At the Origin of the Christian Claim

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., and lecturer in the
Anglican Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver.

Karl Barth in the 1930s and Mircea Eliade almost four decades later made
the point that there are religions, and then there is Christianity.
Luigi Giussani pursues this thought in his own way, and in doing so
produces a Christian apologetic for the 1990s.

He begins with a chapter which shows that the universal human religious
impulse is to search for and pursue the divine, and, by extension, the
meaning of life. The second chapter argues that only the divine, through
self-revelation, can meet this basic religious need. Giussani focuses on
Jesus of Nazareth as the initiative of God to provide a definitive such
revelation to humanity, emphasizing that the particular time and space
dimensions of Jesus give a universality to this revelation. He
demonstrates for the 20th-century mind the psychology and pedagogy of
Christ’s self-revelation, and the light they shed on the question of
the meaning of life.

A key strength is the consistent reasonableness of Giussani’s
writing. His step-by-step approach is easy to follow, but never
condescending, as he weaves together the biblical narrative (showing a
particular fondness for John’s gospel) with the work of such highly
respected theologians as Rudolf Schnackenburg and Eliade. By this means
he effectively refutes the recent mainline tendency to adopt a syncretic
view of the world’s religions and gives the reader a renewed
appreciation of the Incarnation as the unique centrepiece of
Christianity.