The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

BOOK REVIEWS 657 pattern of God-creature causality; essential to recognizing them as such are religious significance and personal witness. This work has much to recommend it. It deserves serious thought and discussion. The author proposes his views carefully and modestly. Occasionally his treatment lacks the depth necessary to his subject; for example, in a discussion of the unity and distinction of beings in preparation for a treatment of divine immanence and transcendence, he has no exposition of the question of relations, which surely are essential to the matter. But such defects are few, and the work as a whole manifests theological and metaphysical competence of a high degree. Jesuit School of Theology Berkeley, California JoHN H. WRIGHT, S. J. A Process Christology. By David Griffin. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973. Pp. ~73. $10.95. According to David Griffin, the task of contemporary theology is "to formulate a conceptuality of God, man, and the world that will be compatible with our modern knowledge and relevant to our sensibilities." (165) Faithful to this task, he makes available to the world of theology the first full-scale Christology based on the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. The formal thesis of his work is that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a conceptuality appropriate to the Christian faith. For Griffin, such a conceptuality " allows one to maintain both his formal commitment to rationality and his substantive conviction as to the truth of the essentials of Christian faith." (10) A key element in the development of his Christology and, in the opinion of this reviewer, a key element in appreciating its inadequacy, is his acceptance of Whitehead's definition: " the essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world." (164) This definition makes Revelation the central notion for understanding Christianity. Griffin admits that it "was not a central category for explicating Jesus' significance in the New Testament," (19) but he holds that in the modern situation "Jesus can only be understood as ' savior ' if he is seen as the decisive clue to the nature of reality." (~0) He begins his study by considering various problems with the concept of Revelation in the context of four modern theologians: Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. In the first four chapters he shows how all of their theologies are inadequate for resolving these problems and, in fact, attempt to avoid these problems both by driving a wedge between faith and reason and by minimizing the role 658 BOOK REVIEWS of doctrinal ideas in the working out of salvation. Nevertheless, Griffin shows that in each of them essential aspects of their theologies demand that faith be reasonable and, further, that doctrinal ideas are really more central to their soteriologies than they explicitly admit. Significantly, Griffin deliberately avoided consideration of Karl Barth since he " rejected the aim of trying to make the Christian doctrine of revelation intelligible ." (11) In the fifth chapter Griffin outlines a new approach which, as it is worked out in the remaining five chapters, will offer a satisfactory solution to the problems with Revelation. The first problem he considers is how theology can be both rational and adequate to Christian faith. The former would seem " to imply that theology cannot be based on Revelation," while the latter "demands that it must be." (139) Griffin, however, points out that every philosophical position is based on a value judgment, i.e., some limited aspect of reality is taken to be the most important clue to the understanding of all reality. Christian philosophy, then, is no less rational when it is based on judgments made in the light of the Christ event as the decisive revelation of reality. Revelation is not, however, to be equated with explicit doctrines, rather it is an intuition, a vision of reality brought to expression in Jesus. According to Jesus' underlying vision of reality " God works on man in the present, calling him to participate in his purpose for the world, life under God's rule." (204) Throughout history theologians have struggled with a dilemma: how to conceptualize the Christian vision of reality by means...