Reviewed by: The Indissolubility of Marriage: Amoris Laetitia in Context by Matthew Levering Tracey Rowland The Indissolubility of Marriage: Amoris Laetitia in Context by Matthew Levering (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2019), 223 pp. My first observation on obtaining this book was that Professor Levering appears from the footnotes and bibliography to have read every academic article that has been written on the subject of Amoris Laetitia. The book considers the issue of the indissolubility of marriage from every imaginable perspective. Its form is broken into four chapters: "Eastern Orthodox, Patristic, Protestant, and Historical-Critical Perspectives on Marital Indissolubility"; "Marital Indissolubility from Trent through to Pope Benedict XVI"; "Pope Francis' Amoris Laetitia and Marital Indissolubility"; and "Theological Ressourcement: Aquinas on Marital Indissolubility." The macro-level conclusion is that Amoris Laetitia does not change the Church's doctrine of marital indissolubility and, indeed, that Jesus "strongly affirms marital indissolubility, more clearly than he does almost any other Catholic teaching" (15). It is also shown that the Church Fathers of the first three centuries supported the idea and that the majority of the Church Fathers in the following centuries also affirmed the idea. Moreover, Levering observes that even those interpreters whose views have been explicitly commended by Pope Francis have all agreed that the Church's traditional teaching on marital indissolubility has not changed. From this fact Levering concludes that discussions around the topic of Amoris Laetitia should focus upon this shared ground of agreement. [End Page 1420] Levering does however acknowledge that part of the problem surrounding interpretations of Amoris Laetitia is the absence of shared agreement among theologians on the principles of fundamental theology. Some theologians do not accept that revelation includes a specific truth content. For some revelation is nothing more than the awakening of the human spirit to divine love. As Arnauld Join-Lambert claims, different cultural contexts make different interpretations of revelation possible. If this is so, then the theological tradition which recognizes a common set of doctrines, truth claims, and moral principles as one of the so-called "marks" of the Church is obsolete. And if doctrinal unity is no longer necessary, then this has flow-on effects for how we understand the Petrine Office, and in particular the power of the "keys." The Petrine Office loses its unifying charism. Moreover, if the power of the keys is limitless, which is another way of saying that the exercise of the power of the keys is not circumscribed by the deposit of the faith, by Scripture or by Tradition, classically understood, but is a kind of prerogative of the pontiff, analogous to a U.S. presidential pardon, then this represents a seismic shift in the field of ecclesiology. Although it is not often presented in this way, divisions over the interpretations of Amoris Laetitia are rooted in different approaches to fundamental theology. We have arrived at a moment in ecclesial history where the fact that something is a mortal sin in one archdiocese and a mere pastoral concern in another is seen by some theologians to be prima facie evidence of a de facto schism in the Church, and thus a cause for alarm, while for others this is not a problem at all but simply a manifestation of the Church's cultural diversity. Perhaps it is precisely because there is so much disunity at the level of fundamental theology that the drafters of Amoris Laetitia decided to deal with the most contentious issues in the footnotes. The footnotes in Levering's work were also of greater than usual interest, and in particular footnote 67 on page 49 seemed to me to address the nub of the pastoral problem in the minds of many Catholics. To paraphrase the footnote, the question is: "does someone whose wife left him and his four children for a lesbian have to remain single for the rest of his life?" My own response to this question—much like Levering's response (113)—is to endorse the position of Nicholas J. Healy Jr. discussed in footnote 6 on page 93, to the effect that a more promising alternative to Cardinal Kasper's "follow the Eastern Orthodox" position is to expand the annulment process. Levering...