Communion and Liberation in Kansas City

Leawood, Kansas. Yesterday, we started the hope book. If you're in the area and would like to join us next time, email me at fpkthree@gmail.com

What Is Faith in Christ?

I want to understand better the connection between faith as an indirect method of knowledge and faith as it pertains to Christ. I know the connection is there because I live it every day, but I want to examine it closer, to test it in its particulars so I don't miss anything. 

I return again to the book on faith: Is It Possible to Live Like This? Faith by Luigi Giussani. Giussani is an authority for me - which is to say, he tells me things that I don't fully understand or believe and when I follow them I grow. Here's what Giussani says:

"How do you come to know Christ? Clearly, from our outline of the methods that reason uses, the one that has to be applied here is faith. We don't know Christ directly. We know Christ neither through evidence nor through the analysis of experience" (25). If someone disagrees with this point, I would like to see an explanation.

A curious thing about Giussani is that he always insists that the method by which we come to know Christ must be the same method that the disciples came to know him. In the book on faith, he describes five passages, or moments, in the progressive coming to know Christ better: 

1. An encounter
   
2. An exceptional presence
   
3. Wonder
   
4. Who is this man?
   
5. Responsibility before the fact
   

Giussani insists: the problem that we have with faith in Jesus is the same problem that the disciples had:

"The moment the question 'Who is Jesus?' was posed for the first time is the instance in which the problem of faith entered the world. Not faith as a simple method of reason, but as a method of reason applied to something supra-reasonable, beyond reason, unthinkable, inconceivable. Faith as a method of reason applied to something inconceivable, because everything this man said was unconceivable" (27). 

If you don't feel this inconceivability, then the note on page 27 points to John 1:35ff (the ff means start at 1:35 and keep reading until you see it).  Here we can see that faith in Jesus is different because the object is different: not this or that, but Someone who is beyond what we can conceive, better than we can imagine. 

Grace builds on nature, stretches it, changes it, but it doesn't wipe it out. It doesn't replace human nature with something alien. Faith does not turn men into angels who know things directly. 

Luigi Giussani, a Spiritual Biography

The Mystery of Fr. Giussani Revealed by His Writings

Sandro Magister

For the first time, a book presents the spiritual biography of the founder of Communion and Liberation. At the center of everything are a "coming" and an "encounter." An extract from the volume's culminating chapter

Hope according to the Apostle Paul and Fr. Giussani

Over at Is it Possible blog, I've collected a series of quotes that Fr. Giussani cites in beginning his meditation on hope: The Apostle Paul on Hope.

Is it Possible to Live this Way? Hope

April 20 Book presentation

On Monday, April 20 Dr. George Nicholas, from the Benedictine College English Department, and Father Meinrad Miller, OSB, from the Theology department will present the book Is it Possible to Live this Way? Volume II: Hope by Monsignor Luigi Giussani.

The presentation will take place at 7:30 PM in the O'Malley-McAlister Auditorium, Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas.

Jonathan Edwards, Gerald McDermott, Tibor Fabiny

So, I've been reading along in my Understanding Jonathan Edwards. It's an adventerous book, and I thought I would share a few notes at this point.

McDermott is a brilliant and generous theologian. Although this is the first time I've read him, I'm very pleased that he makes his own substantial contribution to the collection: a meaty introduction ("How to Understand the American Theologian") and conclusion ("Edwards's Relevance Today"), a topical article on "Edwards on the World Religions," and a response article to Tibor Fabiny's article, "Edwards and Biblical Typology."

The collection itself is pluralistic and generous: 8 topics by a diversity of Edwards scholars, and "each chapter is followed by a response from a European scholar not previously familiar with Edwards" (9) - except of course for McDermott's own response to Fabiny.

* *

** **

* *

Fabiny makes some interesting connection between Edwards and Shakespeare, Luther, and the Metaphysical poets. I'd like to read something longer by Fabiny, but from what I see here he seems to give short shrift to the typology practiced during the patristic period and the middle ages. For example, he says that "The Fathers, however, did not clearly distinguish their typological method from the allegorism commonly used by the Greeks and their Hellenistic civilization" (97). Here, I would expect a citation from a patristics scholar to give some weight to what otherwise is a commonly held truism. The two modern scholars of typology cited are Goppelt from 1939 and Gerhard von Rad from 1952. I wonder what perspective contemporary Origen scholarship could provide for seeing the context of Edwards. Or what affinities there are between Augustine and Edwards. Or what about Henri de Lubac's Medieval Exegesis?

My point here is not so much to fault Fabiny for focusing on the Reformation and the 17th Century, but to suggest that Edwards may be more in the patristic and medieval tradition than one might expect a Reformed theologian to be. In fact, McDermott stresses a continuity between the Fathers and the Reformers: "Edwards, like the Fathers and Reformers, refused to separate letter and spirit" (111).

[1/24/09 correction: in the chapter preceding Fabiny's, Douglas Sweeney offers a careful and detailed history of typology, including both Origen and Augustine.]

* *

** **

* *

This book is definitely launching me deeper into my appreciation for Edwards, and soon I will begin to read some more of Edwards's own writings. I also find it interesting that McDermott focuses on Edwards's views on justification as forming "a bridge between the two traditions" (210). For my part, I see many connections between Edwards's theology and Catholic tradition, and justification is just not as interesting to me as certain other areas (in no particular order):

• morality and natural law
  
• typology
• the analogy of being with Being
• the Trinity as a Communion of Persons
• creation as the unfolding of God's love
• discernment of spirits
• the transcendentals: beauty, truth, and goodness
• the reasonableness of faith, that is, knowledge through testimony

I should say also, that the more I read of and about Edwards, the more interested I am in reading what Msgr. Luigi Giussani wrote about Edwards in his study, American Protestantism. But since the English translation is not ready yet, I will have to watch and wait.

Do We Really Believe This is Possible?

Perhaps part of the reason why in a society like ours, the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience have come to be so often denigrated as irrelevant may have more to do with the fact that they are for the most part seen in terms of a kind of heroic stoicism than as an expedient for placing ourselves in an entirely human relationship with a God who is not only alive and active in our experience, but who is the only possibility for fulfillment. But before even entering into the question of being fulfilled by God, we might back up a bit and ask ourselves a more fundamental question: How is it possible to even know who He is, and know this in a way that is realistic enough to win over one's life, realistic enough to move one to sacrifice even marriage and sexual intimacy, in addition to handing over one's money and obeying a specific group of people that is oftentimes highly flawed?

The title of Luigi Giussani's current book in English, Is it Possible to Live this Way? has been subtitled "An Unusual Approach to Christianity" for a reason, and on October 1 in Washington, at the John Paul II Cultural Center, the question of how exactly unusual that approach is came before an audience of over two-hundred participants, when Roger Scruton, writer and philosopher, Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, discussed the book with Father Antonio Lopez, Assistant Professor of Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies. The discussion was moderated by John McCarthy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University, and in addition, His Excellency the Honorable Pietro Sambi, Apostolic Nuncio of the Holy See to the United States, introduced the evening.

Continue reading the rest of this article: Do We Really Believe This Is Possible?