Faith After Auschwitz-and Belfast

...We are in need of a critical language, a language that clearly brings out, and negates, the forces of evil...

...Revelation, I have indicated, is not information about a sacred object, but salvational truth: it transforms our awareness of reality, our action, and thus our very being...

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...What then does the special Catholic claim mean in this new theological context...

...Your Schulmerich Representative can explain these systems to you in detail...

...and both are moments of divine grace...

...but the church is also the falsifier of the gospel...

...FATHER GREGORY BAUM, O.S.A., i$ the author of several books, including Man Becoming and Faith and Doctrine...

...Why is this so...

...Even when we are destroyed, we want to believe that this is not the end, that in Jesus the definitive victory has been revealed, that God will have the final and last word...

...What is at work is a developing insight that the sensible reality that enters into our daily experience is intrinsically sacramental of the divine presence...

...He can show you why more Schulmerich Bells are used to bring people together than any other bells in America...

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...We are keenly aware of the genocides, the wars, the sustained exploitations proper to our age and remember the history of evil that has preceded us...

...but even when our affirmations fail us, we realize that we are gripped by the inability to believe precisely because we hope for the Kingdom and are unable to reconcile ourselves with so much evil...

...Church leaders who regard the church as divine become defensive: while they readily admit their own personal shortcomings, they feel that they have to defend the image of the church and its traditional institutions...

...But not every church has room in its budget for an expensive cast bell installation...

...The church is the mediator of the gospel through scripture, teaching, sacraments, liturgy, ministry and communal life...

...The world we experience (especially people) is a profound symbol of the divine...

...If we are believers today, then our faith must leave room for the world religions and other wisdom traditions, and enable us to cooperate with other communities in the struggle against the evil forces that devour and deform human life on this globe...

...We impose on the growing child the money- and achievement-orientation of oar society, the hidden and not-sohidden racism, the individualism and elitism of Western culture...

...New York, N. Y. 10016 [ ] One year, $15 [] Two years, $28 [ ] 12 issues trial, $3 [ ] Payment enclosed [ ] Bill me Name Address City, State, Zip 11115/74 when we live out of the quest for faith...

...For in the man Jesus, God reveals to us not only what it means to be truly human but also what the mystery of God is like: Jesus is God's Word addressed to us, in Jesus God communicates himself to us, the man Jesus 15 November 1974:156 is the Word made flesh...

...they are the fruit of Christian experience, they are theological...

...there is the alienation of the Church from the indigenous cultures to which Christians belong in various places, an alienation that is felt most symptomatically in sacramental liturgy...

...Such Catholics interpret the Catholic Church's claim to uniqueness not in reliance on special divine promises that supposedly make this church more faithful to the gospel than any other, but as an expression of its historical self-understanding...

...it is salvational truth...

...Some readers may react strongly against these reflections...

...Is this possible...

...the church that is open to new cultures sometimes to the point of syncretism and remains to this day a transnational and transcultural ecclesiastical community...

...Many Christians today also demand that their faith relate them to people everywhere...

...for that matter, we cannot foresee too sharply the future shape of any of the other ministries we have mentioned...

...18960 Commonweal: 159...

...Christian faith in an evil world is often the longing and the hope, grounded on the biblical promises that God will manifest his Kingdom in the liberation of all people...

...Making the Kingdom the central symbol governing our understanding of history, we remain open to other people, rejoice with them in the wisdom found in their own traditions, join them in a common struggle against the dehumanizing forces, and trust that God's victory is pressing in upon all of us...

...In a word such as ours dominated by so many structures of evil and distorted by so much human misery, it is difficult to cling to the scriptural message that God is good, that God is present in life and history as ground of love and principle of salvation...

...Schulmerich Liturgical Bells have from one to six electro-mechanical bells that maintain the same depth and tone quality as the large cast bells...

...We hold the Christian message in such a way that room is left for several Christian traditions...

...In the preceding paragraphs I have summarized what I believe in terms of the traditional Christian symbols and then indicated that it is possible to translate this symbolic language into the more conceptual language of the church's defined teaching...

...Let me begin with the negative symbols of the biblical message...

...Christian faith has for us an ecumenical dimension...

...What Jesus has revealed, moreover, is that the divine mystery is present to life in a threefold way: God has been present as Word from the beginning of history addressing humanity in a hidden way...

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...The dominion of God over the powers of darkness, promised in the scriptures, has revealed its features in the preaching and the life of Jesus, is made available to us in the community of Jesus where the Spirit dwells, and is pressing in upon human history through the Spirit operating within it, making us long for the liberation of mankind...

...CLAIRE HAHN is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University in Manhattan...

...In this context we recall a beautiful sentence from Vatican II: "Since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every person the possibility of being associated with the paschal mystery" (Gaudium et Spes, 22...

...Catholics rejoice in the greatness of the Catholic tradi15 November 1974:158 tion, but they also appreciate the greatness of the other Christian churches...

...This system also includes a tape player for carillon hymns and carols...

...We find it impossible to believe a message if it locks us into the small circle of Commonweal: 153 our own concerns and fails to link us to the suffering and the aspirations of the wider community...

...It might be good to recall, however, that denigration of any portion of creation (referring to it as "'secular" in a pejorative sense) has never been consistent with Christian revelation, and that exaltation of the "spiritual" at the expense of the body has been a denial of the basic thrust of Christianity...

...An easy belief in God without confronting the ocean of misery which this God seems to permit is not a truly religious response...

...Can we believe after Auschwitz...

...God offers redemption to an enslaved Israel...

...The scriptures also provide us with the symbols that disclose divine salvation operative in our history, personal and social...

...Schulmerich Magnebell Series is a specially-built tape unit that can operate up to four tape players...

...15 November I974:154 call "my faith" does not simply feel like my own: it feels, rather, like a participation in the faith of an historical community under the pressure of the present...

...This is the Kingdom of God in which I believe...

...We realize of course that Christianity is not responsible for Auschwitz...

...is at work...

...Let me add that what I BERNARD COOKE is a member of the theology department at the University of Windsor, Ontario...

...By this I do not mean that they are looking for an apologetics defending the rational credibility of the gospel...

...These brief remarks on the exigencies of faith after Auschwitz and after Belfast, recall Karl Rahner's theological position that God graciously creates in us the question long before he offers us an answer and that this vital question is already a means of redemption...

...God is present in the lives of people as Spirit empowering them to respond to the Word and become creative...

...The gospel also reveals to us that other people, whatever their cultural and religious tradition, are participating in the same drama: for they too are caught in sin, summoned by the divine call present in their lives, and empowered to recognize the structures of evil in their midst and transcend them within their own traditions...

...But this is not the whole story of human life...

...such a multiplicity is already coming into existence...

...and unquestionably this is having an impact on our Christian attitudes, probably most obviously in our more candid and open approach to human sexuality...

...If we still have to believe--as Christian literature tells us from the beginningmthat the Jews are blind, that they are caught in darkness, that they have no place before God, that their entire dignity lies in their destiny to become Christians, then faith loses its meaning for us...

...Men and women, wherever they may be, are not left in bondage to principalities and powers: they are called and empowered by God to create forms of life that correspond to the divine will...

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...I said that I believe the Kingdom is anticipated in the community of Jesus, in which the Spirit dwells...

...If we make demands on Christian faith, do we not submit God's Word to human reason and undermine the very nature of faith...

...This eschatological perspective also affects the understanding of church...

...It is precisely as mediator that the church has the power to distort the gospel and communicate a message to people that does not set them free...

...It gives meaning to our lives in the sense that it makes us see both our personal struggle and the wider social development as part of a great drama of redemption, in which God operating from within history frees us to assume ever more responsibility for our future and empowers us to overcome the obstacles to love and peace...

...What makes faith difficult and sometimes impossible is the overwhelming presence of evil in certain, concrete historical events...

...Born into sin, we learn to participate in the structures of domination...

...He, not Adam, is the key for the understanding of human life...

...I do not think that today's Christians are interested in proofs for the existence of God...

...If we were to be united as we are now, we may simply pool our shortcomings and disguise even more the meaning of God's act in Jesus Christ...

...Dept CL, CARILLON HILL, SELLERSVILLE, PA...

...Christian faith has a global dimension...

...How did Vatican II understand the special Catholic claim to uniqueness in this altered context...

...If the Christian creed separates us in principle from the followers of other religions, we can no longer believe...

...These open our eyes to reality and prevent us from believing the superficial glance at the world that may reveal a peaceful and prosperous land...

...He recently served as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Santa Clara in California...

...the church that has preserved with the other Catholic churches a sense of communality and sacramentality...

...We remember a time when we did not put these conditions on the life of faith...

...My reply to these objections is that the above-mentionod demands on faith--that it make sense and that it be an instrument of reconciliation--are made by Christians as a result of a long spiritual journey...

...The gospel transforms life by healing it and promotes life by reconciling people...

...It is often difficult to believe that what happened in Jesus was an irreversible victory of God over the powers of darkness: for the world goes on being so evil...

...However, something more basic and religiously more important than a recovery of balance in assessing the "human" (important though that is...

...it means rather that faith should clarify our daily experience, bring to light the hidden meaning of it, and reveal the gracious presence of God operative in our history...

...The suffering of the people of Belfast reveals the struggle for power and the contempt for humanity present in confessional strife...

...I must confess that unless I am able to translate doctrines and creedal formulas back into symbols shedding light on human existence and revealing the presence of grace in the midst of an ambiguous world, I do not know what to do with them...

...We repudiate confessional strife...

...It also seems quite clear that jurisdictionally-grounded ministry, as we have known it for many centuries, is incapable of ministering to the needs of tomorrow's Christianity...

...How, then, are we to understand the Catholic Church's special claim to be the one church of Christ...

...Hitler's insanity was grafted on an antecedent, more universal illness...

...The prophetic preaching makes known to us that evil is not the only power: for the divine promises accompany the people on their way and determine their historical destiny...

...In the trinitarian language of the Fourth Gospel, God is Light, Life and Love...

...And hence we can no longer believe in a message that remains extrinsic to life itself and that negates the existence of other religions...

...R e c o n c i l i a t i o n in t h e post.ecumenical age FAITH AFTER AUSCHWITZ - - AND BELFAST GREGORY BAUM T oday Christians demand that their faith make .sense to them...

...In Jesus we have the final manifestation of God's victory over evil...

...The li|e is enriching...

...This language we actually find in the Bible...

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...Must we not accept God's Word whatever its content, especially if it appears in contradiction to a purely human wisdom...

...Combining these two sets of symbols, we recognize that the gospel is both judgment on us and power unto new life...

...People are summoned and strengthened by God, operative in their lives, to move forward to freedom, justice and peace...

...In Northern Ireland religion has sanctified the conflict and stirred up the deepest passions...

...but a symbol in the richest sense, i.e., a sacrament, which implies the coincidence of symbol and symbolized, the presence of that God about whom his creation speaks...

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...it is truly "word of God...

...Today, after the new eschatologieal stress and the greater awareness of the incompleteness of the present order, we hesitate to claim completeness for the church, for any church...

...If this is the only kind of preaching we hear and the only kind of teaching to which we are exposed, then it is very difficult to be a believer...

...Contemporary theologians, I indicated above, have come to lay great stress on the unfinished character of the present redemptive order: all remains incomplete and ambiguous until the final Coming...

...To combine the Christian faith that Jesus is Lord with the acknowledgment of present evil, contemporary theologians have returned to the biblical stress on Christ's second coming...

...For this reason it makes no sense to speak of a movement toward Christian unity which is not at the same time a movement of renewal and re-interpretation...

...The typically Catholic distortions of the gospel, especially through the ilbfated patrimony of authoritarianism, are also related to this remarkable history...

...After the extermination of the six million, we cannot endorse a religion that negates Jewish existence...

...What counts for us is whether people, especially believing people, are willing to be in conversation with us to discern with us the evil forces that devour and destroy human life, cooperate with us and hope with us for the ultimate victory of God over all the enemies of life...

...The learning is challenging...

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...Perhaps it seems that the changes in Christian ministry that we suggest are being dictated by a movement towards the secularizing of religion...

...They want to retain their confessional loyalty while totally repudiating the sectarian spirit...

...This should not frighten us, for jurisdiction was never that appropriate a ground of effective ministry...

...What right do we have to put conditions on the Christians' faith...

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...The opportunities are unlimited...

...At the same time, we also know that without the Church's age-old symbolism depicting the Jews as a blind, carnal and evil people, the enemy of God and mankind, Hitler would not have been able to make the Jews the scapegoat of his political paranoia...

...They are unable to accept that faith can be equated with believing a system of dogmas that describe a sacred realm apart from life...

...What has become important to Christians is, I think, that the gospel message shed light on their daily life, on the issues that actually trouble society, on the problems posed to people by history itself...

...That is why Schulmerich makes two other bell systems for churches...

...Bells bring people together...

...I suppose that this summarizes how I hear the Christian message and what I believe...

...Since I do not wish to deal with this question in a general way here, let me indicate in a few paragraphs how I hear the Christian message and what I believemafter Auschwitz and the crimes of this century...

...In more technical language, we have come to see that the divine truth revealed in Jesus is truth of a special kind...

...and finally God is the matrix out of which we come to be and the horizon toward which we move, the Alpha and Omega...

...Jesus preached against legalism, clericalism and parochialism as the structures of evil that destroy authentic and life-giving religion and oppose the work of the Spirit...

...That a multiplicity of ministries (rather than one allembracing "pastoral ministry") will be needed is rather clear...

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...brief though it be, can be expressed in the church's traditional christological and trinitarian creed...

...No church can free itself altogether from the ideologies of the culture t o which it belongs and from distortions inscribed in its collective life...

...Because the world inflicts so much damage on human life, we must start with reflection on sin...

...How in detail such a ministry to the sacramentalisms o[ human lile is to be structured, we cannot predict...

...For the Catholic Church is the church of the West with the institutionally unbroken history...

...The Christian symbols open our eyes to this dark side of reality which only too often we refuse to acknowledge...

...all coordinated with a precision clock-timer...

...In particular, it means for many of us that we cannot be Christian believers if this prevents us from recognizing Judaism as an authentic religion...

...According to this position, then, God saves us by the quest of faith even if we never hear the voice that removes all our doubts and settles our restlessness...

...Since then, Christians have become aware how easily the affirmation of the gospel implies the 'suppression of other people and how the love of truth can have built into it the hatred of others...

...We hear of the affliction imposed upon people by ambitious and power-hungry rulers...

...Every denomination has its own uses for bells just as every denomination has its own special hymns and carols...

...We affirm the coming of God's Kingdom and the irreversible turning point in Jesus Christ, but we hold this message in such a way that room is left for the world religions and in particular for the living reality of Judaism...

...The preceding account...

...We may not always be able to give an affirmative answer to the question whether we believe in God...

...Such alienations constitute an almost impenetrable barrier to the hearing of the Gospel, because they negate the basic meaning of the Incarnation...

...The theology proposed in the conciliar documents was that while all the churches enjoy gifts of Christ, in the Catholic Church these gifts exist in fullness...

...The ancient symbol of original sin reminds us that the little innocent baby is born into a sinful world and becomes the heir of the deforming influences operative in the community...

...To some extent this is true: one of the positive elements in our present change in values is a recovered esteem of the "material" and the "bodily...

...I am writing this article after participating in a New York Conference on Theology after the Holocaust...

...Each Christian church carries forward the new life brought by Jesus Christ, but each church also distorts the Christian message...

...The demands we make on faith are neither arbitrary nor rationalistic...

...Christian faith in the present age is in search of a new language...

...More than that, we find it impossible to believe if the message itself becomes a source of discrimination, We have become so aware of the damage done by confessional strife and the expression of dogmatism that we refuse to move in this direction...

...For while the social injustices in Northern Ireland and the protests of the Catholic minority have as such nothing to do with religion, the confessional strife has intensified the politicai conflict on both sides and removed from people the common sense that enables them, after having struggled for justice, to begin negotiations whenever a good opportunity arises...

...The prophets reveal to us the nature of sin: sin as personal transgression and sin as collective blindness and group-egotism...

...And the story of Jesus reveals the various forms of human sin, especially people's resistance to the truth--the unwillingness to come to self-knowledge and to renounce power and privilege...

...They not only call people to prayer and punctuate the service, but they allow the church to extend its ministry into the community: To share the great warmth and joy that is within the church with those outside...

...Since then something has happened to us: we have confronted the evil in the world more courageously, we have had new religious experiences, we have reread the scriptures and reflected anew on our tradition...

...Can this faith stand up against monumental evil...

...But I have come to see that if an administrative and ministerial church regards itself as part of what is to be believed (objectum fidei), then i,t easily becomes an obstacle to the faith of vast numbers of Christians and, more gravely still, it finds it almost impossible to come to self-knowledge and submit its institutional life to an ongoing critique...

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...the Mother Church from which the churches of the Reformation have sprung...

...They are unwilling, in other words, to review the church's collective life in the light of the Christian message...

...Faith, we demand, must give meaning to our personal and social existence...

...Christian teaching, then, is rich in negative symbols...

...After Auschwitz, Rabbi Irving Greenberg said, there is no room for "unffoubled theism...

...For we read of the slavery in which Israel lived in the land of bondage before it was delivered by God...

...Today we can believe only if the Christian message makes us more open to others, summons us to join with others in the struggle against injustice, and creates in us a longing for the ultimate reconciliation of mankind...

...Bells have a traditional place in every church...

...Wherever people are they are caught in a world of sin: but where sin abounds, grace abounds even more...

...Because the true question delivers us from superficial questions and false perspectives...

...Contemporary theologians, such as Karl Rahner, have tried to formulate appropriate creeds for our times...

...The church is witness and minister of faith when it proclaims the Word of God and is willing to submit its own collective and institutional life to the gospel...

...I would not have written the preceding paragraph a few years ago...

...Prior to the final coming, the ambiguity remains...

...Christians find it increasingly diMcult to believe if the message preached to them refers to a reality apart from and unrelated to their experience of life...

...The special Catholic claims, then, are not statements of faith: they simply express our unparalleled history, summarize our collective aspirations, and describe the specific character of our failings...

...By making the coming Kingdom the governing principle of theology, the church appears to us as the community that serves and anticipates this Kingdom in history and yet stands in need of an ongoing ideological critique...

...All remains incomplete prior to the Coming...

...If we list Christian doctrines in the customary way, following a particular creed or a traditional theological system, it is difficult to recognize in them the saving truth that gives meaning to life and reconciles the human family...

...Now, as painful experience has taught us that one cannot legislate a deepened faith in Christ, nor a better understanding of God, nor genuine liturgy, nor true Christian love, we may develop patterns of ministry that are dictated by the needs of the Christian community as it seeks to fulfill its historical destiny...

...The reader may have noticed that in summarizing what I believe I did not mention the church except in passing...

...This does not mean that faith should impose an extrinsic meaning on human history by relating it to what is far away...

...Belfast has become a sad and troubling symbol in the Christian world...

...The Catholic Church, One and Holy, proclaimed in the creed, refers to what the Christian community is meant to be and destined to be in the perspective of the Kingdom...

...There are moments when we have faith and moments \~ o , v ^ , ~.~j \o~^,~s.~o n o, . ~ c e ~n~'~e~we ".a~o (~e...

...The covenant reveals the mercy of God to all the oppressed...

...When we call Jesus Lord, we anticipate the final resolution of history...

...The official Catholic position on this issue has greatly changed over the centuries, from the definition of Boniface VIII and the Council of Lyons that there is no salvation apart from the Catholic Church and submission to the Roman pontiff, to the declarations of Vatican II that the other Christian churches are truly churches, i.e., communities used by the Spirit to save and sanctify people, and secondly, that the whole of humanity is the locus of divine grace...

...The church is the community where Jesus' message is proclaimed and his gifts celebrated...

...For living out of this question we are on the way of salvation, even if we never find the answer...