Books
Loewe, William P.
Mystery's meaning: Bible as myth STORIES Or GOD John Shea Thomas More, $8.95 [203 pp.] William P. Loewe PICTURE a group of Hopi children gathered in the initiation hut. Masked gods have been...
...Now the gods enter the hut one more time-without their masks...
...Shea approaches the Bible then, as myth...
...Tracy contended that Protestant liberals of the last century had conceived the task of theology correctly...
...The church, often regarded as God's very Kingdom, or the Incarnation extended, has turned out to be a pilgrim community, quite human, sinful even, and not always sure where it is heading...
...Myth shapes our experience into a world informed by values by which we can direct our activity...
...The stories about Jesus, in particular, are not just about Jesus...
...Addressing a convention of theologians two years ago, Charles Davis borrowed a line from Wallace Stevens to suggest that the Christian imagination had entered a wintry phase of abstraction...
...Resurrection shifts from an answer to the question of survival after death to an affirmation of the boundlessness of God's fidelity...
...The end-time becomes a temporal image, similar to the spatiality of heaven, which indicates the absoluteness of God's opposition to evil...
...He addresses a broad audience of non-specialists, and he writes with simplicity, warmth, wit, and what used to be called spiritual unction...
...Is the New Testament, then, simply false...
...They serve to disclose the basic contours of the relationship between God and humankind...
...And his approach to interpretation-theory led Ave'ry Dulles, for one, to inquire whether the person of Jesus got lost in the hermeneutical shuffle...
...it offers instead a way of living authentically in face of the reality of mystery and our relatedness to it...
...This he anticipated by raising Jesus and will complete when Jesus comes again...
...Weave them together into a continuous story...
...Masked gods have been dancing around, telling them stories and frightening them...
...Tracy offended religious sensibilities as well when he fuN minated against any supernaturalism which would detract from the ultimate significance of our life here and now...
...In the interventionist perspective it is above all God who acts...
...And the emphasis on waiting obscures a full sense of the divine presence now...
...They lead, not away from, but deeper into the concreteness of our everyday world...
...Only when the stories about Jesus become our own stories do they function, in a more traditional category, as the Word of God...
...Refusing to literalize the image, he instead probes the biblical stories for the values involved in an authentic relationship to mystery...
...If an "interventionist" understanding of the Bible were our sole resource Davis could well be right...
...Smug religiosity or narrow scientism alike can dull or pervert this awareness...
...Demystification was a central theme of David Tracy's Blessed Rage For Order, a book which made waves in theological circles when it appeared in 1975...
...Today, however, the disclosive power of the biblical stories has been obscured...
...John Shea's new book should provoke no such stormy reception...
...Clearly its disclosive power needs to be liberated through interpretation, and the style of interpretation will make a vast difference...
...disenchantment in either case may restore it...
...Yet no one denied the brilliance and encyclopedic erudition of Tracy's argument, and the scholarly reviews poured forth...
...Roman Catholics seemed particularly challenged by this work from one of their own...
...At the same time, quietly and almost innocuously, Shea's Stories of God answers Tracy's call for a "revisionist" approach to theology to negotiate the crisis imposed by demystification...
...Faith, in Shea's understanding, draws its life from a dimension of mystery which is present at the depth of our ordinary experience...
...human freedom and responsibility are diminished...
...And Shea proves Tracy right on at least one point...
...And the hope of deliverance into the Kingdom casts a spotlight onto the wretchedness of the present from which we are to be delivered...
...Hence Shea chooses an alternate approach...
...Unlike most modern varieties, biblical mythic stories focus quite directly on the meaning of our relationship to mystery...
...The paths to awareness of this dimension are many...
...This approach manifestly exploits the socio-critical potential of the biblical tradition, but it has a debit side as well...
...Myth supplies no ultimate explanation...
...Thus understood, myth satisfies a perennial need...
...If the paths to awareness are many, they share a common, sacramental structure...
...The tales of Jesus's wonders can seem bizarre and improbable...
...Shea completes his inventory of the content and values of a Christian world by scanning the stories of creation-incarnation-spirit and fall-crucifixion-church, and he concludes by exploring Jesus's Kingdom-parables for the dynamic by which such a world comes about...
...It dawns in moments of intense joy, or dread, or through any of the "signals of transcendence" documented in a rather large body of contemporary literature...
...After demystification, what...
...Thus God led Israel out of slavery, made them his people, and chastened them when they forsook his ways...
...If God is the one who will finally decide the outcome of history, then history is less than fully ours...
...Like every aspect of our human living the felt awareness of our relationship to mystery cries out for meaning, and myth responds to this demand...
...He recognizes the mythic character of the image of God acting...
...The liberals' performance, however, fell flat because they failed to appreciate the positive function of symbol and myth, a failure which contemporary Commonweal: 762 theologians now possess the resources to remedy...
...A first, and very common, interpretation Shea labels "interventionist...
...Our role is to wait, though not necessarily in passive quietude...
...Such disenchantment can mark an abrupt end to childish naivete', and John Shea suggests that something similar has been forcing itself on Roman Catholics for the past decade and a half...
...It came as a shock to read from Bernard Lonergan's best-known student a passionate critique of traditional metaphysical theism...
...Even for modern, enlightened, secular culture the question is not whether we have myths, but what and how adequate they are...
...Scholars deny that Jesus thought of himself as divine...
...At precisely this point lies the strength of Shea's work...
...The story as a whole develops the theme of hope and justice, fostering compassion, engagement, and inventive possibility...
...It seems to me, however, that the revisionist alternative so daringly and imaginatively —and readably — developed by John Shea proves Davis unduly pessimistic...
...There, at times, we attend to feelings which indicate that we participate in a mystery which holds the key to our hopes and anguish, dreams and fears...
...Take, for example, a series of biblical symbols: exodus and convenant, judgment and apocalypse, resurrection and parousia...
...While an earlier age could accept them as straightforward accounts of the way things are, modern scientific and historical awareness have cast a cloud of suspicion over them...
...Still confident in his fidelity, they came to look for a final and decisive act by which he would bring this world to an end and usher in his kingdom...
...And they succeed only when, precisely as stories, they grasp our imagination with sufficient force to lead us into the world they disclose...
...Once symbol and myth are thus known as such, as human products not simply identical with the sacred reality to which they lead, a turning point has been reached...
...Christian faith needed reinterpretation if it was to integrate the genuine values of modernity...
...the biblical myths no longer resonated with the temper of an age of autonomy and were best left to wither and fall...
...It focuses on God as an historical agent and takes this to be the distinguishing mark of biblical faith...
...What kind of world does this story open up...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
