Louis Roy is a well-respected French Canadian Dominican teacher whose books on philosophy, theology, and religious experience evidence a wide range of learning and reflection. This short (40,000 words) paperback has that too, directed to explaining what he thinks Christian theology is, and how it should be done under the changed conditions of modernity, especially our sense of history, and of our own historicity. Humans look for meaning. ‘One desires understanding, asks about the truth-value of what one has grasped, and deliberates regarding one’s commitment. Theology is … a systematic exploration and enlargement of this quest for meaning, with sustained attention to text-interpretation, to historical oppositions and developments as well as to the affective and normative aspects of belief … This view of faith and theology invites us to focus, not on the objects which are studied, but on the enquiring subject that each of us is’ (p. x, with references to his account of ‘the inquiring subject as religious’ in his book Mystical Consciousness (2003), a dialogue with Japanese thinkers, and to his forthcoming Meaning in People’s Lives and in Human History). His greatest debt is surely to Bernard Lonergan on whose thought he has published a book (2016) and articles. That may account for his (perhaps questionable) title, with its mysterious italicized in. The sub-title ‘A few contributions’ indicates his strategy: to discuss, at times brilliantly (but too briefly) a selection of key thinkers with the focus on their hermeneutics. These follow a 15-page ‘chronological overview of Christian thinking’, which discusses patristic and monastic theology and ‘the scholastic mind’, plus ‘theology and modernity’ and ‘varieties of 20th century theology’ (in 3 pages), and chapters on ‘principles of Catholic theology’, on ‘thorny problems such as the plurality of theologies and the sources and the hierarchy of truth’. Chapters on Augustine and on Albert and Thomas are followed by Schleiermacher (on his hermeneutics, not his systematic theology), Lonergan himself, Ricoeur, (especially his expansions from experience to text, and from text to action) and on Congar and Claude Geffré, the former ‘surely a model for apprentices in theology’, the latter an impressive ‘expert in theological hermeneutics’.

The importance of the subject and the wealth of insights provided here deserve a bigger and better-signposted book. Roy’s choice of exemplars could be much larger, but cannot be faulted. They are all obviously worth extended discussion, and we write about what we know, and about the theologians from whom we have learned. But after two re-readings this reviewer was still frustrated, despite general agreement with his advocacy of moves to more hermeneutical theologies. It was hard not to feel lost in a maze and bombarded with observations that could be developed further and probably once were in lectures. For example, there is here good critique of most theological education outside religious communities, and especially (pp. 2–5) of our teaching the Bible without explicit reference to our own or students’ prayerful search for God and self-knowledge. Roy’s solution is surely right: to start where we and our students are, religiously (p. xiii). But in secular universities ‘the knowing that is there in their (or our) faith, love, and prayer’ cannot be presupposed. So we explain the texts and construct their probable contexts without much reference to how they connect with our own understandings of their (contested) subject-matter. But trying to communicate religious meanings of scripture from a standpoint outside the tradition risks trivialising these texts. How biblical study can be truly theological without compromising its academic integrity by diluting its historical and exegetical methods is a task for teachers of the sacred page to work out, but unlike St Thomas, Roy is professionally not a teacher of scripture. The ways in which many biblical scholars combine historical criticism with religious appropriation of theological meanings in New Testament theology is beyond the scope of this book. The issue surfaces clearly in the discussion of Augustine, but elsewhere at best indirectly. That may be too abstract to hold the readership that this topic needs and the book deserves.