Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: hedrick@cs.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: The Bible and Us: a book review; comments on Mary and Protestantism Message-ID: Date: 3 Sep 90 23:23:25 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 194 Approved: christian@geneva.rutgers.edu I'd like to recommend a book that addresses a number of question that are under discussion here. It's "The Bible and Us", written jointly by Father Andrew Greeley and Rabbi Jacob Neusner. It is a conversation between them about the Bible, consisting of alternate chapters reacting to various portions of the Bible, and to each other. It does not pull any punches: This is not an attempt to show that Judaism and Catholicism are the same. In many ways what it does best is to clarify their differences. Yet it is based on the faith that both are part of God's people, and that Jews and Catholics (if not Judaism and Catholicism as institutions) have something to say to each other. At any rate, it is an introduction to the Jewish way of dealing with Scripture, with many examples taken from Talmuddic tradition. It is also an attractive presentation of Andrew Greeley's vision of Catholic Christianity. It is thus a good answer to a question asked by Walsh (which will appear tonight), as to whether changes in the Catholic Church have left any distinctive Catholic spirituality. In an attempt to whet your appetite, and to show something relevant to the discussions we've had here recently, I'm going to quote a few comments by Greeley on Mary. (Neusner's comments are just as interesting, but less relevant to the subject matter of this group.) Bracketed notations are mine. Note that Greeley is a sociologist, and he likes to cite his survey data. "Christianity needs both emphases [Catholic and Protestant]. But if you wish to understand Catholicism, you must realize that it alone of the religious traditions of Yahweh [Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam] has chosen sacramental optimism and with a vengeance: Mary and the angels and the saints and the shrines and the statues and the stained-glass windows and the incense and all the other practices that Protestants abhor and about which Jews tend to feel nervious (although they are more likely than Protestants or Muslims to have sacramental imaginations -- how could they not?). "God for Catholics lurks everywhere. S/He is not a radically absent God but a disturbingly present God -- Yahweh still pushing his way into the human condition, like Mary pushed herself into the crisis at the wedding feast of Cana. ... "The idea that the cosmos is a metaphor was not original to the Jesus movement and to the church into which the movement later evolved. Israel knew it too ... But in the volcanic optimism of the Jesus experience his followers were willing to push that idea much further than the prophets were willing to push it. The prophets were, quite properly from their perspective, reluctant to attempt any association with the pagan nature religions. Yahweh was not a fertility God..., but the Lord of creation, independent of all creation. "The early Christians knew no such restraint or fear. Their experience of Jesus was too powerful ever to be tainted by pagan errors. Therefore, they felt perfectly free to expropriate any and all pagan symbolism and practices that seemed to fit their purpose. "Their universalism enabled them to search everywhere for reflections of God. Their optimism enabled them to "baptise" whatever reflections they found. Hence they became sacramentalists: they used baptised pagan metaphors to describe their experience of God. ... "The gamble to absorb the world and everything in it that seemed good, true, and beautiful was a great risk. Sufficient evidence is not in yet to say whether the gamble was a success. The world continues to be sacred, as it was in pagan times, but now because God (and not just spirits) lurks everwhere. Such a view is an extremely attractive approach to life and make the world a warmer and more appealing place. ... "Mary represents quintessential Catholicism as a religion of incarnational universalism -- a religion that simultaneously asserts the value of that in humankind that transcends time and place and the value of that which is rooted in time and place. "Mary stands for the mother love of God. ... "The core of the devotion to the Mother of Jesus is that the relationship between the child and His mother depicted in the crib scene in in Chesterton's carol [which I have omitted] is a metaphor for the relationship between God and us. God loves us like a mother loves her newborn baby. ... "Now you may not buy any of this, and that is surely your privilege. In fact, you may find it horribly repellent. But don't dismiss it as silly and ignorant superstition practiced by men and women who religiously are still peasants. "The imagery is the result of a well-thought-out view of the world and a gamble that nature religions and world religions can be combined. Moreover, it is based ultimately on an experience of renewal of the world in salvation by Jesus and on metaphors that abound in the Hebrew Scriptures. If you want to fight with Catholicism about a symbol that Henry Adams said was the most important in Western history, argue about the premises on which this symbolism is based and not on what the nuns told you or your Catholic friends or the proliferation of votive candles in Italian American churches. ... "The Mary metaphor is based on the experience of sexual differentiation that is part of the human condition. Men experience women and women experience themselves as powerful, tender, life-giving, nurturing, inspiring, wise. Is that not, we ask, the way God is, too? ... Catholicism accepts such experiences as sacramental and encodes them in the metaphor, the story of Mary the Mother of Jesus. ... "In a study of young people we found that, despite the neglect of Mary by the parish clergy in recent years, the image is still the most powerful in the religious imaginations of young adult Catholics and very appealing to young Protestants, too. "There may be no more May processions, but Mary is alive and well and it would appear on the level of imagination an ecumenical asset instead of a liability. "Moreover, the assertion of some feminists that the Mary image has been too blighted by its association with an inferior role for women is not sustained by the data. Among young people there is no link at all between Mary and chauvinism. On the contrary, for men a strong image of Mary correlates with more frequent prayer, more liberal social attitudes and concerns, and better sexual fulfillment in marriage for both husband and his wife. "I am furious that this rich and ancient and powerful and most Catholic of metaphors has been disregarded in the name of shallow ecumenism by a badly educated clergy who can only remember the saccharine devotions they were taught in Catholic schools and the seminary." In my view [note that the quotation has ended], the interesting question is whether Protestants can offer an equally attractive vision. I believe we can. But just as Catholics are unsure what the Catholic vision should be in a post-Vatican II, secular world, there is a great danger that Protestants will lose their distinctive vision as well. What I believe the Reformers were fighting for, and the Protestant tradition at its best has preserved, is a direct experience of God. This is been popularized as the "personal relationship with Jesus", but of course that's only part of it. There is also the experience of awe and thanksgiving, love and obedience to the Father, and the power of the Holy Spirit. As the Catholic tradition is one that Charles Williams would call "the way of affirmation of images", the Protestant tradition is "the way of rejection of images," a feeling that no image of God or his love can be adequate, and a commitment to go directly to the source. Both of these traditions have their dangers. The dangers of the Catholic approach have been discussed here clearly enough. The danger of the Protestant approach is that in our rejection of images and our concentration on the primary revelatory events as described in Scripture, our religion will simply vanish, or turn into simple anti-scientific prejudice. Because we do not tend to see the world as sacramental, and we reject the Jewish approach of seeing religion in the way we do every daily activity (as Neusner says again and again, "God lives in the details"), Protestants must see the world as secular. That does not mean that God is irrelevant to what we do in daily life. Far from it. But neither do we see him through the world in the same way that the Catholic and Jewish traditions do. It is of course not fair to blame secularization entirely on the Protestant Reformation. The Renaissance was doing a fine job of moving attention from God to Man without Luther. No matter what happened in the 16th Cent., it is unlikely that the Medieval synthesis could simply have continued unchanged. It can be argued that advances in science and increased world-wide communication would have led to a secular concept of the world, and that a form of Christianity that attempts to deal with the world as secular would have been inevitable in any case. But whether inevitable or not, Protestants are embarked on an experiment that is just as audacious and in many ways even more dangerous than the Catholic experiment described by Greeley. For most of human history, the world has been a numinous place. Greeley would have us baptize this in Christ, so that the world is now a way to Him. In rejecting that, Protestants turn the world into something simply secular (though of course it is still an arena in which to show our obedience to God). We do so in order to free ourselves from inadequate symbols, and deal directly with God. But we are attempting to go in high places without a safety net. Should our direct relationship with God falter, we are not accustomed to seeing God's presence through the world to pull us back. As Catholic Christianity degenerates into superstition, Protestant Christianity degenerates into an arid commitment to the literal truth of the Bible, without the experience of the spiritual power that is conveyed by it, or into a liberal version of Christianity that has nothing to distinguish it from secular humanism.