A Testimonial to Grace: And Reflections on a Theological Journey

by Avery Dulles

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Sheed & Ward, 1996-09-01. Hardcover. Good. Underlining. Solid binding, spine slanted very slightly. Dustjacket with moderate shelfwear, not chipped or torn.

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  "This review is about Cardinal Avery Dulles and his 1946, 1996 book, A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY ISBN 10: 1556129041, ISBN 13: 9781556129049. ***



Ten years ago my wife and I first read the now 90 year old American Cardinal, when we led adult education discussions in our parish community of Avery Dulles's best known work, MODELS OF THE CHURCH. Years went by until, throughout 2008, I immersed myself in Father Leonard Feeney, SJ and his "Boston Heresy Case" of 1948. This research soon led me to rediscover Cardinal Dulles, who, be it noted, is the son of Eisenhower's "brinksmanship" Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. For Avery Dulles (1918 - ), in early 1941 as a recent Harvard University graduate and convert to Roman Catholicism, co-founded the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, MA which later became Father Feeney's launching pad for noisily and publicly reminding (not entirely unsuccessfully -- witness the growing body today of ultra-conservative Latin Mass Catholics)the people of Boston that all Catholics had been taught for centuries as dogma that "extra ecclesiam nulla salus": i. e., "outside the church there is no salvation." ***



A naval officer in World War II, Avery Dulles spent time just after World War II working briefly but intensely and co-operatively with Father Feeney and associates before Dulles went off to a Jesuit novitiate. He always admired the radical priest, who would be excommunicated (not for heresy but for disobedience) by Pope Pius XII in 1953. Avery Dulles even wrote a powerful, appreciative eulogy of Feeney on his death in 1978, for years reconciled to Rome without having to retract a word of his narrow doctrine of no salvation for Protestants, unbaptized Jews, pagans and other non-Catholics. Dulles writes of Feeney and Saint Benedict Center in his 1946 spiritual memoir, reissued and updated in 1996 as A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY." ***



For a brilliant, famous man and Roman Catholic cardinal, theologian Dulles is modest and unpretentious in both his voluminous writings and in his self-presentation in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE. Deeper, I believe, than his modesty are Dulles's serenity and balance. He can love and honor a radical Roman Catholic schismatic like Leonard Feeney, present his views fairly and without passion and then politely disagree. Watch this style at work in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE as Protestant Dulles absorbs and synthesizes the world views of his Professors at Harvard, and of his much later partners in Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical give and take. Like Aristotle, Dulles is serene. Like another of his masters, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dulles learns from everyone: from orthodox and heterodox, from conservative and liberal. These qualities cannot be missed in the warm, almost conversational pages of a now 90 year old Prince of the Church. He is now retired, feeble, but still keeping abreast of this world and trying his best to make his master, Jesus of Nazareth, speak to today's secular society in the contemporary language that it speaks and, Dulles argues, has every right to expect to be spoken to in. -OOO-"

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