Correspondence
Correspondence Garvey's gem Saxtons River, Vt. To the Editors: John Garvey's "Necessary Nonviolence" [Feb. 12] is a gem of goodness, wisdom and necessity. MARJORIE MURPHY Able was...
...To the main suggestion in my article, that the followers of Jesus had an experience of God that is normally had only by the dead, an experience focused in Jesus as alive and empowered with the Spirit, and that Christian faith is thus at root experientially beyond death, neither of my critics pay any attention...
...Between Moore's idea of the resurrection, together with that of Schillebeeckx, whose ideas I have read before in your magazine, mostly with incomprehension, and the latter-day upsurge of fundamentalist Christianity, where can the ordinary Catholic Christian stand...
...But who are these scholars and what is their evidence...
...JOHN c. CORT The author replies: Surprise surprise...
...Pursuing this method, I find that this God-encounter goes far beyond other mystical experience, and I was at pains to make this clear...
...Editorial, Jan 29] When did it erupt...
...I remember, decades ago, driving my students up the wall asking them to envision the difference between one's state of mind on learning that a dear friend recently torpedoed was alive and a prisoner of war - this had recently happened with someone known to us - and the state of mind of the disciples when they met the risen Lord...
...Father Moore tells us that "the scholars say the appearance stories [of the resurrection] are stories of newborn faith" and "we've all had enough of a 'resurrection' that was as empirically grounded as it was spiritually arid...
...That's as difficult to believe, in fact more difficult for me to swallow, (Continued on page 219) Correspondence (Continued from page 194) than the idea that he did indeed rise (or was raised), that Peter found the tomb empty, that he appeared to the disciples, ate fish, broke the bread at Emmaus, and finally ascended in Glory...
...Must we be asked to believe that the resurrection only happened as Moore says through memory conversations between the Apostles in which they come to realize that Christ would have forgiven them for their desertion, and that he must be somehow alive, since they could envision themselves being forgiven by him as they remembered his discourse and deeds...
...To quote from a classic of the screen, "what we seem to have is a failure in communication...
...In the Commonweal article, as in two earlier articles in the Downside Review, I argued that the center of gravity of the resurrection problematic has shifted to the area of what Lonergan calls the subject...
...far beyond the Baltimore Catechism and whatever parings of Thomism and religious understanding we managed to imbibe in Catholic institutions of higher learning, but far behind, and disbelieving in what Moore has to say...
...The people to whom Jesus made himself known after his death as "both Lord and Christ" underwent, in that making-known, a profound inner change that was in effect the Christian experi-ence-and thus the matrix of the Christian scriptures...
...The purpose of my article, on the negative side, was to say that this would not do...
...The question concerns the change of heart and mind...
...My friend seemed very surprised, and then said that he guessed he understood what I meant, and that my explanation would be one way of putting it...
...The journalist is clearly limited...
...To say that the resurrection experience was an inner change of mind and heart is not to say that nothing happened outside the mind - such as everyone in the room becoming aware that Jesus was there...
...But before we go any further, a vital point has to be made...
...I realized recently something about the Christian approach to life, when I tried to explain to a young man of my acquaintance what the Unitarians believe...
...the lay reader, as such, if I can call myself an example, is required to make a tremendous leap across a void, then, in order to merely follow Moore through nuance, inflection, and innuendo...
...It occurs to me that the joke works just as well if you substitute "Thou art the homoousion, etc...
...Well, as Elephant's Child would put it, "This is too buch for be...
...Fairbanks, Alaska To the Editors: Where is Mt...
...If I cannot believe this, then I would rather join the Unitarians, and live courageously in a world without hope...
...MARJORIE MURPHY Able was I...
...It sounds very much like the wishful thinking which modern day agnostics like to accuse Christianity of being...
...I am weary of these continual references to unnamed scholars who have somehow proven that no wise and clever Christian can believe in this, that, or the other...
...He is too familiar with the fact that honest witnesses can disagree about the same event, and can with the passage of time forget, and even alter, the details of what they have seen and heard...
...MARY R. SPENCER Subjective experience...
...John's saying, "And we have seen his glory as of the only begotten of the Father...
...Spencer actually quotes, as having my endorsement, the crucial statement by Schillebeeckx which I had quoted in order to refute it...
...it is he who wrote them down and his testimony, we know, is true" (John 21:24...
...If this in turn scandalizes the scholars, that is too bad...
...Helena...
...To the Editors: Reading Father Moore on the Resurrection [Jan...
...In the post-conciliar world we have made much of the incarnation, and what it means, to correct, I suppose, an over-spiritualized conception of Christ...
...As regards the nature of the appearance accounts, I suggest that those correspondents dip into the Jerome Commentary, Reginald Fuller's The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, and the voluminous work of Raymond Brown...
...Is there no writer who can give an overview of modern theology and its various trends, and the findings of scriptural scholars which at least would explain why the events of the crucifixion are actual, while the resurrection accounts are merely imaginative recreations inspired by the Spirit of those events...
...Even more difficult, it seems to me, would be the idea that this religion of hope could have survived for two thousand years believing in a resurrection which was but (as I read Moore) a created image of the risen Christ fostered by the Spirit in the minds of the Apostles, and giving them by this means, a conversion experience...
...If this is where thinking in theology "is" at the present time, then the average lay Catholic has neither the background to follow it, nor the need for either theology or theologians and their La Putan world...
...And they said, "Thou art the eschatological manifestation of the Ground of All Being, the Kerygma manifested in the conflict and decision of the humanizing process...
...Let's get them out front and center and have a good look at it...
...I asked that question forty years ago, and I'm asking it still...
...If it was not, how did it issue in the massive assertion of that man's divinity, in a context of the most severely monotheistic tradition the world has ever seen...
...What do we now understand by his statement that unless we believe in the resurrection, our faith is dead...
...But let me reply to my correspondents with some questions...
...And Jesus looked at them and said, "What the hell is that...
...Furthermore, to my unnuanced understanding, such an idea does not sound different from similar pronouncements which I heard as long ago as twenty-five to thirty years ago from certain Protestant ministers who were trying to explain the resurrection of Christ in humanly understandable terms...
...Through both these criticisms of my article there runs the assumption that the description "subjective" means "merely subjective," which obscures the fact that a conversion experience, which is of its nature subjective, is the most object-centered condition that we ever have...
...SEBASTIAN MOORE, O.S.B...
...Trying to explain away the resurrection, we Catholics might grump disdainfully to ourselves...
...My questions relating to Moore's article deal with his statement that scriptural scholars have determined that the resurrection events as recounted in the New Testament are no longer to be regarded as actual events as the accounts of the crucifixion are...
...Nahant, Mass...
...Paul's experience...
...But how can you show that A goes beyond B if you disregard B? What distresses me most is that what is for one Christian the expression of a passionately held and prayerful faith is read by another Christian as so much gobbledegook...
...I had singled out this passage, because it is Schillebeeckx's most explicit account of "what might have happened"-namely, the disciples discussing the life of Jesus and thus coming to realize who he was...
...My garbled explanation, as I had gleaned it from a Unitarian friend of mine, was that they are a community of people trying to live courageously in a world without hope...
...If it was, is it not the task of the theologian to discuss its nature as a religious experience, using what we know from the depositions of mystics and our own gropings...
...He seemed to understand instantly what I had not really been aware of until then...
...Does...
...The idea of inner experience and outer event as mutually exclusive is a massive error of Bultmann's, an assumption much older than he but powerfully mediated by him, in fact channeled through him into a whole generation of scripture scholars...
...29] reminds one of the apocryphal gospel in which Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do ye say that I am...
...What I am really asking is that you give us some "fill" between the world of Schillebeeckx and Moore, and the place where I stand, together as I believe with many other Catholics...
...Can it be that the time has come to switch the old saw about war and suggest that theology is too important to be left to theologians...
...Therefore he does not feel this terrible urgency to conclude that all the witnesses are wrong, or have confused a subjective "conversion" for an objective, physical appearance, or are simply making up "stories" to "dramatize" an article of faith...
...Christianity, I have always thought, is hard enough to believe, and always must have been, with its insistence that man live in two worlds...
...Napoleon know about this...
...true though that statement may be...
...In conclusion, what was it like to meet the risen Jesus...
...Cort says that my article reminds him of the apocryphal dialogue between Jesus and the disciples-"Thou art the eschatological manifestation of the Ground of All Being," and Jesus looked at them and said "What the hell is that...
...Moore thus dismisses this problem to proceed with his nuanced (delicately) explanation of how we are to understand these New Testament events in Christ's life after the crucifixion...
...What of St...
...Personally, I can think of nothing more spiritually arid than a theory of the resurrection that is based not on objective fact but on a subjective experience of conversion or forgiveness...
...Taking Christianity seriously, whether intellectually or morally, tends to invite ridicule...
...As a mere theologian, I think it's quite a helpful idea...
...Only such a suspicion could justify a mere journalist in wanting to put a word in...
...Indeed, I suspect that the cause of all the trouble is the ruinous split between subject and object that pervades the modern mind, whether of scripture scholars, theologians, or journalists...
...If "the scholars" could come up with convincing evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was in no way a physical phenomenon, then Father Moore's fall-back position might be useful consolation for those who are looking for consolation at any price...
...I cannot be convinced either by his next nuanced leap to explaining how Christ thus becomes Lord and Judge of all creation...
...Your rationale for years, as I have understood it, is the publication of commentary on public affairs, literature, and the arts by lay Christians for the laity and other interested readers, giving a non-ecclesiastical slant on these matters from a Christian (Catholic) point of view...
...And so we will go on believing that when John wrote about doubting Thomas and the finger in the nailprints, or about Peter and the disciples eating fish and bread with the risen Christ on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, he was not telling stories to dramatize anything at all, but was telling the truth as to what he himself had seen and heard, just like a witness in a court of law...
...F. Meyer...
...But Commonweal's two correspondents line me up with Schillebeeckx, finding in both of us the same subjectivism...
...But it is only comparatively recently that it has come to appear that what it means for the resurrection to have happened needs to be explicated in terms of the disciples' experience...
...Nothing would be better calculated to dry up my faith...
...To the Editors: As a long-time and devoted reader of Commonweal, I find myself driven to write to you to put some questions about Sebastian Moore's article "Experiencing the Resurrection" [Jan...
...REV...
...The error is surely operative in Schillebeeckx when he reasons that since the resurrection experience was the birth of faith it could only be an interior event, not an external one...
...LOUIS L. KENNER, S.J...
...This mutual exclusivity of subject and object ignores a primordial in-the-world-ness of the mind, without which there could not be knowledge...
...John's word for it: "It is this same disciple who is the witness to these things...
...Christians do live in a world of hope, and this means that their whole approach to life is colored by hope in ways they may be largely unconscious of...
...namely, reasonably literate, reasonably educated, and reasonably concerned people hoping for a little enlightenment beyond that available in the regular sources of news and commentary...
...The sort of questions being asked, then, are not answered by saying, "Dammit, he came into the room...
...My original title, which was not used, was "Resurrection in the Christol-ogy of Schillebeeckx...
...REV...
...The resurrection event Yakima, Wash...
...A very impressive work that examines the assumptions of many scripture scholars in the context of this radical epistemolog-ical confusion is The Aims of Jesus by Ben...
...If, on the other hand, they have evidence to show that an apology is in order, by all means let us hear it...
...I am told that the Arians did make jokes of this kind against Athanasius...
...Is this too an imaginative recreation inspired by the Spirit...
...Meanwhile we simple folk will go on taking St...
...This is symptomatic of a sickness in this Christian body, which non-Christians are not slow to observe and point out...
...This has always been more or less understood - it could hardly fail to be and Christian belief stay Christian belief...
...Presumably, then, you do not expect your "lay" readers to be theologians, or scriptural scholars, or sociologists, or political analysts, or liturgists, or anything else except what they are...
...It seems a necessary question if one believes that people did...
...How do we account for St...
...The whole purpose of my article "Experiencing the Resurrection" was to say as clearly and emphatically as possible that I find Schil-lebeeckx's interpretation of the original encounters with the risen Jesus inadequate to the demands of Christian belief...
...Was the original encounter with the risen Jesus a religious experience, and of a totally transformative kind...
...I beg to be excluded from that "all," and I suspect there are others: simple folk, fishermen, peasants, publicans, prostitutes, and journalists...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
