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BOOK REVIEWS 168 Thomism, and it is works like Levering’s that will keep us all interested in what Aquinas has to say to us today. CHARLES RAITH II Baylor University Waco, Texas Nietzsche and Theology. By CRAIG HOVEY. New York: T & T Clark, 2008. Pp. x + 173. $21.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-567-03152-5. Craig Hovey’s Nietzsche and Theology challenges the reader to rethink the wisdom of the Crucified in light of the Dionysian wisdom heralded by Nietzsche as a life-affirming response to the “death of God.” Hovey’s approach is Barthian in its desire to enlist and even assist Nietzsche in his destruction of idols, an effort integral to the work of Christian pre-evangelization in the postmodern age. Surpassing Barth, Hovey will claim Nietzsche as an “ally” in the theological quest for understanding (3) and affirm his “profoundly Christian” insights associated with the will to power (140). Readers should not expect this book to introduce Nietzsche’s philosophy in a systematic or comprehensive way, or to trace the history of the reception of his thought in Christian theology. Hovey’s distinctive contribution is to assume the risk of the bricoleur prepared to grapple, Jacob-like, with the God revealed in Christ when exposed to the full force of Nietzsche’s uncompromising rejection of the Christian religion. The intellectual and at times elliptical adventure takes the reader through five distinct though interpenetrating aspects of Nietzsche’s thought—epistemology, historical research, eternal recurrence, will to power, and the god of metaphysics—each of which occasions ad hoc departures into reflection upon corresponding Christian themes. “Christianity has no particular stake in the idea of truth” (18). The Barthian aphorism, according to Hovey, subverts the modern epistemological turn to “truth” as the product of scientific mastery of its object (achieved through establishment of an investigative distance), and puts in its place the personal Witness, Jesus Christ, who invites hearers to risk being emplotted in his story of movement into life beyond the fear of death. Hovey’s emphasis on the narrative quality of Christian theology is isomorphic (though on a higher plane) with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the primacy of participation in Greek tragedy before it was corrupted by the omniscient narrator introduced by Euripides, and displaced altogether by Socratic dialectical inquiry (19f). Hence, “The ethically decisive aim of The Birth of Tragedy may be summarized by the insight that humanity can never tell stories that are grander than our own participation in them” (38). The primacy of tragedy in Nietzsche underscores both the centrality of lyric in human knowing and the “random chaos of absolute flux” (23) as the horizon within which the liberating “yes” to life in all its suffering can be spoken. Hovey BOOK REVIEWS 169 wonders here whether the disclosure of the interpersonal flux of Trinitarian life in the Crucified can envelop and elevate Nietzsche’s basic religious insight, though he defers discussion of the Trinity to the penultimate chapter. Nietzsche’s affirmation of a non-Trinitarian, impersonal flux brings with it the “truth that there is no truth,” or, alternately, manifests that “truth” is parasitic upon the more primordial “will to power.” Hovey is not inclined to reduce Nietzsche’s doctrine to absurdity here. Rather, Nietzsche reduces Kant’s transcendental inquiry to its basis in human willing, which in turn gives rise to a “Dionysian wisdom” and the primacy of the aesthetic and aphoristic modes of expression over dialectic. Emphasis upon Dionysian wisdom should be an occasion for Christians to rethink the place of parables in Jesus’ own teaching strategy and in the life of the Church, not only to overcome the “Socratic corruption of the Dionysian spirit,” but, further, to address the contemporary crisis discerned by the postmodern insight that “Socratic man has run its course” (43). The latter insight is profoundly linked, for Hovey, to Nietzsche’s criticism of scientific historical research as a means to promote a collective national or cultural identity on the basis of an anticipated future greatness that flows from collective memory of a distinctive past. For Nietzsche, this secularization of Christian “salvation-history” is no less an effort to escape the meaninglessness of the absolute flux...

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