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Baker Publishing Group - Robert Barron

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250 pages

English

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A Major Statement on Christology from Bishop Robert BarronFor a long time, Christians have tried to bridge the divide between Christianity and secular liberalism with philosophy and theology. Bishop Robert Barron shows that the answer to this debate--and the way to move forward--lies in Jesus. Barron transcends the usual liberal/conservative or Protestant/Catholic divides with a postliberal Catholicism that brings the focus back on Jesus as revealed in the New Testament narratives. Barron's classical Catholic postliberalism will be of interest to a broad audience including not only the academic community but also preachers and general readers interested in entering the dialogue between Catholicism and postliberalism. The hardcover edition includes a new preface by the author.Praise for The Priority of Christ"Barron's wonderful book The Priority of Christ brings postliberalism back to its Catholic home. . . . A downright lovely book, written with a kind of winsome literary flair that exhibits the inviting clarity of a master teacher. Highly recommended."--James K. A. Smith, Religious Studies Review"The book is full of gems worthy of hours of contemplation."--Mark G. Boyer, The Priest

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Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	23 février 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493405893
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0840€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2007 by Robert Barron
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Hardcover edition with new preface published in 2016
Ebook edition created 2016
Ebook corrections 01.26.2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-4934-0589-3
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword by Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Preface
Introduction: The Grandmother, the Misfit, and the One Who Throws Everything Off
P ART I I CONIC C HRISTOLOGY
1. Jesus as Symbol
2. The Jesus of History
3. Doctrine and Narrativity
P ART II T HE N ARRATIVES
4. The Gatherer
5. The Warrior
6. King
P ART III T HE E PISTEMIC P RIORITY OF J ESUS C HRIST
7. The Scriptural Warrant
8. Modern Foundationalism
9. Natural Theology
10. The Nature of the Christ-Mind
P ART IV T HE N ONCOMPETITIVELY T RANSCENDENT AND C OINHERENT G OD
11. Thomas and James
12. The Distinction
13. God as Giver and Lover
14. Augustine, Aquinas, and the Trinity
P ART V T HE D ISPLAY OF THE C HRISTIAN F ORM : Ethics by Means of the Saints
15. Deontologism and Proportionalism
16. The Breakthrough
17. Edith Stein: Elevated Courage
18. Thérèse of Lisieux: Elevated Prudence
19. Katharine Drexel: Elevated Justice
20. Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Elevated Temperance
Conclusion: The Moment That Gives the Meaning
Bibliography
Index
Notes
Back Cover
Foreword
F aith and reason, wrote Pope John Paul II, are the two wings the human spirit uses to reach truth. The dialogue between faith and reason is a constant in human conversation, with faith using reason to understand more adequately faith’s own truths, and reason using faith to understand better reason’s own nature and that of its findings.
This centuries-old conversation, characterized in Patristic literature as a dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens, finds new expression in Fr. Robert Barron’s highly significant work. The dialogue takes on new importance today because some believers reject any rational critique of their faith, and some rationalists imagine the possibility of a purely secular reason. The danger in such positions is that faith without critique has too often legitimated violence, and reason divorced from faith has constructed utopian or “scientific” experiments that kill the human spirit along with millions of human beings.
Father Barron’s work is theological, for his own reflection is shaped by the task the Church has given him to teach theology at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago. He situates the dialogue between faith and reason in the conversation between those who begin theologizing with the data of revelation, shaping human experience by its demands, and those who begin theologizing from a philosophical or anthropological base, fitting revelation into the contours of reason and human experience.
The Priority of Christ puts this ancient and contemporary dialogue to new music. Fr. Barron creates a “postliberal” theology that is neither a return to Scholasticism nor even to the Fathers, although he draws upon the resources of earlier theologians. His is a theology that reaches back for its sources and forward for its concerns. Precisely to move forward, Fr. Barron must disempower modernity’s critique of faith and modify the exaggerated claims advanced by historicity. The priority of Christ is ontological, epistemic and ethical; but the new melodies chanting who Christ is can’t be heard without first muting the tired songs derived from Cartesian subjectivism. The original sin of liberal Christianity is to reduce divine self-revelation to personal religious experience.
When I was a seminarian over four decades ago, an experienced spiritual director used to take my many concerns about the spiritual life and the life of faith and bring them to the light of Christ. He suggested to me a practice I’ve maintained over these many years. Each year, he advised, I should not just read theology or philosophy, but take and make my own at least one book on the life of Christ. He was concerned neither with the quest for the historical Jesus nor with having me answer naively what Jesus might do with my questions. He was insistent only that constantly living with the Lord creates a curiosity about him that cannot be satisfied by purely intellectual investigations. Jesus is not an idea but a person. In encountering him and surrendering to him, faith is born and reason challenged creatively.
This book gives analogous advice and insight to theologians today. Fr. Barron presents Jesus as an icon, beyond concept but not beyond rationality, a “super-saturated” phenomenon that is the central character in narratives that are always unique and never generic. Idols are manipulative expressions of our making; icons, by contrast, destroy special interests because they draw us into their world and prevent ours from becoming absolute. God is like a noisy shutter insistently banging in the night. We resist listening because we fear moving out of beds of our own making. Jesus, the revelation of God, tells us we have nothing to fear because God is not in competition with us. He is not a threat; he sets us free to think truthfully and to act rightly. God’s self-revelation is a natural complement to human reason, not its competitor; and God himself is “neither one being among many nor the sum total of creatures understood collectively.”
Fr. Barron explores the relations among metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics when each of these rational disciplines is enlightened by faith in Christ. A metaphysics of gift that elucidates creation as a unity of order traces the ontological relationships that enable creatures to participate in being and acting. An epistemology of co-inherence that studies the relation of subject and object in the act of knowing explains how love enters into knowing. An ethics elaborated in reference to iconic disciples of Christ respects individual distinctiveness while uniting every moral agent in the quest for holiness. None of Fr. Barron’s solutions will be the last word, but each resituates the conversation to get us talking among ourselves and with the Lord.
Will this book get a hearing? It enters the conversation today, but its arguments are of more than topical importance. For some, it may sound a discordant note; for others it will be like a shutter banging in the wind of grace, a call to intellectual and moral conversion. It is a hopeful work, designed to help the Church today work through many sterile debates and express the truths of the apostolic faith clearly and persuasively. Hope in Christ is consistent with a certain pessimism about a sinful world that rejects him and refuses to understand its own need for divine grace to set things right. Hope in Christ, nevertheless, knows that, in the end, all will be well because all is grace. Fr. Barron’s book is a gift, a grace, for us today.
Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Preface
T o grasp this book, the reader has to understand that I came of age in the United States in the immediate wake of the Second Vatican Council. Though the conciliar texts themselves are rife with Scripture and deeply marked by the theological style of the church fathers, the implementation of the council, at least in America, was thoroughly grounded in the assumptions of liberalism. By this admittedly slippery term I mean, in the religious context, an approach that commences with experience and then reads doctrine in light of experience. As Karl Barth pointed out over a century ago, this method results in the positioning of revelation by something extrinsic to itself, a move repugnant to the logic implicit in the New Testament. The liberal method was practiced by some of the greatest theological masters of the last two hundred years, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Troeltsch, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and David Tracy, among many others. It resulted in a form of Christian theology easier for the contemporary mind to grasp but, precisely for that reason, one that was relatively bland, flattened out, and defanged.
What this looked like on the ground was what I’ve described as “beige Catholicism.” Jesus was presented rather consistently as one religious teacher among many, a deeply wise and holy man but not the Incarnate Word of God. The liturgy became a shared meal that embodied and celebrated the community rather than the act by which the Son, as head of his mystical body, worships the Father in the communion of the Holy Spirit. The missionary impulse faded away almost completely, since there was nothing really distinctive that Jesus added to the general religious sensibility. Eschatology more or less collapsed into the work of social justice here below. A new Marcionism took hold, as the significance of Jesus was parsed in abstraction from the Old Testament and the history of Israel. In a word, what made Christ distinctive, novel, surprising, and indispensable largely evanesced. As a result, the church sank into a kind of boredom, and boredom is never evangelically compelling.
Therefore, along with many others of my generation, I perceived the need to move beyond the regnant liberalism. I say “move beyond” rather than “repudiate,” for I appreciate very much certain achievements of liberalism, especially in the a