Religion booknotes

...This would also be a good read for those who would like to get an overview of a theologian who, at his best, is the good theological householder bringing forth "old things and new...

...It is the precise merit of Jacques Dalarun's highly readable but quite demanding book that he examines the recent research with a scholarly eye on the various legends to make sense of their provenance, intentions, and historical value...

...I also lament the absence of an index, and would have liked a brief bibliography of basic writings on the creed...

...the kingdom that is to come is not that of imperial strategy...

...Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of Saints Alain Blancy and Maurice Jourjon Paulist, $18.95,162 pp...

...and so on...

...Cummings thinks he bears a theological resemblance to Karl Rahner (a theologian much admired by Macquarrie) in this area...

...He places this discussion in the wider context of Matthew's Gospel as a whole, and does so with good effect...

...Who might wish to read this hom-mage to the life and works of John Macquarrie...

...Crosby concentrates on Matthew's version, with only an occasional glance at the Lucan account...

...In more recent times, the Rahnerian position has, with varying differences, been articulated by Jacques Dupuis and Gavin D'Costa...

...A second tendency would view the Christian faith in general, and the saving acts of Christ in particular, as the fulfillment of the religious aspirations of other religions...

...What I most like about the volume is that it repeatedly anchors the discussion in the biblical, patristic, and contemplative literature of the tradition...

...The book is serious, scholarly, honest, and nonpolemical, and it provides a trustworthy overview of current ecumenical thinking concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary...

...He is to be commended for the clarity and evenhandedness of his exposition...

...Those inclined to seek out a kind of mutuality among religious traditions have, in a sense, bracketed any highly dogmatic understanding of Christ...

...To what degree do they represent polemical positions...

...To put it bluntly: Are Buddhists, Hindus, and others who are beyond the Christian pale "saved" outside of Christ, or must they somehow find their salvation "in Christ," and if so, how...

...Using those volumes and Dalarun, serious students of one of the most complex saints in Christianity now have a guide through the stratigraphy of the early sources...

...The thought of Sri Lankan theologian Aloysius Pieris is a good example of this trajectory...

...Rather, they derive from the experience of a believing community, are located within the discipline of the church, and have their roots in liturgical life...

...He does make the interesting suggestion, borrowing from Eugene LaVerdiere, that the word may contain a eucharistic allusion, but quickly moves on from there...

...John Macquarrie would not know me, but I remember him as a most welcome summer-school teacher at Notre Dame...

...Vigen Guroian's beautiful meditation on the resurrection of the dead is a poetic and profoundly theological rendering of that doctrine, illustrating the power of the Orthodox capacity (Guroian is an Armenian theologian) for stating old truths in vigorous contemporary language...

...I am sorry that he did not spend more time referring to the broad commentary tradition (for example, the reflections by the Fathers, Cass-ian, Teresa of Avila, et al...

...He asks those who do to be honest enough not to teach Christian theology, or, worse, stay on in some hierarchical position...

...Dalarun keeps a firm eye on the tradition and seems to have total mastery of the pertinent research, especially that of the more recent scholars, mainly Italian and French, who have worked so diligently on the Franciscan materials...

...John Macquarrie: A Master of Theology Owen Cummings Paulist, $14.95,152 pp...

...In various ways, scholars like John Hick and Raimon Pannikar have articulated strategies of this sort...

...I have often thought that a good theology course could be constructed by a close study of commentators on the Lord's Prayer in the twentieth century alone...

...Protestant Fundamentalists take this position in its starkest form and it lends considerable energy to their efforts to spread the good news everywhere in the world...

...The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi Jacques Dalarun The Franciscan Institute, $24.95,295 pp...

...Many influences have shaped Macquarrie's theology...

...Sabati-er's portrait of an evangelical reformer avant la parole was daring enough to receive the ultimate Roman accolade: His work was put on the Index of Forbidden Books...

...A more muscular version of this position (espoused by my one-time colleague Paul Griffiths) is to be a good neighbor but also be a vigorous apologist for Christianity...

...That capacious background allowed Macquarrie to articulate theological reflections on everything from papal infallibility to Mar-iology, in which he exhibited both a keen sympathy and a critical edge...

...Finally, as an ecumenically sensitive theologian, he knew how to speak to others...

...Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) is one of the most luminous Christians of the twentieth century...

...As a consequence, the genius of Francis begins to emerge in a more serious and understandable light...

...How useful it would have been to have this little book from members of the European Dombes group as a starting point for our many fruitful discussions...

...I have learned much from this book, even from Crosby's discourses on economics (he is trained in both theology and economics...

...What these theologians and those sympathetic to them end up saying becomes almost a paradox...

...The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us Michael Crosby Orbis, $19,208 pp...

...From the end of the second century, when Tertullian wrote his commentary, to the present, there has been a steady stream of interpretation, explanation, and paraphrasing of the prayer...

...This kind of theological work can be very fruitful but, obviously, it requires skills beyond the training of most...

...It is a thorough study by someone who "was there...

...There are, in fact, profoundly different views of fundamental issues between, say Christians and Buddhists, and we need to acknowledge this honestly, lest we fall into vapid generalities and specious bonhomie...

...Paul Knitter has long been a prominent voice in the theological discussion about the relationship of Christianity to the other world religions...

...Michael Crosby, the Capuchin preacher and social activist, adds to this body of literature with The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us...

...Yes, the Council of Nicea-the first ecumenical council-was centrally concerned with Ari-anism...

...They also rightly insist that the practice of theology "can go wrong if it takes place apart from the life and practice of the church...

...I cannot comment on all the essays, but I would like to single out three...

...It is a delicate area of Catholic theology, as more adventuresome thinkers such as Jacques Dupuis, S.J., learned a few years back when he was hauled before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to explain himself...

...Of course, not all the contributions are of high quality (the essay on creation, by one of the two Catholic contributors, seemed perfunctory...

...This book, however, should not set off alarm bells among the theological bien pensants, since it is an extremely readable and evenhanded survey of recent discussions of the ecumenical question...

...At a time when tensions among religious traditions are everyday news, it is crucial that there be scholars who can pass over to other traditions in an honest and rigorous fashion...

...This book, despite the brevity of its formulations, fills a real gap...

...This approach allows him to uncover the subversive nature of the prayer-note the prayer's (silent) rejection of the Roman Empire...

...Another approach to these difficult questions is found in the influential work of George Lindbeck who argues that our religious identity derives from the language and culture within which we dwell as a "family...

...Macquarrie is now in his eighties, so Owen Cummings, a fellow Scot, gives us a resume of Macquarrie's theological life as a kind of act of pietas to celebrate one of the great Christian thinkers of our age...

...Macquarrie has the peculiar gift, as his longtime editor John Bowden once said of him, of being a "successful mediator between the academic world and the parishes in producing a believing form of academic theology...

...He is perhaps the central figure of that (alas, too small) body of Christian spokespersons and martyrs who stood up to Nazism...

...God's name and not the emporer's is to be hallowed...

...We must affirm two seemingly contradictory positions: salvation comes through Christ and/but God wills the salvation of all...

...Elizabeth Raum's biography, by contrast, is a brief but readable overview that depends on Bethge and other materials...

...As an introduction, it is a satisfactory first look at Bonhoeffer's life but, without the penetrating analysis of Bonhoeffer as a thinker and a theologian, it remains somewhat incomplete...

...We served together on several oral exam committees, where he exhibited, in his soft Scots burr, gentleness with students as well as a radiant love for theology...

...The word has been the subject of mountains of scholarly commentary...

...There have been any number of recent books on the Blessed Mother, some good and some awful, but few that have been seriously and professedly theological and ecumenical...

...Nicene Christianity is a robust treatment of Christian doctrine that takes the historic creeds seriously...

...A handy summary of some of its more notable commentators may be found in the second part of Nicholas Ayo's The Lord's Prayer (University of Notre Dame Press, 1992...

...Knitter was also the object of the CDF's attention for a period...

...While reading Braat-en, I could not but think of the problem of history (did the Resurrection happen...

...This is not a book for the casual consumer of pious Franciscan biographies, but one for those who would try to get closer to Francis and his life...

...Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism Edited by Christopher R. Seitz Brazos, $18.99,250 pp...

...The tone of the essays is resolutely orthodox (with the lowercase o), which is to say that the authors root themselves in the biblical and patristic sources as a bulwark against what they see as corrosive forces eating away at their respective communions...

...The present volume, the result of work done by the group between 1991 and 1997, sets out a series of propositions on Marian questions, and points to where some agreement has been reached and where genuine disagreements persist...

...It is also true that the reaction against Arianism diminished interest in the humanity of Christ-an imbalance that constantly needs correction...

...Many Asian theologians (for example, Michael Amal-adoss, S.J...

...Our Father is not the emperor Domitian, but God...

...Creeds are not simply free-floating "mission statements...

...Speakers ranged from the Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions...

...This view posits the possibility of one divine reality under and beyond all religions, and often emphasizes the mystical path or the mutual pursuit of good works...

...Hence, Crosby's work is not only exegetical but pastoral...

...Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God Elizabeth Raum Continuum, $21.95,184 pp...

...Still, Crosby's Prayer reflects a sophisticated handling of exegetical research, though he never drowns the reader in technical discussion...

...Nicene Christianity is a collection of essays, written by an ecumenical group of theologians, and drawn from papers delivered at a 2001 conference on the Creed at the Episcopal Cathedral of Charleston, South Carolina...

...Were I tempted to offer such a course, Crosby's book would certainly be on the reading list, if only to teach us how to read, as Barth once said, with one eye on the Bible and the other on the daily newspaper...

...Bonhoeffer was executed less than a month before the end of World War II (April 9,1945...

...They see their task as understanding other religious traditions as well as they can-a kind of scholarly enterprise that demands a high degree of linguistic and cultural sophistication-in order to reread the Christian theological enterprise through the lens of the other...

...Cummings is particularly good in tracing how Macquarrie has changed his mind over the decades, how he relates to his theological partners in and outside the Anglican church, and how his critics have reacted to his theological ideas and proposals...

...Is there not truth in the somewhat snippy observation about Francis by an earlier writer in Butler's Lives of the Saints that "religious and social cranks of all sorts have appealed to him for justification and he has completely won the hearts of the sentimental...

...All religious paths are replaced by the saving work of Christ...

...Dalarun helps us understand why the earliest life (by Thomas of Celano) is so hard on Francis's parents, and why that harshness gets muted in later stories...

...To reinforce the point, Alan Torrance writes that a loss of the belief that Christ is of "one substance" (homoousion) with the Father is not to lose a dubious metaphysical concept, but to jettison an anchor that keeps the low Christologies from lapsing into various forms of sentimental special pleading...

...he acts (see, for one example, Mt 20:29-34...

...Since Vatican II, there have been attempts to amplify a kind of Mariology the council itself was anxious to rein in, namely, a type of Marian speculation detached from roots in the saving mysteries of Christ...

...It is also true, as Colin Gunton makes clear in his essay, that Arianism is a perennial Christian heresy...

...That still leaves the question: How, in this schema, are non-Christians saved...

...He was an academic, pastor, ecumenist, peacemaker, and, most important, an early witness against the Nazi regime of his native Germany...

...Both the Catholic Augustine DiNoia and the Lutheran George Lindbeck have a generally common answer: Leave it to the saving mystery of God's grace...

...He owes a debt to German existentialism in general and, for a time, the thinking of Bultmann in particular...

...Recently, I was a speaker at an ecumenical conference held at Saint Olaf's College in Minnesota...

...The Franciscan Institute at Saint Bonaventure University tells us there are two more volumes of Dalarun's research in the works...

...Another writer, John Webster, puts it succinctly: "The church's confession of the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the antidote to Gnosticism in its modern guise," even though, as Webster notes, to assert that belief does not relieve one of thinking about, putting forward warrants for, and generally meditating upon such fundamental claims...

...My own limited experience as a recent participant in a Christian-Buddhist dialogue makes me sympathetic to this postliberal approach...

...For example, careful literary and historical study is made of the legends themselves...

...There is a hint of that approach either in or encouraged by Vatican II's Nostra aetate, but it is most explicitly identified with the thinking of Karl Rahner and his much-critiqued concept of the "anonymous Christian...

...His exegesis begins in the discourse of modern social science...

...The Gnostic impulse shows up in curious ways...

...We are in a better position to appreciate what Dalarun has done because of the labors of three excellent American Franciscan scholars who have translated or overseen the translation of all of the writings by and about Francis, from his own time to a century and a half following his death (Saint Francis of Assisi [three volumes], New City Press, 1999-2001, with a fourth volume promised, including an exhaustive index...

...Today, we are hearing in certain quarters about Mary as "mediatrix...

...Their hope is to find a way of expressing a certain spiritual unity behind the limitations of all religious systems...

...Consequently, we must be wary of seeking out commonalities among different religions...

...His own background as a member of the Reformed Church and later as an Anglican has given him wide scope to explore the Reformation and its various trajectories...

...and of the body (was Jesus raised as a person...

...In interreligious dialogue, then, the most honest procedure is to set out as faithfully as one can what one believes and why, and at the same time (borrowing Knitter's words) to be a good neighbor...

...powerful reflections by Karl Barth, and more...

...Eberhard Bethge, one of Bonhoeffer's closest collaborators, wrote the definitive biography of his friend, which appeared in English in 1967 and was revised in 2000 under the simple title Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography...

...This approach helps to keep speculation about Mary from becoming too freeform or devolving into the merely sentimental...

...Both history and corporeality are stumbling blocks for the Gnostic temper...

...He and his family belonged to a small resistance circle that not only conspired against the government but also tried to assassinate Hitler...

...Thirty-four years after the death of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1226, the general chapter of the Franciscans commissioned a new legenda (literally: a work to be read aloud) about the saint...

...Bonhoeffer's letters from prison made him famous, even though they were put to tendentious use as arguments for "secular Christianity" by some exponents of the short-lived "Death of God" theologies...

...emphasize a practice-based dialogue, which leads almost inevitably to contact with various forms of liberation theology...

...The purpose behind this dra-conian intervention was to quell competing claims about Francis's aims and how those aims (especially concerning poverty and the role of learning in the order) were to be achieved...

...Crosby points out the radical demands embedded in the prayer's petitions...

...His other works have had lasting influence-especially his powerful The Cost of Discipleship...

...Our religious experiences create the language and culture of our beliefs...

...In this volume, theological discussion of these notions is careful and balanced, as is treatment of Marian apparitions and "sightings...

...Born in Scotland and once a Presbyterian pastor (Macquarrie was later ordained an Anglican priest), he has had a distinguished academic career on both sides of the Atlantic...

...One conspicuous tradition within Christianity says boldly that people are saved only by and in faith in Jesus Christ...

...Honest exchange may lead us to learn something we did not know about ourselves before, while at the same time learning a good deal about others...

...he reacts with compassion...

...how Brother Elias turns from hero to villain (and back again, in the estimation of scholars) as time goes by...

...extraordinary lines from Simone Weil on the Greek text of the prayer...

...Radner insists that creeds do not exist "out there" platonically...

...His allegiance to the Catholic wing of Anglicanism gave him a broad sympathy for Catholic theology...

...How historical are they...

...There is a wonderful example for all of us: Look around-be moved by what we see-do something about it...

...It is only to the good that knowledgeable people help us understand the deep beliefs of others, so that we are neither misled by hostile ideologues (note the remarks about Islam bandied about by some preachers), nor left in the hands of well-meaning popular amateurs (such as Karen Armstrong...

...There is no generic religion...

...Certainly, those who have attended his classes and lectures or read his books...

...Finally, there is the task of trying to recover an adequate picture of the saint himself, who is so often seen through the haze of nineteenth-century romanticism...

...They will be eagerly anticipated...

...Finally, Ephraim Radner issues salutary warnings about the difficulty of uttering creedal statements in a church that is not well ordered...

...As the British Dominican Aidan Nichols has written, an orthodox Roman Catholic "can recognize in him [Macquarrie] with but little effort a 'separated doctor' of the Catholic Church...

...There is a certain (inexact) analogy between it and the search for the "Historical Jesus" in New Testament studies...

...Since Sabatier's time, the scholarly world has been embroiled in the "Franciscan Question...

...1274) published the Legenda Major, and the earlier "legends" were ordered suppressed...

...Some earlier "legends" escaped destruction, however...

...Knitter's book is an excellent survey of the best scholarship dealing with the vexatious subject of interreligious dialogue and comparative theology...

...Knitter provides a good survey of theologians who work in a comparative vein (James Fredericks and Francis Clooney, S.J., are his prime examples...

...Carl Braaten's essay on the Resurrection makes a simple but vigorous point: You cannot deny the Resurrection of Christ and call yourself a Christian...

...Crosby wisely resists entering at length into the argument...

...When they came to light again in the late nineteenth century, Paul Sabati-er, a French Protestant scholar, published a path-breaking biography of Francis in which he argued that Francis's followers had been hijacked by Rome and turned into just another religious order subject to the bonds of canon law, clericalism, and monastic observance...

...Douglas Farrow's article on the Holy Spirit does an excellent job of discussing the addition of the filioque to the Western Creed-a major bone of contention between the churches of the West and the East...

...Raum also details Bonhoeffer's early struggles against German antiSemitism, his contacts with the ecumenical movement, his transition from pacifism to active resistance, and his arrest and imprisonment...

...The latter notion is both ill founded in the tradition and ecumenically dangerous...

...Many, including Bonhoeffer himself, paid for their resistance with their lives...

...As such, it is an excellent introduction to the issues involved...

...Three years later, Saint Bonaventure (d...

...Cummings gives us a general introduction to Macquarrie's life and works, and then surveys his contributions to theology, ranging from his doctrine of God to his understanding of the life of prayer...

...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham The disciples' request, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Lk 11:1), elicited one of the most enduring and commented-upon of Christian texts, and the Lord's Prayer has subsequently had a privileged place in the Christian tradition...

...what to make of the different accounts of the stigmata...

...The specific character of a religious tradition helps us understand the incommensurateness of religious traditions...

...More sophisticated versions of this position affirm the singularity of the Christian faith (note Karl Barth's famous rejection of all "religion" over against faith in Christ), while attempting to articulate ways (mysterious and hidden) by which grace acts as a seedbed for faith...

...but only so much can be done in a book...

...The topic was a theological consideration of Mary in the history of salvation...

...The Dombes group, an unofficial gathering of Catholic and Protestant theologians that has met regularly since 1937, was founded by Paul Couturier (1881-1953), a French priest who worked in ecumenical circles when such efforts were not always honored within the Catholic Church...

...There is even an attempt to define Mary as "Co-Redemptrix," although, fortunately, the Roman magis-terium conspicuously avoids that term...

...I am much taken with Macquarrie's Paths in Spirituality, which is a fine work and especially good on prayer...

...There are further studies on how the legends depend or on one another, whether particular stories actually go back to Francis and his own words, and which ones are constructions to serve a polemical need...

...For example, while discussing the petition for "daily bread," he notes how often we find in Matthew this dynamic: Jesus sees a need...

...Gnosticism is another persistent temptation...

...There are still further reasons to recommend the book...

...From the comfort of our age, these declarations may seem like pious banalities, but for a persecuted church they were daring assertions...

...This is not to say these authors have only antiquarian interests...

...Cummings has kindly provided a bibliography of Macquarrie's books...

...Introducing Theologies of Religions Paul Knitter Orbis, $25,256 pp...

...Elizabeth Raum's Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God hits the important moments in Bonhoeffer's life: from his early education, his travels in Europe, his stint at Union Theological Seminary in New York, through his labors with the part of the German Evangelical Church that resisted being co-opted by the Nazi regime...

...We have moving words from the martyred Father Alfred Delp...

...There is, for instance, a huge debate and puzzle (going back to the third century) about the meaning of the Greek word epiousios (generally translated as "daily," as in "daily bread") that occurs in the Lord's Prayer but nowhere else in Greek...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...