Free Will and the Christian Faith by W. S. Anglin (review)

148 BOOK REVIEWS of the author's work offers a further and important contribution. By researching Thomas's thought on satisfaction in the context of penance as well as soteriology, the author manages to suggest, and explicitly, that the generative matrix for Thomas's theoretic work in both areas lies in the cruciform dynamics of Christian conversion, the life of grace. With this insight he opens a door from historical theology to a contemporary systematics. Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM P. LOEWE Free Will and the Christian Faith. By W. S. ANGLIN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. vii + 218. $55.00 (cloth). W. S. Anglin, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Mathematics at McGill University, has produced a highly compact and compelling volume which attempts in just 218 pages to prove God's existence, to argue for personal immortality, to defend the coherence of theism against the problem of evil, to provide cogent analyses of both omnipotence and omniscience, and to examine criteria for distinguishing divine revelation from other forms of communication. The thread holding these rather motley swatches of cloth together is the author's concentration on libertarian freedom which weaves throughout the above issues in one way or another. It shows up in the expected places (e.g., in the so-called 'free will defense' of the problem of evil) but also in places hitherto unexpected (Anglin nicely argues that if humans are truly free in the libertarian sense, then it is appropriate and necessary that the Scriptures take the form they in fact do) . In light of the impossibility of touching on all of Anglin's concerns, the difficulty in reviewing a work such as this is doing justice to what the author has presented while neither ascending to generalizations blind to nuances in his argument nor descending to cavil about particularities ultimately inconsequential to the book's thesis. Allow me to propose the following as a way to go on: In his Preface, Anglin explains that the aim of his book is to show " that it is possible to be both a libertarian and a traditional Christian" (p. vii). Here, then, are three elements to guide reflection on Anglin's work: libertarian freedom, the Christian tradition, and the relation between the two. Let us take each one in turn. Libertarianism: Libertarian views of freedom are a lot like tenure and taxes: much maligned, perhaps necessary, and still around despite the best efforts of intelligent people to defeat them. Indeed, there is BOOK REVIEWS 149 something quite truthful in libertarianism. That is, it seems quite obvious that a situation in which I am not able to do other than I in fact do would be one where I do not aot freely. Anglin does an extremely credible job of showing this in chapter 1, appealing to several aspects of human life where it is necessary that one can do other than one does: loving, moral responsibility, promise-making and keeping etc. But doing other than what one does is perhaps the least interesting aspect of freedom-just as tenure and taxes are perhaps the least interesting aspects of college teaching and the national debt, respectively. For someone like Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good, libertarianism ignores the moral formation going on behind and between such explicit moments of choosing. She argues that if we ignore all that is within the person, we're quite likely to identify freedom with the outward movement of choice, since there is nothing else with which to identify it. If, on the other hand, we attend to how structures of value are imperceptibly built up within and around us, " we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over." For those like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, libertarianism ignores the role of the community in situating freedom and inculcating those good habits or virtues most conducive to a life of true goodness. Neither identified freedom with unconstrained choice, but rather affirmed that freedom was situated amidst particular surroundings and actualized not by following just any one of all possible options but by acting in accord with the goals...