In Stop Blaming Adam and Eve,
John
Foley unveils the truth buried in Biblical myth. In so doing, he rescues Christianity from
fundamentalism and destroys the false choice between Darwin (science) and Jesus
(religion). And though he accepts the
former, he is absolutely in love with the latter.
And wants us all to be as well.
Foley is no itinerant
preacher. A Jesuit high school and college religion teacher and
philosophy professor (full disclosure – I was one of his high school students
forty-five years ago), he’s what the McCourt bothers, Frank and Malachy, would have
become had the Jesuits and Vatican II gotten
hold of them rather than the dysfunction that was mid-century Catholicism in Ireland. There’s a lot of humanity
in Angela’s Ashes. But the endless
tragedies that plagued the clan Mc Court make it hard to see the pony of God’s
gift in what was otherwise the manure of endless poverty, alcoholism, early
death and churchly neglect in Frank McCourt's Limerick.
God’s gift of humanity, however, is
Foley’s central point.
His other is that it doesn’t come
gift-wrapped.
You have to look . . .
And care-fully, which is Foley’s take on that ancient Socratic maxim -- the unexamined life is not worth living.
The examination, we discover in this "religion" book, should not
be restricted to the Bible. Foley was a student of Hannah Arendt’s at NYC’s New School for Social Research before
quitting a business career (much to the chagrin of his extended family, but with the full -- albeit singular -- support
of his wife, who quite clearly is Foley’s most important muse) in favor of what
became a decades long mission in teaching high school and college students at two
Jesuit institutions, Xavier High School in NYC and St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, NJ. So, as is made plain in well-constructed
asides sprinkled throughout the book, part of the reason we need not blame Adam
and Eve is that we can call upon a host of thinkers – Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Husserl, Nietzsche, Sartre – along with those theologians who left us the
Bible’s myths and histories pregnant with truth, in an effort to chart our own personal relationship
with God.
And that is Foley’ central point. The human challenge of Christianity in
general and Catholicism is particular is to create that personal relationship.
For Foley, the watchword of the
relationship is love, essentially because that is what God is and that is what
we can become. It is the glue that makes Kantian morality possible, the reward one gets for that examined Socratic life, and cures existential despair.
Wow!
Wow!
Sign me up.
If only it were that easy . . .
Because Foley's other point is that all of this is possible only if we try hard.
Which means that, at the end of the
day, this short but dense book (it took me weeks to get through because I
had to keep going back to re-read portions) is as much a work out manual as it
is an exegesis on Biblical truth.
We are
instructed in the need to recognize our own Garden of Eden (and to
admit that we too have often squandered the inheritance; hence, stop blaming the
original sinners); the ability and need to see the God of love in everyday life
(especially in those parts of our everyday life where we confront suffering;
hence, don’t blow by the homeless on the street and don’t assume, as Foley puts it, that you have to “discover Narnia or climb Mount Everest” to find God; He or She is everywhere); the redemptive power of love (without which, Foley makes quite clear, his own life would
have been a mere chimera of the rich middle class (that is not an oxymoron),
Brooklyn and neighborhood based , family, extended family and friends it has become); our duties as citizens (because we are social, politics is not
optional, and none of us can claim to be neutral even as all of us are required
to be thoughtful); and the meaning of Biblical truths (those shepherds in
the New Testament’s infancy narratives were outcasts (dirty, smelly, unsanitary and -- generally speaking -- univited in polite society), not
some quaint boys who show up in the seasonal Christmas creche, and that is why they are featured in Luke's Gospel; those
prophets in the Old Testament were courageous -- and often ostracized -- truth
tellers, not wizened old men sililoquizing in the Bible’s version of a middle
eastern Athenian agora; they condemned injustice (Amos) and immorality (the Noah story), hypocrisy (Isaiah) and paralyzing despair).
You won’t
agree with everything Foley says. I didn’t. On politics, he appears captured a bit by the au courrant false equivalence that
blames liberals and conservatives equally for the sorry state of today’s polity;
my own view is that, while the America left has often been thoughtless in the past, the American right is thoughtless today. And on the Catholic Church he loves, he is uncharacteristically quiet on some of
the hot button issues (e.g., the all-male priesthood, gay marriage), even as he spares no church hierarchs (or anyone else who is culpable) on the abuse of children.
None of that, however, detracts from the
overall worth of this fine volume.
Because Foley, like the Jesus he
loves and worships, is a bit of “nudge.”
He makes you think.
About western philosophy, the Bible, its
authors, context, history and message . . .
But mostly about ourselves and how
to relate to that person . . .
We call God.
STOP BLAMING ADAM AND EVE
JOHN P. FOLEY
WEST BOW PRESS, 2018
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment