Word: jesuitic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most Christian theologians readily agree that eschatology-the doctrine of death and the afterlife-owes more to superstition than to supernatural wisdom. "The traditional views of heaven and hell are about 95% mythology," says Notre Dame's Jesuit Biblical Scholar John McKenzie. Except among some fundamentalists, the concept of a three-tier universe with heaven above, hell below and mankind in the middle struggling for divine judgment is recognized as a complete distortion of God's cryptic revelation on eternity...
Rejecting Dualism. Moreover, theologians concede that modern skepticism about eternity is fully justified. Says the University of San Francisco's Jesuit Philosopher Francis J. Marien: "An afterlife that is viewed as an opiate, a kind of workmen's compensation for an ugly and painful existence, is bound to be unattractive." Stanford University's Protestant Dean of the Chapel B. Davie Napier believes that God and man are cheapened by the idea that good behavior can buy "a good berth in the afterlife." As for hell, Napier shares the growing consensus that perdition cannot be permanent. To condemn...
...terrestrial messianism interested only in building up the city of man? That surely is not all there is to religion." Declares Stanford's Robert McAfee Brown: "If God is a God of love, if he is ultimate, that which he loves and sustains he will not simply discard." Jesuit Sociologist-Theologian Paul Hilsdale of California's Loyola University believes that the afterlife, whatever its form, must somehow preserve individual awareness. "Since I conceive of myself as a consciousness which is open to others in love," says Hilsdale, "I feel fairly certain that I will be able to think...
Visiting faculty members often tell him that their summer school course was "the best class I ever taught." Regular Harvard faculty members are occasionally more skeptical--"any teacher who looks out and sees a class with a high school junior and a Jesuit Father won't know quite what he's talking to," Crooks comments. But Harvard Faculty members too are often pleasantly surprised. One Harvard professor, who taught a popular summer school course with about two-thirds non-Harvard enrollment, recalled that "I was prepared for a disappointment, but it turned out to be some of the most rewarding...
...there are still plenty of priests and ministers who see as still valid the traditional rationales for exemption: the clergy performs a vital function for society, and those who are dedicated to preaching God's peace should not have their hands stained with the blood of human war. Jesuit Biblical Scholar John McKenzie argues that mustering ministers "would destroy the symbolic value that the clergyman ought to have. He is to represent in this world that man whose mission was to die for others and not to kill them." Even so, there appears to be a growing consensus among...