Act & Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes by Colin E. Gunton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 639 less objectionable.) Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht's essay, "God and Being, or the New Covenant," will very likely prove the most useful in Anglophone countries to professional teachers of Catholic philosophy and theology. Since phenomenology's "theocentric tum," the issue of the relation of God and being now has a widelyrecognised pertinence that onlyThomists generally appreciated before. That in itself is a testimony to the perennial value of the tradition of Thomist thought which these (mostly) still young men, or men in young middleage , are continuing with courage, learning, andthat peculiar French combination of spirituality with intellectual flair. I noticed with pleasure the name of Hans Urs von Balthasar, invoked positively and at a crucial point in Humbrecht's argument-though a Balthasarian connection is subterraneously present likewise in the discussion of the beautiful in Narcisse's article on the realism of St Thomas. This is a book with very few footnotes or perhaps he would have mentioned his own doctoral thesis which compared Balthasar's mind-set as disclosed in Herrlichkeit with Thomas's appeal to convenientia, or revelatory "fittingness"-itself, he argues, a category of theological aesthetics. Among the "new masters," Balthasar's writing is surely one direction in which Thomists could look in order to amplify the theological resources oftheirtradition-not, ofcourse, uncritically, or withoutthe necessary adjustments that foundational Thomist principles may suggest. This would only be, after all, to repay the compliment Balthasar himself paid Thomas in treating his Christian metaphysic as the high-point, ontologically speaking, of the West. AIDAN NICHOLS, 0. P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Act & Being: Towards a Theology ofthe Divine Attributes. By Colin E. Gunton. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003. Pp. ix+ 162. $29.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-2658-X. A reworking of a set of public lectures, this book proved to be the author's last, as Gunton died unexpectedly in 2003 after a prolific thirty years as a Reformed theologian in England. As the preposition in the title indicates, the work is not a systematic exposition of the divine attributes themselves but a critical discussion of the way they have been and ought to be treated. The first four chapters raise the various theological issues at stake in how and what we predicate of God's nature and character, but for the most part they offer a sustained criticism of the classical manner of attribution. The last four chapters are more constructive, although Gunton's own proposals for theological predication and brief discussions of certain attributes are neither fully developed 640 BOOK REVIEWS nor neatly presented. Although one can appreciate a few of his criticisms and even the general trajectory he wishes treatment of the attributes now to take, those of more Catholic theological sensibilities will have difficulty identifying with his general discounting of the tradition's development, based as it is on a Barthian tendency to oppose philosophical reasoning about what God must be against revelation's account of God's historical actions on our behalf. In the preface Gunton says his original intention to offer a more comprehensive treatment ofthe attributes gave way to a growing dissatisfaction with how the tradition came to define proper theological predication. In his assessment, the doctrine of the divine attributes was often done by using the wrong method, developing the wrong content, and treating things in the wrong order (8). Early Christian theologians emulated the Neoplatonic approach to characterize God as essentially that which the world is not. In favoring a cosmological method of philosophical abstraction from the imperfections found in the world, the tradition displaced the Old Testament as the proper theological foundation of the doctrine of God and neglected to draw God's character more positively from his saving actions in the economy. While explicitly critical of Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus, and Aquinas, Gunton especially indictsThe DivineNames for the tradition's excessively negative approachto and characterization of God, one that conceived the relation of God and the world as opposed to one another, in marked contrast to what the incarnation implies. Gunton criticizes the method for its emphasis upon the unknowability of God because it discounts what divine revelation is meant to...