Gavin D'Costa spends entirely too much time trying to prove that nothing terribly new was taught at Vatican II, in the process impugning the theological credentials of some of the best historical interpreters of Vatican II, especially the late Giuseppe Alberigo, an Italian lay scholar, and the American Jesuit historian John O'Malley. D'Costa quotes at great length negative theological critiques of the historical work of these two authors elaborated by some of the safer scholars ensconced in the seminary universities of Rome or in their daughter institutions elsewhere in the world. Historians of theology and of church history more generally have much to teach theologians caught up in the fog of neo-Scholasticism.
The 433 words of Nostra Aetate dedicated to the relationship of Jews with the Church, as well as the corresponding sentences in Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church, provide D'Costa with an opportunity to prove that little new came about at Vatican II. He is convinced that “Vatican II cannot be charged with doctrinal discontinuity in regard to the Jews,” but the Second Vatican Council began a process of evaluating other faith traditions, and especially Judaism, much more positively than had been done previously. D'Costa assures the reader that Vatican II did not teach “that the Jewish religion is a means of salvation” or that “it is a valid God-given covenant” or that “no mission to the Jews is legitimate” (159), but there have been recent developments in official Roman teaching that contradict D'Costa. On December 10, 2015, the Pontifical Council on Religious Relations with Jews issued a lengthy teaching document that asserts, among other things, that “the Church is therefore obliged to view evangelization to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views. In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.” This does not mean that Catholics cannot or should not receive into the church individual Jews who wish to undergo Christian catechesis or baptism. The 2015 document is very clear about this: “Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God's Word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Shoah.”
D'Costa also only begrudgingly recognizes the sea change involved in Catholic understanding of the faith of Muslims evidenced in the text of Nostra Aetate. That brief paragraph of 133 words was translated from Latin into Arabic during the council and carefully evaluated by eminent scholars of Islam, like the Egyptian Dominican George Anawati and the French Missionary of Africa Robert Caspar, to see how it would sound in Muslim and Christian ears. D'Costa misses the point of the words in the third section of Nostra Aetate that say of Muslims that “they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even [God's] inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham … submitted to God.” In Arabic Abraham's wholehearted submission to God's decrees is islam at its most basic. D'Costa knows that the word “Muslim” in Arabic designates “one who submits,” but the three disjointed Arabic letters (Ḍ-R-‘) that follow this admission in parentheses are the triconsonantal roots of an Arabic verb infrequent in the Qur'an that exists only in its fifth form and connotes a certain humility in behavior, but not the submission of self to God that is islam.
Chapter 3 on the council and Jews and chapter 4 on the council and Muslims stand out as the best-researched sections of this book, although D'Costa returns too often to the hoary theme of “invincible ignorance” as the guarantee that Pope Pius IX and others have suggested as the saving grace for non-Christians. The fact that Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians still find in their own religious traditions deep wells that refresh their faith and hope and love was not recognized by many Catholic theologians prior to Vatican II. Some still do not recognize this fact today.
