The Emergent Church

...A second drawback to politicized Christianity is that faith in Jesus's Father cannot be enacted in the public order...

...One thinks immediately of the withering rebuke delivered to Ferdinando Marcos at a range of about six feet - Canossa in Manila (no complaints then about paternalism...

...John Paul repeatedly annoying both strong and weak peoples, despising their destruction of the weakest of the weak, the unborn...

...Metz is a brave man...

...What we preach to any we must preach to all...

...The bourgeois age, which the author dates from the Reformation and the Enlightenment, is now in its final phase...

...Metz, by contrast, suggests that there are portions of the gospel too demanding for the afflicted...

...Every onrush of the Spirit in a populist church will have its summons...

...His greatest contribution to the political order was to disabuse his followers of their thought that there was where his kingdom lay.ere his kingdom lay...

...Christians accordingly have held themselves little responsible for enacting the Gospel in the public domain where good and evil are writ large...

...I think he is unrealistic, however, in his analysis (there is as much talk of "grassroots" here as in a Chemlawn advertisement...

...As for himself, he writes too heavily to be effective on the plaza and too compromisingly to be effective in the pulpit...

...For the church to do this, however, would require a transformation from its present style - paternalistic, authoritarian, conventional - to a populist amalgam of "basic communities" at the local level, pursuing a more unabashedly political agenda than the narrow, parish-type "services church...

...Twenty-five years ago Abbe Pierre noted a characteristic of the bourgeois clergy: they could not bring themselves to read certain pages of the gospel to the comfortable...

...If now there are other clergy - postbourgeois - who are similarly unnerved before the oppressed, the poor will not have the good news preached to them...

...If there is any alarm the trumpeter of Krakow's horn calls with no sharps or flats, it is for justice among nations...

...The Nicaraguan premiat, "poet, priest and revolutionary" now in high office, is praised as unreservedly as his Polish contemporary is chastised...

...Sometimes a savant will give a clearer and more telltale account of his or her teaching when speaking briefly and to the point...

...The Christian is expected to turn the other cheek when he is struck on the right cheek, but he is not allowed to encourage someone else who is struck on the right cheek to turn the other cheek as well...

...Possibly this was the pope's point when he banned priests and religious from partisan politics...

...He seems to ignore the fact that Phantom jets, like nuncios, move at a very nontranscendental altitude, whatever be their mission...

...First, those who do enter political struggle may not claim any immunity from criticism and opposition simply because their aims are high...

...Yet when he addresses a socialist party group he is much more complimentary than cautionary, seemingly endorsing a partisan option pretty much as is (as one often must in politics) instead of harrying and haunting it with a Christian vision (as in prophecy...

...In one sense, is not political at all: he does not fawn upon his own clerical colleagues...

...Any ideal pursued politically must expect to be met and roughed up politically...

...The comunidades de base of the Latin American churches come in for high tribute as a paradigm of grassroots reformation...

...The church has purveyed a faith so interiorized, so individualized, that it has had only the faintest voice in the counsels and the capitals where decisions of truly massive morality are made...

...The only evidence he offers is John Paul's refusal to lift the celibacy requirement for clergy...

...No political program will do justice to justice or to love...

...Others must seize what alliances and compromises are pragmatically possible...

...No nation will have a conversion of grace...

...Metz, in a moving lament over Auschwitz, recalls the Christian silence in which the Jews there went to their death...

...Their strength, Metz observes, is the work of no great individual reformers, nor political leaders, outstanding theologians, church dignitaries, individual prophets or saints...

...Nor did they spring up unbeholden to the bishops of Medellin and to the social teaching of Leo, the Piuses, John, and Paul...

...Christians should go political, as a church...

...gospel put to them...

...stiffening his own Polish brethren...

...Some must work within the give-and-take of the political order, trying to make the best of it, rescuing the best options available...

...The church's labors for the public good require two somewhat distinct services...

...Religion during that time has been a notably private and individual matter, mostly of worship, between individuals and God...

...His knack and interests have always led him to the political order, not that of prophecy...

...I do not sense this distinction in Metz's political theology...

...On the whole these two services work best in different hands and, while neither is better, both are needed...

...Repeatedly throughout these essays he points a blaming finger at the priests and bishops (especially those of West Germany), and at John Paul II himself...

...What might worry one is that he can stare down an entire synod of bishops as easily as one Asian dictator...

...He takes the Pope to task, for instance, for retreating from the interest of John XXIII and Paul VI in the struggling churches of poor countries...

...Since he is a theologian one would expect him to favor the role of preacher over that of politico...

...Metz insists that Christian faith must be enacted in the political arena...

...The logion ascribed to the late Mae West, that too much of a good thing is wonderful, may not apply uniformly to theology...

...There are two drawbacks to such a teaching which I wish he had noticed better...

...One wonders, though, whether he is as shrewd as he is bold...

...But political guts, he has...

...Nor did their hearts have no Latin heroes...

...It is romantic to imagine that the church be formed except in response to the calls of gifted leaders...

...On one page the shepherds are bidden hush...

...One of Metz's essays is an encomium for the presentation to Ernesto Cardenal of a (not-yet-postbourgeois or post-capitalist) peace prize by the German book industry...

...All those thousands of neighborhood comunidades did not spontaneously begin to speak, each in the tongues of Gutierrez and Sobrino...

...What to do about this...

...They should provoke a massive conversion of hearts and oblige the predominantly rich, northern countries of the earth to accept as their first priority the relief of their impoverished and victimized brethren of the third world...

...And he has reminded their priests and religious that the abused poor have a special claim on them, a claim to have the...

...As Metz anticipates it, the advent of a postbourgeois, postcapitalist age gives the church an opportunity to quit being a tag-along and to stand forth as an initiator...

...The reader is explicitly reminded that one of these speeches provoked a denunciation by the president of the German Bishops' Conference, and the theology of the ensemble led the archbishop of Munich to block Metz's appointment to a chair at the university there...

...Israel's military and political adventures, Metz thinks, ought to be free from (at least German) criticism, because Israel stands as a last redoubt for a persecuted people...

...John Paul at Puebla, thundering about justice...

...Perhaps there is a difference in their revolutions...

...John Paul lias warned Catholic social activists in various beleaguered parts of the globe that they are not to take up the same weapons as their oppressors...

...That silence, ironically, was due in great part to the fact that Christians were active in the political order, and had other interests they preferred to protect...

...These terse doses of Metz are a valuable precis of his current preoccupations...

...Metz calls the church to be messianic...

...at the U.N., growling to the wealthy powers that the poor nations are not their kulaks...

...James Tunstead Bartchaell PROFESSOR METZ of Miinster has published eight recent addresses: not a scatter of occasional essays, but a series of attempts to expound briefly, before different audiences, the case for a "political theology" that finds more thorough elaboration in his more sustained publications...

...Others must work outside that order, complaining that the best of all options available still falls short - far short - of what Jesus requires...

...It bears remembering that its Lord is a Messiah who spoke and acted and enacted like a prophet...

...Likewise, it is difficult to see the consistency when, after idealizing a church in which local cells, free of "paternalistic care," come to their independent resolves about society and its conflicts, Metz then argues that since no politician would long survive if he took the claims of the exploited as his platform, it falls to the bishops (because they are politically immune and secure in their office) to take on this task in the political arena...

...It is characteristic of bourgeois religion that people "believe" but have no courageous readiness to reach very far from themselves to put their beliefs to effective good use...

...In re Father Drinan, while agreeing with the pope on policy I should have applied it differently, leaving Drinan in the Congress and furloughing him from the priesthood (on the most honorable terms...

...Some must blurt out the Gospel in its raw form...

...on the next they are asked to holler...