Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas by Matthew Levering (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 321 relational activities, they are best seen as verbs rather than nouns. Thus whether we think of God as Ipsum esse subsistens or Trinity, as one nature or threepersoned , God is defined by activity. Kerr concludes his survey with this observation: "Thomas's thought, perhaps over a range of issues, contains within itself the Janus-like ambiguities that generate competing interpretations that can never by reconciled.... all along the line Thomas's work, we may surely say, offers readers today little of the 'synthesis' and 'equilibrium' for which it was widely admired 50 years ago, but, on the contrary, reveals a loose-endedness in its constantly repeated discussions of finally unresolvable problems" (210) Herein lies the central problem of this work: Is this unresolved ambiguity really in Aquinas or is it rather more a reflection of the author's inability or unwillingness to adjudicate competing interpretations? It is both the strength and, in my view, the weakness of this book that it leaves the reader with all sorts of unresolved questions. It is a strength of the book that it reviews competing interpretations of Aquinas's theology in an undogmatic, fair-minded, and perspicuous manner; not only beginning theology students but also specialists will learn much from such an approach. Yet the weakness of this approach is that it leaves competing interpretations unresolved in a way that implies that the problem is in Aquinas rather than in his interpreters. Kerr's intuitions are generally on the mark and it is clear that he has more sympathy for some views than others, but he consistently balks at taking an explicit stand in favor of one line of interpretation. Aquinas's thought hangstogethermuch betterthan Kerr leads the reader to believe, despite the loose-endedness of his interpreters. While it was perhaps a fault of Leonine Thomism to treat Aquinas as having straightforward answers to all the questions, it was right to attribute to him a unified view of the whole. There may be versions of Thomism, as Kerr's book discloses, but that does not mean that there are versions of Thomas. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. BRIAN J. SHANLEY, 0.P. Christ's Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas. By MATTHEWLEVERING. Notre Dame: UniversityofNotre Dame Press, 2002. Pp. 264. $44.00 (cloth), $24.00 (paper). ISBN 0-268-022720 (cloth), 0-268-02273-0 {paper). The Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate placed interreligious dialogue at the center of Catholic theology in our day. In many ways, the most important dimension of that dialogue is with the Jewish people. Carried on in the shadow of the Shoah and yet with the elan given to Catholic-Jewish dialogue by the 322 BOOK REV1EWS words and actions of Paul the direction set Nostra Aetate has been "'°""'"'n'"" and has enabled a type of honest interaction that would have seemed u"''·"'""""-'° before its on October 1965. difficulties lie ahead, of course, but some of the means of these have become apparent in recent years. One of the most '1!'1,.,• ..,,,-r"'nJ- means of serious and mutual reflection on the natl.lle of the relation benveen who do not believe in Christ and Christians. How can we understand Paul H's delivered in the synagogue at November the "the people of God of the Old Covenant that has never been revoked God"? ·we are invited to um:lertake a work of retrieval that wiH force us out of famHiar and the energy and we need to look at the of farad in our own and to begin to work toward a of doctrine. """""'"''" of the type of research and reflection needed if we are to recover in greater fullness the robust of the past, in this case th21t of Thomas to the mystery of IsraeL As the tide wishes to see how understands Christ's fulfillment of both Torah a."'1d The first part of the book is dedicated to the first and is followed the second part Christ and the Temple. Each part is made up of three and the book ends with a "'"""'"'~""" chapter. 1, Level'ing offers a response to Michael wvs1:h1Jigiro1:n...