Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology by Marilyn McCord Adams (review)

148 BOOK REVIEWS and they bring about deification. Thus the eternal persons are involved fully in the economy. Theology and economy are united. Questions remain. What is a mode in Aristotelian thought? How does it act? In the economy does Jesus or the Trinity work miracles? Does God or the Father think the first procession and generate the Son? Is conceptio (STh I, q. 27, aa. 13 ) adequately rendered as "concept"? If the divine processions are known only by revelation, why does Thomas designate knowledge of "divine persons" supernatural only in question 32? Does question 29 really succeed in reconciling relation with substance? Wouldn't Boethius's definition make God's substance a person (cf. STh III, q. 3, a. 3, ad 1-2)? Is the natural-supernatural distinction adequate? Emery provides answers. This reader might wish to dispute some of them or might find alternative accounts more persuasive. Nevertheless, Emery's book represents a noteworthy contribution to the study of Aquinas's Trinitarian doctrine. Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan JOHN M. MCDERMOTI, S.J. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence ofChristology. By MARILYNMcCORDADAMS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 334. $31.99 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-521-68600-6. The combination of philosophy and theology can make for a good brew, and in the hands of an expert does not disappoint. Such is the case with Marilyn McCord Adams, now Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and former Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. A sequel to her Horrendous Evils and the Good of God (1999) the present volume is a Christological explication of her basic theodicy, essayed in the earlier work. In fact, Christology makes it work; thus the unnerving title of her first chapter: "Christology as Natural Theology." If this sounds like a blurring of the boundaries between the two disciplines, it is, with a backward glance to the medieval doctors but a determination to harvest their fruit following the century of horrors. Nevertheless, it is a principled blurring, not so much in regard to what is proper to each discipline, but in the integral uses of philosophy made by theologians to propound the coherence of the faith. Coherence is at the heart of the matter and persuasive in its own right. BOOK REVIEWS 149 Already I have made a misstep. This book is only in the broad sense a Christologically informed theodicy. Admittedly, to speak of the divine goodness in light of a "horror-infested world" (42) seems like an exercise in theodicy. But to her credit Adams possesses a healthy sense of divine transcendence (the legacy of her beloved medieval doctors) "because God has no obligations to creatures and hence no need to justify Divine actions to us" (43). Nevertheless, classical theodicy is not convincing. That evil exists to enhance the cosmos or others rather than the "horror-participants" (45) themselves is unthinkable. Adams' option is to offer an explanatory regime (as contrasted with a justificatory one) for how God in Christ makes good on the horrors for all who undergo them, an "eventual beatific intimacy with God" (47). Enter Christology. It is by God's unitive and assimilative aims in Christ that God shares in the horrors and as such Christ is the "horror defeater" (53). For us horror-participants Adams waxes confessional: "If God takes God's stand with the cursed, the cursed are not cut off from God after all!" (41). Her philosophical and theological provenance? Adams is a metaphysical realist (and down deep believes in a correspondence theory of truth) although skeptical on matters of epistemic decidability; hence her option for coherence as "a method ofpursuing truth" (11). As an Anglo-Catholic it is the doctrine of the Incarnation that captures her theological imagination, especially as articulated by turn-of-the-twentieth-century British theologians with their correlative worldview of a sacramental universe. Yet, skeptical realism remains to the extent that since only God is fallible, wronged-headed theological views, even if embedded in Holy Scripture, are simply wrong. This matters, for Adams is an avowed Christian universalist and in this soteriologically driven...