Schultenover, David G

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteTheology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of3-1-2012From the Editor's Desk, "Theological Studies,"March 2012David G. SchultenoverMarquette University, david.schultenover@marquette.eduPublished version. Theological Studies, Vol. 73, No. 1 (March, 2012): 1-2. Publisher Link. © 2012Theological Studies, Inc. Used with permission.From the Editor's Desk As I write these lines, the Christian world is preparing once again to celebrate the fullness of time when God's Son migrated from the Godhead to become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The phrase "fullness of time" comes from Galatians 4:4 where Paul, having just completed his first missionary journey (Acts 13-14), was offering his understanding of how the event of Jesus Christ completed the history of the Jewish people as the bearers of God's promise to bless "the nations" through Abraham (Gen 18:18), the father of faith. The phrase suggests a historical sense that creation evolves, and that the Judeo-Christian God is, in Jesus Christ, the Lord of history whose advent inaugurates the completion of creation, realized eschatology. We Christians live against the horizon of realized eschatology, but in our state as evolutionary, developmental beings, we live also and most immediately in the throes of unrealized eschatology. As such, we regularly find ourselves surprised by the new, something that has been developing over time but now comes to a fullness of expression that slaps us into awareness—this "something" becoming perhaps for the first time a theological revelation that helps us incorporate the seemingly new into our conscious grasp of the Christian mystery. In one way or another, all our articles are about the Divine Mystery. In this issue two articles—by Gioacchino Campese and Kristin Heyer—signal the fullness of time for migration as a locus theologicus. Certainly migration is not a new phenomenon—Princeton University has a website devoted to "The Genetics of Prehistoric Migration," and our Judeo-Christian-Islamic narrative begins with the migration of the Abraham-Sarah family from Ur that gave birth to the great reli-gions of the Book. And ever after, this ur-migration has served the religious imagi-nations of billions of people who understand their lives as mysteries of migration. Migrations come in many forms, some voluntary, others forced by disasters or pressured by fear of persecution and lack of state protection. Common to all migra-tions is that people leave their homeland and travel to a strange land where they are considered "foreigners"—as in the archetypal examples of Abraham-Sarah, the Exodus, and the Exile and return. Throughout history believers inspired by the Abrahamic migration have often chosen to reenact migration in less dramatic, traumatic ways by going on pilgrim-age or making retreats. The aim of such reenactments, however small in scale, is to change our environment radically from the predictable and dependable to one that casts us upon a "foreign shore," there to make our way in the acceptance of mystery, a mystery we choose to trust as benevolent rather than malevolent. Forced migrants tend not to have that choice. As images of God, we are called to do humanly what God does. In creation God poured God's self out into creatures free in their otherness. This divine outpouring leaves human persons free in their otherness to enter into relationship with the Wholly Other, the Creator, and ultimately to return to "where we started / And know the place for the first time" (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding). This is what Jesus did, undergoing the kenosis of which Paul speaks (Phil 2:7) and seeing his death as a "return to the Father" (Jn 16:28). The Christian vocation to "put on Christ" means allowing ourselves to be recreated in his image and patterning our lives after him, having in us "the same mind . . . that was in Christ Jesus" (Phil 2:5). If he, the sinless 1 2 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES one, poured himself out in obedience to his Abba for the love of sinful humanity, we by grace must do the same, putting on Christ and becoming fully what we were created to become. The process of being born, living for a time our earthly vocation, and completing it by rebirth to the fullness of life in God can be described as a migration. But this is an abstract, spiritualized way of describing what generally happens in and through wrenching suffering—endured by God in Jesus' birth, passion-death, and resurrection. Actually, migration has been an arching pattern of human life from the outset. We have tended to consider it primarily as a geographical phenomenon, a dis-placement of people for all sorts of reasons, often involving violence. Heyer points out that 40 years ago one in 29 persons was displaced; today that ratio is one in nine, and largely for socioeconomic reasons. Those who suffer this displacement most assuredly experience it as violent. Yes, it is geographic, but it is also intensely personal, fraught with almost unimaginable suffering, a ripping apart of deeply identifying relationships, that leaves migrants at the mercy of forces often bent on exploiting migrants' powerlessness. Theirs is a kenosis as raw as anything Jesus experienced, and case histories show that migrants are often driven to trust only in God who alone can ultimately save them. Their lives all too often are jeopardized by forces that are malevolent, not benevolent. Those of us who do not directly suffer the trauma of migration might do so indirectly, as Jesus by compassion suffered the trauma of the marginalized he sought to befriend, heal, and restore to living human relationships. Compassion requires imagination, but imagination set free by love, enabling us to see human nature as imaging the Divine. Christian revelation tells us that God, rather than being purely simple, is essentially relational; so human images of God are by nature relational. Absent imagination set free by love, we can easily distance ourselves physically, psychologically, and spiritually from the many millions of migrants around our planet. But freed by love, our imagination recognizes all peoples as members of one family, our planet as a common home from which no one may be alienated, and those on the move as seeking welcome in our common home. Such an imagination comes from a kenosis, an emptying out of self-centeredness that occludes our imagination—a kenosis that makes our hearts capacious for the other, including migrants who become sacraments of the trinitarian God who entered time as a migrant for us, showing us the way to return home, not alone, but arm in arm with all our fellow migrants. David G. Schultenover, S.J. Editor in Chief 

From the Editor\u27s Desk,  Theological Studies,   March 2012

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteTheology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of3-1-2013From the Editor's Desk [Theological Studies,March 2013]David G. SchultenoverMarquette University, david.schultenover@marquette.eduPublished version. Theological Studies, Vol. 74, No. 1 (March 2013): 1-2. Publisher Link. © 2013Theological Studies, Inc. Used with permission.From the Editor's Desk I suggest that the most significant basis for meeting men of different religious traditions is the level of fear and trembling, of humility, of contrition, where our individual moments of faith are mere waves in the endless ocean of mankind's reaching out for God, where all formulations and articulations appear as under-statements, where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency of answering God's commandment, while stripped of pretension and conceit we sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith. Abraham Joshua Hesche!, "No Religion Is an Island." Has Catholicism entered upon that humbler sense of faith, without gainsaying the deposit of faith but hearkening to Joseph Ratzinger's Glaube und Zukunfkt (1970, translated as Faith and the Future, 1971; 2009)? Ratzinger muses about the Catholic Church's marked diminishment, particularly in Europe, due to the progressive secularization of thought and culture since the French Revolution. While his prediction for church membership in the West was dire (and presumably remains so), he takes hope from the Gospel parable of the mustard seed and is confident that "when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church." Those who have left the Church for the secularized world "will find themselves unspeakably lonely" and "will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as some-thing wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret" (116-18). Then the renaissance will begin again. Nothing has happened since 1970 to gainsay Benedict's assessment of the Church's future. On October 11, 2011, he issued his motu proprio Porta fidei calling for a Year of Faith beginning October 11, 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II and the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he called "an authentic fruit" of the council. Benedict invites us to engage in an "intensified" reflection on the faith "so as to help all believers in Christ to acquire a more conscious and vigorous adherence to the Gospel, especially at a time of profound change such as humanity is currently experiencing" (no. 8). To be included in this effort, Benedict writes, is concerted reflection on the texts of Vatican II, because-quoting Pope John Paul II's Novo millennia ineunte closing the Great Jubilee Year and opening the new millennium-these texts "have lost nothing of their value or brilliance. They need to be read correctly, to be widely known and taken to heart as important and normative texts of the Magisterium, within the Church's Tradition .... I feel more than ever in duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century: there we find a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning" (no. 57, emphases original). Porta fidei urges us to study and understand the conciliar texts as an impor-tant aspect of "an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord" (no. 6). But while Benedict highlights the need to grow in and profess the Church's faith, he does not neglect the other theological virtues of hope and Iove-all three are 1 2 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES thematic for his letter. Quoting 2 Corinthians 5:14 ("for the love of Christ impels us ... "), he argues that faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and when it is communi-cated as an experience of grace and joy. It makes us fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and enables us to bear life-giving witness: indeed, it opens the hearts and minds of those who listen to respond to the Lord's invitation to adhere to his word and become his disciples (no. 7, emphases added). These words recall Benedict's encyclicals. Deus caritas est (2005, on love) and Spe sa/vi (2007, on hope). It would be surprising, during this Year of Faith, if Benedict were not to publish an encyclical on faith. Theological Studies is attempting to do its part to assist believers everywhere to appropriate or reappropriate the Vatican II documents, especially by helping them read the texts correctly, as John Paul urges. We have already published two sets of articles on the council. With this issue, we offer our third set (and look forward to two more sets). Anne Hunt takes us through a trinitarian analysis of the conciliar texts, arguing that among the most significant insights of the council was "a fundamental redis-covery: the church's origin in the mystery of the Trinity." Indeed, she maintains, this rediscovery led to four conciliar leitmotifs: the church as mystery, as communio, as mission to the world, and as community of dialogue. (Not surprisingly, Porta fidei is imbued with an explicit trinitarian theology.) Speaking of dialogue, following Hunt's article is one by Richard Gaillardetz on the historical significance of the Groupe des Dombes, an unofficial group of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians who have been unobtrusively but importantly carrying on ecumenical dialogue since 1937 at two abbeys near Lyon, France. Then come two articles on Catholic-Jewish relations after Nostra aetate: one by Edward Kessler, executive director of The Woolf Institute at the University of Cambridge, dedicated to the study of relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; the other by Mary Boys of Union Theological Seminary, a leading US scholar on Jewish-Catholic relations, who gives us a Catholic perspective on inter-religious dialogue in the postconciliar years. Not grouped with these three are James Keenan's expanded Moral Note on theological ethics since Vatican II; a quaestio disputata on papal infallibility by Free Church scholar Mark Powell, fol-lowed by replies from John Ford and Gerard Kelly, a discussion that would not have happened prior to the council; and a review article by John Burkhard on Ghislain Lafont and post-Vatican II ecclesiology. At the head of my editorial I quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hesche! (1907-1972), one of the 20th century's greatest figures and an observer at Vatican II. While the passage cited references "the tragic insufficiency of human faith" (thus implying a mandate for dialogue), Heschel's thought across hundreds of publications eddies around the awareness of not only the insufficiency of our faith but also-if I might paraphrase Krista Tippett's observation in December 6's NPR program on Heschel-the insufficiency of our religious ideas. And, in fact, to acknowledge this insufficiency is a virtue. In this humility, then, let dialogue begin! David G. Schultenover, S.J. Editor in Chief 

From the Editor\u27s Desk [Theological Studies, March 2013]

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1348&amp;context=theo_fac

From the Editor\u27s Desk, Theological Studies, March 2012

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