Religious booknotes:

...Thus, he links theology with worship and spirituality in a way not frequently found in contemporary theological writing...

...All of these movements have their place in this exemplary piece of intellectual history...

...From a somewhat narrow initial focus Cashdollar manages to rehearse for us once again many of the more fascinating religious struggles of the last century...

...Like other historians writing today he wants to get away from the "high" view of history as a history of elite culture to a grittier view of things...

...style...

...Not as comprehensive as Bernard Cooke's massive Ministry to Word and Sacrament (1976), Osborne's book is, nonetheless, a fine historico-theological study of the priesthood and, as such, should find a welcome readership among students of sacramental theology as well as ecclesiol-ogy because of the ramifications of his conclusions in the structures of the church and the ecumenical consequences of those conclusions.ical consequences of those conclusions...

...Books such as this one help us overcome an almost inevitable parochialism in our reading and, at least to that extent, they are most welcome...

...The notion of inculturation has been a much discussed one since the time of the Second Vatican Council...

...Cashdollar, by contrast, is a historian and his book is about theology or, more precisely, how the thought of Auguste Comte (1798-1857) influenced the Anglophone theologians of the last century...

...Van Beeck accepts the challenge by noting early on that if such and such an article or book is not in his notes, chances are he has not read it...

...Furthermore, priesthood cannot be studied apart from the equally complicated issue of the sacrament of orders...

...There is some tendentious special pleading in this work and the translator did not serve us well in the notes and bibliography (Why are a Portuguese and French source for Simone Weil cited but no English reference...

...How did they come to equate the severity of male adultery and female adultery...

...Ayo wishes to reach a broad audience so his work is not forbiddingly technical...

...in command of the sources...

...Indeed, the book is a quite interesting corrective for those nurtured only on church history "from above...

...Fourth, this work is conservative and radical: conservative in that it shows a profound respect for the Great Tradition and radical in the sense that it is never distracted by the accidental or epiphenomenal...

...Comte's philosophy may seem like thin gruel today but it was heady stuff in a century in which religious thought either anchored itself in traditional authority (e.g., The Oxford Movement) or moved to positions of accommodation with the rise of post-Enlightenment critical thought (e.g., the Broad Church Movement, the Unitarians, the Transcen-dentalists...

...If Karl Rahner is correct in his judgment that the council Toward a Theology of Inculturation, by Aylward Shorter, Orbis, $16.95, 291 pp...

...Van Beeck stands within the community of believers with God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, by Frans Josef van Beeck, S.J., Harper & Row, $27.95,338 pp...

...Hoornaert, by contrast, is an ecclesiastical historian living in Latin America who attempts, in this work, to look at church history in its formative centuries, through the liberationist perspective...

...Nonscholars may become a bit fainthearted with Cashdollar's meticulous chronicle of theological wrestlings now consigned to the backshelves of libraries, but I must confess that his book kept me engaged, not so much because of any burning interest in Comte but because familiar people kept swimming into his story: George Eliot and John Henry Newman...

...We have been fairly inundated with theological works from liberation theologians in the past two decades...

...Ayo's book is less ambitious than Van Beeck's but it is in a great theological tradition that goes back at least as far as Cyril of Jerusalem's fourth-century catechetical lectures, i.e., an extended corn-Creed as Symbol, by Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C., University of Notre Dame Press, $19.95,196 pp...

...Still, his history is engaged, which is to say, sure in its belief that we have lost some authentic perspectives on the past because of ideological mystification...

...he opts instead for a more prophetic, underclass consideration of history...

...Theology, history, & transitions Lawrence S. Cunningham lieving community first and not the human need for religion...

...Hoornaert is interested in values as seen in lives rather than in values as formulated in canons...

...and written in a straightforward, expository Priesthood: A History of the Ordained Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, by Kenan Osborne, O.F.M., Paulist, $14.95,388 pp...

...Although his work is more narrowly focused, I found it a nice foliow-up to the much admired study of Michael Buckley (At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Yale) which ends where Cash-dollar's work begins: early in the nineteenth century...

...Why did they reject abortion and the exposure of infants...

...Comte himself imagined a vastly complicated church of general humanity complete with ritual, authority figures, a secular calendar of saints, etc...

...Why did Christians refuse military service...

...And so on...

...Anyone who attempts to "keep up" with theological writing these days knows what a daunting task faces such a sys-tematician...

...This work demands an exposition and critique far more detailed than I can give in these notes, but let me at least say what I like about it (and I like it very much...

...Indeed, Hoornaert builds on the work of a number of scholars who have done very much the same thing...

...His story runs from the New Testament through the patristic, medieval, and reformation periods with final chapters on the recent developments in both the Catholic church and the bilateral ecumenical discussions...

...Their forte is the application of theological reflection to the contemporary situation...

...Ayo's book is welcome because he sums up the history of the development of creeds in Christianity and, as appendices, lists all books in English on the creed written in modern times and provides some versions of the creed in the original languages and in translations...

...But I found this liberationist reading of early church history a fresh new way of looking at things even when many pages cried out for counterargument or a more nuanced reading...

...I look forward to the next volumes...

...Along with Berard Mathaler's recent The Creed (1987) this work makes a good choice for those desiring a foundational survey of the historic Christian faith...

...mentary on the creed...

...As Shorter writes in this book, there is a good deal of resentment in the African church that the new code of canon law is made as a universal law when its foundations are preeminently Western and Roman...

...Almost all of these writers are systematic theologians with a strong interest in biblical studies...

...There are some very profound questions that circle around the issue of inculturation...

...sensitive to the complications of history...

...Charles Darwin and Leslie Stephen...

...Why no mention of the English translation of some of the primary texts...

...It is a complicated issue since the role of the priest in Catholic Christianity developed in tandem with the evolution of other ministries (preeminently the office of the episkopos) both as an office and in terms of its functional role in the church...

...That particular resentment may stand as a shorthand example of what a theory of inculturation must take into account...

...To say that his approach is not original is not to say that it is without interest...

...One need only read Shorter's work (he is English but with many years of African experience) to see that inculturation cannot be fobbed off with a few cosmetic changes to the liturgy...

...At the end of each chapter, Osborne, always the pedagogue, summarizes the main line of the argument in a series of brief statements...

...What he has read in depth is the Bible, the classic sources of the theological tradition, the major philosophical writers both ancient and modern, and the more significant modern voices of the theological tradition that runs from Schleiermacher down to the giants of this century: Tillich, Barth, Rahner, et al...

...There are issues that touch on social and personal morality, the mores of cultures, and extremely difficult questions that are foundational in character...

...This is hardly a new approach as readers of "popular" history know well...

...Second, he begins his theological reflections with the unassailable observation that the Christian community was a worshipping community that sought to encounter God through the person of the resurrected Christ...

...Van Beeck has patience with neither the nostalgia of the right nor the utopianism of the left...

...He thus reverses Rahner's strategy of beginning with the transcendental and then giving account of the categorical...

...The body of the book consists of a series of theological expositions of the verses of the Apostles' Creed which are very well done...

...The past interests them less for its own sake than for the light it sheds on today...

...Why were they criticized for accepting the rabble into their communities...

...At a few places he cites scholars in French or German without translations in the text which will irritate nonprofessionals but, by and large, this is a most readable work...

...It was, after all, the era of Darwinism, the rise of the higher criticism in biblical studies, the emergence of the Social Gospel, and the struggles of the Roman Catholic church with the fact of modernity...

...I also liked it because he is conversant with the theological labors of Africans and, as with most Westerners, that is an area where I am in need of instruction...

...He is concerned with the evolution of the Catholic priesthood out of the New Testament church...

...Finally, the whole question of the priesthood is a central issue both in ecumenical discussions and internally, as we watch the not-so-slow dissolution of the kind of priestly culture that developed in the West after the Council of Trent...

...He The Memory of the Christian People, by Eduardo Hoornaert, Orbis, $26.95, 304 pp...

...That sort of thing...

...Third, he makes a cogent and nonpolemical case for beginning theology with an account of the beLAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is a professor of theology al the University of Notre Dame...

...its inexorable march away from theology and metaphysics, with a mixture of horror and fascination...

...the dual intention of accounting for that community's belief and a systematic reflection on it...

...One only wishes that it will soon get into paperback so that it might find wider use in the classroom and as background reading for an assessment of the drafts for the universal catechism which is to appear this fall from Rome...

...First, it is a theological work and not a book about theology...

...His book is too schematic to deal with all questions in detail but one can get a sense of the whole by a careful reading of this work...

...It was, as Thomas Huxley unsentimentally sniffed, Roman Catholicism without the Christianity...

...This is a very helpful work...

...distances himself from those historians whose lineage traces back to Eusebius of Caesarea's institutional concerns...

...It is irenic in tone...

...What was their objection to the games of the Roman arena...

...My suspicion is that he will take a good deal of criticism for the general framework within which he has chosen to work and the "conservative" yield that derives from his labors, but, be that as it may, this is an impressive work that is learned, passionate, and catholic...

...marked the end of the European church and the emergence of the world church (Weltkirche) then the issue of how the Gospel lives in a fashion that does not bear with it the baggage of Europe becomes a very important one...

...Osborne's study is both historical and theological...

...His books include The Catholic Experience and The Catholic Faith: An Introduction, both from Paulist Press...

...Shorter surRELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES veys these problems and also provides us with a brief history of missionary adapta-tion/inculturation from the patristic period down to the present...

...How, for example, does one balance the authentic rights of the local church against the claims of the Great Church...

...They received his positivist philosophy, with its idea of intellectual progress and The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America, by Charles D. Cashdollar, Princeton, $35, 489 pp...

...John Stuart Mill and Orestes Brownson...

...What would christologies look like separated from the classical formulations of the creeds...