Lord Of History Research Articles

Magisterium and Theological Revisionism

Catholic and Protestant theologians believe that the resemblance between Christian and non-Christian ethics is due not only to desecration, but also to the fact that we live in the same historical order. Gustavo Gutierrez insists that there are no two histories, one profane and one sacred, juxtaposed and intimately connected, but a single history of human destiny, irrevocably assumed by Christ, the Lord of history. The naive optimism of a moral theology that does not consider human limits, and that considers human actions as if the eschatology had already been achieved, has led to an improper methodology, based exclusively on natural reason. Bernard Häring insisted, however, on the need for moral theology to be based on Scripture and grace, and not just on reason and human nature. Charles E. Curran expressed his right to disagree with the non-infallible teaching of the authority of the Catholic Church, emphasizing that Catholics could in theory and practice disapprove of papal teaching and remain faithful to the Catholic Church.

Observatory for the History of Education: looking at the past, analysing the present and reflecting on the future – a transnational perspective

ABSTRACT The Standing Working Group (SWG) “Observatory for the History of Education” was formed in the city of Porto (Portugal) during the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in July 2019. Its essential purpose is to understand and reflect on the current theories and issues that are emerging from this field of knowledge during challenging times of the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In addition, more than a dose of uncertainty has been caught from the COVID-19 pandemic and affected our thinking about the meaning of history and life cycles. For, as we are duty-bound to admit, “time is the lord of history”. This text seeks to set out the guiding principles of this observatory and open up new avenues of reflection in the context of the current pandemic.

The Bible's Greatest Meme?

The Bible's Greatest Meme? Peter Heinegg The Book of Exodus: A Biography. By Joel S. Baden, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xv + 215 pp. $26.95. No serious reader, student, or teacher of the Bible can fail to see that the Book of Exodus is the key to the Hebrew Bible‐Old Testament and perhaps to all of Sacred Scripture. Genesis has many more appealing folkloric tales and mythic moments, but Exodus is absolutely indispensable. Here, we meet God as the Lord of history, the force that created and saved his own people, the Israelites, and bound himself to them forever in a solemn, all‐encompassing Covenant. Baden is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, and his work is part of the Princeton Press's “Lives of Great Religious Books”; but he focuses less on the text of Exodus (or Shemot) than on the astonishing power of the Exodus story to shape and enrich religious traditions not just in Judaism, but in a bewildering variety of Christian churches. At the heart of the narrative is something like a complete historical blank. Exodus 12.37 claims that the Israelites had 600,000 foot soldiers, which translates into a minimum total population or two million; and scholars are agreed that there is no archeological or written evidence of such a mighty horde having lived in Egypt or survived for forty years in the Sinai desert. And was Moses himself an actual personage or a fictional hero? What to make of his Egyptian name and his supposed royal upbringing? Why did Yahweh want to kill Moses (in Ex. 4.24) shortly after the sublime theophany on Mt. Sinai/Horeb? How is it that God's grandest spokesman had a speech defect and was told to let his highly flawed brother Aaron occasionally take his place? Was Moses really barred from entering the Promised Land, after all his years of toil and travail, simply because he struck a rock to make it gush water (Num. 20.11‐12) instead of just bidding it to do so? As for the mass departure from Egypt, the most one can say is that a group of runaway Hebrew slaves may have escaped from Egypt (at some time in the thirteenth‐century BCE?) and made their way into Canaan, where they joined up with some distant tribal kin. And the confusion thickens when we consider the incompatible or contradictory elements in Exodus supplied by the J, P, and E strands of tradition that have been woven together. (E.g., were there seven plagues or ten?) The eating of matzah is an essential feature of Passover, but it turns to have nothing to do with the Exodus, only connected to it by the invented detail that the fleeing Israelites had no time to bake normal leavened bread. And the problems go on, but no matter, because in the Exodus God both makes his tremendous intervention in the life of Israel and establishes the core of Judaism forever. Once again, historical realism has to admit that Moses himself could no more have delivered the vast body of specific legal material in the Torah (much of which refers to conditions in a future settled country, rather than the wasteland of Sinai) than he could have described his own mysterious death and burial in Deuteronomy 34). And finally, there are the painful issues of the death of the Egyptian first‐born and the army of Pharaoh, which we'll get to later (Baden doesn't deal with them). The point is that, historical disputes aside, Pesach joins all Jews celebrating it into an organic symbiosis with a primordial liberation (whatever it may have exactly been) and all past generations who have ever liturgically participated in it. Unlike formal, clerically led synagogue services, Passover is a home‐based, democratic affair, with a unique focus on children. The Seder replaces the obsolete (since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE) Passover sacrifice. Baden calls the Passover Seder “an act of commiseration and of communal redemption,” whose relevance never fades. And, of course, it flowed into the life blood of Christianity. Jesus is at once the new Moses (especially...

Periodyzacja historii w Księdze Daniela

W Księdze Daniela pojawia się charakterystyczna dla pism apokaliptycznych specyficzna koncepcja historii mająca wymiar uniwersalny, która swoim zasięgiem obejmuje dzieje całego świata. Historia w Księdze Daniela jest ukazana przede wszystkim w aspekcie teologicznym, ponieważ jedynie Bóg jest Panem historii objawiającym w niej swoją królewską władzę, potęgę i majestat, jak również Władcą kontrolującym bieg wydarzeń w dziejach wielkich imperiów ziemskich. Cechą koncepcji historii ukazanej w Księdze Daniela (Dn 2 i 7) jest jej periodyzacja, której podłożem jest tzw. schemat czterech królestw, co wyraża prawdę o tym, że historia zmierza do swego kresu. Dzieje świata są ukazane jako kolejno następujące po sobie imperia ziemskie, z których każde następne jest gorsze od poprzedniego, co uwypukla prawdę o ich stopniowej degradacji moralnej. Z powodu nasilającego się zła, wszystkie ziemskie imperia będą unicestwione, a na ich miejscu zostanie ustanowione przez Boga wieczne i niezniszczalne królestwo. W odmienny sposób periodyzacja historii została ujęta w Dn 9, gdzie w nawiązaniu do chronologii „szabatowej” (Kpł 25-26), historia została podzielona na „siedemdziesiąt tygodni (lat)”, a przy końcu tego okresu nastanie „wieczna sprawiedliwość”, czyli era ostatecznego zbawienia.

Richard L. Rubenstein and the Death of “Ghetto Judaism”

Richard L. Rubenstein, who initiated the American debate about theological consequences of the Holocaust with the publication of After Auschwitz in 1966, is best known for his claim that God was dead. This proclamation of God’s demise is usually understood as a result of reasoning that includes the occurrence of the Holocaust among its premises. In the article, the author presents an alternative interpretation. Analyzing Rubenstein’s early essays, the author argues that his rejection of theodicy as traditionally construed and of the notion of God as the Lord of History should rather be read as a part of Rubenstein’s critique of “ghetto Judaism”—Judaism born in tragic and anomalous circumstances of exile, containing intrinsically problematic ideas of God, divine providence, and divine election. Heavily influenced by existentialism in general and by Paul Tillich’s rejection of traditional theism in particular, Rubenstein believed that traditional Judaism had outlived its purpose. In Rubenstein’s thought, Auschwitz—and those interpretations of the Holocaust that attempted to place it within the parameters of traditional vocabulary and the covenantal framework—the author submits, serves primarily as the most glaring example of the bankruptcy of “ghetto Judaism” and its God. It is not, however, the reason for this God’s death and Rubenstein’s argument is logically independent of the fact of the Holocaust.

Logosowy charakter wiary według Josepha Ratzingera – Benedykta XVI

According to Ratzinger, faith is not a blind theory or an outdated concept. Neither is it an intricate philosophical system. Instead, he defines faith as “finding a way towards wisdom, rationality and factuality; [that is] a way towards perceiving reality in full.” This kind of faith becomes a gate to the communion with God, Lord of history and Lord of the universe. Thus, faith is a personal and not a material category. It belongs to the world of personal and not material relations. “Faith is a decision to be with Lord, and to live with Him.” Nevertheless, the decision cannot be a blind choice. It must rest on Logos, so that it truly is a fact-based reality. Claiming that, Ratzinger discloses his great philosophical mind. He skilfully avoids fideism, subjectivism or irrationalism in comprehending faith. He can see faith as the highest level of existence of the mind, reason, will, love and man self-fulfilment in the Holy Trinity.

Ralph Wendell Burhoe and the Natural Selection of God

A crisis is looming for religious man as science claims sovereignty over our objective reality and threatens the stability of communities of faith. One by one, prior claims to explaining ultimate reality are systematically shown to have little correlation with scientific fact. This paper addresses the problem of meaning in Ralph Wendell Burhoe’s scientific theology. Through a detailed analysis of Burhoe’s writings and subsequent criticisms and responses, Burhoe is rescued from Ian Barbour’s claim that “[scientific theology cannot] deal adequately with the problems of human freedom, evil and conflict in nature.” Of primary importance is the demonstration that Burhoe’s Lord of History (God as natural process) is worthy of Paul Tillich’s conception of faith as ultimate concern. Further analysis reveals how one may derive meaning from a scientific theology, providing a basis for Burhoe’s world-view as the next step for homo religiosus.

Without Buddha I Could not Be a Christian (review)

Reviewed by: Without Buddha I Could not Be a Christian Peter A. Huff Without Buddha I Could not Be a Christian. By Paul F. Knitter. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. xvii + 240 pp. Paul Knitter’s contributions to interfaith dialogue and Christian theologies of religions are well known and widely appreciated. Even critics of Christian theories of pluralism, most prominently Pope Benedict XVI, have acknowledged the significance of Knitter’s strategic integration of perspectives from liberation theology into what is sometimes an overly abstract field of inquiry. Colleagues active in Buddhist-Christian studies hold Knitter in especially high esteem as a writer, teacher, translator, [End Page 211] editor, self-described interreligious theologian, and unapologetic person of faith. This book, his first major publication since accepting the Paul Tillich chair at Union Theological Seminary, offers a uniquely first-person reflection on the spiritual fruits of a career profoundly and provocatively shaped by two religious traditions. Written for a popular audience, the book, the author says, has been in the works “for the past forty years” (p. xv). The reader gains valuable insight into the professional and private life of a remarkable “dialogical theologian” (p. xv), whose experience includes a rather conventional upbringing in working-class Midwestern Catholicism, some twenty years of service as a seminarian and missionary priest with the Society of the Divine Word, graduate education in Europe with the likes of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) and Karl Rahner (1904–1984) during the revolutionary years of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and nearly four decades of pioneering work as a productive scholar-activist in mainstream academic theology. At times Knitter even quotes from his unpublished journals in an effort to document fully his unscripted intellectual and spiritual development. Though highly personal, the book is not primarily an autobiography or conversion narrative. Instead, it is an introspective analysis of the internal dialogue that virtually all participants in interreligious affairs recognize as the heart of the global ecumenical encounter. Knitter’s book serves as something of an apologia for what is known today as dual religious belonging or hyphenated religious identity. The author concludes his text with this intriguing but not surprising spiritual self-portrait: both lifelong baptized Christian and “card-carrying Buddhist” (p. 216). The challenge of accounting for this “both /and” orientation grants the book its distinctive character and its reason for being. Knitter borrows his method from the twentieth-century minor classic The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion (1978). In that work, Notre Dame theology professor and Holy Cross priest James Dunne suggested that the path to holiness in the contemporary West leads inevitably through intimate engagement with the ancient wisdom traditions of the East. Even a casual review of the spiritual history of the last century or so will confirm how earnest seekers in modernity’s secular city have renewed, rediscovered, or critically redefined their native faith commitment through life-changing contact with the ideas and values of Asian religious traditions. It is a story familiar to anyone acquainted with the extraordinary religious pilgrimages of interfaith saints such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), and Bede Griffiths (1906–1993). Dunne dubbed this experience the “spiritual adventure of our time” (p. 2); Knitter passionately agrees. He applies Dunne’s dialectical method and his special terminology to his own spiritual odyssey, “passing over” from Christian questions and problems to possible answers and solutions in the Buddhist tradition and then “passing back” to Christian belief and practice with enhanced purpose and a fresh sense of integrity. The starting point for Knitter’s project is cognitive, moral, even emotional dissatisfaction with some of the fundamental structures of the historic Christian worldview: God as transcendent creator and lord of history, Jesus Christ as incarnate Logos and [End Page 212] universal savior, and salvation as the survival of human personality after death and the eschatological redemption of all finite reality. In essence, Knitter claims, traditional theism and the core myth of Christianity as expressed in scripture, creed, and liturgy appear painfully ineffective and to a large extent incoherent in the context of modern life and the international interface of world religions. What especially drives the...

THE HEART OF MY CONCERN

Abstract. This brief piece summarizes the author's lifelong personal credo, particularly his attempt to translate traditional religious wisdom into modern scientific concepts. Contemporary science reveals to us the vast system of natural processes that has brought the universe, our planet, and our species into existence. This natural system is in fact a “more‐than‐human ‘Lord of History,’” corresponding to traditional ideas of God. This Lord of History not only has created us but also sustains us—not just externally but also our interior psychic and spiritual nature. We are challenged to discern the requirements that this system of natural processes places upon us; if we conform to these requirements, we shall be blessed, and we will be enabled as co‐creators of our future evolution.

The Church's Social Doctrine in the Twenty-First Century

CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN THINKING through their relationship with the tangled worlds-within-worlds of politics, economics, and culture for nearly two millennia. The essential nature of that unavoidable entanglement and the distinctive character of the Christian's presence in "the world" came into focus early. As the subapostolic Letter to Diognetus reminds us, Christians are always "resident aliens" in the world, for while Christians honor just rulers, obey just laws, and contribute to the common good of whatever society in which they find themselves, a Christian's ultimate loyalty is given to a Kingdom that is elsewhere. Christians believe that history can be read in its fullness only in the light of faith in the Risen Christ, the Lord of history, and in that perspective, history is both the arena of God's action and the antechamber to our true home—the "city of the living God" (Heb.12:22). Those who know this about history live in history in a distinctive way.1

IF DAVID HAD NOT CLIMBED THE MOUNT OF OLIVES

AbstractThe history of Israel has always been a virtual history. Until recently, historical debate in the field has confined itself almost entirely to a discussion about alternative fictional scenarios for the past: the patriarchs and the conquest stories as an alternative to the exodus and settlement narratives; Moses or Ezra; Josiah or John Hyrcanus. Evidence, when it has been of interest to the field at all, has ever been in regard to any given scenario's persuasiveness. The story of David on the Mount of Olives is used as an example of the theological world at stake in the Bible's virtual history; particularly in regard to the motif of Yahweh as 'the lord of history'. Recognition of such virtuality in the biblical tradition aids the contemporary historian of intellectual history. The story of Jesus on the Mount of Olives is used to illustrate this.

The Uses of Imagination: A Preface

The Uses of Imagination: A Preface . . . the very simple and primary things that the imagination is about: life, love, freedom, dignity. —Northrop Frye He who is the Lord of all things is the lord of the imagination. —William Lynch, S.J. In many ways, what a new journal chooses to present first says a great deal about what it intends and how it may develop. In choosing the imagination as the theme of this first issue we took up a concept that has had a troubled history, has often been misunderstood or distorted, and, on top of everything, is difficult to define precisely. Often, the imagination is erroneously dismissed as delusory and dangerous. Even Shakespeare—that quintessential exemplar of imaginative insight, identification, and sympathy— had one of his characters equate the imagination with "seething brains"and reason with coolness.1 Thus, many were the reasons to Logos 1:1 1997 The Uses of Imagination: A Preface take a more mundane topic when doing something as daunting as starting a new journal. But any reservations were immediately allayed when we thought of all the powerful writers who have given formal consideration to the matter, especially as it affects faith: John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, RichardWilbur, Flannery O'Connor, andWalker Percy, to name a few.We considered also the rich engagements of faith in the poetry of such as Jill Baumgaertner, Edward Hirsch, Luci Shaw, Samuel Hazo, Denise Levertov, Diane Glancy, Mark Rozema, Annie Dillard, Dana Goia,William Stafford, and Jeanne MurrayWalker (and, again, this listing, drawn from the twentieth century only, is of necessity a sampling). Likewise, when we thought about Christian novelists, any listing of which would yield at least a book-length bibliography, we were once again not only encouraged but struck by how the forms of the imagination —in this case storytelling—have been central in helping believers understand the Christian reality, especially the mystery of grace. Thus far, I have been relating the "outward story" of this first issue, but there is a more interesting inner one. And among the characters ofthat inner story, four characters stand out: a theorist; an apologist who is also a storyteller, poet, and critic; a poet who has ventured into critical commentary; and a preacher/professor. They are, respectively, William Lynch, S.J., G. K. Chesterton, RichardWilbur, and Peter J. Gomes. How can one not be intrigued by William Lynch's audacious assertion that Christ is "lord ofthe imagination"? 2We know Christ as redemption from sin, as the efficacious sacrifice, as the way to eternal life and by many other titles, for in the end he defies all our powers of description and definition. Lord of history, yes—but "lord of the imagination"? Is such an appelation eccentric or is it true, and iftrue, what are its implications? Lynch contends that he Logos is "lord ofthe imagination"because ofhis obedience to reality, the ultimate goal ofwhich is unity—the drawing ofall creation to the Godhead. In this obedience, Lynch suggests, Christ shows that the imagination is not a wild but a chaste thing, a perceiving rather than an inventing power. In conclusion, Lynch asserts that "Christology stands as the model and enduring act of the healthy and successful human imagination which, ifit really grasps the act of Christ, will be able analogically to transfer this act to its own plan of human life."3 In this equation of the healthy and successful human imagination with Christ, we see rather markedly how innovative Lynch's take on the imagination and on salvation is. What Lynch sees the imagination contributing to faith is stated with great explicitness in his 1975 preface to a new edition ofhis great work Christ and Apollo: The Christian faith should never think of itself as a conceptual bundle of ideas which must beg imaginative support from literature and art.This faith is also a life of the imagination—historical, concrete, and ironic. There will, hopefully, never be an end to collaboration between theology and literature, but it must be a collaboration of (theological) imagination with (literary) imagination. Otherwise theology loses its nerve and does not have the strength...

History and Martyrological Tragedy: The Jewish Experience in Sholem Asch and Andre Schwarz-Bart

In Isaiah 43:11-12, God, after instructing His servant, Israel, that beside Me there is no saviour, imposes the awesome obligation: Therefore ye are my witnesses . . . that am God. A rabbinic midrash or exegesis offers this meaning: When you are my am God, and when you are not my am, as it were, not God.(1) The biblical text and response embody the potentially tragic crisis for both individual and community who may be called upon to the [of God]--Kiddush haShem--by suffering martyrdom, the act of witnessing whose imperative is declared in Lev. 22:32: Neither shall ye profane my Holy Name, but will be hallowed among the children of Israel: am the Lord which hallow you. While the act of Kiddush haShem affirms God's spiritual sovereignty, there also seems little doubt that a major consequence of martyrdom bears directly upon the necessity of witnessing God's salvational history grounded in and shaped by the Covenant, exile, testing, suffering, faith, sin and punishment, expiation and messianic hopes of redemption. God's divine primacy, as the biblical narratives (Exodus, above all) and their commentaries attest, is manifested in His power as a Lord of history. Thus, when the crisis of whether or not to the Name appears in times of persecution and ideological strife, the very meaning of history itself is placed in theological jeopardy. When you are not my witnesses, the midrash insists, I am, as it were, not God. To remove God from history is, then, a desecration of the Name--Hillul haShem--perhaps the most shattering violation of all. For while the failure to witness cannot affect the ontological nature of God or thwart His providential design, it can, for those seeking order and purpose in the apparent chaos of history, either destroy it or render it so problematic that what remains is a form of existential despair. And yet the grand irony is that there is also an inherent tragic knowledge in the reality that countless individuals have witnessed with their lives to the honor of God and the integrity of His revealing historical plan. The putative martyr is nevertheless faced with a tragic dilemma: if the individual fails to witness, God and divine history are betrayed; but to pass the test of sacrifice and to sanctify God's presence in the historical moment means death. As Max Weber has termed it, martyrdom is the of absolute ends.(2) Moreover, it is an ethic fraught with a genuine tragic content which has been thematically exploited by both secular and religious writers, most markedly from the seventeenth century to the present.(3) This ethic energizes the very form of martyrological drama and other genres whose appearance and popularity in Judeo-Christian culture characterize the response of the artist to those historical and ideological clashes which rarely admit of a reconciliation or solution except through death. Most significantly, martyrological tragedy in particular becomes a theological commentary on both the tragic and redemptive nature of history itself. Conceived as either an irony-laden providential order or a random process upon which meaning must be subjectively conferred, history inevitably creates those situations which demand the need for a total commitment to some abiding or absolute truth. Martyrdom is thus a fated condition of the historical process. The testimony incarnated in the martyr's death is the tragic ground of this process. From this perspective, individual artistic statements about the nature of God, martyrdom, and history independent of any formal dogma, may be fairly--if loosely--called literary theologoumena or, in generic terms, the trauerspiel (mourning-tragedy), whose influence on the development of a non-Aristotelian esthetic of tragedy Walter Benjamin seminally analyzed in 1928. A central tenet of Benjamin's study is that the royal martyr-tyrant tragedies of seventeenth-century German baroque drama embody the shift from the classical mythos of heroic sacrifice to the realm of history. …

RALPH WENDELL BURHOE: HIS LIFE AND HIS THOUGHT

Abstract. This fifth and final installment from the author's book‐length study of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's life and thought covers the period 1966–1987, and it concludes with a summary of his thought. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science began publication in March 1966, the same year in which the Center for Advanced Study in Theology and the Sciences (CASTS) was founded. Both the journal and the center were made possible by Meadville/Lombard Theological School. After a brief period of flourishing, CASTS was succeeded in 1972 by the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS). Burhoe married Calla Butler in 1969, two years after his first wife, Frances, had died. He retired from Mead‐ville in 1974. The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion was awarded to Burhoe in 1980. His thought is summarized under the topics of values, thermodynamics, the evolution of religion, the concept of soul, God, enculturation and freedom, and the Lord of History.

Sacramental Realism: An Exchange A Review

SACRAMENTAL REALISM: AN EXCHANGE* A REVIEW HE BOOK UNDER REVIEW, Colman O'Neill's secnd major work in sacramental theology, has been writen under a double handicap. In the first place, it is a number of a series intended for the general reader, and the format imposed by tha.t intention is simply incompatible with the author's declared ambition of providing a theory which may serv·e as the structuring or systematic principle of a general theology of the sacraments and so of theology across the board. Such a project is highly specialized, requiring a lengthy historical introduction and an extended synthetic development , responsive by anticipation to a criticism incapable of reduction to such conventional indictments as juridicalism and impersonalism. That O'Neill accepted these limitations and strove to work within them is understandable; few publishers would consider publishing a "theological book" today which was not thus circumscribed, and it may be thought better to publish something than nothing at all, the evident alternative . Nonetheless the burden he has accepted is an impossible one. The second element of handicap under which the author labors is self-imposed, that of a traditional Thomist philosophical metaphysics, which vainly attempts to match the monadic cosmological logic of Aristotelian metaphysics to the trinitarian , historical and covenantal truth of a good creation, and thinks to find in the esse-essence distinction of St. Thomas the device by which this radical incoherence may be overcome. *Colman O'Neill, O.P., Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments. Theology and Life Series 2. 'Vilmington, Del., Michael Glazier, Inc., 1983. 224 pp. 279 QSO DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. For O'Neill, the ground for doing theology is provided by our creation in the divine image, which is of the Father, the One God alike of Judaism, Christianity and Islam who, it is supposed , may be known in principle apart from the Christ. This poses for O'Neill, although he does not recognize it, the impossible systematic problem of relating cosmos and covenantal history. It does no good to speak of the cosmic Christ until the primordial quality of that adjective is acknowledged, and with this, the fact of our creation in Christ, the Lord of history . This acknowledgement immediately rules the old metaphysics of the natural creation out of court, as Rousselot saw seventy years ago, and it is time that systematic theology took his insight to heart, for there is no other basis upon which a systematic theology may be founded. Short of this, the long futility of the dispute De auxiliis will continue to haunt any Thomist theologian, however much he devotes himself to more fashionable causes. O'Neill's abiding concern is the justification of the sacramental realism without which Catholic orthodoxy is undone, and he is alert to any dilution of this realism, whether by the reduction of Catholic sacramentaiism to subjectivity, or by its reduction to servility. On balance, it is to dangers of the latter that he is the more alert; taught by a. personalist Thomism, he is intent upon the autonomy of the worshiper, and under the tag of juridicalism poses to himself the perduring dilemma of Hegel: how to appropriate responsibly a salvation worked by another. His solution is supported by a weighty theological tradition: the union of Christ and the faithful is in that " one body " which assures both identity with the will of Christ and the personal autonomy of the individual. How this is done is not further set forth, although it is of course the heart of the systematic problem. O'Neill wishes to understand 'one body ' union of Christ and believers as meaning ' one person,' which is to urge a unity between Christ and Christian hardly supportive of the latter's autonomy. A closer attention to the covenantal interpretation of tha.t union, i.e., as of "one flesh" of Eph 5 rather than "one body" (for the " Body" which is SACRAMENTAL REALISM: AN EXCHANGE ~81 the bridal Church is so only in the " one flesh " of her union with her Head, the Christ-who is not a member of the "Body") would have provided the systematic base for developing the trinitarian structure...

The Third World and the Problem of God-Talk

The major thrust of this paper is that changing historical configurations are not without their effect on the attempts to articulate and interpret the faith principles of a religion which claims allegiance to the Lord of History. If one starts, not with God but with man and his predicament, as does John Macquarrie, how does one ignore some of the most significant changes that have occurred in recent history which have helped to contribute to the precariousness of “Western man”?

Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth

In this third part of volume III of his Dogmatics Barth sets forth the doctrine of divine providence as the objective and universal rule of God which establishes and encompasses but does not absorb the existence of the person or community which becomes the object of His preservation. Barth's steadfast aim has been to produce a theology dominated by its object, Jesus Christ. This part of the Dogmatics is no exception, for here he argues that the order of being and the order of knowledge start with the event of God's action in Christ. Hence he does not speak of a natural theology with an independent cosmological interest in the work of divine preservation, for he insists that Scripture is differently orientated. It does not witness simply to the highest being as first cause; it witnesses primarily to the Lord of history, the God of the Covenant. This means that the doctrine of providence does not become a Weltanschauung. What Barth says concerning this problem in C.D.III.3 should be read in conjunction with C.D.III.2, pp. 3ff. Because he affirms that the central concern of theology is the relation of God and man established in Jesus Christ he regards cosmology as a peripheral concern arid draws the line against attempts to integrate scientific views and theological interpretation into a comprehensive Weltanschauung. Yet he readily admits that the natural sciences which know their limits have their appropriate place in elucidating the nature of man against the background of creation.

Book Review: The Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History

Book Review: The Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History

Reviews

The Paradise Tree. By Gerald Vann.Along the Road to Frome. By Christopher Hollis.Early Christian Doctrines. By J. N. D. Kelly.The Gnostic Problem. By R. McL. Wilson.The Lord of History. By Jean Daniélou.Le Péché Originel Dans L'Ecriture. By A‐M. Dubarle.La Formations des Evangiles: Recherches Bibliques, II.A Guide to the ‘City of God’. By Marthinus Verefeld.He Died Old; Mithradates Eupatror, King of Pontus. By Alfred Duggan.And Yet so New. By Sir Arnold Lunn.

The Lord of History. By Jean DaniélouS.J. Translated by Nigel Abercrombie. (Longmans; 30s.)

The Lord of History. By Jean DaniélouS.J. Translated by Nigel Abercrombie. (Longmans; 30s.)