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Reviews

invalidates those of the Jews (as one might learn from Justin Martyrs Dialogues with Trypho, the Jew). Instead, Seitz argues that Christs Advent did not sum up all that Isaiah had given witness to. The full majesty of Christs being is not revealed apart from the witness of Israel. Advent, in the early church, was a season of penitential longing for the Kingdom, not simply a celebration of the miracle of incarnation. The rst advent of Christ has not sewn together all the loose ends of the promises made to Israel. For those both Jew and Christian stand in hope. Seitz frequently talks of the combustion that occurs when the Old and New Testaments are combined. This combustion does not occur because the New has trumped the Old or sorted out the Old into its wheat and chaff (a canon within the canon). It occurs because the reader discovers the necessity of hearing each one in terms of the other. We get numerous adumbrations of how this combustion occurs; we must await a further book to see the idea spelled out in the detail it deserves. Gary A. Anderson Harvard Divinity School 45 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection: Excursions in the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion by Louis Dupr (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998) ix + 147 pp.
As I recall, Professor Dupr was in the middle of teaching us about St. Francis and his sense of deep communion with the whole creationpreaching to birds and sh included. And then with a twinkling nonchalance we had all come to recognize as the sign of an imminent bon mot, Dupr added, Well, I like sh too, especially if they are lightly breaded and sautd. That class was a good while ago, but Dupr has lost none of his delight in the ironic tugging of the divine upon normal human experience. Indeed, his latest volume could well be described as an attempt to specify how exactly we might notice and understand the peculiar ways in which Gods life takes shape in ours. Less a historical argument than his Passage to Modernity (1993) and less concentrated as phenomenological analysis than The Other Dimension (1972), the present collection of essays nevertheless serves a highly useful purpose in drawing together two potent conversations many of us are willy nilly part of at the moment. The rst of these revolves around the problems of theological knowing, around the question of whether theology does indeed overcome metaphysics (Milbank) and set us free from its traps, around the question of whether theology can nd a way of doing so that does not effectively hermeticize it from contemporary culture. The second, and obviously related, conversation has to do with the spiritual hunger of contemporary culture, with its numb, even autistic, secularity, and whether the mystical traditions of negative theology might not afford Christianity a speaking place that is both within the cultures range of hearing but also faithful to the revelation of God in Christ. The essays, which in their original form appeared between 19801992, have been rationally ordered into three sections, moving from questions of method, and the analysis of specically religious symbolization, to studies of religious experience. There is some overlap, repetition, and, as Dupr himself notes, quite a range of technical theological prociency demanded of the reader (i.e., dont hand this book to rst year theology students unless theyre heavy Husserl readers).
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Reviews 381 In some ways the rst essay, Phenomenology of Religion: Limits and Possibilities, is the most important of the volume. Dupr here directs his insight into phenomenological approaches to religion towards a new theological turn. For he works to undo our theology vs. philosophy knots by directing our gaze along a phenomenological track back into a classical Christian position: The truth of faith induces a compelling inner evidence that initiates a never-ending search for understanding. In contrast to this theory of illumination, modern philosophy had increasingly emphasized the constitutive role of the subject. Despite his own Kantian connections, Husserls concept of Wesensschau prepared the highly modied version of the older theory that Heidegger and other phenomenologists developed in their notion of truth as disclosure. A process of cognition that results in an intuition of what is essential in the appearances shares a fundamental assumption with the ancient illumination theory, namely, that in truth the real discloses itselfit appears with its own evidence. The road to the evidential intuition may be paved by the transcendental subject, but in the nal intuition, reality genuinely discloses itself (p. 17). This passage sets the trajectory for much of the book, a search for the signs, fully observable in contemporary culture, which on closer inspection reveal themselves as signals of transcendence. The following essay on theological models for truth in relation to the usual philosophical approaches is a highly useful introduction to the idea of religious disclosure and might become a staple of theological method bibliographies. Readers will want to follow up Duprs own considerable insights here with some further investigation of work by Robert Sokolowski, Jean-Luc Marion, and of course von Balthasar. The nal essay on theodicy was clarifying but less original. The second section on symbolization begins with a brief essay elucidating von Balthasars theological aesthetics and is followed (not surprisingly) by one on drama and ritual as the most concrete examples of divine expressivity in human form. I found both of these to be lucid and helpful but wished Dupr had allowed himself to push his surveying a bit farther, back into more overt conversation with the phenomenological method he considered earlier. If these chapters were meant as examples of that method in practice (as Dupr suggests in his introduction), then I at least needed a bit more in the way of explanatory apparatus, noting the process (the art?) by which he moves from one stage of analysis to the next. The nal essay in the section, Negative Theology and Religious Symbols, is both substantial and deeply illuminating. Dupr has always managed to put his theological perceptions in the context of acute readings of modern culture and he does so here to ne effect. Modernitys reduction of all the phenomena to mathematized bits has made an overarching sense of reality almost impossible to re-capture. Dupr sees this not in terms of a standard postmodern view regarding the inescapability of language but as a warning against taking negative language positivistically. In other words, it is one thing to defer meaning negatively, i.e., to engage in apophasis, but it is quite another to reify that deferral into a quasi-object, a permanent negativity conveniently captured in our non-speech about it. Dupr directs our attention to the contrary insistence among mystical theologians that ultimate reality is not simply an endless experience of negativity, but a reality beyond any affirmation of ours. At this point, again, the theology of disclosure comes to our assistance, sensitizing us to the real possibility of divine speech coming to expression precisely in our human inarticulacy. The nal section opens with Duprs thoughts on the relationship between experience and interpretation as those issues arise in his consideration of Edward Schillebeeckxs theology. This essay does not engage enough of the present discussion to merit great attention. The last two essays make an extremely powerful conclusion, discussing both mystical consciousness in the Western tradition and the possible openings for a retrieval of that form of consciousness in contemporary
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382 Reviews culture. Especially crucial here are Duprs quite outstanding observations on the nature of mystical knowledge. I think his interpretation offers fertile ground for both a Trinitarian epistemology and an apophatic anthropology. This is a wise and thought-provoking collection, only perhaps let down a bit by the tendency to call a halt in each essay before all the implications had been fully explored. It will be a highly useful volume in graduate seminars and would make a good book for collegial departmental conversations. Mark A. McIntosh Loyola University Chicago Theology Department 6525 N. Sheridan Road Chicago, Illinois 60626 USA

Christian Justice and Public Policy by Duncan B. Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xiv + 274 pp.
Duncan Forrester begins, This book has been some time in gestation (p. xiii). The investment shows. Christian Justice and Public Policy is valuable for its framing of the most signicant issues in the relations between theology, theories of justice, and public policy. Despite this value, for which I recommend it, this book is not the watershed-making volume projected by its agenda. Forresters thesis, putting aside his cautious hedging, promises to show that distinctive Christian insights into justice can contribute constructively to theoretical discussions which undergird policy and to policy itself (pp. 3637). Forrester believes that theology has been systematically excluded from public discourse regarding justice and public policy (p. 24). Bereft of insights from theology, the most prominent theories of justice end up narrow and thin, inadequate to their task of guiding public policy (p. 3). Forrester does not propose that persons or theories must be Christian to be just, but he contends that Christian contributions are indispensable to fully just theories, policies, and practices. Following an initial chapter that develops this thesis for a Christian theological contribution to justice during a time when theology, he presumes, has been shut out of public discourse, Forrester devotes a chapter to the currently futile quest for an objective standard of justice. The extant secular theories of justice, Forrester maintains, do not claim to offer conceptions of justice that are true or that extend justice to the ourishing of victims of injustice and misfortune. Justice has become relative to the consensus in society and is insufficiently critical of the status quo. The poor are viewed as lamentable recipients of misfortune, a matter perhaps for pity and charity but not for justice. His theoretical assertions registered, Forrester turns to two policy issues: imprisonment and poverty. These practical issues reveal, Forrester believes, how uncertain and thin theories of justice have failed to provide practical guidance. Forrester helpfully discusses aws in what he calls the treatment (rehabilitation) and justice (retribution) models for imprisonment. He then turns to theological understandings of guilt, forgiveness, and discipline. These theological resources, Forrester argues, push prison justice beyond fairness to include Gods mercy and love directed to our common good. Unfortunately, Forrester does not demonstrate how these theological fragments should revise formerly awed theories or practices. He leaves us without a reconstructed model for prison justice.
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.