Searching for Truth
Sisk, John P.
A tough & hard-earned Christianity SEARCHING FOB TROTH: A PEBSONAL VIEW OF BONAN CATHOLICISM Peter Kelly Collins, $8.95, 192 pp. John P. Sisk I must confess that I approached Peter Kelly's...
...what it is possible to say he is if one takes a stand between a Protestant tradition of the total otherness of God and a Catholic tradition of non-total separation between God and creature...
...Thus, with reference to the Monophysites and their belief that Jesus had only one nature, Mr...
...These, questions are posed as a dramatic preface to the statement that "We begin from Jesus to God, not vice versa,'' so that the rest of the book is really an attempt to satisfy the urgencies of this chapter...
...Kelly summarizes, "the text of the New Testament, the groupings and patterns, the ideas, motives and traditions that went into the writing, the influences from within and without, the culture and literature of the surrounding world, have all been thoroughly "examined...
...whether a life after death is thinkable (or whether, as Bertrand Russell believed, the soul's habitation can be built' 'only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair...
...M. GERARD FROMM is a staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts...
...I suspect that there is little if anything in this and the subsequent chapter on God and Jesus that is news to theologians and biblical scholars...
...Unable for financial reasons to study medicine, he studies law, not too arduously, at the University of Adelaide in his native AusCommonweal: 252 tralia...
...There follows a chapter on biblical scholarship in which Mr...
...whether it is possible to think about him at all without ignoring the problem of evil...
...Kelly's own faith position, which comes fittingly at the end of his splendid treatment of the Resurrection, is very explicit: "If one is ready and open, then the question stands: do you or do you not accept that Jesus of Nazareth who dies on a cross was raised from the dead to new life, and that with him we have both our path to follow on earth and our hope of promise and fulfillment...
...Having disposed of these preliminaries, Mr...
...what, if he exists, he cannot be...
...In over two hundred years now of detailed work," Mr...
...As Mr...
...There is balance too behind Mr...
...Is there a theology of despair to go with the theology of hope, just as there is a theology of liberation to go with the theology of salvation...
...He is writing for those of us, clergy and lay persons, who pride ourselves on keeping abreast with developments in the post-Vatican II church but who have only the sketchiest notions about what has been going on in New Testament studies and the extent to which those studies have changed our knowledge of Jesus...
...Kelly devotes his second chapter to questions about God: whether he exists...
...and the life situation in which the first oral preaching and instruction began, were formulated and carried on...
...Nevertheless, his combination of clarity and modesty (and one ought not to forget the 17 years in the Jesuit order, which now, ironically, turn out to be intellectually and spiritually productive) makes this chapter and the concluding one on death genuinely profound...
...FORD teaches law and psychiatry at Harvard University...
...John P. Sisk I must confess that I approached Peter Kelly's book with low expectations...
...This is not meant to be another profound work," Mr...
...Kelly's ecumenical temper may be unacceptable to some of them...
...25 April 1980: 253 move...
...He has a rare ability to present complicated subjects with a clarity that avoids condescension and oversimplication...
...Kelly has gone through but what "in infinitely variable ways countless people are going through, or are hesitating about, fearing what they may go through...
...It is personal, certainly, but it is more about Christ than the author, and even in the first and most personal chapter Christ comes first...
...It is a very tough Christian optimism, however—one that is grounded on a hard-won knowledge that "Real life is living with insecurity and flourishing with it...
...JOHN P. SISK is a professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane...
...He will give no more comfort to Christian anarchists, I suspect, than to those contemporary Donatists who insist on an impossible match between end and agency in the institutional church...
...Care in language goes with modesty of aim...
...Kelly begins with the Middle Ages, carries us through Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment into 19th-century Germany to encounter those formidable Protestant scholars whose work is "at the root of much of what is moving and seething or withering and dying in the Christian world today," and finally into the post1919 period, still largely Protestant until Pius XII'sDivinoAfflanteSpiritu in 1943 made it possible for Catholic scholars to enter the "Common Market" of biblical studies...
...the life situation in which the Gospels were written...
...Once this priority is established, everything else is presented in order to help others understand not simply what Mr...
...It protects him from the polemical simplifications one might expect to find in a more purely confessional work...
...He is now a Lecturer in Law at the University of Adelaide...
...Kelly remarks: 4 "This whole matter provides a very good lesson in the need for care in language.'' His own book is a model of such care...
...But to study these matters now, and especially to study the controversies about their meanings that developed in time, is to become aware of the extent to which "past differences come from misunderstandings in words...
...The condition of this flourishing is the faith "that there is a fulness behind it toward which we REVIEWERS MAURICE deG...
...Commonweal: 254...
...In this respect at least he has written a book from which the experts can learn much...
...In 1975, after having experienced for many years the confusion, uncertainty of purpose, and dissatisfaction with the official church that were part of the pre-Vatican II environment (and beginning to realize that he had chosen the wrong profession), he resigned from the Jesuit order and returned to the law...
...whether God is stasis or process...
...Kelly writes in his chapter on the church and authority...
...however, Mr...
...Hejs the author of "Southie Is My Home Town...
...I do...
...Fortunately, Gregory Baum's introduction and the author's opening pages quickly put the book in another category...
...Hence the striking quality of his treatment is balance, the kind of balance that depends on his distinction between "a right reserve" and "a hard scepticism" that points to Russsell's l4unyielding despair...
...Understandably, an examination of the total life situation of the Gospels (theirSifz im Leben) has been left to the experts...
...Kelly's optimistic conviction that "the day of absolute autocratic pronouncements is nearly over," while the day of moving more deeply into Christian unity is far from over...
...The purely autobiographical matter is sketched out in nine pages...
...Shortly after reading The Imitation of Christ he decides to become a priest, and although the decision terrifies him he sticks to it and eventually becomes a Jesuit, studies canon law in Rome, teaches canon law and moral theology in Melbourne and Sydney, and is eventually provincial of the Jesuit order for Australia...
...Title, subtitle, and the advance information that the author had once been a Jesuit made it easy to anticipate either another self-exculpatory record of disillusionment or a narcissistic preoccupation with truth-searching in which the reader would have to suffer once again the well-worn pieties of the human potential movement...
...God knows, it is hard enough to keep the conflicting theologies straight in our heads...
...Kelly presents the Sitz im Leben , it takes into account the life situation of Jesus...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 8
