Reviews 237 world. The aim of providence is not the salvation of the single person, but the moral world rooted in civil society. Providence becomes providentia socialis. Kant’s occupation with divine providence reflects an abundance of ideas close to the thought of his contemporaries. The question of special divine interventions is marginalized or even excluded. Providence as conservatio seems to be the only way of harmonizing natural sciences with the existence of God and human freedom. However, it is human beings who are responsible for their happiness or misery. Lehner’s extensive research fills a gap in a unique way. He enriches the study of Kant’s philosophy in an as yet neglected field. His detailed research corrects many general judgements and invites to further studies. The problem of providence leads into the broader field of the God-question as such, and Kant’s contribution to the problem of evil appears rather insufficient. It is the great merit of Lehner that he not only discusses providence in the thought of Kant and the context of German School Philosophy and Theology, but that he opens up the wide horizon in which the question of providence has to be posed anew. Hans Waldenfels Essen Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2007, 280pp. $34.95 This is the third (of four) volumes in Horton’s series reappropriating the covenantal theological tradition in the exploration of the major dogmatic loci. Here he takes up the topics associated with soteriology and pays particular attention to the contemporary debates on justification and participation. Throughout he is concerned to listen to Calvin and the post-Reformation Reformed theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to bring them into conversation with the contemporary critics of their covenantal paradigm. Here Horton’s central interlocutors are those associated with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), Radical Orthodoxy (RO) and the New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Tuomo Mannerma and an American counterpart, Robert Jenson). He is resolute in his contention that the Protestant confessional traditions of the post-Reformation period have been either wrongfully neglected or naively misinterpreted. He is also careful not to flatten out those traditions as if they spoke with a single voice, nor to suppose they can merely be repristinated. And reading between the lines, it seems that Horton has considerable interest in distancing himself from popular evangelical renderings of soteriology. The unspoken conviction is that critics of Protestant Orthodoxy may find their correct target in the popular evangelical expositions of salvation but not the covenant theologians of the post-Reformation period. It is not the latter but the former that has an over-individualized and subjective soteriology. For Horton it is a false dichotomy to suppose soteriology must be construed in either individualistic (evangelical) or communal (NPP) accounts. © The author 2010 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 238 Reviews The first half of the volume is concerned with the dogmatic loci of justification. The key goal is to flesh out the richness of the forensic metaphor against its contemporary opponents. His attempt to rehabilitate the forensicism of Protestant Orthodoxy will strike many as hopeless, but his use of contemporary speech/act theory in defense of the forensic motifs places the doctrine into a dramatic framework, bypassing the standard critique of its reductionistic character. The forensic speech/act of God in the gospel is not ‘merely legal’, but deeply relational as well. He rehearses some familiar criticisms (Seifrid, Kim, Carson) of Dunn and Wright in their generalizations about Second Temple Judaism. Sanders was right to see the central nomistic principle operative in Second Temple Judaism, but Dunn and Wright misinterpreted Paul’s radical break with that tradition, not merely in terms of an alternative nomism (gentile as well as Jewish), but rather a repudiation of the principle of law as the ground of the New Covenant. It was a challenge to the ‘entire nomistic paradigm by insisting that one gets in and stays in by grace alone’ (p. 51). This makes little sense outside of Horton’s insistence that there were in fact two sorts of covenant in the Ancient Near East – Covenants of Law (Suzerainty Treaties) and Covenants of Grace (Royal Grants). According to Horton, only by conflating the two covenants, does there arise the confusion between law and gospel. The gospel, whatever else it was, was not a covenant based on law. It was a royal grant from beginning to end. Horton’s exposition of the distinction between a Covenant of Works and Covenant of Grace is deeply embedded in Protestant Orthodoxy, but his use of Levenson and also Kline to resist NPP’s monocovenantalism gives credence to what may otherwise appear an outdated paradigm. What then of forensic notions of justification if Covenants of Law are not the ground of the gospel? Why not simply abandon legal metaphors of salvation altogether? Horton supposes that Royal Grants (Covenants of Grace) cannot be understood unless against the backdrop of the Suzerainty Treaties. These latter are judicial covenants that bind the parties together (God and Israel) but also permit the Suzerain (God) to fulfill the terms of the covenant graciously. The Royal Grants of forgiveness and reconciliation must still have a judicial dimension if they are to be faithful to the canonical witness and also to the conceptual integrity of grace. It is Christ who stands in the dock in place of covenant breakers, and it is Christ who legally inherits the kingdom of his Father and passes on its benefits to those who belong to him by faith. These are the two forensic sides to the coin of the gospel. In this articulation, Horton avoids the dilemma of having to choose between the legal and relational metaphors, assuming that in Christ, both metaphors are grounded. The second half of the volume treats of the question what does it mean to belong to Christ? What sense can be made of the dogmatic constructions of union with Christ so important to the New Testament witness but often missing in Protestant (and Roman) expositions of soteriology? Horton rightly notes the ecumenical impulse to many recent treatments of ‘union’ as they intersect with classic Eastern Orthodox statements on soteriology. Both RO and the New Finnish Interpretation of Luther have criticized confessional Protestants as downplaying ‘participation’ in their soteriological frameworks. Horton responds in part by affirming the centrality of participation but in terms of a covenantal ontology rather than on the basis of a © The author 2010 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Reviews 239 Neoplatonic metaphysic. In other words, union with Christ is a covenantal construct by means of which individuals are incorporated into the gospel at the heart of the historia salutis. This incorporation is historical rather than speculative (as in RO): Union with Christ and the Covenant of Grace are not simply related themes but are different ways of talking about one and the same reality . . . This union with Christ is effected for and in us not by an impersonal process of emanations, by a ladder of participation, or by infused habits, but by the Holy Spirit, who gives the ungodly the faith both to cling to Christ for justification and to be united to Christ for communion in his eschatological life. (p. 181) Horton’s defense of a covenantal ontology may well be the most intriguing part of the volume. It is also the point at which Horton sees himself criticizing his own tradition most significantly. His claim is that God’s covenantal declaration is not merely a legal imposition on creation, but rather is constitutive of that which is declared. Protestant Orthodoxy traditionally relied on causal accounts of Divine action to express the priority of Divine action to human action. God ‘caused’ all things to happen. The appeal of Neoplatonic accounts of participation is that they resist the dichotomy between Divine action and human responsibility. They parse the relationship in terms of nearness and distance, rather than cause and effect. Horton argues that these accounts also get dangerously close to fusing the critical theological distance between Creator and creature. Union with Christ is the place ‘where strangers meet rather than where estrangement is [ontologically] overcome’, to borrow Horton’s use of Tillich’s distinction. Horton follows Vanhoozer in privileging speech/act theory as a better account of the God–World relationship than physical accounts of causality. In his final chapter, ‘Justification and Theosis’, Horton affirms the Eastern distinction between God’s essence and energies, agreeing with Palamas that humans can never know God’s essence or inner being. Horton resists the conclusion that the notion of energies by itself is a sufficient framework to make sense of participation. The distance between God and humankind narrated in Scripture is primarily ethical if it also has ontological dimensions. Therefore reconciliation between God and humanity cannot be only or primarily an accommodated metaphysical reality (the incarnation), but must be an ethical and covenantal one at heart. All parties to the debate on theosis may agree that the means of reconciliation is Christ but the disagreement centers on ‘how’ Christ is reconciler. Horton contends that Christ is a self-revelation of God in accommodated form to be sure, but that this revelation yields a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’. The who of revelation is the Great High Priest by whom and through whom we are reconciled to God. Horton here brings the results of his second volume to bear, that Christ is manifest as the Lord and servant of the Covenant. ‘If we draw the East’s concept of “energies” into a more communicative ambit, we can identify these divine “workings” with the word of God, understood here as God’s creative speech distinct from the eternally generated hypostatic Word who forms its archetype’ (p. 302), One minor concern. There are so many conversation partners in the book that it can on occasion produce a slight bit of theological vertigo. There is something © The author 2010 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 240 Reviews entirely refreshing about a conversation that engages Maximus the Confessor, Andreas Osiander, M.G. Kline, Bruce McCormack and Jon Levenson, but the lines of engagement are so infrequently entertained in the literature that it can produce disorientation for the reader. Part of what makes this volume compelling is its two predecessor volumes. Reviewing one volume without the other two in sight may give it less coherence than it otherwise deserves. This third volume is not merely a critical interaction with Horton’s opponents, but fundamentally a constructive theological project driven by the classic dogmatic treatments of the loci in Protestant Orthodoxy. Horton is likely the only person capable of pulling this off. He is to be amply commended for his project. Richard Lints Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Steven Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction. London: SPCK, 2007, x + 192pp. £14.99 Steven Shakespeare leads readers by the hand through the strange land of Radical Orthodoxy (RO), providing a commentary in clear prose stripped of jargon but well padded with illustrations and humour. He aims to be a fair-minded guide, providing a sympathetic interpretation before voicing his own criticisms – substantial though those criticisms are. His introduction sketches RO’s diagnosis of our world’s sickness, its exposure of the ‘quack medicines’ offered by other theologies, and the nature of the cure RO offers; three central chapters analyse the place of language, community and desire in RO theology, and a final chapter summarizes Shakespeare’s criticisms and his suggested response. Despite the undoubtedly engaging writing, however, the book’s usefulness as a guide is somewhat uneven. There are places where Shakespeare fails to give a fully plausible account of RO – one sufficient to show why so many people have been excited by it, or found it worthy of serious engagement. From time to time, the brevity of his tour leaves us stranded on one of RO’s blunt conclusions, without his having shown us the way through the maze of arguments that lead to it – arguments that explain the qualified sense in which the conclusion should probably be taken. As a result, some of Shakespeare’s criticisms land a little way off target, and a little too heavily, even when he has a real, telling question to pose. I found myself mentally leaping to RO’s defence, even when (as often happened) Shakespeare’s criticisms echoed questions about RO that I have myself. So, for instance, Shakespeare accuses RO of dismissing all secular institutions and discourses as ‘servants of evil’. ‘Are Greenpeace, Oxfam and Amnesty International simply the agents of savage capitalism?’ he asks. ‘Granted that their ideas about work, nature, rights and so on need to be examined critically, and that these movements are always likely to be compromised, does this mean that they must be utterly rejected?’ (p. 125). It is not hard to find RO texts that seem to beg precisely © The author 2010 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd