Paths in Spirituality, 2nd ed. - book reviews

Commonweal, June 3, 1994 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

By John Macquarrie, Morehouse, $10.95, 168 pp.

As readers of these notes should know, I have a soft spot for reference books. Pye's is a one-volume dictionary of terms from the various religions of the world. Anyone contemplating such a lexicon recognizes immediately that the editors need to be ruthlessly selective in what to omit and equally rigorous in holding writers to word limits. This dictionary omits proper names, but is not evenhanded on personal titles. For instance, Pye gives us a definition of "Buddha" (which is a title) but not "Christ" (which is also a title). Likewise, there is an attempt to provide entries that cut across religious traditions (e.g., "mysticism" and "myth") but in an uneven fashion (there is no entry on "monasticism" or "asceticism"--terms amenable to transreligious treatment). In a few places, brevity does not enhance understanding. The entry "dying-and-rising-god" describes vegetative gods whose death/rising mirrored the seasonal cycles. The entry then ends on this enigmatic note: "In no case is this proven." What the "this" refers to defeats me.

One could go on and on. This is an adequate dictionary and the entries refer to a bibliography at the end where more information might be gleaned. On a scale from one to ten, ten being the top, I would judge this dictionary to be about a seven.

The study of spirituality is part of any serious theological curriculum. What has been needed, especially for those who use classic texts from the spiritual tradition, is a brief history of the Christian spiritual tradition in order to orient students and contextualize their reading. For that reason I welcomed Holt's little book as one that I might put in the hands of my students as background reading. It is not a perfect text, but it is quite "user friendly." Each chapter ending has a modest list of further readings, as well as some practical hints on how to put into practice what one has learned.

Holt takes a straightforward historical approach, even though it is clear that spirituality is not simply history. In very brief chapters he moves from the world of the Bible through the patristic, medieval, Reformation, modern, and contemporary periods, with an eye on the varieties of Christian traditions, Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, and Evangelical. In a panorama this broad it would be natural enough if some elements of the tradition get skewed and some judgments could be questioned: The Jesuits are not monastics, Trappists do not have a "vow" of silence, etc. Some readers might also want to "correct" his rather linear approach to the history of spirituality by reading Philip Sheldrake's estimable Spirituality and History (Crossroad, 1992) which was not available to Holt as he wrote.

These minor irritants, however, should not detract from the value of the book. In an easy and readable fashion, it provides a quick survey of the history of spirituality. I may pay it the compliment of requiring it for background reading for my course on spirituality. It is, however, a book for the beginner; a more thorough historical survey is as yet a desideratum.

Macquarrie, now emeritus from Oxford University, is a profoundly satisfying theologian. This little bookon spirituality, first published in 1972, has recently been reissued with some additional essays. The text still smacks of the 1 970s with its references to "religionless Christianity," but is well worth reading. Macquarrie is an extremely accomplished theologian, a true person of the church, and unafraid of swimming against the tide. He sees the Christian life as founded on three pillars: doctrine, worship, and deed. Keeping those three in some kind of healthy tension is absolutely necessary if one is not to fly off into spiritual quagmires: deeds without worship end up as pious social work while worship without grounding in doctrine runs the risk of sentimentality.

At the heart of Christian spirituality (Macquarrie is in reaction against those who too exclusively root themselves in the Word) is the Eucharist, and Macquarrie has some fine words not only on the liturgy but also in defense of such "extensions" of the liturgy as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. His chapter on prayer is one of the finest in the book. For Macquarrie, prayer is a kind of "thinking"--a thinking which is passionate, compassionate, responsible, and thankful. The working out of those motifs is worth the price of the book.

At a time when there is so much psychobabble and Jungian sludge passing for spirituality it is comforting to see a genuine theologian turning his attention to the nexus between doctrine and praxis. Some of this book shows its age as well as its preoccupation with the life of Anglicanism (although Macquarrie is an authentically ecumenical thinker) but it contains much wisdom and well repays a close reading.

Given the mountains of books published on the New Testament, the person who merely wishes to "keep up" or even frame some coherent answer to the biblical question "Who do they say the Son of Man is?" might find Cook's little catechetical work helpful. Cook is a theologian with at least one foot in pastoral ministry. He has a sense of what people ask about Jesus and the New Testament. Did those miracles happen? Why did Christ die on the cross? I Jesus meaningful for the big world we live in today? Without patronizing, Cook answers these and similar questions by re-presenting the best of biblical scholarship combined with a genuine sensitivity to the pastoral needs and concerns of people.