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The Sense of an Ending

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

John Navone SJ
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Extract

Life stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. Our sense of the ending depends on our basic faith concerning the ultimate meaning and value of our life story. The entire life story of Jesus Christ and its particular ending in the resurrection equips Christian faith with its sense of the ending of both our individual life stories and of the universal story that is history. The resurrection expresses the belief that the Storyteller’s Creator Spiritus of life-giving love, which enabled Jesus Christ to find his true story, also enables us to find our true stories with the same love that survives death in the resurrection of the just.

The story of the Last Judgment, which also expresses faith’s sense of an ending, implies that the love which survives death is a responsible love. We are responsible for the incipient life stories that we have gratuitously received; and we are responsible for finding our true stories in virtue of the life-giving love that we have received. Our freedom is such that we are not necessarily predetermined by the gift of the life-giving love to the finding of our true story. What has been freely received may be freely rejected.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 65 , Issue 763 , January 1984 , pp. 14 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 . See Bakan, David, The Duality of Human Existence (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1966Google Scholar. Also Navone, John, “Satan Returns,” Sign 54 (Sept. 1974) pp. 11–17.Google Scholar

2 . Heilman, Robert B., Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1968)Google Scholar provides the basis for this distinction. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar is implicitly relevant for an approach to eschatology.

3 . See Brown, Schyler, Apostasy and Perseverance in the Theology of Luke (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

4 . Dunne, John, The Way of All the Earth (London: Sheldon Press, 1972), pp. 89fGoogle Scholar.

5 . Navone, John, Towards a Theology of Story (Slough, U.K.: St. Paul Publications, 1977)Google Scholar treats of “Home, homelessness and homecoming,” pp. 58‐61, 66f., 73f.

6 . Peace is one expression of a God‐given homecoming: “Peace I leave to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you” (Jn. 14:27). The peace of a good conscience, of being “right” with ourselves and the Ultimate Truth of things, implies that God himself–the Ultimate Truth of things–is the basis of our peace or homecoming.

7 . According to Matthew's Gospel, the whole past of Israel is relived in the relationship of Jesus and his disciples as he communicates to them an under‐standing of the kingdom of heaven, and this recapitualted past is prologue to the future struggles of the Church among all nations. See Giblin, Charles H., “Theological Perspective and Matthew 10:23b”, Theological Studies 29 1968 pp. 637–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also his “What is the Gospel Thought XLV (Summer 1970), p. 233.Google Scholar

8 . Navone, John, “Christian Vision,”Cross and Crown 29 (Dec. 1977), pp. 346–56.Google Scholar

9 . Meynell, Hugo, “The Holy Trinity and the Corrupted Consciousness,”Theology LXX (May, 1976), p. 148.Google Scholar This is not inconsistent, according to Meynell, with God's giving the gift of his love in and through other religious traditions. He notes Bernard Lonergan in A Second Collection, pp174f, to affirm: “But if the Spirit who is God's love is the Spirit of the Son, and the Son is made man, those who receive the Spirit explicitly through the Son do have a special privilege,” p. 148.

10 . See Greeley, Andrew, What a Modern Catholic Believes about God (Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1971), pp. 18‐21Google Scholar.

11 . Jones, Hugh, “The Concept of Story and Theological Discourse,”Scottish Journal of Theology 29 (1976) 6, p. 427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 . Hardy, Daniel W., “Man the Creature,”Scottish Journal of Theology 30 (1977), 2, p. 123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar