To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience.

The author himself has followed this regime for over ten years and takes pain to show how he came to do it, what the merits of such a plan are, and why it should be part of monastic life. He admits that his eremetical life makes it easier to follow such a practice, but he thinks it is possible for those in community to regain this ancient form of living.

Adalbert is a distinguished monastic scholar, and this book will be of interest mainly to those in the cloister. Nonetheless, the author raises some important tangential questions for the church that merit at least some reflection. Was it a net gain for Christian living that the Western church abandoned the discipline of abstinence and fasting? Is it curious that precisely at the time when such a discipline was modified practically out of existence we had an explosion in the West of diet plans, fat farms, calorie counting, and the like? Have we ever considered new ways of fasting (in solidarity with the poor; to focus ourselves for prayer or the liturgy, etc.) that would not be simply a form of "punishment" or "discipline"? What is the precise relationship of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting - those "acts of religion" (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls them)? Father Adalbert has, some words on this latter question that may repay reading. In sum: a book which manages to put forth ideas that may be worthwhile considering beyond the rather narrow audience for whom it was intended.

Hans Kung's recent work is an attempt to provide a "simple introduction to Christian theology" with a double focus: What is its subject matter? How is it done? Kung does this by a brief study of seven pivotal thinkers in the history of theology: Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher, and Barth. Each thinker gets a long chapter in which Kung focuses on the fidelity of each to the message of Jesus Christ; his engagement with the culture of his own day; and whether or not he provided a paradigm shift in theology.

Kung is a theologian with a point of view and a sharp critical sense. He has strong opinions and does not hesitate to state them. One must distinguish Kung the historian from Kung the polemicist and partisan. It is sadly the case that the latter Kung sometimes overwhelms the former. His discussion of Thomas Aquinas is a case in point. Kung faults Aquinas for his failure to engage in a dialogue with Islam at any level beyond that of the philosophical. He then argues further that Aquinas is not a creator of new paradigms because Thomas "put his theology at the service of dogmatic papolatry [sic]." The proof Kung adduces is a minor treatise ("Against the Errors of the Greeks") which defends papal primacy against the Eastern church. The plain fact of the matter is that Thomas was a loyal son of Rome but papal claims were hardly his major concern (in the Summa papal claims merit only a glance). As Brian Tierney demonstrated years ago, if one wants to trace the growth of papal claims one should look at the canonists and the Franciscans involved in the poverty debate.

Apart from such polemics one must also wonder whether Kung's theology is just not too oriented to the rather hermetic world of Germany. Schleiermacher may be important for the development of that theology, but was he more crucial than Newman (whose influence would be felt at Vatican II) or Kierkegaard (who was the fons et origo of modem existentialism)? Was Barth (is Barth?) a true postmodem theologian? Is his influence more lasting than that of Tillich? It depends on which side of the Atlantic one lives. Do the liberation theologians provide us with a new emerging paradigm forcing new questions and new locations from which we must query the word of God?

These and other questions carne into my head as I read this unfailingly interesting but idiosyncratic tour of the theological horizon. Indeed, Kung's continuing contribution to current theological debates may well be the gadfly energy with which he forces us to respond to his urgent sense of what theology is and how it is to be articulated. Great Christian Thinkers is one of those books which causes me to say mentally, "Wait a minute," or No - that is not quite right." Such books cannot be dismissed no matter how much they may irritate.