This valuable collection of essays takes as its overarching theme the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the deleterious consequences of its neglect in Christian theology and ethics, and the necessity and benefit of its recovery at the present juncture. The twelve essays coalesce around three topics which are each explored in turn and with increasing brevity: ecclesiology, ethics and finally ecumenism.
Karl Barth—Hütter's main interlocutor in the first half of the book—once remarked that the very existence of Roman Catholicism questions Protestants as to ‘whether and how far’ they are in fact ‘a church’ (p. 82). Hütter is greatly shaken by this question, and his reflections on the Church strive to discern the grounds on which a positive answer might be given. Barth's own account of the Christian community proves, in Hütter's judgment, to be fatally abstract, and ‘cannot really exist in an ecclesially embodied form’ (p. 88). Hütter characterises his own counter proposal as a kind of ‘concrete catholicity’ (p. 90). On this view, the Church is a public constituted by a set of ‘core practices’ and binding doctrines. Constituted in this way by its practices and doctrines, the Church is the embodied Gestalt of the Spirit-driven Gospel in the world. Intrinsic to Hütter's motivations here is a desire that theology acknowledge a discrete economy of the Spirit ‘in his own right’ (pp. 49, 92); his close identification of the core practices of the Church with the work of the Spirit—elsewhere he has described their relation as hypostatic—is offered as a ‘concrete pneumatology’ that does just this. This approach to the Church is also put forth as a realisation of impulses in Luther's ‘mature ecclesiology’ drawn from the much invoked tract On the Councils and the Church. In all this, Hütter provides a more direct and accessible account of these matters than that previously available in his much more technical study, Suffering Divine Things. Hence, these essays are invaluable sources with which to introduce students to an important trend in contemporary thinking about the Church.
The second, ethical section of the book is a sustained and studied attack on Protestantism's ‘antinomian captivity’, made by critical re-consideration of the concept of freedom. As in ecclesiology, so too in morals, Hütter's chief concern is with the particular and concrete Gestalt given to Christian existence by the Spirit. In this case it is salutary function of the law as a principle of action that gives the necessary form to freedom, directing it to its proper ends and signalling its creaturely limits. Indeed, like the core practices of the Church, the enactment of the law is, following Thomas, equivalent to ‘the Holy Spirit's self-enactment in the believer's life’ (p. 126). Critical analysis of modernity's paradoxical expansion and eclipse of freedom—the strange coupling of the assertion of promethean self-making with acknowledgement of grinding determinism—gives way to an extended appreciation of Veritatis Splendor, especially its refusal of the antinomy between human freedom and law, and defence of a view of freedom that has its basis and telos in God's law. Once again, Hütter argues that ideas like these also find support in aspects of the later Luther, in this case his neglected antinomian writings.
The final series of shorter essays pursue matters related to the progress and prospects of ecumenism. The first reflects wistfully on Ut Unum Sint and the possible place of the petrine office in the next wave of global ecumenism; the second aims to expose the harmful effects of leaving the ‘will and its relation to reason’ as the ‘unthematized other’ in the text of Fides et Ratio. The final essay approves of the logic of thinking of the Church ‘in’ Israel and Israel ‘in’ the Church as is done by the 2001 study The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, a document Hütter sees as ‘extended canonical catechesis’ regarding how to read the Bible in light of Romans 9-11 (p. 213). This approach promises to move beyond the alternating Protestant postures of incipient marcionism or ‘showy self-immolation’vis-à-vis Judaism. Indeed, Hütter reflects that in this work of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Protestants confront ‘the embodied suggestion, if not the evidence, that it might indeed require a Church (and not merely a conglomerate of denominations)’ to break the current hermeneutic deadlock between biblicism and historicism (p. 209). That ‘it might require a Church’ is indeed a claim central to all of Hütter's arguments throughout this collection. As his recent reception into the Roman Catholic Church indicates, Hütter himself has become convinced that the ‘concrete catholicity’ required in ecclesiology and ethics must finally be Roman catholicity, and that the Church we require if our reading of the Scriptures is to have a future, is similarly Roman.
