To the Editor, The Tablet
The article in your 7 November issue by Stanley Hauerwas, Age of Discovery in a Time Between Times, left me baffled and frustrated. I want to know why I, a reasonably intelligent, literate and well-educated person, could not understand most of what he was saying. It may be in part because of some of the terminology used, which I ought to know but don't - eschatalogical tension, Christological, incarnationalist, ecclesial, apostilicity- but there are whole paragraphs of plain words (but not always plain syntax) that left me bewildered.
You know how you read a sentence, don't quite understand it, so you go on to the next hoping it will shed light on the previous one. And it doesn't. I could quote paragraphs that were like this. What, for example, does the writer mean by “the tension between Creation and redemption, nature and grace, revelation and reason.....the Church [must] hold in tension claims which may be true but are antithetical.” Reading on does not make it any clearer for me.
I read the Tablet for enlightenment, and it rarely disappoints. But articles like this one are just not helpful, except maybe to a trained theologian.
Even the following only yields its meaning with difficulty:
“[For Lindbeck,] the Church does not have a mission - rather, the Church is Church when she is mission. This cannot help but sound very Jewish. Like Israel, it is by the character of her communal life that the Church will witness to the Gospel and serve the world. This does not mean that the Church is the Church primarily in what the Church does to serve the needs of humanity. The Church's first task is to build up the brothers and sisters in faith, not to be everywhere the agent of liberation.”
Jake Allsop, Haddenham, Cambridgeshire
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