John Cunningham speaks about his new book Aspire
Retired US priest John Cunningham has just published his new book, Aspire. John is a member of the ACP and lives in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, the home of his ancestors.
He was a guest on Midwest Radio’s Faith Alive programme with Monica Morley and Brendan Hoban.
His book is available on-line from Amazon on Kindle or paperback (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aspire-Ruminations-Religion-Paradigm-Shift/dp/B0HC5J573X/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.n72oyOgTo4MDHrudo78g5g.axpr35MHgigZ6fV1NHEt77h2dyBLX5mu_XzHOIiQa8I&dib_tag=se&keywords=cunningham%2C+aspire&qid=1790593355&sr=8-1)
I appreciated the podcast with John Cunningham and Monica Morley.
When John was speaking about myth, a memory surfaced. Our son arrived home from first year high school upset. He was distraught after being told that something he believed deeply was not literally true, but a myth. I said something so SIMPLE that dissolved his confusion. “It’s raining cats and dogs!” Are there cats and dogs falling from the sky? No, he responded. I get it, he said with a relieved smile.
He attacks an easy target in focusing on Jesus walking on water, Jonah, Adam and Eve, Noah, Babel — i.e. the most obvious biblical fundamentalism. Let go our notion of God, he says — a sky-God, another caricature. What about such truths as 1. divine revelation, 2. the Incarnation and the divinity of Christ, 3. the Trinity, 4. salvation, 5. eternal life.
The emergent God that we aspire to — is it just poetry?
An updated version of the Nicene Creed — via another ecumenical council — surely a very exciting idea.
Keep the good things — like community and ethics — and let go of the divine, salvific Christ, downgraded to a prophet or sage? All those pesky antiscientific dogmas are whisked away be being declared merely symbolic. The best investment would be the religions most free of their burden — unitarianism, Judaism, nay, Islam, or better still an agnostic form of Buddhism.
Teilhard de Chardin would surely not be happy with this.
“Outdated religious myths and beliefs…”
This reminds me of Kevin Treston’s excellent book, “Who do you say I am?”
Tony Flannery recommended to me that I read this book after I read one of Tony’s essays, “The language of Doctrine” and I realised that I didn’t really know what was my understanding of the reality of the God that I say I believe in. I am so grateful to Tony for that recommendation.
Anyway, in Kevin’s book he maintains that “The danger for Christianity now is to persist in proclaiming a corpus of beliefs that are incoherent and incompatible with proven modern science and framed in pre-modern outmoded cosmology.”
This, I would think, probably applies doubly so to Catholic Christianity.
From the back cover blurb for ‘Aspire’:
“The greatest scientific discovery and the sacred revelation of all time is the revelation that each moment, in each person, the universe is contemplating itself – this truth transforms human consciousness.”
Given that there is no scientific consensus on whatever ‘the universe’ might be, how could it be possible to verify that ‘the universe is contemplating itself’ in each person in each moment?
As scientific truth is of its nature verifiable by experiment or observation, and therefore worthy of inclusion in an agreed body of knowledge, there can be no scientific discovery of the kind claimed.
Furthermore, as I do not know what ‘the universe’ is – and no one possibly can – the claim that this ‘realisation’ can ‘transform’ my ‘consciousness’ is daft on a scale far greater than anything I have so far read in scripture.
For me the scientific discovery that all matter is a form of energy is mystery enough – but the far greater mystery is the strength of character of Jesus of Nazareth in resisting the compulsion to meet violence with greater violence – thereby revealing and defeating the evil that lies behind all oppression.
From where did he derive that strength if not from the deepest belief in the great commandments and from the prayer that then followed? This pre-scientific practice turns out to be far more existentially important than the entire corpus of scientific knowledge, simply because of our mortality. I know this from my own experience of the valley of the shadow of death – in which all science becomes hohum and any of the prayers of the Rosary can indeed transform consciousness.
There will be yet more books promising some kind of nirvana in contemplation of the wonders of science. They will pass the time but not explain it.
Teilhard wanted to reconcile classic Christian doctrine with evolution, as seen in his book Comment je crois. He did not see the core principles of the deposit of faith as a dead letter, such principles as: God the creator, original sin (hugely reinterpreted), the Incarnation, the Paschal Mystery, the Eucharist. He unified evolution and doctrine in the sense of a ‘cosmic integration’ of which the figure of Christ is the fulfillment. And this requires considering ‘loyally the World as it presents itself to us today in the light of our reason: not the World of four thousand years, surrounded by its eight or nine spheres, for which the Theology in our books was written, but the Universe we see organically emerging from unlimited time and space. […] And let us try to see how the apparent contours of Christ must be modified so that his figure continues now as before to pervade everything, victorious.’
I reflected on how Pope Francis incorporated Teilhard’s theological concepts of creation and cosmic interconnectedness in his encyclical “Laudato si”
(paragraph 83) (footnote 53)
Very many interesting and complicated views here, some requiring mental gymnastics.
Keep it simple. The old Red Heenan Westminster Penny Catechism. I still have my battered Copy. Reprints on sale from TAN USA in Knock Shrine Bookshop. Selling quite well. I wonder why??
For something more substantial but logical (as an Engineer I love structure and Logic). Invest in Fr. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (1952). Reprints available from Baronius Press.
No nonsense. No Waffle.
I miss Fr. Ott. I was privileged to know him and met him in Eichstatt as a teenager. How that came to pass, is rather a long story. Fr. Ott died in 1985. His contribution to Dogmatics lives on.
Link to book review from this week’s Western People newspaper: https://www.westernpeople.ie/opinion/an-exceptional-book-for-this-moment-in-time_arid-111673.html
Neither from its back cover nor from Brendan Hoban’s review can one discern that ‘Aspire’ attributes a transcendantly redemptive – i.e. liberational and salvific – role to Jesus of Nazareth – even though Teilhard de Chardin and the ‘noosphere’ are referenced.
The likely reason for this is that although for Teilhard de Chardin Jesus was indeed the Omega point or completion of the evolving noosphere – the earthly sphere of consciousness – Teilhard lacked a clear anthropology that would fully justify that conclusion. This is especially true with regard to the problem of violence. Though fully experienced in the horrors of war Teilhard’s evolutionary optimism meant that he never addressed the question of what exactly drives humans into conflict – the question pursued above all by René Girard.
To save oneself from the delusion that modern science is more revelatory than scripture one truly needs to see that Girard’s explication of covetousness as mimetic desire – the desire that arises from self-comparison with others – provides a hermeneutic – a key to scripture – that makes it always relevant and revelatory. Jesus’ Jewish enemies wanted the following and the charisma that he so obviously had, and came to hate him because they could not have that. Pilate’s pyramid of power rested upon his ability to prevent disorder – and covetousness is also the source of all power pyramids.
This is why the recovery of the ‘Christus Victor’ understanding of atonement is so crucial. Jesus was unmasking Satan – the spirit of hatred that drives the Accusers and then the lynching mob – and this is the intention behind the Incarnation – not the assuaging of God’s ‘dissatisfaction’ over our sins. It was this ‘satisfactionism’ – originating in the mistaken post 312 church-state alliance – that clouded the vision of Christendom – the pre-1914 social order that had Christian clergies in different empires praying competitively for totally different victories.
It is truly necessary to read Girard, or his best explicators, to avoid the trap of ‘scientism’ – of attributing to modern ‘hard’ science a greater revelatory importance than scripture. And – in the midst of today’s wars – Girard is needed also to justify Teilhard’s evolutionary optimism.
Richard Rohr’s daily meditations: Sun.Feb.3/2019
He doesn’t write of violence specifically but in his understanding of the why of Jesus’s death he believes that the Christus Victor theory and the ransom view of atonement are closely related. “In these views he writes, “salvation became a one time transactional affair between Jesus and his Father instead of an ongoing transformational lesson for the human soul and for all of history.”
That’s a mistake MGB. The early Christus Victor explanation of ‘ransom’ – the standard view until St Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo of 1098 – was that this ransom had been paid NOT TO God the Father but to Satan BY God the Father – in the form of Jesus’ self-giving – FOR the PERMANENT ‘redemption’ or ‘buyout’ of our enslavement to sin and Satan. Only this understanding of the cross could have underpinned St Augustine’s ‘mousetrap’ understanding of the atonement and St Paul’s belief in a ‘New Creation’. That God the Father was seen as equal ‘liberator’ with Jesus is plain from reading e.g. Irenaeus.
Gustav Aulen explains this clearly in his still-influential work ‘Christus Victor’
That instead the ‘ransom’ came to be understood as payable and paid by Jesus TO the Father to ‘satisfy’ or restore the honour of God’s creation is entirely a medieval and post-Constantinian development. Anselm saw the idea of a ransom paid to Satan as demeaning to the Trinity, to Jesus especially. His God the Father was clearly modelled on the nearly absolute medieval monarch rather than the father of the Prodigal Son. Anselm’s transactional model of atonement clearly reflects the honour codes of the medieval feudal pyramid.
You cannot have been reading Richard Rohr correctly. He consistently emphasises the cross as the the defeat of ‘the powers’ (Christus Victor) while deprecating the much later ‘substitutionary’ explanation – which followed (for e.g. John Calvin) from St Anselm’s medieval ‘satisfactionism’.
For example, Richard writes as follows:
“For the early centuries, appeasing an angry, fanatical Father was not their answer. For the first thousand years, most Christians believed that the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross—the “price” or the ransom—was being paid not to God, but to the devil! This made the devil pretty powerful and God pretty weak, but it gave the people someone to blame for Jesus’ death. And at least it was not God.”
https://acireland.ie/richard-rohr-jesus-and-the-cross/
I was just quoting Richard from his Daily Meditation on Sunday, Feb.3/2019. Not my words but his. His meditations are readily available online.
Your quotation from Richard Rohr is indeed accurate, M G-B, but it clearly refers not to the Christus Victor ‘ransom’ theory but to the Protestant Reformation idea of substitutionary atonement, which came much later, as a logical corollary of St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theory.
Here is the page in question.
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/substitutionary-atonement-2019-02-03/
Even the book of Job – Old Testament, pre-Christian – has a reference to God the Father as Redeemer, and to ‘redeem’ was to release from enslavement – the central role of the God of Moses. The transposition of a ransom paid BY God the Father TO Satan into a ransom paid – by Jesus – TO God the Father radically transformed the God of Moses, and of Jesus, into a ransom-demander – the key theological transition that led to fundamentalist substitutionary atonement.
Essentially St Anselm’s satisfaction theory left us with a clouded understanding of redemption – as rescue by Jesus from God the Father’s disapproval rather than as liberation BY God the Father from the captivity that we ourselves had entered into, the central theme of the Exodus story and of the first ‘passover’.
It is the whole Trinity that redeems and liberates. It was St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theory that led inexorably to the notion of God the Father as a ransom-demander, with the life of Jesus as the only ransom that could win back his approval. The sole similarity in the Christus Victor theory and St Anselm’s Satisfaction theory is that idea of ransom – but to make of God the Father a ransom-demander rather than a ransom-payer was to create a stumbling-block – a literal ‘scandal’ – that still hobbles the ‘Good News’.
Sean, I appreciate how much thought and effort you have put into your comment.
You are a true student of Richard Rohr and I imagine you to be an enthusiastic teacher. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.