Theological Studies 75 (4) reviewer agrees that (most of) Haer. 3 presupposes the Demonstration's arguments, and it therefore postdates the shorter treatise (68-69).Haer. 2-5 have a tripartite organization: one God, one Christ, one economy of salvation for the human (103). In Haer. 3-5 the discussion of all three topics is governed by the hermeneutical rule that the gospel proclaimed by the apostles must accord with the OT (chap. 3). By using this approach B. crucially reintegrates Irenaeus's theological themes, naturally dominant in his book, with the biblical interpretation lying at their heart. He rightly points out that the OT and the gospel reflect the single work of God in Christ, thus refuting Valentinian soteriology by the complete revelation of Christ in the cross and the salvation of the flesh, and refuting Marcionite limits of the canon to the gospel by Irenaeus's emphasis that the gospel can only be understood in the light of the OT (139).Reading this volume will demand a good deal from the "students and general readers" in its audience. This is not B.'s fault. The gap between Irenaeus's objectives in his own context and the later adaptations and use of his work is long-standing. Despite its apparent familiarity, Irenaeus's work still grows "strangely unfamiliar" on closer reading (206) because it seems turned upside down. It requires patient reading. The book maps out a path that clarifies Irenaeus's thought.
Being Promised is the first book by Gregory Walter and the latest addition to Eerdmans' ecumenical Sacra Doctrina series, comprised of monographs (among which are Miroslav Volf's After Our Likeness and S. Mark Heim's The Depths of the Riches) that treat theological challenges posed by postmodern culture and its questions. Walter begins by making a distinctively Lutheran identification of God's promise as the mode of God's interactions with the world and constitutive of the mission of the church, and Walter proposes to renew theological attention to promise by considering it as gift. That gift-exchange is a practice and that the gift has been a topic of focus for recent studies in phenomenology, continental philosophy, and cultural anthropology allow Walter to attempt a post-foundationalist and post-metaphysical theology of promise. By his argument, the lack of agreement on criteria in the contemporary world necessitates that theology aim at "establish[ing] the truth of Christian claims and practices on the basis of their success in a pluralistic setting" (4).Walter defines promise as a "doubled and extended" gift; it is doubled insofar as both the initial pledge and its fulfillment are given and extended in that the gift occupies the temporal distention between these two (6). Chapter 2 attempts to find a fitting grammar of the gift using the promise made to Abraham and Sarah by the LORD at Mamre as a test case. The "archaic" sort of gift described by Mauss functions by obligation of the recipient to return a counter-gift; its reciprocity tends towards agonism and domination and so cannot be conceptually adequate to explain the LORD's promises as gift. Derrida's counter-proposal of a "pure" gift that remains "oblique" to all economies of exchange is rejected as well, precisely because so pure a gift would forbid the muddiness constitutive of real relations between the LORD's promise and human economies of "impure" gift-exchange. The promise is sturdy enough to withstand implication in exchange, but more fragile than the unilateral pure gift that depends only on the intention of the giver and not on the trust of the recipient (21). More attractive is Milbank's concept of the "purified" gift that retains the reciprocity of archaic gifts but loses their competitive function and conductivity towards violence. Yet this also fails adequately to describe how promise functions as gift because Walter still wishes to see the promise as having a "unilateral dimension," demanding no return and being "offered on its own" in its extension from initial pledge to eventual fulfillment (33). Locating the type of gift that constitutes the promise between "pure" and "purified," Walter asserts that its function in being given is to unfold possibility between being and non-being. Because of the temporal extension of the promise between token and fulfillment, the degree of "being" of the initial pledge depends on the trust or suspicion with which the recipients regard it.This relation of the promise to time is explored further in Chapte...
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