Christian Life and Christian Hope: Raids on the Inarticulate by Rowan A. Greer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 647 Doctor. It was more within the pluralistic Franciscan school considered as "Scotist" that key aspects of early modern metaphysics were first sketched out. ANSGAR SANTOGROSSI, 0.S.B. Mt. Angel Seminary St. Benedict, Oregon Christian Life and Christian Hope: Raids on the Inarticulate. By ROWAN A. GREER. New York: Crossroad, 2001. Pp. 288. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8245-1916-7. Theological reflection on Christian hope, or eschatology, has proven an abidingly fascinating topic, at once consoling and enigmatic. The desire to know what ultimately awaits the Christian and the problem of how to discern this vision in a fallen world capable of providing only glimpses of the age to come has preoccupied theologians since the time of St. Paul. Accounts of Christian hope, while varying in detail, all must reckon somehow with complex notions of anthropology, Christology, soteriology, grace, nature, free will, and original sin. The spiritual dimension of eschatology, furthermore, inevitably yields a practical consideration, namely, howthat future vision compels Christians to live in the present. Rowan Greer has tackled this topic in a most intriguing, thoughtful way in his study entitled Christian Life and Christian Hope: Raids on the Inarticulate. He begins, as one might expect, with biblical understandings of Christian hope in the Gospels and Paul and moves on to the patristic period with Gregory ofNyssa and Augustine, but then he leaps forward to discuss the two seventeenth-century Anglican writersJohn Donne andJeremy Taylor. At first glance this combination might seem rather odd, even if one is aware that Greer is an Episcopal priest as well as a patristics and Anglican-studies scholar. However, the grouping makes sense given Greer's predominant aim, which is to establish lines of continuity between these three historical periods and today and thus offer models to inform our contemporary thinking. As such, Greer's work builds on the superb 1991 study by Brian Daley, S.J., The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology, which carefully traces the roots and development of Christian eschatology through the entire patristic period. Greer begins by repudiating what he regards as the misguided lament of Jiirgen Moltmann that Christianity has long banished the future hope in favor of a turn inward, a move Moltmann traces all the way back to the post-Constantinian period (see his 1967 Theology ofHope). Nevertheless, Greer concedes to Moltmann that many philosophical and theological claims of Western modernity (especially German idealism and its heirs) internalize hope 648 BOOK REVIEWS so that it becomes a construct of individual consciousness and thus serves merely to make sense of one's present reality. Likewise, culture has contributed immensely to an emphasis of Christianity on the present. While Greer disputes Moltmann's fundamental claim, he is attractedto the identification by Moltmann and others of the character of Christian hope as simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with the present. Here lies the essence of hope. By definition, "Christian hope in its fullest sense cannot exist apart from its object," which is other-worldly, and "equally, Christian hope cannot be hope unless it informs our understanding of life as we experience it" (3), which is this-worldly. An entirely other-worldly view renders hope meaningless, because detached from our present reality, while a totally this-worldly perspective reduces Christianity at best to morality, at worst to moral relativism, and locates salvation solely in the world of our experience. Against Moltmann's assertion, then, Greer wants to argue that Christianity has indeed maintained understandings of the Christian hope that combine these two perspectives in some way, an integration of what he terms the "here and now" with the "there and then." Christian hope becomes paired with Christian life as Gregory, Augustine, Donne, and Taylor demonstrate how only appealing to the there and then can make sense of the here and now. One might suppose that Greer could better support his argument had he treated at least one figure dated later than the seventeenth century, but he explains his choices as partly based on familiarity and partly "because their thought remains uncluttered by critical preoccupations with historicity and with how to affirm religious claims in the context ofpurely empirical worldviews" (7). In...