Category: Contemporaries

46. It is not too much to claim that the development of a good part of modern philosophy has seen it move further and further away from Christian Revelation, to the point of setting itself quite explicitly in opposition. This process reached its apogee in the last century. Some representatives of idealism sought in various ways to transform faith and its contents, even the mystery of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, into dialectical structures which could be grasped by reason. Opposed to this kind of thinking were various forms of atheistic humanism, expressed in philosophical terms, which regarded faith as alienating and damaging to the development of a full rationality. They did not hesitate to present themselves as new religions serving as a basis for projects which, on the political and social plane, gave rise to totalitarian systems which have been disastrous for humanity.

As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is ‘nihilism’. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth. In the nihilist interpretation, life is no more than an occasion for sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place. Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definitive commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional.

47. It should also be borne in mind that the role of philosophy itself has changed in modern culture. From universal wisdom and learning, it has been gradually reduced to one of the many fields of human knowing; indeed in some ways it has been consigned to a wholly marginal role. Other forms of rationality have acquired an ever higher profile, making philosophical learning appear all the more peripheral. These forms of rationality are directed not towards the contemplation of truth and the search for the ultimate goal and meaning of life; but instead, as ‘instrumental reason’, they are directed, actually or potentially, towards the promotion of utilitarian ends, enjoyment or power.

In the wake of these cultural shifts, some philosophers have abandoned the search for truth in itself and made their sole aim the attainment of a subjective certainty or a pragmatic sense of utility. This in turn has obscured the true dignity of reason, which is no longer equipped to know the truth and to seek the absolute.

48. The link between faith and reason needs to be carefully examined, because each without the other is impoverished and enfeebled. Deprived of what Revelation offers, reason has taken side-tracks which expose it to the danger of losing sight of its final goal. Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being.

This is why I make this appeal that faith and philosophy recover the profound unity which allows them to stand in harmony with their nature without compromising their mutual autonomy. The ‘parrhesia’ of faith must be matched by the boldness of reason.

John Paul II Fides et Ratio – On the Relationship between Faith and Reason

The question briefly put it this: in what sense is there or ought there to be communion between Christians whose beliefs seem to differ profoundly on a number of significant topics, from scriptural interpretation to creedal exposition to moral teaching to the church’s political orderings? Does it make sense to speak of communion at all within such circumstances? Any right answer to this question cannot escape the historical reality that the Church’s story must embody the story of a divine union whose only possibility lay in the suffering of its divine inappropriateness. The hopelessness given in ecclesial contention and division is overcome only by the divine victory givenness the body of Christ: it is act coincident with the life of the Church, however, and thus its historical form for the Church can be observed only within the scriptural realm of ecclesial conformity itself – truth and unity joined in the divine suffering of the body’s fractured life itself.

Certainly, unity and truth have struck many Christians as potentially incompatible characteristics at a given time, ranged against one another in a zero-sum game made necessary by the travails of the moment: sometimes unity at the cost of truth, or sometimes truth at the cost of unity…

But while we can note this long history of attempts to play off unity and truth against each other or to relate them to same form of resolved tension… We do not tend to see gentleness and patience as ever being in tension; we do not ever place kindness and self-control over and against each other as two elements whose individual consummation may require their subordination to one another in time…

On the matter of unity, then, we can conclude that if the church is one, its unity will involve a participation in the historical form of the Father’s sending of his Son in time, an act synonymous with the incarnation’s narrative.

Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture

The truth of the God of Jesus Christ is its own reward. Communication of that truth makes for joy and a life well-lived – a second reward. Colin Gunton taught me this.

Colin Gunton showed that the doctrine of God is not only about the truth of God. It also secures our own identity, our worth and our responsible freedom as children of God. The temptation to aspire to something we mistakenly identify as greater than created humanity makes us less than human. The truth that we are not God, but creatures of God – the doctrine of creation – is the really great gift of the Christian faith to the world. This is why Gunton focused on these two doctrines: God and creation.

Gunton taught that we creatures are able to know God because the Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus, who confesses God the Father. Often quoting Irenaeus to say that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of the Father, Gunton showed that the doctrine of the Trinity provides us with a doctrine of mediation – God himself is not only the (christological) content but the (pneumatological) medium and bearer of that content. He argued that God is now at work making possible not only our worship and knowledge of him, but also our recognition of one another. God is the means by which I may see you for who you are, and let you become what God intends you to be – a unique and particular person.

In the years Colin Gunton taught systematic theology at Kings College, London, worldwide interest in trinitarian theology grew dramatically. Postgraduates would come to Colin to study Barth and other heroes of the Reformed tradition, but with him they also discovered the Church Fathers and learned how to think across the whole Christian dogmatic tradition.

In the weekly seminar, Colin hosted an intense encounter of ideas. With the first-timers he always wrestled through the issues again and found better ways to frame them, forever expressing delight in the richness of the Christian tradition. We would arrive with the patronizing assumption that we moderns have discovered crises of previously unknown complexity, but in seminar after seminar Colin would enable us to see that such self-consciously ‘modern’ theology was self-deluding. It is much more likely that we have to catch up with the intellectual rigor of previous generations of Christian thinkers. The result was not only Gunton’s powerful written work, but students who could think for themselves precisely because they could faithfully listen to what many generations of Christians had been saying. We who knew Colin Gunton are grateful to God for him.

One way of looking at the present conflict within our own churches is to see it as an insistence, on the part of the various players, to heal that sickness and to rewrite the plot of the drama of which they are parts so as to exclude the length and detail of its anguished elaboration. In contrast, the history of the Church, which is the history of the Lord writ small and long, proclaims: It is for the sake of charity that we suffer our disagreements; it is for the sake of truth that we love the liar; it is for the sake of the bride that it receive as her gift her beloved’s body as her own. The irony of Christian patience is that it is an eternal hastening into the midst of this story, rather than one that hurries to break out of it. And we are perhaps called to judge our practical reactions to the array of our ecclesial anxieties – over incompetent and unfaithful bishops, over corrupted prayers and unjust stewards, over shallow understandings and venal missions, over uncaring guardians and unheeding tenants – judge them according to the standard of such a passion.

No clear directives emerge from such a judgment. Those who wish to know if they must follow this line, or resist along that, or compromise upon this other, are given no certainties in their choices simply because they subject themselves to the scriptural shape of Jesus’ life. But at least they know that they cannot run away – and because it is ultimately his life, that there is even redemption in staying put! There are not many bodies, some true and some false, some loving and some uncharitable. These are distractions from the one story, and the embrace of this story cannot sustain the parsing of proprieties that today so grips our distorted sense of integrity. Readiness for love – truth bound in unity – is a single and extended temporal exertion. It is embodied in God’s subjection to time in Christ Jesus, and the Church finds its own readiness in this form. There is no escape from this particular fate and promise. And therein are the kisses of God’s peace for his people enjoyed.

Ephraim Radner ‘The Figure of Truth and Unity’ in Hope Among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture

There are four areas where recent papal teaching has articulated a variety of propositions that need to be affirmed. Veritatas Splendor teaches that there’s no freedom outside of truth, There is a slim chance that human beings could find happiness outside of some proper understanding of what it is to be human. This does not mean that there are no truths that human beings can know about themselves, it just means we owe the world to proclaim the fullness of that truth. We owe it to the world, not to come to the table, in the spirit of a pluralism of religions, or the pluralism of ideology as simply equal partners, but with conviction that we have something to contribute to shape the development of a consensus. If you’ve read these encyclicals, you know they stand on their arguments.

Evangelium Vitae tells us, contrary to what modernity thought, that the eclipse of belief in God has turned out to be the greatest threats to the human, not the exultation of the human. The fact that God was eclipsed, has not made human life safer, but more dangerous. The message of Evangelium Vitae, that God is the greatest friend of the human must be proclaimed without obsessing about this. Without a sense of the transcendent dimension of the human, you have what our Holy Father calls of “the culture of death.” The great irony at is that at the end of the 19th century the pope had to defend faith against reason, but here at the end of the 20th the pope has had to defend reason against unreason.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

The criteria then for thinking about the faith and about the relation of faith to culture are the criteria that come from the classical view of theological inquiry which is to see the intelligibility of what is intrinsically intelligible, naturally using all of the capacities and rigor that human reason supplies. It’s not a question of being unreasonable. Intelligibility is not the opposite of reasonability, but it’s the tool of reason that is applied to the reflection on a mystery that itself draws the human mind and challenges it at every point.

Not everyone coming out of our institutions have to be theologians. But it is the case, and you’ve all experienced this, that the people with highly sophisticated knowledge of economics, politics, physics, astronomy, law are traveling with an almost infantile level of knowledge of their faith. I’ve encountered them. They are traveling on the knowledge of their faith that they might remember from a 3rd grade class, or perhaps at 5th grade with their confirmation. After that they haven’t learned a single thing. This makes them incapable of withstanding not only incorrect versions of Catholicism, but also versions of any kind of spirituality that are mad. The danger of irreligion is not skepticism, but credulity. People are prepared to believe anything in the name of religion, as you know.

This is why Ex Corde Ecclesia is so central, so important, so absolutely essential. Our institutions of higher learning must turn out people who know something about their faith and who are capable of articulating the ways in which it relates to whatever area of professional life, politics, science, philosophy, they are in, because God knows the clergy can’t and are unlikely to do so.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

Ex Corde Ecclesia is John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic universities. It begins ‘Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic University is located in that course of tradition which may be traced back to the very origin of the University as an institution…’ . My respect for Ex Corde Ecclesia and Fides et Ratio has grown and grown. When I explained to a ‘Catholic’ educational institution last year why I thought that Ex Corde Ecclesia was binding on it and that this was good news, my relationship with that institution was terminated. These Papal documents have real evangelical power, and our administrators certainly feel the challenge, or threat, these documents represent to the secular agenda.

We are not talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love, pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it’s not a matter of simply us loving God, it’s a matter of us, altogether loving God and loving each other in God. This is the divine wisdom we have to proclaim: God wants to share the communion of the Trinitarian life with persons who are not God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.

From the perspective of the Church, this completely defines what it means to be human. That is, in view of that destiny we now understand how immense and magnificent a thing it is to be a human being. Commenting on Vatican II, the message John Paul II has affirmed over and over again to the world stresses that only Christ knows what is in man. We find the vision of what it means to be human only when we take a God’s eye view.

Short of the God’s eye view, we have nothing of the truth of the human person. I’m exaggerating, but we have only a very small core of the truth of what it means to be human. Only when we know that it is possible for human beings to share communion of the Trinitarian life, do we understand what being human is.

Augustine DiNoia Divine Wisdom and Christian Humanism

The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is ‘Law, Love and Language’.

Here Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe’s argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe’s version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (‘aristotelian’) account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, for which turns we are essentially a demonic eye that hovers above the world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.

I’ll post some snippets from Law, Love and Language. You’ll thank me.

By understanding theological discourse as a church practice determined by the salvific-economic mission of the Holy Spirit in doctrina and the core practices, we overcome the false alternatives between freedom and being bound, between theology being self-determined or being externally determined. Only in the Holy Spirit and in genuine poeisis of communion does theology as a church practice participate in God’s liberum arbitrium [freedom]. Only by remaining bound to God’s economy of salvation does it step into the ‘freedom of the children of God’, becoming thus a discipline commensurate with its object. For only within its distinct pathos does it become capable of truth.

The ecclesial koinonia is to be understood as a soteriological work of the Holy Spirit grounded as such in the communion of the triune God, a communion which through its own presence engages its salvific activity in the koinonia and indeed binds itself to the koinonia by beginning to draw the latter into the divine life. The ‘other’ side of the church as the work of the Holy Spirit is also that the triune God has bound his communion to the ecclesiastical koinonia … In its pathos the church is the actualizing agent of the salvific-economic mission of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In this sense the church needs to be understood precisely as the public of the Holy Spirit.

Reinhard Hütter Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice

You could try Hütter’s more accessible Bound to be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethicsm and Ecumenism. It is not only state of the art, but it is full of joy.

But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?…worse than the world’s ignorance of Jesus’s absence…is the Church’s failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension itself but the ascension and parousia together, constitute the Ecce Homo! which in the eucharist is heard and repeated. Martyrdom, as the Apocalypse teaches, is the truest manifestation of Jesus’s heavenly session. A doctrine of his departure that is not a doctrine of his impending return is a doctrine capable of converting absence into presence without martyrdom.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia.

Farrow’s book is in my top ten. I haven’t yet found anything like it, and it informed a great deal of The Eschatological Economy. Andrew Burgess The Ascension in Karl Barth or Gerrit Scott Dawson Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation are more introductory, and Burgess has a chapter on Farrow.