In this book the distinguished Canadian Jesuit scholar Jean-Marc Laporte, who is a leading authority on St Thomas Aquinas, gives us his latest reflections on the doctrine of grace. He takes as his theme the division of the church into East, West and ‘South’, the last referring to the emerging churches in the Third World. He recognizes that each of these churches has something of vital importance to contribute to the whole, and that the Western church will never have a fully developed theology unless and until it can incorporate insights from other great Christian traditions. Obviously he is on solider ground in dealing with the East than he is with the ‘South’, since the identity and coherence of the latter is highly questionable. As it turns out, it mostly consists of the liberation theology of Paulo Freire, which is interesting, but hardly on a par with the giants he discusses in the rest of the book.

His main theme is that a renewal of the theology of grace in the Western church is vitally important if Christianity is to thrive into the next century. He regards this tradition as central to the church as a whole, and traces it back from Thomas Aquinas through Augustine to St Paul. (The Eastern tradition, in contrast, owes more to St John and the developments of his thought by the Greek Fathers.) Of special interest is the position he assigns to Luther and other Protestants. Far from dismissing them, he recognizes that Luther recaptured the necessary understanding of grace as rooted in the concept of a personal relationship with God. His claim is that this understanding was also developed by Thomas, but by the time of Luther had been obscured by late mediaeval scholasticism.

Protestant readers of this book will be amazed and impressed by the breadth of Laporte’s theological understanding, and will find themselves in sympathy with much of what he says. The chapter on Aquinas may be harder to follow than the others, since it is more specialized, but the effort to come to grips with his thought will be well rewarded. He sees issues on the broad canvas of development, and does his best to fit Pauline teaching on salvation, for instance, into the doctrine of the Trinity as this was developed by Augustine and refined by Aquinas. There are times when his attempts at reconciliation may have gone too far (as, for example, in his restrained praise of Pelagius), and most of what he says about current society, including Third World problems, seems badly digested in comparison with his mastery of the classics. But if these things can be sifted out, the real treasure in this book will shine all the more brightly. Evangelicals should read and learn from it as an example of theology in the great tradition of the Western church.