A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity

by Johann Baptist Metz, J. Matthew Ashley (Editor), Matthew Ashley (Translator)

Johann Baptist Metz, founder of political theology in Europe, is one of the most significant Roman Catholic theologians working since the Second Vatican Council. In A Passion for God, J. Matthew Ashley edits and translates the most important of Metz's recent essays previously unavailable in English. This compelling and diverse collection reflects on such issues as the crucial place of memory in Christian faith and in society as a whole, the role of religious in the Church, the meaning of the mystical virtue of poverty of spirit and the relationship between Christianity and politics in modernity. A Passion for God includes an introduction by Ashley that surveys Metz's career in the context of postconciliar Catholic theology and offers the reader helpful advice for understanding Metz's work. Those interested in the various aspects of North American liberation as well as political or public theology will find this book to be an invaluable resource. †

Genres: Theology, Philosophy

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Johann Baptist Metz is a Catholic theologian. He is Ordinary Professor of Fundamental Theology, Emeritus, at Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, Germany.

A student of Karl Rahner, he broke with Rahner's transcendental theology in a turn to a theology rooted in praxis. Metz is at the center of a school of political theology that strongly influenced Liberation Theology. He is one of the most influential post-Vatican II German theologians. His thought turns around fundamental attention to the suffering of others. The key categories of his theology are memory, solidarity, and narrative. Works in English include: The Emergent Church, Faith in History and Society, Poverty of Spirit, and Hope Against Hope. Collected articles can be found in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, translated by Matthew Ashley and in John K. Downey, ed., Love's Strategy: The Political Theology of Johann Baptist Metz.

Fundamental to Metz's work is the concept of "dangerous memory," which relates to anamnesis in the Greek New Testament, a term which is central to the theology of the Eucharist. Metz speaks variously of "the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ," "the dangerous memory of freedom (in Jesus Christ)," the "dangerous memory of suffering," etc. One of the motivating factors for this category is Metz's determination, as a Christian theologian from Germany, to rework the whole of Christian theology from the ground up in light of the interruptive experience of the Holocaust. This need explains in part his break with Rahner, whose transcendental method appeals to historicity as a category but does not come to terms with actual history. Metz has been in dialogue with progressive Marxism, especially Walter Benjamin and the authors of the Frankfurt School. He levels a fierce critique of what he calls bourgeois Christianity and believes that the Christian Gospel has become less credible because it has become entangled with bourgeois religion. His work Faith in History and Society develops apologetics, or fundamental theology, from this perspective.