Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Prosper Grech, O.S.A. (1925-2019) cofounded the Patristic Institute Augustinianum and was a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. He authored several books, including An Outline of New Testament Spirituality and The Augustine Community and the Primitive Church.

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An Outline of New Testament Spirituality

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface..............................................................................viIntroduction.........................................................................vii1. Deliverance: From What? For Whom?.................................................12. Response to the Old Testament Covenant: An Inherited Piety........................133. Response to the Gift of the Kingdom: Jesus........................................294. Response to the Paschal Mystery: The Pauline Tradition............................795. Response to the Light: John.......................................................1036. Response to Christ's Presence in History: Acts and Revelation.....................125Conclusion...........................................................................139

Chapter One

We are all attached to life and well-being and continually menaced by various evils: sickness, violence, loss of liberty, disasters, sadness, and finally, death. Even our happiest moments are blurred by a lingering subconscious anxiety. This is our undeniable existential situation. Any answer to the questions posed in the title of this chapter assumes our anthropological, cosmological, and theological nature. That this is not the best of worlds in which humanity exists is obvious. But why is it so? What can be done to render existence more acceptable?

An agnostic would say that these are queries to which there is no answer, so let's just make the best of it for tomorrow we will die. Siddhartha Gautama, however, understood the problem of suffering as being the foundation of Buddhism, and would say that because all evils arise from desire, the extinction of all desires leads to beatitude, or nirvana. In spite of its difficulty, he would say this is entirely within our capabilities and requires no recourse to any transcendent being. Hinduism also takes the problem seriously and seeks a resolution in the meditation of the Self (atman) as identical with the Transcendent Self (Brahman). In China, both Confucianism and Taoism base their ethics on the reaction to the evils within society at large. Primitive animistic religions are so beset with the problem of evil that witch-doctors act as their priests; and second-century Gnosticism, with its Platonic worldview, identified matter created by a demigod as being the source of all evil.

If these questions occupy such an important place in world religions and philosophies and give rise to such a multitude of "spiritualities," then what answer does the Bible give to such problems as the nature of humankind, the goodness of the world, the why of suffering, and the way out?

Scripture defines the human being in relation to God. We read that each human is God's creature: "Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness....' So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth'" (Gen. 1:26-28). Adam's dominion over the earth and its creatures defines his being as an image and likeness of God himself: he can only subdue the earth if he shares in God's wisdom and in his freedom. He is neither part of God nor independent of him; like all other creatures he is brought into being from nothingness, which diminishes nothing of his dignity but prompts the psalmist to exclaim: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor" (Ps. 8:3-5). This is an anthropology based on faith in one God, the Creator, who made us in his own image and likeness to be able to enter into dialogue with him. Such a concept of the human being was not the fruit of philosophical reasoning or drawn from experience; in fact any consideration drawn from the ups and downs of daily living would hardly measure up to a quasi-divine being. Qohelet vividly describes the skepticism and cynicism into which we are all tempted to fall if we base our philosophy of life only on the contradictions of our ordinary contingencies.

The Bible is very realistic about our existential situation. The book of Job asks how to reconcile God's justice with the suffering of the righteous and ends by declaring our inability to penetrate this mystery (Job 42:1-6) without offering any way out except Job's confession of his ignorance of God's transcendent designs. The historical books too, notwithstanding their insistence on the call of the patriarchs, Moses, and the election of Israel, underline the slavery in Egypt, the raids of foreign peoples in the book of Judges, the exiles and other evils that befell Israel and Judah. Psalms 90 and 103 sum up humans' plight in a few verses: "The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away" (90:10); "As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more" (103:15-16). Yet these existential ills of humanity are not recounted for their own sake, but only as a contrast to God's saving love; God is the ultimate redeemer.

The New Testament is no less aware of the sufferings of human beings. Jesus' healings and exorcisms, his mission to the poor, his pity on sinners, and the eschatological tone of his sayings express his concern regarding humanity's plight. He is the one who brings God's deliverance to humans.

There is no need to prolong the list of miseries; we are all well aware of them. They all pose the eternal problem of how we reconcile our faith in one good, just, merciful, and all-powerful God with suffering and death. The account of the creation in Genesis 1 ends with the apodictic statement: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (1:31). Does this make sense or must we presume that something has gone wrong in the course of history?

The biblical writer known as the Jahwist offers his answer in his narrative of the formation of Adam from the dust of the earth, made alive by God's breath, and his subsequent rebellion, constantly reiterated by his descendents until the hardening of heart touches rock bottom (Gen. 2–11). These narratives are "mythical" or "symbolical" in the sense that they never happened and yet happen continually. Yet though mythical and symbolical, the narratives are not therefore unhistorical, as alienation from God did have a historical beginning. Describing its origin by means of symbolical narratives enhances rather than diminishes the richness of theological significance. An exhaustive explanation of these chapters is outside the scope of this book, but we can try to decipher some of these symbols and translate them into comprehensible theological language.

In Genesis 2:4-6 the writer tells us that in the beginning, the earth was barren and treeless because there was no one to cultivate it. Man is created from the dust of this unfruitful earth, endowed with God's spirit of...