The Oil Has Not Run Dry: The Story of My Theological Pathway by Gregory Baum (review)

Gregory Baum (1923–2017) was a theological lighthouse who helped steer the Barque of Peter beyond the pernicious shoals of anti-Semitism and religious intolerance into the open waters of critical self-reflection and societal compassion.

Canada's dean of Roman Catholic theology, Baum was appointed peritus in 1960 by Pope John XXIII for the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. In this role, he helped fashion and promulgate Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio) and the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate).

Later, as a member of the board of directors of the international review Concilium, he joined Gustavo Gutiérrez, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, David Tracy, Edward Schillebeeckx, and other theological pathfinders in providing an incisive experiential and sociological reading of the Church, thus engendering and supporting critical Christian engagement with issues of social and institutional violence and injustice.

As professor of theology and religious studies at the University of St. Michael's College (1959–1986), and later at McGill University (1986–1999), Baum left a wide-ranging and dynamic theological legacy, housed in part in his numerous books, hundreds of articles, and his journal, the Ecumenist, which he continued to co-edit until his death.

This, his final book, is fittingly his most personal. Describing it as more a story of his "theological pathway" than a standard autobiography, Baum chronicles his evolution from teenage refugee of Jewish origin from 1930s Berlin to internee in wartime Canada, through his conversion to Catholicism, leading to his ordination and emergence as a "critical theologian" with a special interest in liberationist developments around the world.

Noting that Jesus was a "prophet and troublemaker" (97), Baum also at times assumed such roles in his fruitful, but at times fractious, career.

Led by the questing spirit of Augustine's Confessions to become a Catholic, Baum was later inspired by the French philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) to explore a type of quotidian grace, a sense that the secular, daily lives of persons represent "the locus of God's self-communication" (56). This move from a sacred to secular understanding of God's gifted presence he describes as the "Blondelian shift" so influential for Karl Rahner, S.J., and so compellingly explored in Baum's 1971 work, Man Becoming.

Baum planted the seeds for further ecclesial disturbance during his 1969–1971 sojourn at the New School for Social Research in New York.

In keeping with the Frankfurt's School's unmasking of the underside of modernity, Baum, at the New School, brought the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber, among others, into dialogue with contemporary theology. As a result, he was able to identify the many layers of social sin and institutionalized violence in which well-meaning people of faith, at times unwittingly, participate and often perpetuate.

Having had a perturbing awakening to the Church's deeply entrenched anti-Semitism after reading first Jules Isaac's Jésus et Israël (1947) and later Rosemary Radford Ruether's Faith and Fratricide (1974), Baum was primed to both critique the Church for its past harms and assist in its quest to embrace a more just and compassionate witness. Such insights were encapsulated in his groundbreaking 1975 study, Religion and Alienation.

For Baum, as for Augustine, a sense of the sinfulness of the world was ever-present. As he writes, "Looking at the whole of human history, I recognize that evil has been with us from the beginning: we have created a world of competition, conflict, and violence, marked by a radically unjust distribution of wealth and power" (98).

Such an abiding sense of fallenness led to Baum's distrust of notions of "original blessing" as evoked by Matthew Fox or the optimistic teleological vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Yet...