No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today.
Rausch, Thomas P.
No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today. By Gerhard
Lohfink. Translated from the German by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville,
MN: Liturgical, 2014. Pp. vii + 330. $34.95.
Lohfink explains that his title refers to contemporary efforts to
"tame" Jesus, presenting him as just another rabbi or prophet,
rejecting his views on divorce, reducing his preaching to the
psychological, his eschatology to the ethical, or individualizing his
emphasis on the kairotic and the communal. But L. depicts Jesus as
God's final and ultimate word, "the Word in which God has
spoken God's self totally and without exception" (3). His book
is about Jesus, but also about the church, the eschatological people of
God Jesus founded and for whom he ultimately died. The book originated
in a series of lectures given over the last several years; thus the
chapters are relatively brief, easy to digest, and written to maintain
the interest of the audience.
The topics L. treats are certainly contemporary. They include
questions such as whether Jesus died for "many" or for
"all," how an individual could redeem the whole world, how the
hungry will be filled in the reign of God, how sacraments mediate Christ
through the community of the church, or whether the Qur'an
sanctions violence in the name of religion. One chapter critiques Ernst
Kasemann's arguments about the canon grounding the many confessions
rather than the unity of the church and his "scholarly fable"
(129) about the Pauline church's fundamentally charismatic
structure. Another examines the contemporary notion of
"values" disconnected from the fundamental nature of the
human, and in the process repeats the "so-called Bockenforde
Paradox" (267) that the modern liberal state is founded on
political values that it cannot itself justify or guarantee, an argument
made also by Pope Benedict XVI. L. also stresses that much of
Jesus' activity was directed to "gathering" and
"uniting" Israel, a theme emphasized in his earlier Jesus of
Nazareth, What He Wanted, Who He Was (2012). One of the best chapters is
on how faith works, arguing that it must be learned, that it is mediated
in the intimacy of the family, that it must grow, be ritually expressed,
and that it lays claim to the whole of life. Another chapter that stands
out treats the church's proper name as assembly, tracing the roots
of the word ekklesia, contrasting its essentially visible, communal
nature with various personal religions and pop purveyors of salvation.
A particular strength of the book comes from L.'s years of
teaching the New Testament, while his long association with the
Integrierte Gemeinde gives him a profound appreciation of the Jewish
roots of Christian faith. Indeed at times the book reads like a
rabbinical commentary on the biblical text. At other times, however, L.
might have shown greater appreciation of religious traditions other than
Judaism and Christianity. His reduction of Buddhism to a religion of
escape from the world does not move beyond the "negative
soteriology" of John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope
(1995), overlooking Buddhism's profound teaching on compassion and
its world-embracing ideal of Bodhisattva. L. dismisses other world
religions, including Buddhism, as promoting self-redemption, rather than
trying to see how God might work through other religions. He contrasts
the Sermon on the Mount with Sura 9.5 from the Qur'an, the
"sword verse" used by Islamic fundamentalists to justify
violence against those they see as godless. Though he acknowledges that
the verse is disputed in Islam, he argues that if Christians in Europe
fail to reclaim the physicality of their faith, faced with the
concreteness of Islam, Christianity will not have a chance.
The book harbors considerable wisdom. L. emphasizes that God always
respects our freedom; describes the risen Jesus as "pure,
unimaginable presence" (195); stresses the essential diversity of
the church, which can never be a ghetto of like-minded people; and,
through meditation on the story of David and Bathsheba, shows how the
consequences of even forgiven sin linger in history with tragic effect.
He argues that the failure of Christians to acknowledge Paul's
theology of history in Romans 9-11 resulted in the anti-Judaism that
ultimately made possible the Holocaust. The book, with its exposition of
Scripture, social commentary, and accessible chapters, is well suited
for retreat reading, adult education groups, or homiletic material.
DOI: 10.1177/0040563915574990
Thomas P. Rausch, S.J.
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
