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Theology Today While this is a book for an educated audience, it is not directed primarily to specialists. Swinburne's prose is crisp and clear, and he does an exemplary job of presenting the structure of his argument without render ing the book inaccessible to those who lack his background in analytic philosophy. He wisely relegates his discussion of probability calculus and Bayes's Theorem (whence the 97 percent probability is derived) to a dense but readable appendix. Beyond those who are interested in natural theol ogy and the style of analytic philosophy of religion so skillfully practiced by Swinburne, however, it is a bit unclear who his intended academic audience is. This book lacks the extensive reference to New Testament scholarship one would expect of a book directed to New Testament specialists. His arguments will to some seem skewed in the direction of Christianity, for he does not consider arguments why it would be unrea sonable to consider that God would become incarnate, and he sets the probability that God would become incarnate at some point in human history at fifty percent, which will seem inflated to those unconvinced by his arguments. This is a book that will likely be well received by and useful to pastors, apologists, and educated lay people who are less inter ested in biblical and historical scholarship than they are in a careful and thoughtful reading of the New Testament, combined with a nonsectarian theology that offers a defense of the traditional doctrine of Christ's physical resurrection. This last audience in particular will be well served by Swinburne's book.
JASON RICKMAN

University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN

The Resurrection of the Son of God


By . T. Wright Minneapolis, Fortress, 2003. 817 pp. $39.00. . T. Wright is Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey and a worldwide celebrity lecturer. His reformulation of the New Testament story as ful fillment of Second Temple Jewish hopes for God's saving intervention in Israel's history has been the subject of several earlier books, workshops, and lectures. Wright fans will welcome this volume as next in the series. Conservative Catholic and Protestant readers will be pleased to find their contempt for liberal theology, comparative religious studies, and histori cal-critical exegesis justified. Canon Wright plays to that audience with remarks about the mental deficiencies of those of us who disagree with his gospel of salvation history and attachment to narrative realism as historical evidence. Readers who pick up this book to learn about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth face a daunting task. It is divided into five sections. The first

JOHN J COLLINS

JOSEPH SITTLER

DOES THE BIBLE JUSTIFY VIOLENCE*


Asks whether the Bible endorses violence, and how its many violent texts may best be understood in today's volatile religious and political context. 0-8006-3689-9 64 pp paper $6 00

THE CARE OF THE EARTH


Now reissued! Some of Sittler's most insightful writing that anticipated and precipitated many of today's most pressing religious concerns. 0-8006-3688-0 160 pp paper $6.00

PETER J PARIS

GERARD S SLOYAN

VIRTUES AND VALUES


The African and African American Experience How the religious and moral values of Africa have pervaded African American life and thought. 0-8006-3661-9 paper 84 pp $6 00 PATRICK D. MILLER

WHY JESUS DIED


Gerard Sloyan discusses: how Jesus died; who was responsible for his death; how his death came to be seen as redemptive; how accounts of his death figured in the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment. 0-8006-3693-7 154 pp paper $6.00 WALTER WINK

THE GOD YOU HAVE


Politics and the First Commandment On the First Commandment and the fight against misappropriation of theological themes for political ends. 0-8006-3662-7 paper 84 pp $6 00

JESUS AND NONVIOLENCE


A Third Way
Explains how Jesus' message relates to politics and nonviolence and how nonviolence can win the day. 0-8006-3609-0 paper 96 pp $6 00

FORTRESS PRESS
Augsburg Fortress, Publishers 1-800-328-4648 fortresspress.com

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Theology Today three are about two hundred pages each: (1) methodological considerations and background information on post-mortem survival, the soul, and resurrection in Greco-Roman and Jewish sources; (2) Pauline letters and Paul's personal encounter with the risen Jesus; and (3) resurrection in other New Testament texts and in ancient Christian writings through the early patristic period. Afinalchapter in the third section treats resurrection and confession of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. The concluding sections get to the questions of interest to most readers: (4) the resurrection narratives as we find them in the Gospels and (5) two chapters devoted to the "so what" issues of historicity and Christology. The author is so repetitious and self-referencing that some readers may prefer to skip from the introductory chapter to the Pauline letters and, from there, to the Easter stories in the Gospels. Wright employs an extensive survey of background materials from Greco-Roman and Jewish sources to establish a univocal Jewish understanding of resurrection. God's creative power will restore the dead to a form of bodily life. He rejects the evidence that first-century Jews envisaged other modes of eternal life with God, such as astral immortality, transformation into the glory of the heavenly Adam, or incorporation into the ranks of angelic beings. Only a "transphysical" embodiment in the new creation that is the goal of God's covenant promise and of Israel's messianic hope fits Wright's reconstruction of the religious views of first-century CE Jews. Such a rigid understanding of Jewish texts is not necessary to Wright's more plausible suggestion that nothing short of an "embodied" encounter with the risen Lord and, consequently, an empty tomb can account for early Christian beliefs as articulated in the New Testament. Later Christian writers make the bodily character of resurrection central to their rejection of both gnostic spirituality and Greco-Roman views of the immortal soul. Wright points out the significant discontinuity between Christian claims about Jesus and the cultural archetypes often said to generate resurrection stories. Execution by the Roman governor is not a setting for a quasiimperial apotheosis, though Wright repeatedly appeals to the anti-imperial rhetoric of the exaltation and parousia of the risen Son of God. Nor can the bodily return to life of a relatively unknown Galilean religious leader be equivalent to mythic netherworld journeys or the heavenly ascent of Enoch or Elijah. In short, Wright concludes that, if all the early Christians sought to affirm was that they could continue Jesus' liberating vision of God's rule in the Spirit or that God had taken the crucified, suffering servant to God's right hand in the divine throne room, they would not have produced the Easter narratives. Christians told these stories because they refer to actual, historical events. Though Wright repeatedly flings charges of being victimized by Enlightenment rationalism or by Bultmann's demythologizing at those of us who are not certain whether a simple set of encounters between Jesus' disciples and a Jesus with a "transphysical" body can serve to explain what happened, he is equally trapped by modernism. The only acceptable

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Theology Today version of salvation for Wright is a new creative act of God that will be initiated by Jesus' return at the parousia. In other words, what Wright cannot believe is that there might be reality to all the dimensions of the Spirit encoded in the metaphors we use about angels, heavenly regions, and transformation into divine glory. A more sympathetic reading of Plato, Plotinus, Philo, the Jewish and Christian mystical traditionnot to mention Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante's Commediathan onefindsin Canon Wright's book opens up other possibilities for Christian eschatology. Wright's insistence on a univocal understanding of Christian eschatology leads him to attack the faith of ordinary believers. At best, the "in heaven" and "with the Lord" language is only about the intermediate state of the dead. Our funeral sermons should not promise the happy life in heaven or an immediate transition out of the body by an immortal soul. Easter refers to God's recreation, to the restoration of God'srighteousones in that creation, not to an individual hope for a next life or for life continued in a new sphere of reality. This principled rejection leaves one wondering what the pastoral significance of Wright's project will turn out to be.
PHEME PERKINS

Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West


By Perez Zagorin Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2003. 371 pp. $29.95. Perez Zagorin, professor of history emeritus of the University of Rochester and a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has written frequently throughout his career on western (especially British) intellectual history. Here he focuses on the idea of religious toleration. Despite the broad scope of its title, this book actually covers primarily western Europe from the European wars of religion through the British Act of Toleration (1689), highlighting the contributions of key western intellectuals (up through John Locke) in articulating a rationalespecifically a Christian rationalefor toleration. The author says the book aims "to present readers with a broad historical account of the ideas of tolerance and religious freedom in their appearance and formative period in the early modern era between the sixteenth and the first decades of the eighteenth century." Given this authorial delimitation, the book fulfills its stated purpose.

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