Book Review: Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology

on May 20, 2017 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

      Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology Gilles Emery, O.P., and Matthew Levering, eds. Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 336 pp. $110.00. Reviewed by Luke Zerra   When reading about Thomas Aquinas one must always ask, “Whose Thomas? Which Thomism?” One prevalent view of Thomas is of the great schoolman as essentially a philosopher. This Thomas rediscovers Aristotle, takes him to new heights, and interacts with Scripture primarily as a source of proof texts for his philosophy. This was the prevalent view of the neo-Thomist revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which “Thomas as philosopher” was deployed to buttress Catholic truth against the cultural upheavals of modernity. An alternative view arose in reaction to this by those associated with or influenced by the Nouvelle Théologie that informed Vatican II. These...

Book Review: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

on May 20, 2017 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

        Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels Richard B. Hays. Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016, 524 pp. $47.48. Reviewed by Daniel Hasbun   In this long-awaited sequel to his 1993 book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, Richard Hays again takes up the task of intercanonical criticism with remarkable erudition and clarity. The book’s introduction concisely describes its central aim: to examine “the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture—as well as the ways in which Israel’s Scripture prefigures and illuminates the central character in the Gospel stories” (7). Hays does a fine job of establishing the link between this thesis and each of his subsequent points without being unnecessarily hampered by theoretical or cumbersome asides. The structure of the book—which is helpfully delineated in the introduction (8–9)— mirrors...