Creative Communion:
DeCosse, David E
IN BRIEF Creative Communion, by Joe Holland, Paulist Press, $4.95,87 pp. Joe Holland, setting out here a creation-centered spirituality of work, breaks new ground in his writing. He casts his...
...Yet what about Calvin's far more positive view of the vocation of secular work...
...For example, Protestantism has a pessimistic view of work...
...This communion seems primarily to mean a blend of a fecund sexual love and creative work...
...Grace, Holland argues, is primarily revealed in God's ongoing creation...
...Yet in arguing for this view, he buys into one of the most problematic aspects of the American concept of work-the need to work for work's sake and to produce regardless of what it is we might be producing...
...It is to that end that he wrote the book...
...This is simplistic compared to the real-life mix of these qualities in men and women...
...Indeed, the significance of his life, death, and Resurrection as they apply to work is subordinated to a sense of Jesus as purveyor of cosmic creativity...
...Holland never adequately takes up such questions...
...This shift comes in the midst of what he sees as a new and positive spiritual moment...
...The assertion that "creation is the fundamental doctrine of theology" is debatable...
...Work after expulsion from the garden has become a "harsh struggle...
...DAVID E. DeCOSSEE...
...He sets such an understanding against the prevailing view that grace is present in our creation and is also given afterward for our redemption...
...Sin is what blocks the ease of this creativity...
...Such a moment, he argues, requires a new spirituality of work to help free the creativity of the laity...
...DeCOSSE...
...What is the precise nature of this work...
...Gerhard Von Rad, the great exegete, argued that salvation was the fundamental doctrine of Israel and that the doctrine of creation was only seen in light of it...
...No doubt true in part, given the Protestant wariness of justification by works...
...The generalizations are especially problematic when Holland writes of creation theology...
...Indeed, that work ought to be easy production is the underlying point of Holland's spirituality...
...Furthermore, even given the sad, long, and continuing history of patriarchy, it is facile to locate the cause of all sin in what is portrayed as a specifically male quality...
...Work, then, ought to involve the environmentally safe creation of some tangible product...
...He casts his arguments in terms of culture and spirituality rather than political economy...
...Many sentences float in imprecision...
...For one, the stereotype of male as transcendent and female as immanent...
...Sin has occurred because throughout history the transcendent male principle has broken communion and sought instead domination of women and of the earth...
...We are to connect to this primal source of grace through "creative communion," which Holland understands as union with the divine and feminine source of life immanent in the earth (although not identical with the earth...
...Here is Holland on the meaning of work: "The cyclical holism of production and reproduction linked in turn to the subjective/objective creativity of labor and the spiritual depth of its secularity...
...He would have done better to stick to political economy...
...Then there are the sweeping generalizations and stereotypes...
...This new creation, Holland says with extraordinary optimism, restores us "to the primal condition before sin and its consequences" in which the holistic and easy creativity of work-with its ready capacity to yield a product-is entirely restored...
...In places he terms it "care and service," connecting work and ecology...
...Given this view of grace, the role of Jesus is negated and his humanity stripped away...
...The oppressive legacies of Greek dualism are withering away leaving fresh possibilities for a less hierarchical, more lay-centered church...
...This is not an easy book to read...
...This theology raises a number of difficulties...
...Holland is not unaware of this bourgeois anxiety, yet in the end he has constructed a spirituality that justifies it...
...Elsewhere he calls it "production" and links it to human "reproduction...
...Jesus' gospel," Holland writes, "speaks to the work process not because he grew up in a carpenter's family, but because he proclaims a new creation...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
