The Distancing of God

...Johnson attempted a Great Society...

...As a theological proposition, that has some merit, even if at this stage of the conversation it is scarcely threatening or novel...

...Doctrine became hopelessly complex and opaque...

...the less a reader knows, the more confusing the rapid transition from one period, author, topic to another...

...Third, the tests are flawed by the failure to provide clear categories: The word "symbol" is used in so many different ways that I gave up trying to assign it any specific meaning--yet symbolism is what the book purports to be about...

...Indeed, government officials betrayed a conspicuous lack of memory (and principle) when they announced plans in 1991 to deregulate the banking sector as a cure for its problems-the same argument that produced the disastrous Gain-St...

...Mayer also spends considerable space criticizing the operation created to clean up the mess, the Resolution Trust Corporation, as well as predicting similar convulsions in the commercial banking system...

...In his earlier analysis, Cooke complained about theologians distancing God through their analysis...

...The second part of his book reviews the contributions made to the study of symbols by the academic fields of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics/ literary criticism...

...Yet, the virus of alienation from God's presence was introduced almost at once-even within the New Testament writings--as Jewish structures of authority and worship moved the community toward institutionalization and "ritual," and as Hellenistic hankering for abstraction led the community toward doctrine...

...Why do the present theorists speak about religious symbols...

...Second, the data does not bend so easily to the tests put to it, forcing Cooke to acknowledge as many exceptions as instances...

...As they wrote doctrinal treatises they also preached homilies, and genuflected, and prayed the psalms...

...Do they show the same tendencies...

...Less publicized are the sweetheart deals from the latter part of 1988--which redistributed the remaining riches of the S&Ls to America's wealthiest businessmen...

...Cooke suggests that the first Christians' healthy awareness of God-present-in-therisen-Lord did not require "religion...

...THE DISTANCING OF GOD The Ambiguity of Symbol in History and Theology Bernard J. Cooke Fortress, $24.95,381 pp...

...Germain legislation which opened the floodgates in 1982...

...Beyond all these minor irritants, the reader must ask whether any of these tests proves anything about a disease at all...

...He complains that they were more interested in apparitions, miracles, pilgrimages, relics...

...He complains, for example, that in the medieval period ritual was something that people saw only as a spectacle...

...We'll never know, if these "histories of ideas" keep reading the same standard sources to the neglect of everything else...

...He assumes good motives on the part of too many actors in the drama and treats financial laws as essentially .sound when not unduly distorted...

...The Bush team consistently downplayed the extent of the debacle during the presidential campaign of 1988 and the Democrats (Wright, DeConcini, Glenn, Cranston) were themselves too close to the stink to complain overmuch...

...Does he not recognize that nothing is less likely to have pertinence to the discernment of the experience of God in "ordinary life" than these theories that (particularly in graduate schools at the present time) depend less and less on contact with living data in their formulation...

...Now the names and summations are truly rapid-fire...

...It reminds me of a doctor who does weeks of sophisticated testing to diagnose a lifethreatening illness, only to offer sugared water as a cure...

...It stands to reason that if the sources studied are the sort of "great books of Western Christianity" that form the basis of all such surveys, Cooke's outcome will look the way it does...

...IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE...

...But the disease of distancing wielded inexorable power and took over the entire organism...

...What about the things that Augustine and Athanasius said to their people about their"ordinary experience...

...Thus he can with clear conscience concentrate on fmancial manipulations instead of the more general political and economic trends associated with the Reagan revolution...

...Nor is the S&L situation simply a mistake with large but finite proportions that can, with sacrifice, be borne (by the victims, by the way, not the perpetrators...

...Here's the diagnosis: Cooke wants to show how in Christianity the experience of God has been "distanced" by the way in which symbols have developed and been used...

...Another clinician might detect some flaws in this epidemiological survey...

...Mayer's elucidation of the financial components of the problem is admirable...

...In any case, Cooke's diagnosis declares the body virtually dead because of the disease of symbolic distancing...

...Cooke seems to have great optimism about the contributions all these new theories can make for our understanding of symbols, even though he repeatedly acknowledges that (a) the premises of most of these theories are incompatible with any traditional understanding of God and world at all...

...We have--albeit largely untranslated within the pages of Migne--raftloads of homilies and catechetical instructions and letters available to us, sources that are much more in contact with people's lives...

...Roosevelt gave us the New Deal...

...Indeed, to whom, really, is Cooke speaking...

...His supposed remedy is in fact simply an acute form of the chronic disease he has so lingeringly described...

...His approach is etiological...

...Ritual became formalized and distant...

...Do we no longer even have to argue that notions of transcendence in terms of distance are nonsensical, or that patriarchy in all forms must be eliminated (whatever that means), or that hierarchy is unthinkable in the "movement toward equality and freedom that is at the heart of today's social revolution [that] heralds a new epoch in human history...

...What could possibly establish more distance from the real experience of God in the world than to adopt these academic theories concerning symbolism...

...But were not these things their "symbols" of God's presence immediately available to them----even though they are not the ones Cooke wants to talk about...

...Development, in his treatment, is decline...

...If we read Athanasius and Augustine for the theological treatises, by golly, they do use philosophical abstractions...

...For that matter, Cooke seems to assume that if a particular symbol by its internal logic "distances," then the people's experience of God is thereby alienated...

...complains about the use of a philosophy of "participation" without taking the time to explain what he means by it and why we should all agree it is worse than "presence...

...To whom are they speaking...

...uses phrases such as "ordinary experience" as though they had self-evident significance...

...Neither political party distinguished itself in the drama...

...Reagan has left us only the Great Pyramid Scam, a financial syphilis that unless radically treated will wreak damage in the body economic for many generations to come...

...Yes, there were times and places of temporary remission, or even specious health...

...Cooke traces the sad stages of this chronic sickness through the Patristic, Medieval, Reformation and Renaissance, and Modem periods...

...Unfortunately, however, Mayer is simply not cynical enough to produce an entirely satisfying account of the S&Ls...

...Yes...

...Fair enough...

...The truly amazing thing about Cooke's prescription is that he does not seem to recognize its homeopathic character...

...Similarly, the author talks about Jesus' "Abba experience," as though it were widely known what this consisted in...

...The most puzzling feature of this book, in fact, is that Cooke labors so long reaching the thesis (and even then does not state it so clearly), and that so much of that labor seems misdirected...

...What is his prescription...

...Surely Cooke is academic enough himself to be aware of how the epistemological withdrawal he describes has had the effect in contemporary scholarship of eroding even the bases for conversation between supposed colleagues in the same discipline...

...And were they not perhaps their "rituals," which served exactly the functions ritual always has provided...

...He begins with what he considers an original state of health: First Jesus' "Abba experience" gave an immediate sense of God's presence in all of life's circumstances, and then the primitive church's experience of the Spirit appropriated that "Abba experience...

...What the S&L crisis has shown, however, is the extent to which a politically committed administration can bend the laws of finance and economics to its own purposes...

...Institutionalization placed leaders in the position of mediating salvation...

...His explanations of interest margins, Fannie Maes, and other intricacies of the S&L issue illuminate an otherwise murky subject...

...b) the theories, not only between, but also within fields are often incompatible with each other...

...But did anybody but other bishops ever read those works...

...But at least they analyzed within the context of faith and within a living community of worship...

...First, its rapidity invites the typical problem: The more the reader knows about tile many authors covered, the less willing the assent to Cooke's thumbnail characterizations...

...This semantic slipperiness and concep376: Commonweal tual catch-all-ism is combined with an assumed "political correctness" in the reader...

...Luke Timothy Johnson bat Bernard Cooke r e a l l y wants to argue in this book is that the proper starting point for thinking about God is the experience of God in people's lives...

...Likewise in contemporary Christianity, Cooke disapproves of "magical" or "miraculous" ways of conceiving of God's presence, demanding instead a more immanentist understanding, even though that might appear or work in a far more "distancing" way for the "ordinary life" of the mythical ordinary Christian than the "incorrect" symbolism of miracles...

...Much of this is familiar, though Cooke's clinical procedures are distinctive on two counts: He tests for the same three symp- ~ toms through an unusually ambitious range of literature, and he extends the discussion through the Reformation and Renaissance into the period when the acids of modemity made it more and more difficult even to find the "body" called Christianity, diseased or well...

...1 June 1991:377...