Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Bath by Bruce Marshall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 149 What role Athens has in Jerusalem raises questions, especially about the role of philosophy within the theology of Aquinas, that go far beyond and, indeed, may contradict the historical examples of Lessius and Mersenne. Anton Pegis asked: "If St. Thomas incorporated his philosophy within his theology and intended it to he a part of that theology, how do we read it as he meant it unless we read it as theology? And if we read it as theology, what are the conditions under which we then venture to think of it as philosophy? " [St. Thomas and Philosophy (Marquette University Press: Milwaukee, 1964), p. 34]. These are questions that lead Gilson and Pegis to a quite different reading of Aquinas than Buckley offers. But on the general theme, how philosophy should function in relation to theology, I look forward to further reflections from Father Buckley. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. DENIS J.M. BRADLEY Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Bath, By BRUCE MARSHALL. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Pp. ix + 210. $45.00. This is an extraordinary hook, perhaps the best book on the con· flicting shape of christology in the academy in recent years. It makes a major contribution to the logic of christology as well as to the con· versation between Barth and Rahner-and Aquinas. In brief, Marshall argues that Barth's christology (honed by Aquinas' logic of reduplica· tion) is more adequate than Rahner's to the shared assumption that the particular individual Jesus Christ is of universal significance. But this might make the book sound too scholastic-as if it were another in a long line of revised dissertations convincing us that we will be better off siding with one theologian rather than another. Jn. stead, Barth and Rahner and Aquinas become test-cases for a problem that has a particular " historical shape " (c. 1). In the Middle Ages, says Marshall, " it seems to have been taken quite for granted, in popu· lar as well as learned or ' high ' culture, that the function of that which is ultimately ' significant ' or ' most important ' in human life belonged uniquely and solely to Jesus Christ, the particular person whose story is told in the Bible" (p. 1). This presumption was undercut in modern· ity when " the inextricable tie of all that is ultimately meaningful to Jesus Christ as a particular person ceased to be completely obvious in Western culture" (p. 2). Some persisted in dogmatically asserting the 150 BOOK REVIEWS particularity of Jesus Christ; others abandoned this particularity in favor of seeking what ought be ultimately meaningful for us all. Still others attempted to mediate between these alternatives. Marshall here uses " mediate " in a technical sense: we mediate when some immediacy has been lost by finding another putative immediacy as a sort of launching pad for the first. Thus, the mediator's christological strategy is 1) to discover or construct "logically general criteria" of meaning· fulness and 2) explicate (not prove) how these criteria can be predicated of the particular figure Jesus Christ. I think it would help Marshall's story to point out that the insistence of the Enlightenment and Romanticism on universality was not merely an outsider's challenge to the particularity of Jesus Christ but a challenge to Christians to do justice to the universality of this particular One. It is important to remember that, although classic Christians rightly agreed on the " ultimate significance" of this particular figure, they were frequently wrong on Christ's universal sig· nificance. We need only think of Barth's criticisms of his tradition on double predestination and Rahner's criticisms of the eschatology of his tradition. On some issues, perhaps the world (against its wishes) continues to understand Jesus Christ better than some Christians. The story of our treatment of the particularity of Jesus Christ would perhaps provide the instance of those respects in which the turning of the world from the Church is the condition of the turning of the Church to the world (Church Dogmatics IV/3,1 :21) . In any case, Rahner is one kind of mediating theologian focused on developing logically general criteria of a specific sort (i...