Saint Joseph

The Father of Jesus in a Fatherless Society

Boff, Guilherme

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270175
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In Saint Joseph Leonardo Boff seeks to provide a vigorous critique and theological analysis of Saint Joseph and in so doing attempts to undo historical misconceptions, misunderstandings, and cliches that surround the figure of Joseph. The book provides a comprehensive view of the topic as it takes into account biblical references, including the apocrypha, church tradition, papal edicts, liturgical expressions, and various viewpoints proposed by theologians. Boff is also concerned with updating the figure of Saint Joseph; his first step in this direction is to provide a clear understanding of the life of Joseph as an artisan, husband, father, and educator. He then deals with the issue of the importance of Saint Joseph for current issues concerning family and fatherhood. Lastly, Boff argues that Saint Joseph helps us to understand new facets of the mystery of God, and the author does this through his argument concerning the order of hypostatic union, where, according to his argument, there is a relation between Jesus and the Son, Mary and the Holy Spirit, and Joseph and the Father. Boff seeks here to fill a gap in the theological literature, given that theologians have concentrated their efforts on Jesus and the Son and Christology, and Mary and the Holy Spirit and Mariology; but these same theologians have, by and large, given very little time to the figure of Saint Joseph and the Father and Josephology.

1

How Does One Speak of Saint Joseph Today?

What can be said accurately about Saint Joseph? We do not have one single word from him. Our culture and theology are built to a great extent from spoken and written words. When these are not present memory fades away and intelligence is clouded, and we are then left with the imagination, which notoriously has neither censorship nor limits.

For this reason Saint Joseph has not yet found his place within theological reflections. He is like a piece of land that has strayed away from the theological continent, or even, it is as if he simply did not exist. He belongs more to the piety of the people than to the meditation of popes, of theologians, and of the educated strata of Christianity. Despite this, millions of people, institutions, and places take his name: Joseph.

recovering the figure of saint joseph

In the past decades, however, there has been vigorous research concerning him, which is only comparable to what happened during the seventeenth century when throughout Christendom there emerged a significant meditative study of Saint Joseph. Practically all theologians turn him into an aspect of Christology or Mariology. When faced by Jesus and Mary he takes a secondary and complementary role. His mission is to provide security to the mother and to take care of the baby Jesus. When this function is fulfilled he could disappear from the picture, as in fact was done.

Sometimes theologians deal with Saint Joseph in an inarticulate and non-systematic way by placing him along with other subjects of revelation and theology. The figure of Saint Joseph is used to approach subjects such as the importance of the family, generally speaking, and of fatherhood. However, a devotional and pious approach prevails, which does not engage in a fecund dialogue with contributions made by the sciences within this important subject.

But I do not want to be one-sided here. There are a number of notable researchers and theologians, such as T. Stramatare in Italy, B. Llamera in Spain, R. Gauthier and P. Robert in Canada, F. Filas and L. Bourassa Perrota in the USA, H. Rondet and A. Doze in France, J. Stöhr and F. Brändle in Germany, among others. We have also seen the creation of some centers of research and archives of notable standing with their respective journals which are dedicated to the study of Saint Joseph (Josephology) and which have collated all available data that has been written on this subject down through the centuries. About twenty thousand titles of all types on this subject have been catalogued. There you can find very rich material, which is by and large of historical character, to improve the understanding and the systematization of thought about the father of Jesus and the husband of Mary.

I will make use of these whenever possible. I wish to thank here the Centre de Recherché et de Documentation of the Oratoire Saint-Joseph in Montreal, Canada, and especially its director, Pierre Robert, and his secretary, Katrine, for allowing me the use of its immense library, one of the best in this subject, so that I could do bibliographical research and have access to rare tomes and journals on Josephology. Without their kindness this book could not have been written given the peripheral conditions in which I live, far from metropolitan centers of research and publication.

the objective of my reflections

What is the task I propose to undertake? I propose to answer the question: Has Joseph a unique and singular relationship with the celestial Father to the extent that it could be said that he represents the personification of the Father? And once this question has been answered, then try to establish: What is his relation with the embodied Son, Jesus, and with Mary, his wife, over whom the Holy Spirit put his shadow? What is the meaning of the family Jesus–Mary–Joseph in relation to the divine Family Father–Son–Holy Spirit?

The fact that Joseph has not left us a single word, of receiving messages only through dreams, of being the silent figure of the New Testament, is neither an accident nor is it meaningless. This silence is loaded with a message, the meaning of which must be decoded. Saint Joseph is an artisan and not a rabbi. His hands are more meaningful than his mouth, his work more meaningful than his words.

The task of theology is to question about God and about all things in the light of God and this should not be done only from the perspective of biblical texts, of hereditary traditions and of doctrines that have been fixed by the ecclesiastical Magisterium, since these do not fully encapsulate God nor do they fully encompass revelation. The living God continues to communicate himself in history and for this reason is always larger, breaking through the barriers set by religions, by sacred texts, by doctrinal and theological authorities and by the mindset of people. For this reason it is important to search for God in creation as we understand it today as an immense process of ascending evolution, to search for God in human history, to search for God in the production of creative thinking itself.

God is a mysterious fountainhead and as such all knowledge and all words are insufficient. We are always challenged to take up the effort of trying to comprehend and understand God further, even when we are conscious that God will always continue to be a mystery.

Thus, what is important is to go beyond the limits that have been set by everything that has been so far said and traditionally established with regards to Saint Joseph—these are the outcome of piety, art, literature and meditation. It is always appropriate to place Saint Joseph and the human condition side by side and to try to discover the religious meaning that arises from this; and concretely speaking, it is crucial to bring Saint Joseph out of the marginal position in which he has been left and to provide him with the central role that he deserves.

It is necessary, however, to respect Saint Joseph’s humility, which has been often violated by a Josephology of exaltation and of enumeration of privileges and virtues. This was the kind of discourse that prevailed among theologians, especially in the seventeenth century when the first treatises on Saint Joseph were written. This flattering way of speaking about Saint Joseph impinged on later developments, especially insofar as the pope’s speeches were concerned. Certainly, Saint Joseph must be venerated, but this must be done with respect for the discreet and strict ways that the evangelists use when referring to him.

I dare to propose a radical theology about Saint Joseph. Radical in the sense that I aim to put God at the root of everything and to meditate about issues to their end. When I speak of Saint Joseph I want to speak of God just as Christians understand God, that is, always as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This God-Trinity has communicated itself in history. Within this radical perspective it is not sufficient to have the Son and the Holy Spirit with their distinct missions within humanity. This can generate, as it has generated, Christ-centrism (i.e., Christ is the center of everything) and even Christ-monism (i.e., only Christ is important). Or it can give origin to exacerbated charismatism, that is, it can give origin to a view centered in the Holy Spirit, an age of the Holy Spirit, which leaves behind the Son, the age of the Son, as happened in the thirteenth century with Joaquim de Fiore. Or it can create a community of charisma without any sort of organization. Or it can create a Christianity of sheer enthusiasm and of exaltation of religious experience, as is currently happening with Christianity worldwide, which is a Christianity far from the cross, from issues of justice for the poor and from the limitations of the human condition.

We need the presence of the three divine Persons among us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father must be joined with the Son and the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, we are left as if floating in air, without a sense of origin and of the end of all mystery of revelation and of God’s communication in history, which are represented in the Person of the Father.

saint joseph helps us to understand god further

In other words, I want to speak of God in connection with Saint Joseph, but I want to speak of the God of the Christian experience, which is always a Trinity, a communion, a relation, and an eternal inclusion of the Persons with one another.

My intended radical theology begins from this perspective. It is radical because it intends to go to the roots and it is radical because it aims to approach ultimate questions.

Let us now refer back to the central issue of this book: Saint Joseph is connected with two divine Persons. Firstly, he is connected with the Holy Spirit, who came upon his wife Mary and who overshadowed her (Luke 1:35; “‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’”) in such a way that Mary became pregnant with Jesus. Secondly, he is connected with the Son, who overshadowed the world and who became flesh in Jesus, son of Mary (John 1:14; “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father”). Saint Joseph, as the theologians have spoken about him since the sixteenth century, entered into a hypostatic relation via Mary and Jesus. Let me explain the term hypostatic relation: a hypostatic relation is the relation through which Saint Joseph relates himself in a unique and singular manner with the two divine Persons (NB: hypostase is the root of the term hypostatic and means “person” in Greek and in official theology). Therefore, he has started to be part of the order, which is proper to the divine Persons. Without Joseph there is no concrete incarnation as the gospels bear witness.

Within this scenario the Father has been excluded. According to theologians, the Father was the one who sent the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit. However, the Father has remained as an unfathomable mystery within the immanent Trinity according to the common theological understanding.

Is this the only point that can be asserted regarding the Father? Does not God-Trinity reveal itself as it is, that is, as Trinity? Is it not appropriate for the Father to have a niche to communicate and reveal himself? Who better than Joseph, father of Jesus—the incarnate Son through the action of the Holy Spirit—to be the personification of the celestial Father? Yes, this thesis will be defended in this work. Similarly to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, the Father also overshadowed us in the person of Saint Joseph.

Don’t we say that the intent of God is complete wisdom, supreme harmony, and complete coherence? This intent, because it is divine, has some supreme characteristics. Theology itself, whilst elaborating views, always seeks a coherent and harmonic spirit by articulating all truths among themselves and by demonstrating the connections between the truth of God, the truth of revelation, the truth of creation, and the truth of history.

Within this coherence and symphony I dare to assert that the whole Trinity has communicated itself, revealed itself, and definitely entered into our history. The Divine Family, in a specific moment of evolution, took the form of a human family. The Father personalised himself in Joseph, the Son in Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in Mary. It is as if the whole universe prepared the conditions for this event of infinite goodness.

Thus, we have reached in this way the apex of coherence and supreme symphony: humanity, history, and cosmos in evolution are inserted in the Kingdom of the Trinity. There was a missing piece in the architecture of indescribable completeness: the personification of the Father in the figure of Joseph of Nazareth.

During the unfolding of this work and in its appropriate place I shall provide some anthropological and theological reflections that support this theological premise, for which I use the technical term theologumenon (i.e., “theological theory”). This is not official doctrine and it is neither found in catechisms nor in official documents of the Magisterium. It is, however, a sound theological hypothesis and the outcome of much creative theological research, which is, as I mentioned before, the effort of going further and further into the profunda Dei, into the depths of the mystery of God-Trinity.

out of obscurity and into the light

My theological boldness needs to avoid being arrogant. It is, however, the culmination of ideas that are a trend in works about Saint Joseph. My work here s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• The Gospel of Joseph
• Chapter 1: How Does One Speak of Saint Joseph Today?
• Chapter 2: Dissolving Misunderstandings and Clichés
• Chapter 3: The Historical Joseph: Artisan, Father, Husband, and Educator
• Chapter 4: Saint Joseph of Faith: The Gospels
• Chapter 5: Saint Joseph of the Imaginary: The Apocryphal Writings
• Chapter 6: Saint Joseph of Reason: A Theological Reflection
• Chapter 7: Saint Joseph of God: The Order of Hypostatic Union
• Chapter 8: Saint Joseph of the Father: Personification
• Chapter 9: The Divine Family in the Human Family
• Chapter 10: The Celestial Father in the Terrestrial Father
• Chapter 11: The Family in the Light of the Holy Family
• Chapter 12: The Figure of the Father in Light of Saint Joseph
• Conclusion: The Entire Holy Trinity Is among Us
• Prayer to Saint Joseph
• Bibliography