Book Review: Inspiration: Towards a Christian Interpretation of Biblical Inspiration

Abstract

of this book’s merits, even though the possible criticism that it represents a ‘retreat to commitment’ might also need to be met. In the final chapter, the author has thought-provoking things to say about time, whose importance, he intimates, has been neglected by some recent manifestations of allegedly ‘timeless’ Catholic dogmatism, which are briskly rejected as being themselves symptoms of ‘postmodern inertia’ even though they ‘make a show of resisting a so-called “culture of relativism”’ (p. 290). This thinly veiled broadside is presumably aimed at Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger and his fellow travellers. Whether the author’s suggested remedy of ‘discipleship’ as a way of overcoming the malaise of the age will fare any better than that of the hapless, ‘intellectualist’ (p. 301) metaphysicians he has in his sights, time will no doubt tell. And time, the author assures us, borrowing a gnomic utterance from Pope Francis, ‘is greater than space’ (p. 314). One major difficulty that could surely be raised in relation to Godzieba’s approach is whether his overarching notion that ‘God is love’ is perhaps being used in too undifferentiated, even naïve, a sense. The Jewish tradition, ominously for Christianity it might be argued, refused to move in this direction and to take the risk of defining God as ‘love,’ tout court. Perhaps now the very notion that ‘God is love’ should be handled as if it were a landmine or a time bomb, rather than a comfort blanket. In this context, it may be interesting to note that Nietzsche, in his final clash with Christianity, opposed not, say, Plato, but Dionysos to Christ at the end of Ecce Homo, his brilliant final review of his life and writings (‘Dionysos against the Crucified’). Given that Nietzsche had already sarcastically dismissed Christianity as mere ‘Platonism for the people,’ this may not be too unexpected an opposition. But his pitting of Dionysos, the Greek god of ecstasy and destruction, against the crucified Christ, suggests he saw the real challenge to Christianity not in philosophy at all (thus making any philosophical interpretation of Christianity ultimately irrelevant), but in an altogether different, more visceral realm—in a conflict between the vision of reality to be found in the Greek tragedians and that of the early Christian saints, as Hans Urs von Balthasar (who, significantly, is absent from this tome) once hinted. The God question, in short, may be a debate about the essence of humanity, where we are at least as big a problem as God.