Pastor John Wright

I've spent much of my summer reading and teaching from Henri de Lubac. John Milbank calls his book, Surnaturel, one of the three most important texts in the twentieth century, along with Heidegger's Being and Time and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Yet unlike the high visibility of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the significance of de Lubac's work remains largely subterranean, especially to those outside the Roman Catholicism in which he lived and flourished -- though at times painfully. Moreover, whereas Wittgenstein and Heidegger's publications are all highly abstract and inaccessible except to those initiated into the mysteries of their text, de Lubac, able to write obscure and learned prose, also exercised a pastoral task in his writing. His volumes on Paradoxes of Faith are little clips, vignettes, that provide profound insight into the Christian tradition and the concrete Christian life to which we are called. On this Saturday night, I'd like to post a couple of quotations from his work, Paradoxes of Faith, originally written in 1945, but translated and published (and inexpensive) from Ignatius Press in 1987.

"Faith is surrender. The believer does not have to encumber himself with theories. Should he make use of them, nothing better. If he wants to reflect on his faith, theories are indispensable to him. He wants them sound and true. But he should keep himself from remaining attached to them as to the own good of his intellect. Faith must share the privilege of charity; it does not seek to lay hold of its object, to monopolize; it pours forth in it" (p. 18).

"Just as 'bourgeoise morality' is not the true Christian morality, and the intellectuality of a lot of so-called good thinkers is not intelligence, so a conformist 'orthology' cannot suffice for a true believer" (p. 20).

"Having charity, we have God in us. So the life of charity, the life of union with God, is no different from eternal life. Charity is a value in itself; that is to say that it will last forever. It is not something relative and incomplete; neither is it, therefore, something provisional" (p. 24).