God Among Us: The Gospel Proclaimed [Hardcover]

Edward Schillebeeckx (Author), J.S. Bowden (Translator)

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Text: English, Dutch (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 278 pages
• Publisher: Crossroad Publishing Co ,U.S. (November 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824505751
• ISBN-13: 978-0824505752
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,034,592 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SERMONS FROM THIS ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC AND PROFESSORIAL DOMINICAN THEOLOGIAN, October 9, 2007

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This review is from: God Among Us: The Gospel Proclaimed (Hardcover)

God Among Us: The Gospel Proclaimed by the Reverend Father Edward Schillebeeckx, long recognized internationally and often as one of the three greatest Catholic theologians of the Twentieth Century, first gathered in 1982 a spiritually profound selection of his sermons. It therefore reads much like Saint Bernard of Clervaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs, as published for instance in Bernard of Clairvaux: Essential Writings (The Crossroad Spiritual Legacy Series), as they preserve the in situ references to time, place and people present to hear his holy and edifying and learned words.

As so often amongst the Dominican teachers and preachers and friars, the lessons are divided into three parts. The first is entitled The Way to Freedom and includes meditations on various Gospel passages of the day, including from thje Gospel of Saint Mark: 1.1-8, 9.2-9, 2.18-22, etc. Most moving to this reader is his meditation on the Magnificat, that powerful, liberating and revolutionary evangelical passage, once chanted each evening for several centuries by religious communities standing and bowing and blessing in recognition of the strength and import of this prayer of Mary. Several passasgfes from MAtthew and John and Luke are also given the profound and scholarly consideration of this great theologian speaking in a pastoral charism, more urgently to us now in our lost and wandering age. Read them and weep; read them and find comfort and certain pastoral guidance and compassion at long last.

The second section is entitled Confessing Jesus and examines several aspects of Our Lord's nature as we proclaim them at Mass through the Credo, including Credo in unum Deum, Creator of Heaven and Earth. The Reverend Father Schillebeeckx also examines Jesus as the Christ, the Only Beloved Son, Our Lord, King of the Universe (exclusively ptreated upon the Feast of Christ the King, who frees us from fear (as heard in his sermon on Easter). Father Edward also handles in this section the Resurrection of the Body, Eternal Life, the New Heaven and New Earth, and our belief in Jesus as Salvation for the Outcast.

The third section is entitled Spirituality and Life-Style and includes a meditation on Luke 6.17, 20-26 called The Gospel of the Poor for Prosperous People. Also in this section are ghathered sermons on Dominican Spirituality, on Saint Albert the Great, on Christian Obedience, on Psalm 137.4, etc., etc.

Truly this collection, impossible to summarize here, we are grateful and blessed to find still available to us, here so favorably upon the amazon, from whose waters we can draw strengthening words of eternal life. Let us read once more these words in their fullness and learn to read through them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Father Schillebeeckx is skilled not only as a respected theologian, but also, as Dominican professor, as a pastoral preacher edifying, inspiring and guiding us within the orthodox pilgrim path.

Let us consider a few atypical paragraphs, first from the sermon on the final long and loud cry of Jesus upon the cross as depicted in Mark 15.37 and the synoptic verse at Matthew 27.50 entitled God as a Loud Cry: "True reconciliation is only present in the praxis of a self-giving love which excludes no one and therefore has a positive preference for all those who are outcast, and is universal precisely by virtue of that, despite and even in the limitations of a particular finite situation. Thus from a very limited and dertermined point it takes the world off its hinges. Reconciliation and liberation are something more than a shift in power relationships; they are a new rule, only when they are meant to apply to everyone, albeit from a particular perspective of an historically incomplete situation. Reconciliation means identifying ourselves with what we are not, with people in a different position, with those other than ourselves; the others; those who are not ouselves; with the suffering and injustice experienced by others. Reconciliation is far from being an inner, climactic experience in which everything is already reconciled without the mediation or involvement of others (pp. 75-76)."

Father Schillebeeckx opened some twenty five years ago his sermon on Saint Luke's second chapter at verses 19 through 32, "You are the Light of the World," with this third challenging paragraph: "We theologians have not been able to bridge the gulf between theory and practice; on the contrary, it has become broader and deeper. We have paid little or no attention to the questions which believers constantly raise, or have made them too little ours; we see more clearly than ever how the zeal for both human liberation and contemplative tranquility is disappearing from our Christian brotherhood and is kindled outside our Christian churches, and we are not in a position to rekindle it again within them. To all appearances we are sorely or principally active in banishing one another from the church in ther name of Christ (pp. 85-86)."

Let us now more than ever take these warning words of Father Schillebeeckx to heart and into praxis, let us seek true reconciliation with one another, and enkindle within our repaired house the flame of contemplation and of human liberation. Let us be Church once more.

Read this book as lectio divina, as prayer, as kindly and pastoral guide, avaiable here still a quarter century later upon this mighty amazon, at such a favorable price we cannot afford not to read it carefully once more in prayer each day and hear what the Lord is telling us even now. Take one chapter a week to read, along with the Scriptural texts, and grow strong one with another once more, in peace and in reconciliation, in agape and in God's own Liberating Love.