286 REVIEWS The God of Jesus Christ. By WALTER KASPER. Pp. x + 404. London: SCM Press, 1984. Paperback £12-50. THE trend seems to be these days to write a book on Jesus and follow it quickly with a book on the Trinity. W. Kasper apologizes for the delay in the appearance of his book, on God and the Trinity, and explicitly thanks his assistants for making its appearance Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/37/1/286/1681944 by guest on 24 September 2021 possible even now. Can one detect the development of yet another trend in this area of theology? This is to the best of my knowledge the third book on the Trinity which opens with an account of modern atheism in the belief that the doctrine of Trinity is not simply the only accept- able Christian doctrine of God, but the best answer to modern atheism. Thereafter W. Kasper continues as usual with, in Part 2, chapters on God the Father Almighty, on Jesus Christ, Son of God, and on The Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life, and in Part 3 he turns his full attention to the history and exposition of the Trinitarian Mystery of God. A familiar sequence indeed, and yet it is quite impossible to recommend this book to any serious reader, so serious and ubiquitous are its flaws. The book makes very difficult reading; one cannot help being reminded of Hans Kiing's jibe that some of his fellow theologians wrote 'theological Chinese'. The German habit of internal foot- notes is once again carried over into English publishing practice. These, together with some sixty pages of footnotes, are no doubt meant to give an impression of scholarship, a facile impression as it turns out, but they make the reading of the book like a passage in a sail-boat which every ten minutes encounters a large patch of sea-weed. So every ten minutes one has to slog through extremely dense surveys of thinkers and movements which read like the Pro- fessor's notes (or his assistants'), and all too seldom offer any real scholarly insight. Too often they yield a facile gain for the author's argument or, if the content is not to his liking, far too facile a rebuttal. The composition ot the book is suggestive of tne scissors and paste method, and this results in persistent repetitiveness. Exactly the same six-line quotation from Nietzsche appears on pp. 11 and 41 at almost exactly the same position on the page. And the little pseudo-argument that if God is not immanently Trinitarian, in the required 'interpersonal' sense, he is either 'solitary' or dependent in some unseemly way on us, is repeated ad nauseam. On p. 306 'narcissistic' is added to 'solitary', for good measure one presumes, and on p. 188 we are told 'a non-trinitarian purely monotheistic God would in fact have to be declared dead'. REVIEWS 287 And this leads to the final general observation that throughout this book the quality of argument leaves much to be desired, in the presentation of historical or scriptural data, in critical acumen, and in logic. In the first part, on modern atheism and answers to it, W. Rasper's chosen stance is that of fides quaerens intellectum, and his request is for intellectual honesty. But he seems quite unclear about Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/37/1/286/1681944 by guest on 24 September 2021 his starting-point. On p. 78 this starting-point is the definitive truth which comes in Jesus Christ; on p. 81 'we must take as our point of departure a general understanding of experience' and we can apparently use the transcendental argument, the alleged transcendental condition of the possibility of thought and even of language, to have belief in God as quickly and as cheaply as Rahner ever had it. He does go on to an answer to atheism 'not in terms of religious experience . . ., but in the light of reason' (p. 99) and so to the tradi- tional proofs. But the cosmological class of proofs turns again into the assertion that we are confronted with a 'groundless ground', 'the absolutely groundless', 'the ultimate ground', which we must trust (p. 103); the anthropological class of argument leads by means of similar forms of transcendental reasoning to something or apparently somebody called 'absolute freedom'; the argument from the philosophy of history leads from partial meaning to unconditional meaning ... all the same kind of thing we find in Rahner, Gilkey, and so on, except that it is much more muddled here. Finally, the ontological argument 'to which all the other arguments boil down' (p. 109), turns into a mixture of Augustinian illumination theory and belief in the image of God in us, and all this leads hastily, too hastily, to the next part, on the self-revelation of this mysterious God. The chapter on God the Father which opens Part 2 is the least problematic. But the chapter on Jesus Christ raises, once again, all the old problems about the acquisition of exegetical data, about critical sense, and logic. The admission that strictly Messianic hope may not be central to the Old Testament and that Jesus did not see himself as Messiah leads far too facilely a few pages later to the assertions that 'all the major lines of the Old Testament tradition converge in the expectation of a Messiah' and 'all these movements find their fulfilment in Jesus' (p. 116). Critical acumen is clearly missing from such assertions as 'talk of the Son being sent by the Father clearly presupposes the pre-existence of the Son' (p. 175). In general the difficult problems of pre-existence and divine status for Jesus are most unimpressively tackled. Schillebeeckx's books are dutifully referred to in footnotes, as 288 REVIEWS 'scholarship' requires, but W. Kasper has either not read them or he has learned nothing from them. The chapter on the Holy Spirit simply lumps together great batteries of texts from Old and New Testament in order to yield the distinct, personal Trinitarian Spirit which W. Kasper clearly requires; there is little or no sign of critical discrimination of source material, and not much sign of traditional difficulties which the Fathers themselves had with the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/37/1/286/1681944 by guest on 24 September 2021 distinct, personal, divine Spirit or which moderns have, say, with the status of Spirit in Paul. Finally, in Part 3 the New Testament is once again plundered for texts which are to 'prove' that it is explicit about three divine persons in one God, for W. Kasper is convinced that we cannot deduce the immanent Trinity from the economic Trinity (p. 276); although the 'transcendental-condition-of-the-possibility-of' kind of argument which throughout the book can yield almost anything one wants from it, is used in this part also to yield eternal procession because of temporal procession (p. 278). But in this final part it is surely W. Kasper's mastery of the historical development of Trinitarian doctrine that is most severely suspect. Not only are all the old caricatures firmly in place (Neoplatonists are 'purely' philosophical and it is Arius who is the arch, if not sole Hellenizer), but the use of 'consubstantial', of distinctions of immanent and economic, and the veiling of subordinationism, in reference to pre- Nicene theology is quite persistent. The recent work of scholars like Stead and Wiles is very necessary to this systematician, but it is not in evidence. His Trinity in the end is one of 'three subjects who are reciprocally conscious of each other by reason of one and the same consciousness which the three subjects 'possess', each in his own proper way' (p. 289), for the sorry little pseudo-argument already referred to above drives W. Kasper as close to a social doctrine of Trinity as Moltmann might wish, yet he shows little sense of the problems about divine unity which Moltmann tackled (though Moltmann's book also dutifully appears in the footnotes) and which indeed are endemic to this model. There is no doubt about the fact that modern theology can recover a Trinitarian doctrine from those early centuries and refurbish it, or replace it if that is thought preferable, today. W. Kasper's book does little or nothing towards such a project, and it is so similar in style to so much of the systematic theology published in Germany just now that it raises a serious question for British publishers: can they really afford to waste any of the presumably scarce resources of the small but successful theological publishing industry in this country on translations of such work? On the one hand, working scholars in this country who may feel they have to read such work could REVIEWS 289 presumably manage it in the original. On the other, it is difficult to believe that there are too few theologians in this country who could do better, or could do enough to keep the natives well supplied with reading material. J. P. MACKEY

La Eucaristia, Misterio de Comunion. By M. GESTEIRA GARZA. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jts/article/37/1/286/1681944 by guest on 24 September 2021 Pp. 670. (Academia Christiana, 18.) Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 1983. N.p. THE time is ripe for the writing of a comprehensive theological study of the Eucharist that will take account of modern scriptural, historical, and liturgical scholarship, as well as of recent systematic studies and ecumenical dialogue. Garza's learned and lucid study is perhaps the best answer to the need that has so far been written. The author's fundamental insight is that the Eucharist should be understood in the light of Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God in terms of an eschatological banquet, which he anticipated in his meals with his disciples, above all the Last Supper and the occasions when he shared food with them after the resurrection. The Eucharist is accordingly not the mere commemoration of a past sacrifice, nor the mere'local presence of the Body and the Blood, nor the mere individual presence of the historical Jesus, but the personal and active presence of the sacrificed and risen and total Christ, who, as Lord of all creation, brings the Church and the Church's gifts of bread and wine into communion with himself. Transubstantiation is therefore the consequence of this dynamic presence of Christ's sacrifice, not the cause of it. Transubstantiation is in the first instance the incorporation of the Church into the risen Christ, and only secondarily the transformation of all creation, including that of the gifts of bread and wine which are the first- fruits. The Eucharist is sacrificial in the sense that Christ makes the loving self-surrender of his life, death, and resurrection present, and incorporates into it the self-offering of the Church. Thus communion, transubstantiation, and sacrifice are simply three aspects of the one eschatological Eucharistic banquet. Garza's Eucharistic theology is based on a wide reading of primary and secondary sources. Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin are given full consideration, though unfortunately the same cannot be said of the writers of the English Reformation. One would have wished for fuller treatment of the link between the Eucharist and Jewish berakoth. In addition to Spanish, French, and German authors, reference is made to many English-speaking writers, e.g. R. E. Brown, R. J. Daly, C. Davis (whose name is systematically