Pasquale Vozza is an Italian born evangelist and pastor. He served as president and secretary of the Italian Christian Church of Northern Europe and pastored the North Miami Christian Church for nearly thirty-five years. Vozza studied theology in Rome and at the College of the International Bible Training Institute in London. From Saving Bodies to Saving Souls chronicles his journey as a missionary and shepherd of God’s people. Much of this book describes the signs and wonders that accompanied his ministry as evidence of the ongoing miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in the contemporary Church.

The early chapters detail Vozza’s growing up years. He was born and raised in the industrial southern Italian city of Taranto, Apulia during the WWII years. The efforts of Italy’s Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini, to increase the Italian population, which included a benefit of 3 thousand lire per child, incentivized his parents to keep having kids (eight in all). Raised nominally Roman Catholic, Vozza learned the Catechism at school. However, he recalls how little he was taught about the Bible: “I did not hear the word ‘Bible’ until I was twenty-one years old” (p. 5). He became preoccupied with a nighttime routine of smoking, drinking, and gambling. Through the persistent prayers and encouragement of his mother, who was worshipping at an evangelical house church “underground” (non-Catholic congregations were forbidden), Vozza underwent a conversion experience. He resolved to win the souls of his wayward friends and found work selling Christian devotional literature door to door. He spent a year term in the military, where he earned a reputation as the “Protestant guy with the Bible” (p. 45). Stationed in Rome, each Sunday, Vozza attended the services of the only Protestant church in the city, the headquarter building of the Assemblies of God in Italy, founded by the Pentecostal pioneer, Roberto Bracco.

The final chapters describe Vozza’s move to the US and ministry in Florida. After seven years overseeing the CCNA sister organization, the Italian Christian Church of Northern Europe, he, his wife, and three daughters joined his wife’s family in Miami. There he accepted the call by the CCNA Southern District to pastor the North Miami Christian Church. The church quickly blossomed, aspiring to a multi-ethnic outreach with Sunday school offered in Italian, French-Creole, and Spanish and a dynamic ministry among the Jewish people.

Vozza’s life story, of one sold out to godly service and the building of God’s kingdom, will resonate with Christians from all traditions. From Saving Bodies to Saving Souls offers a portrait of hope for the inquiring mind that will appeal to non-Christians looking in on the meaning of the life of faith from the outside. This book will be of interest to laypersons and ministers as well as historians of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity.

Reviewed by Paul Palma

In Frank Matera’s God’s Saving Grace: A Pauline Theology the author considers with careful and solid scholarship the totality of Paul’s themes in the canonical thirteen letters of scripture. Matera, a Roman Catholic and professor of Biblical Studies at Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., speaks as a scholar who studied Reformation teaching. He recaptures Pauline theology, succinctly unwrapping the apostle’s original framework concerning salvation in Jesus Christ. Utilizing Paul’s conversion experience and call, he builds a case that the grace of God remains the foundation for the apostle’s soteriology. In Ephesians 2:8-9 (NRSV) he states “for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Matera writes, Paul “no longer knows God except in Christ;”(248) therefore, there is nothing that sustains him but Christ alone. Again, he continues, “once the mystery of God’s redemptive plan has been revealed, however, it is clear that there has always been one plan, which is revealed in Christ”(248). Through the motif of the saving grace of Jesus, Matera outlines the meaning of salvation and redemption in his book.

Ch 1 A Pauline Theology of God’s Grace

Ch 2 Paul’s Experience of God’s Saving Grace

Paul’s calling and apostleship is grounded in the Damascus Road christophany (Acts 9) where he encountered with Christ. In Gal. 1:13-2:21, the apostle’s autobiography divulges this defining moment of his life. Matera indicates that a number of his letters commence with the launching of his apostleship by “the will of God” (1 Cor. 1:1). Paul defends his ministry with the Damascus christophany as his conversion was both a transformation and calling in one event. As Matera examines each of the three accounts of his christophany recorded in Acts 9, 22, 26, he writes that Paul’s commission was of divine origin, built on the kerygma of the cross of Christ (1 Cor. 1:18). Hence, he observes “Paul’s call, his gospel, and his apostleship are intimately related to each other” (42). Matera’s Pauline theology, is established in the Damascus Road christophany, and in that momentous event, Christ became the focus of the apostle’s life.

Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 272 pages, ISBN 1451470142

Stephen D. Long, professor of systematic theology at Marquette University, presents a remarkable rendering of the long ecumenical discussion and theological friendship between Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth. While Balthasar received significant backlash for this friendship, he felt that in Barth he had discovered a Protestant theology grand enough to enter into a discussion with Catholic theology. Long primarily follows the younger Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth and traces the influence of Barth’s theology—albeit not uncritically—on Balthasar. This relationship allowed both theologies to interact, challenge, and shape the other at their strongest and most divisive points. While disagreements continued to exist, Long suggests ultimately a stronger theology emerged.

The work begins with a description of Barth’s and Balthasar’s largely unknown friendship that involved not only Balthasar’s book on Barth, but vacations, participation in each other’s seminars, and extensive letter writing. Balthasar rarely made the friendship public due to both Catholic and Protestant disagreement with his Barthian preoccupation. This chapter alone will be of interest to scholars. The second and third chapters set out Balthasar’s reading of Barth and the contemporary rejection of that reading from both Catholic and Protestant theologians. The remainder of the work rehabilitates Balthasar’s reading of Barth for contemporary theology. In turn, Long examines Balthasar’s interaction with Barth on the realm of God dealing with the question of natural theology and revelation, the realm of ethics dealing with the move from a propositional ethic to one that spreads the glory of the Incarnation to creation, and the realm of the Church as means for both renewal and unity.

Barth and Balthasar agreed that the incarnation, rather than a conception of God constructed from within the realm of natura pura (a state of pure nature), was the starting point of theology. Theology radiates outward from the incarnation into nature to define nature in light of the person and work of God-in-Christ becomes the challenge and beauty of the theological enterprise. To first discover God from nature and only then move towards the Incarnation and Trinity, places the unity of God ontologically prior to the Trinity and risks constructing a god from abstraction that inevitably conforms to the image of man rather than the particularity of the revealed God. Barth argued a natura pura does not exist for there is no place that exists into which God has not spoken in Christ (3); as such there is no need for an analogia entis (analogy of being) to bridge the creature-Creator gap. The dividing difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, therefore, was to be found in the analogia entis dogmatized in the Vatican I’s duplex ordo cognitionis (two-fold order of knowledge) that asserted a natural realm in which God could be known via reason outside of God’s revelation in Christ (155).