Garvey & Haight.

Why would you give Roger Haight's book to John Garvey to review ("Malnourished," April 7)? You must have known that Garvey, good Orthodox priest that he is, would have no truck at all with Haight's way of thinking. You might answer: Well, that's a good way of getting the other side. But it really isn't. What results is rather a juxtaposition of irreconcilable ideas. Garvey is a doctrinal fundamentalist. By this, I don't mean that he reads the Bible literally. A doctrinal fundamentalist, according to Paul Tillich, turns myth into history; he can't accept that religious myth, like the Resurrection, is just that--a myth, with many interpretations. Garvey and many other Christians think they can see the cosmos the way Athanasius did in the fourth century. For Haight and many others, an honest twenty-first-century mind can't think like Athanasius. We can understand how bishops at Calcedon saw the world in their time, but so very much has happened since then.

Why not assign Haight's book to someone who understands his epistemology and can critique him on his own terms? It seems that Commonweal's editors, who are clearly Catholic social liberals, are doctrinal fundamentalists. This is the third time you have thrown Haight to a critic who is unsympathetic to his mode of thinking. See John Cavadini's review of Jesus: Symbol of God ("A Metaphor Gone Wild," October 8, 1999) and Luke Timothy Johnson's review of Christian Community in History ("Theology from Below?" January 28, 2005).

EUGENE C. BIANCHI

Atlanta, Ga.

THE REVIEWER REPLIES:

It isn't that I don't understand Haight's epistemology; I do, and I don't buy it. I don't think that a consensus agreed to by all the church over almost all its history (a discernment that is hardly confined to Athanasius and the fourth century) can be so easily dismissed. If believing that the Resurrection is real makes one a doctrinal fundamentalist, I am one.