Reviewed Title: Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements by Eduardo Echeverria. Pater Lang, Inc., International Academic Publisher, 2024. 380 pp. ISBN: 9781636673264

Keane, Vincent

English

Dordt College

Volume 53 Number 3 Article 6 March 2025 Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements (Book Review) Vincent Keane Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege  Part of the Christianity Commons, and the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Keane, Vincent (2025) "Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements (Book Review)," Pro Rege: Vol. 53: No. 3, 46 - 48. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol53/iss3/6 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Dordt Digital Collections. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Dordt Digital Collections. For more information, please contact ingrid.mulder@dordt.edu. 46     Pro Rege—March 2025BOOK REVIEWSEcumenism is a growing topic within Christian circles today. Some reject it as a modernist notion that perpetuates relativism, while others see it as a way forward to greater unity in Christ amidst ec-clesial differences. One of the issues I see with those attempting to be involved in ecumenical dialogue is an almost willful ignorance of the other side. This ignorance is problematic insofar as one cannot truly distinguish between the two or explain where true difference lies without getting polemical, and any attempt at drawing similarities or agreement won’t go beyond the surface level, as a result. In his new book, Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements, Eduardo Echeverria compares and contrasts two of the richest Christian traditions on various theological and philosophical topics. Echeverria engages with key theologians and philosophers from both sides, fairly and charitably laying out their thoughts. These figures include the great an-gelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas; Pope John Paul II; Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange; Herman Bavinck; Herman Dooyeweerd; and G.C. Berkouwer. The ecumenical circles involved in these traditions have been found wanting, in terms of a book that analyzes the traditional thought of both while en-gaging with the primary sources from these great thinkers.Beginning with the relationship between faith and reason, Echeverria draws on Bavinck, Dooyeweerd, and John Paul II. John Paul and Bavinck affirm a classical realist view of truth: “the agreement between thought and being…[and] the idea of correspondence between thought and real-ity” (16). Dooyeweerd objects to this approach, due to his rejection of metaphysics and the supposed confusion of the “object” with substance, which Echeverria discusses in chapter two. According to John Paul, faith needs reason, but also vice versa: Eduardo Echeverria, Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements. Peter Lang, Inc., International Academic Publisher, 2024, 380 pp., 978-1636673264. Reviewed by Vincent Keane, a Dordt University junior and Kuyper Honor Student, majoring in Theology and minoring in Philosophy. “The more we emphasize feeling and experience as the basis of Christian faith, the more we approach a subjective notion of truth” (70). This is one of the main points of the Pope’s encyclical Fides et Ratio: to guard against a subjective notion of truth and argue that the objective claims made by someone are true insofar as they correspond to reality. A key aspect of faith is indeed intellectual assent, which is why reason is needed. The truths to which one assents have their seal in objective reality because of their author, God. It is just as important for reason to need faith, however, because “faith purifies rea-son…[;]the theological virtue of faith liberates rea-son from the presumption of self-sufficiency” (68). John Paul and Dooyeweerd agree that Christ is the central point of all human existence and meaning, and both agree with John Calvin that knowledge of self depends upon knowledge of God (72). Both agree that Christian revelation is the starting point and the point of intersection between philosophy and theology. Moving from faith and reason, Echeverria analyzes the epistemology of Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), focusing mainly on their views of the law and transcendence. Bavinck and Dooyeweerd contrast vastly in their respective epistemologies, due to Dooyeweerd’s denial of realistic metaphys-ics and Bavinck’s alignment with the Thomistic/Aristotelian tradition, which led Dooyeweerd to see his fellow Reformed thinker, along with Abraham Kuyper, as shifting away from bibli-cal Reformational thought into a problematic Hellenized philosophy. Bavinck’s Logos doctrine, echoing St. Thomas’ position, led him to conclude that the human intellect is the divine light, due to its participation in the Divine intelligible light, the Logos. For Dooyeweerd, there is a “universal boundary,” the law, which divides the creator and Pro Rege—March 2025     47 the creature: “Where the law begins, we meet the limit of human reason, ability, and will; where the law ends, divine will and divine reason begin” (110). This is where Echeverria grounds the metaphys-ics debate. Echeverria sees Dooyeweerd’s rejection of realistic metaphysics as problematic in divine predication. Dooyeweerd holds to an analogy of faith over a metaphysical analogy of being, placing a false dichotomy between the two, as he sees ana-logia entis being developed outside of the Christian faith. Echeverria and all who follow the Thomistic tradition argue that inadequacy of expression does not entail total inexpressibility; one can speak ob-jective truth about God in human language due to the condescension of God. However, Dooyeweerd is not fully incompatible with the Catholic tradition. Dooyeweerd and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) agree on the fact that there are “structural laws” to certain things—mar-riage and sexuality being one of them, Echeverria points out. The first two types of the divinely law-ordered structure of reality, modal and typical law, are unchanging. The third type, the phenotypical or variable, refers to the potentialities or possibili-ties of a structure or thing that can have a variety of expressions due to interlacement and cultural development. For example, both Dooyeweerd and John Paul II view same-sex marriage as a perver-sion of the created order that underlies the institu-tion of marriage, thus being a perverted phenotype. Human sexuality, an example used throughout the chapters, helps tie them together, with Echeverria’s analyzing how it is viewed in the Catholic tradition and historically in the Reformed. Dooyeweerd and Wojtyla affirm the “enkaptic interlacement” that occurs between marriage and family, both retaining their distinctiveness in their respective spheres, but the family is an integral part of marital communi-cation, and procreation is a natural end. Echeverria finishes this chapter by arguing that although he rejects classic realism, Dooyeweerd, in theory, is a realist, due to his theory of correspondence.  In the third chapter, Echeverria covers the anthropology of Wojtyla as representative of the Catholic tradition, while touching on Dooyeweerd’s objections. Bavinck, Dooyeweerd, Wojtyla, Berkouwer, and Kuyper agree that there is unity to the human person and that the body is intrinsic to personhood. Dooyeweerd views “dual-ism” as a contradiction, for the soul as its own sub-stance cannot also be the soul existing as the form of the body. The view that the soul is a substance in and of itself causes a problem for the unity of man, but the view that the soul subsists as the form of the body causes the loss of the soul’s personal im-mortality. Echeverria quotes Catholic philosopher Etienne Gilson as vindicating the Thomist tradi-tion by asserting that “the soul of man is not the form of its body in spite of being a substance; on the contrary, it is qua substance that it is form…[;]the substantiality of the soul is the very foundation of the substantiality of man” (217). Thus, the soul communicates its substance to the body, maintain-ing a unity of substance amidst a distinction be-tween the two. Echeverria then describes Wojtyla’s “person-alism,” which accounts for the person in his sub-jectivity and what Dooyeweerd would call “naïve experience.” Wojtyla is more interested in viewing man from this personalism than what was em-phasized in traditional philosophy, “which studies man in terms of cosmological categories like sub-stance, potentiality, rationalist, freedom…” (227). While not rejecting this classical understanding, he sees it as limited. Wojtyla argues, according to Echeverria, that the acts of man express precisely who that man is as a person in the unity of body and soul. Dooyeweerd also had a high view of the acts of man: “Dooyeweerd holds that acts of the hu-man body are ordered to the heart of man….” For Dooyeweerd, all acts come forth from the soul in its “religious unity” (168-169). It is through man’s acts, Wojtyla argues, that he is either moving to-ward fulfillment or unfulfillment, with fulfillment being a good, and unfulfillment an evil. Echeverria’s last chapter takes on one of the most under-examined topics in theology and phi-losophy, in my opinion: the development of doc-trine.  St. Vincent of Lérins’ principle for doctri-nal development was Catholicity: “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (251). This includes organic development: the funda-mental and essential nature of what is developing remains the same, while its expression and form may change. And most importantly, it includes the distinction between doctrine and expression: “the differing expressions of the propositional truths of faith must keep the same meaning and the same judgment” (251). Echeverria attempts to analyze Berkouwer’s 48     Pro Rege—March 2025theory of development, which is highly contextual-ized, due to the questions brought forth from the nouvelle théologie of his day, namely the “nature of continuity between the different formulations of unchangeable truth”(252). Echeverria, I think, rightly criticizes Berkouwer’s emphasis on discon-tinuity and historical expression, but the absence of Berkouwer’s expressing a positive answer to the question himself leads to a “slippery slope” that may limit truth to its historical expression. This is why, I think, Echeverria struggles to bring forth a positive theory of development for the Reformed tradition, which is one of the weaknesses of this section. For Garrigou-Lagrange, and all dealing with doctrinal development, the question of truth is foundational. Garigou-Lagrange defended a tradi-tional-realist definition of truth, that “it is confor-mity to reality and its immutable laws that justi-fies the truth of an affirmation” (257). “Common sense” is fundamental to Garrigou-Lagrange’s theory of development, which states that “common sense contains a rudimentary ontology,” and that having these first notions allows one to assent to for-mulas without fully formulating them. Common sense “has not made explicit what is implicitly contained,” which is also the relation Garrigou-Lagrange will use to describe development (318). Doctrine, like common sense, moves from “ob-scurity to clarity and finally to distinctness” (322). Garrigou-Lagrange beautifully describes how revealed truth has its “primitive formulation in Scripture,” which then moves to more dogmatic language and a fuller expression in creedal state-ments, such as in Trinitarian or Christological the-ology (324). Lastly, Garrigou-Lagrange, as shown by Echeverria, argues that philosophy is subservient to divine revelation: “the supernatural makes use of nature” (326). Echeverria finishes by rightly discussing altera-tions in non-definitive teaching. Many Catholics, most of whom are on the extreme side, might ar-gue that there has been no alteration in the his-tory of their doctrine, but only continuity. This is proven false by the example of ecumenism and how it was viewed in Pope Pius XI’s encycli-cal Moratalium Animos, compared to Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio. Echeverria argues that there is an “apparent contradiction between the earlier and later documents rather than a real contradic-tion”: to summarize, using Vincentian terms, there was not a permutatio (corruption) in teaching, but instead true development with apparent contradic-tions (330). The formulation of truth was incorrect in Pius XI’s letter, in “his analysis that the rejected errors” were inherent to ecumenism, while the fun-damental teaching, the propositional truth, has un-derlying continuity (335). I think there is something left out in Echeverria’s analysis of this question, which in my opinion fits right in, that being the question of no salvation be-ing outside the Church. Echeverria may have had a reason for leaving this out, but the teachings of the Council of Florence and Pope Boniface VIII’s bull Unam sanctam seem like definitive, possibly ex-cathedra statements. I would love to see how Echeverria would take on this “apparent contradic-tion,” which seems extreme in its language (I say that out of genuine curiosity and not in any arro-gant or disingenuous way). Another challenge I may offer to Echeverria is how one may falsify his position regarding magiste-rial teaching and doctrinal development. What is the line where one says “this is no longer an ‘appar-ent contradiction’ but an actual, genuine contradic-tion”?To conclude, Echeverria has done a fantastic job of analyzing the thoughts on these topics across both traditions, dealing well with the primary texts and thoughts of the theologians. Echeverria beau-tifully intertwines all chapters, somehow making them all dialogue with each other. For example, one cannot have an understanding of doctrinal de-velopment without first knowing what truth is and how humans can know divine realities, which is in the realm of epistemology. I think this book will be a great tool to advance ecumenical engagement that goes beyond the surface level of thought and gets deep into genuine similarities and differences. 

Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements (Book Review)

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Roman Catholicism and Neo-Calvinism: Ecumenical and Polemical Engagements (Book Review)

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