Books
best one yet. It is hard to believe that in Paris and lstanbul his mind was really on American movies: but they might have been something in the attic that he wanted to get rid of. And the...
...These observations will indicate some of my misgivings about the book...
...On Being a Christian has long been a best seller in Europe, and the English version is already engaging the interested attention of thousands of readers--not only, or not chiefly, among "the cultural despisers of religion" to whom volumes of apologetics have conventionally been addressed, but among Christians of various denominations who find it impossible to affirm a faith in the Christian tradition in toto but who cannot shake off the hold that the gospel of Jesus Christ has upon them...
...and it is the task of anyone defining what "being a Christian" means to come to terms with the faith of the Church, sentire cure Ecclesia...
...One of the surest results of historical research into the New Testament and into the creeds is the discovery of their liturgical setting...
...But perhaps the most disturbing lacuna in the book comes in its treatment of worship...
...the fundamental criticism that Christian faith levels at what Kting calls "the unmoving, passionless countenance of Plato's God, who cannot suffer" is that this is not the One to whom we pray as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...
...Other issues he faces head on...
...BOOKS ON BEING HANS KUNG JAROSLAV PEIAKA~ On Be|raft a Chrtst~m HANS KUNG Doubleday, $12.95 During the winter of 1899/1900, Adolf yon Harnack, then the most eminent theological scholar of the time, delivered a series of public lectures at the University of Berlin on the theme "The Essence of Christianity...
...Reversing the fateful separation of theology and ethics, Kting uses an analysis of cconomics or of sexuality as a means of opening up the meaning of fulfillment and thus Commonweal: 407 of presenting Christ as the revelation and the embodiment of what is truly human--and hence of what is truly divine...
...But anyone who sees reality as clearly as Baldwin does must be tempted at times to run like the wind...
...Sometimes he does this by omission...
...Conversely, I do not see why it is necessary to introduce such elements of pop culture as Hair or Love Story to show that one is really living in today's world...
...He does engage in a polemic against "those time-conscious theologians who always like to ride on the crest of the latest wave...
...Bearing the subtitle "The Distinction," Kiing's presentation of who Jesus was (and is) and of what Jesus did (and does) avoids the conventional distinctions of dogmatic Christology, "the Christ image of the councils," and strives to do justice to the results of the critical study of the Gospels...
...With a recognition of all of its ambiguities, Kiing feels able to reaffirm the commitment and to do so with eloquence...
...Appleton relished the month to concentrate at last on the meaning of her first work The Plenitude We Cry For (Doubleday, 1972), a long poem about the life o! 24 June 1977:408...
...He even talks several times of human weakness (as opposed to white weakness)--including his own: which suggests that the hanging judge may be ready to come down from his perch and mix it with us...
...It is impossible to imagine "being a Christian" without that...
...Even within the scope of his identification with the "modern" outlook, I find Kiing's handling of the orthodox tradition quite cavalier...
...As I have already suggested, Ki~ng's work is characterized by a readiness to incorporate the results of critical study in the very statement of the faith...
...After all, that's what movies are for---even for those preachers who denounce them the loudest...
...and perhaps, for just a little while, he's done that...
...And with so many clergymen, he too often deduces Reality solely by intelligence in this boo~, and while he has more than enough of that quality, it tends to fly off in bootless directions unless anchored by touch...
...He regards the language about "natures" and "properties" as too static a category for the description of what I share with Jesus as a human being...
...The nine days of Pentecost were part of twenty-one more, however, which Sarah Appleton spent at Yaddo, a wooded mansion retreat for poets, writers, artists, and musicians at Saratoga Springs...
...The cast of characters whom~ Kiing summons is, therefore, highly unusual for a volume of systematic theology (if that is indeed what On Being a Christian is to be called): more references to Mahatma Gandhi than to Saint Athanasius, more frequent consideration of Marxism than of the Reformation, and (for some reason or other) more quotations from Josephus than from Cardinal Newman...
...It is evident throughout the chapters on Christ that Kiing, together with many contemporary theologians, is critical of the orthodox doctrine of Christ for having done less than full justice to the humanity of Jesus...
...There are those (and I am one of them) who will sniff "reductionism" is any such effort to find the kernel of the gospel inside the husk of the tradition, but it will not do to dismiss Kiing's book in so hasty a fashion, for it is animated by an explicit loyalty to the Christian and Catholic tradition and is ultimately concerned with the question of continuity in that tradition...
...Hans Kiing has written a provocative and important contribution to that debate...
...There is a comparatively long consideration of the virgin birth, in which the biblical evMence (Matthew and Luke) and lack of evidence (the other two Gospels and Paul) form the basis for a theological discourse on what roles, if any, this idea should play in our view of Christ...
...His apologetic intention is to identify the search for authentic humanity, as expressed in the social and political struggles of the present day, with the concrete representation of authentic humanity that is given in the life and teachings, the sufferings and death, the resurrection and presence, of Jesus of Nazareth...
...He blames this omission on "the tiresome disputes forced on me afresh by Rome," which made it impossible to write that part of the book because of the press of time...
...Ladder o/ the World's Joy is a revelation that the earth is astir...
...Without wanting to play the citations numbers game, one may see here the evidence of the author's conviction that the "restless heart" of which Augustine spoke is speaking today in the fight for liberation and that it can find the object of its yearning in the man Christ Jesus...
...Written for the most part in the nine days before Pentecost while . . . reading The Phenomenon o/ Man," the poems blaze Appleton's tremendous joy at witnessing the birth of her own thoughts...
...Christians have not always written books on theology, they have not even always been able to read "me Bible...
...There are indications that Kiing is conscious of these problems...
...Of course the creeds and councils of the Church were speaking in their own time and of their own time, but they were also speaking--or thought they were--for all time...
...From the perspective of a seer, Appleton snubs the contemporary schism between past ~nd present, conscious and unconscious, flesh and spirit by praising, instead, the unity of the cosmos...
...Kfing's loyalty to tradition and his quest of an "essence of Christianity" converge in the most important--and most moving--portion of his book, the discussion of Jesus Christ, which is the second of the four major divisions of On Being a Christian...
...It is consistent with this treatment of the resurrection of Christ when KLing likewise has very little explicit to say about the traditional Christian hope of life in the age to come, beyond the affirmation that "'there is no cross in the world . . . which can refute the offer of meaning issued on the cross of the one raised to life...
...But they have always prayed, and they have always participated in the breaking of bread for the service of God and of humanity...
...Kting devotes a longer section to the Easter faith, putting aside the story of the empty tomb and the narratives of the post-resurrection appearances in favor of a declaration that "'the Crucified lives" through being "taken up by that incomprehensible and comprehensive ultimate reality which we designate by the name of God...
...Ladder o f t h e World's Joll SARAH APPLETON Doubleday, $4.95 ELEANOR B. WYMARD In a time of angry poets, especially women, Sarah Appleton's second book Ladder o/ the World's Joy proves that even out of love, poets can create...
...it thus became "a victim of the policy of the Roman Inquisition...
...But for now he remains up there wagging his finger sternly at the converted and the bored...
...And the attempt is worthwhile if only for the sake of some sprighltly lines, to wit, "J...
...Clearly it is this sharing that Kiing is defining as the content of salvation...
...Taken as a whole, Kiing's attempt at such a portrait must, it seems to me, be counted a success...
...In a footnote near the end of the book, noting "how closely faith and prayer are linked," Kiing apologizes for having failed to include a special section on "prayer, meditation and Christian worship (in particular, the Sunday act of worship...
...except for a glancing blow or two in passing, he does not so much as take up the Augustinian doctrine of original sin as brought on by the fall of Adam and transmitted through procreation...
...For by failing to ground his proposals for a fresh statement of the Christian faith in a definition of theology as doxology, Kiing has deprived himself and his readers of an inestimable--and indispensable --resource...
...He is right to love the stage...
...Edgar Hoover, history's most highly paid (and most utterly" useless) voyeur," and random bangs and flashes...
...the rationalistic disjunction between "history" and "myth" underlying much of Kiing's argument is one that the Church has transcended (some would say "evaded") above all in the celebration of the Eucharist, about which Kiing has almost nothing to say...
...Acknowledging that historical-critical research can neither confirm faith nor destroy it, Kiing has had the courage to ask whether or not the understanding of the figure of Jesus that is left to us when such research has done its work is compatible with the sort of commitment to him that has defined the content of Christian discipleship...
...His art needs real bodies...
...Much as I deplore the harassment to ~r Hans Kting has been subjected, I find this explanation a lame excuse at best and a "cheap shot" at worst...
...A catalog of the pictures of Christ put forward by philosophers, poets, and novelists provides an effective foil for the attempt to draw a portrait that is not simply a projection of one's own fantasies or aspirations...
...In the original German and in translations into more than a dozen languages, the book that grew out of those lectures provoked a debate that is still going on about what is essential and what is accidental in the historic deposit of the Christian faith...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 13
