WAS JESUS GOD? by Richard Swinburne

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2009.01326.x

Reviews

WHO WAS JOHN?: THE FOURTH GOSPEL DEBATE AFTER BENEDICT XVI’SJESUS OF NAZARETH by John Redford, St Paul’s, London, 2008, Pp. 319,£16.95, pbk

Canon John Redford, Reader in Biblical Hermeneutics at the Maryvale Institute,here presents an uncompromising defence of the traditional view that the Gospelof John is, historically speaking, precisely that: it was composed, more or less inits entirety and as it now stands, by John the son of Zebedee, brother of James,the ‘Beloved Disciple’ of its own narrative.

It would be fairer to say that this book is not so much a defence as an at-tack upon the historical scepticism of biblical critics since Kant, with RudolfBultmann being cast as the villain of the piece and Benedict XVI as the hero,championing a return to the belief in the possibility of revelation in and throughhistory with his Jesus of Nazareth. Not that Redford rejects historical criticism assuch: ‘the Pope . . . is not even going beyond the bounds of legitimate historicalJesus research, provided that we abandon the anti-incarnational and anti-miraculous presuppositions of so much historical Jesus research’ (p.49). Thebook begins with three brief chapters which set Pope Benedict’s life of Jesusin the context of the shifting trends of biblical criticism, and while these areoccasionally a little sycophantic in tone for a scholarly work, they offer a veryclear and fair assessment of the difference in stance between himself and those forwhom historical study begins with the bracketing out of the supernatural. WhetherRedford will convince these latter that they should abandon their suppositions Ivery much doubt, and it is easy to imagine a great many biblical scholars gettingno further than the first two dozen or so pages of this before throwing it aside ashopelessly uncritical or even fundamentalist.

But the tide is changing: more and more scripture scholars are showing them-selves unwilling to pretend not to believe what they say in the creed, or to putthose beliefs aside in an exercise in academic schizophrenia. Furthermore, quiteapart from these hermeneutical starting points, it is no longer considered impos-sible that the Fourth Gospel contains substantial elements of tradition that goback to Christ himself – in particular, the ever-growing strength of the ‘earlyhigh Christology’ movement means it can no longer be taken for granted thatthe explicitly incarnational presentation of Jesus proves that this Gospel bearswitness not to the historical Jesus but to the Christology of some hypothetical‘Johannine Community’. Redford himself argued in a previous work (Bad, Mador God?, 2004) that the ‘I AM’ sayings in John are historically authentic, com-prehensible of Jesus in his particular place and time, and clearly demonstratinghis claim to be identified with the God of Israel. Only if we cannot believe thatJesus was the incarnation of the God of Israel and knew himself to be so dowe have reason to reject these sayings, and more broadly to reject the FourthGospel’s presentation of Jesus as authentically historical rather than theologicalmyth-making.

So what Benedict has done for the historical Jesus, Redford seeks to do,mutatis mutandis, for the author of John’s Gospel. He begins by noting thatchapter 20 of John makes it quite explicit that the Gospel purports, at least,to be substantially an eyewitness account, testimony to the life of Jesus but

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especially to the way in which he spoke of his mission and his relationshipwith the Father. One of the problems he must address – which has often ledto rejection of the historicity of the Gospel – is its difference from the syn-optics, but Redford argues that this is explicable simply in terms of differentstrategies for selecting material, because of different purposes. He does not quiteaddress satisfactorily that, while we can understand John’s Gospel as carefullyselecting and ordering material without rejecting its substantial historicity, it ismore difficult to explain why so much of this christological material was omit-ted by the other evangelists. He proposes briefly that ‘It is quite possible thatthe early Christians were embarrassed by the full divinity of Christ . . . In theprocess of the selection of the tradition, the Synoptics simply do not wishto overstate the incarnation’ (p.75, emphasis original). This is a bold sugges-tion, and needs a lot more justification if it is to hold the chain of argumenttogether.

Since Redford is rightly critical of a common tendency in biblical scholarshipto glide from ‘it is plausible’ to ‘it may be taken as established’ in formingarguments, it is surely fair to criticise him for the same mistake, and alas it is notinfrequent. The next chapter is a typical example, in which he seeks to establishthe early date of the Fourth Gospel. It is a sadly brief chapter, and does littlemore than summarise JAT Robinson’s arguments; these, however, only show thatarguments that John must be late do not hold water, not that it must be earlyenough to be written by an eyewitness.

After an interesting excursus on possible influences on John – Jewish, Greek,Persian, etc. – which again shows that the Gospel is plausibly the product ofa writer situated within a solidly Jewish context, Redford moves on to look atpatristic evidence for the authorship of the Gospel. Here he engages at last withRichard Bauckham’s controversial Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), and hedemonstrates that ‘it remains a genuine possibility’ that the author of John iswho tradition claims him to be. Bauckham, though conservative, differs – heconsiders the author indeed to be identified with the Beloved Disciple, but thisone is ‘John the Elder’ and not John the son of Zebedee. Redford is evidentlysomewhat uncomfortable with the fact that the Pope concurs with this, and I notethat elsewhere Bauckham has accused Redford of mis-representing his argument(The Tablet, 31/1/09, p. 24).

What ought to be the last substantive chapter in the book goes on to arguefrom exegesis of the Gospel text for the identity of the author, the BelovedDisciple, and John son of Zebedee. Again, the argument is plausible, and if,as Redford claims, the tradition should be given the benefit of the doubt, thenhis case is made. The sceptical historical critic will not be convinced, but Red-ford makes a fascinating and a fairly strong case, and I think the sceptic willbe forced to admit that his refusal to concur with the tradition results fromhis presuppositions rather than being the necessary outcome of an objectivestudy.

The chapter that follows, one of the most enjoyable and convincing, is a fairlydevastating critique of ‘theories of composition’ of the Gospel, such as the workof the much-revered Raymond Brown. The only flaw in this chapter is that itshould be much earlier: it is surely one of the building blocks of Redford’sargument to show that the text is properly to be read as a unity rather than seenas the result of multiple layers of redaction. On the other hand, there are thosewho would argue for reading it as a unity prescinding entirely from questions ofhistory: ‘I don’t care how the text emerged, it is canonical, it is as it is, and Ishall read it so.’ But Redford, perhaps wisely, gives more or less the last wordto the riposte to this offered by Markus Bockmuehl: ‘In dealing with the NewTestament’s inalienably theological subject matter there can be no neutral historynor a neutral historian’ (Bockmuehl: To Be Or Not To Be, 1998, cited p. 281).

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Redford has not tried to be a neutral historian, and his work is much the betterfor it.

RICHARD J. OUNSWORTH OP

EARLY IRISH MONASTICISM: AN UNDERSTANDING OF ITS CULTURALROOTS by Catherine Thom T. & T. Clark London 2007, Pp. xxix+226, pbk.,n.p.g.

One of the ways that Christianity renews itself is by reflection on aspects of itspast, its experience, and its variety over the centuries. For Christians the past isnot simply prologue, but a treasure trove of memory from which we formulate andreformulate our identities. One striking area where this process has been occurringin recent years has been the so-called area of ‘Celtic spirituality’ which, leavingaside the question as to whether it has genuine historical credentials – and clearlymany authors in the field have little more than a taste for illuminated manuscriptsand a fertile imagination – demonstrates some of those areas where contemporaryChristians believe they need to recover insights from the past. It is within thisperspective – a work seeking to recover parts of the Christian memory – of studieson the early Irish church that I approach this book.

The monasticism found in Ireland in the early middle ages is apparently well-known: one cannot open a book on Christian art but one sees fabulous imagesfrom illuminated manuscripts described as the work of ‘Celtic Monks’, the Irishtourist industry produces images of round towers in spectacular scenery, whilethe shelves in religious bookshops bend under the number of books on ‘Celticspirituality.’ By contrast, among scholarly works one has to go back to 1931 forthe last serious study of Irish monasticism, by John Ryan, a trained historianproperly equipped with the auxiliary and, most importantly, the linguistic skills.There have, of course been many scholars since who have approached parts of themonastic legacy, but these have been either specialist investigations (e.g. Rumseyon the Liturgy of the Hours) or studies in related areas which used monasticevidence (e.g. Etchingham on religious organization), rather than surveys of themonasticism as such. This absence of competent work on the monastic legacy isfelt in this book. The author frequently resorts to early studies whose underlyingassumptions are dated or whose command of the evidence leaves much to bedesired. Old translations and editions are used – sometimes even reproduced infacsimile as on p. 187 – without awareness of how the history of liturgy hasdeveloped in the intervening period; and, overall, there is an over reliance onsecondary materials and translations by others. However, to an extent this isinevitable in any work that wants to survey the whole scene. If nothing else thisbook should remind us that there is a pressing need for young researchers toopen up this field who are competent both in the historical and linguistic skillsneeded for any study in the early middle ages, but who are also willing to becomecompetent in the twin fields of historical theology and liturgy before they set outto write their dissertations. Monasticism in early Christian Ireland is still a terraincognita, and this book unwittingly highlights that fact.

However, no book is written in a cultural vacuum, and Thom’s book is writ-ten against the continuing fascination among contemporary Christians with theChristianity of the insular region in the first millennium. This fascination – itcan be found as early as Renan – has many aspects. The period seems simpler,the Church was not riven into denominations, disputes did not seem to turn onobscure points in academic theology, and Christianity appears as being embracedwillingly and joyfully. In these desires we have some of the deepest longings ofChristians – and when they can be, or it is imagined that they can be, projected


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into an actual period, then that time and place becomes one of pilgrimage. Herelies the interest that has launched a thousand books in the last couple of decades,most of them so ill-informed as to be, optimistically, simply a waste of trees or,pessimistically, down-right confusing or worse.

But this quest for alternatives to the contemporary within our past is a genuinequest – it is a basic form of Christian renewal – and must not be dismissed byhistorians (for it is not simply an historical investigation) or by theologians (simplybecause so many of the books are the works of charlatans). When Thom’s bookis viewed as part of this quest we can say that we have a fine product indeed. Shehas carefully examined the spirituality of that monasticism and sought a balancedperspective on their lives, values, and achievements. It is written by someone whois sensitive to the monasticism of the period, who has tried to come to grips withthe spirituality of the time (I say ‘tried to come to grips’ as this is all anyone cando: the past, especially of our inner lives, is always a foreign country), and whohas used all the evidence that she could lay her hands on and used that evidenceto the extent that the current state of scholarship permits. So this is an importantwork: first, it lays out a balanced and evidenced presentation of a monasticismthat many today look to for inspiration; second, it sets questions, through itswillingness to examine matters such as monastic discipline and penance, oversome of the more sensationalist writing labelled ‘spirituality/Celtic’; and third, itpoints out how few people have taken up the challenge to examine in detail thisaspect of Christian history.

THOMAS O’LOUGHLIN

READING ANSELM’S PROSLOGION by Ian Logan, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 220,£55.00 hbk

Ian Logan’s aim is to place Anselm’s Proslogion historically (he speaks of himselfas offering an ‘audit trail’) and to comment on the worth of its argument. Hestarts by noting what he takes to be the Proslogion’s origins, paying particularattention to what we know of what Anselm might have read and to authors suchas Augustine and Boethius. Basing himself on part of a text now in the BodleianLibrary in Oxford (MS Bodley 271), he then presents a Latin text and translationof the Proslogion, the Pro Insipiente (Gaunilo’s much cited reply to Anselm),and the Responsio (Anselm’s less cited reply to Gaunilo). Next, he providesa commentary on the Proslogion running to around 29 pages. In his remainingchapters we find a discussion of Anselm’s Responsio, an account and discussion ofthe Proslogion’s medieval reception, an account and discussion of the Proslogion’sreception from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century, and an accountand discussion of how the Proslogion has fared at the hands of some contemporaryphilosophers. Logan concludes his book by remarking on the significance ofAnselm’s argument. His suggestion, in line with what we find throughout hisbook, is that Anselm succeeded in doing what he set out to do.

It is unfortunate that what people often think that they know of the Proslo-gion comes from sources which are not to be trusted when it comes to exegesis.Hence, for example, it is commonly and mistakenly said that Proslogion 2 and3 amount to what Descartes argues in certain works and to what Kant attacks inhis Critique of Pure Reason. A great virtue of Logan’s text is that it shows towhat extent many have been deceived in their impressions of what the Proslogionhas to say and how it relates to what others than Anselm have written. Logan’shistorical approach to Anselm is excellent and much to be welcomed. Havingdone as good a job as can be done to relate Anselm to his predecessors (here, ofcourse, a lot of guess work is needed), Logan continues firmly and successfully


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to show how numerous discussions of the Proslogion (or works often thought tohave a bearing on it) have failed to engage with the text as it stands. Take, forexample, what he has to say about Karl Barth’s Anselm, Fides Quaerens Intel-lectum (English translation, 1960). Barth’s line was that Anselm never dreamedof offering a philosophical argument for the existence of God in the Proslogion.Rather, says Barth, his approach to God in that work was that of Barth himself(an avowed opponent of natural theology considered as an attempt to argue forthe existence of God in philosophical terms). Yet, as Logan rightly observes,‘Barth’s account is flawed because he does not take account of the fact thatAnselm is a dialectician who has great confidence in the power of reason’ (p.169). To be sure, Barth and Anselm are at one when it comes to the importanceof faith and the radical distinction between God and creatures. But Anselm hada philosophical nose that Barth clearly lacked. And Logan shows this to be sonot only in his discussion of Barth but also throughout his book. At one point heobserves: ‘The monastic, prayerful Anselm, the author of the Orationes sive Med-itationes, who reads scripture for spiritual nourishment, is not to be too stronglydistinguished from the Anselm who applies the skills of the grammarian anddialectician to scripture’ (p. 20). The remark captures Anselm very nicely. ‘ThatAnselm has been consistently misunderstood and misrepresented’, says Logan,‘is a central thesis of this book’ (p. 1). In my view, Logan has well defended thisthesis.

I have to say that I am puzzled by some of the other things than he hasto say. Speaking about Proslogion 2 he says that Anselm ‘does not draw theconclusion that God exists from his argument’ (p. 91). But Anselm, surely, doesjust that, for, having noted that God is ‘that than which nothing greater can bethought’, he claims in Proslogion 2 that, considered as such, God must existboth in intellectu (in the understanding) and in re (in reality). In a perfectlyobvious sense, Proslogion 2 does conclude that God exists. Again, I do not seethat Logan has, as he seems to believe, disposed of the Kantian charge that the‘Ontological Argument’ wrongly takes existence to be a ‘predicate’. Accordingto Logan, Anselm is concerned with whether or not existence is a predicate onlyin the case of ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’. Anselm, saysLogan, holds that ‘existence subtracted from the concept of God . . . leaves onewith the concept of something else’ (p. 160). Yet as Logan presents Anselm’sway of thinking it seems as though Anselm is taking existence in re to be aperfection of some sort. On p. 95, for example, Logan suggests that Anselm isasking us to believe that ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is inre since ‘if it exists in re, it must be the possessor of greatness in a sense which isclearly greater than if it exists in intellectu alone’. In that case, however, it looksas though Anselm is working with the idea that existing in re is a perfection,which is at least part of what Kant’s ‘existence is not a predicate’ slogan isdenying.

In replying to this slogan as employed in critiques of Anselm one might, ofcourse, deny that Anselm wished to suggest that existing in re is a perfection.This approach to Anselm was adopted by the late Elizabeth Anscombe in herpaper ‘Why Anselm’s Proof in the Proslogion Is Not an Ontological Argument’(Thoreau Quarterly, 17, 1985). Logan, though, and in my view unfortunately,does not pursue it and makes no mention of Anscombe’s paper. If Anscombe isright in her reading of the Proslogion, as I think she is, then Logan is wrongin his reading. Unlike Logan, she thinks, as I do, that Anselm’s Proslogion2 argument depends on the premise that we can think of there being some-thing greater than something in the mind, a premise not asking us to supposethat being in re makes something to be great/perfect/good in some sense orother. This premise of Anselm was one that he defended at some length in hisResponsio.


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All of that being said, however, there is much more to praise than to worryabout in Logan’s distinguished volume, which provides a much needed referencework for anyone wanting seriously to understand and think about the Proslo-gion. I think that Logan misrepresents Anselm in certain ways. But he does afine job when it comes to giving readers a sense of Anselm in his historicalcontext.

BRIAN DAVIES OP

THE IMPORTANCE OF INSIGHT: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF MICHAEL VERTIN,edited by John J. Liptay Jr. and David S. Liptay, University of Toronto Press,2007, pp. 230

Michael Vertin has had a distinguished academic career as both a lecturer atSt Michael’s College, University of Toronto, and as a Lonergan scholar. ThisFestschrift has been put together to celebrate Vertin’s achievements by two of hisformer students.

One of the most stimulating contributions to this collection of essays byLonergan scholars is on Lonergan’s Christology by Charles Hefling. Hefling’spaper, exemplary in its clarity and precision, outlines central features of Loner-gan’s writing on Christ’s divine self-consciousness and knowledge, at the sametime as throwing light on the notion of Christ as Revealer, on the relationshipbetween Method in Theology and Lonergan’s ‘Latin theology’, and on the no-tions of ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as these appear in Insight and Method. As Heflingvery ably demonstrates, Lonergan’s explication of the Church’s teaching thatChrist had the beatific vision while on earth is subtle and persuasive. Given therecent reaffirmation by the magisterium of this doctrine, in the CDF censureof Sobrino’s Christology, what Lonergan has to say is very relevant to currenttheology.

I detect a common theme running through three of the other contributions tothe collection that I would like to especially commend here: those by MatthewLamb, Fred Lawrence, and Mark D. Morelli. All three authors are concerned,in one way or another, with showing how Lonergan’s thought is an invitation toan intellectual, moral and religious personal appropriation which points the waybeyond both the great philosophical ‘systems’ of modernity and the existential oranarchic deconstructive reactions to the same. Such self-appropriation is at oncean appropriation of the heritage of the tradition of Aristotle, St Augustine, StThomas Aquinas and later thinkers, such as Newman. Thus, Morelli shows thatthe existentialist and personalist dimensions of Lonergan’s philosophy acknowl-edge the anti-Hegelian protests of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, while invitingthe ‘protestor’ through, among other things, the dialogue of friendship, to ac-knowledge his or her underlying intellectual and moral ‘commitments’. MatthewLamb issues a challenge by underlining how an hermeneutic appreciation of whatLonergan is really up to becomes ever more difficult insofar as there is a failure,a failure evident in much theological education today, to read what Lonerganread: Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Fred Lawrence begins hisessay with an appreciative evaluation of Charles Taylor’s analysis of both thestrengths and weaknesses of the modern view of the self. Taylor is positive aboutthe modern stress on subjectivity yet indicates the inconsistency of the modernsand post-moderns in their refusal to specify ontological and cultural values thatthe self may aspire to. Lawrence goes on to show how Lonergan’s work as awhole can do justice to both sides of the coin.

Bob Doran’s contribution to the volume is important for the ways in which itdraws our attention to possible misreadings of Lonergan’s ‘level of experience’


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in the process of coming to know. That Lonergan does not espouse some versionof the ‘raw data’ idea attacked by Wilfred Sellars, in his critique of the ‘myth ofthe given’, is evident right from the beginning of Insight. In addition to the textsDoran highlights, I would also draw attention to Lonergan’s phenomenology ofperception, in his discussion of the idea of ‘data’ (Insight CWL, pp. 96–7), andto his analysis of insights regarding the data as these occur in our experience ofadvertising and literature (Insight CWL, pp. 592–3).

While the theological motives behind Fred Crowe’s piece exploring the pos-sibilities of a third way between affirming God’s freedom in creating, on theone hand, and the non-necessity of God’s doing so, on the other, are laudable, Ifound the results less than satisfactory. For one thing, Crowe’s discussion seemsto be conducted solely as an exercise in systematic theology, attempting to findin Lonergan’s theology some finite, limited analogies for the divine creative acton the basis of both the necessary and free aspects of human willing, so as tothrow light on the dogma of Vatican I. However, the absence of any discussionof or reference to the critically validated metaphysics of chapter 19 of Insightresults in Crowe’s failing to bring into the discussion what Lonergan thinks canbe established in purely philosophical terms concerning God as free and creationas non-necessary. Chapter 19 is crucial in helping us discern the scope and limitsof any created analogies used in systematic theology. Crowe wants to point toa possible tertium quid between divine freedom and necessity and in so doingsuggests that we be agnostic regarding possible world scenarios in which Goddoes not create. But in this context talk of possible worlds is only another wayof saying what chapter 19 of Insight establishes, what it does not leave indeter-minate: that (among other things) creation is a possibility – for it is a fact – andthat creation is non-necessary. Crowe invites us to think of the saint in whom theoutpouring of good acts is an habitual ‘compulsion’, and affirms that such a goodmust surely be predicated of God. But by making such attributions without thenecessary qualifications (dependant upon the metaphysics of chapter 19), one endsup with all manner of anthropomorphisms, based upon the finite human goods ofmoral and cognitive growth, such as to compromise divine transcendence.

S.J.McGrath’s essay, ‘The Imaginal and Indirect Communication in MethodicalPhilosophy’, has a number of interesting points to make. However, I found thediscussion somewhat lacking in its appreciation of what, in fact, Lonergan has tosay on the issues McGrath treats. McGrath is critical of Lonergan’s separating offthe sphere of reality that is the mysterious, the numinous, that of the aesthetic andmystical experience, from the world of the everyday (p. 64). But a few lines onfrom the passage in Insight McGrath quotes to illustrate Lonergan’s distinction,Lonergan himself points out that these realms can combine and interpenetrate inour conscious daily living, as in Wordsworth’s poetic celebration of the apparently‘ordinary’ (Insight CWL, p. 556). Nor is it the case that on Lonergan’s view theaesthetic dimension is absent from our ordinary language use (see Insight CWL,p. 567).

Finally, among the pieces in the collection I found less impressive was MargaretO’Gara’s evaluation of the CDF’s response to ARCIC’s report on authority in theChurch. I found that it did little to dent my adherence of mind and heart (at theappropriate level) to that Vatican document.

Space does not permit me to mention all of the contributions to this Festschrift.As my remarks above indicate, I found some of the essays in the collection tobe of a very high quality, others I thought problematic and others somewhatbland. However, all in all the collection is, given its strengths, a fitting tributeto Michael Vertin and is certainly a significant and valuable contribution to theever-expanding secondary literature on Lonergan.

ANDREW BEARDS


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ECCLESIAL EXISTENCE: CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IN HISTORY by RogerHaight SJ, Continuum, 2008, pp. 300, £30.00 hbk

This is the third volume of a trilogy on the Christian Community in Historywritten by the distinguished American Jesuit scholar, Roger Haight. The first twovolumes focused on the development of various ecclesiologies in the course ofhistory: the first dealt with the first fifteen centuries of the Christian church, thesecond with the development of ecclesiologies, Catholic and Protestant, from thetime of the Reformation onwards. This third volume is the product of the lessonsthe author has learned in the course of writing the first two. It can, he assures us,be read independently of the first two, which is just as well for this reviewer sinceI have not read any of Haight’s books before, but clearly the work is very muchinformed by, and builds on, the author’s historical researches. The aim of thethird volume is to work out what is termed “a transdenominational ecclesiology”which is described as “a set of principles and ecclesiological constants that areto be found in the church across its many historical incarnations.” The methodunderpinning the author’s approach is one of “historical phenomenology” whichhe describes as “ecclesiology from below”. The phrase “Ecclesial Existence” hasbeen chosen because it describes the actual existential, lived reality experiencedwithin the various institutional forms of the Christian church. As such, it cutsacross the various denominations and seeks to convey what it is that the variousChristian churches aim to achieve and the bonds that unite them.

Despite the fact that the book is clearly written and organised, the argumentit presents is novel, dense and highly nuanced, and I found that I had to readit slowly and with great care. Haight is keen to utilise a structure of inquiryindependent of any one church’s claims or arrangements and this takes him tothe sociology of organizations, in order to find a neutral set of terms and ideasthat will enable him to find and describe what it is, in organizational terms,that Christian churches have in common. It is perhaps initially surprising to findin a Catholic author extremely few references to other Catholic theologians orscholars. Haight’s main theological sources consist of various reports producedby the World Council of Churches. The reasons for this are not difficult to graspfor these reports attempt to stay close to the New Testament and were writtenby teams of scholars with the intention of being as inclusive as possible, doingjustice to the characteristics of the many churches making up the WCC. At thesame time, it is not too hard to detect in Haight’s approach the influence ofhis twentieth century Jesuit training and, in particular, of the great CanadianJesuit scholar, Bernard Lonergan. Phrases like “insight into the data”, “heuristicstructure”, “historical consciousness” and “group bias” attest to this influence, asdoes Haight’s sophisticated attention to issues of methodology. Lonergan’s nameappears nowhere in the book but his influence is evident in just about every page.While Haight names more authors and sources from the Reformed than from theCatholic tradition, there can be no doubting the fact that this is a work emanatingfrom within the contemporary North American Catholic theological tradition.

The two key conceptual tools Haight uses in conducting his argument towards atransdenominational eccelesiology and its corollary, “partial communion” betweenthe churches, are historical consciousness and pluralism. The second, which isborn of the first, refers to diversity and difference within a larger unity, in whichthe differences are not merely tolerated but are recognized as having positivevalue. He maintains that in the modern church the alternative to relativism isnot uniformity but pluralism: unity amid difference. This is the lesson of his-tory: pluralism existed in the church in New Testament times; from the outsetthe Christian community was tolerant of a diversity of institutional forms, andthe various contemporary churches all seek to find scriptural support for theirparticular form of organization. He concludes: “critical analysis of the church’s


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organizational development argues against the idea that there is one exclusiveGod-given institutional form for the church.” (p. 77)

Armed with these concepts and insights, Haight’s approach is, in the first place,to set up antithetical conceptions of church, such as church as “community” ver-sus church as “hierarchy”. Next, he brings out the nature of the contrast betweenthem, depicting the former as emerging by development out of the group of dis-ciples in dialogue with the environment, and the second as being claimed by itsadherents to be the church structure determined during the ministry of Jesus or ina linear development reflecting the will of God, a divinely established institution.Finally, the claim is made that an “existential-historical” approach can appreci-ate the consistency, integrity and validity of both sets of ideas (p. 113). Whencomparing claims and counter-claims regarding such things as liturgical practices,forms of ministry, or forms of church governance, Haight argues each time in asimilar fashion, attempting to find a larger existential-historical framework thatcan provide the unity within which differences in practice and understanding canbe tolerated and valued; or, as in the case of eucharistic practice, he goes back tothe skeletal scriptural account ante-dating the fuller development of such practicesin the course of history, and argues that this skeletal form was/is capable of beingdeveloped in a diversity of ways. It is in this way that he seeks to establish thesimple fact of differences within a larger unity of purpose and function.

Haight is conscious of the fact that the glue that today holds together thechurches and distinguishes them from other churches, conferring on them theirindividual identities, lies much more in their social and historical dimensionsthan in distinctive doctrines and beliefs. He is also aware of the ease with whichpeople today switch between churches (“spiritual activities” cut across denomi-national boundaries), as well as of the rapid inculturation of the Christian faith innon-Western forms taking place throughout the globe, and here his sociologicalapproach is valuable in throwing light on what is going on. At the same time, heis very much a theologian and he places theological considerations at the centreof his argument, maintaining that the church was founded by God and its missionis to continue the ministry of Jesus in the world; and that ministry relates tofour functions – word, sacrament, healing, and jurisdiction – that enable us torecognise each other as Christian churches. Function is esteemed above form. Forexample, in the case of ordained ministry, we should pay less attention to a fewspecific characteristics, such as whether the minister is ontologically set apart orjust another lay person, celibate or able to marry, and so forth, and pay moreattention to function. On eucharistic practice, he claims that historical conscious-ness and pluralism have taught us that no one church’s language “controls” themystery of Christ’s presence, and the common acceptance that God in Jesus Christtakes the initiative in the eucharist should render the churches more compliant toChrist’s commandment of unity in love. Leaders of the churches, who are lesswilling to engage in interdenominational activities than the people in the pews,“cannot hide behind caution”, he chides. “Christ’s call to unity, to communionin his name, is not conditional upon theology; theology is conditioned by it”(p. 216).

It is easy to see why Roger Haight is regarded with such suspicion by Rome –he has recently been forbidden even to publish theology – given the mindsetthat prevails there and the current equation of pluralism with relativism. How-ever, even at a pragmatic level the Catholic Church has much to gain from the“mutual recognition” and “partial communion” that Haight argues for (there isa devastating footnote on p. 152 about the papacy historically gaining more andmore authority over fewer and fewer constituents). In realistic terms it is hardto see how unity in theological understanding can be achieved in advance of thekind of communion Haight advocates. If the Catholic Church wishes to assistthe ecumenical process it claims to support, it will need to prescind from the


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exclusivism and exceptionalism that characterise it at present. This will requirea change in the church’s culture and, if such a change is ever to take place, itwill be in no small part due to the pioneering labours of theologians like RogerHaight.

JOSEPH FITZPATRICK

WAS JESUS GOD? by Richard Swinburne, Oxford University Press, 2008,pp. 192, £9.99 hbk

Whilst philosophers and theologians have defended various views on the existenceand nature of God, until recently discussion of particular religious doctrines waslargely left to theologians. However in his recent book, Was Jesus God?, RichardSwinburne, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religionin Oxford University, turns his attention to the distinctively Christian account ofGod and argues that if God exists, then God probably is as Christianity describeshim because the main Christian doctrines about God are probably true.

What makes the main Christian doctrines about God probably true? Here Swin-burne’s argument depends upon his earlier work on confirmation theory and itsapplication to philosophy of religion. According to that, the main Christian doc-trines about God should be treated as a hypothesis: Christian theism. And likeany other hypothesis, Christian theism needs to be assessed according to whateverevidence there is for it. For Swinburne there are two kinds of such evidence: priorand posterior evidence. Posterior evidence is evidence whose probability dependson a hypothesis’ probable truth or falsity and thus can confirm the hypothesis ifit is the sort of thing one would expect were the hypothesis to be true. In the caseof Christian theism, this evidence is the historical evidence concerning the life,death and resurrection of Christ. Prior evidence on the other hand, is independentof a hypothesis’ probable truth or falsity. It can affect the hypothesis’ probability,making it more or less probable than it would otherwise be, if it can be shownthat the hypothesis fits in with the prior evidence. In the case of Christian theism,Swinburne suggests that the basic features of the universe constitute its prior evi-dence. Accordingly since Swinburne holds that a hypothesis will be probably trueif it is simple, fits in with the prior evidence and leads one to expect posteriorevidence not otherwise to be expected (pp. 16, 23) and this is true of Christiantheism, then Christian theism will be probably true.

To work out the details Swinburne divides the book into two parts. In thefirst part after reviewing his earlier work on the existence of God in chapterone, Swinburne tries to show how the main claims of Christianity fit in withthe prior evidence for Christian theism. Consequently, if the prior evidence forChristian theism makes the claim that there is a good God moderately probable,then such a God might be expected to exist and act in ways consistent withthat. Accordingly Swinburne considers God as triune (chapter two), becomingincarnate (chapter three), atoning for sin (chapter four), teaching humans how tolive (chapter five), and offering eternal life to human beings (chapter six) in orderto show that these claims are consistent with the claim that there is a good God.The second part of the book considers the posterior evidence that the claims ofchapters two to six are true. Here Swinburne discusses Christ’s life and death(chapter seven), the resurrection (chapter eight), the Church (chapter ten), theBible (chapter eleven). Chapter nine offers a provisional conclusion and chaptertwelve the main conclusion.

The need to keep Christian theism a simple hypothesis raises difficulties forSwinburne’s approach. Take God as triune. On the face of it, the claim that Godis a trinity of persons is less simple than the claim that God is one person.


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That being the case however, since Christian theism is committed to a Trinitarianaccount of God, on Swinburne’s terms it would be less probable than a non-Trinitarian view. To avoid that consequence Swinburne tries to show that God’sbeing triune follows necessarily from God’s being good. This gives rise to twoproblems: why accept Swinburne’s inference and even if one does, what aboutits consequences? As to the consequences: if reason entails that God necessarilyis triune, yet scripture only supports the claim that God is triune, then one endsup making reason a source of knowledge of God which is superior to scripture:reason can show that God is necessarily triune, scripture cannot. But even readerssympathetic to Swinburne’s project are likely to have reservations about that. Asto the inference: why must a perfectly good being have an equal in order to beperfectly loving? Admittedly that might be true of human beings, but no onesuggests they are perfectly good. More needs to be done to make that case for aperfect being. Specifically one wonders about Swinburne’s confidence that Godwill act in a recognisably similar way to a human being. Even if one accepts theargumentation however, God the Son and Holy Spirit turn out to be metaphysicallynecessary i.e. ‘inevitably caused to exist by an ontologically necessary being’(p. 31). But given that creation for Swinburne is a matter of God knowinglycausing something to exist or allowing something else to cause something to exist(p. 12) then the distinction between Son, Spirit on the one hand, and creation onthe other, does not seem to be very robust.

Leaving aside issues that arise from the need to keep Christian theism a simplehypothesis, Swinburne is at his best tackling the posterior evidence for Christiantheism. The account of Christ’s life and death is useful; likewise the way inwhich Swinburne takes seriously the scriptural and other evidence and marshalsit in favour of the resurrection is refreshing. Criticisms notwithstanding, the bookis clear, well written and interesting throughout, indeed Christianity is fortunateto have so gifted an advocate as Swinburne. That said however, where many arelikely to part company with Swinburne is in his commitment that reason alone isable to access fully the divine mystery.

DOMINIC RYAN OP

SUFFERING AND EVIL: THE DURKHEIMIAN LEGACY: ESSAYS IN COMMEM-ORATION OF THE 90th ANNIVERSARY OF DURKHEIM’S DEATH, edited byW.S.F. Pickering and Massimo Rosati, Berghahn Oxford, 2008, pp. viii + 195,£30.00 hbk

For most theologians, Durkheim is a figure who looms peripherally. Those whodabble in religious studies will be aware of his landmark work, The ElementaryForms of the Religious Life. Few might realise his enormous and growing signif-icance within sociology. In France, his star is very much in ascent. Thus, whenit came to naming side streets adjacent to the Bibliotheque nationale de Francein 1996, Durkheim won over Sartre. But this increase of interest in Durkheim isby no means confined to France.

The British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, based at Oxford, has done muchto enhance his reputation with an annual review, numerous conferences, and aflood of scholarly excavations. This is an unusually creative collection of essaysto come from the Centre, one of particular significance for theologians. Editedby Bill Pickering, who age does not wither and who has produced a flood ofinvaluable critical appraisals of Durkheim on religion, and by Massimo Rosati, anItalian specialising in the history of sociology, the work comes with significantcredentials. As to be expected, it is impeccably edited. The first section of essaysdeals with suffering and evil in Durkheim and the second with the Durkheimian


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legacy. Why is the collection so interesting, given that Durkheim wrote littledirectly on these topics?

The collection seeks to open out a neglected topic, both in Durkheim and insociology itself: suffering. The essays involve a re-reading of Durkheim throughthe lens of suffering to produce a brilliant re-reading of his works, one thatexposes his strengths and weaknesses, but above all in ways that propel sociologyin the direction of theodicy. This term, the property of Weber, has now beenwell applied to Durkheim’s sociology of religion, and presents a card to playfor those sociologists seeking to deepen links with theology. Ingeniously, in theprolegomena Pickering exposes Durkheim’s own vulnerability by speculating if hedied in 1917 from a stroke, or cancer, or a broken heart at the loss of his son Andrein battle in 1916. Such biographical speculation would be commonplace in regardto central figures in other disciplines, but oddly, up to recently, have been rare insociology. This biographical reticence seemed to affirm the virility the disciplinesought for itself, of providing scientific appraisals that came from lives castabove the human and, so disembodied, seemed above its weaknesses. Setting theirthoughts in the milieu of their lives, far from diminishing their insights, enhancestheir credibility, a point illustrated in Radkau’s recently published massive tomeon Max Weber.

All the essays in the collection are thoughtful, scholarly and creative, butparticularly noticeable is the quality of the Italian contributions from Rosati andPaoletti. The collection turns Durkheim around into concerns of late modernitywith happiness, fulfilment and its denial, evil and suffering, and what is structuredin the collective that gives rise to manifestations of melancholy. Some originalre-interpretations appear. Thus, The Division of Labour is denoted as concernedwith the pursuit of happiness. It can be thwarted by pathological breaches of thenormal, that which gives society stability and solidarity. It is in the failures ofmeshing between society and the individual that aberrations can be found thatgive rise to Durkheim’s twin concepts of egoism and anomie. These generate aproperty of melancholy which Jankelevitch treats as ‘the modern face of ancientacedia’ (p. 39). She exploits well Durkheim’s metaphor of tissu (holes in fabricof society) that require repairs, often obtained through rituals (pp. 41–44).

All the time, the emphasis in Durkheim and his followers is to accentuate thesignificance of the collective, hence the emphasis on evil as social in location, butalso as something affecting the individual, a specific concern of Jankelevitch’scontribution. The nuances of Durkheim’s approach to evil are given a subtlereading in the essay from Paoletti. Social evil derives from a failure to mark limits(hence giving rise to anomie and egoisim) (p. 59). It also emerges from whathe terms ‘an excess of reality’ (p. 72). Emptiness, frustration and sadness shapeDurkheim’s notion of social evil. Denial, sacrifice and asceticism are marked outas the vitalising contributions of suffering, issues pursued in the contribution fromCladis. He evaluates suffering in relation to the dilemmas of Durkheim’s homoduplex, struggles with which offer prospects of moral transformation. It is thelocation of the source of this transformation, but also in regard to social ties, thatmark a division between Durkheim’s sociology and theology; for the former itlies in the social resources alone and for the latter in God alone. Both differ overthe origin of flourishing.

Suffering and its neutralisation by means of ascetic and negative rites emergesin The Elementary Forms and this is well explored on Rosati’s first essay (oftwo) in the collection. A creative linking of evil to the sacred and the profane ismarked here. These rituals respond to suffering and seek to heal the damage doneto social vitality. The strong argument for linking suffering to society in termsof redress is well explored in Allcock’s reflections on the Hague Tribunal wheregenocide and collective guilt are brought into focus. Parkin’s chapter on Hertz,a follower of Durkheim who, in anticipation of Bauman explored the ‘dark side


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of humanity’, will occasion interest with its exploration of sin and confessionsequestered to sociological concerns. Expiation is given a social rather than aDivine universe of understanding. Rosati’s second essay on ‘evil and collectiveresponsibility’ uses moral taint to provide the interconnection.

In his conclusion, Pickering seeks to rehabilitate the notion of theodicy forsociology but in ways that draw attention to the limits of Durkheim’s concernswith evil and suffering. The difficulty emerging from this study, as also in Mausson prayer, is that what is of the interior and of the subjective is sacrificed inDurkheim to attenuate the significance of the objective, what is of social fact,and of the collective. The perplexities within the sacred and its relationship to theprofane are given an original interpretation in this collection. In the end, Pick-ering is right to conclude that Durkheim does not start with evil and sufferingin his sociology, but rather treats them as outcomes of social forms of society(p. 168). Because evil is never personified, nor indeed adequately classified inhis sociology, Durkheim seems doomed to treat it as a form of damage to societybut in ways that block off exploration of the sensibilities of the individual, mostnoticeably in regard to fear. This dread renders evil malign, both for the indi-vidual and for society. Where evil eludes sociological understandings is wheretheological reflection on its origins begins.

KIERAN FLANAGAN

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE by Martha C. Nussbaum, Basic Books, New York,2008, pp. viii+406, US$28.95 hbk

Martha Nussbaum presented her credentials as a philosopher and a classicalscholar in 1978 with a book on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium. Since thenshe has been a prolific author, at first chiefly in the field of ethics, but morerecently, since she joined the Chicago Law School, addressing philosophicalissues connected with law. In Hiding from Humanity (2004) she criticised theadvent into American penal practice of subjecting offenders to public shaming,and the weight given by legislators and judges to feelings of disgust as a groundfor prohibiting behaviour that arouses them and as an excuse for violent reactionsthey allegedly inspire. In Liberty of Conscience she examines judicial decisions onappeals concerning religious freedom and religious establishment. Although thecases she discusses all belong to the United States, her book is highly relevant tocurrent debates in Britain about disestablishment, about state funding for religiousschools and adoption agencies, and about conscience in health care. She refersparticular issues back to general principles with great clarity and philosophicalrigour. And her book has something more that has almost disappeared fromacademia if not from the law courts: she writes with eloquence. You feel not onlythat she believes what she says, but that she cares about convincing you of ittoo.

Nussbaum bases her reasoning on two related but distinct principles. First,everyone should be free to practice any religion or none. On the basis of thisshe argues for giving religious people exemptions from certain general laws, forinstance about military service, dress, drugs and absence from work on sacreddays. She also relates it (p. 286) to depriving pupils at religious schools of ben-efits like free transport which the state ought to provide equally to all, and even(pp. 338–9) to depriving religious institutions of charitable status if they makesexual discriminations their religion requires, though she thinks that could nothappen in America. To the question why religion should have this specialtreatment, her answer in brief is that it is required by respect for conscience(pp. 167–9). No doubt she would agree that before the sixteenth century not


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many societies had this concept of conscience, but she may argue that in Amer-ica at least it has always been sacrosanct.

Her second principle is that the state should do nothing that either endorses orshows disapproval of any religious beliefs, including negative beliefs like atheism.She notes that this is not accepted in Britain or generally in Europe – she chargesFrance with having a ‘secular establishment that is more obtrusive than any ofthe current European religious establishments’ (p. 83). And she argues not onlyagainst referring to a monotheistic God in constitutional documents, but alsoagainst official displays connected with particular religions: private bodies mayput up crucifixes, nativity scenes, or the Ten Commandments, but public bodiesshould not.

She is opposed even to the most uncoercive forms of establishment becauseshe attaches the highest value to equality. Above all else a political society mustensure, not just that everyone has equal rights in law, but that everyone has equalrespect. Any endorsement by the state of any form of religion (or irreligion)sends a message, she says (pp. 234, 252, 263, 310–11), to some citizens that theyare second-rate members of the society, ‘not quite fully equal Americans’. LikeHume’s Wollaston and Pope John Paul II she holds that actions make statementsthat are not expressed in words. It is certainly desirable that citizens shouldenter society on equal terms; but there is such a thing as over-sensitivity, andEnglish Catholics who complained that the Protestant establishment makes themfeel less than fully English would be thought absurd. Every civilised societyknown to history has sought the blessing of Heaven on its most cherished publicenterprises and its whole continued existence. Must we say that equality has suchvalue that in the modern world this apparently natural instinct can no longer beaccommodated?

Professor Nussbaum is well equipped to treat questions about religion even-handedly. Her upbringing was Protestant (on her mother’s side she is descendedfrom the Warren family that went to America on the Mayflower), she has becomea Reform Jew, she provides her readers with a sobering history of American anti-Catholicism, and she has made working visits over a number of years to India.We have much to learn in Britain from her sensitive and rational approach.

WILLIAM CHARLTON


Documents

WAS JESUS GOD? by Richard Swinburne