Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Scholars, saints, skeptics & gadflies Lawrence S. Cunningham RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES Over the past few years there has been a good deal of news in the popular press about the Qumran scrolls. Some...
...there are several useful maps and some black-and-white illustrations...
...He admits that his eremetical life makes it easier to follow such a practice, but he thinks it is possible for those in community to regain this ancient form of living...
...This is the book for those interested in a sober, careful, and well-written account of the discovery of the scrolls, their meaning, and the current state of research on them...
...and that he probably did think of friendship in the monastery through the prism of his own experiences...
...the relationship of the scrolls to both the Old and New Testaments (along with a very informative The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, by James VanderKam...
...I was also struck by what Borg does not treat in any detail: the significance of the Passion of Christ and the central datum of the Resurrection...
...Each chapter has a bibliographical note for further reading...
...One odd note: in all my years of reviewing books, this is the first one I have come across dedicated to two deceased dogs...
...It depends on which side of the Atlantic one lives...
...Each thinker gets a long chapter in which Kung focuses on the fidelity of each to the message of Jesus Christ...
...How is it done...
...We have a large number of his writings (some yet to be translated into English) which have been the subject of much scholarly research...
...As a good friend of mine has observed, "Be ye perfect" has been more misused in the history of Christian spirituality than any other single verse in the New Testament...
...the former urges solidarity and the latter, separation...
...What is the precise relationship of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting-those "acts of religion" (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls them...
...an act of canine pietas that irritated more than it edified...
...Borg emphasizes the Lucan "Be ye compassionate as the Heavenly Father is compassionate" as against the Matthean "Be ye perfect...
...The participants devised a calculus of descending historical weight and cast votes: Jesus said this...
...Chapters 4 and 5 treat Jesus and Wisdom and Jesus as the Wisdom of God...
...the hypothesis of Essene provenance (VanderKam holds to this thesis...
...The basic thesis of this work is simple enough: the earliest strain of monastic experience proposed that monks eat once a day in the late afternoon...
...But my distance from these proceedings has not prevented me from occasionally thinking that the whole enterprise had a slightly pretentious air about it...
...of the text...
...His discussion of Thomas Aquinas is a case in point...
...Alone among monastic writers, Aelred encouraged friendships in the monastery and had none of the fear of "particular friendships" which were such a commonplace in monastic literature...
...Bryan makes the plausible argument that this could have meant a reading of the entire text (which can be done in just under two hours...
...It is sadly the case that the latter Kung sometimes overwhelms the former...
...Adalbert is a distinguished monastic scholar, and this book will be of interest mainly to those in the cloister...
...Is his influence more lasting than that of Tillich...
...This book is a nice complement to the author's earlier Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience (Cistercian Publications, 1988...
...By becoming a monk Aelred "entered a world of friendship where all the erotic intensity of men could be transformed into agapetic joy...
...McGuire convincingly argues that Aelred had little interest in friendship between men and women...
...In sum: a book which manages to put forth ideas that may be worthwhile considering beyond the rather narrow audience for whom it was intended...
...Eerdmans/SPCK, $12.99, 206 pp...
...that Aelred probably did have homoerotic relationships before becoming a monk...
...I am not an expert in these matters, but it does seem that VanderKam is fair to those who have serious scholarly opinions, although he has little patience with the wilder, less serious writers on the scrolls...
...He has strong opinions and does not hesitate to state them...
...VanderKam's work makes a nice companion piece to Fitzmyer's Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls which I reviewed in an earlier column...
...Some books have put forth tendentious interpretations of the scroll material, while others have demonstrated a penchant for conspiracy theories...
...Jesus probably did not say this...
...It kept making me think of the late Ronald Knox's famous send-up in which he used the advanced exegetical techniques of his day to prove that Tennyson's "In Memoriam" was actually written by Queen Victoria...
...Bryan does not link Mark to Peter but he does seem to like the idea of Mark's text having a relationship to orality...
...Furthermore, Mark's "Life" was most likely meant to be read aloud in a cultural-liturgical setting...
...Such books cannot be dismissed no matter how much they may irritate.dismissed no matter how much they may irritate...
...As Brian Tier-ney demonstrated years ago, if one wants to trace the growth of papal claims one should look at the canonists and the Franciscans involved in the poverty debate...
...Marcus Borg was an active member of LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM teaches theology and chairs the department at the University of Notre Dame...
...Secondly, Borg shares some of his insights about Jesus after long meditation on the text of the Gospels...
...While obviously a learned book, it is free of footnotes...
...Drawing on a good deal of both biblical research and contemporary literary theory, Bryan argues that Mark is a "Life" not dissimilar to the kinds of biographical literature composed in the ancient Greco-Roman world...
...Jesus as a preacher of compassion and as a preacher of holiness...
...Earlier in the book, Borg contrasts (too sharply...
...Was it a net gain for Christian living that the Western church abandoned the discipline of abstinence and fasting...
...Mark's Gospel has been the focus of much research...
...ed guesses...
...the "Jesus Seminar"-that group of scholars that began meeting in 1985 to discuss this question: Which sayings in the Gospels constitute the very words of Jesus as opposed, for example, to sayings which were redacted by the evangelists or created by them or redone to account for post-Easter Christian faith, etc...
...For a nonexpert like myself, it was immensely informative...
...In regards to genre nomenclature, however, I still prefer the Jesuit John Donahue's description of Mark (incorrectly attributed to John Crossan, S.J., by Bryan in one place) as a "kerygmatic narrative" since it neatly captures both the idea of orality and writing...
...That close reading is quite illuminating...
...In the patristic period it rarely merited full commentaries since it A Preface to Mark, by Christopher Bryan, Oxford University Press, $32, 220 pp...
...and that it should be reconsidered as part of monastic ascesis...
...Great Christian Thinkers is one of those books which causes me to say mentally, "Wait a minute," or "No-that is not quite right...
...he certainly did not say this...
...That recognition alone may explain the stream of Markan literature coming from the presses...
...Schleiermacher may be important for the development of that theology, but was he more crucial than Newman (whose influence would be felt at Vatican II) or Kierkegaard (who was the fons et origo of modern existentialism...
...thinkers in the history of theology: Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher, and Barth...
...and, finally, a survey of current controversies regarding the scrolls...
...Thorough indices and a final bibliography make the work quite "user friendly...
...That conservative personal crochet now being confessed, let me stipulate that there is still much to be learned from what these scholars did (without buying into their method or blindly accepting their educatMeeting Jesus Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg, Harper SanFrancisco, $16,150pp...
...paratactic style...
...Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-67) belongs to that first generation of Cistercian writers, along with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who, in the words of Etienne Gilson, gave Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx, by Brian Patrick McGuire, Crossroad, $22.95, 186 pp...
...What he does discuss, however, is well done and repays a careful reading...
...that they "love fasting" (the phrase is Benedict's in the Rule...
...Marcus Borg's wonderfully written and passionately argued book is one example of what these New Testament scholars can teach us...
...I can only mention a few of the observations that I found extremely helpful...
...that would not be simply a form of "punishment" or "discipline...
...235pp...
...Kung is a theologian with a point of view and a sharp critical sense...
...that this usage has, over the centuries, fallen into decline...
...I am not a New Testament scholar so I watched or heard about their doings from afar and have only recently begun to read some of the results of their work, especially that of John Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack...
...a survey of the manuscript finds...
...The author himself has followed this regime for over ten years and takes pain to show how he came to do it, what the merits of such a plan are, and why it should be part of monastic life...
...Do the liberation theologians provide us with a new emerging paradigm forcing new questions and new locations from which we must query the word of God...
...At the end of the book there is a short bibliographical essay providing background reading for each of the individual chapters...
...Father Adalbert has some words on this latter question that may repay reading...
...Have we ever considered new ways of fasting (in solidarity with the poor...
...The organizers have published the fruit of their research with color-coded lines to reflect their scholarly consensus...
...Was Barth (is Barth...
...The second-century writer Papias said that Mark's Gospel was a written version of Peter's preaching...
...Kung does this by a brief study of seven pivotal Great Christian Thinkers, by Hans Kung, Crossroad, $24.95...
...The proof Kung adduces is a minor treatise ("Against the Errors of the Greeks") which defends papal primacy against the Eastern church...
...There are many other provocative themes, lightly touched on, that could bear comment...
...Those interested in the history of spirituality will find this a solidly scholarly study of an important writer...
...a true postmodern theologian...
...This is a very well-written book with good bibliographies at the end of the individual chapters...
...I learned a good deal and will use some of his more telling comments in my own teaching...
...To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience, by Adalbert de Vogue', Saint Bede's Publications, $9.95.137 pp...
...In advancing that argument, Bryan reads the text of Mark closely to indicate what he considers the oral substrata (formulaic sayings...
...In Borg's case, it is the rejection of his unblinkingly conservative Lutheran upbringing and a rediscovery that one can "give one's heart to" (that is, believe) Jesus...
...The plain fact of the matter is that Thomas was a loyal son of Rome but papal claims were hardly his major concern (in the Summa papal claims merit only a glance...
...Is it curious that precisely at the time when such a discipline was modified practically out of existence we had an explosion in the West of diet plans, fat farms, calorie counting, and the like...
...Contemporary scholarship, with its emphasis on Markan priority, contends that Mark is not only a very rich work but one of greater literary and theological complexity than had been earlier recognized...
...the use of inclusio, etc...
...Indeed, Kung's continuing contribution to current theological debates may well be the gadfly energy with which he forces us to respond to his urgent sense of what theology is and how it is to be articulated...
...The latter chapter, especially, is suggestive of ways in which we might think about Christology in a non-Chalcedonian manner...
...up everything for God except the art of writing well...
...Borg first confesses his own personal passage from what Paul Ricoeur called a conversion from first naivete to second naivete...
...Apart from such polemics one must also wonder whether Kung's theology is just not too oriented to the rather hermetic world of Germany...
...discussion of the formation of the biblical canon...
...Aelred has been the focus of intense interest over the past decade or two because of John Boswell's (in)famous suggestion that Aelred was a gay apologist, especially in his treatise on spiritual friendship...
...It is for those reasons alone that I wish to recommend my colleague Jim VanderKam's book...
...and whether or not he provided a paradigm shift in theology...
...In a well-organized and highly readable account, VanderKam surveys his subject under these general headings: a history of the discoveries...
...Hans Kung's recent work is an attempt to provide a "simple introduction to Christian theology" with a double focus: What is its subject matter...
...Professor McGuire, an American teaching in Denmark who is a distinguished scholar of matters Cistercian, examines the life and writings of this important medieval spiritual writer, with one eye on the controverted judgment of Boswell...
...One must distinguish Kung the historian from Kung the polemicist and partisan...
...the source of the manuscripts...
...These and other questions came into my head as I read this unfailingly interesting but idiosyncratic tour of the theological horizon...
...He adduces evidence from what we know of the ancient practices of the Christian church to show that this would not be as strange as we who bridle at fifteen-minute homilies might suppose...
...Jesus may have said this...
...McGuire is especially good at a close reading of the surviving works of Aelred, especially his major work, The Mirror of Charity...
...Father Adalbert's little monograph on monastic fasting is just the sort of book that I love: a passionately written, scholarly annotated, and illuminating treatment of some small offbeat corner of the Catholic experience...
...his engagement with the culture of his own day...
...was widely believed to be a kind of condensation of much fuller materials in the other synoptics...
...Where there are controverted issues, VanderKam sets out the opposing views, weighs the evidence, and then states his judgment...
...Despite the modest disclaimer that he did not wish to study Aelred theologically, McGuire sheds much light on the sources of Aelred's writings, makes judicious pronouncements on the intentions of the writer, and carefully discriminates Aelred's own worldview from that of contemporary discussions about sexuality...
...He then argues further that Aquinas is not a creator of new paradigms because Thomas "put his theology at the service of dogmatic papolatry [sic...
...Kung faults Aquinas for his failure to engage in a dialogue with Islam at any level beyond that of the philosophical...
...Nonetheless, the author raises some important tangential questions for the church that merit at least some reflection...
...to focus ourselves for prayer or the liturgy, etc...
Vol. 122 • April 1995 • No. 7
