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  • Children of God in the World: An Introduction to Theological Anthropology by Paul O'Callaghan
  • Jacob W. Wood
Children of God in the World: An Introduction to Theological Anthropology. By Paul O'Callaghan. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 595. $39.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2900-3.

English-language graduate courses in theological anthropology have been in want of a good textbook for years. Rondet's has long been out of print; Journet's and Hardon's, while excellent in themselves, contain neither the detail nor the depth that a graduate course requires; and other significant contributions to the subject area have tended toward addressing one or more particular areas of controversy (e.g., the relationship between nature and grace, or the complementarity of man and woman) rather than theological anthropology as a whole. The prospect of filling this void is daunting for any author. As O'Callaghan notes in this book (18), the treatise on theological anthropology may be a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of theology, built on the backs of a collection of Scholastic treatises, but in its brief lifespan it has been asked to address such wide-ranging topics as biblical criticism, gender theory, hermeneutics, and neuroscience. O'Callaghan's textbook is thus as welcome as it is ambitious, providing a complete overview of the treatise on theological anthropology in its current form, doing justice to the myriad of interdisciplinary fields with which it has come into contact in the last half century, and offering the studious reader a series of generous bibliographies in its notes that touch on nearly every topic of importance or controversy that it addresses.

Part 1 ("Methodological Considerations": chaps. 1-3) situates O'Callaghan's approach to theological anthropology within the wider fields of social anthropology, philosophy, and theology. From the start, we see the breadth of O'Callaghan's erudition, as he places the book's subject on a map of contemporary thought that stretches from Scholastic theology to the history of religions to important works of literature from any number of periods, languages, and cultures. Within this broad field, O'Callaghan orients himself by dividing the scientific question of "what" human nature is (18-20) from the philosophical and theological question of "who" human persons are (21-25, 33). O'Callaghan argues that, by focusing on the concrete situation of the human species, reflection on human nature fails to account for the transcendent aspirations of human persons towards immortality (16); by studying what is determined and [End Page 481] universal in human nature, it fails to account adequately for the uniqueness and liberty of human persons (22-24); by focusing on knowledge outside the context of love, it risks turning knowledge into a means of domination (27). A phenomenological approach to the experience of human persons overcomes these limitations, but even then, unaided reason encounters certain "binomials" of human experience that appear mysteriously irreconcilable (26): the relationships between concreteness and transcendence, universality and uniqueness, determination and freedom, and knowledge and love (24-25, 31-33). In this context, the person of Jesus Christ "reveals man to himself" (Gaudium et Spes 22, quoted on 64), not only in the sense of revealing the healing of human nature by grace and its elevation to glory, but even revealing the very intelligibility of human nature as such: only "Christ, the incarnate Logos, is the one who gives a unitary and harmonic intelligibility … to human nature" (80-81).

Part 2 ("The Historical Development of the Doctrine of Grace": chaps. 4-11) begins with a nuanced meditation on the imago Dei in Scripture (chap. 4). Honing in on the patristic distinction between image and likeness, while ably placing it in the context of contemporary biblical scholarship (93-95), O'Callaghan sees in the term imago two important aspects of human existence: the human person is filial (in relation to God) and social (in relation to other human persons) (96). While the imago Dei is present equally in all human persons (98-99), Part 4 ("Christian Anthropology": chaps. 18-25), which addresses a range of disputed questions about the imago Dei, suggests...

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