Message and Existence

...In the pages I have mentioned, his intention is to show that the Christian gospel "is both spiritual and political, involving both an inward healing of sin and an outward transformation of history's institutions...

...At the same time he shows how much mainstream twentieth century theology Commonweal: 408 can learn from political and liberationist theologies...

...Often I wished I could hear him reading pages of the text, giving it the clarifying emphasis and inflection of the spoken word...

...Likewise, one wants to hear more from the author about his distinction between literal or factual truth and symbolic truth, especially since, heavily influenced by Hans Ku'ng's christology, he proposes a limited but relatively reliable historical knowledge of the life of Jesus...

...Our temporality is seen as derived from a self-limiting God, our estrangement overcome by a self-giving Jesus, and our community re-established by an outpouring of new love...

...It might be asked whether Gilkey's account of symbols clearly enough relates them to the needs of conceptual analysis or thought on the one hand and literary context or narrative on the other...

...To the alternating movement or dialectic of reality corresponds the dialectic of our symbols, the sighting of resurrection hope in the cross of Jesus to which our misuse of freedom and nature have led him—and us...

...A distinctive feature of Gilkey's work is his extensive and consistent effort to relate the Gospel to present experience, its message to our existence...

...The way Gilkey presents the content of faith is the second distinctive feature of his book...

...Frequently one notes the influence of his teachers—the echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr's moral passion and cultural sensitivity, the revision of Paul Tillich's view that religion is basically a concern for ultimacy and that theology proceeds by a method of correlation.Gilkey is original, however, in his search to think faith and its content in a thoroughly dynamic way...

...But nowhere is the light of faith excluded from the process...

...From every point of view we are children of the critical habit,'' wrote Paul Ricoeur some twenty years ago...

...it is impossible for us to believe without interpreting.' ' To see a great teacher at this task is inevitably to learn as much about how it may be done as about its actual results...

...Through connecting the personal and the institutional dimensions of human existence with the symbols of the Holy Spirit and the Kingdom, he provides an adroit summary of the Christian message's encouragement for the present and its promise for the future...

...Even if he only partially succeeds, he is arresting in his effort to present an essentially processive view of the ethos of belief, of God in history, of Christ as God's divine activity in and through the history of Jesus, and of the Spirit as gathering a new human community in anticipation of the Kingdom...

...At any rate, for those who are unable to sit in the lecture halls of the 4 July 1980: 409 University of Chicago's Swift Hall, here is a convenient sampling of what they might hear there, and to whom they might go with their further questions...

...This introduction follows the order of the articles in the Creed, treating in turn the question of belief, God as provident creator, Jesus as the Christ, Holy Spirit...

...Each section considers common experience before it turns to analysis of the specifically Christian symbol that illuminates the experience...

...If it plays directly only on the second phase in each stage of the reflections, it is elsewhere evident at least by the shadows it casts...

...Thus it risks challenging comparisons with Adolph von Harnack's The Essence of Christianity and Karl Adam's The Spirit of Catholicism, or more recently, with Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity and Wolfhart Pannenberg's The Apostles' Creed...

...As believers we are invited first to consider the situation we share with all human beings and then to appreciate the new perspective and orientation the symbolic content of our faith provides...

...Commonweal: 410...

...He pursues his reflections with palpable personal investment and integrity, and that gives him a special appeal among contemporary American theologians...

...Uniting these topics is an alternating movement of positive experience, conflict, and resolution or, in more technical terms, a dialectic of affirmation, negation, and then higher reaffirmation...

...Leo J. O'Donovan IN THE EASTER season, many readers would find the most relevant passages of Langdon Gilkey's book in its final chapter...

...More important now is the immediate lesson of interpretative faith with which this book presents us...

...Gilkey's gift for diagnosis of religious and cultural situations has always been coupled with skill at relating current questions and traditional wisdom...

...Though the terms of his title may suggest an existentialist perspective, the book as a whole makes it clear again that the author has moved from the essentially neo-orthodox position of his first writings such as Maker of Heaven and Earth, through the foundations of a secular theology which were laid in Naming the Whirlwind, to the increasingly critical and practical correlation between Christian symbolism and today's human prospect which he attempted in Reaping the Whirlwind...

...There he discusses an experiential pattern of crucifixion and resurrection in four major contexts in which it appears: our personal relations, our lives in the community of the church, the wider communal context of social life and interaction with nature, and, finally, the historical process as a whole...

...The book as a whole sets itself an ambitious and deceptively simple task, namely, to present a brief overview of Christian faith...

...Indeed, I wondered after closing the book if it were not so much a general introduction to Christian theology as an introduction for Gilkey's own students...

...But these are points for further discussion...