A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity

A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity. By Johann Baptist Metz. Edited and translated, with an introduction, by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Paulist Press, 1998. 212 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Johann Baptist Metz turns seventy this year and the translation of these recent essays is a suitable way for English readers to celebrate the occasion. The essays, with a very helpful introduction by the translator, were published in various German sources in the early 90s (with one exception). They reprise the main themes of Metz's earlier works from Theology of the World through Faith in History and Society and The Emergent Church, with greater clarity and intensity.

Perhaps most illuminating is the autobiographical note "In Place of a Foreword," in which Metz tells of being taken out of school when he was sixteen, drafted into the army and, after a brief period of training, sent to the front. One evening his company commander sent him with a message back to battalion headquarters. After wandering all night through destroyed, burning villages and farms, he returned in the morning to his company and found them all dead. "I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day.... What would happen if one took this sort of remembrance not to the psychologist but into the Church?" (pp. 1-2). He goes on to say that this memoria passionis, the remembrance of the suffering of others, is the leitmotiv of his theological project.

Hence, the theme of the memory of suffering, of the suffering of others including those in the past, of "suffering unto God," runs throughout the essays. Thus, also does the "catastrophe of Auschwitz" and the "church after Auschwitz" become another dominant theme. This memory of the suffering of others contributed to his turning from the transcendental Thomism of Karl Rahner, his mentor and "father in faith," to his own version of political theology. Ashley aptly points out Metz's "alternative set of existentialia""What if the reality that contextualizes and threatens modern belief is not just, or even primarily, that of secularization and unbelief, but the horrifying worldwide prominence of inhuman suffering, the existence of crucified peoples?" (p. 14). Metz acknowledges that his turn to political theology was also occasioned by the "movement out of European monocentrism and into a culturally polycentric global church with painful social divisions" (p. 4).

For Metz, the mysticism that corresponds to this memory and experience of massive suffering is to be found in the tradition of apocalyptic spirituality. This form of spirituality takes the form of protest, of cry, of insistent questioning of God. Thus, Metz's theology is basically a social theodicy. But it is not a traditional theodicy that tries to explain or interpret human suffering; rather it is a theodicy whose "task consists in formulating it as a question directed back at God...." (p. 56). It is a theology of protest, of resistance and of transformation, a transformation which in its fullness becomes liberation. This is the "political-mystical dimension of Christianity."

A third theme throughout the essays is that of "anamnestic reason" or reason endowed with memory (p. 25). Metz believes that theology should not abandon the Enlightenment project altogether, but that its model of reason-reason without memory-needs to be corrected. "Anamnestic reason, therefore, is not primarily led by an a priori of communication and agreement [contra Habermas], but by an a priori of suffering" (p. 143). Thus, reason with the memory of suffering can be compatible with modernity and the best of the Enlightenment. Metz diplays little patience with postmodernism.

These themes, of memory, of suffering, of the mysticism of the apocalyptic tradition, with reason as a cognitive dimension, suffuse these essays and are an accurate reflection of Metz's whole theological enterprise. The two essays in honor of Karl Rahner are moving and informative about his theological (e.g. his critique of Rahner's "anonymous Christianity" on p. 114) and personal relationship with his "father in faith." They also show how Metz is the bridge figure between Rahner's transcendental theology and liberation theology. These essays show Metz's theology at its mature best. The translator has done us all a service.

T. HOWLAND SANKS, SJ

Jesuit School of Theology Berkeley, California

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