Much in this book is extremely valuable. Stamps demonstrates an excellent understanding of Torrance's theology of the eucharist as that is based in his Christology and ultimately in his understanding of the Trinity. In this doctoral dissertation completed in 1986 there is a deep awareness of some of the most important aspects of Torrance's thought, presented with detailed and sometimes tedious precision. While there may be a question about whether or not Torrance's trinitarian theology is reliably presented without reference to his three major works on the Trinity, published between 1988 and 1996, Stamps was able to glean enough of an understanding from Torrance's previous writings and several personal interviews with Torrance to present a thorough, if somewhat dated picture, of how Torrance's thinking about the eucharist is grounded in his understanding of God and Christ.

In five chapters, beginning with a fine discussion of how Torrance's theological epistemology structures his view of the Trinity and how we participate in God's self-knowledge through union with Christ in the Spirit, Stamps introduces the main themes of Torrance's approach: a realistic view of Christ's real spiritual presence, not to be confused with the elements themselves but to be understood as Christ's making himself present through the elements by the miraculous action of the Holy Spirit; a discussion of Torrance's opposition to Augustinian dualism as well as his positive view of analogy; and his consistent effort to distinguish without separating Christ's own divinity and humanity (via the homoousion), and analogously to maintain a similar relation between the sacramental actions of the church in its acts of worship and the act of grace in its identity with the Giver (Christ). I especially liked Stamps’ discussion of why Torrance rejected the notion of created grace and how his view differed from other views; also the discussion of why Torrance rejects Apollinarianism and Pelagianism. One of the best sections of the book is the discussion of the christological basis for understanding what happens in the church's celebration of the eucharist. That is matched by the chapter discussing eucharistic real presence and sacrifice. Stamps demonstrates clearly how and why Torrance's sacramental theology is considered by some today to be one of the most significant presentations since the Reformers themselves; it avoids the idea of a sacramental universe but emphasises that we must share in the mind of Christ in order to worship the Father in, with and through the risen, ascended and advent Lord. That is indeed quite an achievement by Torrance. One comes away from this book with a deeper appreciation of the complexity of Torrance's thought about how the doctrine of God and the eucharist interconnect via Christology and pneumatology.

The last chapter offers a critical appraisal of Torrance's work, and here problems arise. Stamps gave hints of his criticisms earlier, claiming that Torrance's theology remains ‘safe’ because it operates on the assumption that Jesus is truly divine and truly human; by assuming the divinity of Christ as the factor which gives meaning to his human history, Torrance is preserved from having to demonstrate Jesus’ significance for faith from history. Stamps reckons that Torrance's theology depends ‘not nearly so much upon the observable reality of Christ . . . as upon the unobservable theoretical side, or upon the interpretation of that historical reality by the theology of the Church’ (p. 49). This kind of thinking, however, slips right past Torrance's most substantial point, namely, that one cannot engage in serious theology except in faith by allowing the historical Jesus, who was and is the Word, to dictate one's interpretation; thus what is ‘unobservable’ is not the ‘theoretical side’ of history, but the actual Word of God acting within history. Hence, Jesus’ significance for faith is not dependent upon the interpretation of his history, but upon who he is as the incarnate Word. Stamps hesitates to presume consistently the divinity of Christ when thinking about Jesus’ history. Yet for Torrance, without that constant ‘presumption’, we would substitute ourselves or our view of history for Jesus himself, thus calling into question the very basis of theology itself.

This may explain why Stamps criticises Torrance for not finding Christ's ‘substantial’ presence in the bread and wine. He thinks Torrance's view is a kind of ‘transinstrumentation’ (p. 242). Though Stamps claims that Torrance has no notion of Christ's bodily presence in the eucharist, Torrance actually insists that the visible church is ‘the earthly-historical form of the existence of Jesus Christ’ as it is united to its heavenly head through the Spirit without any confusion or separation of the visible church, including the eucharistic elements, from the ascended Christ. Torrance took the empirical correlates of Christ's presence seriously without focusing on them, but instead focusing on the risen, ascended and coming Lord who, as the one high priestly mediator, enables our worship. When Stamps wonders whether or not we can really know God in himself and whether or not the incarnate Word can be understood to be truly present to the church (pp. 252ff.), one wonders whether he really appreciated the full depth of Torrance's trinitarian understanding of the sacrament.

Stamps’ accusations of ‘christological monarchianism’, a collapse of pneumatology into Christology, a kind of latent Augustinian dualism and a type of modalism all manifest a less than adequate understanding of Torrance's trinitarian theology. Many of his criticisms of Torrance's trinitarian theology are based on assumptions which Torrance consistently and rightly opposed, namely, that the Spirit's significance can be considered apart from the Son; that the principle of the Godhead is to be found in the person of the Father rather than in the being of the Father; and that Christ's vicarious representation of us before the Father displaces our response. A study of Torrance's books on the Trinity may have helped Stamps to see more clearly how and why Torrance could adopt the views of Athanasius and others in the East while remaining faithful both to his Reformed heritage and to the thinking of Augustine and Hilary in the West.