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Spring 2009: The Entry Into Jerusalem
INTRODUCTION | Table of Contents
Our Spring, 2009 issue begins with a brief statement regarding the University of Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama to receive an honorary law degree and give the commencement address at the university’s graduation in May. In his editorial, “President
Obama, Notre Dame, and a Dialogue That Witnesses: A Question
for Father Jenkins,” David L. Schindler uses the occasion to raise more general questions about a truly Catholic engagement with the culture. Noting Fr. Jenkins’s desire to open a “dialogue” with the president about abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, Schindler asks whether the conventional understanding of “dialogue” is in fact able to avoid proportionalism, and whether there
might exist some issue whose weight exceeds the capacity of the
proportionalist dialogue suggested by Notre Dame’s action, calling
rather for an embodied witness to the issue’s gravity. This embodied
witness, he argues, is not opposed to reason; rather, it represents
reason’s fullest realization.
The question of the relationship between the political and
the religious, raised in Schindler’s editorial, receives illumination
from a different angle in the event of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem,
which is the next installment of our Spring series on the “Mysteries
of the Life of Jesus.” This event, which comes at the end of Jesus’
public ministry and which we commemorate liturgically on Palm
Sunday, is filled with paradoxes: Jesus allows himself for the first time
to be called “king,” and yet he approaches the holy city on the back
of the humblest of all animals, the donkey; his coming is the long-
awaited fulfillment of the prophecy made to the People of Israel, and
yet it overturns all expectations; he is welcomed by his own, and yet
they are about to condemn him; his arrival is hailed as the “triumphant entry,” and yet he is going there to die. In the present issue,
three authors take up a reflection on some aspect of this rich
mystery.
José Granados begins our treatment of this event with
“The New Hosanna in the New Temple: Jesus’ Entry Into Jerusa
lem,” which gives an account of the Old Testament background to
the event of the entrance into the holy city, and then goes on to
show that “it is not so much Jerusalem Jesus enters, as the Temple.”
The destruction and rebuilding of the Temple of his body entails a
new conception of the body and of reason: as the incarnate logos,
Jesus is “reason made flesh.” Granados shows that this notion of
embodied reason, in fact, allows a true, Christian separation of the
political and religious spheres, and helps to illuminate the presence
of Christians within society.
Gary A. Anderson, in “To See Where God Dwells: The
Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Origins of the Christian Mystical
Tradition,” examines the role of the Temple and its furniture in the
Second Temple Period (520 BC to 70 AD), in order to show how,
from the beginning, the house of God was not clearly separable from
the being of God. In this respect, the Tabernacle in the Temple of
Jerusalem foreshadows the “appearance of God in the flesh” of the
man, Jesus, and becomes a central topos of early Christian mystical
contemplation.
Peter M. Candler, Jr.’s article “The Logic of Christian
Humanism,” expands the discussion of the Temple in a study of,
first, Christianity’s aesthetic and architectural “transformative
preservation” of paganism, in which Christianity both preserves the
“greatness of humanity” contained in antiquity and paganism, and
adds to the deposit of humanity in a way no other religious,
philosophical, or political culture is able to do. Candler then holds
up modernity’s self-conscious “liberation from tradition,” next to
Christianity’s approval of cultural “borrowings”: the approval springs
from seeing that providence has left a community among all natures
through the fact of their being created by God. An “intimation of
the glory of God still subsists in the stones” of pagan cultures as a
preparation for the Incarnation, and the ability of a true Christian
humanism to keep, rather than destroy, the “spoils of Egypt” is an
index, too, of the Incarnation, since “whatever is not assumed is not
healed.”
David M. McCarthy, in “Scripture and Ethics: Bearings
From Balthasar,” takes the theme of modernity and Christian
humanism in a different direction: his article shows how modernity’s
fragmentation takes form in moral theology and scriptural studies,
which, he says, are characterized by a tendency to avoid theories of
atonement, on the one hand, and attention to the Old Testament,
on the other. McCarthy’s proposal takes Balthasar’s theo-drama and
theological aesthetics as a way of correcting the “fragmentation of
practical reason and the breaking up of the Bible into discrete texts,”
by overcoming christologically the modern divorce between subject
and object, and by approaching the times and places of Scripture on
their own terms.
Rodrigo Polanco picks up the theme of the Incarnation
sounded in our articles on the Entrance Into Jerusalem in an essay on
the role that Irenaeus plays in the thought of Hans Urs von
Balthasar. In “Balthasar and Irenaeus: The Total Glorification of God
and of Man in God,” Polanco shows how the theological centers of
these two thinkers converge. Balthasar develops the thought of
Irenaeus in part with the help of modern concepts—especially
Goethe’s notion of Gestalt—and in relation to contemporary
concerns, but according to Polanco he does so in a way that is
surprisingly true to Irenaeus’ own self-understanding. The heart of
the matter is a christological interpretation of the analogy of being
as the ultimate answer to gnosticisms both ancient and modern: the
Incarnation has implications for the meaning, not only of human
nature, but of all nature and indeed of all time and space. And yet,
in this mystery, God crosses the infinite abyss that separates him from
the world without for all that eliminating the difference.
Martin Rhonheimer returns to the question of the
relationship between the religious and the political in his “Response to David Crawford,” in which he replies to a critical assessment of an article of his that Crawford offered in the Fall 2007 issue of Communio. Rhonheimer argues that Crawford failed to realize that Rawls’ later work took a distance from the “pure liberal proceduralism” that some read as a “comprehensive doctrine” in his original
Theory of Justice. The “second Rawls” presents public reason “as a way of reasoning about political values shared by free and equal citizens that does not trespass on citizens’ comprehensive doctrines,
so long as those doctrines are consistent with a democratic polity.”
Rhonheimer believes that such a notion of public reason is open to the very one
implied by the natural law tradition embraced by Catholic teaching, provided Rawls’ limitation of public reason to “free an equal citizens” is abandoned and natural law is recognized as a standard of its truth. He claims that Crawford abandons the Catholic tradition of natural law insofar as his approach, by contrast, “is essentially theological, founded in a
trinitarian-christological doctrine, and thus based on Christian
revelation.” Crawford will answer Rhonheimer’s charges in an
upcoming issue.
Finally, Notes and Comments closes the issue with Andrew Hofer’s “Amalek and the Early Christian Battle for Scriptural Interpretation,” which takes up again our opening theme of the
relation between the Old and New Testaments. Hofer gives
examples of three early authors, Marcion, the author of Barnabas, and Justin Martyr, to show how their commentaries on the battle with Amalek in Exodus 17 presuppose and argue for a christological reading of Israel’s scriptures.
—DCS
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