Featuring more than fifty authors in nearly one thousand pages, this book aims “to provide a readable and dependable guide to the content of Catholic theology, and to introduce the different schools and debates of modern Catholic theology against the broader background of Catholic tradition” (viii). In light of this statement, I find that although this book contains many excellent chapters and provides a strong historical reference on Catholic teaching, it offers a partial and sometimes distorted picture of the Catholic theological landscape.
The book's greatest strengths lie in its analyses of the history of Catholic thought. Grant Kaplan and Holly Taylor Coolman's “The Development of Doctrine” provides an in-depth analysis of Newman's predecessors in the Tübingen School and offers resources for ressourcement that may inform contemporary reflection on doctrinal development. Gabriel Flynn's chapter, “Ressourcement and Theologies of Communion,” illuminates the contributions made by de Lubac and Congar to the Second Vatican Council—a topic of continuing discussion. Chapters on prayer, liturgy, devotions, monastic theology, and neo-Platonism likewise provide seedbeds for rediscovering lost threads and muted voices within the tradition.
The book's best chapters merge historical analysis with attention to the complex relationship between doctrine and theological reflection. In “Creation and Salvation,” John McDade concludes his presentation of Catholic teaching on these doctrines with a well-balanced look at Rahner's and Balthasar's views—somewhat of a rare occurrence in contemporary discourse. Readers can find similarly nuanced historical and theological analysis in Susan Wood's chapter, “Holy Orders,” Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt's “The Eucharist,” Joseph Wawrykow's “Grace and Justification,” David Cloutier's “Marriage and Sexuality,” and Roberto Goizueta's “Theologies of Liberation,” which presents the principles of liberation theology and magisterial critiques of liberationist thought as aspects of a generative moment in theological history that may provide a basis for reflection on the relationship between academic theology and doctrine today.
Yet on the whole, this book does not always demonstrate the balance and nuance of the chapters just named. Absent such balance, the book fails to achieve its aim of representing the “different schools and debates” that constitute Catholic theology. For example, despite the merits of his presentation of the hermeneutical frameworks that emerge from within Scripture itself, Matthew Levering concludes his chapter by lifting up the work of R. R. Reno and others on patristic exegesis and critiquing the historical-critical methods used by Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer. Levering is, of course, entitled to offer this view. But to do so without acknowledging the tremendous influence of Brown and Fitzmyer on both Catholic biblical scholarship and the Pontifical Biblical Commission is to distort the field. Similar but subtler moves reflect other biases, such as when Thomas Weinandy puts the word “salvific” in scare quotes in a discussion of non-Christian religions (180) or when Emery De Gaál details the historical usage of the terms “mediatrix” and “coredemptrix” without engaging the debates surrounding their use.
A second imbalance emerges in the book's androcentrism and Eurocentrism. Out of more than fifty authors, only about ten are women, and although scholars of color author excellent chapters on Catholic theology in Asia and Africa, they are absent in the bulk of the text. Engagement with the voices of women and scholars of color is also nearly nonexistent; glimpses of their great contributions to theology—as in Bauerschmidt's invocation of Julian of Norwich—come as breaths of fresh air. Moreover, although influential women theologians receive attention in Danielle Nussberger's chapter on feminist theology, they do not appear as showing any influence outside the feminist theological arena—a misrepresentation of the field. This perspectival limitation also manifests in the topics the book does not include. With very rare exceptions, analyses of gender, race, colonialism, mental health, dis/ability, ecology, science, and power are absent from this book's thousand pages.
These imbalances manifest even more strongly when one takes a bird's-eye view of the topics and thinkers that are and are not centered in the book's section on “Modern Catholic Thought.” Although entire chapters are dedicated to Catholic personalism, the theology of the body, and Balthasar, Rahner receives only a few pages of sustained attention—in very solid chapters by Declan Marmion and Peter Joseph Fritz—and Lonergan receives only three pages in the whole text. Nearly the same number of pages are devoted to a treatment of limbo in an early chapter. But this imbalance is not only an issue of quantity. In Durand's “The Trinity,” Rahner is invoked only to be dismissed on the way to an appreciation of Balthasar's theology. This is not to deny Balthasar's contributions. But in a handbook of Catholic theology, one would think that Rahner and Lonergan—and countless others—deserve comparable treatment.
In some ways, this all boils down to what one includes under the umbrella of “Catholic theology.” The editors speak of theology as consisting of “exploration” and “meditation” on Catholic teaching. The book's contents imply that Thomas, Balthasar, and official teaching provide the center of gravity for this endeavor. If one accepts this premise, this book succeeds. But if theology is considered in a broader sense, this book comes up quite short on several accounts. Still, this is a valuable historical resource that is well suited to libraries, and the suggestions for further reading and bibliographies that conclude each chapter offer helpful points of reference for research. Individual chapters may be suitable to undergraduate and graduate teaching and can provide foundations for further inquiry—but this book must, in my view, be supplemented and critically engaged if one is seeking a full and accurate portrait of Catholic theology.
