Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words.
By Stanley Hauerwas.
The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar.Disrupting Time is an omnium gatherum on familiar Hauerwasian themes, ranging in style from the incisive to the outrageous to the whimsical. It will be a feast for Hauerwas fans, of whom there are many, and a very uneven introduction to his thought for the uninitiated. Cross-Shattered Christ is a very different genre for Hauerwas. Here, as he explains, Hauerwas is displaying more of the theologian and believer that he is as he invites readers to explore with him, and with much guidance from Hans Urs von Balthasar, the central mysteries of the faith. The title is from John Deane's poem "Mercy," by which, it is evident throughout, Hauerwas has been graced in myriad ways. Although the author is a Methodist, the book is redolent of catholic and Catholic sensibilities.
Edited by Edward T. Oakes and David Moss.Cambridge
You could spend a lifetime, or so it seems, reading Hans Urs von Balthasar. At least three or four years would be given just to reading through the long shelf of books, and then comes the rereading and pondering without end. I suppose that Father Edward T. Oakes has read Balthasar as closely as anyone alive. His book The Pattern of Redemption is the best introduction to the great man’s thought. Now Oakes has joined up with David Moss of Exeter University in editing The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (check out this link - much of the book is avaliable on-line), which contains seventeen essays by mostly notable theologians, plus editorial commentary. Balthasar, who died at age eighty-three in 1988, is among Catholics probably the most discussed theologian today. But Protestant and Orthodox thinkers have also been brought under his spell, as witness The Beauty of the Infinite by Orthodox theologian David B. Hart, a tour de force justly acclaimed as one of the most suggestive theological contributions of recent years (see the FT review, March 2004). In the afterword to the Cambridge Companion, Oakes allows himself to speculate on “the future of Balthasarian theology.” He notes that Balthasar set himself against the mainstream of modern thought from Descartes to Kant to Hegel with its “epistemological obsession” and “turn to the subject”—a belief that truth can only be found, and indeed is founded, in the subject. But Oakes may underestimate the extent to which Balthasar anticipated much of postmodernism, especially in its continental and French modes, both incorporating and trumping its insights with a Christian understanding of reality and how it can be known. This is an argument very effectively made by David Hart. For the interested but uninitiated, the place to enter the conversation is Oakes’ The Pattern of Redemption, followed by a substantial investment of time in the Balthasar writings highlighted by Oakes, then the Cambridge Companion to see what others make of it all, leading into Hart’s The Beauty to get an idea of what might be “the future of Balthasarian theology.”
Edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson
On several fronts, Protestant theologians continue to work at reappropriating dimensions of Christian faith and life that were abandoned during the tumultuous course of the divisions of the sixteenth century. This is true also with respect to thought and piety regarding Mary, as is addressed in a fine collection of essays edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, Mary, Mother of God (Eerdmans). In his essay, David Yeago, professor of systematic theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, examines the scriptural testimony about Mary in sympathetic conversation with John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater. A close reading of the biblical texts, Yeago persuasively argues, demonstrates not only that Mary is inseparable from the plan of salvation in the Word becoming flesh, which should be obvious, but that she has a continuing relationship with the Church as prototype, mother, and “archprophet.” To the Protestant objection that Mariology is not “necessary to salvation,” Yeago writes: “The goal of faith and theology is not to see how little of Scripture we can take seriously and still be saved; the goal is the maximum of integrity in taking seriously and holding together in our understanding the whole canon of testimony with which the Church has been provided by the Spirit. After all, the New Testament canon itself is superfluous to what is ‘necessary to salvation,’ since the foundational apostolic preaching went on without it. The question of ‘necessary for salvation’ arises when faith and mission have lost their way; [we are called], not to a reductionist purism, but rather to make distinctions within the totality of the biblical witness, in order to identify the chief point at which Scripture aims and to trace the ways in which its various aspects hang together to make that point.” “Mary’s paradigmatic role,” writes Yeago, “is different in kind from that of her Son: she is not the Redeemer but the prototype of the redeemed; she is not the one in whom we participate but the paradigm of that participation.” Mary, in the view of some, is but the contingent means for the accomplishment of the birth of the Messiah. She has no necessary role; any woman might have served that purpose. “Mary is a contingent phenomenon,” responds Yeago. “But if the gospel is true, then nothing in the economy of salvation, indeed nothing in creation nor creation itself, is ‘necessary’ in that sense. God’s love and freedom are prior to all necessity; all that is, and especially the mystery of salvation, is a meaningful concatenation of contingencies rooted in God’s free election. Mary, like Israel, like the form of the sacraments, like the make-up of the biblical canon, is simply one more such contingency.” It is not as though Mary, having played her part, is then moved off the stage of the continuing drama of the Church. Yeago quotes Martin Luther: “Therefore Mary is Christ’s Mother, and the Mother of us all, although he alone lies on her lap. . . . If he is ours, then we are to be in his place; where he is, there we also are to be, and everything he has is ours, and therefore his Mother is also our Mother.” Mary, Mother of God is a cautious probing by mainly Protestant thinkers who are keenly aware that most Protestants are inclined to assume that Mariology is synonymous with Mariolatry. There is an understandable anxiety to make clear that, by embracing lost dimensions of Catholic Christianity, one is not, as it is commonly put, “betraying the Reformation heritage.” Catholics are tempted to be impatient, thinking such anxiety and caution to be excessive. The temptation should be resisted. In a time when the prospect of ecclesial
reconciliation—whether with Lutherans, Anglicans, or any other communities of Western Christianity—seems increasingly remote, theological explorations such as
the essays in Mary, Mother of God should be welcomed as a necessary sowing of seeds that may bear fruit in a harvest of Christian unity at a time known only to God. We do not need to know. One is reminded of Jesus’ response to Peter when he wanted to know about the future of the apostle John: “If it is my will that he is to remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me.” Following Christ means, among many things, working for the fulfillment of his prayer that his disciples be one in a manner visible to the world. If it is his will that that happen a hundred or two hundred years from now, or not until the End Time, what is that to us? The quest for Christian unity, to which, as John Paul II has repeatedly said, the Catholic Church is irrevocably committed, needs no further justification other than that it is inescapably part of following Christ.
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