Christian Hope
McDonnell, Kilian
Monarchy Men, again failing to note their negativity toward current Christian history. For them the Fifth Monarchy of Christ arrives in history through a divine annihilation of the evil...
...From...
...Indeed, one suspects that the rejection of this criticism is the prime inspiration of this work...
...Her novel deals with the "parallel lines" of three charac- ters who never really "converge"--they pursue different, crooked paths, hoping to find salvation through art, politics, and self-assertion, but they cannot reach "a stopping place" where they achieve complete peace of mind...
...JOE HOLLAND is On the staff of The Center of Concern in Wastu'ngton, D.C...
...It never occurs to Nisbet that ecologists might be criticizing an unjust REVIEWERS GREGORY BAUM teaches at the Center of Ecumenical Studies, St...
...KILIAN McDONNELL O.S.B., i$ a professor of theology in the graduate school of St...
...Nisbet sees modern progressives such as Condorcet, Comte, Hegel and Marx as secular millennialists...
...monopolization and misuse of resources by the West precisely in order to clear the way for a renewal of hope on the new basis of distributive justice and sustaina- ble harmony with the environment...
...In modern thought Nisbet sees two main trends...
...Unless this 61anis preserved one tends to get an outline without urgency and one ends up with that warm deism which David Tracy mentions...
...They are involved in political movements (whether or not they desire such comCommonweal: 606...
...Without opting for an apocalyptic eschatology, some account should be taken of this impatience which Paul expressed in cosmic terms when he spoke of creation waiting in eager long- ing, groaning in/a'avail, for the final reve- lation of the redemption of our bodies, and expressed in personal terms when he spoke of desiring to be dissolved and be with Christ...
...Macquarrie understands the resurrec- tion as the central mystery by which Christianity stands or falls, which he conceives mythologically, meaning Jesus fulfilled the essential possibilities of human existence and now lives on a new level of existence...
...Although Mojtabai writes about three strikingly odd individuals--the Ameri- can poet, Melus...
...Their private frustrations and limited joys symbolize social conditions...
...In a "note to the reader' A. G. Moj- tabai informs us: "While writing this book, I was haunted by an image--an image of parallel lines unfolding, nowhere converging...
...It ~ has been said that process thought can have no eschatology...
...At the time when the West has lost its faith in itself, Nisbet sees hope for the future being preempted by third world socialism...
...A central theme in this modest volume on eschatology (found in a different form in Raymond Brown's The Birth of the Mes- siah) is that the first understanding of eschatological promise (Abraham, in-fancy account, public ministry, resurrec- tion) are only first approximations, un- specified and misty, which are re-thought and given precision in the light of later experience...
...Nis- bet's failure to read the signs of the times aright at this point makes his whole plea for a revival of the idea of progress rather vain, as though one could, by an act of will, revive faith in an idea without acknowledging the real causes for the loss of this faith...
...But he seems to have little explanation for how racist and repressive regimes could have arisen within the individualist doctrine of progress or how to avoid such developments in a future revival of the doctrine...
...The infancy account and Jesus's public ministry are clearer to us in their meaning than to those who first experienced them because we see them with hindsight, through the lens of the passion and resurrection...
...Not so, as William Beardslee has demonstrated...
...IRVING MALIN teaches at CCNY...
...Unfortunately, Nisbet regards the ecological movement which criticizes affluent individualistic progressivism as the great threat to Western faith in itself...
...He has edited several studies, including Saul Bel- low's Fiction and The Achievement of Wil- liam Styron...
...The main burden of his message is that the idea of progress is the creative core of Western faith and we must find some way to revive this faith against its modern detractors...
...KILIAN McDONNELL A STOPPING PLACE, by A. G. Mojtabai, Simon & Schuster, $10.95, 345 pp...
...John Macquarrie one expects and gets incisiveness, breadth of view, control of the sources, and provocation...
...Eschatology sees clearest backwards before it sees darkly forward...
...To this I would add 61an...
...Disillusioned by the dualism implied in the immortality of the soul, and dis- tressed by the spiritual physics necessary to sustain the final resurrection of our bodies, Macquarrie approaches the prob- lem of individual destiny by borrowing from process theology and Einstein's theory of relativity to elaborate an approach to the future life where our past is gathered up, healed and inserted into the experience of God who is both outside of and dominates our space-time continuum...
...tVlichael's College, Toronto...
...ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER is a member of the faculty at Garrett-Evangelical Theolog- ical in Illinois...
...For them the Fifth Monarchy of Christ arrives in history through a divine annihilation of the evil "Fourth Monarchy" (an idea derived from the book of Daniel...
...In Brief CHRISTIAN HOPE, by John Macquarrie, Seabury, $7.95, 131 pp...
...The first he calls progress as (individualist) freedom, and the second progress as (state) power...
...the despairing American wife of an Iranian, Kate Nazar--they are presented as part of a larger scheme, an almost fatalistic plan...
...This realization of total hope is more than the persistence of what God remembers...
...To some extent this is based on the broad and continuous experience of Christians who claim to know in their lives the presence of the living God manifested in the risen Christ...
...Quite rightly Macquarfie says there is no viable eschatology which omits judgment and renewal...
...Monarchy Men, again failing to note their negativity toward current Christian history...
...the Christian-Hindu statesman, Nirmal Roy...
...John's University in Collegeville, ~linnesota...
...He clearly favors the first, and finds that the second view declines into totalitarianism...
...GARY ZEBRUN is a poet and critic whose work has appeared in Commonweal, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar and the New York Times...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 19
