Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Who is Jesus what does he want? Lawrence S. Cunningham The first volume of Meier 's work is a major piece of Catholic biblical scholarship. The "search" for the historical Jesus is a...
...a keen Commonweal 31 January 1992: 41 interest in the community from which John derives and lessening of interest in the relationship of John to the synoptics...
...2) Bosch, utilizing Kung's periodization of church history, provides a history of the missionary enterprise in Christianity giving fair attention to the Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed tradition...
...44: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...
...Rightly, he includes the dialogical theology of Buber and the activist thought of Gandhi, but the majority of his chapters are on a range of Christian thinkers from Whitehead and Maritain to contemCommonweal 31 January 1992: 43 porary figures like Rahner, Gutierrez, Kung, and Tillich...
...the former chapter is the more technical of the two...
...Each chapter has a series of discussion questions...
...His chapters are just long enough to say what he wants to say and his material is set out with clarity and orderliness...
...A final chapter surveys the literature dealing with thematic issues in John...
...The first part of this volume looks at sources...
...What Meier attempts is, simply, to look again at this century of productive labor and rethink the answer to this simple question: using the best historical methodology possible, what can we know, with the certainty that history allows, about Jesus...
...The book ends with a very modest bibliography and a full index...
...Granfield knows how to discriminate and his work shows wide acquaintance with the better literature on the subject...
...I suspect that this approach to Christology which takes seriously the ancient image of the Pantokrator (the One who "holds all things in his hand") will get fuller treatment by theologians in the future...
...Meier is meticulous and prudent, and openly impatient with tendentious conclusions based more on imagination than on hard evidence or rigorous thought...
...They were greatly appreciative of his clear prose, his capacity for rendering difficult concepts into intelligible language, and, most of all, his suggestions for further study in the original texts...
...I say "traditional" not as a pejorative label but to describe a work which understands mysticism from within the Christian framework as a "heightened consciousness of a loving union with a transcendent and triune God...more intimate than usually afforded by graced reason and revelation...
...This is not a history of Christian mysticism nor a "how to" manual, nor is it "mysticism made easy...
...How do we judge the question of the family of Jesus with respect to his birth, his putative father (Joseph), and his brothers and sisters...
...A further two chapters consider the cross as revelation of God and the Resurrection as gift (the latter particularly fine...
...He urges a further point which strikes me as unimpeachable: mysticism and holiness are not synonymous terms...
...Dermot Lane, an Irish theologian, is well known in this country as both teacher and author...
...If one were to ask for a solid, careful, if somewhat technical, first book on Christian mysticism this would be the one I would suggest assuming the inquirer had at least a modicum of theological education as background...
...Except for fundamentalist proselytizers, 42: 31 January 1992 Commonweal current mission thinkers now more fully understand (and worry about) the relationship of modern missions to colonial enterprises just as they reject the hegemony of Western culture as the model for missionary work...
...a life which will be the focus of Meier's second volume...
...It judges the historicity of the canonical Gospels, the scattered references in pagan literature, the witness of Josephus, the allusions in the Jewish Talmud, the value of the apocryphal writings, and, most importantly, the criteria for judging the historicity of the sayings of Jesus...
...In the end, however, Bosch stands firm for a missionary Christianity in which "missionary" is free from the defects of older paradigms and more comfortable with the abolition of the distinction between "sending" and "receiving" churches...
...and those of inculturation (what does a truly Asian Christianity look like...
...Granfield has well-argued chapters on the epistemology of mystic consciousness, the difference between kataphatic (imagebased mysticism) and apophatic ("dark" or imageless mysticism) experiences...
...For Granfield, there is something flawed about any mystical experience which would be the product of either an elite effort or one unconcerned with the entire life of the church as a locus of Christian witness...
...As a consequence he knows theology at a deep level and, given the exigencies of his position, he also can communicate...
...Most of us, I suspect, have been shaped in our thinking about the Gospel of John by the massive commentary of Raymond Brown for the Anchor Bible series...
...What were the social conditions of his upbringing...
...This is an enormously long and extremely detailed work on Christian mission(s) which repays the effort it takes to get through the whole of it...
...That commentary, however, is a generation old and much has been written on John since that time, including the further work of Brown himself...
...It is, to describe it succinctly, what used to be called in an earlier curriculum, a systematic treatment of mystical theology and should be read as such...
...Of those three sections, the first (on the New Testament) is necessary but the least interesting since it only pulls together much scholarship that we know from elsewhere...
...Can we sort out the chronology of his life (a notoriously vexatious issue...
...Before a discussion of a text, for example, from Lonergan or Barth, I would have students read Bacik's entire chapter on these thinkers for context...
...A dustjacket blurb on Bosch's book describes it as a Summa Missiologica...
...At the end of each chapter he sums up his conclusions for those who might get lost in the detail of his exposition...
...I have already checked off some items from the bibliography as "must read...
...In other words, Lane wishes to close the gap between what theologians say and what the community witnesses to and prays about...
...Part 2 begins at the beginning: Where was Jesus born...
...David Granfield's book on mysticism is not conservative but it is very traditional...
...who have pioneered the biblical renewal of this country...
...Bosch does three things: (1) He argues at length that the church, as it is depicted in the New Testament, is missionary by structure although that missionary character is as various as the theologies found in the New Testament...
...I think Rahner is correct and, for that reason alone, welcome this work as it helps me to understand how, as a Christian, I might act locally but think globally...
...Those interested in getting an overview of a particular thinker as a prelude to deeper study would also find the work useful...
...I especially liked his notion that the true Christian mystic is anaphatic (the word is his), i.e., one who comes back from prayer into the world with a heightened sense of the presence of God in order to bear witness...
...those who fail in the effort should at least have it on their shelf as a reference work...
...Contemporary Theologians, then, is very helpful for the teacher and student...
...Sloyan's conclusions about the contemporary contours of Johannine scholarship can be briefly summarized: an emerging consensus about the essentially Jewish character of John despite the Hellenistic patina and his anti-Jewish polemics...
...There is a wide scattering of books available on mysticism but, alas, too many of them are either tendentiously argued or hopelessly unsophisticated or, even, psychologically dangerous...
...American Catholic biblical scholarship has been singularly blessed by great scholars (Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, Roland Murphy, etc...
...Meier is part of the younger generation who carry on that work at a continued level of deep learning and concern for the church...
...His book, as he tells us in the introduction, has two very admirable goals: to mediate between Christological scholarship and discipleship and to bring into closer focus theology and liturgy...
...I noted only one error which national pride demands correcting: Theodore Roethke was not a German poet but an American whose first efforts appeared, years ago, in the pages of this journal...
...The chapter then concludes with a brief annotated bibliography of primary sources...
...He provides two rather full chapters on the reign of God considered biblically and reflected upon theologically...
...Meier takes up these questions in turn, surveys the best thinking of scholars (his footnotes are a treasure), sifts his sources, and renders his considered judgment...
...Such blurbs tend to the baroque but in this case the reader was right on target...
...There are persons of great holiness who are not mystics (and vice versa...
...Sloyan's opening chapter surveys the "landmark" commentaries on John from the beginning of World War II to the present...
...This first volume gets us up to the moment of the emergent public life of Jesus...
...What language( s) did he speak and how much education, if any, did he have...
...the second is fascinating as history and reflects the author's full command of the literature...
...Its subtitle ("An Overview of Influential Twentieth-Century Thinkers Who Have Helped Shape Christian Dialogue") is helpfully descriptive: Bacik treats eighteen theologians and philosophers who have influenced the way theology is done...
...and (3) he surveys the contemporary scene of missiological thinking in order to explicate a contemporary theology of mission...
...The final essay on the Incarnation is the best of all as Lane meditates on the mystery of the Word become flesh in terms of the doctrine of creation and sacramentality and the consequences (e.g., for an ecological ethic) deriving from such an angle of vision...
...bump up against the far more difficult questions raised by the "History of Religions" school which asks whether, say, Christianity should even try to insert itself in, say, a Hindu culture...
...the specific character of Christian mysticism and its place in the larger life of the Christian...
...Thus, this book sets out a revisionist understanding of the older discussions of infused contemplation by a more holistic approach to the subject...
...Bacik's book is a welcome reprint of a 1989 edition published by Thomas More Press...
...and, for Sloyan most significantly, a turn toward John from the perspective of literary style in order to consider the Gospel as a narrative/ story...
...I have found this book extremely useful (as have some of my colleagues) for classroom use...
...Christ at the Centre is topical rather than systematic...
...By putting methodological brackets around faith and the tradition of faith (Meier is a Catholic priest) he assesses the evidence presented to us from the world in which Jesus lived...
...We are grateful, then, for Gerard Sloyan for his (always) readable and wide-ranging survey of recent Johannine scholarship...
...The "search" for the historical Jesus is a century old and the amount of scholarship that has been part of the search is enormous...
...In fact, were Ito fault his work it would be that he did not expand more generously his discussion on the relationship of mysticism to the apostolate of the church since that relationship of mysticism to ecclesiology is a most important one...
...For Granfield, there is only a natural distinction between the mystical life and the ordinary Christian life with the former a result of either a connatural appetite for such consciousness or a cultivated state as one enters into a regimen of serious prayer...
...Bosch treats all of these issues in great and sympathetic detail but with a critical eye (his critique of the shortcomings of contemporary theorists is as good as his capacity to describe their notions fairly...
...Lane's book can be warmly recommended for its solid theological fare, its pastoral urgency, and its jargon-free writing...
...He calls for a church in mission in the widest possible ecumenical sense that sets out a view of the Christian life that is both transcendent and immanent...
...If it is true, as Karl Rahner would have it, that our era marks the beginning of the World Church (Weltkirche) and the end of the Eurocentric church, then books like this one are of supreme importance as we think about the future of Christianity...
...a chapter on the Paschal Mystery is a textbook example of how to blend theology and liturgy into a creative whole...
...What did the culture of Galilee look like...
...That latter task is most demanding since, as Meier notes, the criteria are crucial in order to avoid circular reasoning, philosophical prejudice, or academic fashion...
...Bacik is a trained theologian (he studied under Rahner) who is also a university pastor...
...There is an added bonus: he can write...
...and the third is a masterly summary of contemporary theology as Bosch attempts to set out the new paradigm of a theology of mission...
...It should come as no surprise that he is dubious about the work of the so-called "Jesus Seminar" and its attempt, through scholarly consensus, to decide what are and are not authentic logia that go back to Jesus...
...I suspect that this book (and the subsequent volume) will be in the library of every serious student of the Scriptures and theology as the work on the historical Jesus that most judiciously sums up what we can know about the man who in the Spirit we call Lord...
...Those issues present thorny questions about everything from the relationship of the individual church to the Great Church to the raging debate about the singularity of Christ and his salvation...
...Students of the Bible who cannot hope to master the river of Johannine scholarship but whose interest in the Gospel is deep, can only express gratitude for the economical bibliographical tour provided by this book...
...Theorists of contextualization (should we follow a mission model that seeks to express an indigenous church or work for new models of socio-economic life...
...Chapters 2 and 3 deal with John's sources and John as religious writer...
...Each person treated is biographically and intellectually profiled with a summation of the thinker's leading ideas, how they touched on others...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 2
