Faith's Freedom
Imbelli, Robert P.
clericalism. One can infer from Ravitch's analysis that leopards and spots may finally be separated. Yet are they? My one regret is that the author closes his work with the supposed liberal...
...As if that were not merit enough, here, in addition, is a scholar and believer who writes with verve and conviction...
...But this dependence perhaps also accounts for the one area where I found myself registering some reservation...
...In describing what he means by "a classic spirituality," Johnson disclaims any presumption to be composing "a spiritual classic...
...More than his o p i n i o n s about Centesimus annus, what interested us about Mr...
...Hence, when I received Faith's Freedom, I approached it with considerable expectations...
...Happily, it does not disappoint...
...Neuhaus wrote: "It may be, for instance, that the controlling assumptions of the American bishops' 1986 pastoral letter, 'Economic Justice for All,' must now be recognized as unrepre444: Commonweal...
...It satisfies, further, because it recognizes that for Scripture to live it must be heard and received anew in the living experience of the church...
...It satisfies, finally, because an "argument" is mounted which is both personal and rigorous: one that seeks to outline a genuinely "lay" spirituality to be lived not in the monastery, but in modernity with its peculiar promise and peril...
...If this definition seems to move theology perilously close to spirituality, I would count that gain and further tribute to the fecundity of the Benedictine spirit...
...A converted Jew with a Sorbonne (secular) education, he makes no effort to disguise the fact that he is standing in for the pope, whom he happily compares to Gregory VII...
...and thus, transforming our situation from within, became "the source of the new life of the Spirit for all who believe in him...
...One senses as much in his nuanced treatment of philosophical and theological anthropology under the heading, "the human project...
...Johnson's insistence, so faithful to both the letter and spirit of the New Testament, is that holiness is the fruit of unremitting generosity and discernment, not the undiscriminating canonization of one's personal preference and current state, whether mellow or dyspeptic...
...But he ranges well beyond this expected theme to take up nettlesome, yet crucial, issues of power and possessions, of anger and sexuality, of evil and suffering...
...Led by the irrepressible and brilliant archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Made Lustiger, a growing number of French bishops and clergy are lashing out against and suppressing many of the forms of Catholic action (clerical and lay) associated with Vatican II--modalities which they consider to be submissive, weak, complaisant...
...The "lay" character of Johnson's vision of spirituality is manifest in the themes of part 2 of the book: "Connecting...
...FJ FAITH SEEKING DEPTH FAITH'S FREEDOM Luke T. Johnson Fortress Press, $8.95, 188 pp...
...Such spiritual diagnosis and discernment is an essential moment of mature faith...
...My one regret is that the author closes his work with the supposed liberal transformation of French Catholicism (or at least of the clergy)--as if the story ended with the early Fifth Republic...
...It is thus a preeminently pastoral theology, whose optic is the present encounter with the Word in the community formed by the Spirit...
...This is an immensely satisfying book...
...Another feature of Johnson's approach is its clear Christocentrism...
...It may not be the Interior Castle...but then Johnson is writing for "contemporary Christians...
...Key to his understanding is the New Testament concept of teleios: faith come to mature measure in a person...
...Indeed, Johnson himself, elsewhere in the book supplies resources enough for a more adequate treatment...
...In that case all might yet be rectified, in the treatment of revelation, by a double measure of Balthasarian leaven...
...As one would expect, he explores the issue of prayer and its possibility and modes for those not engaged in the professedly "contemplative life...
...And, later in the same chapter, he summarizes his understanding of revelation, "not as a product delivered by God but as a human process of interpreting experience...
...We think readers will find the pope's thinking considerably more nuanced and his conclusions far more conditioned than they are represented to be in Mr...
...we leave it to them to judge whether our editorial treated Centesimus annus in a ho-hum, tepid, or condescending manner...
...bishops' pastoral on the economy...
...Suffice it to assert that, inspired by the Letter to the Hebrews' designation of Jesus as "the pioneer and perfecter of faith," Johnson takes with utmost seriousness that Jesus is God's Word incarnate, sharing fully in the finitude of the human condition...
...Surely tertium datur...
...and how d e f e n s i v e - - o r n o t - - w a s our response...
...Moreover, its intentional objective is to read those Scriptures "whole": allowing the many voices of the New Testament canon to be heard...
...Neuhaus's letter to us or in the op-ed piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal...
...He evidently has read widely and well in philosophy and theology...
...And, though he speaks of them as "ideal types" and refuses to associate specific authors with them, anyone engaged in pastoral ministry will quickly recognize their popular epigones and be grateful for the diagnostic clarity his analysis offers...
...Neuhaus's Journal article was its attempt to insert a wedge between the encyclical and the U.S...
...We do not recognize our editorial in the steady patter of adjectives and innuendos Mr...
...Rather, it is a theological sensibility nourished by a close and meditative pondering of the Scriptures: a lectio divina that joins careful exegesis with concern for the Word spoken now to the community of faith...
...To avoid construing revelation as "a product delivered by God," is our only recourse to reduce it to "a human process of interpreting experience...
...From beginning to end, the form of Christian spirituality is the imitation of Christ...
...Neuhaus applies to it...
...Another characteristic feature of Johnson's approach is his conviction that spirituality is faith "seeking depth and maturity...
...Considering it brought to mind Saint Benedict's not always complimentary discrimination of the "types of monks" early in his Rule...
...and accords pride of place to Karl Rahner as a theological mentor...
...He shows himself in that work to be not only a fine student of the New Testament...
...but it can and must be construed as the Spirit-inspired replication of the pattern of Jesus, the Messiah, in the changed circumstances of our own lives and times...
...Robert P. Imbelli few y e a r s ago I chanced upon Luke Johnson's wonderfully helpful book, The Writings of the New Testament...
...The modesty is spiritually becoming...
...that he was "brought to perfection by what he suffered...
...By this I do not intend "cloistered" or "detached...
...Yet as Ravitch is surely aware, recent years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful reaction against conciliar liberalism...
...Johnson indeed speaks of "the proper task of theology" as "the discernment of God's work in the world...
...Thus a two-fold exegesis is required: an exegesis of the scriptural text, but also an exegesis of the contemporary experience of faith...
...Having, in the post-Vatican II era, aban12 July 1991:443 doned the invidious elitism of "higher ways" in the Christian life, we seem, in reaction, to have succumbed to a pseudodemocratic leveling-down, confusing the "universal call to holiness" with its actual attainment...
...but, more remarkable still, one who reads the Scriptures with a keen sense of their faith perspective and concern which continues to nurture the life of discipleship...
...Hence the quest for a spirituality both classic and contemporary, ever ancient and ever new...
...In his discussion of "revelation" in chapter 3, Johnson writes: "The term revelation, therefore, describes less a divine activity than a process of human interpretation...
...Thus there is a comprehensiveness to Johnson's vision of life in the Spirit--all too rare in discussions of spirituality which frequently roam between the rarefied and the sentimentalized...
...And, of course, we recommend a careful reading of the encyclical itself as the surest way to grasp John Paul II's thinking on the intertwined themes of human freedom, the market system, and the cultural, political, and moral systems that so largely determine the impact of the economy, whether on individual persons or on whole societies...
...Lustiger delights in speaking delphically and is therefore hard to slot...
...I] CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 418) Commonweal readers...
...It allows him, perceptively and courageously, to identify two alternative "models" of spirituality, which, though they may employ Christian terms, actually represent debased coinage...
...He calls these the "gnostic" and the "liberationist" models...
...The classic Christocentrism of Johnson's approach provides him with appropriate criteria of Christian identity at a time marked by a perilous "erosion of tradition," when an indiscriminate and promiscuous use of Christian symbols risks rendering Christianity "linguistically dysfunctional...
...These untapped resources may, in fact, derive from another theological influence to which he attributes "significant leavening": Hans Urs von Balthasar...
...That last disjunction seems particularly unfelicitous...
...But, if laying solid and spacious foundations, raising imaginative and insightful upper stories, and embellishing the whole with a clear elegance of expression, is the stuff of which classics are made, Faith's Freedom is certainly in contention...
...In a reflex move to the verb form that might be called the insinuating conditional, Mr...
...The elucidation of that pattern forms the heart of this thoughtful and profound book...
...It satisfies, first, because it is so solidly based upon the church's written "constitution": the Scriptures of the New Testament...
...This cannot be construed, of course, in a literalist manner...
...whether we found it disorienting...
...Though I have stressed Johnson's biblical commitment and competence, I would not want to leave the impression that he is an unregenerate "biblicist...
...So one does not know where it will all lead, but one certainly hopes that Professor Ravitch will keep watching...
...whether we are animated by a"superannuated anticapitalism...
...Paradoxically, to support this "lay spirituality," Johnson sets forth a theological vision which I deem distinctly "monastic...
Vol. 118 • July 1991 • No. 13
