a very good commentary on Edward Hill Martin's work in his doctoral dissertation, done at Catholic University under the direction of Sister Mary Collins in her last series for prioress, and in Addison, thanks for the lexicons. It was done by a Jesuit by the name of Jerome Hall, and it's called We Have the Mind of Christ. the Holy Spirit and the Church of Revenue in the thought of St. Luke Tillmark, published by the Liturgical Press. Very clear and very illuminating. So if you wanted to pursue that, you might as well get down the hall. And there may be copies in our bookstore. Is it? There might be. There was some in the shop. We have the sign of Christ. That's the key title. We have the sign of Christ. All right, I want to talk a little bit now about pantheism and how we might rethink this issue, something that turns out Very regularly.

[01:17]

I certainly don't have definite conclusions about this. I tend to change my mind depending on what I read. But when I do read, and people write about this, I guess my first question is... What can I know positive of these people? Well, how can I tell you not? I have to think, you know, like this is my own life. If somebody begins to express a view that I think that's wrong, immediately I go into gear and say, how can I respond to that? Instead of asking this to students, what can I learn from that? And I must admit, I learned this from one of my doctoral students years and years ago. I don't know if the name means anything to you, Christian Brusselmans. but she was a Belgian woman who was a student at the Institut Catholic in Paris in the 60s. Europe generally was not giving women doctorates so she came to Catholic University with me.

[02:22]

She was one of my students but she had enormous influence on me and we used to be very interested in liturgy so we used to go to Trinity College which is a women's college in Washington DC. to celebrate Lent, especially during Lent. And Christiane would get a team together and we would prepare as a team, celebrate with the assembly of young women. But it was interesting afterwards, she said, now we need it for tea. Well, we must not do it immediately, because after you have a celebration, one is always conscious of what has gone wrong. I think that's very true. And when she would bring us together after we had supper together for a discussion, her first question was, what did we do well tonight? What did we do well? And then her second question was, what did we do wrong?

[03:24]

But what did we do that was not so well done? Very different attitude toward things. Well, much more of a positive, so that you can build much more on the positive while somehow meeting the negative behind it. Anyway, let's talk about happy accidents again. Certainly, from the beginning, or most of the Baptistic period, the Christian theological tradition held that God is, in fact, impassable. God cannot suffer. God does not experience emotional changes and therefore God does suffer. Well then toward the end of the 19th century there was a major change in the tradition so much so that at present many if not most important Christian theologians

[04:30]

I hope that God in some way does suffer, that in some way he is passable and undergoes emotional shame. There is a great variety of 20th century Catholic theologians, including my nearest partner Lomessa, one of my most favorite theologians. the present Pope, John Gallo, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Roger Hay, Elizabeth Johnson in this country, John Sobriero coming out of the Liberation Religion. They also hold in God's suppers, though they differ considerably concerning the manner and the extent of God's possibility. So there's no doubt that the 20th century theological literature made much of Capucasianism the idea of a suffering and compassionate God.

[05:40]

The D. G. Budhucker opinion, which was expressed in the midst of the horrors of the Second World War, was fairly determinative. He maintained that only a God who suffers can really help people in the midst of their appalling afflictions. And as people have begun to reflect on this more and more, they conclude then that somehow God must be passable, must suffer. And what they're trying to do is to take a sophisticated and yet carefully nuanced approach to the question of Christ's suffering and death and try then to come to grips with how, in fact, does God relate to a world in which there is tremendous suffering caused both by our own moral culpability

[06:49]

and also caused by natural catastrophes. So you hear even very ordinary people wonder whether we are left with an amiable God who is ultimately unable or simply unwilling to help us in times of catastrophe. So what you have today is a number of theologians who are searching quite reverently for a fresh and yet hopefully orthodox language to deal with this very profound question which troubles many people today and certainly troubled people in the past. In other words the basic question is why, why do bad things happen to good people? And so these theologians then are not satisfied with a God who somehow presides in the heavens, but refuse to intervene to help suffering humanity.

[07:59]

They find something incongruous about a God who is totally impassable. Consequently what they're doing is searching for a God who freely suspends various aspects of the my omnipotence in order to relate more deeply and fully to the depths of human suffering and death. Likewise, they tend to dismiss the charge that the biblical expressions about the emotions and feelings of God are mere anthropomorphic assertions. Perhaps the most widely read contemporary theology which argues for a suffering God has been written by the Germans, Jürgen Möblin, M-O-L-T, M-A-N-N. His first significant work here was The Crucified God, and he also wrote an important book called The Trinity in the Kingdom, The Doctrine of God.

[09:13]

His basic argument, and I think there are holes in it, but he claims that out of love, God freely chooses to be affected by what happens in the world, so that when human beings suffer, God suffers too. However, it's very good to say God does not suffer out of weakness, but rather simply out of love. In fact, Milton argues that God's eternal nature is really best characterized by the phrase, the self-sacrifice of love. God being a sacrificing one to the interior life of the Trinity, even before creation came into being. He argues, quite forcibly, that if God could not suffer with humanity,

[10:18]

Then he said, God is not really love, since it's a basic characteristic of love to be affected by the one who is in fact love. Like the person whom I love, who is suffering, who I just take a detest since. So in writing the cross, He says that God wants to save the world, which is in sin. Here I have problems with this. He clearly hands over the Son to be crucified. Seems to be he makes God into a child abuser. Hands over the Son to be crucified, so that salvation might be accomplished. Morton told Sam, that in a mysterious way the cross of Jesus opens the way for all the world's suffering to be taken into the very being of God, since God is so intimately united to the world through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

[11:34]

Felix the Dutch Dominican. S-C-H-I-L-L-D-E-T-C-K-N. Okay, but I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Okay, before you start, I'm going to... [...] I'm going to He sets out, he's in his eighties now, by education and essays but doesn't produce large works. He sets out a very different theology of the cross and suffering and trying to make it the theology which I'm interested in quite a lot. So rather than somehow seeing the suffering of the world ascensoring into the very being of God.

[12:40]

He has tried to develop a theology much more in keeping within the lines of Catholic Thomistic theology. He's a divinity. So him, or him, above all, God is pure act, being itself. God's very nature then is to be. God then, he says, is purely positive, pure life, perfect love. And as such, God desires only life and never the death of his faithful. But there is evil in the world which God wants to overcome. However, he stresses, God does not hand over or deliver out Jesus itself. God is not a sadist.

[13:43]

He emphasizes, and I think this is very important in terms of our relationships with Jewish-Christian relations. Historically Jesus was condemned to death unjustly by the Roman and Jewish authorities. He was a victim of human sinfulness as well as political hostility and religious ambition on the part of the Romans and the Jewish leaders. He says to say that God handed Jesus over to the cross is to blame God for what should be blamed on human evil, human injustice. He says God always wills life. not death, joy, not suffering, for both his son Jesus and for all of us.

[14:46]

He says, God enters into compassionate solidarity with Jesus, dying on the cross. He does not abandon him. and keeps vigil until human freedom, we go back to that issue of human freedom again, until human freedom has played itself up and Jesus has been put to death. Then he says God overcomes the evil of sin and injustice and persecution by raising Jesus from the dead conquering the evil of something brought into existence by human simpleness. A very interesting point is that he insists that by itself the cross does not save humanity for it was by the cross that Jesus was put to death.

[15:51]

Hence he says the cross is basically evil. some Protestants really get parodied. He says it is Jesus' loving fidelity along with God's power to overcome the cross in the resurrection of Jesus that really affects our salvation. We are saved above all by the resurrection not primarily by the cross. He sees the cross simply as the port of entry to the Resurrection. There's a quote that the Apostle Paul made, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is vain. Yes. There's a very strong claim in Protestantism that we are saved by the cross. You're talking about his resurrection.

[16:57]

It's both. He argues that suffering does not enter into the being of God. I find this convincing. God could not save others if God needs to be saved himself. That's a very interesting point. God could not save others if God needs to be rescued and saved. And so he goes on and he says, what happens both at the cross and subsequently at all other experiences of suffering in the world is that God, who is both free from all evil and the foe of evil, in your scenes of compassionate solidarity with all those who suffer. And he points out then that God's compassionate presence is mediated to those who suffer in the world through the human presence and compassion of faithful people who resist evil and injustice and so then become sacraments of God's saving will

[18:22]

to rescue the world. It's the body of Christ, then, that mediates this compassion into the lives of those who suffer. Arranged theology, whether you like it or not, preserves God's impassibility, while at the same time it does affirm God's compassion, which renders God powerfully sympathetic the suffering of the world, but discloses God above all as the All-Living One. So the point that he draws in conclusion then is that it makes us realize that as disciples of the Lord Jesus, we too then are called to enter into solidarity, compassionate solidarity, with all those who suffer. What's missing, I think, in Skelegax's argument, he has failed to confront the fact that much of the suffering in the world

[19:37]

is not caused by simple actions of human beings. But much suffering in the world is caused simply by natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, all the rest. Now there's another figure who is key. It's this Cambodian by the name of Thomas Van Endy, W-E-R-N-A-N-D-Y. He's an American pastor. He was for a long time on the faculty at Hogster. He has just been invited back to this country and he has become the General Secretary of the American Bishops' Doctrinal Committee. Lloyd, what's his RV?

[20:39]

He really looks tall. He does. Lloyd, stop it. and he certainly engages a wide variety of Biblical and Prophetic meaning in contemporary authors in an effort to refute what he considers to be false arguments that God is testable and somehow to articulate in a positive way a Christian understanding of God and God's relationship to humankind. So, very strongly, he denies the notion of passability, according to which God undergoes or experiences inner emotional changes of state. He holds that God is certainly loving and kind, despite being impassable. but also that God is compassionate precisely because God is impassable.

[21:46]

He can suffer with others. Because he is pure being and full of life, he himself then does not have to suffer. The lynching for Bonanni's argument is in fact the biblical doctrine of Prius. He acknowledges that the Old Testament speaks of God as though He does undergo emotional changes, including the Sabbath Supper. However, he maintains that such passages must be interpreted within the clear biblical revelation of who God is. He says above all one must discern accurately the biblical notion of God's utter transcendence at the same time as we try to explore God's eminence. How does God both transcend creation and at the same time be present to it and be eminently active within creation?

[22:59]

That's his question. to affirm that God is impassable is simply and yet I think profoundly important and it underscores the fact that God in fact differs from everything that is not divine. There's an infinite distance between the creator and creation. He wants to distinguish carefully God, above all, from human kind. Now, my reservations about this book, and he's also written a fairly long article on this issue in the first things, it needs to be balanced with a sympathetic dialogue with modern science.

[24:02]

Nowhere does he consider all the issues that we talked about last hour, Darwin's book, or the work of contemporary biologists and physicists. And he might find that a careful reading of John Hawkes' work, and the works of other contemporary Christian scientists who are sympathetic to theological concerns, would strengthen him rather than contradict his own conviction. Do you end up? Where do you choose to come down on this issue? And do you think we have adequate responses? Why do bad things happen to good people? And yet I think often in preaching and teaching we feel compulsion to provide people with easy answers. What about you? Ah, I see that there. Oh yeah, I like books. Do you still believe in God as transcendent and infinite?

[25:06]

I'm not sure if that's the real problem. Yeah, it's a slump, I guess. So she said, when we set up the hotel, it's transcendent. Yeah, well, it's far from it. It's distant. But we live way up. Don't even mention it. There is no law. It's because we cannot see beyond the edge. It's the domination of God. I was on the island when some people made that, made say God. They were so close to it. And they were able to describe the metaphysical aspect of God. So they made God. I didn't see the metaphysical, I don't know. God made an argument in like this. What you're raising is the next question that I want to go into. What is the significant difference then between pantheism and panentheism? What is pantheism? Everything is God. What is panentheism? God is in everything.

[26:18]

Does that mean we in fact then become God? One has to use the term divinization which is so strong in the Eastern tradition with a fair amount of caution I think in this regard. Let's talk a little bit then about in-entityism. Where is that today? Well, among both theologians and scientists today, there is considerable emphasis in panentheism in the mode of God's presence in or to a scientific world. Certainly, numerous contemporary theologians identify themselves quite openly as panentheists.

[27:27]

For example, in this country, Joseph Bracken from Ohio, Marcus Lord, Baldwin himself, Callistus Ware that I talked about yesterday, John Macquarie. Others would be identified as pantheists, but don't very clearly identify themselves. Rosemary Luther, for example, Peter Berger. Then you go back in history, Theologians from earlier ages would be identified as Pantantheus, Limulus Accusa, Leicester Eckhart, Maxwell and Batchelor, Julian of Norwich, even Martin Luther would fit into the category there. But one of the most carefully articulated books in this regard has been done by an Australian, diocesan priest by the name of Dennis Edwards. And his basic ideas are set out in a little book called Breath of Life, A Theology of the Superior Spirit, published by Mary Noah, Orvis Books, 2004.

[28:40]

It's very interesting, you know, after the Council, Australians found themselves in a situation where there was no Catholic university. in Australia. And so people who were interested in theology either went to York or they also came in great numbers to this country. Now they are certainly surfacing with a vengeance and producing works which are extremely imaginative and very, very comfortable. And he's one of them. He's probably imaginative at 50, as I imagine. So just to summarize this a little bit. He understands ambiism in such a way that somehow creation does impact upon God as well as upon creatures.

[29:43]

He argues with Aquinas. He agrees with Aquinas in his understanding of creation as involving a relationship between each creature and the Creator who is the principle of all being. He holds against Aquinas though that the relationship with creation must be seen as real on the part of God as well as on the part of creatures. In other words, what he's raising here is the question of the meaning of relationship. The two people are involved in a relationship and both are open to revelation from another. What goes from one side must affect the other.

[30:47]

That's what he's getting at. We have to disagree. Aquinas would say that the relationship only affects the creature, it never affects the creator. He disagrees with that, and I find that that's challenging for me anyway. So he holds in his own way that we need to be able to think of God as capable of suffering with creatures, And this is the itch. He says God suffers in a divine way, not in a human way. And so what he's emphasizing here is that language about God is always being used analogously, metaphorically. So the transcendent God, he says, would never, never suffer as he suffers.

[31:49]

We're kind of thinking that when we say the thing that spikes, what we say it's... I don't want to be technical, but it is a metaphorical analogy, or proper subversion of what we mean by that. In other words, it's real something when we speak of it analogously, but like a mouse knows, man knows, God knows, God really knows, but it's not doing that. Well, the language that he used, I've only had correspondence with, I've never met him. He was a doctor at a distant, he was a student of Cathy B. when I taught there, but I never met the man. I've only had correspondence with him after he's written this book, which I have found extremely helpful. I don't want to put words in his mouth, I mean, he talks about the language being used analogously. But somehow he wants to insist that whenever we talk about God, we're always in the realm of metaphor. And we cannot be making God older in our image and likeness.

[33:05]

The limitations of human language. If the argues that a ritualist perfects God, then God can be changed. Exactly. And that's what these other theologians are maintaining too. That you do not end up with an impassable God, but a passable God. And they're very distinguished people in the little list that I gave you. I mean, I was surprised that Pentelemessa would identify himself in this category. Well, I'll leave that question with you. And now what I want to do is to go on and talk about the implications that all this has for you folks. It's the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 4 to 10.

[34:08]

It really, I think, provides the foundation for a sound understanding of the relationship between sacrifice and the Eucharist as gift. Eucharist is gift. Sacrifice is gift. You know, it's very interesting. The thing of the way we talk about the communion rite, Do you go to communion? Do you take communion? Or do you receive communion? If you go to communion, I'm going to the filling station now to get tanked up with gas. If I take communion, I don't think there are any who can choose that expression.

[35:10]

Did you take communion today? You take once you have a right to. If you receive communion, it is here. Robert Taft, again, is a very provocative and devastating article on this whole question of the rights of communion. And he points out, I think quite rightly, that in the Eastern tradition, no one takes. No one takes. The deacon administers the Eucharist, gives the Eucharist, in that sense, even to the presider. Whereas our rubrics are very clear that the on celebrants or the presider always takes rather than receive. Very provocative article. So it's a gift here, it's a gift.

[36:13]

The text in Ephesians, God is rich in mercy and because of this great love for us brought us to life with Christ when we were dead because of our sins. It is by grace, by gift, that you are saved, that He raised us up in union with Christ Jesus, and enthroned us with Him in the heavenly realm, so that He might display in the ages to come how immense are the resources of His grace, and how great is His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. It is by grace, by gift, that you are saved, we pray. It is not your own building. It's God's gift, not for reward or work done. There is nothing for anyone to boast about. It is the share of them. And God's own light that is offered to us in Christ Jesus through the power of the Spirit.

[37:19]

Christ Jesus is the one who offers us his very body and blood, his very life in the Eucharist. Now, although the Eucharistic liturgy is a meal, the meal characteristic is essentially bound up with the sacrificial character of the whole celebration. King Mark says, insofar as Jesus instituted the memorial of his symbolic actions at the Last Supper, the sacrificial and real aspects are inseparable from one another. A sacrificial event is constituted in the form of a ritual real process. The meal has to do with the modus quo, the manner in which the gift is given.

[38:22]

It's not the info of the celebration. The Eucharist is essentially a sacrificial gift, but it's given to us under the forms of bread and wine, which are to be eaten and drunk. So that whole debate was heard so often after the Council. You know, we're abandoning now the sacrificial character of the Eucharist and substituting meal. Well, this is a clarification, I think. When you talk about it, I think it's important to talk about the Eucharist as a sacrificial meal. Our goal, then, in celebrating the Eucharist is communion with Christ in the power of the Spirit and through Christ with the Father but also communion with the body of Christ which is the Church.

[39:30]

That manner of communion is achieved through the power of the Holy Spirit. What we have there is what has been described as a catabatic or descending self-id of God through Christ in the power of the Spirit. But there's also necessarily a fake response, an anabatic or an ascending dimension. That's the reason why Christians have considerable difficulty with our response Pray brothers and sisters, your sacrifice and mine. Question there, you know, what are we doing here? We're only in the realm of receptivity. And so what I bring to the Eucharist is an availability, an openness, a receptivity. That's what Thanksgiving is all about. Receiving the gift that is up.

[40:35]

There's nothing magic that happens here. As you're talking, I was just, the question popped in my head. Do we understand the Eucharist as a phenomenon or as an object? I think liturgy generally is a verb, rather than a noun. So it is an experience, you know. to describe it as an intersubjective experience of us being born. That's right, Ed. That's all right. That's all right. That's good. But this leads into the interesting question, Ed, of how we came about for reservation and adoration with the Eucharist. That's what I'm going to deal with now. Is, for example, the primary goal of the Eucharist adoration? or is the primary purpose of the Eucharist as the term implies, Thanksgiving.

[41:43]

In terms of order, I would move this one to Thanksgiving, to praise, The meaning of God is a human person fully alive. That's the way I praise God, by allowing God to transform me more and more into the divine image. So I always bring to the Eucharist this mysterious combination of strengths and weaknesses, acknowledging my need to be healed, In the process then, as I mentioned last evening, in this transformative process, I am gradually changed, often in ways that I cannot explain. Then thirdly, it's petition and interception.

[42:54]

But it will be the thanksgiving and the praise that tend to dominate as we break this up, our Eucharistic prayers. In a sense then, I think we can say that salvation history is realized, made real in the lives of those who share faithfully in the Eucharist. Now, it's a history, first of all, of the divine author, of personal communion with God, extended to human beings, but also involving the free accepting response of those saving human beings. There's something magic that happens here. Do I really appropriate the gift? on all levels as the body person that I am.

[44:00]

So the human response is described as an offering of self, in the sense that one freely opens oneself to the gift, embraces the gift, so that one ultimately receives the meaning of one's life from God in Christ, in the power of the Spirit. In other words, I freely choose to be open to the divine gift, which alone gives true and final meaning to my human existence. So initially, salvation history takes place in the special mission of the Word. What happens in Christ's own humanity, in his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, The Christ event then is really an expression of the Father's fidelity to the covenant made to his people.

[45:08]

It's an expression of the Father as being always faithful to promises that have been made. There is, first of all, in terms of salvation history here, the incarnation and transformation of the humanity of Jesus Christ. And what happened to His humanity through the power of the Spirit is meant to happen to our humanity as persons and communities also, always through the power of the Spirit. Salvation history is not something confined to the Old Testament. It's something that must be worked out in our lives now. In the same way as Jesus Christ responded the Father's love in his life. So also, we call for the same kind of positive response. It's very important that I think to remember that the Word and the Holy Spirit are at work in all the actions that God performs in the world from the very beginning of creation.

[46:26]

It's not that God first sends the Word and then sends the Spirit. The two missions are simultaneous and convalescent. The gift that comes with the two-fold mission of the Word and the Spirit is dependent always on the divine initiative. God is the giver. The gift comes from God as the gift of divine self-sacrificing, self-giving love. And Jesus responded all life long to that gift of the Spirit in his own humanity. He died all life long to the human tendency to be independent, self-sufficient. I think one of the best things that Rauner ever wrote was his little theology of death. He makes the point that death in a real sense characterized Jesus' humanity of giving. who characterized His whole life, His whole humanity, is carried over then and given marvelous symbolic expression by His death on the cross.

[47:37]

The same thing is meant to happen in us. It is in our whole life that we are initiated into the life of God through the sacraments of Christian initiation. It's meant to characterize our life So that all life long, through the power of the Spirit, we in turn are dying to self-centeredness, self-preoccupation, self-sufficiency, acknowledging our basic dependence. In the celebration of the Eucharist day, What we really are meant to do is to submit our own lives to the paschal rhythms on Jesus Christ's own life and consequently the paschal rhythms on the church as the body that's lost.

[48:38]

We come to see that the life we're given not as a commodity that we can control. that is mysterious you. It's a gift which invites us then to our human thanksgiving opening our hearts and we receive the gift which allows God to be God in our lives. It's God's presence in our hearts which transforms us to be in fact are glorified by God's initiative. So then Irenaeus said, the glory of God is the human person, holy or not. Louis-Marie Chauvet. He and John of Arian, whom I mentioned earlier this morning,

[49:48]

There are probably the two most important sacramental theologians writing in the Bible. Jobei, C. J. U. B. E. T. They're both French. Jobei does not speak English, and so has never come to this country to lecture. His basic hope, which I think you would find helpful, is called symbol and sacrament. sacramental reinterpretation of Christian existence. He points out that the Eucharist is always gracious. God's life, God's gift, resolves virtuousness. That's something we've learned. It's gracious in the sense that we can never quantify its value. It's gratuitous because it's always unmerited to care.

[50:59]

Consequently, he says, the Eucharist always calls us for a disposition of thanksgiving, of receptivity, because without such a response there can be no true communion between God and us. The response certainly places us in a distinctive relationship with God, one of total dependency, but we, in a sense, offer our return gifts not because we have merited them, but because they are gifts in the first place. Everything we have is God's gift. And what he points out very effectively is that ethics, the way we relate to one another, draws this Christian aspect from its quality of a liturgical response to the initial gift of always promising God.

[52:05]

So, in one of his other little quotes, where he talks about the word of God, at the mercy of the Lord, which is nothing automatic, you know. To what degree are we responding effectively to the offer of divine light which comes to us in God? I'll fix some of these points up in a similar way tomorrow.

[52:37]

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