BOOKS

...and we must learn to conquer it through love...

...The order of the day should not be a direct emphasis upon transcendence, which in the present situation would simply be misunderstood and reinforce the false transcendence that plagues religious thinking and practice...

...Two decades after The Organization Man, the goal for so many of us remains the comfortable three bedroom house, the clipped lawn, the two-car garage, the white picket fence...

...It is, most emphatically, a good one, full of crisp, clear writing, real characters coping with real situations, and a genuine sense of place...

...But Rome at least was not afraid of counter-affirmation and, further, it was always possible to reconstruct the classicist theology which caused the fear of modern thought...

...Luke Salm remarked that the Appeal was utoo reminiscent of the generalizations that characterized Roman pronouncements in the past...

...I cannot, however, praise Ignacio Ella-curia's Freedom Made Flesh, latest Latin American contribution in translation...

...Toward the beginning, standing in his parents' Lake Forest driveway, "He wants to belong to this house again, needs to be part of these tall windows set low to the ground, walls half-hidden behind thick waxy rhododendron leaves, the cedar hedge in front, all of it-all elegance and good taste...

...In Something Happened, Bob Slocum, drowning in his own words, adrift from feeling, became an archetype...

...Ordinary People gives a true, uncritical picture of life in suburbia...

...The very title of the book, "Against the World For the World" puts the world over there, apart from us Christians, an object of either fear or concern...

...And yet, at the end, when she has left them, father and son still vainly hope that love will bring her home...

...There was the tired cynicism of Updike's Couples, and then, with Rabbit Redux, there was paunchy Rabbit Angstrom, stuck in a failing marriage and development living, unable to move in any direction...

...What is lacking in the book is not theological affirmation, which is there in plenty...

...More to the point is to meet the superficiality of modern culture by a stress on the depths immanent in every area of human experience...

...Various factors combined to destroy the sense of divine immanence in the world: the rise of the empirical method and its subsequent dominance over human thought and culture, the related empiricist philosophy, the dualist philosophy of Descartes, the abstract reason of the French Enlightenment...

...Still, there are aspects of this novel that are genuinely disturbing in their limited perspective...

...He observes that "many Christians do not believe in that universe of discourse that transcends all movements and universes of discourse...

...And then there is his mother...

...The question, then, arises: Is the loss of transcendence the cause of the present weakness of Christian faith and theology...

...How, in fact, can Con try so hard to reaffirm them...

...A remark in the essay of Richard Neuhaus does for me reveal a latent dualism...

...Faced with the responsibilities of a fatherhood, he has become overprotective, all bound up in those questions of control, fault, forgiveness...

...God, banished from the world and subjects, became purely an object, and his transcendence was supposedly secured by removing him to an infinite distance beyond other objects...

...I am sympathetic, it should be clear, to both the European political theology and the Latin American theology of liberation with their stress on political and social involvement as the necessary expression of Christian faith today...

...It is a novel that draws you in and draws you along, and it is best at depicting those terrible frustrations-those derailed intentions and misplaced remarks-that complicate all our lives...

...Its lack of precise theological content makes it an instance of the disease it deplores...

...The Hartford Appeal itself, I repeat, does not allow reasonable discourse, because any pointed comment, whether positive or negative, can be rebuffed by saying that it does not meet its intention...

...He became less and less accessible and was increasingly deprived of any meaningful relationship to the world of men...

...But as Americans everywhere have continued to embrace the suburb, writers of fiction have continued to denounce it...

...Expressly sacred ritual or language is but an element in religion...

...Surely, this is a demand for a purely religious discourse...

...First, consider Conrad Jarrett and his father...

...In Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Bob Slocum floundered in the wreckage of his suburban life...

...Though disavowed, a suspicion of dualism has hung over the Hartford Appeal...

...I was back again in that atmosphere I had almost forgotten of vague condemnations, tendentiously worded "errors," diffuse anxiety about "modern thought" and reproaches against over-accommodating, novelty* seeking theologians...

...The Hartford signers composed an appeal for theological affirmation that does not itself affirm anything theologically and is capable of contradictory interpretations according to the context in which it is placed...

...Despite all the clumsiness and exaggeration accompanying it, the worldly turn of faith and theology, the emphasis upon secular and political concerns, is a reaction in the right direction...

...These larger dimensions gave the novels greater weight, and appealed to the symbolic American imagination...

...An Evanston, Illinois, tax attorney, Calvin Jarrett grew up in an orphanage in Detroit...

...All of which Con's father must learn as well...

...The style is one that precludes reasonable discourse-for which ironically the Hartford signers appeal...

...It is difficult to rationalize these drawbacks in an otherwise polished, attractive, absorbing book...

...Judith Guest's first novel, Ordinary People, does just that...

...He must learn that sometimes no one is at fault, that punishment isn't around every corner, that forgiveness is not an impossibility...

...Con had blamed himself without reason, had known he would be punished, had given up on school and himself and finally cut his wrists...

...Against the World, For The World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion EDITED BY PETER BERGER & RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS Seabury, $8.95 Freedom Made Flesh: The Tfce Mission of Christ and His Church IGNACIO ELLACURIA Orbis, $8.95 CHARLES DAVIS I found it difficult to focus the discomfort I felt with the style of the Hartford Appeal until I came across the comment of Luke Salm, cited by Carl Peter in the present volume of essays on the Appeal by eight of its signers...

...In Rabbit Redux, Rabbit was caught between stoned youth and black anger, and the book was electric with the fear and rage of the late sixties...

...But how, in the midst of their struggles, can Conrad and Calvin Jarrett never question their suburban values...

...In both the Roman case (I am thinking of such documents as Humani Generis and Mysterium Fidei) and the Hartford case the lack of specific references is defended on grounds of charity, namely the desire not to condemn any writer personally...

...Much of what passes for transcendence and otherworldliness in religion and theology is the distorted counterpart of the positivism and objectivism of the dominant culture...

...Each of these suburban domestic novels had a larger dimension, as well as a personally critical one...

...Which is not to say that Ordinary People is a bad book...

...and consequently for a religious realm set apart from the world of ordinary life...

...Eventually he disappeared over the horizon...

...At the end of Couples the local church burned down, but the golden weathercock was saved...

...It stirs up a distrust which the suspects have no means of dissipating...

...The summer before last, he and his older brother Buck had been in a sailing accident on Lake Michigan...

...In Bullet Park, Tony Nailles had to escape crucifixion-Hammer against Nailles-and then, with exquisite irony, "everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been...

...A moment later he will question his sense of identity, but he'll dislike the LeMans he gets for Christmas only because he sees it as a bribe...

...It is the legacy of Puritanism all over again (how close does Calvin come to Calvinism...

...For me the book represents the airy, insubstantial quality of theological thinking when it does not accommodate itself to the methodological demands of modern thought Divine immanence will not be restored to the modern world until that world is comprehended from within with every available resource...

...Yes, that was it...

...It cannot be done by adding another supposedly transcendent world...

...We are given instead in this book a mystifying transcendence sprayed from without upon a humanly pressing situation...

...But greater insight and a broader perspective might have produced a bolder result...

...Most important, he must learn, from his hip psychiatrist and from a school romance, that the ability to feel is worth much more than the ability to control your feelings...

...Peter Berger sees the Appeal as responding to "a widespread loss of transcendence," and Avery Dulles in turn speaks of "the rampant immanentism, humanism, secularism, psychologism, sociologism of our age-a convergent movement that leaves no room for the transcendent...

...As the book opens, he is going on eighteen and barely a month out of a mental hospital...

...For that reason there can be no demarcated religious sphere...

...And in John Chee-ver's Bullet Park, Tony Nailles, child of the suburbs, woke up one morning, felt "terribly sad," and didn't get out of bed for a few weeks...

...I myself would attribute the decline of religious faith and the absence of an assured theology to a loss of immanence and a false concept of transcendence...

...It will be popular because-fortunately or unfortunately -so many people can identify with the "ordinary" characters...

...Human concerns are intrinsic to religion and vice-versa...

...Sacred and secular are in this conception related extrinsically not intrinsically...

...the world is not apart from God or outside God...

...The shopping centers spread their blight across the land, and after polite murmurs of objection, everyone just goes and shops in them...

...The later stages of the process as reflected in literature have been admirably described by J. Hills Miller in bis two books, The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality...

...Now he is trying to struggle back, to connect with people...

...She is incapable of feeling, has no forgiveness in her, seems the perfect product of her surroundings...

...Beth is a cool, distant, selfish woman intent on appearances...

...Con Jarrett stands at the center of Ordinary People...

...But -when, I wondered through them all, when would a writer come along who had no such grander view and no personally critical one either, a writer who would accept the suburb as our way of life and find little fault with it...

...However, the present volume of commentaries by some of its signers enables one to select some observations for discussion...

...Light-hearted, confident Buck had drowned...

...The defect is rather that the theology is not brought into an intrinsic relation with an empirical, secular analysis of the concrete situation...

...Of its nature, the recovery of divine immanence can be achieved only by embracing the world of men in its concrete, imperfect reality and working to transform it from within...

...The book to me shows how far off the track the Hartford Appeal is in its diagnosis of the present weakness of Christian faith and witness...

...But according to a genuine transcendence God and the world are not distinct as two finite objects nor as object and subject...

...Religious faith and love embrace every human concern...

...But the effect is to insulate the negative judgments from any argued attack for reasons of misunderstanding, neglect of context or unfair caricature...