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

National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1998 by William C. Graham

A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity is a collection of essays by Fr. Johann Baptist Metz, edited, translated and introduced by J. Matthew Ashley.

Metz, a German priest who teaches at the University of Vienna, notes that he was 16 years old toward the end of the Second World War and was taken out of school and forced into the army. He arrived at the front with over 100 in his company, crossed the Rhine, was sent to deliver a message and returned to find his entire company dead. This experience, the memoria passionis, the remembrance of the suffering of others as a basic category of Christian discourse, prompts a question that, for him, is never silenced or taken care of by the Christian message of redemption.

Metz asks if there is too much singing and not enough crying out in our Christianity, too much jubilation and too little mourning, too much comfort and too little hunger for consolation. He asserts that whoever bears the message of the resurrection in such a way that in it the cry of the crucified has become inaudible, hears not the gospel but a myth of the victors.

After the 1984 death of his teacher, Karl Rahner, Metz wrote that Rahner never interpreted Christianity as the happy conscience of an advanced bourgeois condition that has been purged of every endangered hope, every vulnerable and stubborn longing. But there remained in Rahner, he continued, a longing, never sentimental, like "a hushed sigh of the creature, like a wordless cry for light before the face of God shrouded in darkness." Clearly true for Rahner's student as well.

Many thanks to Notre Dame's Ashley for making these essays available to English readers.

Fr. William Graham writes from New York City. He is associate professor of religious studies and director of the Caldwell Pastoral Ministry Institute at Caldwell College in New Jersey.