Wesley, Aquinas and Christian Perfection: An Ecumenical Dialogue by Edgardo Colón-Emeric (review)

648 BOOK REVIEWS preaching life is a "performance" of the gospel, then it is a performance rooted in wisdom rather than in extrinsic techniques or strategies for effectiveness. Preaching also responds to the beauty of Christ's holiness. The analogy of art provides Pasquarello with yet another way of saying that homiletics must move away from pedagogically "reductive, instrumentalist tendencies" (134) and that preachers must "become what we do and say" (136) by lives rooted in contemplation, prayer, and worship. As Pasquarello puts it, "By following in the way of Jesus Christ, a preacher's whole way of being is transformed by the Spirit to become a 'living sermon,' moved and moving others to worship God in 'the beauty of holiness"' (151). The preaching life, like the Christian life as a whole, is entirely a response to the Word and Spirit who lead us to the Father. It will be apparent that, like many good preachers, Pasquarello has a tendency frequently to repeat his favorite insights and phrases. Especially in the early chapters, he also fills his pages with quotations from so many contemporary authorities that at times the book reads almost like a medieval catena. Yet these minor criticisms should not obscure his achievement. Rather than a study of Aquinas on preaching, this book is something arguably even more valuable: a theology of preaching that discerns in the Summa Theologiae the resources for a contemplative and nonutilitarian understanding of the practice of preaching and a sapiential, virtues-based understanding of the preaching life. Like many others over the centuries, Pasquarello finds particularly instructive Aquinas's theocentric theology, his Trinitarian and Christological sensibility, his scriptural insight, and his appreciation for the union of knowledge and love and the role of practical wisdom in the Christian life. As Pasquarello ably demonstrates from a Methodist perspective, it is not for nothing that Aquinas is both the Church's "common doctor" and the outstanding representative of the Order of Preachers. University ofDayton Dayton, Ohio MATTHEW LEVERING Wesley, Aquinas and Christian Perfection: An Ecumenical Dialogue. ByEDGARDO CoL6N-EMERIC. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009. Pp. 330. $49.99 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-60258-211-8. John Wesley and Thomas Aquinas are surely not the most obvious pair of individuals to bring into touch with each other, separated as they are by five centuries in time and vastly different cultural and ecclesiastical circumstances. Yet it is their respective positions in relation to two traditions in Christian history-themselves long ignorant of each other but now brought into mutual contact and attention by the modern ecumenical movement-that lends interest BOOK REVIEWS 649 to a comparison between the two figures, standing as they do in formative theological positions at the head of Methodism and, in the other case, of a strand in that movement's more remote ancestry, with the elder Catholic indeed a most distinguished medieval member of the Order of Preachers and the younger Protestant an eighteenth-century evangelist committed to "the general spread of the gospel" (to quote the title of Wesley's programmatic Sermon 63). In the broadest sense, a conversation between Aquinas and Wesley could contribute to that "mutual reassessment" which the Joint Commission for Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church has declared to be necessary and possible in the "new context" of ecumenism since the Second Vatican Council, as well as furnishing matter for both the "exchange of ideas" and the "exchange of gifts" which Pope John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint (1995) saw as belonging to the nature of ecumenical dialogue: so the Joint Commission's Seoul Report of 2006 under the title "The Grace Given You in Christ." An initial difficulty in comparing the thought of the two subject figures of this book resides in what its author detects as the difference in their exercise of the metier of the theologian. Edgardo Col6n-Emeric characterizes Aquinas as a "speculatively practical" theologian and Wesley as a "practically practical" theologian. Much of Thomas's work was conducted in the role of a scholarly teacher, and his writings follow an orderly structure. John Wesley, on the other hand, taught and wrote in the more "occasional...