Showing papers in "The Journal of Religion in 1979"

The Sermon on the Mount: Its Literary Genre and Function

Abstract: In his presidential address before the annual meeting of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1977,' Professor Giinther Bornkamm raises the problem of the literary Gattung of the Sermon on the Mount (SM). It is certainly appropriate to address this problem because the literary Gattung needs identification2 regardless of whether the SM is a composition of the gospel writer, as Bornkamm maintains, or a pre-Matthean composition, as I have suggested.3 Bornkamm immediately states his conclusion that he does not see any real analogy to the literary Gattung of the SM in either primitive Christian or Jewish literature.4 This conclusion,

Polysymbolism and Modern Religiosity

Abstract: The present as a time of spiritual change and creativity is widely recognized and has been helpfully analyzed by a number of commentators on religion and contemporary culture1 For the most part, their soundings have concentrated on the so-called new religions-a bewildering variety of countercultural ideologies, cult religions, and self-realization therapies popular among the alienated and marginal members of society Some may question the appropriateness of this focus in light of the comparatively small percentage of the population involved and of the recent revival of interest in traditional forms of religion But, in fact, attention to the new religions is not misplaced because something is happening here that will radically alter traditional religions from within The revolutionary possibility at work on the fringes of our time's "return to religion" is not the content of the new religions but the form of a new religiosity2 The new religions are contributing to the formation of a new way of being religious-a spiritual life that is not tied to any monolithic culture, tradition, or self-identity Indeed, the widened pluralism of religious options in our culture reflects a deepening pluralizing of religious consciousness as such In William Shepherd's elegant phrase, we are witnessing the emergence of a "polysymbolic religiosity"3

Is Theodicy a Question of Power

Abstract: David Ray Griffin's treatise on theodicy is one book thatjustifies itsjacket blurbs. Not only is it the \"first large-scale treatment of the problem of evil from the 'process' perspective,\" it should indeed \"become a standard text on theodicy for courses in theology and philosophy.\" (I can report from experience that it is a superb seminar text.) In this work we are dealing with a substantial treatise on a pressing issue; I would say that it is the central issue for theology today. Naturally, our interest is heightened by curiosity as to how process thought can deal at length with an issue that many of its critics have judged to be the rock on which it must finally flounder. We remember that more than a decade ago, in his memorable review of John B. Cobb's first full-scale work in process theology,' Langdon Gilkey prophesied that unless it could deal with sin and tragedy better than Alfred North Whitehead did, process theology would indeed flounder.2 In this review I will summarize the argument that Griffin sets before us and then raise some questions. The author has organized his book in a straightforward manner, beginning with a brief statement of the problem and definition of terms, followed by an almost as brief summary of biblical and Greek sources for reflection on theodicy. The longest section is a 200-page survey of a dozen theodicies, reaching from Augustine to several contemporary thinkers; one of the great merits of the book is its rather extensive dialogue with contemporary theologians and philosophers. This historical section is not mere reportage; it is an interpretive backdrop for the final sixty pages, which lay out a forceful, constructive and \"nontraditional\" theodicy (the other dozen thinkers are labeled by Griffin as \"traditional\"). Griffin's method is the now familiar philosophicaltheological approach which he set forth in his earlier book on christology3 and which he and Cobb propound together in their recent Process

Arnold's Version of Transcendence. The "Via Poetica"

Abstract: By the England over which Victoria presided we are bequeathed but three religious thinkers-John Henry Newman, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Matthew Arnold-who, by reason of the relevance of their legacies to contemporary discussions, appear to be genuinely living guides; and it is a considerable oddity of modern intellectual life that Arnold who is, of this great trio, the most truly prophetic figure should, from his own time unto ours, have been regularly responded to in a hostile and dismissive way. Paul Ricoeur suggests that the hermeneutics of culture in the modern period may be thought of as having had two great styles, the one being determined by an intention to demystify received traditions and the other being distinguished by an intention to rehabilitate and salvage a heritage of proclamation and kerygma: he speaks of the former as \"the school of suspicion\" and of the latter as \"the school of restoration.\"' And we will have no difficulty in assigning Marx and Nietzsche and Freud, on the one hand, or Newman and Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, on the other, to their proper spheres. But Arnold's career, like that of Rudolf Bultmann or Paul Tillich, resists being situated wholly on either side of the divide between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of restoration, since it was committed at once to a project of iconoclasm and a project of retrieval. On the one hand, as he considered the condition of the Christian faith in the nineteenth century, he found himself confronting a religion which had \"materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact,\" which had \"attached its emotion to the fact, and now,\" as he said, \"the fact is failing it\"2-which meant, he felt, that candor required the exposure of how vaporous and illusory indeed was the \"fact\" on which orthodoxy had for so long been wont to rest its case. But, then, he was equally convinced that the real genius of the witness made by the Chris'Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 27-36. 2Matthew Arnold, \"The Study of Poetry,\" Essays in Criticism, 2d ser. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1896), p. 1. ? 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0022-4189/79/5903-0001$01.93

William James's Philosophy of Mysticism

Abstract: Renewed interest in mysticism and mystical experiences is widespread in the contemporary intellectual and cultural scene. The sources of this revived interest are varied but need not occupy our attention here. For our purposes we only need to note that this new cultural fascination with the mystical has engendered several questions. Some of these questions deal with the relation of mysticism to the ethical life and go something like this: Does the mystical experience enhance the ethical life? Or is mysticism, as some would claim, actually subversive of the ethical life? If the mystical experience enhances the ethical life, is it a major source of ethical living? If one has a mystical experience, does it lead directly either experientially or logically, and independently of other factors, to enhanced ethical capacities? Or is the mystical experience primarily one among many factors that might be helpful for the realization of ethical values, and then only if prior ethical interpretations and points of view are brought to the mystical experience so that certain values and possibilities in it are maximized and brought to the service of the ethical living? In this paper, I propose to review some of the answers William James gave to these questions. James is a worthy person to review on this topic for several reasons. First, he was one of the early American psychologists and philosophers to give careful attention to mysticism. He had an especially broad and generous view of the field of scientific psychology.1 All mental phenomena, no matter how unorthodox or bizarre, were fair game for the subject matter of psychology.2 Such latitude easily included

Religion and Literature in a Secular Age: The Critic's Dilemma

Abstract: In most cultures of the world, religion and literature are still indistinguishably linked at the moment when they emerge from the mists of prehistory. From the Vedic hymns of ancient India to the chants and incantations of the Amerindians, from the earliest Egyptian pyramid inscriptions to the liturgical poetry of Old Church Slavonic, man has usually consecrated his first poetic efforts to the service of his worship. Early epic, in keeping with the folktales underlying it, often fulfilled the dual function of entertainment and religious instruction: the Gilgamesh Epic incorporates ancient Babylonian astro-theology with its myths of creation and annual regeneration into the adventures of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu; the Old Saxon Heliand translates the story of Jesus into aggressive terms intelligible to Germanic warriors newly converted to Christianity. Drama, as we know it in the West, emerged from rituals associated with religious celebrations-first in Greek antiquity and then again during the Latin Middle Ages. In European literature, this religious impulse remained dominant for many centuries. Most of the landmarks of postclassical Western literature down to the eighteenth century are generally Christian in their orientation-from the medieval mystery plays to Milton's epics and the meditative poetry of the European baroque. The history of German literature, for instance, begins with Bible translations, paraphrases, and commentaries (e.g., Otfried's ninth-century versified harmony of the Gospels, the eleventh-century rhyming Vienna Genesis, and so forth).1 Until the twelfth century, in fact, written German literature-in contrast to that transmitted orally-is virtually coterminous with religious literature. Even in an increasingly worldly culture, various forms of spiritual poetry persist which revolve around the dogmatic and ethical content of

Hermeneutics or Poetics

Abstract: Since the advent of modernity, the problem of reading and interpreting literary texts has posed itself increasingly in terms of contextuality. The dogmatic past, with its unquestioned authority of tradition, has been gradually replaced in the last two centuries by a plastic historical past that is constantly questioned and reshaped according to criteria evolved by the present. Historicism first asserted itself by stressing the importance of historical contexts, indeed their primacy: to understand a work of the past was largely a matter of discovering and specifying the setting in which it had appeared (cultural, social, psychological). But such historical contexts, it was eventually realized, no matter how objectively and painstakingly established, had nothing "fixed" or definitive about them.

Lessing, Kierkegaard, and the "Ugly Ditch": A Reexamination

Abstract: Thanks largely to Kierkegaard, references to Lessing's "ugly ditch" between the contingent truths of history and the necessary truths of reason have become a permanent part of our theological landscape. Undertaking yet another investigation of the ditch may, to use John Austin's expression, be subject "to the law of diminishing fleas,"3 but a major unclarified issue seems to warrant such an investigation. It is well known that Lessing and Kierkegaard respond very differently to the ditchwhereas Lessing, due to his "old legs" and "heavy head" (not to mention theological scruples)4 cannot make it across, Kierkegaard goes ahead

Between History and Paradise: Initiation Trials

Abstract: "Great novels are above all great fairy tales," Vladimir Nabokov used to say. This was certainly meant as a paradox, since the fairy-tale nature of the works Nabokov had in mind (Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Proust'sA La Recherche du temps perdu, among others) is by no means easy to grasp; indeed, to become aware of it, one must first realize that, according to another typically Nabokovian dictum, "Life is the least realistic of fictions." Most serious novelists would be surprised and a little annoyed to hear someone state, no matter how admiringly, that all they do is recount fairy tales. Not so Mircea Eliade. Actually, his most carefully constructed and most ambitious novel, The Forbidden Forest, achieves some of its most powerful effects by showing how many unobserved elements of the marvelous enter into what we call reality, and conversely, how real certain aspects of the marvelous are. The Forbidden Forest has an entirely self-conscious fairy-tale dimension. And this goes beyond the significant fact that three of the central motifs of the novel are explicitly linked to some of the best-known Romanian basme (folktales): the motif of the unrecognizability of miracle or the sacred reminds us of "Fat Frumos si merele de aur" (Prince Charming and the golden apples), in which the prince will be put to death if he is unable to choose the one apple of real gold out of a hundred gilded ones; the motif of the search of eternal life recalls "Tinerete fare batrinete si viata fara de moarte" (Youth without Old Age and Life without Death); and the motif of unattainable love refers us to the various tales about Ileana Cosanziana, the inaccessible fairy princess of Romanian folklore. Essentially, for Eliade, fairy tales perform, on the level of imagination, an initiatory function which is analogous to those performed on different levels by other kinds of narrative. This function is rooted in the "human condition" itself, man's life having the character of a "story," and specifically of an initiation story-"every existence," Eliade writes, "is made up of an unbroken series of 'ordeals,' 'deaths,' and 'resurrections' ..." (Myth and Reality [New York, 1968], p. 202). In substance, then, if not in form, a novel, insofar as it attempts to make sense of the fate of human individuals, functions as a "doublet" for initiatory rites and myths, very much like a fairy tale. Among contemporary writers, Eliade is one of the few who could fully subscribe to Nabokov's paradoxical formula, but we must not forget that Non idem est si duo dicunt idem.

The Political Dimensions of Theology

Abstract: First let me say what a signal and unexpected honor it is for me to find myself being inaugurated as the Shailer Mathews Professor in the Divinity School-the school which he did so very much to make illustrious. It is also a great personal pleasure because my memories of Mathews remain exceedingly vivid, even though I was a small boy and he a mighty but kindly dean with a pair of very twinkling eyes! Were he to be inaugurating himself with this lecture, there would, I fear, be some rather significant differences: It would be delivered with a Maine rather than a Chicago accent, and it would be uproariously funny. I can manage neither. But I can, in my solid Midwestern tones and in a noticeably different way, talk about the same theme he would have emphasized: Christianity and the social, the political dimensions of theology. This is, therefore, one major reason for my choice of topic: to emphasize a theme-the relation of Christianity to the social-to which he gave so much of his thought and productive work. Another reason is that through the inscrutable workings of providence-connected in some way with the perhaps no less inscrutable workings of the present dean-I find myself temporary custodian of the Field of Ethics and Society. To date I have offered these disenchanted orphans nothing but boring avuncular advice and heavy motherly comfort and thus I feel called upon to attempt a more positive, if not to them ultimately more helpful, relation to their work. I have chosen, therefore, to speak of some of the theological grounds of the social and political concerns their studies embody. As we all are aware, the issues involved are every bit as central for present-day political ethics and political theology as they were in Dean

The Tasks of Theology in Judaism: A Humanistic Program

Abstract: The principal task of theology in Judaism is to draw out and make explicit the normative statements of the acknowledged sources of Judaism and to learn how to renew discourse in accord with these norms.' It is, specifically, to delineate the world-view shaped within the experience and aspirations of the community of Judaism and to perceive the world within that view. The goal is that, in time to come, the sight of ages to come may be made yet more perspicacious too. Vision received, vision reformed, vision transmitted-these are the tasks of theology in Judaism.2

Is There Any Way from Athens to Jerusalem

Abstract: Karl Rahner has at last presented us with a work that sets out his theology both compactly and in the round. Over the years Rahner has produced many articles and monographs, but these almost always were addressed to particular topics or problems. However stimulating and illuminating the treatment of these issues, one always wished to see how all these pieces fitted together in a full systematic theological position, and one wished for a careful statement of the philosophical and theological foundations on which that whole position rested. In the present work these desires are met. We have here a carefully crafted statement of the systematic theological position of Karl Rahner, now available in a clear English translation. The work begins with a discussion of the anthropological foundations on which, as Rahner sees it, all talk about God, and thus all theology, proceeds; it moves gradually and carefully to a discussion of the problematics of the human condition, especially as evidenced in the experience of guiltiness; and then it proceeds, in the latter two-thirds of the book, to an interpretation of the specifically Christian claims about the history of salvation, the centrality of Christ, and the significance of the church, in the light of the anthropological foundations earlier laid. It would be impossible in a short review of this sort to do justice to the richness of this book. There are interesting and illuminating discussions of the christological and trinitarian dogmas; of human freedom and creativity; of the problem of miracles; of the relation of Christianity and other religions; of the contrast and similarity of Protestant and Roman Catholic interpretations of grace, faith, the church, religious authority, and the like; of the nature of dogma, of life after death (which Rahner repudiates in any ordinary commonsense version); of the nature of human subjectivity and historicity; of the relation of time and eternity; and of many other issues. At many points Rahner departs from traditional Christian positions in highly creative ways, and yet he is always able to show a certain legitimacy for his moves. At every point Rahner is concerned to show that Christian faith and Christian teaching, when properly interpreted, make very good sense in the light of modern scientific, historical, and philosophical thinking. Even when he is not fully convincing in his argumentation, Rahner is highly instructive. Though

History and Dogma and Individual Psychology

Abstract: It is a common assumption that the historicist of Maurice Blondel's essay, "History and Dogma," was Alfred Loisy. Since 1899, Loisy had been publishing some pieces of what he envisioned as a large treatise on historical apologetics. The Gospel and the Church appeared in 1902 as part of this program; it was and for some years continued to be a sensation. When "History and Dogma" appeared in 1904, knowledgeable readers took for granted that the essay had in view Loisy's historical apologetics. Some were pleased. Others, notably von Hiigel, were not and criticized Blondel's failure to understand Loisy's historical method. Later commentators have maintained the assumption that Loisy was the target of Blondel's essay. They have been encouraged, first, by the fact that the essay marked Blondel's departure from the far Left and, lately, by Rene Marle's edition of the correspondence between Loisy and Blondel. Marle's comments are patently prejudicial in defense of Blondel's orthodoxy, but the fact remains that the same criticisms addressed to Loisy in the correspondence reappear almost verbatim in the published essay directed at a supposedly fictitious historicist. Blondel disclaimed any association between the essay's historicist and Loisy. Insofar as the essay was thrust into the surge of Loisy's notoriety, such a disclaimer does seem feeble and has usually been disregarded. Nevertheless, Blondel may have meant what he said.1 While it is true that the historicist was constructed from Blondel's objections to Loisy, it is also the case that, by Blondel's own admission in the correspondence, Loisy satisfied these specific objections.2 Moreover, one cannot ignore

Historical Understanding and Theological Commitment: The Dilemma of Ritschl's Christology

Abstract: Before the days of his dialectical outburst against liberal theology, Karl Barth once said that the problem of Christian faith and history was "the problem of Protestant theology in the present." "Indeed," Barth continued, "in view of the Modernist controversy in the Catholic situation, one might say that we have to do here with the problem of Christian theology generally."1 Today, even though various problems claim to be the problem of Christian theology, Barth's comment still points to an extremely important problem. Attention to the thought of Albrecht Ritschl can illumine the relation between historical thinking and Christian theology. Ritschl's critics have frequently frowned upon the way in which historical or ethical thinking appears to dominate his theology. But at significant points, such criticism is unwarranted, for Ritschl's theology is clearly the controlling factor vis-a-vis historical interpretation. Such theological limitation upon historical thinking is especially evident in his christology where he attempts to be faithful both to the principles of historical thinking and to certain traditional dogmatic claims about Jesus. In significant ways, his approach anticipates certain positions which are advanced at present. The following examination of his understanding of history and christology will correct possible misinterpretations of his thought and will seek to clarify methodological alternatives.

The pain of self-contradiction

Abstract: sary entailment of the generic features of human action. Here he defines problems, proposes solutions, refutes objections relentlessly, and traces practical implications-all with a thoroughness which exhausts the reader and renders any prospective critic wearied and disheartened. Gewirth deals with the fundamental questions. He proposes to explain why we ought to be moral, whose interests we ought to consider favorably, and just which interests ought thus to receive favorable consideration (sec. 1.1). In dealing with these questions, he employs what he describes as a \"dialectically necessary method.\" The dialectically necessary method \"begins from statements orjudgements that are necessarily attributable to every agent because they derive from the generic features that constitute the necessary structure of action\" (sec. 1.13); it then proceeds to examine what these necessary statements and judgments imply. Where does this method lead Gewirth? In one of his summaries he outlines his argument as follows:

Respect for Rational Creatures

Abstract: It is a pleasure to write about a book whose theses one believes to be, in their essential respects, profound and true. Alan Donagan is correct in his attempt to ground moral norms in our nature as rational creatures and in his claim that this theory of morality, at least in its general outlines, is transmitted in religious as well as nonreligious traditions. I will discuss various difficulties in Donagan's formulation of these theses, but I present my points with respect for the scope and depth of his theory.