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WORK TITLE: Is This All There Is?
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/29/1934
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 29, 1934.
EDUCATION:Attended Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 1954-55; Philosophical-Theological College Sankt Georgen, graduate in philosophy, 1957; attended Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, 1957-58; University of St. Georgen, graduate in theology, 1960; Julius-Maximilians-University, Würzburg, doctorate in theology, 1971.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Catholic theologian, author, and educator. Ordained priest, 1960; chaplain, Parish of St. Ursula, Oberursel, Germany, 1961-63; Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany, scientific council, and professor of New Testament, Catholic Theological Faculty, beginning 1973-87, ordinary for New Testament, 1976-87; member, Catholic Integrated Community, 1987–; Chair of the People of God, Pontifical Lateran University, 2008–, chair of postgraduate distance learning in German, 2016–, and in English, 2017–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Christian Century, Church Life Journal, Cruciform Phronesis, Jesuit Review, Plough Quarterly Magazine, and Theology Digest.
SIDELIGHTS
More than a decade and a half after being ordained as a Catholic priest, theologian Gerhard Lohfink stepped away from his prestigious post as a professor of New Testament studies at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany, and joined the Catholic Integrated Community in Bad Tölz, Germany. He had already earned a reputation as a distinguished interpreter of biblical texts and Catholic theology in works such as The Conversion of St. Paul: Narrative and History in Acts, The Gospels: God’s Word in Human Words, Death Is Not the Final Word, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith, and The Work of God Goes On.
The Catholic Integrated Community was created as an attempt by German Catholics after the end of World War II to come to terms with the rise of National Socialism in their country and to try to find ways to return to the religious roots of Catholicism. “Members of the community were determined to rediscover, in the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the authentic roots of what it means to be Catholic,” explained Lawrence S. Cunningham in Commonweal. “From the beginning, the Integrated Community invited theologians and other intellectuals to join them. They strongly opposed the German cultural practice of identifying Catholics or Protestants simply by their birth heritage and enrollment in the government census. In short, the community wanted to discern their communal identity as Christians as opposed to their membership in what Germans called the Volkskirche.” Its founder, Traudl Wallbrecher (a coauthor, with Lohfink, of Form und Reform der Kirche?), called for Catholics to live Christian lives in ways that would attract lapsed Catholics who had fallen away from the teachings of the Catholic Church. After joining the Catholic Integrated Community and retiring from his academic position, Lohfink continued his efforts to interpret Catholic and biblical teachings with publications such as Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God, Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today, and Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life.
Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus of Nazareth looks at the perceived conflict between the historical figure of Jesus—a freelance preacher who lived in Roman Palestine—and the ecclesiastical figure, the son of God and the founder of the Christian Church. “Lohfink structures his study not as a narrative, but more like a documentary film, centered on key questions: the reign of God, discipleship, parables, miracles, the Torah, his last day and Easter events,” wrote Raymond Schroth in a review of Jesus of Nazareth appearing in the National Catholic Reporter. “The author knows that many of his scholarly colleagues have offered answers more radical or skeptical than his. He trusts the historical validity of the earliest Gospel texts, though he concedes, by implication, that the events described did not necessarily happen as described. … Lohfink consistently underlines Jesus’ social, even political, mission.” “While he is careful not to identify the church with the reign of God, he maintains that the church is a ‘visible sign’ of that reign–or least it should be,” said Thomas D. Stegman in America. “As such, it is to be a light to all peoples, drawing them into the sphere of God’s rule. Here we find the prophetic edge of Lohfink’s presentation of Jesus. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that since 1986 the author has lived in and served as a theologian for the Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde (Catholic Integrated Community), an intentional community that strives to make the Gospel present.”
Critics found Lohfink’s work a unique and thought-provoking addition to literature on the twin natures of Jesus. In Jesus of Nazareth, suggested Greg Carey in the Christian Century, Lohfink exercises a “fierce independence; I cannot recall a book very much like it. Lohfink rarely engages the work of other Jesus scholars directly. Just the same, a reader acquainted with Jesus scholarship will encounter familiar ideas. Lohfink’s description of the Gospels as interpretations of the impact Jesus made on people evokes James Dunn’s work on memory in early Christian communities. The Jesus who advances Israel’s story into its eschatological fullness, not in some remote future but in the here and now, recalls the work of N.T. Wright. The Jesus who seeks revolution but rejects violence resembles the Jesus of Richard Horsley.” “What makes Father Lohfink’s book so richly satisfying is its seamless attention to both the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith,'” asserted James Martin in America. “Father Lohfink’s book is—if you’ll pardon the expression—a revelation. It is one of the rare works that considers equally both natures.”
No Irrelevant Jesus and Is This All There Is?
In No Irrelevant Jesus, which was based on a series of lectures Lohfink delivered, the theologian “argues that the failure of Christians to acknowledge Paul’s theology of history in Romans 9-11 resulted in the anti-Judaism that ultimately made possible the Holocaust,” stated Thomas P. Rausch in Theological Studies. “The book, with its exposition of Scripture, social commentary, and accessible chapters, is well suited for retreat reading, adult education groups, or homiletic material.”
“Lohfink is a German determined not to forget the terror that was Nazi Germany,” declared Stanley Hauerwas in the Christian Century. “This book is also relevant for the challenges facing Christians in America. His is a vision, deeply grounded in scripture, that I believe is our future.” “Never contrived and never quixotic,” concluded Jonathan Martin Ciraulo in Church Life Journal, “Lohfink’s book represents the best in an authentically Catholic approach to not only personal holiness, but holiness lived in community. This book is a great gift for the New Evangelization for its small, meditative chapters that will be of benefit to both neophyte and scholar, and also because the insights are gleaned from a life saturated in the Scriptures.”
Is This All There Is? addresses the modern crisis of faith that has cost Christian churches membership over the past decades. “Asking big religious questions,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, the author “… takes aim at classic discussions of faith from a Christian perspective rooted in wonder and trust.” “Readers will find Is This All There Is? engaging and challenging,” wrote Thomas D. Stegman in America. “Lohfink wrestles with perennial questions, including how to talk about: God’s justice/wrath and mercy; God’s desire that everyone be saved … and what genuine care for the dead should [be].”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, March 11, 2000, “Does God Need the Church?” p. 27; February 11, 2013, James Martin, “Jesus, by the Book”; March 18, 2013, Thomas D. Stegman, “The Living Presence of God,” p. 34; February 19, 2018, Thomas D. Stegman, “What Happens after Death?” p. 54.
Commonweal, June 1, 2001, Lawrence S. Cunningham, “Does God Need the Church?” p. 27.
Christian Century, December 12, 2012, review of Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, p. 20; January 23, 2013, Greg Carey, “What Jesus Knew,” p. 36; August 12, 2014, Stanley Hauerwas, “Untamed Jesus.”
National Catholic Reporter, September 27, 2013, Raymond A. Schroth, “Jesus and Human Imagination,” p. 18.
Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2018, review of Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life, p. 58.
Theological Studies, March, 2014, John Topel, review of Jesus of Nazareth, p. 182; June, 2015, Thomas P. Rausch, review of No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today, p. 371.
ONLINE
Church Life Journal Online, https://churchlife.nd.edu/ (March 14, 2016), Jonathan Martin Ciraulo, review of No Irrelevant Jesus.
Plough, https://www.plough.com/ (July 9, 2018), author profile.
Gerhard Lohfink
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Gerhard Lohfink (born 29 August 1934) is a German Catholic priest and theologian. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and was professor of New Testament at the Eberhard Karls University at Tübingen until 1986. Lohfink works as a theologian in the Catholic Integrated Community (KIG). He is the younger brother of Norbert Lohfink, professor of Old Testament.
Contents
1 Life
2 Writings (Selection)
3 Reviews
4 References
5 External links
Life
Lohfink graduated in 1954 from the Heinrich-von-Gagern-Gymnasium. He spent two semesters studying German and Latin at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. From 1955 on he studied philosophy and theology at the Philosophical-Theological College Sankt Georgen. In 1957 he passed the philosophical Final Examination. In 1957 and 1958 he studied theology at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich He passed the theological Final Examination in 1960 at the University of St. Georgen, in the same year he was ordained a priest by Bishop Wilhelm Kempf. From 1961 to 1963 he was chaplain in the parish of St. Ursula in Oberursel.
Bishop Kempf granted him permission for Lohfink to pursue a doctorate in theology with the requirement that he would initially serve as a pastor for a year in Frankfurt. In 1964 he continued his studies in theology at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg. In 1971 Lohfink earned his doctorate with the dissertation The Ascension of Jesus: Studies on the Ascension and Exaltation texts in Lukas. He habilitated (qualified as a teacher) in 1973 with his work The Collection of Israel: An examination of Lukan Ecclesiology.
In 1973 Lohfink was appointed scientific council and professor of New Testament at the Catholic Theological Faculty of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. In 1976 he was appointed ordinary for New Testament.[1] In 1979 and 1980 he was involved as a deputy of the theological faculty in the ecclesiastical dispute over Hans Küng. At the end Lohfink publicly voted for Küngs’ exclusion from the faculty.[2]
In 1987 he left the university on his own behalf to live and work in the Catholic Integrated Community. He continues to research and lecture on ecclesiology and eschatology.[3] His books have been translated into many languages.
Since 2008, Lohfink has been working at the Pontifical Lateran University as Chair of the Theology of the People of God,[4] as well as the postgraduate distance learning program the chair offers since 2016 in German and since 2017 also in English.[5]
Writings (Selection)
• Die Himmelfahrt Jesu – Erfindung oder Erfahrung? Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-460-10181-4.
• Die Sammlung Israels. Eine Untersuchung zur lukanischen Ekklesiologie. Kösel, München 1975, ISBN 3-466-25339-X.
• Wie hat Jesus Gemeinde gewollt? Zur gesellschaftlichen Dimension des christlichen Glaubens. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1982, ISBN 3-451-08798-7
• Gottes Taten gehen weiter : Geschichtstheologie als Grundvollzug neutestamentlichen Gemeinden. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1984, ISBN 3-451-20343-X.
• Die Bibel: Gotteswort in Menschenwort. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-460-10015-X.
• Wem gilt die Bergpredigt? zur Glaubwürdigkeit des Christlichen. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ISBN 3-451-08777-4.
• Braucht Gott die Kirche? – zur Theologie des Volkes Gottes. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-451-26544-3
• Das Vaterunser neu ausgelegt. Urfeld, Bad Tölz 2007, ISBN 978-3-932857-32-4.
• with Ludwig Weimer: Maria – nicht ohne Israel. Eine neue Sicht der Lehre von der unbefleckten Empfängnis. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2008; 2. edition 2012, ISBN 978-3-451-34139-7.
• Welche Argumente hat der neue Atheismus? Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung. Urfeld, Bad Tölz 2008, ISBN 978-3-932857-33-1.
• Der letzte Tag Jesu. Was bei der Passion wirklich geschah. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-460-33179-2.
• Beten schenkt Heimat. Theologie und Praxis des christlichen Gebets. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2010, ISBN 978-3-451-33052-0.
• Jesus von Nazareth. Was er wollte, wer er war. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2011, ISBN 978-3-451-34095-6.
• Gegen die Verharmlosung Jesu. Reden über Jesus und die Kirche. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2013 e-book -, ISBN 978-3-451-34561-6.
• Der neue Atheismus. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-460-30031-6.
• Auf der Erde – wo sonst? Unangepasstes über Gott und die Welt. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-460-30033-0.
• Im Ringen um die Vernunft. Reden über Israel, die Kirche und die Europäische Aufklärung. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2016, ISBN 978-3-451-31239-7.
• Am Ende das Nichts? Über Auferstehung und ewiges Leben. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2017, ISBN 978-3-451-31104-8
• The Gospels. God's Word in Human Words. Chicago 1972, Franciscan Herald Press (Herald Biblical booklets), ISBN 9780819902122
• with Malina, Bruce J. The conversion of St. Paul: Narrative and History in Acts. Chicago 1976, Franciscan Herald Press. 1976 ISBN 9780819905727
• Death is Not the Final Word. Chicago 1977: Franciscan Herald Press (Synthesis series). ISBN 9780819907158
• The Bible: Now I Get It! A Form-criticism Handbook, Garden City, N.Y. 1979: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385134323
• Did Jesus Found a Church? In: Theology Digest 1982 (30), page 231–235.
• Jesus and community. The Social Dimension of Christian faith. Philadelphia, New York, 1984 Fortress Press; Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-2661-3
• The Last Day of Jesus. An Enriching Portrayal of the Passion. Notre Dame, 1984, Ind.: Ave Maria Press. ISBN 978-0877933120
• Jesus' Death and the Church's Life. In: Theology Digest 1985 (32), page 156–158.
• The Miracle at Cana. In: Theology Digest 1985 (32), page 243–246.
• The Work of God Goes On. Philadelphia, 1987 Fortress Press, ISBN 9780800620264
• The exegetical predicament concerning Jesus' kingdom of God proclamation. In: Theology Digest 1989 (36), page 103–110.
• Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God. Collegeville, MN, 2014, Liturgical Press. ISBN 9780814659281
• No Irrelevant Jesus. On Jesus and the Church Today. Collegeville, MN, 2014, Liturgical Press. ISBN 978-0-8146-8289-0
• Jesus of Nazareth. What He Wanted, Who He was. Collegeville, Minn., 2015, Liturgical Press. ISBN 9780814683088
• Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life, Collegeville, Minnesota 2018. ISBN 978-0-8146-8451-1
• Did the Early Christians Understand Jesus? Nonviolence, Love of Neighbor, and Imminent Expectation. In: Plough Quarterly Magazine (8).The Plough Magazine: Did the early Christians understand Jesus?
Reviews
• Thomas D. Stegman (2013): The Living Presence of God. Jesus of Nazareth by Gerhard Lohfink. In: America The Jesuit Review 2013. (18 March 2013)[6] • James Martin (2013): Jesus, by the Book. America The Jesuit Review.[7]
• Stanley Hauerwas (2014): The Untamed Jesus. In review: No Irrelevant Jesus, by Gerhard Lohfink. The Christian Century.[8]
• Jonathan Martin Ciraulo (2016): Review: “No Irrelevant Jesus” by Gerhard Lohfink. Hg. v. Church Life Journal. University of Notre Dame.[9]
• Wholeness is the Inmost Principle of the Sermon on the Mount. Cruciform Phronesis.[10]
Gerhard Lohfink, a Catholic priest and theologian, was professor of New Testament studies at the University of Tübingen. A member of the Catholic Integrated Community since 1986, he lives in Bad Tölz, Germany. He has written many books, including Does God Need the Church?, Jesus and Community, and Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was.
What happens after death?
Thomas D. Stegman
America. 218.4 (Feb. 19, 2018): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
Gerhard Lohfink, author of the critically acclaimed Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, takes up a new question in his latest monograph, Is This All There Is?: "What happens after death?" For Lohfink, there are only two genuine options, either resurrection or inexorable nothingness. After arguing that other proposals (the immortality of the soul, survival in descendants, reincarnation, dissolution into the universe) are inadequate, he turns to divine revelation. Revelation as it came to be articulated in Israel's Scriptures is the result of reflection and understanding of God's self-revelation through history: in Israel's being liberated from slavery, in being formed into a human community and in being shown divine mercy in times of infidelity. With the coming of Jesus, God's self-revelation in history reaches its pinnacle, and the divine power to save is revealed in Jesus' resurrection, which his followers came to realize was both eschatological (the beginning of the new messianic age) and collective (it pertains to everyone). The physicality of the Risen One shows that, in Lohfink's words, "what is saved is not a bloodless soul but our whole life-history, our flesh and blood, everything we have been."
Here we arrive at some of Lohfink's most crucial claims. Both the unceasing creation (creatio continua) and the new creation of the world in the resurrection are acts of God's creative love. The resurrection of the dead--along with the transformation of the world--is the goal of all history. In death, Lohfink writes, one encounters the living God--more precisely, God in the risen Christ, in whose face we see God. With death the so-called end of the world occurs for the dying; so too is experienced the return of Christ, the resurrection and the judgment of the world.
Readers will find Is This All There Is? engaging and challenging. Lohfink wrestles with perennial questions, including how to talk about: God's justice/wrath and mercy; God's desire that everyone be saved (cf. 1 Tm 2:4) while hell remains a "fearful possibility"; and what genuine care for the dead should look like. As a New Testament scholar, I greatly appreciated his exegetical analyses, especially his interpretation of the imagery found in Revelation 21-22. Many readers, however, will be left wanting to hear more about how Lohfink would engage in dialogue with those who do not share his Christian beliefs.
Thomas D. Stegman, S.J., is dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stegman, Thomas D. "What happens after death?" America, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530817551/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=34d2763d. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530817551
Jesus and human imagination
Raymond A. Schroth
National Catholic Reporter. 49.25 (Sept. 27, 2013): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 National Catholic Reporter
http://ncronline.org/
Full Text:
During the past year; word has spread that the new account of Jesus by widely respected, 79-year-old German New Testament scholar Gerhard Lohfink is a milestone must-read for thoughtful Christians. It is not an easy read, but often beautiful and always demanding our full attention.
I was reminded of Albert Schweitzer's controversial depiction of Jesus, in which Jesus hastened to his death convinced that this would trigger the end time or final judgment. I don't think Lohfink's Jesus expected history to climax with his death, but his vision was eschatological in that he sought to transform history beginning with his announcement in Mark 1:15: "The time is fulfilled, and the reign of God has come near, repent and hear the good news."
Today our lives still work to fulfill the original plan for which Israel had been chosen but, in its response to Jesus, it resisted: that the kingdom would take root there in Palestine and evolve into a worldwide society of peace and love.
Lohfink structures his study not as a narrative, but more like a documentary film, centered on key questions: the reign of God, discipleship, parables, miracles, the Torah, his last day and Easter events. The author knows that many of his scholarly colleagues have offered answers more radical or skeptical than his. He trusts the historical, validity of the earliest Gospel texts, though he concedes, by implication, that the events described did not necessarily happen as described. At Cana, for example, Jesus changed water into wine. But 500-700 liters of wine? The story's point is not the "miracle" but the lavishness of the kingdom.
Lohfink opens not with Luke and Matthew's nativity stories, but with John the Baptizer preaching in the desert. Why no angelic visits to Mary and Joseph, no Bethlehem shepherds or wise men from the East? Because these stories are meant to anticipate later historical events, but are not themselves historical. Lohfink knows that Raymond Brown, in The Birth of the Messiah, suggests that Jesus was born not in Bethlehem but in Nazareth. He wants us to begin where Jesus went public, to confront him as an adult rather than imagine him as a child.
Lohfink consistently underlines Jesus' social, even political, mission. Consider the sermon on the plain: "Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled." From the first day, Jesus' mission is "about poor, the hungry, the weeping in Israel, with whom Jesus was confronted every day. It is about the hopeless, the oppressed, the despairing among the people of God who followed Jesus."
Early every morning in Manhattan, I walk the richest streets of the wealthiest city in the world. There at my feet are invisible bodies wrapped in blankets and rags. They're huddled in doorways next to shopping carts crammed with all their earthly possessions, men barely alive, men with no pasts and no futures. So little has changed.
Why did Jesus offer so many parables about growing? Lohfink contends it's because they reflect what Jesus was learning about the slow growth of God's reign. The apocalypticists had become convinced that the world was so depraved that God would have to destroy the old world and create a new one. But Jesus held, in spite of the superior power of its opponents, and of its "shockingly minute and hidden character," that the reign's growth was unstoppable--like the mustard seed, the leaven. Lohfink calls this a silent revolution. "Growing things make no noise."
Lohfink breaks with the mainstream biblical scholarship that analyzes miracles as nature miracles, healings, rescues, exorcisms and punishments, etc. He sees them as "deeds of power" not "events contrary to nature." The healings--which he has no reason to question--result from a combination of God's grace and human faith. God does not intervene directly in the world, he says. Each person has powers of self-healing, but they require the right circumstances, including a healer, to set them in motion. Lohfink does not attribute diabolical possession to a personal spirit named Satan who occupies one and makes him curse and kill, but he does point to times in history where the phenomena of guilt, self-betrayal, lies, egoism, recklessness, meanness and heartlessness of society underlie a crisis in the culture.
Central to Lohfink's presentation is Jesus' relationship to the Old Testament, particularly the Torah, which precedes and surpasses the kings and Israel's wars. Israel is not meant to be a state but a "holy people of sisters and brothers." Jesus took the sword from Peter's hand and preferred being a victim to using violence.
Lohfink portrays Jesus as a "genius," even a political genius, because, with his knowledge of history and wisdom, he is able to take the heart of the Torah and allow something new to emerge from what "had already been known and hoped for."
The reader's attention peaks as Jesus faces death. He does not call himself the messiah, nor does he silence the crowds who so proclaim him. Unlike some historians, Lohfink insists on the historicity of the Last Supper, here the Passover meal, celebrated with Jesus' new family At table, Jesus, following Mark's account, takes bread and "interprets the broken bread" handed to his companions with "This is my body" This "sign-action" means: "My life will be broken like this bread." Later he "interprets" the wine as his blood, rather than say this bread and wine were "changed."
The Easter appearances have been validated not by the evidence of the empty tomb but rather by the unconscious sensing of the disciples, beginning with Peter. Lohfink says that God uses the imaginative power of the human to reveal. God's self in the midst of history Theologically, the appearances are of the really Risen One, but psychologically, they are constructed by the disciples' imagination. On Pentecost we are asked to put aside the wind and tongues of fire and the disciples speaking different languages and replace them with the "speaking of tongues" that formed them into a community in an experience of the Spirit.
The reader closes this book himself struck by the Spirit in whom this Jesus keeps working on the--some would say--now shrinking, endangered community he left behind.
There still may be hope.
Caption: --CNS/Stephen B Whatley
Caption: The Resurrection is depicted in "The Glory of Christ" by Stephen B Whatley, an expressionist artist based in London.
JESUS OF NAZARETH: WHAT HE WANTED, WHO HE WAS
By Gerhard Lohfink Published by Liturgical Press, $39.95
Reviewed by RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
[Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth literary editor of America magazine.]
Schroth, Raymond A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Schroth, Raymond A. "Jesus and human imagination." National Catholic Reporter, 27 Sept. 2013, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A346531727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1809784. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A346531727
THE LIVING PRESENCE OF GOD
Thomas D. Stegman
America. 208.9 (Mar. 18, 2013): p34+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
JESUS OF NAZARETH
What He Wanted, Who He Was
By Gerhard Lohfink (trans. Linda M. Maloney)
Liturgical Press. 391p $39.95
"There are innumerable books about Jesus." So begins the preface of Gerhard Lohfink's volume, Jesus of Nazareth, translated from the German original. So why another Jesus book? In the first place, Lohfink contends that every generation must encounter Jesus anew. Even more pressing, Jesus' proclamation and practice of the reign of God represent "the only hope for the wounds and sicknesses of our planet." The author thus presents his portrait of Jesus, the distillation of a lengthy and distinguished career of research and writing.
Lohfink makes clear from the outset that his approach is historical. He also acknowledges that the quest for the "historical Jesus" has produced both good results and bad results. Lohfink's volume can be added to the list of good ones because he avoids two pitfalls.
First, he does not fall into the trap that insists that the quester check his or her faith at the door. To the contrary, Lohfink argues that "the real 'historical Jesus' cannot be grasped independently of faith in him." He therefore takes seriously, as a historian, what the original witnesses believed about Jesus, as set forth in the canonical gospels. Faith is not inimical to knowledge; rather, it produces another kind of knowledge, the knowledge gained by personal encounter. In this connection, the author's own faith, while not explicitly invoked, is at play throughout, making his portrait all the more compelling.
The second pitfall Lohfink avoids is falling prey to the tyranny of the "criterion of dissimilarity." Using this criterion, some scholars attempt to discover Jesus' uniqueness by focusing on words and actions of his that cannot be derived from the Judaism of his time or from the early church. To the contrary, Lohfink is completely sanguine about Jesus' Jewishness. He portrays Jesus as an astute reader of Scripture, as one who with great sensitivity "discerned and drew out the scarlet thread of God's will." Particularly influential on Jesus' thinking and doing was Isaiah 52:7-9, which speaks of a messenger who brings good news (gospel!) and announces to Israel, "Your God reigns!"
Regarding Torah, Jesus drew out its center--"the commandment about the uniqueness and sole rule of God"--and insisted that its telos was to form a social order marked by solidarity, love, respect and mutual support. This social order was to reflect the love and holiness of God and there-by to draw the nations to God.
Just as Lohfink claims Jesus' close connection with Israel, so he asserts his intimate relationship with the early church. Indeed, at several points the author catches himself talking about the early Christian community. Here we arrive at a crucially important element of this book. While explicitly about Jesus, lying just beneath the surface is a vision of what the church is called and empowered to be (a point to which I will return).
Taking up the first question raised in the book's subtitle, what did Jesus want? Lohfink insists that everything Jesus said and did was to announce and make present the eschatological reign of God. Jesus' parables announced and his healings enacted God's salvation, making them present "today." The banquet imagery in his teaching and in his provision of food for the crowds proclaimed God's desire to share abundance of life--and to do so in the present.
In proclaiming and enacting God's eschatological reign, Jesus performed a number of symbolic actions. Not the least of these, according to Lohfink, was his creation and institution of the Twelve. Jesus called the Twelve from a larger group of disciples in order to symbolize and enact his desire to gather all of Israel. The "gathering of Israel" had become a fixed concept that represented God's eschatological salvation. It is thus no accident that Jesus' ministry focused on Israel.
More specifically, it centered on the formation of a "new family," a society that responded favorably to God's plan as set forth in Torah. Such a society--in which members regarded one another as family, exercised loving service, provided hospitality, supported those in need and practiced mutual forgiveness (even 77 times a day) and non-violence--gave concrete expression to the reality and power of God's reign.
This tangible manifestation of God's reign, of living in the saving presence of God, was also enacted in the communities of the early church, according to Lohfink. While he is careful not to identify the church with the reign of God, he maintains that the church is a "visible sign" of that reign--or least it should be. As such, it is to be a light to all peoples, drawing them into the sphere of God's rule. Here we find the prophetic edge of Lohfink's presentation of Jesus. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that since 1986 the author has lived in and served as a theologian for the Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde (Catholic Integrated Community), an intentional community that strives to make the Gospel present in all aspects of life.
And what about the second question in the subtitle, who was Jesus? He is, for Lohfink, the one through whom God has come eschatologically for salvation. Although it was often only implicit in his ministry, Jesus spoke and acted as in God's stead and was experienced as such by those who received him. He manifested God's rule by coming to serve, not to be served. His atoning death, which revealed God's reign in a climactic manner, was "not a substitute action but the cause and enabling of a process of liberation" that continues through the eschatological people of God, a forgiven people who are empowered to forgive and liberate others in turn. Jesus' resurrection and exaltation are then the definitive revelation of who he is and always has been, the messianic Son of God and Son of Man.
Lohfink's portrait of Jesus is very much worth reading. Because he looks to the Gospels with a sympathetic yet critical eye, he gives a faithful interpretation of Jesus. And because he is faithful, Lohfink offers a portrait that is challenging--especially for the church today.
THOMAS D. STEGMAN, S.J., is associate professor of New Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.
Stegman, Thomas D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stegman, Thomas D. "THE LIVING PRESENCE OF GOD." America, 18 Mar. 2013, p. 34+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323419425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e4e6343. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A323419425
What Jesus knew
Greg Carey
The Christian Century. 130.2 (Jan. 23, 2013): p36+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press, 408 pp., $39.95
Gerhard Lohfink clearly loves Jesus, and his book demands readers who share that love. Because the readers love Jesus, they want to know more about him, and collecting facts takes them only so far. They want to understand Jesus, to appreciate in a fundamental way how Jesus perceived his world and to glimpse Jesus' vision for the reign of God. In the three weeks I've had this book, I've recommended it to three such readers.
Lohfink introduces a Jesus who proclaims the reign of God--God's decisive irruption into human affairs. More important, Jesus bears the very presence of God in his own person. Grounded in Israel's scriptures and heritage, Jesus gathers disciples and builds community; he demonstrates God's reign through prophetic actions and healing works; and by telling vivid parables, he prepares people to imagine what God is doing. Israel's God always begins with particular people and particular places. Jesus calls Israel to enter into God's reign, resisting evil but rejecting violence. He invites people into a joyful, unconditional embrace of God's reign in their lives and in their society.
Nothing controversial so far. Interpreters of the parables may object that Lohfink understates the parables' potential to disorient their audiences. Some will not share his principled belief that divine activity contributed to Jesus' miracles. Apart from his claim that Jesus would have learned important parts of scripture in his youth, Lohfink has little to say about Jesus' origins or childhood. Just the same, many interpreters emphasize Jesus' Jewish identity and attend to the practices of teaching, community building and restoration that mark his ministry.
One simple thing distinguishes Lohfink's account: his Jesus possesses a fundamental self-awareness of his person and his mission. Jesus knows he is the Messiah, but even that title bears limitations and does not account for his full identity. He claims authority as Son of Man, embodying in his own person "the new society of the eschatological Israel." When his work achieves only partial success in Galilee and when he encounters resistance from the authorities in Jerusalem, Jesus perceives not only a personal rejection but Israel's outright rejection of God's reign.
Confident in his divine vindication, Jesus interprets his own death as the means by which God will overcome even Israel's rejection. His death, "utterly and entirely death for others," opens the way to life for all. Jesus' tomb was empty, an event that prompted his followers to understand that they had entered an eschatological situation. The Easter narratives, Lohfink insists, say nothing about our individual afterlives; instead, they call Jesus' followers into mission. The most distinctive thing about Lohfink's Jesus is that he embodies God's presence as a decisive intervention in human history--and he knows it. In his person Jesus bears the full presence of God.
Lohfink's ideal reader need not be a scholar, though it will help to have a solid college-level understanding of the Bible. Lohfink writes clearly and accessibly, but he also expects readers to share his assumptions concerning the nature of the Gospels as historical sources. He never explains why Jesus surely did not say the kinds of things we find in John's Gospel, or why that same Gospel might provide our only source for particular bits of historically accurate information.
A Catholic priest, a New Testament scholar by training and a former Tiabingen professor, Lohfink lives and works as a theologian for the Catholic Integrated Community, a renewal movement based in Germany. His publications include works in New Testament studies and ecclesiology.
Lohfink participates in a major trend in contemporary Jesus research. Until the 1990s, historians tended to build their portraits of Jesus from the ground up. Like the notorious Jesus Seminar, they sifted through the Gospels, picking out specks of "authentic" material from the theology, mythology and interpretation that account for a significant amount of the Gospels. Lohfink instead starts with a big picture and fills in the details.
This volume reflects a fierce independence; I cannot recall a book very much like it. Lohfink rarely engages the work of other Jesus scholars directly. Just the same, a reader acquainted with Jesus scholarship will encounter familiar ideas. Lohfink's description of the Gospels as interpretations of the impact Jesus made on people evokes James Dunn's work on memory in early Christian communities. The Jesus who advances Israel's story into its eschatological fullness, not in some remote future but in the here and now, recalls the work of N. T. Wright. The Jesus who seeks revolution but rejects violence resembles the Jesus of Richard Horsley. And Lohfink's high estimation of Jesus' symbolic behaviors, including building community at table and through healing, brushes the edges of John Dominic Crossan's work. Significantly, Lohfink shares his refusal to separate historiography from theology with Dale Allison, who has offered a brilliant critique of Jesus scholarship.
The book ends, as not all Jesus books do, with a reflection on Jesus' basic claim regarding himself and with the church's most basic confession concerning him: "Jesus, true human and true God." Lohfink is frustratingly indirect on these points. He all but says that Jesus possessed an awareness of his divine identity: he understood his own acts as works of God, yet they were ,accomplished by his own power." Even his proclamation of God's reign implied a christological claim. But this is a sensitive subject: why doesn't Lohfink come out and say whether Jesus possessed a divine self-consciousness? And why doesn't he say definitively that the church's confession of Jesus emerged from Jesus' own person? Instead, he writes: "Jesus found others who saw what was happening through him and who he was."
Perhaps I am small-minded to want Lohfink to say clearly and directly how he imagines Jesus to have understood himself. I suspect that Lohfink would trace his own elusiveness back to Jesus, who knew better than to spell out such things for his followers.
Greg Carey teaches New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary and is a resident scholar at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carey, Greg. "What Jesus knew." The Christian Century, 23 Jan. 2013, p. 36+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A317202271/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c8773d50. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A317202271
Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was
The Christian Century. 129.25 (Dec. 12, 2012): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press, 480 pp., $39.95 paperback
The attempt to distinguish the authentic words of Jesus from the inauthentic ones has the whiff of silliness, says Lohfink. The Gospel writers, drawing from numerous traditions about Jesus, put together a narrative interpretation of his life and ministry. The Gospels are interpretation through and through; neither facts nor authentic sayings can be extracted as if panning for gold. The constant temptation in Jesus studies is to re-create him in our own image. Lohfink thinks we need a community of interpretation to protect against private interpretations. Jesus emerged from an interpretative community, Israel, within which he must be understood, and today the church serves as the interpretative community.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was." The Christian Century, 12 Dec. 2012, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314933125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b0be3ad. Accessed 3 June 2018.
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Print Marked Items
Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and
Eternal Life
Publishers Weekly.
265.2 (Jan. 8, 2018): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life
Gerhard Lohfink, trans. from the German by Linda M. Maloney. Liturgical, $34.95 (314p) ISBN 978-0-
8146-8451-1
In this thoughtful, entertaining book, Lohfink (Jesus of Nazareth), a German Catholic priest and New
Testament professor at the University of Tubingen, considers the Christian perspective on large questions of
faith and the existence of an afterlife. He begins with an overview of theories about the afterlife from
different religions and cultures over the millennia. With supporting quotes from tomb inscriptions,
obituaries, poems, novels, scriptures, and philosophers, Lohfink offers perspectives from those skeptical of
any afterlife to various understandings of the soul's continuation--whether through descendants (as in Hindi
traditions), reincarnation (Buddhism), or becoming one with the universe. Following this general summary,
he focuses on the early Israelites' relationship with the divine, exploring how their relationship with one
God (rather than the many gods of their neighbors) infused a "radical worldliness." This understanding,
Lohfink asserts, then found affirmation in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Asking big
religious questions (such as, "Can God, whose nature is pure love, allow a part of humanity to suffer eternal
hell, eternal torment?") Lohfink takes aim at classic discussions of faith from a Christian perspective rooted
in wonder and trust. This intelligent, gracious book is a welcome contribution to theological conversations
about life, death, and resurrection. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life." Publishers Weekly, 8 Jan. 2018, p. 58. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524503030/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=879c53df. Accessed 3 June 2018.
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Does God Need the Church?, On the
Lord's Appearing: An Essay on Prayer
and Tradition, In the School of Love: An
Anthology of Early Cistercian Texts, The
Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual
Tradition, and Solanus Casey
Lawrence S. Cunningham
Commonweal.
128.11 (June 1, 2001): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
http://www.cweal.org/
Full Text:
Does God Need the Church?
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press (Michael Glazier Book),
$39.95, 341 pp.
On the Lord's Appearing: An Essay on Prayer and Tradition
By Jonathan Robinson
Catholic University of America Press,
$26.95, 280 pp.
In the School of Love: An Anthology of Early Cistercian Texts
Edited by Edith Scholl, O.C.S.O.
Cistercian Publications, $29.95, 180 pp.
The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition
By William Countryman
Orbis, $15, 214 pp.
Solanus Casey
Edited by Michael Crosby
Crossroad, $19.95, 275 pp.
In 1986 Gerhard Lohfink resigned his professorship in New Testament at the University of Tubingen,
moved to Munich, and put his theological expertise at the service of the Catholic Integrated Community.
The community was founded by a group of young German lay Catholics who, at the end of World War II,
met to discuss the meaning of Christian community and to grapple with their country's embrace of National
Socialism. Members of the community were determined to rediscover, in the Jewish origins of the Christian
faith, the authentic roots of what it means to be Catholic. From the beginning, the Integrated Community
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invited theologians and other intellectuals to join them. They strongly opposed the German cultural practice
of identifying Catholics or Protestants simply by their birth heritage and enrollment in the government
census. In short, the community wanted to discern their communal identity as Christians as opposed to their
membership in what Germans called the Volkskirche.
Lohfink's Does God Need the Church? is a work of biblical ecclesiology that advances four arguments.
First, God did call a special people even though (and paradoxically) God's call is universal. Second, there
are characteristic signs of Israel that perdure (gathering, faith, the Exodus experience, etc.). Third, Jesus and
the Twelve are inexplicable unless seen in the context of the people of Israel. Last, the characteristic signs
of the church should include the continuation of the Exodus and the gathering, a function of remembering
and articulating faith, and a struggle for wholeness, against which disunity is a scandal.
Lohfink repeatedly insists that the "newness" of the New Testament does not, and cannot, mean a
repudiation of the "Old" Testament. Lohfink puts the issue bluntly: "It is usually forgotten that what
happened in Galilee and afterward in Jerusalem was not something strange and alien to Israel; it was Jewish
history." He firmly grounds his ecclesiology in the reality of the two testaments that constitute, for
Christians, one sacred Scripture. Although that unity is evident in every Catholic liturgy, we need
reminding; and so Lohfink dwells on Saint Paul's assertion that Christians dare not brag that they are
branches since "it is the root that supports you" (Rom. 11:18).
The passion that fills this book comes from Lohfink's conviction that the church will not survive (indeed, in
much of Western Europe it is dying) by feeding on a cultural memory of its past place in society. What it
means to be a member of the Christian community must be seen free from pious nostalgia and fear of the
world. Bible-based repudiation of Judaism and anti-Jewish violence are twined in European history. In a
postscript Lohfink thinks back on his own childhood: "I saw men and women who were forced to sew a
yellow star of David on their garments; then one day I didn't see them any more." That haunting memory
has brought about this reconsideration of his faith.
Excellent close readings of Scripture secure the arguments of Does God Need the Church? Deep faith
moves them forward. The question asked in the title gets an affirmative answer but one that is unsentimental
and compellingly fresh. One would do well to read this book with a Bible close at hand as the fine insights
Lohfink offers can be further considered thanks to a good scriptural and subject index.
These days, books on prayer seem to sprout like mushrooms after a spring rain. Rare, however, is the book
that attempts to understand prayer from a theological perspective. Jonathan Robinson's On the Lord's
Appearing is such a book. As is fitting for an Oratorian, Father Robinson turns to Philip Neri to find the
organizing principle for his discussion of prayer in the Catholic tradition. He notes that Philip loved to read
the lauds of Jacopone of Todi, a thirteenth-century Franciscan poet. Robinson takes a Jacopone laud titled
"The Five Ways in Which God Reveals Himself" as the template for discussing the ways of prayer. Those
five ways can be roughly understood as liberation from the bonds of sin; healing through the agency of the
sacraments and ascetical practice; developing friendship with God; entering into the dark mystery of God;
and, finally, achieving union with God in love.
Anyone who juxtaposes prayer and tradition will end up with a traditional vision of prayer. There is nothing
wrong with such an approach but, given the direction of much writing today in spirituality (some of it,
admittedly, odd and even risible), Robinson's volume does seem open to criticism. Let me advance some
reservations. First, there is almost nothing in this work that sets the prayer life of an individual within a
communal context. It is easy to forget that John of the Cross was not a solitary mystic but one who
celebrated Mass, sang the office each day, and lived in a community. Robinson's only use of the sacramental
life of the church to advance his theory of prayer is to invoke the sacraments under the rubric of "healing"
while grumbling sotto voce about liturgical deformations after Vatican II. Nor is there any sense that the life
of prayer should spill over into a transformed life for the sake of others. After all, when Teresa of Avila
finishes The Interior Castle she says that the test of those who have entered the deepest level of prayer is
rather simple: Do they love their neighbor?
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If I found this work somewhat deficient in the context within which the author writes, I also confess that he
has some very penetrating observations to make about the life of prayer. The book would have even been
better had the author been more expansive in putting his doctrine of prayer into the context of the nexus
between prayer and the larger world within which the one who prays lives.
Saint Benedict called the monastic life a "school of the Lord's service" and some centuries later Bernard of
Clairvaux refined that description, calling his community a "school of charity." Indeed, the emphasis on the
affective love of God has been a leitmotif of Cistercian spirituality. Sister Edith Scholl, herself a Cistercian
nun, has had the good idea of assembling an anthology of texts from the early Cistercian fathers and
mothers. These works on the love of God are designed to be used as a meditation manual, book of prayers,
or resource for lectio.
Scholl divides her selections into twelve brief chapters beginning with considerations of Cistercian
anthropology and ending with the "perfection of love." There is an especially rich chapter on the
blessedness of love that cites a number of texts on the beatitudes as well as another excellent chapter linking
love of God with love of neighbor. All of these writers (Sister Edith gives us selections from ten early
Cistercians) come across well in English. Their writings are unencumbered by scholastic neologisms,
replete with scriptural allusions, and affective in tone. Brief biographical notes and a select bibliography
close the book.
With very rare exceptions no selection runs more than a paragraph or two. The merit of such brevity is that
one can take small doses, preferably reading them aloud slowly as an exercise of prayerful consideration
(which brings us very close to what lectio should be, as Basil Pennington points out in his brief introduction
to the book). This is a fine anthology that would be a welcome addition to anyone's personal library. It
deserves room on the shelf of any retreat house or other place where prayer is taken seriously.
William Countryman's The Poetic Imagination is part of a series edited by Philip Sheldrake under the
general title "Traditions of Christian Spirituality." Countryman does not intend to provide a global view of
writers and movements that have flourished under the aegis of the Anglican communion. His sharply
delineated focus is on the Christian life as seen in the tradition of English lyric poetry extending from postElizabethean
writers to the twentieth-century poets W. H. Auden and Welsh priest R. S. Thomas. Rather
than devote chapters to individual writers Countryman identifies four themes in four central chapters: the
resources of image and language; the dialectic of presence and absence (of God); life under grace; and a
living tradition.
The author wants to show that the poets he discusses have something classically Anglican about them, and
to demonstrate to what degree the English lyric tradition addresses the present reality of Anglicanism,
which is hardly defined by church life in the British Isles. His strategy is to admit the protean nature of
Anglicanism (he says that what is unique about Anglicanism is its lack of uniqueness!) while insisting that
the Anglican biblical tradition, mediated by the Book of Common Prayer, provides a common ground.
Such a case is obviously easier to make for figures like Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Traherne, and moderns
like Eliot and Thomas. It is less clear in a poet like Blake where other factors enter in (for example,
Swedenborg). Be that as it may, the importance of this volume is Countryman's emphasis on the littleexplored
topic of poetry as a locus for shaping a vision of the Christian life. He falters when he attempts to
wring out something specifically Anglican from poets (such as the Romantics) whose connection to church
tradition was nominal and whose wellsprings of imagination derived from other sources. Coleridge would
be the textbook case and nobody, I think, would wish to make a case for the late work of Wordsworth (for
example, the ecclesiastical sonnets) when the poet was pretty much running on empty. Furthermore,
Countryman's decision to focus on the lyric allows him only passing comments on Eliot whose "Four
Quartets" is easily the greatest religious poem of the past century, though hardly a lyric poem.
Given the task Countryman has set himself, he has done a credible job. It was wonderful to reread some of
the great poetry of the seventeenth century handled so sensitively. At the same time, I wish he had included
prose writers, since that tradition within Anglicanism is so rich and too little studied. Having just reread
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Boswell's Life of Johnson, I wonder if anyone (other than the writers of the collects of the Book of
Common Prayer) has ever written more moving and deeply felt prayers and meditations.
Kenneth Woodward's Making Saints (1990) provides an authoritative and highly readable account of the
process of canonization in the Catholic church. Michael Crosby's book on the American Capuchin friar
Solanus Casey (1870-1957) gives those interested in saints and the saint-making process an inside look at
the kind of dossier compiled for the canonization process.
Solanus Casey is a textbook example of the traditional candidate for beatification and canonization. A
model Franciscan religious whose academic deficiencies were such that he was ordained to the priesthood
but was not given faculties for solemn preaching or hearing confessions--a so-called sacerdos simplex--
Casey exercised his ministry as a doorkeeper at various religious houses in Detroit. He never requested that
his status be changed even though he was obviously average in intelligence, and his deficiencies were
largely because of the bad academic training he got in a seminary where the texts were in Latin and the
lectures in German. He had an extraordinary reputation for his spiritual counseling, the power of his prayer,
his generosity to the poor, and his work as a healer. Thousands attended his funeral and, after his death, his
reputation grew as many people invoked his aid in their prayers.
As these pages make clear, Casey derived his spirituality from the traditional sources set forth for every
consecrated religious in his day: the Mass, the Office, devotional practices of the rosary, and visits to the
Blessed Sacrament. The only peculiar side to his spiritual life was his lifelong devotion to the four-volume
The Mystical City of God by the seventeenth-century Poor Clare, Mary of Agreda--a work which for a time
rested on the Index. How Casey came across this strange work and why he read it all his life "on his knees"
and encouraged others to read it is not clear although, in that period, there was a rather widespread taste for
other rococo spiritual writers like Grignion de Montfort. There is no evidence in Casey's writings--
consisting of his spiritual notebooks and his many letters--that he was in any way heterodox.
How the process of Solanus Casey fares (and every indication is that he was a person of great prayer and
extraordinary self-giving) is not for us to say. What is interesting in this volume is the rhetorical tone that is
adopted to make its case. The editor, Michael Crosby, has also written a good biography of Casey titled
Thank God Ahead of Time (1998) that knits together more cohesively the story told here.
Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cunningham, Lawrence S. "Does God Need the Church?, On the Lord's Appearing: An Essay on Prayer
and Tradition, In the School of Love: An Anthology of Early Cistercian Texts, The Poetic Imagination:
An Anglican Spiritual Tradition, and Solanus Casey." Commonweal, 1 June 2001, p. 27. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A75445720/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0311c8c6. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A75445720
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Does God Need the Church?
America.
182.8 (Mar. 11, 2000): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2000 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
Toward a Theology of the People of God
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press. 341p $39.95 (paper)
In 1986 Gerhard Lohfink stunned the guild of biblical scholars by resigning his professorship on the
Catholic theological faculty at the University of Tubingen and joining the Catholic Integrated Community
in Munich. This book is evidence that he has not ceased to think deeply and creatively about what was the
focus of his academic work: the biblical foundations of the church. He contends that God does need a
people in the world (Israel, the church) that lives according to God's will because otherwise the world
cannot be redeemed in freedom. After explaining why God needs a special people, he discusses the
characteristic signs of Israel, Jesus and the figure of the Twelve, and the characteristic signs of the church.
He gives particular attention to such themes as the gathering of God's people, the exodus experience, the
"todayness" of the reign of God, the superabundance of salvation, the church as the eschatological people of
God, community and unity. Although Lohfink takes a rather gloomy view of the world and the church
today, his book is full of positive and constructive biblical insights about what the church could and should
be.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Does God Need the Church?" America, 11 Mar. 2000, p. 27. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A60028079/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ecd96e2.
Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A60028079
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No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the
Church Today
Thomas P. Rausch
Theological Studies.
76.2 (June 2015): p371+.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0040563915574990
COPYRIGHT 2015 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.ts.mu.edu/
Full Text:
No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today. By Gerhard Lohfink. Translated from the German by
Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2014. Pp. vii + 330. $34.95.
Lohfink explains that his title refers to contemporary efforts to "tame" Jesus, presenting him as just another
rabbi or prophet, rejecting his views on divorce, reducing his preaching to the psychological, his
eschatology to the ethical, or individualizing his emphasis on the kairotic and the communal. But L. depicts
Jesus as God's final and ultimate word, "the Word in which God has spoken God's self totally and without
exception" (3). His book is about Jesus, but also about the church, the eschatological people of God Jesus
founded and for whom he ultimately died. The book originated in a series of lectures given over the last
several years; thus the chapters are relatively brief, easy to digest, and written to maintain the interest of the
audience.
The topics L. treats are certainly contemporary. They include questions such as whether Jesus died for
"many" or for "all," how an individual could redeem the whole world, how the hungry will be filled in the
reign of God, how sacraments mediate Christ through the community of the church, or whether the Qur'an
sanctions violence in the name of religion. One chapter critiques Ernst Kasemann's arguments about the
canon grounding the many confessions rather than the unity of the church and his "scholarly fable" (129)
about the Pauline church's fundamentally charismatic structure. Another examines the contemporary notion
of "values" disconnected from the fundamental nature of the human, and in the process repeats the "socalled
Bockenforde Paradox" (267) that the modern liberal state is founded on political values that it cannot
itself justify or guarantee, an argument made also by Pope Benedict XVI. L. also stresses that much of
Jesus' activity was directed to "gathering" and "uniting" Israel, a theme emphasized in his earlier Jesus of
Nazareth, What He Wanted, Who He Was (2012). One of the best chapters is on how faith works, arguing
that it must be learned, that it is mediated in the intimacy of the family, that it must grow, be ritually
expressed, and that it lays claim to the whole of life. Another chapter that stands out treats the church's
proper name as assembly, tracing the roots of the word ekklesia, contrasting its essentially visible,
communal nature with various personal religions and pop purveyors of salvation.
A particular strength of the book comes from L.'s years of teaching the New Testament, while his long
association with the Integrierte Gemeinde gives him a profound appreciation of the Jewish roots of
Christian faith. Indeed at times the book reads like a rabbinical commentary on the biblical text. At other
times, however, L. might have shown greater appreciation of religious traditions other than Judaism and
Christianity. His reduction of Buddhism to a religion of escape from the world does not move beyond the
"negative soteriology" of John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1995), overlooking Buddhism's
profound teaching on compassion and its world-embracing ideal of Bodhisattva. L. dismisses other world
religions, including Buddhism, as promoting self-redemption, rather than trying to see how God might work
through other religions. He contrasts the Sermon on the Mount with Sura 9.5 from the Qur'an, the "sword
verse" used by Islamic fundamentalists to justify violence against those they see as godless. Though he
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acknowledges that the verse is disputed in Islam, he argues that if Christians in Europe fail to reclaim the
physicality of their faith, faced with the concreteness of Islam, Christianity will not have a chance.
The book harbors considerable wisdom. L. emphasizes that God always respects our freedom; describes the
risen Jesus as "pure, unimaginable presence" (195); stresses the essential diversity of the church, which can
never be a ghetto of like-minded people; and, through meditation on the story of David and Bathsheba,
shows how the consequences of even forgiven sin linger in history with tragic effect. He argues that the
failure of Christians to acknowledge Paul's theology of history in Romans 9-11 resulted in the anti-Judaism
that ultimately made possible the Holocaust. The book, with its exposition of Scripture, social commentary,
and accessible chapters, is well suited for retreat reading, adult education groups, or homiletic material.
DOI: 10.1177/0040563915574990
Thomas P. Rausch, S.J.
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Rausch, Thomas P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rausch, Thomas P. "No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today." Theological Studies, vol. 76, no.
2, 2015, p. 371+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A415323306/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=36f65050. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A415323306
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Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted,
Who He Was
John Topel
Theological Studies.
75.1 (Mar. 2014): p182+.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0040563913519056
COPYRIGHT 2014 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.ts.mu.edu/
Full Text:
Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was. By Gerhard Lohfink. Translated from the German by
Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2012. Pp. xvi + 391. $39.95.
Lohfink, professor of New Testament at Tubingen from 1973 to 1987, resigned his position to live in the
Integrierte Gemeinde after the model of Acts 2:42-47. This volume is the fruit of 50 years of scholarly
research and faith-filled living.
Chapter 1 is decisive. Against many "historical Jesus" critics, L. demonstrates what Carl Becker had shown
American historians in 1931: there are no uninterpreted facts, and bald facts communicate no meaning. The
evangelists did what documentary filmmakers do--cut, recombine, allude, and comment--to interpret the
meaning of Jesus for their community. The task is to find not "the facts" but the right interpretation of Jesus'
life. For this, faith is indispensable. L. interprets Jesus not against the Gospels, but as a member of a
community that has given us the only credible interpretation of the facts.
L.'s 18 chapters follow the usual outline of Jesus books. The first 12 chapters describe what Jesus wanted,
under the topics of the proclamation and meaning of the reign of God, the gathering of Israel, and the call to
discipleship in many forms: Jesus' parables and his miracles, his warnings about judgment, and his view of
the OT and the Torah. The next six chapters describe who he was, living his Father's will unconditionally,
his commitment to the reign of God, and the ways his life and death for Israel laid a sovereign claim to
which the church responded in faith. In brief, Jesus wanted a response to the reign of God breaking into
history through his proclamation, teaching, and healings. His absolute commitment to that reign was both
the eschatological fulfillment of Torah and the basis for his scandalous claims to ultimate authority. Those
claims ground the church's calling him Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Lord.
Like Ben F. Meyer, E. P. Sanders, and N. T. Wright, L. finds Jesus not understandable apart from his
identity as a first-century Jew. Against those who identify the reign of God as a spiritual realm within
individual subjects, Jesus' reign had to be visible as a new society in the experimental field of a small
nation, so that it could be apprehended by the whole world. The reign Jesus announced is already
powerfully present for those who commit themselves to it in faith. L.'s pervasive emphasis on Jesus'
gathering of eschatological Israel corrects the dispensationalism of older exegetes. Jesus' teaching, then, is
seen not as a new law but as the interpretation of the center of the Torah. Finally, it was monotheistic Jewish
Christian communities, not Greek ones, that made Jesus Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, and Lord.
Jesus' absolute commitment to God's reign breaking in with eschatological power leads to his "reckless" life
and to harsh demands on his disciples. These can be explained only by the joy and fascination of a treasure
found in the field, one that produces the Gospels' hundredfold--houses and family, liters of wine, and
baskets of food. When the church is totally committed, it is a new society, enjoying, amid persecutions, the
abundance of the new creation (86). This fascination makes the church not a utopia, but a concrete historical
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society in which people support one another in Jesus' radical selflessness, which alone can bring peace on
earth.
Beyond the innumerable insights of each chapter lies the sheer readability for the layman. L.'s Jesus as a
first-century Jew is much closer to the historical Jesus than is the cynic of J. D. Crossan. Incorporating faith
into interpretation enables L. to see Jesus' reign "already" fully present in God's omnipotence and "not yet"
operative because of human refusal to commit in faith, both in Jesus' ministry and in the contemporary
church.
There are exegetical problems, such as an occasional proof-texting, as with Romans 3:13 (212). L.'s
"representation" may explain atonement, but not "substitutional" atonement (262-65). His admirable
locating of Jesus' teaching at the center of the Torah ignores Jesus' negation of many of its laws and so
diminishes the striking novelty of his teaching, which was as countercultural to his Jewish world as it is to
every culture (122).
L.'s Catholic faith is implicit and crucial throughout the book. The fundamental problem of his subtitle is
that Jesus' claims, or even his "self-understanding" implicit in those claims, are not all that Jesus was. Once
L. admits the authenticity of the Gospel interpretations, he must deal with what Mark says about Jesus in
the voice from heaven in 1:11 and 9:7. "My beloved Son" may mean the Messiah, but L. does not say so.
And what of Jesus' self-understanding expressed in the "thunderbolt" of Matthew 11:27/Luke 10:22? Once
L. has (rightly) admitted faith as an element of his quest, what are his criteria for excluding texts that the
Synoptics considered important for their "authentic" interpretation of Jesus? To answer this question we
must go even beyond Meyer's method (in his The Aims of Jesus [1979]) of interrelating history and
theology to a more formal collaboration of exegesis and systematic theology.
DOI: 10.1177/0040563913519056
John Topel, S.J.
St. Mary Star of the Sea, Port Townsend, WA
Topel, John
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Topel, John. "Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was." Theological Studies, vol. 75, no. 1, 2014,
p. 182+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A361183733/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2260b46. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A361183733
ARTICLES
Published on March 14, 2016
Review: “No Irrelevant Jesus” by Gerhard Lohfink
written by Jonathan Martin Ciraulo
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As the title suggests, Gerhard Lohfink’s No Irrelevant Jesus, essentially a collection of short talks on various biblical themes, is concerned with the relevance of Jesus today. However, as more than a century of biblical studies has demonstrated, Jesus’ supposed relevance has been inflected in so many divergent ways that such an enterprise necessarily falls under a cloud of suspicion. The approach has often been to dismiss the “Christ of faith,” deemed hopelessly irrelevant for modern times, and instead to figure him as a radical prophet, a wise teacher, or an emblem of whatever social movement happens to be in vogue. Lohfink, by contrast, does no such thing. He does not claim to have discovered a new truth that will finally and definitively make Jesus important today, but rather claims simply and incisively that he has always been relevant. Rather than his relevance being circumscribed by our current standards and expectations, Jesus is most relevant when the Church lives up to his standards. Jesus cannot be separated from the Church, and thus, for Lohfink, Jesus is relevant not in spite of his ecclesial veil, but because of it. Though not a work of ecclesiology per se, Lohfink’s study of the historical Jesus always bears in mind that Christ’s Incarnation is prolonged in his Body, the Church.
However, rather than exculpating the Church and incriminating the world that simply fails to see Jesus’ relevance, Lohfink consistently shifts the burden of proof onto the Church. Jesus’ relevance, or the relevance of the Church, is not a fait accompli. As the Church has always recognized, its true identity (its essence) is not the same as its actuality in any given historical moment (its existence). It is the Church that often makes Jesus irrelevant by not receiving the gift of its own identity. Thus, instead of making Jesus relevant by an accommodation to the current expectations of the world, which for Lohfink is always a distortion of the Gospel, “there are areas in which Christian communities must be counter-societies. Otherwise they will make themselves superfluous” (296). The relevance of Jesus may be found where the Church appears, at least at first glance, to be most irrelevant to a society that often oppresses the weak and exalts the strong, which is part of Lohfink’s repeated warnings about a growing neo-paganism. Chapter 12, “Must the Pope Be Conservative?”, is telling in this regard. In short, Lohfink answers that yes, the Pope, and the Church as a whole, must be conservative (though not “regressive”) in regards to the gift of Christ, but this is only because “Christ is always far in advance of advancing history” (144). The “conservative” nature of the Church, continually receiving what has been entrusted to it by God, is what makes it radically progressive. The Tradition of the Church, then, is one of “a continuity of ‘non-accommodation’” to the values of society (146).
Lohfink’s genius and value lie in his ability to exegete the biblical texts in a way that is simultaneously refreshing and unaffected. As Raymond Brown had always done, and as recently found in Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth series, so Lohfink uses the tools of modern biblical studies, such as form criticism, to support the Church’s understanding of Scripture, rather than to subvert it. The results are, incidentally, more interesting than those of the de-mythologizing approach. Likewise, because the chapters originated as oral presentations, Lohfink is continually thinking of the “signs of the times,” whether found in newspapers, mystery novels, or pop psychology. We thus find a triple commitment to an accurate biblical interpretation, to the Church, and to addressing the contemporary situation. Lohfink is convinced that “The Bible enables every generation to compare its own experiences of faith with the previous experiences of God’s people” (153).
Chapter 17, “A Catastrophe in the Life of David,” exemplifies Lohfink’s approach. He begins with an acknowledgement of the precipitous decline in the practice of the Sacrament of Reconciliation among Catholics, and the corresponding rise of psychological, anthropological, and biological attempts to explain away personal guilt. With characteristic candor, Lohfink avers that “What is normal is that one has guilt feelings because one is guilty” (212). The story of King David’s sin against Uriah and Bathsheba, when rightly exegeted, can shed light upon our contemporary situation. Nathan, representing the community of Israel, is an essential character to the story, because it is he, a member of the People of God, who shatters David’s blindness. Likewise, Lohfink writes, “The sacrament of reconciliation is a church thing. It needs communities that have a history with God; it needs congregations in which guilt is understood as guilt and forgiveness and reconciliation are really lived” (217).
Never contrived and never quixotic, Lohfink’s book represents the best in an authentically Catholic approach to not only personal holiness, but holiness lived in community. This book is a great gift for the New Evangelization for its small, meditative chapters that will be of benefit to both neophyte and scholar, and also because the insights are gleaned from a life saturated in the Scriptures. If “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ,” then Jesus’ irrelevance is almost assured when the Bible is no longer read or understood. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, a longtime supporter of the Catholic Integrated Community with which Lohfink is associated, said, “It is my hope that, in fidelity to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the study of Sacred Scripture, read within the communion of the universal Church, will truly be the soul of theological studies” (Verbum Domini, §47). By this measure, Benedict would find Lohfink’s book very relevant.
Jonathan Martin Ciraulo is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame.
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BOOKS
Untamed Jesus
by Stanley Hauerwas August 12, 2014
IN REVIEW
No Irrelevant Jesus
By Gerhard Lohfink
Liturgical Press
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Distinguished New Testament scholar Gerhard Lohfink and his brother, Norbert Lohfink, a Jesuit and an Old Testament scholar, are members of the Catholic Integrated Community in Germany. The community was founded in 1945 by Catholics who thought that Nazi rule in Germany was not some freak event but an indication that a deep moral failing was at the very heart of German life. Members of the Integrated Community believe that if Germany is to have a moral future, a fundamental reconstruction of German life is demanded. That project, they believe, requires a people committed to living as an alternative community. The Catholic Integrated Community now has over a thousand members.
That Lohfink and his brother are members of the Integrated Community is no surprise given the character of their work, which is centered in the presumption that faith is entry into a long history constituted by a people whose lives have been shaped by a narrative enacted in rituals. That history is first and foremost the history of God’s promised people, Israel—a history that Christians have suppressed. This suppression of Paul’s message in the ninth through 11th chapters of Romans is what made the unsurpassed horror of Auschwitz possible. Christians’ suppression of Israel and the Jews has also meant that Christians misunderstand the character of the church.
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas teaches theological ethics at Duke University. He recently wrote Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (Eerdmans).
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Aug 20, 2014 issue
English readers’ introduction to Lohfink’s account of the Christian faith came in his book Jesus and Community, published in 1984. There Lohfink responded to the oft-made suggestion that “Jesus came preaching the Kingdom and instead we got the church” by observing that Jesus could not have founded a church because there had long been a church—namely God’s people, Israel. The calling of the disciples and the requirement that they renounce violence, Lohfink argued, manifests Jesus’ determination to call into existence a people who are an alternative to the world.
When I first read Jesus and Community, I thought Lohfink must have gained his fundamental perspective by reading John Howard Yoder, but there has been no indication that he knows anything about Yoder. That he is innocent of Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus makes his work all the more significant because without being influenced by the Anabaptist thinker he has developed christological and eschatological arguments that are quite similar to Yoder’s readings of the New Testament. Lohfink is clearly a deeply committed Catholic whose understanding of the church might be characterized as conservative by some, but in Lohfink’s hands a conservative reading of texts has radical political implications. The same, of course, is true of Yoder. Many have argued that Anabaptists are much closer to Catholicism than to the forms of Christianity associated with the magisterial reformers.
No Irrelevant Jesus is composed of short talks Lohfink has given over the years that are filled with exegetical and theological wisdom. The only comparable writer I can think of is Herbert McCabe. Both McCabe and Lohfink have a genius for helping us see the significance of basic convictions and actions that make the Christian faith the Christian faith. For example, Lohfink reads Mary’s Magnificat as a song of the people of God about the great “overturning” that began in Abraham and finds its culmination in Jesus.
Lohfink revisits many of the themes he began to develop in Jesus and Community, but the talks in No Irrelevant Jesus are for nontheologians. In a chapter on the taming of Jesus he argues that Jesus is tamed when we cease speaking of his imminent return, when we ignore his sharp words against the rich, when we avoid the significance of his celibacy, and when we forget his stance against divorce. Jesus-taming strategies are designed to reduce Jesus to a gifted charismatic who at best can be identified as a gregarious social worker. Jesus is tamed by such descriptions because they conceal his claim to being the truth of God.
Lohfink’s account of Jesus is determinatively eschatological. Jesus’ death and resurrection is a radical creation that results in a new conception of time. In Christians’ unique understanding, the end of the world does not come at the end, because we already live in the midst of the end time. The new creation does not arrive only when the old creation has passed away; it has begun already within the old world. In Christ’s death and resurrection God’s new world has begun, and in baptism every Christian receives a share in it.
Though Lohfink writes as a Catholic, his high view of the church is not a case of special pleading; rather, it correlates with his Christology and eschatology. The church is ever new exactly because it must constantly look back to its past. The church is more modern than any other society because it has a better memory—because God is acting in it to ensure that it remembers the future. The newness of that memory was gradually lost after Constantine, but the rise of the secular state dissolved the marriage of church and state, which was a blessing for the church. Lohfink is trying to help us make the most of the freedom that God has given to the church in the world in which we now find ourselves.
Lohfink is a German determined not to forget the terror that was Nazi Germany. This book is also relevant for the challenges facing Christians in America. His is a vision, deeply grounded in scripture, that I believe is our future.