Book Review

God’s Amazing Salvation Pedagogy:
fundamental moral theology

By László HOLLÓ

The author, Dr. Laszlo Hollo, is professor of moral theology at the Roman Catholic Faculty of theology at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca. The title of this book is res ipsa loquitur, for those who are knowledgeable about moral theology. The essence of moral theology is expressed this way by the author in the foreword to his book: “Its main aim is to offer a solution for those ethical problems that occur in special cases”. And additionally to this the foregoing: “The present book intends to complete that expectation.” All this, as the title shows, was discussed in the book from the basis of the teachings found Holy Scripture.

The reader holds a handbook of fundamental moral theology indeed. In László Holló’s book, this reviewer read a quite complete fundamental textbook of moral theology, even as it contained just 275 pages. The book was systematic and summarize its topics. The bibliography was thorough. In spite of being a scientific work, the text was also enjoyable for lay readers. The author presented the developement of moral theology after Vatican Council II while avoiding both extreme progressive as well as exaggerated conservative approaches. As several chapters demonstrated, this was not an easy job in these days when free will, individual rather than social counsciuosness and the self responsibility are so emphasized over and above absolute compulsory moral norms.

The book has five chapters. In the first, which deals with the historical developement of moral theology, after the author draws a parallel between some of the non-Christian ethical models and the ethics of the Old and New Testament, he presents the impact of the ethics of Stoicism upon Christian ethics from Apostolic era until the present day. Using interesting examples Holló designs the age-bounded character of moral theology and its development from the epoch of the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages into modern history until the present.

The second chapter draws the image of the human being as a basic element of the moral theology. Holló does this in an unusual way since his point of departure is not the metaphisical human, the soul-owner and self-conscious man, but by taking into consideration the results of the modern philosophical anthropology and behavioral science research – which demonstrate to the author that the human person is much more than an animal. As Holló comments, this is so because the results of the empirical sciences are more accessible to modern men and women than the abstract theology derived from Aristotle’s logic applied to Stoical phylosphy (natural law) as found in Aquinas (and his source for Aristotle was Islamic writers such as Avicenna and the Jewish Rambam, Moses Maimonides. In view of this compelling evidence, how modern human beings can obtain freedom from sin, knowledge of the law and how to deal with death became accessible. In the third chapter that tells about the motivations of the human actions, the reader faces the whole of the text and its train of thought. Although Catholic moral theology is deontological in its reasoning on the one hand, on the other is as much teleological. Another way of stating this would be to balance duty (Kant’s deontology) alongside of the end goals for Christian human beings (being with God). The author then justified his dependence on modern social science to accomodate both duty and ends.

The moral Norm is God Himself for human beings, according to Holló. Because God created man on Hhis own image, acting moralLY means developing this image. We human beings can freely accept the order of which we became part - from the moment of our creation and to our salvation, says the author in the fourth chapter. He developed his arguments to inclue the norm of the moral actions, about the law, about consciousness, and about the Church.

The fifth chapter presents possible answers on the moral needs to deal with sin, conversion and virtues. Talking about conversion, the author deals in a separate chapter with the sacramental forms of conversion. The historical presentation is an interesting read in itself while the part about specifics might also be a pleasant spiritual reading.

„Moral theology is the most important branch of theology”- was said in an introductory class by the author when I was his student. I am confident that he probably says this even today during at first course. Biblical studies do not help human beings to achieve salvation - nor do dogmatics. Not even the rest of the branches of the theology help human beings to achieve salvation. Only a moral life derived from the Bible alongside the teaching of the Church (dogmatics) can help man to salvation (along with God given grace of course). This book reveals to the reader and to the students these moral norms and values.

We do not get responses for all our questions; there are paragraphs where we have the sensation that it is too hard to understand what the author intends to say; sometimes questions that a reader like me had were not answered in this book just reviewed, and sometimes some arguments were difficult to discern.

These are things that can occur durring the readnig, but only by those who really take the time to open up this book having such a simple though very pleasant layout. Meanwhile, a reader gets a very impressive amount of information from Biblical sources of today’s moral theology - which could be quite enough to give some advice for living one’s life morally.

CLUJ-NAPOCA University press, 2007

Gyöngyvér BERECZKI