A Fractured Relationship: Faith and the Crisis of Culture

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy

School of Theology

Thomas J. Norris, (Dublin: Veritas, 2007). Pp. 267.

Reviewed by Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR, Australian Catholic University

The author of this wide-ranging book is a professor of theology at St Patricks University, Maynooth, and a member of the International Theological Commission. The tone is deeply spiritual and pastoral in orientation, even as it calls on a wide range of theological and literary sources. In the introduction, we are reminded that talking about God is dangerous, as martyrs of past and more recent times—under the Soviet Union, for example, amply testify.

The underlying question, expressed in various ways, asks what effect the recovery of the first freshness of faith might have in the lives of Christians today? This Irish theologian with extensive contacts with various Christian groups has in mind the present cultural plight of Europe which is in danger of renouncing its Christian heritage, a situation that has been called "the third death of God". Hence, the reader can welcome TN's effort to express a theology in a more inspirational key—to that degree less instinctively suspicious of the Christian and Catholic tradition.

On the other hand, he appeals to a stronger and more comprehensive notion of "reason" in contrast to the desiccated rationalism that has had such negative effects. He enlists the support, not only of Augustine, Aquinas and the great Franciscans, but also of Newman (TN is a recognized specialist in Newman studies), and of such writers as Lonergan, Voegelin, von Balthasar—and John Paul II, especially the encyclical, Fides et Ratio.

After first detailing cultural loss that modernity has suffered, he presses on, in the main section of the book, with a specific task: not to presuppose faith, but to propose it anew.
To this end, he gives an account of the drama of drama of Israel and is promise-filled history. This leads him to the Gospel and Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and the different ranges of its significance. A conclusion emerges in that only love revealed in the cross and resurrection of Christ is the aesthetic, integrating point of our experience of the real. Evil, helplessness, the fear and impermanence are conquered, not by ignoring them, but by acknowledging God's entry into them in a way that transforms, inspires and gives hope.

In all this, what is at stake at this early stage of the third millennium is the recovery of the experience of God's self-revelation in Christ. A chapter of the Trinity locates the divine mystery at the centre of faith and the community life of the Church. The book moves on by way of a reflection on the Gospel of John with its multi-dimensional presentation of community and mutual indwelling: Jesus and the Father, Jesus and his disciples, with all enfolded into the divine unity—so that through the realization of Christian community the Trinity becomes newly visible in the world—the "we" of an ultimate love.

This freshly-proposed vision of centre of Christian faith, it is hoped, will bring a distinctive healing and light in the midst of the "dark night of the soul" manifest in the current cultural schizophrenia of the West.

I would think this book would be useful for the general reader, by opening wider theological, spiritual and cultural horizons. The theological student would find it a valuable reference, in that it brings together theological and spiritual concerns in an accessible and inspiring manner. Perhaps most of all, it poses a question for the present extraordinary interest in "spirituality": it witnesses to dimensions of Christian spirituality that have been too long neglected, even by theology itself.