Reflections on ‘Towards a Critical White Theology’

Néstor Curbelo: The Latin American Andrew Jenson

Sacrifice as the Key to Understanding the Difference and Relationship Between the Priesthood of the Baptized and of the Ordained Matthew J. Albright (bio) I. Introduction A precise understanding of the common priesthood of the baptized, both in relationship to Jesus Christ and vis-à-vis the ministerial priesthood of the ordained, continues to elude us, as evidenced by the appearance of a modern clericalism and novel attempts at sharing the duties of ordained priest with the laity. The common priesthood and the hierarchical priesthood both descend from divine origin and are rooted in Scripture and Tradition. Yet, in response to the emphasis placed on the common priesthood by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council—in stark contrast to the historical experience in some places of a heavily cultic priesthood distant from the laity—there has been a frenzy of disparate interpretations. Some of these have stripped both ordained ministry and the universal call to holiness offered to all the baptized of their unique connotations. Rooted in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the life of the Church, the Priesthood of Jesus Christ himself becomes the source of the Christian understanding of priesthood and of the two manifestations of priesthood in the Church. The centrality of the life and ministry of Jesus, particularly his sacrifice on the Cross, is the core of the identity and experience of priesthood. Both in the sacred liturgy and in the life of costly discipleship, the sacrifice of Christ is manifest for the baptized and the ordained. The celebration of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharistic liturgy and the living out of the sacrificial dimension of discipleship is the key to understanding the priesthood of the baptized and of the [End Page 310] ordained. Properly understood, both priesthoods mutually support and nourish one another for the complete flourishing of the whole Body of Christ. In liturgy and in life, the disciple is defined by his sharing in the sacrifice of Christ. Pope Francis has been clearly emphasizing the importance of a personal encounter with Jesus as the foundation for all we are and do as a Church. To the members of the Society of Jesus gathered at the Church of the Gesù in Rome for the feast day of Saint Ignatius, Pope Francis delivered a homily using the emblem of the Society—the monogram IHS—to illustrate “the centrality of Christ for each one of us and for the whole Company, the Company that Saint Ignatius wanted to name ‘of Jesus’ to indicate the point of reference.”1 Jesus Christ is the point of reference for the life of the whole Church, for the life of every disciple and, in a particular way, for our understanding of priesthood. The Christian life is an encounter with Christ. Living the common and ministerial priesthoods is possible only when we understand the priesthood of Christ in which both find their origin. Pope St John Paul II spoke to the bishops of the northwest region of the United States on October 9, 1998 about the foundational role of the priesthood for understanding the proper role of the faithful in the sacred liturgy: “The sharing of all the baptized in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ is the key to understanding the Council’s call for ‘full, conscious and active participation’ in the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 14).”2 This is true not only for liturgical participation but for the whole Christian life. Our sharing in Christ’s life, in particular his priesthood, defines how we live out the call to discipleship and our own individual vocations. We will see how Jesus builds on the ancient priesthood and leaves behind a new participation in his eternal priesthood that is manifest in the life of the Church. II. Priesthood in the Old Covenant God spoke to his faithful people from ages past through the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Moses and the Judges; the [End Page 311] Kings David and Solomon; in various and sundry ways through the prophets. In the Old Testament, “we can distinguish two forms of the reality of the priesthood.”3 First, “the non-specialized exercise of priestly functions” is “carried out by the...

Church History from the International Periphery: The South American Perspective

When Mr Southern produced The Making of the Middle Ages in 1953, he illustrated it with photographs and was praised for the way he scooped up such a revealing collection of personalities and instances. Now in his new general work on Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, the photographs have been displaced by graphs and tables, and the selection of ‘moments’ in the life of the medieval Church is disclaimed in favour of a study of the interplay and tension between medieval society and its Church, and of a study of the continuous adaptation of the institutional modes by which the medieval Church attempted to satisfy the changing requirements of society. All too often ecclesiastical history lapses into the history of the organization and life of the Church as seen from the inside, and no doubt this is the image which the phrase ‘Church history’ evokes in many minds, but what is here studied is the history of the Church looked at from the viewpoint of society at large. Already by the ninth century western Church and society were so closely identified that those outside the Church were usually outside society also, but there is no risk of confusion here if one grasps the fact that throughout the medieval period elements in the Church continually tried to tune its responses to changing social demands.This book is structured according to a pattern of threes. Each of the five essays which form its core is planned in relation to the differences which separate a primitive age (c. 700-c. 1050) from an age of growth (c. 1050-c. 1300) and an age of unrest (c. 1300- c. 1550). Each essay is unquestionably a masterpiece. That on Byzantium and the West pursues the double theme of Rome as the source of western unity and the source of division in Christendom as a whole. The essay on the papacy shows theory evolving in relation to social change.

152 BOOK REVIEWS Walking with Faith: New Perspectives on the Sources and Shaping of Catholic Moral Life. By WALTER}. Woons. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 528. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8146-5824-5. This book's primary concern is "moral life in the faith community" (xii). It is an ambitious work, one that seeks "to illuminate the sources of moral life in faith, show how moral life in the Church has developed over the centuries, and encourage a more integral, comprehensive view" (xv). As such, it is a welcome addition to the mounting body of literature that demonstrates the ongoing historical interplay of the Christian faith with the ethical conduct of believers and their official worship from the pews and in the sanctuary. The author shows particular interest in the temporal, contemporary, and transcendent factors that went into the shaping of Catholic moral life. He orders his presentation in a chronological sequence of eleven balanced and well-written chapters. He reflects on the scriptural, historical, intellectual, and liturgical dimensions of this important walk with faith and provides a helpful summary of his findings in the closing Epilogue. The book has many strengths, not the least of which is the author's competent and judicious use of the principle of correlation, the historiographical assumption that a complex web of interrelated sociological and cultural factors must be taken in account when examining the way ideas arise, develop, and function through time. It is exceedingly difficult to study any particular facet of Church life in this manner for any single historical period, let alone the entire span of its existence. Although his selection and presentation of the material is not beyond reproach (as will soon become evident), the author maintains a largely convincing level of scholarly discourse that conveys not only a sense of the great complexity of factors which must be taken into account when examining the relationship between morality and faith in the Church's life, but also a sensitivity to the continuities and discontinuities that such an organic relationship necessarily entails. For this reason alone, the book can be read with interest and to great benefit. While it does not qualify as a "history" of moral theology as such (nor does it purport to be), the perspectives it offers into the shaping of Catholic moral life-both historical and otherwise-will need to be examined and reckoned with by all future historians of Catholic moral theology. This reader was also impressed with the methodological consistency with which the author constructs his chapters (enabling less expert readers to navigate the often turbulent waters of the Church's history with a relative degree of calm), his ability to find common threads in the Church's doctrinal and moral teachings (some of which have not been explicitly adverted to until now), and his balanced integration of the history of Christianity with the general history of Western civilization (especially in chapters 9 through 11, where he maps out the Church's response to the modern Western outlook). If that is not enough, his "Reflections" at the end of each chapter summarize the salient points regarding the impact of the BOOK REVIEWS 153 faith on the Church's moral life and offer many astute insights into why the Church's teaching developed the way it did. The author's penchant for method and his high level of scholarly discourse, however, do not dispel a number of serious concerns resulting from certain lacunae in his historical presentation. Although this is to be half-expected in a large synthetic work of this kind (it would be virtually impossible to investigate every instance in the Church's life where the faith has contributed to a deeper understanding of the believer's moral responsibilities), the number and scope of the author's omissions tend to weaken and, at times, even blemish this otherwise outstanding effort of historical inquiry. It seems strange, for example, that the author would spend so much time in chapters 1 and 2 outlining the relationship between faith, moral conduct, and worship in the Old and New Testaments and say hardly anything at all about the evolution of the canon of Scripture...

Fragmented History: Challenges and Perspectives Building a Narrative of the Latter-day Saints in Brazil

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence

Missing and Restoring Meaning

The Challenges of Global Church History for Those outside the United States of America

Основные цели и задачи данной статьи - дать характеристику журнала в кругу других периодических изданий 40-х гг. XIX в., проанализировав редакционную политику и основные литературные и религиозные взгляды главного редактора журнала С. О. Бурачка, который был автором многих журнальных публикаций: по вопросам кораблестроения, литературы, культуры, философии, психологии, истории России и Русской Церкви. В оценке классических произведений А. С. Пушкина и М. Ю. Лермо нтова С. О. Бурачок ставил христианские идеалы превыше литературных достоинств. Методология исследования базируется на комплексном применении традиционных научных методов: источниковедческого, историко-логического и сравнительноисторического. Несмотря на краткое время издания, журнал стал заметным явлением в журналистике и церковно-общественной жизни России середины XIX в. Закрытие журнала объясняется резким размежеванием общественного сознания, усилением в обществе либерально-западнических идей, проводниками которых стали многие периодические издания. Положительную оценку журнал «Маяк» получил в церковных кругах. Критически отзывались об идеологии журнала известные литературные деятели XIX в. В. Г. Белинский, Н. А. Полевой, Ф. В. Булгарин, А. А. Григорьев и др. «Maiak» magazine was first published in 1840 in St. Petersburg. The editor in 1840-1841 were P. A. Korsakov (1790-1844) and S. O. Burachok, from the 17th issue of 1841 to the end of the existence of the journal editor was S. O. Burachok. The main goals and objectives of this article are to characterize the journal among other periodicals of the 40s of the XIX century, analyzing the editorial policy and the main literary and religious views of the editor-in-chief of the journal S. O. Burachok, who was the author of many journal publications - on shipbuilding, literature, culture, philosophy, psychology, history of Russia and the Russian Church. In the evaluation of classical works of A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov. S. O. Burachok put Christian ideals above literary merits. The research methodology is based on the complex application of traditional scientific methods: source studies, historical-logical and comparative-historical. Despite the short period of publication, the journal became a noticeable phenomenon in journalism and Church-public life of Russia in the mid-19th century. the Closure of the journal is explained by the sharp division of public consciousness, the strengthening of liberal-Western ideas in society, which were carried out by many periodicals. The magazine received a positive assessment in Church circles. Critical has responded about the magazine›s ideology of V. G. Belinsky, N. A. Polevoj, F. V. Bulgarin, A. A. Grigoriev and others.

Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism:The Call for a Woman Visitor to "Half-Caste" Girls and Women in Domestic Service, Adelaide, 1925–1928 Victoria Haskins (bio) The home has a historical significance as a space for white women's intervention in and negotiation with colonization, a significance that is both symbolic and literal. One of the first feminist campaigns for Aboriginal reform was for the appointment of a woman to go into the private homes of privileged urban women to visit and inspect the conditions of mixed-descent Aboriginal girls and young women brought to work as domestic servants from central Australia to the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Launched in 1925 by the Women's Non-Party Association of South Australia (WNPA),1 such an official appointment was secured two years later, but the campaign for a Woman Visitor was quickly forgotten. The struggle by white women for power on the domestic frontier preceded the struggle that followed on the frontier proper, and that later struggle would subsume its memory. Thus for historians of the interwar feminist campaigns for Aboriginal reform, the Visitor campaign does not feature, even as a footnote; the later activities of the WNPA president, Constance Cooke, who agitated on national and international stages in the 1930s for the appointment of Women Protectors of Aborigines in central Australia, dominate our understanding of this past. "Frontier feminism"—to use Marilyn Lake's compelling term2 —captured the imagination of white women then and since in a way no "domestic" campaign ever could. The remote central and northern desert regions of white pastoral expansion in Australia had long been considered a man's domain, and in many respects still are: a contact zone when masculine brutality unrestrained by the "civilizing" influence of respectable white women wreaked and continues to wreak havoc upon Aboriginal women and children. Domesticating the frontier was a challenge that white women, newly conscious of their roles as white national citizens, could hardly resist. In the 1920s, as Lake shows, a number of feminist activists had shifted their focus from white women's degradation here at the hands of "marauding white men" to that endured by Aboriginal [End Page 124] women.3 Fiona Paisley observed that urban Australian women activists, determined to speak alongside white men as citizens, defined the frontier in the 1920s and 1930s as "a political and social space in which to enact their own responsibilities as white women."4 The interwar campaign by Australian women activists to install women in positions of authority to "protect" Aboriginal women from white men's sexual predations in the Australian outback has been analyzed by Alison Holland. Describing it as a push for "the feminisation of 'native' administrations" by which feminist activists sought "the expansion and consolidation of their own roles in public life," Holland points to the Woman Protector campaign's almost universal appeal for urban white women as a way of self-actualization in this period.5 In all these studies, one gets a sense of how the open horizons of the central Australian frontier beckoned to white women as a symbolic and actual place to assert their public presence and power in the interwar period, in distinct contrast to the confining "domestic sphere" allotted to them traditionally. The studies themselves reflect that predilection. Yet, in modernizing white settler societies like Australia and the United States, it was the domestic sphere that would come to constitute a key site of strategic manipulations by the state, in the process revealing domestic work to be (like sexuality) "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, settler and native, an administration and a population."6 Domestic service can be understood as a transitional point for Indigenous girls, the urban household a liminal space into which these girls were inserted by the state and from which they were, it was hoped, to step into oblivion. Here, Aboriginal women of reproductive years were to be supervised, contained, and disciplined, as the state sought to effect the disappearance of a race. Even as the disruptive hybrid woman was to be "absorbed" in the home, it was also a site that spoke to colonial concerns and...

In the history of canon law, as well as like in history of many other forms and aspects of ecclesiastical life, Trident Council (1545-1563) was of a great importance. Renovation work initiated by Council, thought as remedy for crisis situation intensified by reformation outbreak, was without any doubts a turning point not only in history of church legislation, but also in the history of Church itself. For hundred and forty years from ending of the conference of Trident Council is an occasion for discerning reflection over the role and importance of votes of that significant and grave event in the history of the Church, which was a great gift of the Spirit presented to the Church in hard times of XVIth century and turning point that started big, needed and salutary reform and renovation of the Church. Trident formed and changed the visage of Catholic Church more than any other ordinary Council except of The Und Vatican Council. The other Councils, despite their significance, influenced only specific areas of Church life, impressing their impact on them. It set a new direction and shape to the whole historical epoch. It was this Council that formed „catholic confession Church”, it gave him an order and shape in doctrinal and disciplinary area. Legal resolutions of the Council had first of all reformative character. Besides passing the resolutions, which had fundamental importance for Church’s work, as residency dictation, ban of benefices accumulation, establishing the clerical seminary, enforcing the obligatory legal form of marriages contracting or reform of religious law, the Council implemented all line of improvements and institutions started by Apostolic Capital.
 The great gift of the Spirit, reforms and renovation presented to the Church of the half of XVIth century in resolutions of Trident Council was to release comprehensive trend of assimilation by individual countries, nations, church’s provinces and dioceses the basic decrees and resolution, which were taken by Council’s fathers. Before everything else, situation that the Church winded up in required all that, because Church was from one side menaced by developing reformation, from the other side it was afflicted by crisis of its structures and institutions, collapse of discipline of priesthood and declining religious life. This situation forced to take on changes and reforms programmed by the Tridentinum and which concern widely understood religious renovation referring to priesthood and secular congregation, as well as Church structures themselves. In the same time, the point was both to correct recognition of totality of Council’s reformatory resolutions and to definitely implement them and enforce into life of mentioned church units.
 Acceptance of Trident resolutions meant the beginning of reforms on many areas of church and religious life. So no wonder, that efforts of popes from the end of XVIth century and the subsequent centuries were directed to propagate a conviction in Church’s consciousness, that Tridentinum should be recognized as not only the ultimate principle of faith, but also as rule of church discipline. Norms established earlier were integrated, specified and updated by Trident becoming a significant motor of further legislative activity of legislators in the Church. On the Council, foundations for development of modern canon law and its application in the Church were also set. Hereof, taking this all into consideration we can state, that this Council is a beginning of a new epoch for history of canon law. Its resolutions explained and determined dogmatic matters, strengthened organization and discipline in the Church, gave a new impulse to maintain shaken internal cohesion of the Church and created convenient conditions to take up offensive priestly action on wider scale. Thus they had significant impact on four centuries of life, activity and history of the church.

Revolutionary Suicide

Christianity remains a substantive religion in the African continent. With various expressions such as missionary Christianity, indigenous Christianity, and Charismatic Christianity, it remains a critical force in African societies. Christian scholars in post-colonial Africa have engaged important themes in Christianity including the pertinence of African traditional religions, African identity and in the recent decade, postcolonial hermeneutics, and approaches to reading the Bible. Whereas a majority of Kenyans are Christians, there seems to be little evidence in how Christianity engages the politics of the day. It is argued that African Christians, contrary to the historical development of Christianity as well as the holistic worldview of African traditional cultures, have bi-furcated their religion to a private sphere. This paper explores the rich developments of political theology in church history, with particular reference to key African theologians and scholar-practitioners such as Emmanuel Katongole, Sammy Gitari, Damaris Parsitau and Timothy Njoya. By retrieving the global church’s historical thinking on the matter, this paper explores the implications for African societies, including the church, theological institutions, and public life.   Key words: African Christianity, African theology, church and state, political theology, religion and society, world Christianity.

What did the Barmen Declaration have to say to the churches of the German Democratic Republic?