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Title: The Quest for God : Personal Pilgrimage, A by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0-06-092823-9 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 21 May, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.33 (15 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Catholic Catecism class?
Comment: I love Paul Johnson. I love Paul Johnson's books. I just disliked this one. His impeccable credentials (Oxford) and his usual penchant for exhaustive scholarly research (The Intellectuals, History of the Jews, History of Christianity, etc.) were surprisingly absent. This book is thoroughly Catholic - not necessarily a bad thing mind you. It's just that the book title had nothing to do with the book. This was no "Quest", no grappling with doubt or faith or pain. Just a Catholic Catecism - a celebration of one man's faith, not the Quest or personal pilgrimage of a man searching for God. It appears that Johnson has found God, neatly and conveniently inside the cathedral. That's O.K. for him. I just was hoping he would help me turn over a few more stones.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not merely food for thought, but a banquet.
Comment: 'The Quest for God' needs at least two careful readings before judgment can be passed upon it. There is much of C. S. Lewis in it; that is, they share common views upon omnipresent and omnicompetent government, and the follies of those who would bring about Heaven on earth by legislation, but I would be the last man to declare that Mr Johnson either cribbed from Mr Lewis, or was influenced by him. Both men shared a British education; both men, in their respective fields, are (or were) historians of the first rank; both see more clearly than most the need for God and the consequences that devolve upon humanity when God is ignored. Although Mr Johnson has often been excoriated as a 'conservative', many of his views are what might be called 'progressive'. His meditations upon God, His nature, and His interaction with man are steeped in Catholic tradition and reflect his faith. This book is intensely personal, as the subtitle proclaims, and is guaranteed to offend the casual modern reader; I exhort the c. m. r. to read it twice, and see for himself the ineluctable logic behind Mr Johnson's arguments. He might learn something to his benefit.
Rating: 4
Summary: What the World Needs Now ...
Comment: ...
It is no accident that this unapologetic blow for conservative Catholicism was written by a layman. The same spring that saw HarperCollins release The Quest for God saw Oxford University Press publish academic Steven Pals' Seven Theories of Religion. All but one (Mircea Eliade) of the theorists Pals discusses see religion as dependent on some other phenomenon. That means that they have not so much a theory of religion, as a theory of x, whereby x is NOT religion. Religion then becomes so much "garbage," as when computer scientists speak of "GIGO: garbage in, garbage out." Religion, politics, accounting, sports: Same difference.
Not so, says Paul Johnson, who goes to great lengths to make clear that only God is God. In a time when militant secularists insist on seeing God as a front for politics, Johnson says, "No! There is no substitute for the real thing." According to Johnson, it is the secularists who are deluding themselves with God-substitutes, which he sees as the cause of the twentieth century's genocidal history.
Although Johnson begins a bit pompously, and even weirdly, with some bad science, after the first two chapters this book becomes quite charming, exhibiting a droll sense of humor and, at times, a refreshing modesty. However, to appreciate Johnson's modesty, one must be able to countenance the notion that a belief in moral absolutes can accommodate tolerance towards those with whom one disagrees on doctrine. Thus, if you believe that all values (or principles or virtues) are relative; have an absolute contempt for anyone who disagrees with you; and third, believe in showing "no tolerance for the intolerant!," then this book is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you are at all curious about Catholicism; you feel that unlimited access to abortion on demand for young girls, and detailed, public school instruction in safe "fisting" by the Gay Men's Health Crisis are not quite the answers to what ails us; or if you have deep spiritual yearnings, then you could do worse than devote a day or so to The Quest for God.
While barely 200 pages long, and written by a popular historian used to having closer to one thousand oversized pages to get the job done, Quest... is an incredibly meaty -- but not overstuffing -- meal. In summing up his own life and work, Johnson recalls his childhood, the famous and not-so-famous whose paths he has crossed, and tells quite a bit of church and secular history. The personal anecdotes and capsule histories, often coming from his historical studies, all bear on Johnson's quest(ion): How does one live, and die, in the proper Christian manner?
There is much of philosophical substance here, yet Johnson is at once both more personal and more philosophical than most academic texts I see on philosophy of religion. The successors to the social gospel, whether feminists, Afrocentrists, or even gay activists, see in religion no more than a worldly, political tool. Some sharp, less politicized minds, on the other hand, offer merely arid analysis; both sides seem to have lost sight of the prize. Johnson hasn't. And so, his philosophical considerations are guided always by the same, simple consideration: How best may I serve God, and thereby, hope to attain Heaven?
If you're a Christian, that's what it's all about. Of course, it may well be harder for a Catholic to keep matters in perspective, as a 2000-year-old tradition of bad theology has rejoiced in complicating matters. With great good humor, Johnson seeks to explain some of these complications as briefly as possible without needlessly confusing or alienating the reader.
"Catholicism - the Holy Roman Catholic Church - Rome - the Scarlet Woman - the Whore of Babylon -- has no terrors for me because I am as used to it as a much-loved old teddy bear or a favorite armchair or a smelly old favorite dog.... I have, as it were, been married to the church all my life and am used to her ways, be they slatternly or tiresome, noble, loving, admirable, foolish or insupportable.... I have a fondness for old institutions which have high pretensions but are also timeworn and manipulable, theoretically rigid but in practice accommodating, which demand everything but will settle in practice for less, often much less."
In sixteen brief chapters, Johnson tussles with contemporary conflicts and perennial problems: The challenges of atheism, feminism, environmentalism and gay activism; the nature of God; the problem of evil; the consequences of there possibly being other rational beings in the cosmos; the roles of dogma and authority, respectively, in the Church; the relationship of Christians to Jews; death; Judgment Day; Hell; Heaven; and the role of prayer. Finally, he has appended some prayers he has composed for the reader's possible inspiration and use.
Johnson notes, early on, that "the most extraordinary thing about the twentieth century was the failure of God to die." He believes that, rather than costing men their faith, the atrocities of the twentieth century actually turned them towards God.
The biggest problem I have with The Quest for God is with Johnson's insistence in the one moment that God is inconceivable in terms of petty, human emotions, and his description in the next of God as "angry" or "impatient." If even Paul Johnson confounds the human with the godly, no wonder the rest of us are so confused!
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Title: Intellectuals by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060916575 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 11 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: A History of the Jews by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060915331 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 14 September, 1988 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: A History of the American People by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060930349 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Modern Times Revised Edition : World from the Twenties to the Nineties, The by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060935502 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The Renaissance : A Short History by Paul Johnson ISBN: 067964086X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 22 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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