Revelation in a Pluralistic World. By LouisRoy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xi, 309. £97.00.

Louis Roy, OP, professor at the Dominican University College in Ottawa, presents his latest contribution as a sort of sequel to his previous book, The Three Dynamisms of Faith (CUA Press, 2017), declaring: 'the former volume focused on the subjective side (faith) of the human religious search, whereas this volume focuses on the objective side (revelation)' (p. v). Roy's aim is to provide a 'provisional synthesis' of the topic of revelation for students in theology, but he also offers some new insights, especially on the relation between Christian revelation and God's speech in other religious traditions. The book consists of four parts of varying length and scope. After a first introduction to the topic (part one, only one chapter), he continues with a historical exposition concerning 'The Challenge of Modernity' (part two, chapters 2-4), in which he explores how modern representations of belief and revelation have been addressed by Catholic and Protestant theologians, especially in what concerns historical knowledge. Part three ('Contemporary Discussion') presents a long section entirely devoted to Paul Ricœur's contribution (chapter 5) and a chapter (chapter 6) about the problem of pluralism. Part four ('Revelation apart from Jesus?') explores the 'Claims Made by Other Religions' (chapter 7) and then it presents Roy's own position about 'Revelation, or God-Speech?' (chapter 8) and about the uniqueness of Jesus (chapter 9). Many modern theologians are discussed in Roy's overview, but the author declares from the beginning that his main interlocutors are Thomas Aquinas (introduced in the first chapter as the 'groundwork'), John Henry Newman (whose contribution is presented in chapter 3), and Bernard Lonergan, to whom no specific section is dedicated, but who is regularly employed to provide an epistemological framework, particularly in chapter 6. Other important voices, specifically acknowledged in the conclusion, are those of von Balthasar and Ricœur, both particularly important for their hermeneutics. The first chapter ('A Basic Characterization Inspired by the Past') is categorised as 'groundwork': Roy works on the Bible and Thomas Aquinas, and he elucidates some basic approaches to the subject of revelation, i.e., revelation as anthropological, as evolutionary, and as Christological. Then, he exposes Aquinas's articulation of inspiration and revelation when speaking of the prophets. Finally, he tries to define symbolic and literal statements, and their importance in discussing revelation. Chapter 2 deals with 'Modernity's Representations of Belief' and shows how the new paradigm of modernity questions certain medieval constructs and, particularly, how the notion of the supernatural is widely contested and rejected. A second fundamental issue concerns the opposition of conceptualism and anti-conceptualism, from Ockham to Kant and Fichte, and the balance between voices of reason and heart. Various philosophers (such as Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel) and liberal Protestant theologians are discussed. The third chapter introduces 'Catholic Responses' to the challenges of modernity (concerning, in particular, history and dogmatic evolution). After a section on the Tübingen School, great attention is given to Newman's articulation of the permanence and development of doctrine. Then, Roy explores the contribution of the two Vatican Councils, especially Dei verbum. A concluding section describes Hans Urs von Balthasar's aesthetic approach to faith in a positive but nonetheless critical perspective. The fourth chapter continues the reflection on 'The Problem of Historical Knowledge' and presents the position of a numbers of thinkers, such as Reimarus, Lessing, Kierkegaard, and most notably Troeltsch, Barth, and Pannenberg, to whom specific sections are dedicated. The focus of this chapter is on the articulation 'between the two sources of religious information: historical (special revelations) and philosophical (general revelation)' (p. 103), and on the capacity of critical research to gain access to the original revelation. Roy describes the attempts to deal with the questions originating in the new consciousness of historicity, and underlines both the importance of these attempts and their shortcomings. Chapter 5 opens part three and is entirely dedicated to Paul Ricœur. Roy specifies that he is going to introduce only 'some aspects of the thought of Ricœur' in connection with the subject of revelation, but in fact this section, adapted from another publication, is quite wide. Since it deals with various related topics, such as the difference between sense and reference, truth in faith and hope, and testimony, it is sometimes less easy to follow the fil rouge of the argument and its connection to the principal matter. Roy explains the importance of both the world and the work of the text in Ricœur's hermeneutics of the Bible, and then focuses on the dialectic between suspicion and testimony. Later, he examines Ricœur's understanding of 'a concept of revelation that is pluralistic, polysemic, and at most analogical in form' (Ricœur quoted by Roy, p. 163), starting with the observation that biblical revelation is not only prophecy, but also narration, law, wisdom, and psalms. Finally, Roy addresses four epistemological questions to Ricœur about practical and theoretical truth, author's intentions, and imagination. Chapter 6 focuses on the main topic of Roy's endeavour, addressing the question of pluralism, as announced in the book's title. Here Roy discusses the postmodern challenge to the notion of universal truth, arguing that 'because they are detachable from their original venue, genuine insights are communicable worldwide. They are absolute, not in that they would comprehend every aspect of a reality, but in that the aspect they have grasped is universally understandable and thus invariant' (p. 191). He therefore favours a model of moderate pluralism (as opposed to radical pluralism), where he rejects the idea of immutable concepts directly given by God and stresses the importance of the 'interpretative hanging-on, namely the living tradition' (p. 218) which develops dynamically. This chapter would have fit better perhaps in the following part. Part four tackles more precisely the question of religious pluralism and, thus, chapter 7 explores the 'Claims Made by Other Religions', namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam. The presentation is by necessity cursory, but it shows Roy's personal interest in the subject. The author concludes by arguing that each religion normally claims to be the sole bearer of the fullness of revelation, which is not opposed to religious tolerance, as long as this claim is connected to a 'total respect for absolute truth' (p. 240). He concludes that Christians should not be afraid in believing that 'their own view is the best one, while they admit that other religions carry much truth', not forgetting that 'only at the end of world's history, namely at the eschaton, shall we at long last find truth self-evident' (p. 241). In chapter 8, Roy finally arrives to his main thesis. On the one hand, he upholds the importance of 'total esteem and respect both for all the authentic forms of secular faith and for all the authentic forms of confessional faith, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, or other' (p. 243), and affirms that he does not want to prove, by way of comparison, Christianity's superiority. On the other hand, he argues for the necessity of a 'clear-cut definition', namely that, 'in Christian theology one should avoid applying the term "revelation" to non-biblical religions' (p. 246). In fact, under the general umbrella of 'God's self-communication', he aims to distinguish 'revelation' in the theological technical sense (reserved to Christian texts and traditions) from 'God's speech'. The latter idea means that God effectively communicates through other religions, though not with the same 'assurance that the human mediators have always been capable of translating the gift of divine light into dependable truths' (p. 267). For Roy, this is a sort of middle position between the extremes of excluding God's self-communication outside the biblical tradition, on one side, and holding all religions as equally capable of full revelation, on the other side. Roy summarises his stance in these terms: 'My position here has the merit of recognizing the right of any world religion—not only of Catholicism—to believe that it offers more truth than any other. So what I am keen to maintain is that, first, from the viewpoint of Catholic thinking, there is more truth in the biblical-Catholic tradition and that, second, outside of it, God addresses everyone and yet one is never sure that such address is correctly received.' (p. 269). Chapter 9 logically concludes Roy's itinerary by asking: 'Can We Either Absolutize or Relativize Jesus Christ?' Roy discusses some 'objections to the universality of Jesus', which he finds in Schillebeeckx, and argues that Jesus's 'uniqueness resides in his divine-human person and in his mission' (p. 279). He then rejects, on the one side, Christocentrism as understood by Barth, because it tends to become a Christomonism, excluding God's communication outside of Christ. On the other side, he criticises 'isomorphism' as well, 'that is, the sameness of form, in the sense of the equal truth of competing revelations' (p. 288). Instead, he opts for 'Christomorphism', namely 'the normativity of a revelation found in Christ, which integrates many non-Christian sources of meaning' (p. 288). In this view, 'Jesus Christ is the morphē, Gestalt, form, figure, shape, pattern, which moulds the believers into his image. His followers have been 'con-formed' to Christ. … In addition, those who accept grace from the Trinity resemble Jesus more and more, even if they don't know him' (p. 284). It is not simple to define Roy's book: on the one hand, it is a historical presentation of the theology of revelation, because it provides, especially in part two, a broad picture of the actors involved in the modern debates, but there are also considerable exceptions (for instance, Karl Rahner is nearly absent) and it evolves in a positive proposal. On the other hand, it resembles a systematic proposal, but in fact it does not aim to offer a complete analysis of the different questions and it often focuses on a critical presentation of the contributors from the past two centuries. This work could therefore be useful on two different levels: first, it could be a good introduction for anyone interested in understanding the modern debates concerning revelation, with some short but precise presentations of many of the most important philosophers and theologians who wrote on the subject. Second, it offers an original contribution to a specific topic, namely revelation in a pluralistic world, as suggested by the title, with the discussion of the current 'clash of views' and a personal proposal advanced by Roy. The prudent articulation of revelation and God-speech aspires to be a middle of the road option between extremes, allowing the theologian to conceive the possibility of God's self-communication outside the Christian tradition while preserving the uniqueness of the revelation in Jesus and Christian 'Christomorphism'. Roy is conscious that his restrictive use of 'revelation' could be annoying in the context of pluralism, but in fact the book is very consistent in showing not only respect, but real interest and desire to learn from different religious traditions, as also attested by Roy's publications on Japanese thinkers. Finally, it should be remarked that the book has a specific stance in the theological panorama, embracing the Thomistic heritage and following Lonergan's intuitions, while neglecting other legitimate options (as already mentioned, Karl Rahner's virtual absence is indeed striking). In this sense, the book does not offer a complete and impartial picture, but Roy is very coherent from the beginning in acknowledging his own position, and he nonetheless tries to give a fair account of many different positions. In conclusion, the book is to be recommended as a learned introduction to modern questions about revelation and as a sensible effort to embrace moderate pluralism. It provides a fruitful openness to different traditions, while never losing the belief in the uniqueness of Christian revelation.