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Book Review: The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology

Christ, the Church, and the sacrament are a product of an analogia entis wherein communion between the divine and the human being originates in the human being's transcendental experience of pure being. Barth claimed that on the basis of grace, faith, and revelation the above analogies are human inventions in which anthropology is substituted for a faith-based theology. God has chosen to encounter man indirectly: he enters freely into communion with men and women, but he does not enter into a synthesis with them, or with bread or with wine. For example, the exposition of bread used in the Lord's Supper is an attempt to control the presence of God and thus take away his freedom to be actively present as he chooses. In regard to the theologians whom M. compares with Barth, Karl Rahner is made into a villain because of his emphasis on the analogy of being. While M. examines the possibility of Barth's Eucharist contributing to the ecumenical dialogue on this sacrament and its trinitarian, christological, and ecclesiological foundations, his last chapter, on transubstantiation as an occasion for unity and/or dialogue, is more than borderline polemical. The dialogue is developed in his comparison of the theologies of Rahner and Barth, in which Rahner is represented as preventing any rapprochement because of his starting point in which our experience of self-transcendence enables us to know God and to be in communion with him. In criticizing the analogy of being, M. is inclined to make his points by repetition. A more substantial criticism against M. has to do with his use of general statements about the origins of the ideas of Barth's opponents. M. appeals to docetic and Ebionite Christology, nominalism, pantheism, panentheism, Pelagianism, and gnosticism instead of undertaking the more difficult task of critiquing without using -isms. However, in this period of renewal of Barthian studies, M. has made a substantial contribution in that he has developed Barth's theology of the Lord's Supper, beginning with his analogia fidei, and including the essential material from his doctrine of the Trinity, his Christology, and his ecclesiology in an efficient and comprehensive manner.