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The book provides a fresh description and analysis of Augustine's monumental treatise, De Trinitate, working on a supposition of its unity and its coherence from structural, rhetorical, and theological points of view. The main arguments of the treatise are reviewed first: an examination of Scripture and the mystery of the Trinity; a discussion of ‘Arian’ logical and ontological categories; a comparison between the process of knowledge and formal aspects of the confession of the mystery of the Trinity; an account of the so‐called ‘psychological analogies’. These topics hold a predominantly instructive or polemical function. The unity and the coherence of the treatise become apparent especially when its description focuses on a truly theological understanding of the knowledge of God: Augustine aims at leading the reader to the vision and enjoyment of God the Trinity, in whose image we are created. This mystagogical aspect of the rhetoric of De Trinitate is unfolded through Christology, soteriology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of revelation. At the same time, from the vantage point of love, Augustine detects and powerfully depicts the epistemological consequences of human sinfulness, thus unmasking the fundamental deficiency of received theories of knowledge. Only love restores knowledge and enables phiolosophers to yield to the injunction which resumes philosophical enterprise as a whole, namely ‘know thyself.’

Though understandably overshadowed by Augustine’s preeminence in the West, Ambrose is a doctor of the Catholic Church and an important patristic authority for the Middle Ages and Reformation, especially in moral theology. Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue argues that Ambrose of Milan’s theological commitments, particularly his understanding of the Christian’s participation in God’s saving economy through baptism, are foundational for his virtue theory laid out in his catechetical and other pastoral writings. While he holds a high regard for classical and Hellenistic views of virtue, Ambrose insists that the Christian is able to attain the highest ideal of virtue taught by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This is possible because the Christian has received the transformative grace of baptism that allows the Christian to participate in the new creation inaugurated by Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. This book explores Ambrose’s understanding of this grace and how it frees the Christian to live the virtuous life. The argument is laid out in two parts. In Part I, the book examines Ambrose’s understanding of human nature and the effects of sin upon that nature. Central to this Part is the question of Ambrose’s understanding of the right relationship of soul and body as presented in Ambrose’s repeated appeal to Paul’s words, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). Part II lays out Ambrose’s account of baptism as the sacrament of justification and regeneration (sacramental and proleptic participation in the renewal of human nature in the resurrection). Ultimately, Ambrose’s account of the efficacy of baptism rests upon his Christology and pneumatology. The final chapters explain how Ambrose’s accounts of Christ and the Holy Spirit are foundational to his view of the grace that liberates the soul from the corruption of concupiscence.

The Order of Christ Sophia (OCS) is a small New Religion which, in the short span of eight years, has evoked intense controversy. An unusual synthesis of traditional Catholicism, esoteric cosmology, and psychology, the OCS already has centers in a dozen major cities in the United States. Thus far, however, it has eluded the attention of scholars of alternative religions. An offshoot of an earlier group, the Holy Order of MANS, the OCS developed a distinctive set of beliefs and practices that set it apart from the mother faith. It has cultivated some curious and provocative features for a Christian-based religion, including the elevation of women to full participation and status within the evolving sacred order. Its treatment of gender is refreshingly egalitarian; women can be priests, and Mary is deified and given equal status with Jesus. Another unusual feature of the group is its emphasis on introspection and intensive psychological and emotional work for all members. Beyond surveying the history, doctrines and practices of this unusual group, this book brings data from the author's study of the OCS to bear on many items of conventional wisdom in the New Religions field. It shows, for example, that far from joining the Order in response to a “youth crisis”, the average age of new OCS members is 37. This and a number of other characteristics of the OCS membership challenge generally accepted conclusions about recruits to New Religions. In addition to the six core chapters, three other experts contribute chapters on: the results of personality and I.Q. tests administered to members; membership attitudes; comparison of OCS with mainstream denominations; and sex roles in the OCS.

French Dominican Yves Congar is widely recognized as the most important Roman Catholic ecclesiologist of the twentieth century. He was a leader in the ecumenical movement in Europe and one of the most influential theological advisors at the Second Vatican Council. In this book, Groppe analyzes Congar’s theology of the Holy Spirit. She systematizes his pneumatology and identifies its primary contribution. Congar, she argues, advanced Roman Catholic pneumatology through his elaboration of a theology of the Holy Spirit that is at once a theological anthropology and a theology of the church. The early twentieth-century Roman Catholic pneumatology that Congar inherited consisted primarily of a spiritual anthropology—a theology of the Spirit’s indwelling of the human person—while giving little or no attention to the theology of the Holy Spirit within the discipline of ecclesiology. Congar saw this divorce of spiritual anthropology and ecclesiology as a betrayal of Christianity’s biblical and patristic heritage and of his Thomistic tradition. His own theology reintegrates a theology of the Spirit’s indwelling of the human person with an account of the Spirit as co-institutor and life principle of the church, and his approach has significant implications for contemporary discussions in the areas of ecclesiology, theological anthropology, sacramental theology, ecumenism, and spirituality. The book includes extensive notes and bibliography and is important both as an introduction to Congar and a contribution to a contemporary theology of the Holy Spirit.

This book represents a study of the meaning of "the end" in the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, that highlights both the originality and the fruitfulness of his vision of a reciprocal drama between God and the world. The argument of the book can be summed up simply: being -creaturely being and trinitarian being -unveils its final countenance as love in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. After setting forth three basic problems inherent in Christian eschatology, Healy introduces Balthasar's trinitarian perspective: eschatology is concerned with the life of the Trinity, as revealed by Jesus Christ, and as the origin and final destiny of the whole created cosmos. The book presupposes that a critical engagement with Balthasar's thought requires attending to the original way he uses philosophy within theology. Thomas Aquinas' analogy of being, fulfilled in the person of Christ, is both the abiding precondition of, and is ultimately disclosed in, the drama between God and the world whose form takes shape within Christ's return to the Father. The ultimate form of the end, and thus the measure of all that is meant by eschatology, is given in Christ's eucharistic and pneumatic gift of himself - gift that simultaneously lays bare the mystery of the Trinity and enables Christ to "return" to the Father in communion with the whole of creation. Insofar as Christ reveals the trinitarian life and the mystery of creation in their dramatic interplay, he establishes the form of eschatology as a participation in God's engagement with the world. Under the sign of the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist, Christian eschatology involves a sharing in Christ's double movement into the world and, together with the world, into God. By developing the metaphysical dimensions of Balthasar's doctrine of the last things, Healy shows that his writings on the eschaton contain unexpected resources for the ecclesial renewal envisaged by the Second Vatican Council and its missionary opening to the world.

The present‐day situation of the Roman Catholic Church has been described as a state of ‘peril’. That fact alone, to say nothing of the challenges inseparable from faith in God, implies that the embrace of ecclesial faith is less likely today. Seeks both to account for the emergence of such a situation and to identify sources of possibility for the church. In order to do so, begins by examining both the internal life of the Catholic Church, especially what has occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and the relationship between the church and the wider society, with a particular emphasis on the Western world. As the necessary foundation for expressing how the church might respond to its present situation and what might enable or support the embrace of ecclesial faith, the book focusses on a broad understanding of ‘the church’, one that highlights its multiple implications for human communion and for the communion between God and humanity. In particular, develops a contemporary theology of the foundational elements of Christian faith in regard to the church, especially its relationship to Jesus Christ and its existence as symbol of the Holy Spirit. In the light of that theology, analyses also how controversial elements of ecclesial faith – such as tradition and authority – might be appropriated positively. The final chapters identify possibilities for both a constructive relationship between the church and the surrounding culture and for a more reconciled diversity within the church. The emphasis of the final chapters is on the need to understand the church as ‘unfinished’, as not simply able to develop, but as defined by the dynamism that expresses the presence of God. Concludes that a willingness to embrace the need for movement, for being a pilgrim, is inseparable from the risk of ecclesial faith.

This book is a speculative philosophical theology based on three themes: that a version of materialism is a help, not a hindrance, in philosophical theology; that God develops; and that this development is kenotic, an abandonment of power. The materialism considered in this work is non-reductive: of metaphysical necessity, the mental supervenes on the physical. Materialism leads to the thesis that the primordial God is metaphysically necessary, the limiting case of supervenience. It is speculated that the brain-analogue of the primordial God consists of all the possibilities for creation. It is also speculated that God changes. In the beginning there was a God which loved no one and which was not lovable, but was all-powerful and all-knowing. A sequence of acts resulted in a community of divine love, the Holy Trinity, and a world with many creatures who were autonomous agents. God loved us so much that one Divine Person became fully human and was willing to suffer to show us divine love. This is the kenotic development of God from Pure Will to Unbounded Love. In addition, kenosis provides a new resource for understanding evil. The Primordial God is good but in an inhuman way; why should anyone expect otherwise? But as a result of God's kenotic development, God is now like a loving parent, as the great monotheistic religions teach.

The story of the Grail, usually identified as some kind of mystical vessel, has gripped the imaginations of millions since it first appeared in several medieval romances. Of these, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Middle High German Parzival (c. 1210) is generally recognized as the most complex and beautiful. Strangely, in Parzival, the Grail is identified as a stone rather than a cup or dish. This oddity is usually seen as just another mystery, further evidence of the difficulty of discerning the true sources of the Grail legend. This book seeks to illuminate this mystery and to enable a far better appreciation of Wolfram's insight into the nature of the Grail and its relationship to the Crusades. The Grail, container of the sacred body and blood of Christ, Wolfram was saying, was where God said it would be: on the altar at the consecration of the Mass. Wolfram's “sacred stone” was none other than a consecrated altar, precious by virtue of the sacrament but also, this book argues, by virtue of the material from which it was made: a green gem, one of the precious stones associated with the rivers of Paradise. The book explores what it signifies for the Grail to be a translucent gemstone and an altar made portable only by a woman. Wolfram's stone is a sacramental reference to the stone the Crusaders fought to obtain — the Holy Sepulchre. Parzival, the book states, was intended as an argument against continued efforts by Latin Christians to recover the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem by force of arms. In Wolfram's story, warring Christian and Muslim brothers are brought together in peace by the power of Wolfram's Holy Grail.

Classical Christian orthodoxy insists that God is Triune: there is only one God, but there are three divine Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who are somehow of one substance with one another. But what does this doctrine mean? How can we coherently believe that there is only one God if we also believe that there are three divine Persons? This problem, sometimes called the ‘threeness-oneness problem’ or the ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, is the focus of this interdisciplinary volume. It includes a selection of recent philosophical work on this topic, accompanied by a variety of essays by philosophers and theologians to further the discussion. The book is divided into four parts, the first three dealing in turn with the three most prominent models for understanding the relations between the Persons of the Trinity: Social Trinitarianism, Latin Trinitarianism, and Relative Trinitarianism. Each section includes essays by both proponents and critics of the relevant model. The volume concludes with a section containing essays by theologians reflecting on the current state of the debate.

In 1295, a house fell from the evening sky onto an Italian coastal road by the Adriatic Sea. Inside, awestruck locals encountered the Virgin Mary, who explained that this humble mud-brick structure was her original residence newly arrived from Nazareth. To keep it from the hands of Muslim invaders, angels had flown it to Loreto, stopping three times along the way. This story of the house of Loreto has been read as an allegory of how Catholicism spread peacefully around the world by dropping miraculously from the heavens. This book calls that interpretation into question by examining historical accounts of the movement of the Holy House across the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. These records indicate vast and voluntary involvement in the project of formulating a branch of Catholic devotion. The book surveys the efforts of European Jesuits, Slavic migrants, and indigenous peoples in Baja California, Canada, and Peru. These individuals contributed to the expansion of Catholicism by acting as unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers of Loreto. Their participation in portaging Mary's house challenges traditional views of Christianity as a prepackaged European export, and instead suggests that Christianity is the cumulative product of thousands of self-appointed editors. The book also demonstrates how miracle narratives can be treated seriously as historical sources that preserve traces of real events. Drawing on rich archival materials, the book illustrates how global Catholicism proliferated through independent initiatives of untrained laymen.

This book is about what it is for there to be a God, and what reason there is to suppose that God to be the traditional Christian God. Part 1 (Chs.1 to 5) analyses the metaphysical categories needed for this purpose – substance, cause, time, and necessity. Part 2 (Ch. 6 to 10) begins by setting out some of the different ways in which the doctrine that there is a divine individual (an individual with the traditional divine properties) can be developed. There can be more than one divine individual so long as a first such individual is necessarily the cause of the existence of the others. Given the supreme moral goodness of cooperating with one individual in sharing everything with a third individual, it follows that if there is one divine individual, there will be three and only three such individuals; hence the necessity of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that there is one God consisting of three divine persons. One of these persons may choose to become incarnate, i.e. human, and there are reasons why he would do so.