Two autobiographical accounts by American Jesuit priests of their New Age involvement have gained considerable attention recently—David Toolan’s Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness published in 1987, and Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age, published last year and already reprinted.

David Toolan does not, so far as I am aware, attempt to define the New Age movement. But his encounters reveal this ‘epistemological revolution’ to be an amalgam of Asian mysticism, modem physics, and transpersonal psychologies. Its major proponents are the Esalen Institute, Jean Houston’s ‘Ritual Theater,’ and a host of physicists, psychologists, and naturalists, including Ernest Becker, Stanislaus Grof, Loren Eisley, David Bohm, and Ilya Prigogine, among others.

According to Pacwa’s descriptive (and to my way of thinking very limited) definition, the New Age Movement ‘is a loosely structured, eclectic movement based on experiences of monism that lead people to believe in pantheism, with a tendency to hold millennarian views of history’ (p. 13). (No one, of course, with the possible exception of some professional philosophers, experiences monism or believes in pantheism or even holds millennarian views of history. What Pacwa means is that some people have experiences that he considers monistic rather than dualistic, or entertain ideas about God that he considers insufficiently distinct from ideas about the world, and who tend to think the world might end soon.)

‘This is the Lamb of God’. These are the words used at the Eucharist to describe Jesus Christ present in the consecrated bread. Jesus, sacramentally present, is identified with the passover lamb, the sacrifice without blemish, and the dumb sheep of Isaiah 53, representing passivity and acceptance of suffering as in some way redemptive. However, for a fuller picture of what it means for Jesus to be ‘Lamb’, it is necessary to turn as well to the Book of Revelation. Here we find that, apart from brief references in Chapter 1 to other Christological ideas involving a figure which seems to combine the Ancient of Days, Jesus Christ and an Angel figure, Christ is always referred to as ‘Lamb’. The Lamb for the author of Revelation is the symbol of power.

The Lamb of Revelation is seen in heaven. The action that takes place in heaven is the judgement that takes place upon the world. This is an effective judgement which produces the dramatic events that will take the world through the End time to the End, the last Day of Judgement and the Renewal of the Cosmos, that is through the culminating events of world history in the broadest sense. The action is effected through Christ, represented by the image of the Lamb of God, a slain yet living Lamb.

This image holds together the heavenly court scenes and world history at two consecutive levels. The Lamb represents one who, now enthroned in heaven, has acted decisively in world history, one who has conquered (5.5).

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

The goal of this article is to show how all parts of the Book of Job function coherently, co-operatively and brilliantly. Though commentators continue to assert that the frame of the work (1-2, 42:7-17) is easily separable from the body of the work (3-42:6), that contention is simply not true. The prose prologue and epilogue pose the book’s central and crucial issues, which are then partially, and slightly unrealistically, dealt with in the work’s central, poetic dialogue section. The ‘game’ of understanding the work would be much easier to play if the frame—front and back—were not there. But it is there; and it is indispensable. The prologue raises the theological stakes of the dialogue.

Five key issues are posed by the prologue, setting the agenda for the entire book. First, who is God? What sort of deity is God, according to information we receive in the prologue? Why is God employing an adversary (a satan) and what can an adversary do that assists God? What is God’s motive in calling attention to Job? How can the wager between God and the adversary, apparently entered into so casually, be benign? What is God’s presumption regarding the outcome of the wager made with the adversary?