emphasis rests on baptism as a human act, a baptism with water which Barth radically distinguishes from God’s act, baptism with the Spirit. Human action cannot be anything more than an answer, an act of obedience, a witness to God’s salvific act. Human acts, even baptism and the Lord’s Supper, human realities like the church, do not mediate salvation. Is this stress on baptism and the Lord’s Supper as human acts legitimate? In his critical evaluation, the author is closer to Calvin’s rich use of metaphors than to Barth’s radical ‘demythologization’. Van der Kooi closes his vast exposition of Barth’s theology with a forceful rejoinder not to understand the weight it places on God’s decision as leading to an attitude of indifference. Barth’s theology ‘is distorted into a total lie, if subsequently the necessity of communicating the Gospel also disappears under the table’ (p. 413). ‘The step that has to be taken within dogmatics is the question of what a concept contributes to the particular reflection at hand’ (p. 4). This step is taken here and there in the book, and more systematically in the last 40 pages (‘Evaluation: Profit and Loss’). That Barth participated in the modern relativization of doctrine is good: doctrine is a human affair. But his neglect of the ‘natural-physical’ realm is an impoverishment. The ‘theme of the way to faith’, present in Calvin, was no longer viable for Barth, and this is another loss. The author suggests broadening the concept of the Word and of self-revelation in order to retrieve Calvin’s way of correlating the Word and the Spirit. Not that the Word should no longer be the ‘criterion’for the truth of the knowledge of God. But the presence of a true knowledge of God in religions, in philosophy, through the Spirit, should not be sacrificed through a strict identification of the Spirit with the Word. Despite various editorial problems, which are surprising in a book sold for $169, anybody interested in the present and future of Reformed – and, more broadly, Christian – theology, anybody who shares the conviction that the present and future of theology cannot ignore the past, should be invited to read this excellent presentation and critical evaluation of two great theologians. Christophe Chalamet Fordham University Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain, eds., Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein. London: SCM Press, 2004, xiv + 286pp. £35.00 Grammar and Grace, a collection of essays dedicated to the memory of Victor Preller, sets out to make sense of the linkage between Aquinas and Wittgenstein. Why Aquinas and Wittgenstein? In the 1960s, the Neo-Thomists had cleanly divided Aquinas’s thought into philosophy (natural theology) and theology. Preller’s Divine Science and the Science of God (1967) reacted to this by arguing that Aquinas doesn’t think our words have any meaning when applied to God. Consequently, Aquinas’s natural theology cannot be separated very neatly from his theological © The author 2006 Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006 464 Reviews