Martin Poulsom's Dialectics of Creation proposes and successfully demonstrates “a relational dialectic of creation as a hermeneutic, not only for Schillebeeckx's thought, but for a philosophical theology which follows in his footsteps” (xi). In a manner that mirrors the narrative strategy of Schillebeeckx himself, Poulsom leads the reader through the steps of his own investigative process, beginning with a survey of contemporary thought about God and the world, and continuing with a comparative analysis of the creation accounts of Schillebeeckx and Burrell. Finding the hoped-for functional complementarity between the two disrupted in his examination of dialectic, Poulsom expresses a preference for the philosophical theology of Schillebeeckx. While the second half of the book primarily engages Schillebeeckx in relation to Thomas Aquinas, Poulsom maintains a robust dialogue with Burrell as well as other significant interlocutors.
Chapter 4 is pivotal to Poulsom's study, providing the substantial core of his analysis of what Schillebeeckx's “relational dialectic” is and how it shapes his philosophical theology. In the first section of this chapter he critically engages Schillebeeckx's method of correlation, praxis as the relation of theory and practice, and the relational dialectic of mysticism and politics. The second section of chapter 4, subtitled “Humanism,” importantly deals with Schillebeeckx's manner of speaking of humanization in dialogue with secular humanism. Here Poulsom analyzes the relational dialectic of finitude and contingency in Schillebeeckx's thought, emphasizing his assertion of the distinction between the believer's experience of contingency and that of the nonbeliever. Poulsom's analysis here reveals potent resources in Schillebeeckx's work for today's increasingly complex conversation between religion and science where creation is concerned.
The third and final section of chapter 4 engages Schillebeeckx's Sequela, extrapolating from Schillebeeckx's reflection on the Christian life as a sequela Jesu to an analysis of Schillebeeckx's own work as both a sequela Aquinas and a sequela Irenaeus. Poulsom sees in Schillebeeckx a sequela Aquinas in the sense of a “critical correlation of continuity and change” (145). That is, Schillebeeckx creatively interprets Aquinas in dialogue with the time and place in which he is writing. Poulsom thus engages the notion of sequela as an example of what Schillebeeckx means when he says that “structural continuity may be best expressed in and through conjunctural breaks.” From here, he devotes his final two chapters to the development of a “Schillebeeckian approach to theology in which relational dialectic can play a key role” (149).
If chapter 4 provides the pivotal substance of Poulsom's understanding of relational dialectic in Schillebeeckx's theology, chapters 5 and 6 offer his own creative constructions of a Schillebeeckian relational dialectic, first retrospectively, then prospectively. Retrospectively, Poulsom offers a reading of Aquinas on analogy that he terms Schillebeeckian because of Aquinas' use of mediated immediacy and relational dialectic, and the presence of continuity and change in his examples of analogical predication. That is, in Aquinas, Poulsom finds the continuity and breaks that Schillebeeckx deems essential to genuine orthodoxy. Poulsom defends his reading of Aquinas as a Schillebeeckian retrospect through engagement with Schillebeeckx's own material on analogy in Aquinas, which he maintains needs to be modified in order to defend Schillebeeckx fully. This correction and completion of the master's work he proposes as his own sequela Schillebeeckx.
Prospectively, chapter 6 “considers the possibilities disclosed by the theme of participation in God, particularly with regard to divine and human action, the interaction of freedom and commitment, and God's knowledge of creaturely action” (11). Here Poulsom emphasizes the seamlessness of theological themes made possible by relational dialectic. In particular, he demonstrates how creation and salvation, and humanization and divinization, respectively, are linked in Schillebeeckx's theology. These moves serve on the one hand to diffuse the disagreement among Schillebeeckx scholars as to whether creation or salvation is primary in Schillebeeckx's work, and on the other to open a path to interreligious dialogue on the basis of creation-faith.
In sum, Poulsom's philosophically nuanced study offers a much-needed classically oriented Schillebeeckian foundation for exploring the most controversial theological questions evoked by creation science today.
