Long’s latest book advocates a recovery of metaphysics for theology, eschewing the post-metaphysical onslaught of recent systematic and philosophical theology. As the third volume in the newly launched Eerdmans Ekklesia Series (a work of the Ekklesia Project: www.ekklesiaproject.org), a key focus is the political impulse of basic metaphysical tenets of the Christian faith. To address metaphysics and public reasoning, he offers chapters on speaking of God in the modern context, faith and reason, the divine names, language, and truth.

What does he combat? He sees four ills in the modern milieu: fideism, projectionism, ontotheology, and a post-Tridentine version of the analogia entis (p. 80). In short, the temptation is to view knowledge of God as totally removed from other intellectual endeavors or to conflate it with other rational work. Many have viewed the metaphysical approach to God as an anthropological game of maximizing human ideals, projecting them onto God, identifying them with human powers, and justifying social ills and inequalities. To combat social injustice and to distance God from the pains of the political arena, many moderns have jettisoned that God of the classical Christian tradition as so much Hellenism. Long is not convinced.

How does he respond? Historically, Long views this rejection of metaphysics as less a careful reading of the Bible than a tradition misinformed by the so-called “Hellenization thesis,” the hypothesis that the early church quickly succumbed to the straightjacket of Greek thinking and thereby morphed the Hebrew story of Jesus into the dogma of the creeds, councils, and schoolmen. The problem, as Long says, is that this history is bunk (pp. 183–85, 187–88). The Christian tradition Christianized Hellenism (a phrase cited from Robert Louis Wilken), not the other way around. In chapter three, the dogmatic center of the whole book, Long shows that the divine name given in Exod 3:14 undergirds this metaphysical framework, implying a whole host of dogmatic tenets: impassibility, simplicity, infinity, eternity, etc. He relies on a recent spate of good archaeological work by Janet Martin Soskice, Fergus Kerr, Matthew Levering, and others to explain the revealed nature of the classical divine attributes (what he calls the “divine names”), focusing especially on their place in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Theologically, Long argues that the incarnation provides a model for speaking about God. In Jesus, we see that the human nature can be with God without itself becoming divine; here the continuing integrity of the two natures is crucial (pp. 14–15, 85–86, 226, 258, 295). As he says, “Jesus Christ is the ‘way’ or ‘logic’ of our speaking of God, for he is the Procession who takes on creatureliness without confusing it with divinity in the concretion of his one Person” (p. 177). So all theology is anthropology, as Long says, but all anthropology is Christologically focused (p. 40, drawing on Victor Preller). By continuing to reflect on the two natures of Christ’s person, Long is able to honor the adequacy of theological language without denying the distinction between divine and human life.

The strengths of the book are many. Long rightly responds to the overwhelmingly post-metaphysical trends in contemporary theology. He references a cadre of thinkers who protest this groundswell, especially William Desmond, Fergus Kerr, and Matthew Levering, engaging with varying interpretations of the doctrine of God in the Thomistic tradition. However, two limits of the book appear here. One wishes that he engaged the iconoclastic proposals of Bruce McCormack or that he addressed debates among those influenced by Barth in greater detail. He consistently mentions Barth, but he restricts his analysis of Barthian scholarship largely to that offered by Hans Urs von Balthasar. While this is no doubt an important ecumenical and dogmatic conversation to note, perhaps the most heated debate about the classical metaphysical tradition is presently occurring amongst Barthians. Even more important, however, is the lack of biblical exegesis in Long’s text. He does make the programmatic and historical point that the divine names tradition flows from biblical texts; that is, Thomas was a biblical and exegetical theologian. Furthermore, he shows the importance of a couple texts (Exod 3:14; John 14:6). But a successful response to post-metaphysical theology is going to have to offer more than this in the way of biblical commentary. The whole warp and woof of Scripture points to and presupposes a particular metaphysics. If ever it was necessary to go text by text, theme by theme, the time is surely now. This reader left Long’s book wanting more by way of exegesis.

Long also succeeds in tying metaphysical inquiry to political engagement (see esp. chap. 5). Among other things, he challenges Mark Lilla and others in their too frequent claim that dogmatic religion necessarily leads to violence and, thus, must be replaced by a secular pluralism. Against this now popular view of ancient and early modern history (popularized by Bart Ehrman, Dan Brown, and so many popular periodicals), Long observes that “this analysis of violence gets the cause of violence in modernity exactly backwards” (p. 263). He shows that the divine names tradition does not justify the power and violence of human kings indiscriminately; rather, if God is the universal sovereign, no other ruler can claim that role.

All told, then, Long’s book is a useful entry into recent discussions of theological metaphysics, linguistic philosophy, and the doctrine of revelation. He also addresses the political implications of classic Christian orthodoxy. He reads Thomas in the most plausible way possible, making the most of recent scholarship and drawing a number of synthetic judgments that are helpful. The book reads largely like a survey of Thomistic scholarship, but it is survey of the best kind and with sane judgment. It will be especially useful as a launching pad to send students and scholars alike deeper into the Western theological tradition, where they can see Thomas and others reading the Bible with metaphysical interests.