Religion booknotes

...Alas, I am asking Martin Marty to write a different book with different parameters...

...This book is too brief to be anything like definitive, but what is here is rich and its very existence is a tribute to the energy and dedication of this world-class twentieth-century scholar...

...For a long time now, scholars have made much of the larger issues that made the Reformation possible...

...An attempt at comprehensiveness is evident in many of the entries...

...I note this long genealogy to illustrate how long the author has engaged the life and thought of one of the most fecund religious philosophers of this century...

...The covenant is only a covenant when the "I" of God is answered by the "Thou" of people...

...The implications of that insight (as Moore so well says) compelled Buber to engage issues of human sociology, education, communications, and so on...

...Moore is deeply involved in Jewish/Christian relations (he has also done a book on Abraham Heschel) and, as such, is a loving and gentle reader of Buber...

...Florida is my home state, and I had lived there on the Gulf Coast during the years Marty chronicles...

...gian and exegete was in his ninety-second year...

...The basic presupposition in writing these portraits is to "put forward as faithfully and impartially as I can accounts of nine great mediators of the spiritual life, and in order to do this, I try to confine myself to facts and hypotheses which are open to my readers...

...That did not permit him to drop a step below intellectual history to reflect on (in the case of Catholics) the crucial impact of parochial education and the seminal role of such innovative women as Sister Madeleva who, among other things, developed the first graduate program in theology for women in this country...

...The whole work is framed by an introductory chapter on prayer as a problem and a final chapter in which Cullmann reflects on the place and pertinence of prayer in the contemporary world, especially from the perspective of theological problems...

...He is particularly good on the role of the Spirit in Paul's theology of prayer...

...What he has chosen to do he has done exceedingly well...

...Furthermore, he was often in the midst of heated debates about his scholarship (most famously with Gershon Sholem with respect to his understanding of Hasidism...

...This work is not a substitute for the biographical studies of Maurice Friedman, but it is a solid, well-researched, and sympathetic reading of one of the truly crucial spiritual masters of our age...

...Ask any committed Catholic of my age (especially if he or she were tempted to the religious life), and that individual will tell you that Merton's book was a powerful influence...

...and Peale's book was quintessential spiritual uplift...

...Marty skillfully weaves these disparate threads together by means of this thesis: that to the tradition which strove for consensus, ecumenical and interre-ligious cooperation, and a healthy symbiosis of faith and culture, there was a countertradition which was critical, resistant, aggressive, and skeptical of the culture...

...The 1950s, after all, saw the rise of evangelists like Billy Graham who would play their part on the national scene...

...While Macquarrie lets each tradition speak for itself, he also judiciously interprets similarities (or dissimilarities) of insights or positions...

...That conviction gives rise to Buber's famous assertion that God cannot be expressed but only addressed...

...What to do about the genteel (and not so genteel: I remember Florida motels with the "restricted clientele" signs) anti-Semitism in the culture...

...Professor Hillerbrand and his collaborators deserve plaudits for executing what must have been a Herculean task of assigning and checking the articles (a number were penned by continental scholars and then translated into English), while Oxford University Press should be equally praised for the beauty and care with which it has brought this work to the reading public...

...Liebman wrote without any serious discussion of the Holocaust...

...Just think of those army units in Hollywood movies composed of a spectrum of Irish, Jewish, Polish, Southern, and African-American names...

...Even though Joachim Jeremias's The Prayers of Jesus is justly famous, it is wonderful to have a new study which treats the subject of prayer from the Gospels through the Pauline literature and the other books of the New Testament...

...However, Cullmann does not deal at any length with the liturgical underpinnings of various Gospel pericopes, and his reflections on New Testament texts other than the Gospels and Paul are rather perfunctory...

...and fine entries on popular religion in general (again subdivided by country) and subsets of this topic (for example, magic...

...What strikes me as curious is that Marty does not mention the single most influential and popular Catholic book of the postwar period (still in print and still widely read): Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sold 600,000 copies in its first year...

...Articles like those on the liturgy and on sacraments cover all the denominational bases...

...In his discussion of Paul, he sorts out the Pauline vocabulary in order to provide further nuance for his own reflections...

...That biographical entry is then followed by lengthy articles on Lutheranism, Lutheran theology, a wonderfully interesting article on Lutheran historiography, and a separate entry on Luther's catechisms...

...Apart from my casual browsing, I have reached for these volumes frequently to look up something pertinent for class or to track down a reference in my reading...

...Donald Moore's book on Buber is an updated version of a work he first published in 1974 which, in turn, was a reworking of a doctoral dissertation written for the University of Strasbourg and inspired by work he did on Buber with Maurice Friedman in the 1960s...

...That being said, who would argue with the judgment that he made original contributions to religious thought...

...Cullmann's book on prayer in the New Testament appeared in German when the distinguished Swiss theoloPrayer in the New Testament by Oscar Cullmann Fortress Press, $19,190 pp...

...How did the evangelicals fit into this picture...

...Times Literary Supplement suggested that a better title for the work might have been Encyclopedia of the Age of the Reformation...

...Finally, I would like to single out the four excellent articles on the Bible which treat seriatim, theories of hermeneutics and exegesis, editions, translations, and biblical commentaries...

...Nor is it always appreciated that Buber's insistence on the I/Thou relationship is rooted in one of the most profound aspects of the Bible: that the covenant between God and Israel is essentially cast as a dialogue: I will be your God/You will be my people...

...I did keep thinking about how this material would affect the way we think about prayer, and how Buber's dialogical thought might help us positively to critique recent thinking about liturgy...

...Macquarrie provides nine such portraits (Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Krishna, Lao-tzu, Moses, Muhammad, Socrates, and Zoroaster) by extending the so-called time frame of the axial period described by Karl Jaspers to the rise of Islam...

...In the generic article on Protestantism there is also an entry on the history of the use of the word "Protestant...

...The entry on Luther was written by Martin Brecht whose three-volume life of the reformer has been available in English for some years...

...Apart from Buber's work as a biblical translator, commentator, and meditator on the riches of Hasidism, it seems to me that nobody in the modern world has better understood in depth and lived more deeply the conviction that life is dialogue in the deepest sense of that term...

...and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking...

...All were best sellers...

...Marty shows that the period of the war engendered a certain honest if pa-pered-over religious consensus in order to focus on a common enemy...

...In fairness to Marty, he stipulates that he sought out representative persons- largely Caucasian males-who did the writing, organizing, etc...

...In the postwar period, however, there was a real fear among some Protestant commentators that Catholics (growing in numbers, education, and economic strength) might overwhelm the culture-a fear not assuaged by the situation in countries like Spain where the Catholic majority was less than tolerant of Protestant minorities...

...same to the Catholics, while every Notre Dame football victory was considered a fifth mark of the One True Church...

...Buber was not universally loved by his fellow religionists in his adopted land of Israel (he moved there in the late 1930s), both because of his passionate support for a binational state and his lifelong unwillingness to participate in synagogue life or accept the imperatives of Orthodox observance...

...all attempted to speak to a broad audience...

...These long entries, with their extremely useful bibliographies, provide an excellent overview of both historical and theological issues...

...It was there that I first knew about (to the degree that I did at all) Fulton Sheen on the television, Senator Joe McCarthy lambasting the Communists, and Paul Blanshard (a bete noire to us) doing the Modern American Religion: Under God Indivisible 1941-60 by Martin E. Marty University of Chicago, $34.95,548 pp...

...His landmark works on Peter in the New Testament and his studies in Christology were models of ecumenical sensitivity and high learning appreciated both in Reformed and Catholic circles...

...Needless to say, he devotes a number of keen pages to the Lord's Prayer and summarizes much of the research which has been done on that locus classicus...

...Indeed, the reviewer in The The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (4 volumes) edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand Oxford University Press, $450,1,977 pp...

...This more contextualized and ecumenical understanding of the Reformation explains why, for instance, the entry on John Calvin was done by the German Catholic scholar, Alexandre Ganoczy, and why the entry on catechisms takes issue with the older view that catechisms were a new literary form "springing ex nihilo out of the supposed 'catechetical vacuum' of the late Middle Ages...

...The editor notes that his vision of this handsomely produced work (wonderful clear printing, excellent indices, useful maps, but no illustrations) was to understand the term "reformation" within the broader religious culture of sixteenth-century Europe...

...In my estimate, this project is a great success...

...Those individuals who can afford it should consider purchasing the encyclopedia...

...The most attractive feature of Marty's book is his skillful use of popular culture to flesh out his history...

...Of course, one of the best things about reference books of this sort is running across things which one had never heard of before...

...Cullmann surveys all of the instances where prayer is a feature of the New Testament text while drawing on his vast learning to elucidate what those texts mean...

...Mediators between Human and Divine: From Moses to Muhammad by John Macquarrie Continuum, $19.95,171 pp...

...You get the idea...

...It is, rather, an interpretive history of American religion from the start of our involvement in World War II to the end of the period of Protestant hegemony, an end symbolized by the election of John F. Kennedy...

...He examines at length, for example, Will Herberg's three religious groups by discussing a trio of postwar best-sellers: Joshua Lieb-man's Peace of Mind...

...Over thirty years ago, John Macquarrie tells us, he wrote that Christian theologians should learn from other religious traditions and not proselytize among them...

...The material is interesting in its own right, and made more instructive by a deeply committed Christian theologian and Anglican priest reading sympathetically the traditions of others with openness and respect...

...Nonetheless, Marty sees the Eisenhower years as a time when there was a broad, if shaky, national consensus emerging, shaped somewhat by the cold war, but heading for trouble in the 1960s-a period which he will address in his next volume...

...Macquarrie is a graceful writer, widely read in the sources, with an approach that is neither mindlessly syncretistic nor triumphalistic...

...While hardly a "page turner," it is, as everything Marty writes, well done...

...The fat tomes of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation landed on my desk some months ago, and I have been contentedly browsing in them in my spare moments ever since...

...I found myself jotting down in my notebooks lines and words of Buber quoted by Moore that shed light on any number of issues that concern me...

...all reflected the optimism of the period...

...Marty's book is not simply a chronicle of this period...

...Sheen's book had, sotto voce, Liebman in mind...

...Reading Moore might well spur a person to go back and read Buber...

...Volume 3 only makes me wish that volume 4 be not far behind...

...I read with some mild interest of the "Gnesio-Lutherans" which led me to look up "Flaccus Illyricus" as well as "Andreas Osiander," which led me to "Nicholas von Amsdorf," when, I must confess, attention flagged and "Weddings" and "Witchcraft" caught my attention...

...The religious scene was not simply one of polarities...

...Could one legitimately combine piety and patriotism (a kind of religion ruthlessly satirized by writers like Peter DeVries and Flannery O'Connor...

...Each of these short essays has a separate and rather complete bibliography of sources for further reading...

...If there ever was a book that told a story counter to the sweetness and light of Liebman, Sheen, and Peale, it was Merton's (very unecumenical...

...Along with these extensive essays on major figures or topics there are also excellent shorter articles on other historical figures, geographical sites important for the Reformation, general cultural topics (art, architecture, music, the role of pamphlets and printing, etc...

...Thus, a goodly amount of attention is rightly given to Catholic issues since the reforming impulses in Catholicism go back deeply into the Middle Ages...

...He has also chosen these figures on the grounds that even when they wrote little or nothing at all, a body of Scripture rose in association with their persons and teaching...

...Those who would like an intelligible account of some of the great world religious figures will find this a helpful and readable work...

...Macquarrie likes that phrase both because he sees such persons as conduits of the transcendent and because it seems more inclusive (and less given to misunderstanding) than "savior" or "prophet" or "sage...

...Where did the African-American fit into this picture...

...In his final (new) chapter, Moore writes about Buber in relation to some strands of Catholic theology (especially in Karl Rahner), but I think he makes too much of the links between the apophatic strain in Buber and Rahner...

...Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism by Donald Moore Fordham University Press, $18,248 pp...

...The volumes need to be in every decent college or university reference library...

...Now retired from his chair at Oxford, Macquarrie has not repented of that youthful conviction...

...This current work treats a somewhat under-researched topic...

...The text is fully annotated and there is an index of scriptural citations and of names but, alas, no subject index...

...and all are period pieces...

...Apart from the articulation of a "civic faith" (of which Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, and Jew was paradigmatic) and the tensions between liberals and conservatives within Protestantism, there were the more vexatious and deeper questions...

...After "Reformation" there is a very useful long entry on "Reformation Studies" that might well be read as a kind of prologomenon to the encyclopedia itself...

...Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul...

...I think the present title is quite serviceable...

...Macquarrie says "holy Being" intentionally since he knows fully well that the word "God" does not do justice to other designations such as the One or the Absolute...

...Preaching and Sermons," for example, has separate commentaries on the four major regions of Europe...

...His basic intention is to show that each of these mediators in his own fashion brought "to a group of human beings a new or renewed sense of holy Being...

...conversion autobiography...

...Florida was also the appropriate place for me to read it...

...This slender book is his attempt to learn from other traditions by providing a series of portraits of great religious leaders who, to use his term (which he borrows from Schleiermacher), are "mediators" of the divine...