Christianity: Essence, History, and Future.

by Hans Kung Continuum, $44.50, 936 pp.

Kung has been investigating the abiding centers of the three great monotheistic religions of the West (judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in order to foster interreligious connections which would address the compelling problems of the contemporary age, especially the issue of peace. The first of his trilogy, on Judaism, has already been published. A volume on Islam will finish the work. Christianity is the centerpiece of the project.

Kung is not a dispassionate historian. His central claim is that the core fact of Christianity is faith in Jesus Christ but the answer to the query about Christ ("What think ye of the Christ?) has undergone a series of paradigmatic shifts even though the core truth of Jesus Christ has never been lost to the tradition. These paradigms about Christ run parallel to paradigmatic shifts in the history of the church which, according to Kung, run from early apocalyptic through the Hellenistic and Roman Catholic medieval to the Reformed and Enlightenment paradigms. We now stand on the cusp of what Kung calls the ecumenical (postmodern?) paradigm. There is, however, the "abiding substance of the faith," which is Jesus the Christ. That fundamental concern keeps these paradigm shifts from being seen as discretely atomized units in history.

Kung takes us from the nascent church to the period after Vatican II. There is no doubt that he has read extensively, untangles a great number of difficult stories in the history of the church, and writes with passion and vigor (but with too much reliance on boldface type and exclamation points). I plowed through this great lump of a book both because I like church history and also as a duty. When I finished the volume I asked: Could I recommend this work to a well-educated and interested reader? My answer is no.

There are a number of reasons for this evaluation. First, Kung frequently refers to his other published works (especially his Great Christian Thinkers, which was a kind of finger exercise for this book), so that one needs those works to see the full argument of this one. Second, Kung's judgments are often marred by his own acerbic asides about anything connected to the papacy, the Roman curia, or Roman theology (a little of this goes a long way). Third, he seems to have a tin ear when it comes to spirituality (as well as a thin grasp of Christian mysticism; Bernard McGinn's seminal work finds no place in his bibliography). In short, he is long on the history of dogma but meager on the life of prayer, sacraments, and so on.

Only those predisposed to accept Kung's paradigmatic methodology and his ideological presuppositions will find this a satisfactory work. It has some fine pages (I learned a good deal about the background of the Serb/Croat religious antagonisms) but overall it is a disappointment. We still need a good thick one-volume history of the church. Kung's Christianity (the same reaction greeted his volume on Judaism) is simply too idiosyncratic; too Kungian.

The posthumous collection of Hebblethwaite's dispatches to the National Catholic Reporter from the Rome of John Paul II is like a walk down memory lane. This compilation ranges from the eminent British Vaticanologist's first reports on the election of the first Slavic pope in 1978 to a final column assessing the list of cardinals created in late 1994. Hebblethwaite provides a panoramic, if somewhat punctuated, survey of the more public doings of one of the more celebrated popes of recent memory.

What made Hebblethwaite such a readable journalist is that, unlike most English-language reporters posted to the Vatican, he had an excellent grasp of Catholic theology and Catholic culture. Thus, for example, his discussion of Veritatis splendor has a certain heft because he knew what the theological issues were; who proposed them and who did not; who the authors of part of the encyclical were; and who was not consulted and why. The same is true of the discussion of, among other things, Centesimus annus and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He was particularly good about contextualizing John Paul's papal style in terms of those deep Polish roots which so naturally nourish Marian devotion, millenarian aspirations, and an angle on Europe that does not take, as its starting point, the West looking to the East.

Collections of columns, of course, have their limitations. Reading this book was rather like reading a biography with too many chapters and not enough connective material linking the chapters; the book hiccups along. That being said, close students of the Vatican will find this a useful resource for sorting out the major events of John Paul's papacy through 1994. Most of the reportorial material about the Vatican is, to be blunt, gossip. Hebblethwaite practiced what, for a better term, I would call the "higher gossip" (with some first-rate intellectual analysis in the bargain). Good gossip always makes a good read.

It is a paradox to note that a religion which roots its very meaning in a doctrine of Incarnation has, at the same time, a perceived problem with the body and bodiliness. It would be otiose, however, to demonstrate that fact; it is sufficient to remember the historic Christian struggles with gnosticism, various forms of Platonism, and a steady stream of unhealthy asceticism, fear of sexuality, and a persistent temptation toward what the late Jacques Maritain called the sin of "angelism."

The bodiliness of Christianity in general and the female body in particular has received much attention from, mainly, women writers over the past few decades and this from the angle of social history, art history, psychology, philosophy, and theology. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel's thin volume is part of that larger, much denser, conversation. Her little book has three parts. The central section ("The Body and Christianity" is framed by an opening discussion on the problematic of the body having a body/being a body) and a concluding section on new areas for exploration "toward a theology of embodiment."

I read this book while thinking of a somewhat similar issue (how to convince my students that Jesus was like us and not simply, as one of my students once brilliantly said, "a spirit in a Jesus suit" and found her biblical reflections most helpful. Moltmann-Wendel notes how tactile the Gospels are: Jesus is always touching somebody or imposing hands or embracing or being kissed or having his head anointed or his feet washed in tears or being beaten up or having thorns shoved in his head or being nailed up on a cross. It is only the resurrected Christ who issues the noli me tangere. Her little book is replete with such insights while raising some very difficult questions about bodiliness from a Protestant feminist perspective. The bottom line, however, is this: she rejects any spirituality which abstracts from the bodily and any which so focuses on the spirit world beyond as to ignore the bodily needs of the present. Her work is not very systematic, but there are valuable things to learn from it. The usefulness of the volume would have been enhanced had there been an index (always an irritating omission in my judgment) and an enlarged bibliography including more English-language works.

Tilley's volume on postmodern theologies has an interesting beginning. In 1993 he had the very good idea of organizing his doctoral seminar in such a way that the papers could make, after appropriate reworking, a coherent volume that would provide a kind of status questionis relative to postmodern theological trends. He, in turn, would edit the work and provide the explanatory nexus linking the various "schools" of the postmodem enterprise.

Tilley's taxonomy is fourfold. First, constructive" postmodernisms, or those theologies that attempt to extend the modern project by appropriating its main features within theological discourse (for example, David Tracy's revisionist theology). Second, postmodern "dissolutions" which intensify the erosions of belief by a hermeneutics of suspicion; these theologies (represented by Thomas Altizer and Mark Taylor) tend toward the hermetically academic and, as such, are rather harmless exercises. Third, postliberal theology whose most articulate practitioner is Yale's George Lindbeck. And fourth, those school's that ground theology in community praxis; the most widely recognized of these would be the liberation theologians represented here by an essay on Gustavo Gutierrez.

The individual essays are workman-like, providing an entry into writings which might otherwise prove formidable for those not instructed in the arcane jargon of postmodernism. Tilley helps by the simple strategy of introducing the various sections with short essays. In a final chapter he makes religious diversity a test case to show how the theologians represented in these various "schools" would respond to the issue of, say, the meaningfulness of theological discourse in a cross-cultural setting or the exclusive claims of Christianity. There is a bibliography of books cited in the essays and a good index. For a first look at the workings of postmodern theology this is an uneven but useful collection. It may well stimulate further efforts in this protean field.

A final note: What I most admire about this book is the model which Tilley provides of how a master teacher can produce solid research in a collaborative effort with tyros.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is professor of theology and chair of the department at the University of Notre Dame.