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invalidates those of the Jews (as one might learn from Justin Martyrs Dialogueswith Trypho, the Jew). Instead, Seitz argues that Christs Advent did not sum up allthat Isaiah had given witness to. The full majesty of Christs being is not revealedapart from the witness of Israel. Advent, in the early church, was a season of

penitential longing for the Kingdom, not simply a celebration of the miracle ofincarnation. The first advent of Christ has not sewn together all the loose ends of thepromises made to Israel. For those both Jew and Christian stand in hope.

Seitz frequently talks of the combustion that occurs when the Old and NewTestaments are combined. This combustion does not occur because the New hastrumped the Old or sorted out the Old into its wheat and chaff (a canon within thecanon). It occurs because the reader discovers the necessity of hearing each one interms of the other. We get numerous adumbrations of how this combustion occurs;we must await a further book to see the idea spelled out in the detail it deserves.

Gary A. Anderson

Harvard Divinity School45 Francis Ave.Cambridge, MA 02138USA

Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection: Excursions in the Phenomenologyand Philosophy of Religion by Louis Dupr (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998) ix + 147 pp.

As I recall, Professor Dupr was in the middle of teaching us about St. Francis andhis sense of deep communion with the whole creationpreaching to birds and fishincluded. And then with a twinkling nonchalance we had all come to recognize asthe sign of an imminent bon mot, Dupr added, Well, I like fish too, especially if theyare lightly breaded and sautd. That class was a good while ago, but Dupr has lostnone of his delight in the ironic tugging of the divine upon normal humanexperience. Indeed, his latest volume could well be described as an attempt to specifyhow exactly we might notice and understand the peculiar ways in which Gods lifetakes shape in ours. Less a historical argument than his Passage to Modernity (1993)and less concentrated as phenomenological analysis than The Other Dimension (1972),

the present collection of essays nevertheless serves a highly useful purpose indrawing together two potent conversations many of us are willy nilly part of atthe moment. The first of these revolves around the problems of theological knowing,around the question of whether theology does indeed overcome metaphysics(Milbank) and set us free from its traps, around the question of whether theology canfind a way of doing so that does not effectively hermeticize it from contemporaryculture. The second, and obviously related, conversation has to do with the spiritualhunger of contemporary culture, with its numb, even autistic, secularity, and whetherthe mystical traditions of negative theology might not afford Christianity a speakingplace that is both within the cultures range of hearing but also faithful to the revela-tion of God in Christ.

The essays, which in their original form appeared between 19801992, have beenrationally ordered into three sections, moving from questions of method, and theanalysis of specifically religious symbolization, to studies of religious experience.There is some overlap, repetition, and, as Dupr himself notes, quite a range oftechnical theological proficiency demanded of the reader (i.e., dont hand this bookto first year theology students unless theyre heavy Husserl readers).

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In some ways the first essay, Phenomenology of Religion: Limits and Pos-sibilities, is the most important of the volume. Dupr here directs his insight intophenomenological approaches to religion towards a new theological turn. For heworks to undo our theology vs. philosophy knots by directing our gaze along a

phenomenological track back into a classical Christian position: The truth of faithinduces a compelling inner evidence that initiates a never-ending search for under-standing. In contrast to this theory of illumination, modern philosophy had increas-ingly emphasized the constitutive role of the subject. Despite his own Kantianconnections, Husserls concept ofWesensschau prepared the highly modified versionof the older theory that Heidegger and other phenomenologists developed in theirnotion of truth as disclosure. A process of cognition that results in an intuition ofwhat is essential in the appearances shares a fundamental assumption with theancient illumination theory, namely, that in truth the real discloses itselfit appearswith its own evidence. The road to the evidential intuition may be paved by thetranscendental subject, but in the final intuition, reality genuinely discloses itself

(p. 17). This passage sets the trajectory for much of the book, a search for the signs,fully observable in contemporary culture, which on closer inspection reveal them-selves as signals of transcendence. The following essay on theological models fortruth in relation to the usual philosophical approaches is a highly useful introductionto the idea of religious disclosure and might become a staple of theological method

bibliographies. Readers will want to follow up Duprs own considerable insightshere with some further investigation of work by Robert Sokolowski, Jean-LucMarion, and of course von Balthasar. The final essay on theodicy was clarifying butless original.

The second section on symbolization begins with a brief essay elucidating vonBalthasars theological aesthetics and is followed (not surprisingly) by one on dramaand ritual as the most concrete examples of divine expressivity in human form. Ifound both of these to be lucid and helpful but wished Dupr had allowed himselfto push his surveying a bit farther, back into more overt conversation with thephenomenological method he considered earlier. If these chapters were meant asexamples of that method in practice (as Dupr suggests in his introduction), then I atleast needed a bit more in the way of explanatory apparatus, noting the process (theart?) by which he moves from one stage of analysis to the next. The final essay in thesection, Negative Theology and Religious Symbols, is both substantial and deeplyilluminating. Dupr has always managed to put his theological perceptions in thecontext of acute readings of modern culture and he does so here to fine effect.

Modernitys reduction of all the phenomena to mathematized bits has made anoverarching sense of reality almost impossible to re-capture. Dupr sees this not interms of a standard postmodern view regarding the inescapability of language but asa warning against taking negative language positivistically. In other words, it is onething to defer meaning negatively, i.e., to engage in apophasis, but it is quite anotherto reify that deferral into a quasi-object, a permanent negativity conveniently cap-tured in our non-speech about it. Dupr directs our attention to the contrary insist-ence among mystical theologians that ultimate reality is not simply an endlessexperience of negativity, but a realitybeyond any affirmation of ours. At this point,again, the theology of disclosure comes to our assistance, sensitizing us to the realpossibility of divine speech coming to expression precisely in our human inarticulacy.

The final section opens with Duprs thoughts on the relationship betweenexperience and interpretation as those issues arise in his consideration of EdwardSchillebeeckxs theology. This essay does not engage enough of the present dis-cussion to merit great attention. The last two essays make an extremely powerfulconclusion, discussing both mystical consciousness in the Western tradition and thepossible openings for a retrieval of that form of consciousness in contemporary

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culture. Especially crucial here are Duprs quite outstanding observations on thenature of mystical knowledge. I think his interpretation offers fertile ground for botha Trinitarian epistemology and an apophatic anthropology.

This is a wise and thought-provoking collection, only perhaps let down a bit by

the tendency to call a halt in each essay before all the implications had been fullyexplored. It will be a highly useful volume in graduate seminars and would make agood book for collegial departmental conversations.

Mark A. McIntoshLoyola University ChicagoTheology Department6525 N. Sheridan RoadChicago, Illinois 60626USA

Christian Justice and Public Policy by Duncan B. Forrester (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997) xiv + 274 pp.

Duncan Forrester begins, This book has been some time in gestation (p. xiii). Theinvestment shows. Christian Justice and Public Policy is valuable for its framing of themost significant issues in the relations between theology, theories of justice, andpublic policy. Despite this value, for which I recommend it, this book is not thewatershed-making volume projected by its agenda.

Forresters thesis, putting aside his cautious hedging, promises to show thatdistinctive Christian insights into justice can contribute constructively to theor-etical discussions which undergird policy and to policy itself (pp. 3637). Forrester

believes that theology has been systematically excluded from public discourseregarding justice and public policy (p. 24). Bereft of insights from theology, the mostprominent theories of justice end up narrow and thin, inadequate to their task ofguiding public policy (p. 3). Forrester does not propose that persons or theories must

be Christian to be just, but he contends that Christian contributions are indispensableto fully just theories, policies, and practices.

Following an initial chapter that develops this thesis for a Christian theologicalcontribution to justice during a time when theology, he presumes, has been shut out

of public discourse, Forrester devotes a chapter to the currently futile quest for anobjective standard of justice. The extant secular theories of justice, Forrestermaintains, do not claim to offer conceptions of justice that are true or that extend

justice to the flourishing of victims of injustice and misfortune. Justice has becomerelative to the consensus in society and is insufficiently critical of the status quo. Thepoor are viewed as lamentable recipients of misfortune, a matter perhaps for pity andcharity but not for justice.

His theoretical assertions registered, Forrester turns to two policy issues: imprison-ment and poverty. These practical issues reveal, Forrester believes, how uncertainand thin theories of justice have failed to provide practical guidance. Forresterhelpfully discusses flaws in what he calls the treatment (rehabilitation) and justice

(retribution) models for imprisonment. He then turns to theological understandingsof guilt, forgiveness, and discipline. These theological resources, Forrester argues,push prison justice beyond fairness to include Gods mercy and love directed to ourcommon good. Unfortunately, Forrester does not demonstrate how these theologicalfragments should revise formerly flawed theories or practices. He leaves us withouta reconstructed model for prison justice.

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