Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
~ enan Osborne has gained a good reputation for a series of books on sacramental theology (holy orders and sacramental reconciliation) which are marked by a reliable summaD~ of...
...Jacques Maritain's "integral humanism" was a sophisticated scholastic model of the relationship between the temporal order (the world of time, politics, society, the perishable) and the spiritual order whose end is the contemplation of the truth which is God...
...Richard's picture of Jesus Christ represents the compassionate face of God who is self-giving in creation, in revelation, in the Incarnation, and in the church...
...It is clear that within a generation after the earthly life of Jesus, the Pauline communities taught that Jesus had lived, had died, and ,was raised by the power of God from the dead...
...Chalcedon lacks the power, paradox, and open-endness that characterize, for example, the narrative Christology of Mark...
...What is one to make of that...
...He uses a close reading of the classic text in Philippians 2 as well as a considera tion of the Gospel of Mark (which he Christ: The Self-Emptying of God by Lucien Richard Paulist, $18.95, 236 pp...
...In other words, Osborne's treatment doesn't do justice to a topic that is complex and multilayered even with respect to the Gospel materials on which he concentrates...
...Osborne's unremitting predilection for the Gospels at the expense of the Pauline corpus does not give enough of a rounded view of what the early church affirmed about the Resurrection, especially Paul's own attempt to explain to people who had a too-carnal notion of the Resurrection as Commonweal ~ ~ March 27, 1998 "mere" resuscitation of a dead person...
...Gutierrez understood liberation to be a triad: political, human liberation allows for human freedom and solidarity and, finally, liberation from sin, so that one might enjoy communion with God and with others...
...That latter form of liberation has mostly preoccupied Gutierrez in his later books, including his great meditation on the Book of Job and his dassic work on spirituality, We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983...
...The opening chapter, with its analysis of the human condition, has a very dated ring to it...
...After an analysis of these three seminal thinkers, Bracldey adds some further reflections taken from feminist thinkers and from the Basque Jesuit, lgnacio EIlacuria, his martyred colleague, as well as from Ellacuria's mentor, the philosopher Xavier Zubiri...
...A kenotic Christology is able to hold in tension two elements: power (Christ is the Son of God) and powerlessness (Christ lives in the human condition...
...Brackley does not dismiss Maritain, nor does he accept the early Gutierrez without comment on his weaknesses...
...Osborne makes the interesting analogy between how the Gospel writers depict the Resurrection and how a mystic like John of the Cross writes about religious experience...
...This can be read as, "Whatever you will, you can do good to them, but you do not always have Me...
...reads as a kind of commentary on the text from Philippians) to emphasize a "kenotic" understanding of Jesus Christ...
...That is an account of Resurrection faith predating the Gospels by perhaps as much as a generation, and in which Paul himself notes that he was "handing on" to the Corinthians something that he had received...
...as both a Jesuit activist and an academic, investigates a straightforward but very complex issue: What is the intimate relationship between salvation and liberation...
...These realms are inseparable but also distinct...
...But the best part of the book, in my estimation, is BrackJey's own passionate commitment to the New Testament message of Jesus...
...Until recently the topic, among scholastic manualists at least, was largely apologetic...
...For Osborne, that the Gospel Resurrection accounts are "constructed" does not imply they are fictions in the pejorative sense of the term...
...To put the issue in other terms: Is there a continuity between transcendent salvation and immanent liberation...
...What Brackley says on this issue complements materials in Osborne and Richard...
...The "supernatural existential" (Rahner's famous neologism) means that, in Brackley's words, "the offer of salvation stamps every aspect of human existence, not from without but from within...
...His reflections on theology are even more problematic...
...For John, first there is an experience, then there is the writing of poetry to somehow capture the experience...
...As Jon Sobrmo says in the foreword to this book, what is at stake is not a theoretical debate but the very credibility of Christian belief itself...
...Osborne's book presents a survey of contemporary theological research on the Resurrection, a close reading of the The Resurrection of Jesus by Kenan Osborne Paulist, $14.95,194 pp...
...This volume, in short, though useful, needed some updating, especially in the first chapter...
...Finally, Richard offers a vision of the kenotic church where power is given and dispersed rather than consolidated and exercised...
...This book, reflecting the author's background Divine Revolution: Salvation & Liberation in Catholic Thought by Dean Brackley Orbis, $19, 197 pp...
...Hence, the sense is something like: "The poor you have around you all the time...
...Brackley chose three thinkers who constmcted classic paradigms to relate Christian faith to contemporary social life...
...Perhaps the author, refined by his experiences North and South of the border, will take up his pen again...
...Dean Brackley is one of the Jesuits who went to E1 Salvador to replace the Jesuit professors who had been murdered in 1989 at the Universidad CentroAmerica...
...Salvation and well-being are "attained not by conquest, but by self-effacement and self-giving love....Real authority and real power lie in compassionate love, in choosing weakness instead of strength...
...Brackley concludes with a meditation on Jesus and the reign of God...
...Osborne's basic point, however, is a good one: If we accept the reliability of writings about religious experience like John's, why can't we accept similar accounts, even with imaginative elements, that speak of the Resurrection narratives...
...I very much liked, for example, his reflection on the "kingdom of God" in his final chapter, even though it was not clear to me how that chapter related to the theology of the Resurrection...
...enan Osborne has gained a good reputation for a series of books on sacramental theology (holy orders and sacramental reconciliation) which are marked by a reliable summaD~ of current research and his own perspective on the subject at hand...
...It is not without interest and it is certainly fair and balanced, if somewhat dated...
...The final chapter seems tagged on to the book to put flesh on it...
...To Karl Rahner's famous question about whether there is Christology after Chalcedon, Richard gives a definite yes...
...Creation is seen as self-emptying (one hears the process voices of Hartshorne and Whitehead here...
...Richard applies his kenotic Christology to a wide range of theological issues...
...The common critique of Rahner is that he is insufficiently political (Metz) or that his rather Commonweal 2 8 March 27, 1998 optimistic view of the world does not take seriously enough the fallen nature of humankind, both individual and social (Moltmann...
...By the way: Osborne might have profitably commented on the prologue to John of the Cross's Spiritual Canticle, where the great mystic sets this process out in some detail...
...I suspect that parts of this book have a long history...
...An American trained at the University, of Chicago, he had worked in the Bronx as an organizer and pastoral worker...
...Let me cite one example...
...Brackley notes that this is a very inadequate translation of the Greek, which uses the present, not the future tense...
...Jesus, according to a oft-cited passage in Mark (14:7), says that the "poor you will have with you always...
...All of their work was oriented toward overcoming dualisms between nature/grace or transcendence/ immanence or history/eternity...
...it was like a march down memory lane as one listens to the voices of Langdon Gilkey, Ernest Becker, E. F. Schumacher, E. Fromm, Christopher Lasch, Herbert Marcuse, and other iconic voices of the 1960s and 1970s...
...At the risk of oversimplification, Osborne's thesis seems to be that the New Testament account of the Resurrection centers on what God did in Jesus (raising him from the dead...
...Karl Rahner, by contrast, argued forceflflly that the order of redemption is within the order of creation...
...Osborne is such a good theologian and so widely read that we can only hope that this little book, useful in so many ways, is a "finger exercise" for something far more meaty in the future...
...However, a good deal of recent scriptural work has been done on the question of the Resurrection...
...Especially provocative is Brackley's analysis of the Beatitudes, drawing on the exhaustive research of Jacques Dupont, and concluding, in a wonderful phrase, that God "does not take the side of the poor because they are good but because God is good and compassionate to those who suffer...
...The implications of this view of Christology for social justice are patent...
...Furthermore, Osborne does not even mention the New Testament kerygmas located in Acts, all of which end with an affirmation of Jesus being raised from the dead...
...pertinent New Testament texts with an almost exclusive focus on the Gospel narratives, a theology of the Resurrection derived from that New Testament reading, and, finally, an effort to fit the above into a "unified Christology...
...This work on the Resurrection of Christ derives from Osborne's own conviction that contemporary theology lacks a cogent account of how the Resurrection of Christ fits into a total Christology or, as he calls it, a "unified Christology...
...The right ordering of the former is understood to lead us to an appreciation of the latter...
...For my taste, it was an extremely satisfying but all-too brief reflection on the New Testament teaching about Jesus' preaching of the kingdom...
...Brackley himself is much taken by the notion of "transcendence in history'--an idea that Ellacuria gets from Zubiri...
...Are those terms discrete or badly posed or in dialectical relationship...
...Little has been said historically in the magisterium about the Resurrection (apart, of course, from the creeds and professions of faith...
...Lucien Richard's thesis is straightforward: the theological category of kenosis (self-emptying) is an extremely useful resource for correlating the meaning of Jesus Christ with the human condition...
...There is much useful material in this book, especially Osborne's summary of previous research...
...Richard's admiration for this approacl~ derives largely from his judgment that the classical formulafion of the Council of Chalcedon that Jesus Christ as "two natures united in one person" is too abstract...
...I thought that this work had o~her weaknesses as well...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...The Resurrection, reflected in the received experience of those who wrote of that event, is linked to the larger issue of what the "kingdom" or "reign" of God really is...
...The only erratum I noticed is that the distinguished British exegete, Morna Hooker, became, throughout, Monica Hooker...
...the Trinity as selfgiving, both in its immanent and economic life, as is the relationship of the Cross and the Resurrection...
...Finally a prose commentary and perhaps a "map" shows how to read the account of the experience...
...Nor do the endnotes (sigh) reveal references for anything written after the late 1980s for any of the other chapters.The book has no bibliography and there is a barely adequate index...
...Why was there no sustained analysis of 1 Cor...
...Drawing on a number of fine studies, Bracldey makes some fine points...
...I suspect that the earlier, more academic part of Brackley's book derives from dissertation work...
...Gustavo Gutierrez, aware of those criticisms, knew that to create a fiflly adequate theology one had to ask: What is the relationship between salvation and the historical process of human liberation...
...Indeed, I wanted more along these lines...
...Commonweal 2 9 March 27, 1998...
...In fact, the last chapter barely discusses the Resurrection at all...
Vol. 125 • March 1998 • No. 6
