Abstract
Swimming in the stream of Jean Daneilou’s classic work The Bible and the Liturgy, Isaac Morales, OP, offers a thick account of the Bible’s theology of baptism. Unlike Daneilou’s book, M. focuses almost strictly on the biblical text and relegates the history of interpretation and reception to sidebars. The book has a wide readership in view and as such does not burden the reader with jargon or elongated engagement with various Auseinandersetzungen on the topic. Depending on the reader, some will welcome the volume for this reason, and others may wish for more for precisely the same reason. This reviewer found the book a fruitful example of the kind of theological engagement with Scripture that many in the lectern, pulpit, and pew are looking for these days. M.’s work demonstrates the richness of a theological and figural reading of Scripture where the Church’s prayers, practices, and doctrine receive their shape and substance from the Sacred Page.
The book is neatly divided into two sections reflecting the shape of the Christian canon, Old and New Testaments. The whole book brims with exegetical and theological insights into the sacrament of baptism. For the broad audience M. has in view, the book’s heavy engagement with the Old Testament may come as a surprise and delight. The broad stream of the Christian interpretive tradition recognizes the pressure the Old Testament placed on Christian thought and practice, and this book follows suit. M. offers four chapters on the image of water in the Old Testament, and the ways in which the Old Testament’s broad deployment of this theme helps to frame a biblical theology of baptism. Water in the Old Testament signifies in figured fashion the source of all life, the deep trenches of judgment and death, the movement from slavery to freedom (the Red Sea), and the ritual means by which purity is affected for worshippers of the living God.
These chapters on the Old Testament reveal the fruitfulness of an associative or cross-canonical reading pattern that brings biblical texts into a thick and meaningful relationship around a common theme. One of the characteristics of modern criticism is bringing to the fore Scripture’s diverse voices and traditions. Much can be appreciated from this legacy, but the Church’s reading strategy prioritizes the divine author of Scripture and resists the modern-critical instinct to read one portion of Scripture as if it is “repugnant” to another. M., in good keeping with Aquinas, recognizes the importance of linking canonical intentionality within the frame of a single, Divine author, not to flatten the biblical text into a monotone voice but to recognize the thick texture of biblical and theological matters across the fertile field of the biblical canon.
M.’s engagement with the New Testament covers a great deal of canonical territory. These chapters are exegetically and theologically insightful as the book moves through the four Gospels to the Pauline and General Epistles. For a subject matter as important and contentious as baptism, the tone of M.’s work is irenic, seeking to allow the literal sense of Scripture and the givenness of its own language pride of place. Naturally, a figural/theological reading of Scripture and Sacramental sensibilities go hand in hand. For readers in non-sacramental traditions, this kind of engagement with Scripture’s literal sense may seem out of keeping with modern, critical sensibilities, even though M. is in good company with the Church’s hermeneutical instincts.
M. keeps his head low on contentious matters that could cloud his work. As a Protestant, this reviewer found himself much in agreement with the book’s figural approach and the deft ways M. brings Scripture into deep conversation with itself. Naturally there are some curiosities and quibbles. With as much ground as M. covers, readers would expect as much. For example, M. follows Nathan Eubank’s reading of Matthew’s “to fulfill all righteousness” phraseology. Fruitful as this reading is—baptism as the beginning of Jesus’s “filling to the measure” his acts of righteousness culminating in the cross—one wonders if more is going on with Matthew’s turn of phrase: perhaps the linking of the office of King (Psalm 2) and Servant (Isaiah 42) in the Father’s pronouncement over his Son, or the initial identification of Jesus with sinners in the waters of baptism? Many Protestants will hesitate before M.’s definition of justification (129). The relation of faith to baptism, and the nature of faith itself, remain matters of some dispute in the Western theological tradition. In other words, contentious theological distinctions between Rome and various stripes of Protestants still exist, and M.’s location in these disputes is clear. Nevertheless, the sacramental approach to Scripture that M. models in this book should be welcomed by all who recognize Holy Scripture as the privileged means by which Christian faith and practice are measured. As such, this reviewer hopes M.’s book finds the wide readership it deserves.