Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Christian Thought at McGill University. In his latest book, Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology, Farrow engages in sustained ‘negotiations’ around nature and grace as they appear in many sites, such as theology and philosophy, sacraments and atonement. Farrow's writing style is energetic and often polemical. In my view, the latter tendency clouds these negotiations, many of which appear staged to support Farrow's increasingly rigid moral and political arguments.

Farrow's first essay, ‘Theology and Philosophy: Recovering the Pax Thomistica’, lays the groundwork for much of what will be argued in subsequent chapters. Farrow sets up a conversation between Kant, Barth and Thomas Aquinas on what can be known by means of reason. Farrow sides with Aquinas and critiques Barth for his failure to recognise the gratuity that inheres in nature and the concomitant possibility for knowledge of God through God's creative acts. Were this critique and the Thomistic modification left here, there would be little to find objectionable. However, Farrow goes on to introduce a genealogy to Barth's error, and it is one that he will make use of throughout the book as he lumps together various theological and social positions across centuries that he does not like. Farrow locates in Barth a heresy deriving from nominalism (p. 23) and argues that Barth relegates reason outside the sphere of theology to the degree that philosophy can serve no other purpose than as an occasional pursuit. According to Farrow, Barth's project represents a ‘theological totalism’ (p. 23). Farrow's own conceptualisation of the relationship between theology and philosophy is supposedly much more eirenic, drawing from Aquinas a view of the relationship as a ‘cooperative and peaceful cohabitation, as a respected border’ (p. 27). When Farrow enumerates the kind of philosophy that exists at the border of theology, he avers that such a philosophy must necessarily be ‘the pursuit of clarity about ourselves, our world, and our place in it, for the sake of the good life’ (p. 28).

According to Farrow philosophy and theology are to be done within a commonwealth of ‘angels ascending and descending’ (p. 32), united in faith as in reason. At this point, one might ask the question that both Kant and Barth suggest: what of the critical natures of philosophy and theology? In profoundly different manners, Kant and Barth both alert us to the reality of human error, particularly human arrogance, and how our metaphysical projects have about them invariably an aspect of hubris. Indeed, Barth particularly enjoins us to consider dialectically the ‘strange new world’ of the Bible and its distance from human conceptions and programmes for the good life.

For Farrow, the institution of the church and the capacity for human reason are chastened to be sure by christology, yet where this chastening occurs is all too predictable. It lands squarely on those sites where Farrow avers that autonomy – the ‘treacherous’ (p. 195) descendant of nominalism – reigns supreme: abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage and transgender rights. ‘The autonomy principle acts like an acid to dissolve what remains of the moral and cultural fabric of Christianity’ (p. 188). At this point, one wonders what is driving Farrow's theological negotiations. Is it his theological vision of the good life or is it his trenchant animus toward liberalism?

Farrow offers more clues about what else does not belong to commonwealth of the elect, including Islam ‘that great falsification of biblical religion’ (p. 248). Yet who manages to escape Farrow's winnowing fork? According to the concluding chapter, ‘The Gift of Fear’, it is those who fear God appropriately:

Those who fear God, in other words, are emboldened not to fear political correctness, or the suffering of LGBTQ folk, or the agony of the dying. Their fear is rooted squarely in fear of God and the threat of divine judgement that such a God wields. As for me, I fear the renewed confidence and proliferation of such theological negotiations and I fear the earthly judgement that inspires them.