God and the New Haven Railway:

...Where Playboy inflates perfectionist fancy, the Bible disconcerts the god in us by insisting, "You are your body...

...In sum, however, O'Brien's humor, like Karl Barth's good cheer, saves the train ride.the train ride...

...Well, guess again...

...or the style, you may think, will be solemn high, too specialized, and therefore alien...

...The tone, you probably fear, will be lugubrious, appropriate for announcing foreclosure on the mortgage...

...all that ferocious war poetry hardly conforms to the UN charter...

...Fair enough...

...O'Brien downgrades the latter, along with their meditative paths, as falling under the category of Pelagian self-help...

...Jesus never dealt with leverage buy-outs...

...He does not prove anything ("This book is an attempt at what to say when proofs are constitutionally out of order...

...But pardon me, my children need attending...

...He shows that theology can be written with panache and read with pleasure...

...Does an argument for the distinctiveness of Christianity require us to ignore the theme of incarnate cosmic love to be found in certain forms of Hinduism and the bodhisattva tradition within Mahayana Buddhism...

...In this regard, I found O'Brien's most explosive chapter the one (titled "Saints and Sexpots") that differentiates Christianity from both Platonism and Hugh Hefner's philosophy...

...O'Brien's sharp dichotomy echoes the theological one-upmanship of nineteenth-century Protestant students of comparative religion...

...He makes it look easy...

...How," he asks, " is the modern commuter to engage his or her imagination with that biblical narrative so overstocked with sheep and figs...

...By the way, he has some fun with the "Mafia godfather" deity of fundamentalists, liberal ethical culture, and the inadequacy of Mother Nature as an untalkative respondent to incurably voluble human beings...

...Being a facsimile god is not tough for us to accept...

...I think not...

...Which is to say that the conundrum of God emptying himself to become human (Phil...

...It is not only the showstoppers that are the problem...

...What is not so fair is the author's sharp contrast between the Judeo-Christian tradition of "salvation" and religions of "enlightenment" - mainly designated as oriental...

...That is a biblical conversation...

...The animus against Eastern meditation, I felt, was particularly regrettable when O'Brien discusses prayer (which is cleverly explicated on an analogy with cursing...

...Or worse, to reinforce a popular neglect of spiritual exercise...

...2:6) is our problem too...

...In contrast to the transcenders, "Judaism and Christianity offer only those neurotic Portnoys from Newark and the dreadful Dedalus from Dublin" - presumably unsalvageable cases...

...David Toolan Have you wanted, lately, to read a book of theology while commuting to and from New York, Boston, or Chicago...

...He aptly cites Franz Rosenzweig's startling dictum that Jewish belief is "not the content of a testimony, but rather the product of reproduction...

...As a graft on Judaism, then, Christianity is not carried by sage judgment but consists in procreating Portnoys and Dublin Dedaluses who, in seizing their own day, life, and history, reiterate God's definitive yea-saying - in the Christ - to a human body, quotidian event, and messy history...

...That is a complicated question...

...Sample: "I cannot give you a judgment on whether the world is good, very good or bad, awful...

...O'Brien had successfully laid aside...

...being a genuine human is...

...THE ENGINE & THE ENGINEER GOD AND THE NEW HAVEN RAILWAY AND WHY NEITHER ONE IS DOING VERY WELL George Dennis O'Brien Beacon, $14.95, 159 pp...

...O'Brien is candid: ' "The Bible is one of the more implausible books on the best-seller list...

...Where do we fit among the superpowers (i.e., the state, celebrity stars, nature, gods), O'Brien asks, and how do we avoid both the dreamy, empty quest and also avoid settling for what we are stuck with...

...What makes the [biblical] story of interest is that the story of Jesus is the story of everybody faced with the problem of expressing the fullness of human dignity with a limited repertoire...

...In fact, he has accomplished the rare feat of translating the plodding, humorless Germanic prose of Karl Rahner's fundamental theology into stylish wisecracking American English...

...O'Brien is persuasive (though the writing grows heavy here) in arguing for the importance of finding meaning beyond the self, in a saving good Samaritan, and ultimately, the wisdom of grounding our fallible life in a truly cosmic gesture of love...

...No small problem...

...It isn't just the Holy One Blessed Be He who has problems being incarnate flesh, it is the ordinary man on the bus who is all thumbs when it comes to incarnating.'' The restless transcenders - Socrates, Faust, Don Juan, Shane, and Hugh Hefner - sidestep the scandal here by offering ideal figures of aspiration that have been air-brushed clean of dirt, sweat, and bad odor...

...He has learned to locate the scandal in Christianity by listening to the Jewish tradition...

...Now the problem here isn't where the reader is likely to place it...

...Hence our (Kierkegaardian) dilemma: we are caught between the wild-West drifter's dreams of unlimited possibility, always riding off into the sunset, and the settler's need to hunker down to bed, board, and taxes...

...But Hinduism is many things, as is Buddhism - and anyone raised within the tradition of Catholic mysticism and the subtle Tridentine definition of cooperative grace should make discriminations and see affinities between East and West where a Mayflower or Cavalier descendant would not...

...O'Brien can be wisely contrary...

...Given his job, he'd better...

...The great virtue of O'Brien's book, which in a former day would have been called philosophical apologetics to the Gospel, is its tone - flippant, bantering, irreverent...

...O'Brien likes it that way...

...I suspect not...

...But what can his message be, I wondered, except to encourage the commuter-reader's religious parochialism...

...The Jew, engendered by a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people...

...Undaunted, O'Brien starts by setting forth the human condition: "a mystery story with a sage-brush setting scripted by Samuel Beckett.'' Genuine religion, a kind of overcommitment that horrifies Epicurean and stoic rationers of desire, arises, he claims, from the frustration of worthy desires impossible to abandon...

...Similarly, Christian doctrines in the Socratic mold, infallible teaching, are derivative and quite secondary, in O'Brien's view, to a sense of participating in an "unfailing life" present in an ongoing body of disciples...

...Dennis O'Brien, currently president of the University of Rochester, contends that "any decent divinity is at-hand in the texture of weekdays''-even, that is to say, on the 6:10 from Grand Central...

...The biblical answer doesn't get around or above these questions so much as into the thick of them...

...Willingly then, the Christian is implicated in this earthen plot made holy by God's " Yes.'' The problematic part of this immensely graceful and lightsomely sophisticated book, in my judgment, comes with O'Brien's interpretation of Christianity's uniqueness among the world religions...

...In developing this theme, he argues tellingly against the American penchant for self-help religion...

...The issue is our own resistance to embodiment, our inveterate docetism...

...Basically, he seeks to make sense of biblical religion...

...To my ears, this sounded like the oversimplification of an older apologetic which, in principle, Dr...

...The Jew is himself the belief...

...In what sense 'good' or 'bad...