Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald OCollins, eds., The Incarnation The Incarnation by Stephen T.

Davis,; Daniel Kendall,; Gerald OCollins, Review by: KathrynTanner The Journal of Religion, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 2005), pp. 142-143 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/428534 . Accessed: 21/02/2014 10:15
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The Journal of Religion

Those who start from an orientation other than that of the authors might want to read the third part of the book rst. In Mathematics, Empirical Science, and Theology, Gerhart and Russell examine the relationship math is to science as science is to theology. Here we get to one of the main points of the book about changes in world meanings made possible by metaphoric process in both science and religion. Metaphoric process brings about change in what is believable (p. 165). When current understandings in either science or religion are challenged, it is metaphoric process that allows for a change in what it is acceptable to believe. In the remaining chapters, the authors offer a welcome caution against too easy an equation of concepts such as uncertainty in quantum physics with concepts in philosophical theology. They critique Anne Foersts discussion of embodied intelligence in the robot Cog and the image of God. Lastly, in Myth and Public Science, they apply the genre of myth, usually associated with religious beliefs, to certain characteristics of public science. The topics of these essays are wide-ranging, and the reader must work to understand the relationship between the various chapters. Relating seemingly disparate concepts and elds in the way the authors do requires a high degree of creativity. Amid the literature in science and religion, Gerhart and Russells work stands as a unique and challenging contribution whose full inuence is yet to be felt. They have helped point the way for further work that needs to be done in relating science and theology in terms of metaphor, text, and narrativeexchanging new maps for old. LOU ANN TROST, Council for a Parliament of the Worlds Religions. DAVIS, STEPHEN T.; KENDALL, DANIEL; and OCOLLINS, GERALD, eds. The Incarnation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxv404 pp. $55.00 (cloth). This volume on the incarnation (like its predecessors, also from Oxford University Press, on the Resurrection and the Trinity) assembles papers given by established scholars at an interdisciplinary and ecumenical symposium devoted to the topic. Many of the essays are of high quality (for example, those by Eleonore Stump and Brian Leftow). Others do readers the service of indicating something of the perspective of their authors to be found in more sustained treatments of the topic elsewhere (in the case of the essays, for example, by N. T. Wright and Steven Evans). Because the incarnation is treated from a variety of viewpointsbiblical, historical, systematic, philosophical, homiletic, literary, artistic, and so forththe volume as a whole does a very nice job of conveying the richness of its subject matter. The potential downsides of such a project are, however, amply evident. An interdisciplinary, ecumenical symposium obviously holds great promise for genuine intellectual engagement and argumentative advance, but none of that happens here. Established scholars with preestablished views on sometimes erudite particulars merely offer up what they already think. Individual essays acknowledge the input of other participants at the incarnation summit but rarely across disciplinary lines. And there is very little effort to bring the essays into direct dialogue with one another, even within the same disciplinary frameworks. The reader might have beneted, for example, from knowing the degree to which the similar-seeming philosophical apparatuses of Leftow and Stump are compatible with one another, or from a more direct airing of the

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Book Reviews
apparent disagreement between Wright and Alan Segal on Judaisms capacity to envision incarnation as it is exhibited in the biblical texts, or from hearing what Kathleen Norris, with her plea for incarnational language that gives eshand-bones reality to ideas, might make of the mostly technical analytical tools of philosophy on display here. Many of the essays are quite fascinating, once one makes the leap of accepting their starting pointsfor example, Stephen Daviss essay develops into an apologetic argument that Jesus would have had to be either insane or malevolent to think he was God when he wasnt. But there is very little that holds this collection of quite disparate essays together or counters the occasional impression of simple idiosyncrasy in either their individual focus or overall principles of organization. On the latter score, for example, why are biblical, patristic, and medieval materials initially given such a heavy emphasis in the volume and followed by a jump made to the contemporary positions of the authors from an exclusively analytic perspective? Gerald OCollins, in an introductory essay that sets up the project as a whole, outlines twelve different issues surrounding the incarnation, and many of the contributors bother to mention which of these issues they take up for discussion. But the interconnections among the issues themselves are nowhere developed, and little work is done to address the way the contemporary situation (e.g., a situation of religious pluralism) might be playing up theseor perhaps other issues. The collection, for all its variety, seems to circle around what is taken to be a doctrinally orthodox view of the incarnation, but even here, this reader at least was not convinced that the contributors really agreed about what that meant. One is left, then, with the sense of a wasted opportunity: if only these very smart people from very different disciplines had been asked at the beginning to hammer out together the assumptions and questions about the incarnation that would form the basis of both their essays and a more sustained conversation with one another. KATHRYN TANNER, University of Chicago. OBRIEN, GEORGE DENNIS. The Idea of a Catholic University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 336 pp. $28.00 (cloth). The fundamental clash between Catholic faith and the modern university, George Dennis OBrien contends, is rooted in the failure to differentiate between three types of truth: the propositional truth of science, which the university has elevated to dogmatic status; the signatured truth of art, which preserves the particularized, historical insight of the creative individual; and, nally, the truth of Revelation, that is, a truth about the real that escapes the categorization of science and the shaping power of art (p. 58). Unfortunately, religions willingness to subject faith claims to the criteria of scientic reason, a sign of the Enlightenments enduring legacy in higher education, has fostered a confusion of categories. Revelation, OBrien insists, is not a truth continuous with reason and beyond its grasp: rather, the truth of Revelation is essentially not available to reason. More important, the author writes, the truth of revelation is fundamentally distorted when formed upon the universitys [scientic rationalist] model of truth (p. 24). Catholicism, rightly understood, does not compete with science; rather, it engages the truth about the real. For Christians, Jesus Christ is that truth. Theology, the discipline appropriate to the exploration of this truth, must be

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