In This is Our Faith, Thomas Rausch has written a clear, accessible survey of the contemporary Catholic faith, well suited for presentations to non-Christians (his original audience of Chinese college students) as well as to the mixed market found in today’s Catholic colleges. The book invites and supports explication by a teacher; unaided readers with little background in theology might struggle with the passing references to “Augustinian pessimism” and a host of unfamiliar names.

The book is organized around the basic articles of Apostles’ Creed, except for “the life of the world to come.” In place of eschatology, Rausch extends consideration of the Church into a four-chapter look at the Church in our day. I especially appreciated this section, as well as Rausch’s presentations of the Divine Mystery (Chapters 1-2) and “the Jesus of the Gospels” (Chapter 3.)

Rausch works up to his portrait of the God of Israel with a review of various approaches to the divine, ancient and modern. Compared to the embodiments of fertility in the ancient Near East and the capricious anthropomorphic deities of Greece and Rome, the God of Israel stands out for transcendence, otherness. “Israel’s God is a God who remains mystery even in relationship,” or in God’s poignant desire for relationship with a people that constantly turns away (14). Rausch skillfully draws out passages from the Hebrew Bible as well as Christian mystics and theologians to show us how “God is not a being among others in the world—the mistake of the new atheists; God is Being itself, pure, dynamic existence” (19).

His second chapter gives more detail on the biblical God, who creates and acts in history, culminating, as Christians believe, in God’s entry into human life through Jesus. This chapter includes useful discussions on ways of “knowing the transcendent God,” from Natural Theology to Revelation, with the interplay of faith and reason that we call Theology. His discussion here includes a helpful note on the difference made by one’s theological anthropology: “Protestant theology, heavily influenced by an Augustinian emphasis on the corruption of human nature due to original sin, has limited knowledge of God to what is learned by direct revelation, thus to Scripture. Catholic theological anthropology, more positive, admits of some knowledge of the Divine apart from revelation” (30).

The Jesus chapter sweeps from consideration of the sources for the life of Jesus into the events and themes of his ministry. Rudoph Bultmann’s collection of fifteen sayings “accepted by most scholars as authentic” (54) provides an interesting read for anyone either unfamiliar with Jesus or too familiar with his popularized image shorn of sharp edges. These sayings confront us with the One who challenged us to love our enemies and warned, “how hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23b; Rausch 54)

Rausch’s excellent presentation of the Church stretches from its New Testament basis to key themes like koinonia/communion and sacramentality. He points out the elements of “early Catholicism” in the later New Testament books—less spontaneously charismatic, more structured ministry—that Lutheran scholar Ernst Käsemann found so lamentable. Rausch dismisses Käsemann’s disapproval with the observation that “it was precisely these structures that kept the church together, under episcopal leadership and united in faith” (113)

Finally, Rausch’s extended treatment of the contemporary church is unusual in this kind of survey but could be quite helpful. His sympathetic account of Vatican II will educate not only non-Christians but young Catholics, who often have only the vaguest notions of where the Council came from or what it accomplished. Thoughtful assessments of the papacies of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis give context to current headlines, while the final chapter on Global Catholicism aptly introduces the Church’s shifting center of gravity toward the global South.

For inquiring minds wanting to know, this book would anchor a lively class of introduction to theology.