Love Become Incarnate is a Festschrift in honor of Bruce D. Marshall, Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. Marshall is one of the most significant Catholic theologians in the English-speaking world. His work exemplifies an intentionally Catholic theology that makes fearless use of the fullness of truth—wherever it may be found—in conscious service to the Church. Marshall has made significant contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity, Christology, Pneumatology, ecclesiology, ecumenism, Jewish-Christian dialogue, and fundamental theology. St. Thomas Aquinas has been his most constant theological companion, although he has also advanced our understanding of Saints Augustine and Anselm, John Duns Scotus, Martin Luther, Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Karl Barth, and other major figures. Marshall has carefully developed a unique, powerful, and wide-ranging theology of the primacy of Christ over all things. It is this same Christ who is the love of God become incarnate. This series of essays by Marcia Colish, J. Augustine Di Noia, Paul Griffiths, Reinhard Hütter, Matthew Levering, and others engage and advance Marshall’s ranging contributions to historical and systematic theology.

Marshall has made significant contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity, Christology, Pneumatology, ecclesiology, ecumenism, Jewish-Christian dialogue, and fundamental theology. St. Thomas Aquinas has been his most constant theological companion... This series of essays by Marcia Colish, J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Paul Griffiths, Reinhard Hutter, Matthew Levering, and others engage and advance Marshall's ranging contributions to historical and systematic theology.

In John Duns Scotus on Grace and the Trinitarian Missions, Mitchell J. Kennard argues that Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) has been wrongly inscribed in the narrative of the late medieval theology of grace. Scotus is presented here not as the initiation or cause of the low fourteenth-century theology of grace but as the last great contributor to the high thirteenth-century theology of grace as deifying participation in the divine nature. This book argues that Scotus’s signature reflections on the relationship between grace and the Trinitarian missions—the Incarnation of the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—warrant closer attention by both historical and systematic theologians alike.

In this book, Shaun Blanchard argues that the roots of the Vatican II reforms must be pushed back beyond the widely acknowledged twentieth-century forerunners of the Council, beyond Newman and the Tübingen School in the nineteenth century, to the eighteenth century, when a variety of reform movements attempted ressourcement and aggiornamento. This close study of the Synod of Pistoia (1786) sheds surprising new light on the nature of church reform and the roots of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The high-water mark of the late Jansenist reform movement, this Tuscan diocesan synod was harshly condemned by Pope Pius VI in the Bull Auctorem fidei (1794), and in the increasingly ultramontane nineteenth-century Church the late Jansenist movement was totally discredited. Nevertheless, much of the Pistoian agenda--an exaltation of the role of the local bishop, an emphasis on infallibility as a gift to the entire believing community, religious liberty, a more comprehensible liturgy that incorporates the vernacular, and the encouragement of lay Bible reading and Christocentric devotions--would be officially promulgated at Vatican II. Investigating the theological and historical context and nature of the reforms enacted by the Synod of Pistoia, he notes their parallels with the reforms of Vatican II, and argues that these connections are deeper than mere affinity. The tumultuous events surrounding the reception of the Synod explain why these reforms failed at the time. This book also offers a measured theological judgment on whether the Synod of Pistoia was "true or false reform." Although the Pistoians were completely rejected in their own day, the Second Vatican Council struggled with, and ultimately enacted, remarkably similar ideas.

Robert W. Jenson, one of America's foremost theologians, dedicated much of his thought to the theological description of how Scripture should be read--what has come to be called theological interpretation. In this rapidly expanding field of scholarship, Jenson has had an inordinate impact. For the first time, Brad East has collected all of Jenson's writings on Scripture and it's interpretation in this groundbreaking volume.

In On Divine Revelation—one of Garrigou-Lagrange’s most significant works, here available in English for the very first time—he offers a classic treatment of this foundational topic. It is an organized and thorough defense of both the rationality and supernaturality of divine revelation. He presents a careful yet stimulating account of the scientific character of theology, the nature of revelation itself, mystery, dogma, the grace of faith, the powers of human reason, false interpretations thereof (rationalism, naturalism, agnosticism, and pantheism), the motives of credibility, and much more. Though written a century ago, On Divine Revelation will restore confidence in theology as a distinct and unified science and return focus to the fundamental questions of the doctrine of revelation. It also serves as a salutary corrective to contemporary theology’s anthropocentrism and concern with what is relative in revelation and religious experience by reorienting our theological attention to what is most certain, central, and sure in our knowledge of divine revelation: the Triune God who has revealed his inner life and salvific will. Readers will see the great splendor of the gift of divine revelation: radiant with credibility before the gaze of reason and drawing our supernatural assent to the mysteries through the gift of faith. As Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P. observes, “On Divine Revelation . . . is a stunning work of inestimable value. No other subsequent work on this topic has come close to meeting it (much less surpassing it).”

Neither Nature nor Grace operates at the intersection of systematic and philosophical theology, exploring in particular how St. Thomas Aquinas variously uses the latter in service to the clarification and faithful advancement of the former. More specifically, Neither Nature nor Grace explores the overlooked logical difficulties that have followed the late modern debates in ecumenical Christian theology as to whether knowledge of God is available solely through God’s gracious self-revelation (e.g., Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture), or through revelation and the deliverances of natural reason. Van Wart takes the prominent French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as paradigmatic for the case that knowledge of God can be had by both revelation and natural reason. Representing the opposing position, that God can only be known through divine revelation, Van Wart highlights the work of influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth. By placing these two imposing 20th century theologians in conversation, and by providing a careful theo-philosophical analysis of the logical mechanics of each thinker’s respective arguments, Van Wart shows how both inadvertently overreach their self-professed epistemological bounds and just so run into significant problems maintaining the coherence of their relative theological positions. That is, against their expressed intentions to the contrary, both thinkers unwittingly evacuate the divine essence of the mystery Christian tradition has always previously claimed it to have, effectively reducing the being of God to mere creaturely being writ large. As a contrasting corrective to this problem, Van Wart proffers a constructive grammatical reading of Aquinas’s measured account of the crucial but often overlooked logical differences between what can be said of the divine, on the one hand, versus what can be known of God, on the other. While many recent works have attempted to solve the ongoing arguments which Garrigou-Lagrange and Barth epitomize regarding the epistemic use of God’s effects, Van Wart’s contribution constructively pushes the conversation to a different level in showing how Aquinas’s grammar of God provides a salutary means of dissolving and moving beyond these contentious debates altogether.