The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast. By GEORGE HUNSINGER.

Abstract

George Hunsinger, a distinguished Barthian scholar, is Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, of which Iain Torrance is the President and chief editor of the new Cambridge series of Current Issues in Theology. The purpose of the series is to provide state-of-the-art studies in key areas of theology, aimed particularly at postgraduate levels. Alongside such authors as Oliver O’Donovan and John Webster, Hunsinger joins the team with an incisive study of the two key areas of eucharistic controversy—presence and sacrifice—to which he adds two further (welcome) sections on ministry and social ethics. The result reads as much like a series of essays in historical theology as a systematic theology of ecumenics. It is well stocked with modern scholarship, the influence of Barth through the prism of T. F. Torrance providing a firm but generous tone throughout. In some respects, presence and sacrifice are well-worked areas. Torrance senior's love of the Greek Fathers, especially the Alexandrians, shines through in Hunsinger's espousal of an understanding of presence that avoids some of the mechanistic language of the medieval West; yet he is ready to criticize aspects of Protestantism that subjectivize that presence. He has no time for what he calls ‘enclave theology’, which operates within a given tradition and has little time or interest in what does not come to heel from outside. Nor does he want to write exclusively for fellow academics, which means that the book lacks the style of yet one more monograph on a well-worked area. For him ecumenical theology has to engage with the life and worship of the churches. I couldn’t help drawing a comparison with the late H. R. McAdoo's description of Jeremy Taylor's theology of eucharistic presence when he remarked that Taylor ‘skims the cream off virtualism’.