Religious booknotes:

...It is far easier to say what kind of book it is than to judge its merits on particular points...

...As such it is a useful contribution to ecumenical theology...

...Equally, it would be nice to have a full study of the ninth-century Manual of Dhuoda who is, as far as I know, the only woman known to have written a full-length book in the Carolingian period...

...Yates's book has a somewhat detached and cerebral air to it...

...Some argue that Lathrop's project (and that of others who write in his vein) is too "old-fashioned" and "conservative...

...Another use would be to make known people who are extremely interesting but who have not been treated in any depth in accessible books...

...In an earlier column I wrote appreciatively of Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time...

...Contemporary discussions about the "uniqueness of Christ" are fraught with missiological consequences...

...Lathrop belongs to this latter tradition but with a much tighter focus on the community at prayer...

...Not as broadly sweeping as the late David Bosch's Transforming Mission (1991), reviewed in this column a few years ago, Yates's volume is a satisfactory if somewhat circumscribed survey of generally mainline Protestant efforts to give flesh to the gospel mandate to "teach all nations...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM chairs the theology department at the University of Notre Dame...

...Catholics do not even get consideration until he reaches the 1940s) theories about mission in this century...

...What kind of theology is this...

...I was much taken, for instance, with the hypothesis that the success of the charismatic movement in Korea may be explained by seeing the preacher as a Christianized revivification of the traditional Korean shaman who was a healer and analyst of dreams...

...My bias is somewhat against this school of scholarship but, at the same time, I never fail to learn good things from it...

...the libera-tionist whose end is justice...

...Powerfully influenced by pneumatol-ogy, Hodgson's view of God is a dynamic one and his picture of the church focuses on its role as a "transfigured mode of human community" founded on the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ, "created by the redemptive power of God as Spirit...

...The essays in this book sketch out some of the more recent reconstructions of the life and significance of Jesus, the new insights we get about Jesus as a result of these reconstructions, the work of the "Jesus Seminar" (those scholars who attempted a consensus, based on a vote, about which of the logia of Jesus are authentic), and the place of such work in the life of the church...

...Lathrop's focus is on the prayer of the Christian community...

...Barthian criticism allowed no sympathy for the Thomistic dictum that grace builds on nature (the "siren song of the old serpent," Barth said...

...He rightly notes that the liturgy itself is primary theology and he devoutly wishes all Christians to be theologians in that sense...

...That is not to say that the spirit of the book is uncritical or detached...

...The emphasis is on transformation, human bonding, and the liberating power of the gospel...

...It was also nice to discover a writer like Susanna Wesley (mother of nineteen children, including John and Charles) who, among other things, wrote a commentary on the Creed still well worth reading...

...and an elastic form of worship whose main focus is praise...

...Each question has triggered a theory and its own advocates...

...When that reflection correlates with contemporary life it takes on a pastoral edge...

...In sum: Borg's inexpensive (but somewhat repetitive) collection of essays repays reading, both to get a sense of the status questionis of recent Jesus studies and for the leads he provides in his notes for further study...

...Anthologies of theological/religious writing by women have appeared with some regularity over the past few years...

...How it exercises its mission has always been debated...

...Furthermore, an essay on the use of history to give weight to the charismatic movement was a textbook case of searching the tradition to establish legitimate roots...

...It is also a book written from the inside out in the sense that Lathrop attempts to make sense of the liturgy from his stance as a critically reflective believer...

...Any theory that permitted "grace" to be found apart from Christian revelation was anathema...

...spends no time on preaching or evangelization...

...Should Christians satisfy themselves with being a witnessing presence...

...the uniqueness of Christ...

...Let me make one general criticism in the form of an observation...

...Such a slant may have been outside the scope of what he set out to do, but it is an odd lacuna for one who has spent his life in a divinity school preparing people for ministry...

...He devotes only two paragraphs to worship and the sacramental or liturgical life of the church...

...For Borg himself, Jesus becomes a "Jewish mystic" while for Richard Horsley he is a political/social revolutionary...

...Religious Booknotes Mission to the world Lawrence S. Cunningham I have always been interested in theories of Christian mission since such reflections, inevitably, bring to the fore fundamental theological questions: the nature of salvation...

...Hodgson has taught theology at Vanderbilt for twenty-five years...

...Many stretches of the Pauline literature as well as the Gospels can be understood as reflections on missiology...

...Much of recent theology, both Catholic and Protestant, has begun from an analysis of the human condition in correlation with the Christian mystery (in obedience to Karl Rahner's idea that all theology begins in anthropology...

...Theology, of course, should not be a choice of either/or but of both/and...

...Written by someone who stands within the Lutheran confession, this is, nonetheless, a book solidly placed in the catholic tradition...

...Another strand of theology (one thinks of the current project of Josef von Beeck) begins from within the Christian community and inquires about its language, "grammar," structure, and ethos...

...How should Christians act vis-a-vis other faith traditions...

...This new volume from the pen of a distinguished American scholar is basically a collection of essays which he wrote over the past decade or so...

...Amy Ogden's now adds to that list...

...His bass notes are emancipation, ecology, and dialogics, as befitting one who takes postmodern concerns with such seriousness...

...There is much to admire in Hodgson's work and much that would require a more extended critique...

...the charismatic movements in the Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Orthodox churches...

...and the contemplative whose end is adoration...

...Dividing her subject into historical periods, Ogden rounds up some of the usual suspects (for example, the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity...

...How I would love to have a full biographical study of this extraordinary woman who was an intimate friend of Michelangelo and a member of a "reforming" humanist salon in Renaissance Rome...

...In fact, the history of missiology is a history of oscillation between those who preach the superiority and exclusiveness of Christianity and those who seek accommodation or convergence among the religions of the world...

...It is also a timely work...

...However, a careful reading of Borg reveals how precarious is the foundation used to arrive at conclusions...

...In the 1930s and beyond, at least in Protestant circles, the influence of Karl Barth was at its most authoritative...

...Let me cite two instances...

...as well as some writers who are not as well known (for example, the early twentieth-century convert from Hinduism, Pandita Ramabai, 1858-1922...

...Without careful attention to what we signify as a gathered people our shriveling sense of faith may lead us to the woeful notion that "true religion is resident in disembodied ideas"-a notion, alas, one frequently encounters in much current academic theology...

...Is it to be straightforward proclamation...

...The book ends with some trenchant pastoral reflections on the state of the liturgy today...

...Indeed, as Borg notes, the major players have themselves formed no united consensus...

...E. P. Sanders argues for a profoundly Jewish picture of Jesus while Burton Mack minimizes his Jewishness in order to present a model of the "Cynic-sage...

...to date we have to be satisfied with Dhouda's Manual in Latin (with a facing French translation) in the estimable series, Sources Chretiennes...

...If there is a unifying theme, it is an apologia for the renewed interest in, and the labors of, those scholars who search through the sedimentary levels of the New Testament for the "historical" Jesus...

...Yates writes in a clear manner...

...Since few of the selections are complete texts and because an individual might cavil at the omissions (why, for example, no Gertrude of Helfta or The"rese of Lisieux...

...At any rate, Ogden's anthology should be at least perused by those who wish to know about (or teach) the full Christian tradition in order to make present those women whose voices are only now getting the attention that they deserve...

...That Christianity is a missionary religion is a truism...

...To what degree should (must) the faith be "incul-turated...

...Timothy Yates's history of modern Christian mission theory gives ample scope to those and cognate issues as he sketches out the evolution of Christian (largely Protestant...

...One school sees the renewal of the Spirit as a simple reconstruction of the New Testament church while others attempt to identify a stream of Christianity (for example, from the Montanists through the Anabaptists, Pietists, etc...

...that extends through history...

...It is, and I borrow this all from Hodgson's own descriptions, liberal, Protestant, constructive, and openly sympathetic to the Tillichian method of correlation (that is, of the Christian datum and human experience...

...one might reasonably inquire to what use such an anthology might be put...

...The results of such research, of course, made it to the front pages and at least one of the leading scholars in this enterprise (John Dominic Crossan) produced a best-selling book...

...His story reaches back to just before the now famous Edinburgh Conference of 1910 (which would be so formative for the modern ecumenical movement) and forward to current debates about the uniqueness of Christ and contemporary approaches to understanding Christian faith vis-a-vis the world's religions...

...Lathrop, accordingly, gives us a rich and satisfying study which first seeks out the pattern and structure of Christian worship and then examines the ordo of worship from within the experience of worship...

...It is also a theology organized around a trinitarian motif due, at least in part, to the author's long meditation on the Hegelian corpus...

...In general, I found this a very helpful study (with an excellent bibliography) of an important Christian movement which I know mainly at a distance...

...If Hodgson's book has a deficiency it is in what he does not talk about...

...Charismatic churches (of which the Pentecostal churches are a part) emphasize the experience of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit (healing, tongues, etc...

...Ogden gives us a few sonnets of the Renaissance writer, Vittoria Colonna...

...What Yates does not talk about is a bit surprising...

...All these topics are taken up in this unfailingly interesting study...

...never utters the word "prayer...

...that it brings new disciplines (cultural anthropology, the social sciences, literary theory) to bear on the Gospels...

...Should the strategy begin with building community ("church planting...

...No attention is paid to the phenomenal growth of fundamentalist or charismatic churches in Central and Latin America, nor to the interesting phenomenon of receiving churches now becoming sending churches (our local diocese regularly brings in clergy from both Asia and Africa...

...Clare of Assisi...

...Finally, and largely deriving from the above contours, it is a "postmodern" theology...

...the relationship of Christian revelation to non-Christian religions...

...My own feeling is that one must distinguish theology directed to the believing community from that directed to the world of academe or society as a whole...

...As one who, in company with theologians like David Tracy, tends to emphasize the postresurrection Jesus proclaimed as Christ, I read these other authors with more detached interest than firm conviction...

...When Yates brings Roman Catholicism into focus there are the added elements of Nostra aetate from the Second Vatican Council, the insights of the liberation theologians, and the newer fields of comparative theology...

...Hodgson gives a fairly detailed synthetic accounting of the first two strains (this may satisfy his own understanding of theological "construction"), but is thun-deringly silent about the third...

...the transition of church membership from the working-class poor to middle-class churches in this country...

...Gerald O'Collins has recently sketched out three strains in contemporary theology: the academic whose end is truth...

...Borg claims that this search (the third in this century) is new in that it is not driven by theological concerns...

...There is much to study about this branch of the Christian tradition: the rise of the "mega-church" phenomenon (the largest Christian church in the world is a 66,000-member congregation in Seoul, Korea...

...For that reason, I am grateful to Borg and recommend his work...

...By contrast, many of the essays in Professor Poewe's collection derive from close observation of one of the fastest growing movements in contemporary Christianity: the charismatic church(es...

...Peter Hodgson's book is far too complex to summarize fairly in this column...

...One answer is that it could serve as a core text to tease an interested student into reading in more depth about a given person whose work is represented merely in the form of a brief selection...

...Secondary liturgical theology is critical reflection on the language, structure, and meaning of that primary experience...

...His exposition of the various missiological tendencies, especially when they are antagonistic, is well done...

...These essays tend to focus on specific and well-detailed observations, as is befitting a work done by anthropologists...

...Julian of Norwich, etc...

...The contributors to Poewe's book are at pains both to explode some of the common misconceptions about the charismatic movement (for example, that its success in Central America is due mainly to American money) and to take the movement with more seriousness than it is normally accorded...

...If one allows Lathrop's starting point then one must say, as I say, that this is a richly powerful exposition of the authentic meaning of what Christian worship means au fond...

...the phenomenal spread of charismatic churches in Latin and Central America, Africa (with their syncretist variants), and Asia...

...This work is a result of Hodgson's efforts to think theologically along with his students and in the company of his Vanderbilt colleagues Sallie McFague and Edward Farley...

...Of the lot, Borg is one of my favorites since he still remembers that Jesus has something to do with the Christian church (in this he is similar to Elizabeth Schiissler-Fiorenza) and because he provides us with interesting and "strange" (in the nonpe-jorative sense of the term) approaches to Jesus, especially within the context of the trajectory of Wisdom...

...In a sense all mission theory goes back to the most primitive form of the church as it debated its relationship to Judaism and, following that, the nexus between Christianity and its pagan surroundings...

...There is no discussion about the relationship of missions to colonialism...

...In essence, Hodgson feels most at home with contemporary concerns and less comfortable with the historical continuities of the theological tradition (the witness of patristics, the regulafidei, and the great medievals make only cameo appearances...