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BOOK REVIEWS 317 Ultimately for this reader, the most spirited engagement will take place around the theology of nature and grace, as already indicated. It will no doubt surface traditional confessional differences. Added to that is Tanner’s deployment of Barth’s accentuation of divine agency relative to the human reception of grace. As already noted she intends no diminishment of the latter. Grace as our natural disposition (a tradition that goes back to Schleiermacher) may aspire to the new creation. However, a sound theology of nature and the human person is required to account for the new creation in its supernatural mode both as created grace in us and in the sacramentality that is constitutive of the life of the Church, in other words, the whole supernatural organism of grace. This is not an issue of the self-sufficiency of human nature but rather of the permutation of all aspects of our humanity by the grace that the Holy Spirit imparts. Whether in light of her critique there will be new conversations between de Lubacians and neoScholastics remains to be seen. RALPH DEL COLLE Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin Studien zum Ökumenischen Konzil: Definitionen und Begriffe, Tagebücher und Augustinus-Rezeption. ByHERMANN-JOSEF SIEBEN. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010. Pp. 281. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-3506768797. Sieben, a renowned scholar on ecclesial councils, joins six previously published essays (slightly reworked) to a new study on the development of conciliar theology in the West. Two essays lay the groundwork for subsequent scholarly studies: the first examines in detail the influence that St. Augustine exercised over councils both in his lifetime and especially after his death; the second studies the conciliar diary (Tagebuch), identifying its genus, specifying its differences from other literary types, listing the principal diaries (from the Renaissance on) as well as earlier anticipations. Another chapter studies de Lubac’s diary with respect to two integralisms already present at Vatican II: the earlier curial integralism which reduced faith’s content to declarations of the magisterium and what followed from them, and the second integralism which was the secularism that started at the council and worked its havoc in subsequent decades. De Lubac perceptively recognized the latter’s beginnings and predicted its baneful effects. His own position straddled the extremes, staying firmly oriented to Christ, the personal object of the Church’s faith. (While this reviewer agrees with de Lubac’s insight that both extremes flow from opposed understandings of the natural-supernatural relation, he laments that the French BOOK REVIEWS 318 Jesuit failed to recognize how the paradox central to his own view has difficulty in maintaining itself: why is a paradox only apparently a contradiction? Men seek coherent rational systems in which to express their faith, and more than a paradox is required to prevent them from rushing to extremes.) Another article studies the meaning and context of Gregory of Nazianzus’s oft-cited dictum, “I avoid every synod of bishops, for I have seen no felicitous end to any council nor has any council resolved a problem instead of increasing it.” The remark doubtless reflects his own experience at Constantinople I, where after his elevation to the patriarchal see of Constantinople the Alexandrian delegation arrived to eject him because Nicaea’s canon prohibits a bishop from migrating from one episcopal see to another. That negative experience was confirmed by the Arian, imperial Council of Seleucia (359), which condemned his hero Athanasius. Yet Sieben notes that Gregory professed the highest esteem for Nicaea, the “sweet, beautiful source of our ancient faith,” where the Holy Spirit guided bishops. Gregory’s disdain for bishops’ councils was probably due to the Church’s own incomplete appreciation of an ecumenical council’s institutional position in her life. Only gradually did she recognize an ecumenical council’s necessary role in defending the faith. Nicaea’s “miracle” could not be unique, and its “monopolistic” position was definitively overcome when Chalcedon culminated dogmatic development by accepting previous councils as authoritative judges of the Christian faith. Most interesting for dogmatic theologians are three central essays dealing with the definition and essential requirements of an ecumenical council. These expand and revise an article in Sieben’s Studien...

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