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Book Review: Experiencing God: A Theology of Human Experience

where clearly the trend of his thought along traditional lines is rendered tortuous and unnecessarily ambiguous by his diffidence visà-vis the use of metaphysics so familiar to Catholics. It is not unreasonable to connect this diffidence with T.'s approval of the axiom simul Justus et peccator and his view of the theologizing intellect as essentially sinful, not merely wounded. T.'s insistence on articulating his Christology in terms of office rather than person is quite consistent with the Protestant notion of revelation stressing event rather than manifestation of truth, and the notion of faith stressing trust rather than assent; but this is not at all the accent of the Catholic theological tradition. His consistent rejection of any form of human mediation of revelation and faith, difficult to reconcile with the Catholic understanding of a divinely appointed hierarchy and sacramental system, but quite compatible with the Lutheran notion of fides fiducialis, private inspiration, and a distrust if not outright denial of the salvific value of good works, cannot help but remind the Catholic reader of the continued existence, importance, and influence of doctrinal differences. While many of these points taken singly in an ecumenical context are open to plausible interpretations from a Catholic point of view, and while none of them will prevent a Catholic from acknowledging the great merit of T.'s stand against the destructive force of the Cartesian spirit in modern theology as well as the value of his synthesis, a Catholic cannot but wonder whether a defense of orthodoxy against the inroads of Cartesianism can adequately rest on Lutheran insights into the nature of faith, revelation, and inspiration. T. explicitly denies that paternity for Cartesian theology can in any way be ascribed to Luther. Yet a doctrinal synthesis such as T.'s, professedly Lutheran, that can permit the reduction of belief in the virginity of our Lady to the merely symbolic, while insisting on the importance of orthodox tradition, immutability of dogma, historicity of the Resurrection, divinity of Christ, and trinity of God, is surely involved in contradictions more than apparent. Once the divinely instituted authority of the apostolic magisterium is replaced by the immediate inspiration of each believer as the final criterion of faith and conscience, there remain no other grounds for regarding any article of the Creed, or none of them, as more than symbolic except the will of the believer. In a very basic way, one man's inspiration is as good as another's. It is this that orthodoxy denies as the root of heresy and source of disunity.