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These collections are the fruit of two 2004 conferences held within a month of each other at Boston College and the University of Southern California. They cover generally the challenges and possibilities of Communicating religious faith and identity from one generation of Americans to the next. In Handing on the Faith, the faith in question is Roman Catholicism; Passing on the Faith is about all three “Abrahamic” religions. The two books can appear, at first, to be different in at least one other way. Handing on the Faith seems very much occupied with describing and worrying over an American “cultural catechumenate” that is up to no good and to which the church must somehow respond. Passing on the Faith is mostly focused on “success stories.” As its editor, James L. Heft, writes, the book describes “how three religious traditions can pass on to their next generation a robust and vital understanding and practice of their faiths.”

In the end, the contrast between handwringing and high-fiving may not come
to very much. In addition to all the success stories in Passing on the Faith, there is also a lot of concern about cultural circumstances that challenge the communication and formation of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim identity-including the circumstances of religious diversity and pluralism, which the authors of the Handing on the Faith largely put to one side. And while it is true that the latter collection gives far less attention to hands on models of handing on, it does include Bishop Blase Cupich’s fine report of a diocesan-wide transition in western South Dakota from it “catechesis of schooling” to “church-based formation.” A traditional CCD-classroom approach tends to isolate faith formation from a parish’s life of worship, from families, and even from the hearts of those being formed. It also builds comically false expectations. As one catechist put it, “I am afraid that we have led parents to believe that it is possible to drop their child at the church for religious education, run to the dry cleaners, the bank, and the grocery store, then come back an hour later and pick up a Catholic!” Bishop Cupich’s account of parish efforts to expand and nurture responsibility for handing on the faith, both within and between generations, gives its reason to hope that things are changing.

There is in both books a kind of consensus view about what religious believers are up against and what they should do about it. On this view, the “cultural catechumenate” of late liberal capitalism has commodified religion, making it, in William Dinges’s words, “a toolkit of sacred wares for selectively constructing a personal spiritual identity.” Identifying who you are, spiritually or otherwise, is for Paul Griffiths a matter of “branding.” Appeals to “self-discovery” or “self-invention” promise us complete freedom to fashion and refashion ourselves among like-minded people. But such appeals also make it difficult to explain to young people that there is such a thing as “a community of truth” – and that this sort of community is different from communities of taste. From this perspective, the I’m spiritual but not religious mentality betrays an anti-institutional individualism bordering on narcissism. Christian Smith argues that an “internal secularization” has also taken place within religious traditions and institutions. According to Smith, “moralistic” therapeutic deism”—a system of belief in which God functions as a problem solver who wants us all to be civil and happy and to feel good about ourselves—increasingly shapes the lives of American teenagers as it infects, “colonizes, feeds upon, and decomposes” its traditional religious ” hosts.”

The second part of the consensus view endorses “countercultural” activities that communicate a particular way of life rooted in ancient traditions of religious practice. Catholics who hold this view insist that members of the church should become more familiar with the distinctive language of Christian faith, a language that gives one access to an alternative culture. Those who learn to speak this language discover that the world finds, its full intelligibility in the light of Jesus Christ. And the importance of this language also reminds us of the narrative character of Christian witness: its sacred scripture is the story of salvation, embodied in worship, and modeled in the lives of the saints. In his excellent Afterword to Handing on the Faith, John Cavadini writes that “handing on the faith means first and foremost handing on the practice of the faith in its sacramental and liturgical dimensions and in the virtues that they form.”

This position is now very common in both academic circles and journals of opinion. It is the position of those who criticize political liberalism, individualism, and mass consumerism for promoting a false universality, for alienating people from their historical and social contexts, and leaving them alone with their “free choices,” vulnerable to collective powers that manipulate their desires and self-understanding. There follows from this critique a call for a robust commitment to the kind of community that seeks the good and the true within moral and religious traditions. And from this call to tradition there follow certain defensive strategies, ways of explaining how being “countercultural” does not make one all uncritical sectarian.

There is a story about a group of old friends who become so familiar with each other’s jokes that they need only designate them by number. “Four,” someone says, and the others erupt in laughter. One day a newcomer witnessing the hilarity is surprised when someone says “twenty-seven” and is met with dead silence. “What happened?” he asks, and someone answers: “He didn’t tell it right.” What makes Handing on the Faith and Passing on the Faith valuable is the way a group of writers committed to this consensus view seek to tell their familiar story right-right in nuance and refinement and detail. We of an older generation who are interested in transmitting our faith to the young (and who find ourselves asking, “How can we possibly meet them ‘where they are’ when they are…there? And where, after all, are we?”) would do well to imitate the careful zeal of these writers.

But while Griffiths is right to highlight the influence of secular culture’s “deforming pedagogy,” Cavadini is also right to insist that such a critique must not fall prey to “pride and its derivatives-trimphalism, clericalism, smugness-all of which threaten to destroy the good” that root, the critique. “This requires genuine humility before the goodness we find in the world, even if…that goodness is flawed.” Christopher and Deborah Ruddy (in Handing on the Faith) and Brother John of Taizé (in Passing on the Faith) reflect on how the work of Christian communities involves acts of discrimination that will confront dis-ordered desire while at the same time helping to awaken our deepest longings.

Christians should concede that their own command of the language of faith is hardly perfect. Luke Timothy Johnson reminds us that “taking the creed seriously” may “prove to be a scandal first of all to Christians.” Formation through immersion in traditional practices and understandings leads to a situated faith, but never a settled faith. Nor does such an immersion preclude openness to the wisdom of other religious traditions, and Peter Phan’s stimulating essay in Passing on the Faith presents one case for a “dual religious belonging” that is compatible with-and, indeed, deepens-a “robust Christian identity.” Phan is aware of the danger of syncretism–of toolkit religions in which “spirituality,” uprooted from practiced communal belonging, becomes a matter of taste.

Even the success stories in Passing on the Faith sometimes raise a similar set of concerns. “Congregations that get it,” claims one contributor, attract young adults who want to “feel valued” and enjoy “being moved,” who value “choice,” “connection,” and a “sense of ownership.” But the same Jewish, Christian, and Muslim congregations are evidently also alter what Diane Winston calls organized religion’s “gold standard,” a traditionally authentic, hospitable, and animating life of learning, worship, service, and prayer. Again, handing on faith today demands that discriminations be made, discriminations that rightly value personal appropriation of, and accountability to, the truth, but also reject the trappings of a consumer-style subjectivism. A living language of faith must communicate the distinction between the personal and the merely private.

Thiel, professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, offers a theological alternative to traditional theodicies indebted to philosophical analysis. But, make no mistake: This is a tightly reasoned treatise. Thiel believes that traditional theories have failed to acknowledge the genuine innocence of victims. He wants a position that avoids the “Scylla of a guilty God,” viewed as the cause or source of innocent suffering, or the “Charybdis of denying the common human experience of innocent suffering” (p.55). In this regards, he is particularly critical of Augustine’s supposition that no one suffers innocently since all are born into sin. Also, he criticizes the pot-modern tendency to affirm that God, while involved with the well-beings of the whole cosmos, is not providentially involved. Hence, he is critical of the perspective that sees death as a penalty as well as the “providential” explanation that seeks to align divine love with justice with the affirmation that in death “God call someone to heaven.” For Thiel, God is ever at odds with death (p.86).

Thiel wants his perspective on evil to be guided by three commitments. First, he affirms the traditional view of eternity and the absoluteness of the divine perfections. Second, he notes that the injustice of innocent suffering is an undeniable and tragic moral fact of life. It is not to be denied by transforming it into a meaningful vehicle of moral development, or by removing innocent suffering from the scope of divine providence. Third, he rejects the view that God is the cause of suffering either by permitting the evil victimization of some or by willing suffering through natural means. God neither permits, nor wills, nor causes any kind of suffering or death at all (p.59).

For Thiel, God’s presence in the universe testifies to the guilt of those perpetrate evil and offer solidarity with victims (p.131). Evil exists, in part, not only because of the deeds of perpetrators but also because God is self-restrictive in this world. Thiel affirms that God lets the otherness of creation with respect to God be taken seriously. Evil disrupts the goodness of this freedom. Thiel appeals to Luther’s notion of promise in order to affirm God’s solidarity with suffering.

Thiel’s is a fresh, crisp, thoughtful approach to a longstanding issue. It is to be welcomed by theologians, pastors, and church leaders.

On the basis of experience, Thiel argues, one sees that there are forms of suffering, which are totally undeserved. Classical philosophical and theological efforts to reconcile divine goodness with human misfortune have been either legal (all are guilty and thus deserving of punishment) or providential (suffering serves a divine purpose). A process view resolves the tension between divine goodness and human suffering by deconstructing the notion of omnipotence. But if one takes seriously the Bible’s conviction that God never wills death or any of the evils that kill the human spirit, then one is in a position to appreciate the category of “innocent suffering” and God’s relation to it. Death is not what God wants for humanity; the resurrection of Jesus is the primary scriptural evidence of this fact. Because it has been linked so closely with human reproduction, Thiel shows why it is important to reconceptualize original sin in social and historical categories, although the correlative christology he offers could stand more development. The book would draw serious undergraduates into a splendid thought experiment, introducing them to major thinkers (Augustine, Anselm, Leibniz, Hick) and inviting them to wrestle with the dualism that lurks, perhaps unavoidably, in many Christian minds.

John Thiel argues a challenging and complex thesis, or theses, on a crux interpretans for any theology: innocent suffering. Stated negatively, Thiel argues “that God neither permits, nor wills, nor causes any kind of suffering or death at all” (p.59) — and this requires him to deny a number of features of traditional, modern and postmodern understandings of God, evil and innocent suffering. Stated positively, the eternal God of prevenient love creates a world that has both guilty and innocent suffering a world in which God moves in the solidarity of the Innocent Sufferer, calling disciples to be authentic witnesses to both guilty and innocent suffering. The book’s prose is clear — accessible, at least in large part, to the undergraduates and lay readers for whom Thiel writes. But his argument is very complex; it will be (as Thiel hopes) of interest to theologians and even the philosophers of religion of whom he is critical (p. x).

Chapters one and two focus on but are not restricted to his negative thesis. This “majority tradition” includes the tradition of Paul and Augustine, modern “best of all possible worlds” theodicies from Leibniz to Swinburne and process theologies, and “revisionists” who affirm that God creates the world but does not act in specific ways in the world. Thiel argues that this position does not take account of disproportionate suffering, when the punishment does not fit the crime, from the death or murder of children to the Shoah and modern genocides.

It is not clear to me why Paul cannot he read in the light of the broader biblical narrative so clearly affirmed by Thiel (see below) rather than the way Thiel has read him. But Thiel’s negative thesis ultimately has to be judged in relation to the positive thesis articulated in chapters three through five. In chapter three, God is a living God and therefore a God of the living. Thiel sketches what he modestly calls “a rather traditional theological portrait” in which God is a God of prevenient grace, and his omnipotence eternal and absolutely perfect (p.78). Thiel proposes as his model Aulen’s Christus Victor, where (appropriately demythologized) God is engaged in dramatic “ongoing battle with death for the liberation of humanity” (p.91) in contrast to Anselmian or Abelardian models.

If not God, then who or what causes death and other evils? Thiel admits that he “risks dualism” by leaving evil unexplained. But this is not a Gnostic or Manichaean dualism but “productive theological ignorance” (pp.98-99) — ignorance over the origin of evil and “why God’s promise to destroy death has not been completely fulfilled in the present” (pp.98, 173). Thiel is wise indeed to build ignorance into the framework of our thinking about innocent suffering. This is not ignorance about what evil is — Thiel agrees with the traditional Augustinian description of evil as “a privation, the absence of being and so the absence of the good that everything created possesses” (p.97). And this is not an ignorance of where innocent suffering is going God will eventually emerge victorious over it. It is an ignorance over where such suffering cones from, and why God does not complete that victory now. How much ignorance over these questions is productive? The last two chapters can he read as an answer to this question.

Does Thiel’s affirmation of our abiding ignorance over the origins of innocent suffering deny original sin, particularly as canonized at the Councils of Orange and Trent (p.115)? Thiel affirms “a functionalist understanding” of the “tragic precedence of sin” (p.121) in which we find God is not the cause of death in any way and death is therefore not divine retribution (p. 124). Remove the traditional doctrine of original sin from its ties to what Thiel had called the “legal explanation” of evil as punishment for sin and we can affirm “innocent suffering in the midst of guilty suffering” (p.120). Although I would press the question of the ontological origin of the privatio boni further than Thiel, his agnosticism on this score enables him to say powerful things throughout the book about innocent sufferers, including our need for solidarity with them. The relationship between his non-functionalist account of the God of prevenient grace (chapter three) and his functionalist account of sin and evil (chapter four) becomes clear in his account of Jesus, the Innocent Sufferer (chapter five). Jesus’ powerlessness in crucifixion and death does not undo his innocence, and his Resurrection is God’s promise “to do for humanity what God has already done for Jesus” (p.146). Thiel argues that Anselmian understandings of Jesus’ death — where “Jesus willingly exchanges his uncompromised innocence for humanity’s uncompromised guilt, taking onto himself an undeserved death that is humanity’s lot” (p.153) — reinforce difficulties he has with the traditional teaching. On the other hand, he argues that a directly Chalcedonian understanding of Jesus emphasizing Jesus’ full humanity and divinity means that “humanity too possesses the quality of innocence that is its existential condition for Jesus’ innocent suffering” (pp.157-158). We should think of “Jesus’ saving work not as sacrifice but as solidarity in the Incarnation with the innocent suffering of humanity” (p.159). Here Thiel sides with what Catholics might call a more Rahnerian soteriology of solidarity rather than a Balthasarian soteriology of substitution. He does not think that Jesus solidarity with our innocent suffering eclipses the differences between each. That is, his desire to avoid monophysitism does not lead him to the Nestorianism of which “monophysites” often charge western Chalcedonians. But Thiel will need to say more about the relationship between Jesus innocence as God and as human to persuade substitutionary soteriologists. I think it is only by going through the latter that one can address the question of the incompleteness of God’s victory that is so crucial for Thiel’s case.

Thiel’s main achievement is to have located innocent suffering in relationship to faith’s thinking about God and evil and Jesus Christ, in contrast to those who seek to understand it within the limits of reason alone My question is whether the two theses with which I began are Consistent whether a God out to liberate us from evil (actual and original sin and suffering, guilty and innocent) can do so without in some sense permitting (albeit not doing) evil for the sake of the greater good of the communion of saints.