Easter in Ordinary
Himes, Michael J.
EASTER IM OBHMHY Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God Nicholas Lash University of Virginia, $29.95 313 pp. Michael J. Hfa his is, quite simply, the finest new book in theology...
...But for Lash, Buber corrects von HUgel's inattention to the political and social consequences of his position...
...The book converses, first critically and then constructively, with a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century relig-ious thinkers...
...The first conversation part-ner is William James...
...Such treatment distorts the understanding of both the person and God...
...Religion can never be used as a retreat from reality...
...Von Hiigel's description of Christianity as a school for authentic personhood is rooted in his analysis of religion as the balance of three elements, the historical-institutional, the critical-speculative, and the mystical-operative...
...Most recently, he has given us two volumes of selected essays, Theology on Dover Beach (Paulist Press, 1979) and Theology on the Way to Emmaus (SCM Press, 1986), and the deservedly praised, A Matter of Hope: A Theologian's Reflec-tions on Karl Marx (Notre Dame Press, 1982...
...These elements correspond to needs within the developing person...
...As one expects of Lash, the book is lucidly written...
...Lash proposes that such language can avoid blasphemously reducing God to an It by following the pattern of the Trinity- provided, that is, the doctrine is under-stood "to function more like a set of rules or protocols for Christian speech and less like a set of descriptive claims or What is needed is a distinction that we can experience but which is not a difference between things...
...This means that the attempt to reach some understanding of what is meant by "God" can only be by way of what Lash calls the discipline of contemplative practice, "for the only understanding which we can hope to attain will be a byproduct of appropriate behavior...
...Lash locates that distinction in our experience of communion or lack of communion with others...
...This excellent book is further evidence that Nicholas Lash may be the most acute, polished, and exciting Christian philosophical theolo-gian at work today...
...But von Hiigel and Buber play the central roles here...
...Yet speech about God goes on unavoida-bly...
...God-talk is properly prayer, not theology...
...Being in love with another obvi-ously makes a difference, and yet it makes no particular difference...
...Is this religious experience an experi-ence of God...
...To answer that question, Lash enlists Martin Buber in formulating an interpretation of experience that uses the category of relationship...
...If God is always You and never It, in Buber's terms, then God can only be addressed, never discussed...
...The fragile and rare experience of true human communion is the least distorting symbol for God...
...This is theology on a refreshingly high level...
...Lash's clarification of the meaning of religious experience, of personhood, and of God leads to well-argued conclusions regarding orthopraxis as the building of authentically human communities, the rejection of theism as an adequate inter-pretation of God in the Christian tradition, and the centrality of the Trinity in Chris-tian action and discourse...
...Readers of Lash's .earlier books will not be surprised at his excellent exposition of Newman...
...This new book is in every way worthy of its predecessors...
...Nicholas Lash, HHi the Norris-Hulse profes-sor of divinity at Cambridge University, has written several important works over the past twenty years on eucharistic theol-ogy, doctrinal development, and church authority...
...To accomplish this, Lash broadens the conversation to include Friedrich Schlei-ermacher, John Henry Newman, Fried-rich von Hiigel, Martin Buber, and Karl Rahner...
...Concentrating on The Varieties of Religious Experience and A Pluralistic Universe but ranging widely through James's writings, Lash argues that James assumed the severed ego of Cartesian dualism which he so often criti-cized...
...This, Lash contends, provides a richer vision of the person and of religious experience than James's, which von Hiigel regarded as mistaken in its attempt to isolate relig-ion from its historical environment and from intellectual criticism...
...This difficulty requires no apology, for as the author notes, one part of the theologian's task is to discipline the propensity of the pious imagination to hasty simplification...
...His discussions of Schleierma-cher is brief but extremely insightful...
...The central concern of this book is to clarify these two terms and so yield a more adequate ac-count of religious experience...
...Both von Hiigel and Buber maintain that "God is not, and can never be, one of a number of possible objects of consideration and use, nor is relation with God one of a number of possible human loves...
...One is al-ways aware of the respect with which the author treats his subject, his sources, and his reader...
...And also corrects the ease with which von Hiigel engaged in God-talk...
...He suggests that this tacit assump-tion underlies James's individualism and leads to a privatized' notion of religious experience as a form of heightened indi-vidual feeling...
...Michael J. Hfa his is, quite simply, the finest new book in theology that I have read in the last year...
...Lash turns to von Hiigel, especially to that unappreciated masterpiece, The Mystical Element of Religion, to assist in expanding the meaning of person...
...The insistence that all three elements are continuously interacting means that the religious is not a particular kind of experience but an ingredient of all experience...
...That it is rigorous reading is due not to any obscurity of style, but to the intrinsic difficulty of the matter under discussion...
...No questions are shirked, no objections brushed aside, no easy vic-tories taken over straw men...
...it alters every-thing without changing anything...
...And the demands placed upon the reader are richly repaid...
...This results in a religion which devalues historical and institutional forms, avoids the risks of vigorous in-quiry, and "contracts into those private temples of the heart in which, unwittingly, we worship either an idea or a ghost...
...Discipline is an apt word here, for Lash is an intensely disci-plined thinker...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 6
