T & T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology ed. by C. C. Pecknold and Tarmo Toom (review)

As the Christian West continues to struggle with working out its Augustinian legacy, tools for thinking about that legacy are always in need. As the editors note in their introduction, this volume is meant to be an aid to deepening our understanding of that legacy. The volume offers six chapters on doctrines (Trinity, the human being, Christ, Church, Scripture, and eschatology) that are focused on Augustine himself, followed by six chapters dedicated to how major theologians from the thirteenth (Aquinas and Bonaventure), sixteenth (Luther and Calvin), and twentieth (Lubac and Zizioulas) centuries have received Augustine. Even the chapters focused on Augustine, however, are generally composed with an eye toward modern theology and the ways in which Augustine is useful in addressing its concerns. A few of the chapters are slightly tarnished by imperfect editing, but Pecknold and Toom have put together an admirable volume, drawing together a wide range of scholars to offer their insights to us. If there is one problem this reader would note, it is that there is no chapter on Augustine’s doctrine of grace, one of the richest and most influential aspects of his thought. The Luther and Calvin chapters, of course, talk about the reception of that doctrine, but the absence of a chapter about Augustine and grace feels like a loss.

The chapter on Augustine and the Trinity is by Luigi Gioia. Gioia’s offering is more or less a distillation of his book, something that is always useful for the scholar whose reading list grows ever longer. His reading of the progress of the truth from polemic to anagogy to mystagogy to theology of revelation to worship as the expression of wisdom is deeply illuminating. The De Trinitate as speculative theology and as theological anthropology is situated clearly and appropriately in the context of the questions raised by our sinfulness and our weakness, questions that are answered by the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. The missions are, if anything, even more important to theology than are the processions. It is precisely in the sacrifice of Christ that the inner life of the Trinity is revealed to us, for knowing God is only possible through “the full thankful and humble acknowledgement of our total dependence on God” (17).

Michael Hanby’s chapter on Augustine and the human being presents a deeply admirable project: to locate a sense in Augustine of relationality as essential to humanity, rendering the human person “analogous to the ‘substantive relations’ of the Trinitarian personae” (22). He explicitly places himself in the tradition of re-readings of the De Trinitate that has included such figures as Lewis Ayres and Rowan Williams. He does this by pointing to the constitutive role of memory in the human person as “by definition a response to something first given” (25).

The chapter on Augustine and Christ is written by Ronnie Rombs. Rombs skillfully exegetes the centrality of “one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” as a binding together of person and work, soteriology and Christology, the mediator reconcilians. But perhaps the more significant move comes in his discussion of the relation between mediation and revelation, where he argues that Augustine provides us with the means for a “fruitful engagement” (38) with contemporary “symbolic” Christologies found in Rahner, Dulles, and Haight. For, as mediating revealer who mediates and reveals precisely in the flesh, Christ gives sensory expression to what is non-sensory, and thus can be said to be a “symbol” of God, so long as we allow the symbol simultaneously to be that which it signifies.

In Michael Root’s chapter on Augustine and ecclesiology, he hones in on the question of the unity of the Church, and especially with an eye to ecumenical concern. He notes that, in Donatism, we find “a fully non-ecumenical ecclesiology” (57), where...