EXPLORING LOST DIMENSIONS IN CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM: OPENING TO THE MYSTICAL edited by LouiseNelstrop and Simon D.Podmore, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, pp. 242, £60.00, hbkCHRISTIAN MYSTICISM AND INCARNATIONAL THEOLOGY: BETWEEN TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE edited (original) (raw)

The first 40 pages of this book-'My journey in and with the Church'-outline the author's intellectual autobiography. The rest, with a hundred pages of endnotes, reads like the lecture course on the nature of the Church that Cardinal Kasper would have delivered but for being transplanted from academic life (in 1989, aged 56), to run the fourth largest diocese in Germany. In this sense, as he says, the book adds ecclesiology to the two earlier books on Christology (Jesus the Christ, first English edition, 1976) and Trinitarian doctrine (The God of Jesus Christ, 1984), respectively, thus completing the trilogy on God, Christ and the Church which a professor of Christian doctrine, at least in a German Catholic university, would aspire to write. Cardinal Kasper's career has been more colourful than the autobiographical account records. Famously, in 1993, with a couple of episcopal colleagues, he went public in favour of welcoming to holy communion divorced remarried Catholics, in some circumstances. Notwithstanding this dissent from received thinking, he was brought to Rome in 1999 by Pope John Paul II as Secretary to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Then, in 2000 he endorsed criticisms of Dominus Jesus, the document produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger's signature, which reaffirmed the view of the Church in communion with the Roman see as the only true Church: it was the negative style to which he objected, not the content (p. 29). In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI promoted him to be President of the Christian Unity Council. Despite these ecumenical duties, Kasper withdrew from accompanying the Pope to Britain in 2010 after being quoted in a German magazine as saying: 'When you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country'; and that the United Kingdom is marked by 'a new and aggressive atheism'. A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Britain insisted that his remarks were not the views of the Vatican or of the Church.Britain as a 'Third World country', his secretary explained, meant nothing more than 'a description of the many different people that live in Britain at the moment'. By 'aggressive atheism' he meant people like Richard Dawkins, some of whom had, after all, talked about making a 'citizen's arrest' of the Pope. According to his secretary again, the Cardinal decided not to come simply because gout made it difficult for him to walk. Cardinal Kasper had already taken a major part in interchurch relations in Britain, at the conference held at Ushaw in January 2006 when 'receptive ecumenism' was launched. We may note in this journal that, back in 1997, Walter Kasper wrote a foreword to Faces of the church: meditations on a mystery and its images, the fine collection on ecclesiological matters by our lamented brother Geoffrey Preston OP, especially relating to symbolism. The greater part of the book covers everything that would be expected in a course on ecclesiology. Copiously documented by references to biblical, patristic and conciliar sources, the simple thesis that runs through the book is that what the Creed affirms about the Church is set within what is said about the Holy