Good Books in a Bad Year

Although many religious publishing houses have closed, consolidated or moved into secular publishing, religious books have had a quality year. Among the best:

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER by Eberhard Bethge. 867 pages. Harper & Row. $17.95.

Theologian, reluctant rebel, martyr of the German Confessing Church in its struggle against Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become something of a religious folk hero in recent years, credited variously with being both a religious Che Guevara and a founder of secular theology. Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's student, coconspirator, and literary executor, expands what is already known about Bonhoeffer, but also adds important new material.

Bonhoeffer's deep involvement in conspiracies against Hitler--in which Bethge also played a significant part --is here fully developed for the first time. So is Bonhoeffer's rather practical attitude toward rebellion: during a German celebration of the fall of France in 1940, Bonhoeffer gave a Nazi salute in a cafe and urged Bethge to his feet as well: "Raise your arm! Are you crazy? We shall have to run risks now, but not for that salute!" Bethge describes Bonhoeffer's vivid disappointment after a visit to Sweden in 1942, where he asked Anglican Bishop G.K.A. Bell for Allied assurances that could have encouraged an early coup d'etat in Germany. But the British, committed to Germany's unconditional surrender, refused to offer any such assurances.

Discussing Bonhoeffer's theology, Bethge argues convincingly that the "nonreligious" world Bonhoeffer envisioned in his Letters and Papers from Prison was by no means a world without Christ. In fact, says Bethge, it was Bonhoeffer's deep Christology that enabled him to foresee a world "come of age" in which faith could exist without the traditional piety of the churches.

LUTHER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES by Richard Friedenthal. 566 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $9.50.

After four centuries of intensive study, little new can be added about Martin Luther, so German Biographer Richard Friedenthal has wisely chosen another tack. He has placed Luther among the popes and emperors, the bankers and sellers of indulgences, the world of academic debate, and the devious world of church politics.

One learns, for example, how the German banking family of Fugger played a major role in handling the moneys of the indulgence traffic and thus in provoking Luther's confrontation with Rome. In fact, suggests Friedenthal, "it would be as correct to speak of the age of Fugger as the age of Luther." There are other instructive asides: though Luther could more than hold his own in Latin debate, he could hardly add simple sums. In other respects, his wisdom was commonsense, not classic, the product of roadside conversations on his walking trips through Germany. At home, he deferred to his energetic wife Kathe, who not only managed to control 16 children (her own and relatives') but took in boarders.

Such detail gives Luther's life a depth and scope that other biographies have missed. Friedenthal does not hesitate to portray the egocentricities of the Grand Old Man that Luther became, but the candid approach makes Luther's own last written words all the more poignant. "We are beggars," wrote the Great Reformer, "and that is the truth."

SACRAMENTUM MUNDI: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGY, edited by Karl Rahner. Six volumes. Herder and Herder. $135.

No comprehensive survey of Roman Catholic theology has been issued since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, which came out in 1967, tried to incorporate many of the new interpretations of theology, and succeeded at least in suggesting the outlines. German Theologian Karl Rahner, himself one of the Vatican II experts, has edited (and partly written) an impressive new set of volumes filling in those outlines with rich and scholarly detail.

If this work still falls short of being totally comprehensive, it is because events and discussion are proceeding faster than the speediest compilers. The set, for instance, makes no mention of the small minority of Catholic theologians who question traditional teaching on abortion. The widespread disagreement within the church on the morality of contraception, however, is presented in detail. Among other new and pertinent interpretations are the discussion of original sin, the theology of holy orders, and the teachings on marriage. In places, the authors candidly dismiss outdated theology. "Attempts to deduce the notion of the family theologically from the Blessed Trinity," admits Jakob David, "must be regarded as a failure."

THE MEANING OF THE CITY by Jacques Ellul. 209 pages. William B. Eerdmans. $5.95.

Jacques Ellul is a French historian noted for his pessimistic view of man's works (The Technological Society) and a lay theologian who mirrors the deep Calvinism of his French Reformed Church. The Meaning of the City, probably the year's most important theological work, is more than a corrective to the kind of jaunty Christian optimism typified by Harvey Cox's The Secular City. Ellul asks whether a Christian can justify even being part of the inhuman modern metropolis. His answer: a rigorously qualified maybe.

As Ellul sees it, Old Testament authors wrote better than they knew when they pictured the haunted Cain hiding from God in the city, or when they portrayed the builders of the Tower of Babel as city men. Admitting that readers must first believe in the Bible before they can accept his analysis, Ellul charts an entire scriptural theology of the city, in which the city is a veritable blasphemy, a source of man's rebellion against God. The city cannot be saved by man's technology, warns Ellul, but only by Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, which ensures a heavenly Jerusalem.

Then why not abandon hope, surrender to the city, and trust in Christ's promised pardon? With stern Calvinistic orthodoxy, Ellul replies that those who do so immediately mark themselves among the unpardoned. For the Christian he suggests a subtler course: work with and in the city, but stay apart from it spiritually, disarming its lures to power and pride with the humor of an "active pessimism." But there may come a time, Ellul cautions, when life in the city "is no longer possible for the Christian." What then? Flee.

THE MAN IN THE SYCAMORE TREE: THE GOOD TIMES AND HARD LIFE OF THOMAS MERTON by Edward Rice. 144 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

The Seven Storey Mountain, the best-selling 1948 autobiography that made a young Trappist monk named Thomas Merton a worldwide sensation, dealt with only part of a life that ended suddenly when Merton, studying Buddhism in Asia, was accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok in 1968. Edward Rice's ingenuous, openhearted memoir rounds out the 33 Mountain years and gives substantial shape to Merton's later years. As biography, the book is frankly worshipful.

Rice was Merton's boon companion at Columbia University, his godfather for baptism in the Catholic Church, and a lifelong friend. It is nonetheless a fuller, richer portrait of Merton than any available, partly because Trappist censors seriously bowdlerized Merton's own books. The handsomely designed work is full of Rice's kaleidoscopic recollections; tantalizing snatches of Merton's books, letters and poetry, both published and unpublished; pages of photographs; even a few breezy, Picasso-like nudes drawn by Merton shortly before he entered the monastery. Merton the Columbia undergraduate emerges as an accomplished rapscallion, occasionally wicked enough to make his later repentance believable. Not only did he have "an active sex life," but Rice even implies that a prewar romance during Merton's Cambridge days in England produced a child (who died, with its mother, in the London blitz). Rice stimulates curiosity with his fast-cut, almost cinematic images of his subject's wide-ranging mind: Merton's opposition to World War II because "if we fight Hitler, we will become like him, too"; his prescient 1963 analysis of the bitterness of black revolt; his final turning toward Buddhism as a "way" that could complement Christianity; his incongruous moments, as when he took the time to see What's New, Pussycat? and thought it very funny. Because Merton was a man of such fevers and contradictions, The Man in the Sycamore Tree cannot be so much an explanation of Merton as a hint of an explanation--but that is achievement enough.

sb Mayo Mohs

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