few references to the Radical Reformation appear in the entirety of The Gift of Differ-ence. I count five that are somewhat developed, three of which are anecdotes from theseventeenth-century martyrology, The Martyrs’ Mirror, which is a particularly trou-bling source to use in passing reference without explicit hermeneutical attention to itsfolklore-ish character. None of the essays examines Menno Simons, Conrad Grebel,Pilgram Marpeck, Hans Denck or any of the other of the plethora of radical reformersof the sixteenth century at length. Absent, too, are the voices of the eighteenth- andnineteenth-century Mennonites and other descendants of the Anabaptists, though thetwentieth century makes frequent appearance in the person of John Howard Yoder(and a few other scholars, though far less frequently). By and large, however, theauthors cite these last sources as accepted grounds for their own views, and (at leastin this volume) they do not engage in sustained critical reflection on them. “Radicalreformation” thus appears, in The Gift of Difference, as a style of theologizing based ina particular version of contemporary “neo-Anabaptist” thought rather than a set oftheological sensibilities infused with deep and patient attentiveness to historical textsand resources. I am neither entirely uncomfortable with this trend (and it is, I think,a characteristic of a good deal of contemporary Anabaptist-friendly thought), norentirely at ease with it. It does seem to me, however, that patient attention to sourceswithin the Radical Reformation should again begin to infuse the work of theologiansand ethicists writing on behalf of it.

That said, The Gift of Difference collects a rewarding and stimulating set of texts thatshould set the stage for continued and expanded reflection on similar contemporarytheological trajectories that emerge from quite distinct ecclesiologies, a conversationto which I happily look forward.

J. Alexander SiderBluffton UniversityDepartment of Religion1 University DriveBluffton, OH 45817USAsiderja@bluffton.edumoth_1768 571..595

Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society by JonathanChaplin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), xii + 452pp.

Across the British political spectrum recently, whether from “Red Tories” or “BlueLabour”, in terms of the “Big Society” or mutualism and co-operatives, there has beenrenewed discussion of civil society. It is as if the perceived failure of the market andthe state to deliver human flourishing has led to a revival of interest in the complexweb of institutions and organisations that fall between and often seem squeezed bythese two. Unusually for British political debates, this discussion has been influencedby currents in political philosophy, where the classical liberal model of the sovereignstate and the mass of self-interested little sovereign individuals with nothing inbetween the two has been widely abandoned. States, markets, and individuals are allembedded in other complex socio-cultural realities which shape their particular iden-tities, from families and ethnic communities, to charities, voluntary groups and “notfor profit” organisations, trades unions, political parties, religious organisations,popular movements, and so on. As questions of successful regime change or domesticriots remind us, even the most formally perfect political system cannot make virtuous

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citizens without depending upon more substantive visions of the good and culturesfor their transmission, which usually fall to civil society. The debate around civilsociety has received considerable input from religious groups and thinkers, not justopportunistically because they naturally occupy this space of civil society themselves,but also, as this book shows, because the Christian social tradition has particularreasons of its own for thinking in these terms, instead of the more purely individualistor collectivist categories of modernity. The debate about civil society is then oneinstance of the “post-secular” turn of much recent political thought and of the remark-able resurgence of Christian social and political thought on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jonathan Chaplin describes three contemporary approaches to the question of civilsociety: first, the conservative “protective” model, for which civil society is the realmof real community life (family, faith and neighbourhood), which needs to be protectedagainst the constant encroachments of the state and the market; secondly the “inte-grative” approach, which he sees as indebted to Hegel, and which seeks to incorpo-rate civil society as part of the state; and finally the radical “transformative” model,represented by the civil rights movement or the popular uprisings of the Arab spring,which offers a critique of the contemporary political status quo and seeks to changeit. Chaplin believes that Dooyeweerd’s account of civil society and its relation to thestate includes elements of all three approaches while also overcoming some of theirvarious weaknesses.

The Dutch legal and political philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) isunlikely to be well-known to most British audiences, as Chaplin’s excellent book is thefirst substantial treatment of his thought in English, although he has a significantgroup of advocates based at the (Dutch founded) Toronto Institute of ChristianStudies. As intellectual heir to Abraham Kuyper, Calvinist founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party and briefly Dutch Prime Minister, Dooyeweerd might seem tobelong to an earlier generation of Christian political thought, amongst the ChristianDemocrat thinkers who opposed Nazism and contributed to the post-war reconstruc-tion of Europe. However, Chaplin situates him in more contemporary debates bydrawing attention to his critique of liberalism, or the “humanistic ground motive” ashe calls it, and his account of “Christian pluralism” and how this might contribute torecent debates about Civil Society.

Dooyeweerd is able, according to Chaplin, to help clarify three key questions: whatwe mean by “civil society”; what is its relation to the state; and whether it can be usedfor social critique. Civil society is to be understood as “that realm of social interactionsembracing the dense networks of interlinkages characteristic of a modern society”; itis the “sinews” rather than the “muscles” of society. Here Chaplin is arguing againstmore conservative, communitarian accounts of civil society, by insisting that civilsociety is not the residue of pre-modern community holding out against modernindividualism, but rather is only possible in modern society where individuals andcommunities can form free and equal connections rather than necessary ones.

Dooyeweerd is developing Kuyper’s account of “normative institutional plural-ism” with its key idea of “spheres of sovereignty”: the state is not a family, nor abusiness, nor a church, and each of these would mistake its own proper vocation if itwere to stray into the territory of other sovereign spheres. This institutional pluralismderives from Reformation notions of the equality of all vocations directly underunmediated divine sovereignty. Different spheres have their own irreducible norms,which can even be “positivised” as different laws. Here Dooyeweerd is arguing forlegal pluralism, against the legal positivists for whom the state is the only source oflaw. Dooyeweerd contrasts these spheres of sovereignty with the more hierarchicaland corporatist organic model of civil society in Catholic thinking, which he associ-ates with medieval Christian thought and its Neo-Thomist revivals. The Church is not“above” the state, nor the state “above” the family, but all are equal under God.

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Chaplin offers a “progressive” reading of Dooyeweerd’s three key innovations (thenotion of “irreducible institutional identity”, the “correlation between communitiesand interlinkages” and the “principle of public justice as the core task of the state”).He argues that the first two points strengthen the autonomy of the various spheres, sothat for example the state is prevented from having any special intrinsic relationshipwith any religious or ethnic group. The third point is equally progressive but arguablymore “Thomist” than classically liberal, and enables Chaplin to press Dooyeweerd’sthinking beyond a purely negative notion of the state towards ideas of the commongood. This in turn enables him to justify state interference in the economic spherebeyond what was envisaged by Dooyeweerd himself (such as encouraging profitsharing rather than just a minimum wage).

So far this might well sound like a classically liberal account of the distinction ofpowers. But while, as we have seen, Dooyeweerd situates his account of civil societyagainst what he calls “universalism”, the absolutist tendency to subsume all socialspheres under the state, he also situates it against the individualism of liberal moder-nity. Against the tradition of Hobbes and Grotius, Dooyeweerd insists that “juridicalclaims in a society are legitimately advanced by communities and cannot all bederived from those of individuals”. Chaplin develops Dooyeweerd’s critique of Lib-eralism, particularly through his account of normativity: if different spheres have theirown vocations, then they cannot simply do what they want. They are not monadicindividuals whose freedom is the only thing that matters. There is a “right” way to bea state, or a family, or a business, or whatever, and for them to interact, and a “wrong”way, and Dooyeweerd believes this is part of the structure of reality itself, not simplysomething constructed by humans. He offers a teleological account of human asso-ciation, oriented to particular ends and rooted in a particular ontology or view of theworld. This distinguishes his Calvinist “covenantal voluntarism” from what he sees asthe individualism of secular humanist “instrumental voluntarism”. He regards theattempt to separate facts from values (“historicist positivism”) as the “fatal illness ofour times”, which has led to a purely “relativistic standpoint” in political philosophyand the “loss of any notion of the normative structure of the state”. Dooyeweerd, onthe other hand, is a “philosopher of created order” seeking to offer us a “Protestantversion of natural law”, telling us “norms do not change, only the human responsesto them” (here he has significant parallels with Oliver O’Donovan’s writings). Chaplinworks hard to defend this ethical realism from charges of being “conservative”,“imperious”, and a “static essentialism”, insisting that Dooyeweerd recognisesdynamic historical development, but sees this as the unfolding of already existing“universal, functional capacities rooted in (created) human nature”. In the end, forChaplin, as for Dooyeweerd, “human freedom does not generate moral norms exnihilo” but is always “responsive to divine sovereignty”. It is this normative account ofcivil society which distinguishes Dooyeweerd’s position from purely secular under-standings. Here we see the distinctively theological basis of his political philosophy.Dooyeweerd argues that all philosophies have a “religious ground motive”, but heclaims that “only the biblical ground motive” can generate a fully pluralist notion ofcivil society against both pagan absolutist notions of the state and humanist individu-alism. Herein lies his claim to be a “distinctive modernity critic”.

Chaplin thinks this distinctively normative account of institutional pluralism can behelpful to those who do not share its underlying ontological and religious convictionsand, as such, it offers a good example of religious contribution to public debate in apluralist society. This may well be so, but his allusions to contemporary debates aboutthe nature of marriage suggest how fraught any discussion of normative social insti-tutions is likely to become when we move beyond Dooyeweerd’s often unhelpfullygeneral abstractions. Here mainstream liberal social and political theorists will prob-ably part company with Dooyeweerd, but despite their repeated efforts to exclude

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normative judgements from a purely descriptive social and political science, it couldcertainly be argued that more hidden and ungrounded normative judgements con-tinue to operate at every level of social and political analysis. The renewed awarenessthat liberal political structures and processes are not purely rational, morally neutraland self-grounding, but depend upon more substantive visions of human flourishing,has perhaps opened a “post-secular” space in which religious and other metaphysicalaccounts of the political are once again able to contribute to the wider public debate,particularly in the area of social criticism.

Potentially more problematic for Dooyeweerd is his bias towards thinking informal, legal, abstract ways about civil society to the neglect of actual symbolic-material distributions of power. Chaplin notes this in his conclusion and challengessome of the specific unconvincing distinctions which follow from this throughout thebook, but the problem goes deeper than he recognises. Ultimately Dooyeweerd’sspheres may not be so normatively distinct as he would like them to be. Althoughmodern liberal societies depend upon trying to separate the state from the church,from the market, from an ethnic community, and so on, it is less clear whether this isever actually completely possible in practice, let alone why these distinctions shouldbe regarded as normative. Chaplin rejects the charge of Occidentalism, but has toadmit that Dooyeweerd does seem to regard the differentiated bourgeois society ofearly twentieth century Europe as the normative conclusion of a linear developmentfrom “primitive”, “closed” and “undifferentiated” societies. These are claims whichraise questions for critics of modernity from the Right and the Left, whether secularor theological.

John HughesJesus CollegeCambridgeCB5 8BLUKj.hughes@jesus.cam.ac.ukmoth_1769 574..598

The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? edited byThomas Joseph White, O.P., (Grand Rapids MI / Cambridge UK: Wm. B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), xiv + 440 pp.

This remarkable collection derives from a conference in 2008 sponsored by theDominican House of Studies and the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington DC.The papers are designed explicitly to reconsider the vigorous interaction between twointellectual giants, Karl Barth and Erich Przywara, whose disputes, contends editorThomas Joseph White, “between the years 1929 and 1932 concerning analogia entis,‘analogy of being,’ [gave] rise to the single most important ecumenical controversy ofthe twentieth century” (p. 1). White has deftly organized contributions to confirm andabundantly illustrate that contention. Divisions of the text give the story: (1) recon-sidering the theological contours of the original debate, (2) ecumenical proposals, (3)the analogy of being and Thomistic ressourcement, (4) the analogy of being and therenewal of contemporary theology. Each section is graced with commentators whohave pondered this central, yet recondite, subject sufficiently to display its contoursably.

So let us begin with parts one and two, where Bruce McCormack’s astute accountof Karl Barth’s development on this neuralgic issue leads us to recognize the complexpolemical context of his celebrated (or notorious) nein:

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