A World Renewed. - Review - book review

National Review, March 20, 2000 by Michael Potemra

Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, by Richard John Neuhaus (Basic, 272 pp., $24)

Religion is a universal aspect of human life. So is suffering; and these two facts are intimately connected. The world's many faiths offer hope and consolation to a world that is obviously broken. Some of them do so by denying that suffering exists, in the true sense of existence; others portray it as somehow an aspect of a higher good.

At the center of the specifically Christian form of religion is a man who suffers. A possible key, then, to understanding Christianity is making sense of the suffering and death of Christ: Why is it so important-indeed, in most denominations, central-to that tradition? Richard John Neuhaus has set himself this ambitious task of explaining the inexplicable: a God who died, and yet continues to be worshiped, fervently, to this day. To Neuhaus, unusual turns of fate are nothing new. He was a Lutheran minister, and became a Catholic priest. He was a leader of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, and is now one of America's most important neoconservative intellectuals. Through his magazine, First Things, and his celebrated book, The Naked Public Square, he attracted respect as a political thinker; with this new book he addresses issues of the soul.

Neuhaus's contribution takes the form of a meditation on the seven last phrases spoken by Christ on the Cross-the famous "Seven Last Words" that have been such an important part of Catholic theology, and also of the history of Western music. Neuhaus begins with the insight that while theodicy-the attempt to justify God's ways to man-has been a staple of religious literature throughout history, it is not the most promising avenue for the investigation of the significance of the suffering and death of Jesus. What is needed, rather, is a "homodicy": an understanding of how man's ways can be, or have been, justified to God. Human beings cause suffering to each other, and "the truth," writes Neuhaus, "is that we are incapable of setting this right. . . . The more we try to set things right, the more we compound our guilt."

It has been said that original sin is the only religious dogma that is confirmed, every day, by empirical observation. This is an overstatement-it asks of empiricism an unrealistic ability to discern causes-but it is more true than false. When at least one of us (I speak only of myself) sees a wrong, his first impulse, his "default mode," is to commit another wrong. Only when-and if-other emotional and rational factors intervene, does he respond with actions that tend to repair the harm instead of aggravating it. As an astute observer has noted, if you expand the stage from an apartment to a planet, it becomes clear that the world, in its default mode, is Rwanda.

One of the best artistic presentations of this concept is Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film masterpiece, The Conversation. A wiretapper starts to believe, based on his own interpretation of his tapes, that his work is furthering a businessman's plot to murder his wife and her lover. He spends the most emotionally wrenching parts of the film working up the courage to intervene-only to discover, once he has done so, that the plot was the exact reverse: It was the wife and lover who were conspiring to kill the businessman, a crime to which he has now become an unwitting accomplice.

Even men of good will, then, find themselves implicated in the world's brokenness. If man's ways are to be justified-made just, made right-it is God, says Neuhaus, who will have to repair the breach. Thus Christianity's insistence on the Incarnation of God, the intimate union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus.

Neuhaus presents the suffering and death of Jesus as the axis of the world, because only in that event do we see a fundamental reversal of the world's values. One tendency in religion, perhaps best represented by non-dualist Hinduism, asserts that the world's values, the suffering they cause, and indeed the world itself, are all illusory. The path to peace, in this view, is to commune with the genuine ground of being that is beyond the suffering of experience. This tendency, Neuhaus notes, is present within Christianity itself; but he contends-supported by tradition-that it does not do justice to the historical facts about Jesus. Jesus could have been a successful guru converting millions with a sophisticated PR campaign. He chose instead to be jeered at by yokels as he died "out on the killing fields by the Jerusalem city dump."

Why? To show mankind that this world, too, has meaning. He could presumably have "cured" the world by remote control. But humanity, he is telling us, is more important than that. The human race-indeed, the entire created order-is intended for joy, its own and that of its Creator, but it is more than a mere plaything for the Divine. It has its own dignity, a gift from the Father in whose image it was created; now it will have hope, a gift from that Father's Son. But hope, says Neuhaus, "is not finally hopeful unless it has taken into account everything that contradicts hope." That means taking the world seriously, to the point of death.