Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
The early days Lawrence S. Cunningham Rather like a fashion photographer who "shoots" a model from many angles and with many frames in order to capture one subject, Kingsbury looks at the...
...One was the Origcnistic concept of the final summing up of 411 things in Ovid with its hope of universal salvation...
...at the offset, that these pages bring much clarity to what is often a murky subject...
...What is the relationship of death and human fate in relation to the Final Judgment envisioned by the Scriptures...
...Conflict in Luke follows the narrative but from the three quite distinct angles noted above...
...Indeed, his close reading of texts is one of the conspicuous merits of this volume, allowing him to weigh, for example, the influence of a pagan like Plotinus on the development of Christian mysticism and how much Christian writers were able to modify pagan sources...
...They are very useful volumes produced in the best tradition of British scholarship: lucidly written and argued without any claims the text can not bear...
...It is quite sui generis and should find a welcome spot on the reference shelf of every person seri - ously concerned with historical theology and the history of theology in general and matters eschatological in particular...
...By taking note of that fact, McGinn can bypass sterile arguments as to whether...
...Murphy does not restrict himself to the canonical Scriptures but considers, in historical sequence, the vast corpus of extracanonical literature from the time period he considers...
...She further affirms that all three epistles wrestle with an issue which is with us even today, to wit, the need to link our common faith with the tradition of witnesses who, from the beginning, affirmed Jesus as Christ while, at the same time, not turning that witness into sterile repetition of formulae...
...Murphy-O'Connor's contribution to this series on II Corinthians is a model of clarity and good sense...
...the notion that only first-person autobiographical accounts can he analyzed in a study of mysticism...
...His book ends, with this panoramic picture of Judaism as background, by a presentation of Jesus as interpreted in a Jewish context: Jesus as Teacher of the Torah (Matthew...
...Jesus, however, does not make an entrance until chapter 11, then only to reappear in the final chapter...
...Individual readers might find the entire series a bit of an expense, but the collected volumes belong on every reference shelf...
...Its careful indices of scriptural citations and the annotated bibliography of Lucan scholarship makes it a "user friendly" volume...
...to do otherwise, John says pungently, is a lie...
...Murphy consciously breaks out of the boundaries of the received canon of Sacred Scripture and, more to the point, he enlists various methodologies (historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, etc...
...She sees I John as affirming the full humanity of Jesus against those who would so divinize him as to forget that humanity...
...connections of II and III John to Pauline theology...
...No matter how specific the Corinthian problems may have been, the issues which Paul treats are valid across the centuries: the problem of suffering...
...a vehicle which would be the main one well into the Middle Ages...
...and New Testament roots of Christian mysticism...
...on Easter Sunday as one of the Fathers suggested...
...Whether it should function as an undergraduate textbook depends crucially on a more philosophical question...
...For his purposes, mysticism means the sensed presence of the divine III life, He puts his weight on the word presence and no' On experience...
...his study will focus only on mysticism in the West...
...This volume ends with Augustine...
...For the nonprofessional student of Scripture this book is not only useful for its careful and sympathetic reading of the text but for the clarity and jargon-free character of its prose...
...This, then, is an exercise in narrative criticism similar to one that Kingsbury utilized in an earlier book on the Gospel of Mark...
...has an ecclesial...
...The title reads The Religious World of JESUS (with JESUS in a different bold color...
...In describing the genesis of his work, the Reverend Daley gives us a fair indication of what the finished product would look like...
...Greek...
...at kast in Christianity...
...If the damned...
...This first volume discusses the Jewish...
...liturgical, and sacramental dimension...
...Asked to contribute a survey of patristic eschatology for a multivolumed German history of dogma, Daley decided to expand his contribution into an English history of the subject...
...Daley examines each patristic writer in turn—he ends his survey with Pope Gregory the Great, i.e...
...Each has its own peculiar angle of vision even though each also covers some familiar ground...
...Do we really want to encourage students to plow through nearly five pages on the Commonweal J3 March J992: 41 Assumption of Moses when the Beatitudes of Jesus gets thirteen lines and the Lord's Prayer twenty...
...and Armenian tradition as well...
...McGinn's volume is the film of a projected four-volume history of Western Christian mysticism which will appear under the general title The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism...
...a comprehensive salvation for all...
...in his work...
...He has launched a major scholarly project which, when completed, will be cited as the standard and authoritative work on this complex and challenging subject...
...Furthermore...
...live in "no time there was no need to postulate a "miscricordism" by which for certain periods their pains were mitigated (e.g...
...Kingsbury takes seriously Luke's comment in the prologue to his Gospel (I:I-4) that his is a "narrative" and, following on that, "an orderly account...
...His focus is tied to the elucidation of surviving texts with little time spent on social history...
...Syriac...
...Lieu's book on the Johannine epistles must settle, in a very brief space, a plethora of vexatious questions (e.g., the genre of I John...
...What was his relation to women...
...what becomes patently clear is that there were problems enough for the early church to ponder as they tried to make sense of the scriptural data: What was the nature of heavenly life...
...He outlines, in economic strokes, the contemporary setting of the epistle (or, more accurately, epistles, since chapters I-9 were probably written independently of 10-I3 and only later combined into a single whole) which had to do with divisions in the Corinthian church and Paul's prickly relations with the church...
...Theology...
...mysticism...
...which solved a lot of problems about the condition of souls after judgment...
...Murphy, unhappy with courses on the Old Testament and New Testament in college curricula, designed an alternative approach which focused on the history of Israel from the period of the founding of the Second Temple down through its destruction at the hands of the Romans in A.D...
...By the end of the fourth century Christian mysticism's main vehicle of expression was that of monasticism...
...Hill's volume has its own particular merits: clear writing, nice pedagogical aids like bibliographies and discussion questions, and a concern for contemporary issues...
...This imbalance can be seen by a simple glance at the cover...
...and as Eschatological Warrior (Book of Revelations...
...McGinn rejects, and rightly...
...to the concerns of the earth...
...In sum: these two volumes, representative of the series as a whole, derive from the scholarly labors of very able commentators who provide us with a close reading of the text (I had to read these works with Bible in hand) and a sensitivity to the present needs of the believing community who hear these texts as inspired...
...Thomas in the first question of the Summa, that while Scripture narrates deeds it also brings forth mystery (dum gestum narrat,mysteriumprodit...
...Duley's book reflects enormous and wide-ranging research...
...is supremely prepared for his task one which he himself admits is a daunting one...
...Another was the absolutely pivotal distinction of Augustine between time and eternity (the later being not a long time but "no time...
...The next will argue that the greatest flowering of mysticism in twelfth-century monasticism (mainly, but not exclusively, in the Cistercian family) has its roots in the story told in volume I. That story, as this volume argues, is a slowly developing theological woridview entwining the wisdom of the Greeks (especially the Neo-Platonists), and the witness of the Scriptures to Christ...
...In order to bring some limits within which to work...
...say, a Pseudo-Dionysius or a Meister Eckhart was truly a mystic at all...
...its relationship to the Gospel of John...
...Hill's work is an addition to a similar kind of book that has been produced with some regularity over the past few decades by scholars like Jaroslav Pelikan, Sean Freyne, William Thompson, Dermot Lane, Robert Krieg, Gerard Sloyan, and others...
...For that reason it is a welcome addition to Christological literature in that it provides teachers another reliable option when telling the story ever ancient and ever new...
...Let me note...
...Borrowing from von Hugel and others, he insists that my stician is an integral pan of Christianity since the gospel tells us that God in Christ is to be encountered as person rather than an object of thought...
...is a modern term (McGinn traces it to the seventeenth century)of protean ambiguity...
...The merit of this approach is to place Jesus in the context of the Judaism from which he came and to contextualize the New Testament writings (e.g., about the Scribes, Pharisees, etc...
...There is first of all a matrix and then a lived experience within that matrix...
...The general editor (James Dunn of the University of Durham in England) explains the intention of the series as an attempt to steer a course between massive commentaries studded with philological, exegetical, archaeological, and historical analysis, and popular "introductions" which have neither the space nor the inclination to pursue, in any systematic manner, the theology embedded in particular books of Scripture...
...What lies behind our affirmation that he was born at Bethlehem or crucified or raised from the dead...
...a sensitivity which would recommend it to preachers and teachers...
...If one does read the book through...
...Nor does he seem overly interested in the fact that the canonical Scriptures are a sacred text within a religious community...
...Hence, the use of "handbook" m his subtitle...
...This book reads like the extremely long encyclopedia article it is...
...It is an attempt to provide a panoramic view of Christology that does justice both to the researches of scriptural scholarship and the concerns of contemporary theology...
...at the very beginning a the seventh century—to see what they had to say about the "Last Things...
...After a traditional account of the New Testament background and discussions about the historical Jesus, Hill has separate chapters depicting Jesus from a number of diverse angles...
...McGinn, who has published major works in this area and who serves as general editor of the Paulist "Classics of Western Spirituality" and as a senior editor of the Crossroad Encyclopedia of World Spirituality...
...If our desire is only historical knowledge, then this is the approach...
...and the significance of Jesus as we attempt to balance his his40: J3 March J992 Commonweal toricity with the claims made about him and his salvific activity...
...for instance...
...Murphy is useful on the gestus but the mysterium is nowhere to be found and it is the latter rather than the former that most students, in my experience, seek...
...Conspicuously, however, he omits theology...
...There is in Luke, to put it in other words, a story of Jesus, a story of the authorities with whom he was in conflict, and, finally, the story of the disciples who were the followers/ believers who sustain the story as they move from naive credulity to a mature faith in the Risen One...
...Daley rightly notes that there were some watershed moments in the history of eschatology...
...Now the question occurs: what do we want students to take away from a course "on the Bible...
...Lieu and Murphy-O'Connor 's volumes are part of a Cambridge University Press series under the rubric New Testament LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM chairs the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...the character of the Johannine school[s], etc...
...The early days Lawrence S. Cunningham Rather like a fashion photographer who "shoots" a model from many angles and with many frames in order to capture one subject, Kingsbury looks at the Gospel of Luke from the multiple perspectives which make up the subtitles of the book...
...the shape of Christian ministry (contemporary discussions look, naturally enough, to the origins of our faith to see our present crises in the light of the gospel...
...Positively, it permits him to read texts closely as a source for the matrix from Commenweal !dart h 1992- 43 which mysticism derives...
...Furthermore,, this presence of God in Christianity is to be experienced in a community through an encounter with word and sacrament...
...Mysticism, as it w used in the vernacular today...
...McGinn's volume has an appendix of nearly a hundred pages surveying this century's research, psychological, philosophical, and theological, on mysticism...
...Certainly, those who would like a larger context within which to study the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular...
...Hence...
...And further: that witness and/or affirmation of faith is doubly sterile if it does not manifest itself in behavior that turns to God and neighbor in love...
...A miracle worker...
...Finally, how did a "doctrine" arise about Christ and in what sense is he to be called on as savior...
...However, if our desire (it is my desire) is to have students reflect intelligently on the privileged writings of the Christian tradition, then this work functions better as background reading...
...as High Priest (in the Epistle to the Hebrews...
...Hill's book also had its beginnings in the classroom...
...But Lieu is not convinced that this message is a corrective to a too docetic reading of the Gospel of John...
...42: 13 March 1992 Commonweal Given its origin and genied suspect did this k a work to which readers will min for reference rather than reading it through...
...44: 13 March J992 Commonweal...
...The series, Dunn writes, is "directed at those who already have one or two years of full-time New Testament and theological study behind them...
...Who might profit from this work...
...The woridview is first articulated as a whole by the titanic figure of Origen and modified by later generations who accepted, modified, rejected, and enlarged his insights...
...Kingsbury's brief work has none of the exegetical depth of, say, Fitzmyer's massive Anchor Bible commentary (curiously missing from Kingsbury's bibliography) but it reflects long meditation on the text and a sensitivity to theological concerns...
...He taus his net wide enough to include not only Clock and Latin writers but those who come out of the Coptic...
...Professor Murphy can certainly make his case on methodological grounds (it has been made for years by the regnant wisdom in certain quarters of biblical studies) but, on this point, I rather like Gregory the Great's observation, cited by St...
...Were sinners damned for ever or was there, as some Fathers thought...
...The appendix can be read separately from the main text (I read the appendix as if it were a discrete monograph) but, in the end, fleshes out the methodological claims made at the beginning of the volume...
...His book is a direct outcome of this approach...
...In what sense can he be called a prophet...
...Of the many books I have read this past year for this column, McGinn's is, by far, the most ambitious and the most promising...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
