Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar by Edward T. Oakes

Abstract

652 BOOK REVIEWS crediting casuistry for providing a way for Christians to make judgments about new and complex moral issues, and begin asking critical questions about the actual judgments themselves. Several of these essays, for example, seem to assume that the church's gradual lifting of the ban on usury was a positive development. The ban appears to be thoroughly irrelevant now, but whether or not this is a good thing is, of course, an open moral question. To Christians in the early modern period it may have made good sense to practice usury, if for no other reason than that their businesses would have folded without it. But we in this late-capitalist period are obliged to re-examine this issue, from a perspective that was not available back then. Was the church's acceptance of the practice of usury an instance of casuistry providing an effective means of dealing with a complex modern issue? Or was it an instance of casuistry facilitating the church's accommodation to the emergent capitalist order? The impression given in these essays is that the church's prohibition of usury was solely the product of an objectivist, essentialist, deductive, and rather useless methodology of moral reasoning. But perhaps this methodology should be read as a form of ecclesial resistance, albeit a theoretically problematic one, to an economic order that was replacing practices of production and exchange that were crucial for the flourishing of Christian life with a set of practices that were (and still are) corrosive to life in Christ. An opening for this line of reasoning emerges in several of the essays, which suggest that the primary social context within which casuistry is practiced is the church. This ecclesial setting is also brought into relief in the concluding call for further study of casuistry to be coupled with the recent retrieval of virtue ethics in the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition. With the practice of casuistry placed more firmly in an ecclesial setting, we will be able to avoid the pitfalls of both moral relativism and objectivism by embracing an historicized, metaphorical, and thus more malleable "nature," but one that is ordered to its supernatural end. Here the closing remark of Noonan's essay is pertinent: change has a place in traditional Catholic moral teaching-"if the principle of change is the person of Christ" (201). University ofNotre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana MICHAEL]. BAXTER, C.S.C. Pattern ofRedemption: The Theology ofHans Urs von Balthasar. By EDWARD T. OAKES. New York: Continuum, 1994. Pp. xii + 334. $29.50 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8264-0685-8 (cloth), 0-8264-1011-1 (paper). Pattern of Redemption may be the single most effective summary and presentation in English of Balthasar's massive work. The Mount Everest of BOOK REVIEWS 653 contemporary theology, it takes a while to climb up to Balthasar's level, as Lonergan said about St. Thomas. Pattern of Redemption is a Baedeker of Balthasar, and more; it is a guidebook that has intellectual depth and actually begins to get the reader into Balthasar's world through carefully chosen texts. The book is divided into four parts: part 1, "Tributaries of Influence"; part 2, "The Aesthetics"; part 3, "The Theodramatics"; part 4, "The Theologic." The first part explores the theological background and methodological context of Balthasar's work; parts 2, 3, and 4 achieve a theology student's dream, a summary of Balthasar's famous trilogy in under two hundred pages. To make matters even better, Oakes's style is (considering the subject matter) light and, at times, conversational and witty, even while he carries out his didactic purpose with directness and a literary urbanity. Chapter 1, "Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being," unveils what Oakes considers to be the skeleton key to Balthasar's thought, his understanding of the analogy of being. It is St. Thomas who has freed the doctrine of being from the incompatibilities of the Greek understanding. For Aristotle, each being is primarily what it is, its form, and there is no act above this. Thomas, however, having distinguished existence and essence, found creatures analogous to God (Pure Act) "in and by existing" (32). Przywara's dynamic and...