The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutic and Narrative Theology.

The Text as Thou: Marin Buber's

Dialogical Hermeneutic and Narrative Theology, by Steven Kepnes, Indiana University Press, $35, 221 pp.

The works of Martin Buber have been a regular part of my undergraduate syllabus. For about fifteen years I used his classic I and Thou as a regular capstone for my course on the study of religion. Students found the book difficult not because of the complexity of the language (it is simply, almost aphoristically, written) but because one could not sit down and read through it at a clip. Indeed, the work's value is that for those who wish to engage it the demand for slow reading is absolutely necessary.

Kepnes's study (it has the lingering marks of a Chicago dissertation all over it) wishes to make a central and straightforward point: Buber's thought is such that he should be seen, as the subtitle indicates, as a model both for authentic dialogue (a topic which is central for Buber) and for the construction of a narrative style of theology. (Buber wrote much on Jewish narratives, especially those coming from the Hasidic tradition.) By a judicious use of contemporary critical theory Kepnes makes this point a leitmotif of his rather dense study.

I will leave to others to judge how compelling the author's argument is. What I most appreciated was his survey of the Buberian corpus. Kepnes is at his best in describing Buber's principles of biblical hermeneutics in which Buber attempted to balance a sense of the Hebrew text with an eye for the reader who encountered the text in the present situation; Buber's translation reached for a dialogue between reader and text. For Buber the text is always a potential Thou which speaks back to the reader demanding of her an equal response. Kepnes argues elegantly that Buber's conviction fits nicely with contemporary discussions of reader-response theory and goes to some lengths to explain why.

Buber has always been a bit of an enigma. Many observant Jews found his lack of interest in being faithful to the Law troublesome (he himself was not Torah observant) while Zionists were vexed by his interest in a binational state. Nonetheless, both Jews and Christians can learn much from his desire to listen to--or better, converse with--the accumulated source(s) of revelation and from his abiding seriousness. This may not be the book to begin with when learning about Buber, but for those who have read him this sophisticated study will drive them back to a fresh rereading of one of the modern sages of Israel.

Those who remember Catholic worship before the reforms of Vatican II (it is a sad but true fact that we are a diminishing tube) can only marvel at the seismic shifts that have occurred with reference to the Eucharist: the emargination of tabernacles; the sunsetting of "visits" to the Blessed Sacrament; the decline of Benediction; the different cadences connected with the celebration of the liturgy (remember Solemn High Masses?). Behind those shifts there are, of course, shifts in eucharistic theology. It is useful then to have a highly competent sacramental theologian like David Power (of Catholic University) give us a broad look at the development of euchanstlc theology from its New Testament roots through its long and complicated development in subsequent history.

Power's book is historically oriented. He takes us from the New Testament through the rather complex historical roads of the patristic, medieval, post-Tridentine, and contemporary periods. I say "complex" because Poweris determined to evoke not only the evidence of the theologians but that of popular religiosity and the growth of the liturgy itself. There is a real payoff with this strategy. Before he treats Saint Thomas, for example, Power situates Aquinas's discussion in terms of the popular eucharistic piety of the Middle Ages.

The Eucharistic Mystery concludes with a survey of contemporary theological thinking about the Eucharist, with a final chapter devoted to suggestions about a eucharistic canon that would do justice to the long historical tradition of the Western liturgy. That final chapter includes a model canon which would link our liturgy with its Jewish antecedents while taking cognizance of the needs of the contemporary situation. What impressed me most about this model was its resistance to any trendiness while being obedient to the exigent realities of today. Power concludes this final chapter with some apposite remarks on ritual performance but--wisely, I think--without giving too many specifics.

In sum: a very fine piece of work by a scholar who has thought hard and read widely about his subject. One can only hope that he, or another sacramental theologian of his competence, will address the other sacraments with the sophistication and care shown in this study.

Power's colleague at Catholic University, Berard Marthaler, has revised his book on the Creed which was first published in 1986. This revision consists both of updatings of the bibliographies and of rewriting certain chapters.

Marthaler's aim is to bring the Creed into dialogue with contemporary theology and religious experience from the perspective of the Catholic tradition. A long-time religious educator, Marthaler has a clear prose style, remembers that his intended audience is not the professional theologian, and fully intends to make his book a pedagogical tool. He is, in short, in the tradition of those (beginning back in the patristic period) who use the affirmations of the Creed as a launching pad for a wider discourse on the mysteries of faith.

After an economical but clear description of how creeds evolved in the church, the author devotes chapters to the affirmations of the Creed and, where apposite, adds an excursus that illumines certain problems in contemporary culture. The tone of the chapters is hard to describe: it rests somewhere between theological and catechetical, which is to say that it respects the intellect of the reader while making appeal to her desire for religious response. Marthaler, rightly, assumes that the creed is both a statement of faith and, as its place in the liturgy makes plain, a proclamation of praise (a doxology).

Many writers, from antiquity on, have commented on the Creed and will continue to do so. It is good that we have such works not only for their own value but as signposts as we look at the first part of the new catechism for the church which also frames itself, at least in part, as a commentary on the Creed. This revised version of Marthaler' s work is, then, a welcome and useful addition to that literature.

Lectionaries are difficult works to produce. Last spring I was asked to deliver reflections on some Lenten lectionary readings for a local church. I found myself constantly frustrated because the selection always started right after an important verse or ended before the appropriate punch line. This current lectionary, meant to be used by communities or prayer groups, is based on the Roman lectionary but with readings culled from the tradition to supplement those readings and to highlight the experience of women in the church. The readings (apart from the biblical texts) are gathered from extracanonical sources, martyrologies, hagiography, spiritual works, inscriptions, etc. Some are by women and others about them. To get a sense of the orientation of the work, one might look at the Holy Week readings: from Palm Sunday through Thursday the readings are from the Bible; on Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, the readings recount the martyrdom of men and women in second-century Gaul. A nice touch.

I have enjoyed reading from the lectionary and profited from it. I have only two criticisms; one a visceral reaction and the other a more "academic" suggestion. The editors decided to use gender-inclusive language (which is fine by me) but it does point up a problem of prose style. Is it really an advance to substitute "child of humanity" for "son of man"? Apart from the debate about the phrase's meaning in the Bible, the term "child of humanity" reminds me of something one might find on a UNICEF poster. The editors struck the term "Father" for God (a problematic decision in its own right) but could not quite pull that off since it shows up in their version of Luke 2:49 (see: December 31). Was this an oversight or was there another criterion utilized? Wisely, they retained the term "Lord." Their efforts point up how vexatious a problem this linguistic tangle is when one tries for gender-inclusive language.

Two of the editors were trained (at Harvard) as New Testament/early church scholars. This reflects their choice of extrabiblical readings which are heavy in early noncanonical and patristic sources but very thin once they get past the medieval period. If the editors ever desire to expand their lectionary let us have--to cite just a few examples--some Dorothy Day, Edith Stein, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Therese of Lisieux, Teresa o f Jesus, Clare of Assisi, Gertrude of Helfta (represented only by a fragment culled from an anthology), Angela of Foligno, etc. There have been just too many texts written by women (and recovered by scholars) after the patristic period to be so parsimonious.

In sum: a splendid idea, well organized, with the potentiality to be even better. It has been nourishing to use.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been much in the news of late. It is my good fortune to have colleagues who are experts on these manuscript discoveries which are of interest not only in themselves but may shed light on the period immediately preceding the life of Jesus.

Joseph Fitzmyer, a prodigiously gifted scholar, has been involved with scrolls research for nearly forty years. Like other scholars of his generation (e.g., Roland Murphy and Raymond Brown), he has written both important scholarly studies and more popular and accessible books. This little catechism of the scrolls answers questions about how the scrolls were discovered, how they are being edited for publication, what their significance is, and how they bear on our understanding of both Judaism and the New Testament.

Fitzmyer writes, at least in part, to counter the more tendentious claims of those scholars who publish by press release and to sort out and contextualize the journalistic stories which evolve around putative scrolls conspiracies, anti-Semitic plots, Vatican machinations, etc. He is rightfully irritated about the slow pace of scroll publications (especially of nonbiblical material from Qumran Cave No. 4; most of the biblical material is already published) but sees the problem more in terms of scholarly monopoly than of conspiracy. More importantly, in brief but very clear pages, he tells us just how the scrolls help us get new insights into the New Testament. Those pages, untutored as I am in this area, were worth the price of the book.

The question/answer format of Fitzmyer's book has certain disadvantages (such a template interrupts a narrative flow when he has a story to tell) but it has the advantage of providing precise focus for the vast number of topics which he wishes to treat. His scholarly citations are bracketed within the text (he has a prodigious command of the scholarly literature) while a selected annotated bibliography, an index of both citations from the scrolls and the Bible, and a general index round off the volume. Any literate person who wishes solid, nonsensational information about the scroll material will find this book an excellent survey.

For the past generation we have had a flood of theological publications from south of the border written by thinkers who try to articulate theology from a Latin American perspective. This vast theological enterprise goes under the general rubric of "liberation theology," although those who have read in it know all too well that it is better to speak of liberation theologies; Gustavo Gutierrez is not Jon Sobrino who is not Leonardo Boff.

Members of ACHTUS (Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States) have now put together a collection of essays in order to give voice to Hispanic Catholics who, while vigorously retaining their Hispanic identity, live within the North American reality. These writers realize that the term Hispanic is an abstraction since it covers, all too inadequately, cultures and histories that are quite diverse. The long Mexican experience in this country, say in the Southwest, is not that of the vibrant Cuban community of South Florida, just as the urban experience of Puerto Ricans is dissimilar to that of Central Americans newly arrived from such tortured countries as El Salvador and Guatemala.

A number of the contributors to this volume (Romero, Espin, Hinojosa) insist that the hermeneutical lens through which one must understand Hispanic religion is the vibrant, popular, paraliturgical complex which goes under the name of religiosidad popular (inadequately understood as "popular" religion; perhaps "people's religion" is a better term). Pace Juan Segundo, these theologians do not see religiosidad popular as an alienating and repressive phenomenon but as a way of expressing a sense of community, transcendence, hope, and liberation. As a consequence, even those theologians in this volume who are classically trained after the European model (Goizueta and Garcia) tend to turn, as the matrix for their reflections, to the actual life and practice of their communities; a strategy that strikes me as a fruitful one since it helps to keep theology from flights into abstraction. As I have often said, only half jokingly, trust no theologian who does not belong to a parish and never uses the envelopes provided for the Sunday collection.

One issue that does occur to me but is not addressed in these essays (Espin alludes to it in a footnote) is what happens to this Hispanic worldview in North America as Hispanics enter the more homogenized mainstream of American culture? After all, the analysis of these scholars about their communities, their customs, and their religious expressions could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to almost any immigrant group who settled here at the turn of the century (I leave aside those Hispanic communities, largely in the Southwest, who were here centuries before the post-Civil War immigrations).

Whatever particular problems I see with this volume (like every book written from an ethnic position there is a tendency toward special pleading) are overshadowed by the richness of the material. The ten contributors open up a world which is not my own, teach me about customs which are not mine, and forcefully remind me that the vibrancy of the Catholic tradition is not only to be found in the high-book culture studied by the theologians but in the lived experiences of people like those women (oradoras) who take command of ministry in priestless villages and barrios to keep the faith (and the people who profess that faith) united and alive.

That religion involves anthropomorphisms is a banality. Five centuries before Christ, Xenophanes argued that if horses could draw their pictures the gods would be horselike. In the modern period, Ludwig Feuerbach made religion a massive projection of humanity's noblest aspirations and ideals. Marx, and after him, Freud, borrowed Feuerbach's insight and read either economic or psychological messages into these projections. Guthrie, an anthropologist from Fordham, goes a long way beyond Feuerbach: anthropomorphism is so fundamental to the human enterprise that it says something about being human and, as a consequence, is the foundational key for understanding the fact (as well as the persistence) of religion. In lengthy chapters he shows that anthropomorphism is the way in which humans deal with everything from perception in general to artistic, philosophical, and scientific discourse in particular. In science, for example, versions of the Anthropic Principle (in either the "weak" or "strong" variation) is a notorious example, but it shows up in less obvious ways (e.g., when we speak of the "birth" and "death" of stars).

Guthrie argues that anthropomorphism is at the "core of religious experience." His case is, in my estimation, not very persuasive for the simple reason that he neglects to account for the long tradition that recognizes the problem of anthropomorphism and attempts to overcome the limits of such language. Let me be satisfied with a single example. When Paul Tillich described God as the "Ground of Being" he borrowed his language from the Rhineland mystics (Tillich's "Ground" is, e.g., Eckhart's Grund) to attempt an escape from anthropomorphic language. Eckhart, in turn, is a spiritual descendant of the Pseudo-Dionysius (a fifth-century Syriac monk) who was widely commented on in the medieval period. Dionysian theology, in turn, had earlier roots. That tradition, in turn, continues into the contemporary period (there are elements of it in Rahner) via mystics like John of the Cross.

Guthrie has no sustained familiarity with the apophatic tradition and its attempts to avoid domesticating God through the (mis)use of human language. As early as Origen in the third century, there is a fear that a too literal reading of Scripture yields a deficient conception of transcendence. Furthermore, this same apophatic tradition has strong parallels with both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Guthrie has read widely in every area except the history of theology and, as a consequence, his theory seems, to this theologian, reductionistically naive.