology.
The result is a three-fold argument against a variety of contemporary reductionisms. Against the reductionist denial of metanarrative, Rolnick argues for the importance of the grand narrative of creation as the irreducible context of human personhood. In addition, as Rolnick develops the idea of personhood by incorporating the insights of great thinkers from Augustine to Jacques Derrida, he implicitly affirms the importance of metanarrative in developing one of his own. This makes the text an especially useful resource for theology students. However, it suffers from a paucity of women and minority voices—a concern made more pressing given that the topic is personhood and what it means to be human.
In conversation with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, E.O. Wilson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, Rolnick offers direct responses to biological reductionistic views of altruism and postmodern reductionistic views of the gift and of the self. Thoughtful responses like Rolnick’s are an especially useful corrective to the often one-sided public discourse on these matters. However, Rolnick devotes more attention to postmodern concerns than to biological ones. As a consequence, the challenges from Darwinian biology seem rather monolithic. A more thorough engagement with these challenges— especially with more recent scientific advancements—would have been most welcome.
Rolnick’s constructive proposal is another argument against contemporary reductionist tendencies. Grounded in an analogical, Trinitarian, and incarnational view of persons, Rolnick argues for a view of the human person as animal nature and spiritual gift joined in a single personality (p. 230). The result is a dynamic view of humanity ever reaching to be “more than” itself, increasingly related to God and others and yet whole and unique in the midst of these changes. Scholars in the field will likely find Rolnick’s constructive proposal of particular interest, even as we are left wanting more, particularly about the more subtle marks of personhood such as incommunicability. Despite these concerns, this book is a welcome invitation to consider more deeply who we are and how we are intimately related to God, each other, and the rest of creation.
Lea F. Schweitz
LUTHERAN SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CHICAGO
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism
by Paula Fredriksen
Doubleday, New York, 2008. 457 pp. $32.50. ISBN 978-0-385-50270-2.
Paula Fredriksen examines Augustine’s extant documents in chronological order, tracing the church father’s Christian defense of Judaism from its inception to its maturity. Through this process, she demonstrates how his thought developed during his dispute with Faustus the Manichee, thus making Against Faustus a crucial text in any examination of his argument.
Augustine argued that Christians must allow Jewish practices to continue, because these practices originate from the same God as do their own religious practices. Therefore, unlike religious outsiders, such as pagans and heretics, Jews hold special status. Furthermore, Jews share a special relationship with Christians through a shared Scripture, the OT. Because of its antiquity, this sacred text validated Christian teachings that otherwise might have been deemed fraudulent by pagans.
How did Christians and Jewish relations become so fractured? Fredriksen answers the question, first, by explaining the Hellenistic society within which the ethnic base of Christianity shifted from a Jewish to a Gentile one. She then examines how those traditions and ideas shaped the culture in which Augustine found himself as he journeyed from heretical Manichaeism to Orthodox Christianity. And in doing so, she reintroduces Augustine’s belief that Jews live under the mark of Cain, a concept that, according to Fredriksen, played an important role while his argument was developing. Jews carry the mark of Cain in that although God scatters them outside of Israel, they are not without his subsequent protection in their exile. The physical mark of Cain is their faithful adherence to ancestral practices, while their continued existence is evidence of God’s protection. Fredriksen then explains why this one idea, so fundamental in the development of Augustine’s argument, was eventually replaced with Ps 59 in City of God, which better fits his theme of wandering, even though all the other elements of the original argument developed against Faustus remained.
Augustine’s argument, unique and original in his own time, remains provocative today. In resurrecting it for a new century, Fredriksen offers a finely researched and comprehensible explanation of how and why Judaism and Christianity were torn apart. Those Christians hungry to understand, and perhaps even searching for permission to mend, this breach will find Augustine and the Jews invaluable.
Sandra Kay Goehring
UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
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