Tough love

Commonweal, June 18, 2004 by William R. Eidle

I very much appreciated Donald Senior's response to Rabbi Irving Greenberg ("Blame the Gospels?" May 7). However, I was disturbed by Senior's dismissal of Greenberg's argument that "satisfaction theology" is at the heart of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and, by extension, the Gospels themselves. As a practicing Catholic whose early formation was in the pre-Vatican II church, I can attest that "satisfaction theology" was clearly at the center of what we were taught about Jesus' Passion and death. The nuns and priests told us that Jesus died so that our sins would be forgiven. Concomitantly, we were taught that ours was an unconditionally all-loving God. It was up to us to try to integrate these two seemingly disparate images of God. I suspect that most people, like me, were not very successful in doing so.

WILLIAM R. EIDLE

Poughkeepsie, N.Y.