Religion booknotes

...But Cottret gave me many reasons to contemplate why, even if one does not love Calvin, one cannot ignore him...

...For in Christ, the unseen God has been made tangibly present in this world through Mary, and in Christ and Mary is the promise that this world can be fully restored to a condition worthy of its origins in God...

...Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary Sarah Jane Boss Continuum, $27.95, 264 pp...

...And, finally, how is one to live as if the revelation of God as Trinitarian is central to faith...

...There are similar formulations in prayers found in Pauline letters, which have been adapted for use in our liturgy: "The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you" (2 Cor 13:13...

...Was this simply the result of Calvin's relentlessly logical mind...

...It is one thing to articulate the three names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but it is quite another to reflect on what they mean and how they can and cannot be understood...

...Apart from some tedious pages of such analysis, Boss argues well that certain kinds of Marian devotion contribute to patterns of domination and repression...

...That insight, not always accepted by such groups as the Jesus Seminar who want Jesus to be some kind of vagrant cynic philosopher, needs much attention beyond the world of academe...

...Recently, there has been a spate of books studying everything from Marian apparitions to the cult of Mary as seen by feminists...

...O'Collins structures his work around three major questions: What does Scripture tell us about the Trinity...

...Paulist, $16.95, 234 pp...

...But I think a fair case can be made for Delbrel's pertinence today if one transposes her vocabulary slightly to imagine her writing for an unbelieving world...

...Karl Rahner once famously observed that most Christians profess the Trinity in their recitation of the creed but live as monotheists...

...On the other hand, it would be easy to dismiss this body of work as of mere historical interest since the only Communists left in France are a handful of academic Gauchistes and their camp followers...

...His historical discussion, covering just under eighty pages, is a model of clarity and concision...

...In any number of places in the New Testament there are triadic formulations linking God the Father/Christ/Spirit or Holy Spirit...

...On the positive side, Boss sees the nexus between Mary and Christ as an opportunity to articulate a different model of humanity, free from domination and oppression...

...At the same time, he did not mind appealing to the council to discipline recalcitrant citizens who played tennis in the town square while he was preaching on Sunday...

...She also raises the issue of aggressive evangelizing of Jews...

...a truth not yet fully appreciated or sufficiently articulated...

...One of the characteristics of Catholicism is a lively devotion to Our Lady...

...In the final third of his work, O'Collins takes up contemporary thinking about the Trinity and the relationship of that thinking to actual Christian practice...

...Calvin's logic of election and damnation, the twin decrees of predestination, are, in Cottret's words, "as chiaroscuro, the work of a painter or an architect, sensed more in the mass than in the detail...

...He also notes the strong and early influence of such language in the liturgy and the development of the creeds...

...The reader comes away from this learned book with two somewhat contradictory impressions: admiration, to be sure, for the single-minded devotion to the Word of God expressed by an ascetic person of keen intelligence and great piety...

...What I most liked about the book is its resistance to reductionism...

...A basic effort of Boss's book is to demonstrate that various images of Mary express relationships based on domination and repression...

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

...Here one finds the real value of her writings...

...What results from that summation is a passionately felt and thoroughly readable work on the tripersonal God...

...Cottret traces John Calvin's (1509-64) intellectual development in the context of sixteenth-century Northern humanism, with its emphasis on critical study of the Bible and patristic literature...

...A sociologist, Boss approaches Mariology through the lens of the sociology of knowledge...

...In the last part of her book, Boys takes up various strategies for teaching the faith with a sensitivity to Judaism, and offers an overview of recent fruitful dialogue between Christians and Jews...

...What does the subsequent witness of the liturgy and theological tradition say about this subject...

...Over the past generation, there has been a reorientation in focus away from speculation on the Trinitarian relations within the Godhead toward an attempt to understand the Trinity in the actual economy of salvation...

...Delbrel's writings have a dated feel, but when one looks beneath the surface there is perennial wisdom...

...has an extensive bibliography, a good index, and pages of footnotes that contain material almost as interesting as what appears in the text...

...The most famous, of course, are in the stories about the baptism of Jesus, and the mission mandate at the end of the Gospel of Matthew to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...

...The neophyte student of Calvin would not know from this bibliography that the Institutes of the Christian Religion and most of his corpus are available in good English versions...

...As I read through these quite disparate papers (some never before published), what struck me was the deep sense of contemplative awareness that they reveal in an almost accidental fashion...

...Has God Only One Blessing...

...First published in French, Bernard Cottret's Calvin is a very readable study of that central Reformation figure...

...He provides a full resume of Delbrel's life and work...

...To make that case the author depends on the philosophical work of the critical theory associated with the Frankfort School-a theory based on a lumpy blend of Freudian analysis and Marxist philosophy and articulated in unreadable prose...

...O'Collins studies these and many other texts in the New Testament...

...In one sense, she reflects a crucial era in the life of the modern church, namely, the pastoral energy of France in the period of the nouvelle theologie...

...In Empress and Handmaiden, Sarah Boss looks at the varying ways in which Mary has been depicted and venerated in the Christian tradition...

...At the same time she gives witness to her deep commitment to Christ in a place and time where that commitment was not easy to keep...

...After all, as she writes in one place, if someone asks a person if he or she really can "swallow" the story of the Resurrection of Christ, it is the authentic person of faith who says simply: "Yes, I do...

...That hard truth was uttered more than forty years ago but it still rings true...

...It is still not clear to me why, for instance, predestination, a doctrine found from Augustine through Aquinas, should have become such a central article of faith for Calvin and the subsequent Reformed tradition though it never reached that level of importance in the historic Catholic creeds...

...In making that case Boss uses not only sociological theory but a good reading of the theological sources and a keen eye for art...

...From my outsider, Catholic viewpoint, Calvin's theology seems bloodless, and insufficiently attentive to the implications of the Word made Flesh...

...Boys's survey of Catholic and ecumenical movements promoting greater Jewish-Christian understanding provides additional resources for this important undertaking...

...Cottret's work favorably resembles William Bouwsma's 1988 biography, and is quite balanced in its historical judgments...

...Curiously, the book's cover touts a second Hans Urs von Balthasar introduction, written for the German edition...

...Cottret argues, for example, against the common characterization of Calvin as absolute ruler of Geneva...

...Such a truncated Christian life offers nothing to the unbeliever...

...This task she undertook at a student conference in 1961 where she parsed belief as a kind of knowing and a kind of speaking...

...Edith Stein (oddly, never mentioned in this work) would be a good test case...

...Different Christian groups have different positions: Evangelicals feel compelled to evangelize vigorously while Catholic attitudes are in flux...

...Her analysis does not turn the doctrines and devotions about Mary into a psychoanalytic case study (as does the work of Michael Carroll) or a somewhat simplistic feminist screed (Marina Warner...

...She says that when radical faith is weak there arises a surfeit of obligations and commitments which do not spring from the deepest core of faith...

...Those insights help free Mary's conception from the old persuasion about the "contamination" of natural procreation...

...Some of the more rewarding aspects of this volume are her demonstration that what we do as Catholics might sound less innocent were we to imagine having a Jew in a pew next to us...

...And one must hold onto the fundamental insight of historical-critical scholarship, namely, that Jesus must be understood as a Jew or not be understood at all...

...She is a highly regarded writer and scholar who has devoted much of her energies to the relationship of Judaism to Catholicism...

...A convert to Catholicism, Delbrel spent her adult life as a Catholic activist in the overwhelmingly communist Parisian suburb of Ivry...

...In fact, although Calvin had an abiding antipathy for anything Roman, his real bete noire was the radical wing of the Reformation...

...As a kind of summing up of those many scholarly reflections, Gerald O'Collins, a beloved veteran professor at Rome's Gregorian University, has published the heart of his lectures on Trinitarian theology, presented (among other places) at Notre Dame during regular summer visits...

...I conclude with a minor quibble: While the translation by M. Wallace McDonald is crisp and very readable, the translator should have provided a select bibliography of Calvin's work in English, rather than repeat the original French bibliography...

...When speaking, she insists, we cannot afford the luxury of saying easy things to make it easier for ourselves...

...An older focus on Mary as mother, for example, recently has given way to an understanding of Mary as the perfect disciple or, among those who have an interest in liberation theology, to a Mary who, in the Magnificat, represents the poor and overthrows the pretensions of the rich and powerful...

...Boys (trained in Scripture) spends many pages thinking about how the Bible is to be read...

...He worries about some new forms of naming because of their tendency to modal-ism, but rightly points out that there is much to be gained by remembering that at the heart of the Christian understanding of God is the key fact that God is relational...

...Calvin, to put it mildly, had little tolerance for such devotion, and Cottret has some good pages in which Genevans are hauled before the Council charged with speaking of Mary as a "saintly woman" or praying the Ave Maria...

...If an unbeliever asks about the Resurrection, then it is about the Resurrection that we must speak...

...She considers, for instance, the old topos of Mary's virginity in partu (often pictured as light coming through a window in late medieval and Northern Renaissance painting) to argue that popular interest in that theme might have some link to both the pain of childbirth and the high maternal rate of death...

...This turns out to be brief and oracular, and tells us nothing about Delbrel...

...One of the most useful things about this biography is its focus on the content and style of Calvin's teaching...

...I myself made much use of it in preparation for some talks on the Trinity for an RCIA class...

...I was also much taken with her discussion of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, in which she points out that its acceptance within the Franciscan tradition (the doctrine was denied by such worthies as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas) might be linked to the Franciscan insight that even the most minute parts of creation were occasions of grace and wholeness...

...The result, alas, is a worldview less than persuasive when looked at closely or stated more directly...

...One of the burdens of early Christian writers (Justin Martyr in the second century is a prime example) was to show that such affirmations did not imply polytheism...

...Although she was by birth and heritage a Jew, when she converted, she did so from atheism, not from Judaism...

...Calvin had an ongoing battle with the Genevan councils over whether the church was to be subservient to political or judicial power in the right to excommunicate...

...We, the Ordinary People of the Streets Madeleine Delbrel Eerdmans, $24, 270 pp...

...This book, the fruit of her own lengthy engagement with the topic, reflects a command of the pertinent literature in the area of Jewish-Christian relations as well as an agreeable style which makes the work not only readable but teachable...

...Geneva was a refuge for religious reformers of every stripe, but that refuge did not countenance the presence of Catholics or members of the so-called radical reformation...

...Happily, the translation contains the original introduction written by the estimable Father Jacques Loewe...

...Finally, the cross, a central image in Christianity, she argues, can and must be "read" without falling back on the poisonous observation of Jews as Christ-killers, or as an image that gives support to anti-Jewish sentiment...

...Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding Mary Boys Paulist, $29.95,393 pp...

...Boys also notes that the juxtaposition of texts from Old and New Testament could easily be mistaken to suggest that the Old has now been superseded by the New when, in fact, the church teaches that God's revelation is a continuum...

...The "Ressourcement in Catholic Thought" series from Eerdmans has now brought out the collected writings of this French Catholic activist, first published in Paris more than thirty years ago...

...The Resurrection may not be the first topic brought up when speaking with an unbeliever but if it is brought up, she writes, one must face it squarely and not flinch...

...In more than one meditation she attempts to articulate in the simplest, most compelling terms what it means to be a believer (a difficult task under any circumstances...

...equally a kind of repugnance for a person who seems to have been humorless and driven by logic into personal and theological rigidity...

...Boss locates theological truth in the person and place of Mary...

...The word itself [trinitas] was coined in the late second century by the North African writer Tertullian...

...A few years ago I reviewed in this column a short book on the life of Madeleine Delbrel (1904-64) written by Charles Mann...

...O'Collins does a good job explaining how the debates of the fourth century finally ended with the affirmations of the councils running from Nicaea to Chalcedon...

...She made me wonder what, for example, a Jew would make of my favorite Advent hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" with its plea "to ransom captive Israel," a phrase which, prior to reading Boys, I had always identified as "us...

...Particulars of Boss's analysis are very telling...

...Boss shows that the varying ways Mary has been understood can be traced in the evolution of Christian art over the centuries...

...The Tripersonal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity Gerald O'Collins, S.J...

...She argues, for example, that the hostility the Gospel of John shows toward Jews is the result of specific polemics between the synagogues and the Johannine community at the time of the Gospel's composition, and must not be universalized...

...In some particularly fine pages, Cottret explains in what sense Calvin was a humanist (both by training and by his philological interests) and in what sense he was not (Calvin accepted none of humanism's benign view of human perfectibility...

...There is a fine discussion of Calvin as a polemicist, preacher, and French prose stylist...

...Further, one cannot reduce the complex forms of Judaism in the times of Jesus to an abstraction described simply as "the Jews...

...I was surprised that, in making her case, she did not mention the rococo Mariology of Grignion de Montfort and his devotees-a form of devotionalism alive today and somewhat favored by the pope and others on the Marian right...

...In a paper prepared for those who participated in Vatican II, she makes some striking observations about the life of Catholics which are as true today as they were forty years ago...

...Has God Only One Blessing...

...things like "attachments to certain forms of moralism, a commitment to certain political alternatives, an adoption of certain lifestyles and customs, which are all indifferent in themselves but which start to be taken for Christian duties and mistakenly equated with the life of faith...

...Boss is at pains to show-and argues with some persuasion-that Mary has been understood in quite different ways over the centuries...

...Sister Mary Boys holds the chair in practical theology at New York's Union Theological Seminary where she moved after some years of teaching religious education at Boston College...

...If I understand Boys correctly, she would cede the right of Catholics to present fairly the claims of faith, accept converts if they are so led to the church, but not "target" Jews since they are part of that one blessing from God...

...One very illuminating section discusses his most famous work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which developed through a series of additions and expansions over the decades until it arrived at the architectonic whole in which the grandeur of God stands as a pole over against which sinful humans dwell...

...It is in that context that her writings should be read...

...That relationality allows us to speak to God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit...