Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
The God that matters Lawrence S. Cunningham Herbert McCabe, longtime editor of the English Dominican journal, New Blackfriars, is not as well known in this country as he deserves to be. God...
...Brian Hebblethwaite, an Anglican theologian and fellow churchman, is not amused by Cupitt...
...That clarity is even more manifest in the last section of this collection where McCabe, to fill out the book, assembles odds and bits...
...With the above stricture (prejudice...
...Sulivan does not write in the standard language of theology (hence my trouble with the French) but in the prose of a seeker and a person of letters...
...It would be interesting to know, for instance, if Herzog thinks the founding documents of the United States are liberationist or not...
...Writing on the Resurrection of Christ (where one finds a lot of fudging and hedging), he is forthright: "I think that there was an event other than the crucifixion in consequence of which the body of Christ was not to be found in the tomb but is transfigured and glorified...
...Shannon takes an ancient contemplative schema from the medieval Carthusian monk, Guigo II, who wrote about how one moves from "reading" (lectio) to "meditation" (meditatio) and thence to "prayer" (oratio) and "contemplation" (contemplatio...
...Furthermore, he adds to Guigo's schema another step: "action" (operatio) so that the simple prayer of contemplation aids us in the business of living converted lives...
...Such a paradigm, he believes, will result in a greater appreciation of world religions and encourage a more sophisticated encounter of science and theology...
...What makes him so attractive as a theological writer is his obvious intelligence, his vast theological learning, his contacts with current philosophical writings, and most of all, his inability to write turgidly...
...traditional) and, in its traditionalism, cogently argued...
...Carpenter believes that can be done by a renewed interest in nature and less emphasis on history...
...This book is an attempt to show that such an expressivist view of Christianity is egregiously false and, in an appendix, wonders whether Cupitt should remain in the church while advocating such a stance...
...His essays on the "God question," the recent debate over the Incarnation, and on the meaning of "transignification" with respect to the theology of the Eucharist are striking in their originality and incisive in the way he cuts past the epiphenomena of theological discourse to get to the heart of the matter...
...The issue of grace in nature broadly understood has an honorable history in Catholic thought...
...On the unpromising topic of the genealogy of Jesus he has some wonderful things to say...
...Morning Light, Sulivan's spiritual diary, was published in France in 1976...
...Readers seriously interested in the spiritual life might do well to read Shannon's book with care, while keeping in hand the recent excellent translation of Guigo's work which inspired it: The Ladder of Monks (Cistercian Publications, 1981...
...On the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception he muses on the religious mystery contained therein in order to explain why the affective piety of the church accepted what Saint Bernard and Saint Thomas Aquinas rejected...
...By reading both books in tandem one gets an object lesson on how new things may be drawn from old...
...This will happen, he argues, because such a theology will place God at the center and not the particularities of Christianity traditionally conceived...
...McCabe does not fudge and hedge...
...If Hebblethwaite's book were simply one more salvo in a provincial pamphlet war it would not be worthy of extended comment...
...Cupitt appears to be one of those eccentric cranks with which the Church of England seems to be inflicted now and again...
...This journal is a sustained meditation by one sensitive person on the meaning of the Gospels...
...I especially liked his strategy of keeping his more theoretical musings in the notes (it is rare that footnotes prove to be as interesting as the text) while his text maintains a more hortatory and homiletical (in the good sense) tone...
...He is a producer of aphorisms and mots...
...This is monastic theology translated into a non-monastic idiom...
...Cupitt, in short, is a sort of latter-day Feuerbach...
...Frederick Herzog's book is advertised as a first attempt to create an authentic North American theology of liberation...
...William H. Shannon is a priest-theologian best known to most readers as the author of a very fine work on Thomas Merton and as the editor of the first volume of Merton's letters...
...To use his language: we need to move away from theological "God-talk" to "God-walk...
...noted, I do want to acknowledge the many good things about this book...
...He is a professor of theology and a translator of Aquinas...
...There is a long tradition of spiritual journals that has enriched the devotional and contemplative tradition of Christianity...
...That latter gift shows itself in a number of different ways...
...What makes Hebblethwaite's work interesting (at least to me) is that it is one of the few recent works of Christian apologetics which is unabashedly traditional (not conservative...
...1 think it is a wonderful work...
...This is a rich contribution to that genre...
...The late Jean Sulivan was a French priest who, with the permission of his bishop, retired from the active ministry to pursue a life of writing...
...The problem of grace and nature in the classical sources of Catholic theology almost always deals with human nature and not nature in the broader, more modern sense of the word...
...His starting point is a rejection of the notion that theology resides in either doctrine (Barth) or feeling (Schleier-macher...
...Hebblethwaite's argument takes two lines of offense: one, by showing that Cupitt's vision of things is not adequate (not a very hard job) and second, giving a straightforward argument to defend his basic thesis: that an objective God is the only authentic source of all value and being in the Christian view of things...
...Yet, I must say, the best essays in the book are the three long meditations he writes for the great services of Holy Week...
...Part of my confusion derives from the author's unwillingness to distinguish nature as meaning human nature from nature as meaning the created world, that is, the natural world...
...The kinds of theology that well up from oppression can be vividly effective (the civil rights movement of the 1960s proves that liberation theology can liberate), but to argue that all theology must derive from the wellhead of those social locations strikes me, when the argument comes from an academic, as sentimental or, worse, ideological...
...He says of one who contributed to the infamous book, The Myth of God Incarnate: "At the root of all this lies a deficient doctrine of God, and this must be partly due to the author's omission of a thousand years of hard Christian thinking on the topic...
...Herzog writes as both an academic and as a churchman (he belongs to the United Church of Christ) so he has a pastoral instinct...
...There are many books on the life of prayer available to the contemporary reader, but this is one of the better ones because it is clearly written and passionately argued, while having the added merit of being rooted in an old tradition which is translated into a contemporary idiom...
...For such an enterprise, he looks back to the ideas of Whitehead and to such contemporary thinkers as John Hick, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and the ethicist...
...God Matters is a collection of his writings from the past decade or so...
...Sulivan was a belletrist, but he is also a theologian in the fashion that the old monastic writers defined a theologian: one who speaks of God with the authority of prayer...
...A final chapter ("the nature of grace and the grace of nature") tries to imagine a theology that might have come to us had Augustine not entered the battlefield against Pelagius...
...Shannon is at pains to demystify that language and to assure readers that there is nothing mechanical or esoteric about the process...
...Like all great books of this genre it can be read without starting on page one...
...a writer in the reflective tradition...
...There is nothing inherently wrong with this definition of social location but we should acknowledge, more than Herzog does in these pages, that such a social location carries with it the virus of sectarian elitism...
...In those pieces he shows- something rarely done-how a theologian can combine the intellectual rigor of his calling with a believer's sensitivity to the great ritual actions of the church at prayer...
...There is a good deal of close reading of classical and modern sources in this book, but I must say that in the final analysis I found it to be a confusing work...
...Carpenter writes with no consideration of either Francis of Assisi or the Franciscan school nor is there any formal consideration of the broader sense of the sacramentality of the world beyond what he says about it in the writing of Irenaeus...
...His long and dedicated attention to the writings of that major spiritual writer stands behind this present work, which is dedicated to contemplative prayer...
...True to liberationist practice, Herzog insists that all theology has a "social location" so that when he advertises his book as "North American" he really means certain North' Americans (preeminently blacks and other marginalized groups) who live at the edges...
...James Gustafson...
...1 first read it in French (under the title Matinales) with considerable difficulty...
...A highly regarded novelist in his own country, Sulivan only now is becoming available in English, thanks to the efforts of Joseph Cunneen, the editor of Cross Currents, who has given us samples of Sulivan's fiction in that journal and promises more...
...His separate chapters, then, on Augustine, Irenaeus, Tillich, Rahner, Metz, etc., focus on the issue of nature (and grace...
...Carpenter wants a theology that appreciates a functional unity between nature and grace...
...It is in that common experience of sharing community that we most profoundly meet Christ and proclaim him...
...It is that kind of writing which shows how the lex orandillex credendi can produce exemplary theology for the church...
...Let me not leave the impression that McCabe is a conservative curmudgeon...
...Curiously enough, in a book on North American liberation theology such issues are never raised nor such "classic" loci of North American theology addressed...
...Its emphasis on the Eucharist brings many insights to the subject while its desire to move theology from the plane of pure discourse to the level of deed reflecting inner discourse is pastorally useful...
...What he does very well is draw on the tradition in new and innovative ways...
...Theology, in Herzog's view, is to be found in God's interaction with us...
...That experience triggers not words but word-acts which are the sacramental signs of Christ among us...
...There is a Church of England parson, Don Cupitt, who is evidently stirring things up a bit with a book and BBC series arguing that Christianity does not speak of any objective reality called God (we are the offspring of chance in an impersonal universe) but expresses an ideal form of life...
...Nor is he a shrinking violet when he wishes to criticize...
...As a consequence of this starting point Herzog puts a very strong emphasis on the Eucharist...
...This is, all done while Shannon intersperses some autobiographical reflections on his own conversion(s) both to contemplative prayer and to Christian pacifism...
...In the preface to his work, Nature and Grace, James A. Carpenter tells us that his chapters, while discrete studies, have a common end: to move from anthro-pocentricity to a God-centered view of things...
...one to be savored in bits and pieces...
...indeed, it is difficult to read it in that fashion since it makes no pretense of being systematic...
...Readers may or may not be persuaded by the author's line of reasoning, but they will learn a good deal about contemporary theological and philosophical thinking in the process of working through the book...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 2
