Answerable for Our Beliefs: Reflections on Theology and Contemporary Culture Offered to Terrence Merrigan (Louvain Theological & Pastoral Monographs, 48) [1 ed.] 904294742X, 9789042947429

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LO U VA I N T H E O LO G I C A L & PA S TO R A L M O N O G R A P H S 48

ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OFFERED TO TERRENCE MERRIGAN Edited by Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

PEETERS

ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS

Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs aims to provide those involved in theological research and pastoral ministry throughout the world with studies inspired by Louvain’s long tradition of theological excellence within the Roman Catholic tradition. e volumes selected for publication in the series are subjected to peer review by the editorial board and international scholars, and are expected to express some of today’s finest reflection on current theology and pastoral practice. Members of the Editorial Board The Executive Committee: Yves De Maeseneer, Professor of eological Ethics, KU Leuven, editor Annemie Dillen, Professor of Pastoral and Empirical eology, KU Leuven Anthony Dupont, Professor of Church History, KU Leuven Annemarie C. Mayer, Professor of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions, KU Leuven, editor-in-chief Pierre Van Hecke, Professor of Biblical Studies, KU Leuven International Advisory Board: Raymond F. Collins, e Catholic University of America, Washington DC, chair José M. de Mesa, East Asian Pastoral Institute, Manila, Philippines Gabriel Flynn, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland Mary Grey, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, England James J. Kelly, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland Ronald Rolheiser, Oblate School of eology, San Antonio, TX Donald P. Senior, Catholic eological Union, Chicago, IL James J. Walter, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA

LOUVAIN THEOLOGICAL & PASTORAL MONOGRAPHS • 48

ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OFFERED TO TERRENCE MERRIGAN

Edited by

Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys and Viorel Coman

PEETERS LEUVEN  PARIS  BRISTOL, CT 2022

We shall miss you. De collega’s

Cover image: Chapel of Memorial University Newfoundland, painting by Jana Binon on the basis of a photo by K. Bruce Lane

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

© 2022, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, 3000 Leuven, Belgium ISBN 978-90-429-4742-9 eISBN 978-90-429-4743-6 D/2022/0602/9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe; if we believe lightly, or if we are hard of belief, in either case we do wrong.” (Letter of Saint John Henry Newman to Mrs. William Froude, June 27, 1848)

Table of Contents

Introduction .............................................................................................. Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman



Part I The Thought of John Henry Newman 1. e Rise and Fall of High Church Anglicanism in the Life and ought of John Henry Newman, 1826-1841 ............................... Peter Nockles

3

2. How to Argue with Unbelief: Newman, Ward, and Manning Engage the Secular ............................................................................ Geertjan Zuijdwegt

41

3. Newman, Frankl, and Conscience: Individual Call and Ecclesial Belonging ..................................................................................... Christopher Cimorelli

57

4. Purgatory as Agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius: An Essay on the Church’s Suffrages for the Dead .............................. Andrew Meszaros

77

5. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent Or: On Liturgy’s Spirituality .......................................................................................... Joris Geldhof

99

Part II Christology, Trinity, and Church 6. Tilling the Ground for a Later Christology .................................. Raymond F. Collins

121

VIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

7. From Mountain to Mountain: e Tremendous Significance of Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation ............................................... Jeffrey C. K. Goh

135

8. Who Is Christ for Us Today? Some Soteriological Reflections along the Lines of Bonhoeffer’s Theologia Crucis ........................ Annemarie C. Mayer

155

9. A Cumulative Approach to the Resurrection ............................... Gerald O’Collins, S.J.

173

10. Christology and Ecology in Dialogue ............................................ Dermot A. Lane

191

11. omas Aquinas: An Indispensable Contribution to the Renaissance of the eology of the Trinity .............................................. Herwi Rikhof

211

12. “e Doctrine of Divine Unrest”: Pneumatological Perspectives from Karl Rahner .............................................................................. Declan Marmion, S.M.

229

13. eological eology and the Quest for Salvation: Soteriological Reflections on a eology of Non-Christian Religions ........ 249 Kristof Struys 14. e Absolute Newness of Love: An Innovative ‘Agapology’ in the Trinitarian Metaphysics of Miklós Vetö ................................. Beáta Tóth

263

15. Toward a Dialogical Approach of Tradition, Allowing for Coherent Self-Criticism ................................................................... Emmanuel Durand, O.P.

279

16. e Ecclesiology of Marie-Dominique Chenu: A Paradigm for Service to Humanity ......................................................................... 307 Gabriel Flynn 17. Ecclesia semper reformanda: Karl Rahner, Pope Francis, and eology as Radical Critique ........................................................... Jerry T. Farmer

329

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IX

Part III Theology of Interreligious Dialogue 18. Revisiting the Redaction History of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in Response to a Recent Debate in Catholic eology of Interreligious Dialogue ................................................................................... 347 Peter De Mey 19. From De Iudaeis to Nostra Aetate: e Development of the Text from November 1963 to October 1965 .......................................... Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck †

391

20. “e True Light at Enlightens Everyone”: A Critical Examination of J. Dupuis’ Application of Jn 1:9, 14 in His Trinitarian Christology and eology of Religious Pluralism ....................... 443 Nguyen Thi Tuong Oanh, Sr. Maria, ZvMI 21. Graced Religions: Ecumenical Perspectives on Revelation and Grace in the eology of Interreligious Dialogue ....................... 463 Wouter Biesbrouck 22. “Tread Soly! All the Earth Is Holy Ground”: A Comparativist Responds Constructively to Terrence Merrigan’s Sacramental eology of Religions........................................................................ 489 Francis X. Clooney, S.J. 23. Is ere a Judeo-Christian Approach to Religious Others? e Case Study of Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Buddhism ..... 509 Elizabeth J. Harris 24. Can Christians Follow More an One Religious Tradition? On Buddhist-Christian Dual Practice .................................................. Alexander Löffler, S.J.

529

25. At the Intersection of Racial and Religious Othering: eologies of Interreligious Dialogue as a Performance of White Christian Innocence? ........................................................................ 545 Judith Gruber

X

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part IV The Significance of Secularization for the Contemporary Church 26. Recalibrating Tradition: Renewal and Retrieval in Contemporary Catholic eology ..................................................................... Stephan van Erp 27. Problematic Predictions: Religion in the Secular Age ................ Hans Joas

571 587

28. Re-Imagining God in a Secular Age: Religion, Philosophy, Science ................................................................................................. 603 James J. Kelly 29. “Which Wolf Will You Feed?”: Good Narratives as the Basis for Dialogue and Building a Common Life ........................................ Lieven Boeve

625

30. Secularization and eological Ethics ........................................... Joseph A. Selling

639

31. Common Discernment in eology............................................... Jacques Haers, S.J.

657

32. Kenotic Solidarity in a Splinterizing World: A Balthasarian Response to the Polarization of Contemporary Society ............. Robert Aaron Wessman

679

List of Contributors .................................................................................

699

Introduction Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

“We are answerable for what we choose to believe” (John Henry Newman)

With this Festschrift the colleagues from the Research Unit Systematic eology and eology of Religions of the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, honor a colleague and friend on the occasion of his retirement as an expression of our profound appreciation for the exceptional quality of his research in different domains of theological research, for the deep impression he has made on several generations of master and doctoral students working under his guidance, and for what his ever supportive leadership and presence has meant to all of us. e willingness of many international colleagues and former doctoral students of Terry to contribute to this volume shows that this experience is also shared beyond our research unit. Since the theology of John Henry Newman has inspired our colleague during his entire career, it is appropriate to open this volume with a number of outstanding Newman studies. Already his dissertation Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, published in 1991 as volume 7 of Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs, was considered by reviewers a “must for all serious students of Newman,” especially for its attention to the structure of Newman’s thought as a whole.1 Our colleague also was co-editor, together with the famous Newman scholar Ian T. Ker, of three volumes that contain the rich fruits of the second, third and fourth Oxford International Newman Conference.2 In 2009, both scholars co-edited the Cambridge 1 Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991). 2 Terrence Merrigan and Ian T. Ker, eds., Newman and the Word, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 21 (Louvain: Peeters, 2001); iid., eds., Newman and Faith, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 31 (Louvain: Peeters, 2004); iid., eds., Newman and Truth, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 34 (Louvain: Peeters, 2008).

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Companion to John Henry Newman.3 Our colleague has, however, continued to contribute to Newman scholarship in the last decade as well.4 In the first of five Newman studies in this volume Peter Nockles explores John Henry Newman’s interaction with high church Anglicanism. Nockles seeks to clarify to what extent Newman embraced high church Anglicanism and what were the motivating factors that determined him to depart from and critically react against it. e chapter authored by Geertjan Zuijdwegt analyses the responses and reactions of three illustrious Victorian Catholic theologians to what they defined as the secularization process of English intellectual tradition and culture. Apart from John Henry Newman, Zuijdwegt engages the thoughts of William George Ward and Henry Edward Manning, two other Oxford educated converts from Anglicanism. Christopher Cimorelli investigates John Henry Newman’s and Viktor Frankl’s understanding of conscience, with particular attention to the similarities and differences of their views. According to Cimorelli, Newman’s approach to conscience transcends the limitations of Frankl’s views, especially on central issues related to the human person’s relational nature and ecclesial fulfillment. Andrew Meszaros contributes to this volume with a reflection on purgatory as agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius. Meszaros draws a careful parallel between the soul’s experience of judgment and Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. For Joris Geldhof, the neglect of liturgical spirituality in Newman’s theology functions as a warning and impulse for contemporary theologians to find the right balance between lex orandi (dogma) and lex credendi (doxa). Besides his important and influential Newman research, part of professor Merrigan’s academic career was dedicated to the fields of Christology and Trinity. He founded the biennial Leuven Encounters in Systematic eology in 1997 with an international colloquium on The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology. For many years, he was the holder of the course Dogmatic Theology: Christology and Trinity. According to what he regularly said himself, this course was and remained one of his favorites. A considerable number of 3 Ian T. Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4 See among others Terrence Merrigan, “Is a Catholic University a Good Idea? Reflections on Catholic Higher Education from a Newmanian Perspective,” Irish Theological Quarterly 11 (2015): 3-18, and Geertjan Zuijdwegt and Terrence Merrigan, “Conscience,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 434-453.

INTRODUCTION

XIII

his publications are situated on the intersection of contemporary Christology and its soteriological impact within a pluralistic and secularized context.5 A considerable number of articles in this Festschrift are devoted to these topics. Raymond F. Collins delivers a close reading of Paul’s first letter to the essalonians in order to highlight the passages that play a crucial role in the development of New Testament Christology. Against any kind of over-emphasizing of Jesus’ divinity, Jeffrey C. K. Goh holds a plea for the soteriological importance of Jesus’ real humanity. For his plea, he finds himself familiar with Pope Francis’ paradigm in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. He reflects on the imitation of Jesus’ praxis of non-violence towards a Kingdom oriented social order. Annemarie C. Mayer poses the Christological ‘who-question’ of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and considers this question as very consequential in soteriological reflections of today, with special focus on the theology of the cross and God’s love ‘for us’ in it. By way of what he calls a cumulative approach to the resurrection, Gerald O’Collins critically constructs a case for the resurrection based upon philosophical, historical and theological considerations. In his chapter, Dermot A. Lane delivers a mutual discourse between Christology and ecology with the objective to promote further reception of Integral Ecology. Lane examines responses to ecological crisis that emerge from three key areas: New Testament Christologies, Deep Incarnation, and Karl Rahner’s reflections on creation and Incarnation. For Herwi Rikhof, omas Aquinas’ theology remains an indispensable resource in the contemporary renaissance of trinitarian theology. He investigates the implications of Aquinas’ trinitarian theology for Christian identity in general and sacramental life in particular. Declan Marmion explores Karl Rahner’s pneumatology as it is presented in his

5

Terrence Merrigan, “‘For Us and for Our Salvation’: e Notion of Salvation History in the Contemporary eology of Religions,” Irish Theological Quarterly 64 (1999): 339-348; id., “e Historical Jesus in the Pluralist eology of Religions,” in The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Jacques Haers, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 152 (Louvain: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 2000), 61-82; Terrence Merrigan and Bénédicte Lemmelijn, “Van de God der Vaderen naar God de Vader: Het christelijk triniteitsdenken en zijn oudtestamentische achtergrond,” in Triniteit, een kruis erover? Nieuwe perspectieven op een oeroude christelijke doctrine, ed. Terrence Merrigan, Christoph Moonen, and Kristof Struys (Antwerpen: Halewijn, 2006), 21-34; Terrence Merrigan, “Faith in the Quest: e Relevance of the First and ird Quests to the Understanding of the ‘Christ-Event’,” Louvain Studies 32 (2007): 153-163.

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treatises on the Trinity, the Church and grace. For Rahner, the Holy Spirit is part of God’s self-communication which belongs not only to professional mystics or ecclesial office, but to the everydayness. Marmion examines the implications of Rahner’s pneumatology for the theology of religions and concludes with new developments in pneumatology. In his reflections, Kristof Struys critically explores the epistemological criteriology as it is dealt with in some pluralist theologies of religions. Inspired by Walter Kasper, he argues that a ‘theological theology’ is a condition of possibility for the case of human salvation. Beáta Tóth examines Miklós Vetö’s concept of ‘agapology’ that offers a metaphysical interpretation of love within the intersection of otherness and relationality. By applying a theological reflection on the trinitarian love, Tóth helps to further develop Vetö’s social account of love, which she considers as being beneficial to moral theology. Emmanuel Durand focuses on the reality of Catholic tradition and its development, by critically analyzing the questions of continuity and discontinuity, as well as the risks, limitations and self-criticism that are involved in reform. Gabriel Flynn presents a theological biography of the prominent Dominican scholar, Marie-Dominique Chenu. Flynn explores Chenu’s contemplative spirituality, the theological methodology that emerges from this spirituality, as well as his ecclesiological vision. At the center of Chenu’s work is the incarnation. In his contribution, Jerry T. Farmer explores the validity of the Protestant adagium ecclesia semper reformanda, particularly in the theology of Karl Rahner and the papacy of Francis. Farmer explains how both Rahner and Pope Francis provide subversive messages that are critical for the renewal of church life. As of the outset of his academic career Professor Merrigan developed a strong interest in the theology of interreligious dialogue. He helped promoting the views of the deplored Jesuit theologian Jacquis Dupuis,6 but also developed his own views which Francis Clooney identifies in this volume as a “sacramental theology of religions.”7 6

Some important articles by Dupuis appeared in Louvain Studies: Jacques Dupuis, “‘e Truth Will Make You Free’: e eology of Religious Pluralism Revisited,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999): 211-263; id., “Christianity and the Religions Revisited,” Louvain Studies 28 (2003): 363-383. Among Merrigan’s publications on Dupuis, see especially: “Exploring the Frontiers: Jacques Dupuis and the Movement ‘Toward a Christian eology of Religious Pluralism’,” East Asian Pastoral Review 37 (2000): 5-32, and “Jacques Dupuis and the Redefinition of Inclusivism,” in In Many and Diverse Ways: In Honour of Jacques Dupuis, ed. Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 60-71. 7 Among the most relevant contributions by Terrence Merrigan in this field, are: “Saving the Particular: Incarnation and the Mediation of Salvation in the

INTRODUCTION

XV

Part III of the Festschrift starts with two articles dealing with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on non-Christian religions. Peter De Mey explores the redaction history of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in light of the particular interpretation of these paragraphs among Catholic inclusivists such as Gavin D’Costa and Ralph Martin. Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck † explore the development of Nostra Aetate from November 1963 to its official promulgation on October 1965 by Pope Paul VI. As the chapter emphasizes, once the Nostra Aetate document was finally finalized and approved, it led to an intensification of the Catholic Church’s involvement in interreligious dialogue. Maria Nguyen Thi Tuong Oanh critically explores the Trinitarian Christology and theology of religious pluralism of Jacques Dupuis in light of his engagement with John 1:19, 14. Although Dupuis’ theology of religions has received a lot of attention from scholars, the biblical fundaments of his approach to religious pluralism have not been properly examined. According to Wouter Biesbrouck, the idea that God’s revelation has a soteriological dimension bears relevance for a Christian theology of interreligious dialogue. Resourcing the Western Christian tradition, Protestant and Catholic alike, the author reflects on the Neo-Calvinist concept of ‘common grace’ and participatory ontology in order to indicate the reverberance of an ecumenical notion into the theology of interreligious dialogue. Francis X. Clooney provides a constructive response to the theology of religions as developed by Terrence Merrigan. In his opinion the particularity of Jesus Christ stimulates the embracement of an inclusive theology of religions and fosters the development of a comparative methodological work that is respectful and attentive to other religions. Elizabeth J. Harris argues that even though due to historical circumstances Christianity and Judaism have parted ways as early as the first centuries of the first

eology of Religions,” in Orthodoxy, Process and Product, ed. Mathijs Lamberigts, Lieven Boeve, and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 227 (Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 299322; “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17-27; “Between Doctrine and Discernment: Pope Francis on Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Geo-Politics of Pope Francis, ed. Jan De Volder, Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 77 (Louvain: Peeters, 2019), 127-150, and “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Breaking the Impasse in Contemporary Catholic eology of Interreligious Dialogue,” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis: Studies on the Second Vatican Council Offered to Mathijs Lamberigts, ed. Dries Bosschaert and Johan Leemans, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 317 (Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2020), 469-482.

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millennium, both traditions share a lot in common within the field of interreligious dialogue. e similarities between Jewish and Christian approaches to interreligious dialogue are greater than their differences. Alexander Löffler reflects theologically on the topic of individual Christians who theoretically and practically adhere to more than one religious tradition. e question that guides his analysis is how to explain, interpret, and assess theologically the phenomenon of double religious belonging and practice. Drawing insight from spirituality, Löffler seeks possible ways to legitimize Buddhist-Christian religious affiliation from a Catholic perspective. Judith Gruber focuses on the controversy that arose in Germany in 2020 following the invitation of the Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe to the Ruhrtriennale in Bochum. Examining the controversy through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s notion of White innocence, Gruber decenters theologies of interreligious conversation, spotting their role to the consolidation of White supremacy and re-articulating innocence in a way that does not cover up histories of conflict and violence. As a teacher of the courses European Perspectives on Religion and Christianity and Contemporary Culture, professor Merrigan’s interest is in bridging the Christian tradition with the contemporary world.8 In Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow he finds, among others, two important interlocutors. Our culture is characterized by the quest for ‘selood’ which needs the assistance of communities and traditions, understood as cumulations of similar experiences of searching for selood throughout history. Merrigan states that the Church is one such community which can help people engaging with their quest for selood. In this Festschrift some authors take it as their perspective to write on the challenging relationship of faith and culture. Stephan van Erp, commenting on the recently published Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), presents a brief overview of the development of Catholic theology in the nineteenth and twentieth century. His final section on the challenges for postsecular Catholicism, forms a good starting point for Part IV of this 8 Terrence Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject: A Newmanian Perspective on Religion in Contemporary Society,” in A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, ed. Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers (Washington, DC: e Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015), 179-208; id., “Religion, Education, and the Appeal to Plurality: eological Considerations on the Contemporary European Context,” in Toward Mutual Ground: Pluralism, Religious Education, and Diversity in Irish Schools, ed. Gareth Byrne and Patricia Kieran (Dublin: Columba, 2013), 57-70.

INTRODUCTION

XVII

Festschrift. According to Hans Joas it is not allowed to define secularization from the perspective of modernization or in terms of the weakening of Christianity in the West. An alternative narrative is not to be found in the simplistic application of the paradigm of ‘disenchantment’. For him, the future of religious faith largely depends on purposeful human action. James J. Kelly is convinced that today’s secular context makes a re-appraisal of the traditional image of God imperative. Dismissing dualistic worldviews, he explores a theological approach in which transcendence is reconstructed within an immanent process. He argues that process-thinking safeguards a systemic, ecological and cosmic holism upon which the future of humanity and creation depends. Lieven Boeve examines the sociological category of the ‘nones’ within the context of religious dialogue. Boeve dismisses theological options that either downplay the Christian identity or rigidly safeguard it as both unsatisfactory, and rather proposes the approach of dialogue towards a social consensus. Examining the relationship between secularization and theological ethics, Joseph A. Selling looks at how the ancient church dealt with secular issues during its formative years in Europe. In the attempt to assert its autonomy, the contemporary church appears disconnected from the world: she oscillates between ambiguity and suspicion of the secular. Selling sustains the hope that Pope Francis provides the appropriate pastoral response to secularization. Drawing on the Ignatian spiritual background, Jacques Haers pleads for a renewed method of theology based on common ecclesiogenetic discernment, with emphasis on revelation, shared history and common narratives. Robert Aaron Wessman prolongs Terrence Merrigan’s theological engagement with contemporary Western culture. He deploys the concept of ‘splinterization’ in describing this culture, and further problematizes the question of identity. Relying on Balthasar, Wessman proposes that Christians should engage dissimilar groups in a kenotic solidarity that is inspired by the example of Christ. We are thankful for the help received in the editing process from Rita Corstjens and especially from the series editor, our colleague Annemarie Mayer. We owe great thanks to the other members of the Merrigan family: Clairette, Michaël, Klaartje and Katelijne. We involved them in selecting a cover image which perfectly illustrates the intellectual and spiritual environment where Terry learnt to become answerable for his beliefs, the chapel of Memorial University Newfoundland. Many thanks to Bruce Lane for taking pictures of the chapel and to Jana Binon for realizing the watercolor painting on the cover.

Part I

The Thought of John Henry Newman

1 The Rise and Fall of High Church Anglicanism in the Life and Thought of John Henry Newman, 1826-1841 Peter Nockles

“Newman had a peculiar power of seizing intellectually the ethos, and principles of another, and making them his own, as if as it were on trial.”1

is observation by Newman’s one-time curate and Tractarian disciple, Isaac Williams, reveals how Newman interacted with others in the Tractarian triumvirate, notably John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude. Although the acknowledged leader of the Oxford Movement, recent scholarship has revealed the extent of Newman’s intellectual and spiritual debt to a supporting cast of others, particularly to his friends, followers and disciples.2 He was as much influenced as he was the influencer. Newman’s debt, however, was not only to individuals but to theological traditions, different ones of which at different phases in his life he made his own. Yet the extent of Newman’s debt to and identification with, different theological systems at different times should not detract from his own originality. As Stephen Morgan has argued, there was continuity and consistency as well as change in the development of Newman’s thought prior to his secession from the Church of England in

1

Autobiography of Isaac Williams, BD. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College […] Edited by His Brother-in-Law, the Ven. Sir George Prevost (London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1892), 43. 2 James Pereiro, “A Cloud of Witnesses: Tractarians and Tractarian Ventures,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, ed. Stewart J. Brown, Peter B.  Nockles, and James Pereiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 111-122. Pereiro focuses in particular on the role of Newman’s one-time pupil and disciple, Samuel Francis Wood (1809-1843). See James Pereiro, ‘Ethos’ and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4

PETER NOCKLES

1845.3 He was creative and inventive, and not merely an external passive legatee of existing theological systems or the views of others. Several studies have demonstrated the extent of the role of evangelicalism in the early life and thought of John Henry Newman.4 In particular, Terrence Merrigan has shown the seminal importance of his first conversion in 1816 at the age of fieen.5 is has helped correct a tendency to downplay Newman’s evangelical early career as a mere preparation rather than foundational bedrock of his life-long religious journey. e great Newman scholar Charles Stephen Dessain even claimed that “Newman was never a real evangelical at all.”6 is trend was encouraged by Newman’s own attempts to reinterpret his own past, in his Apologia pro vita sua (1864) and Autobiographical Memoir (1874) with its schematic account of his disengagement from evangelicalism. e most systematic treatment of evangelicalism in the making and formation of the young Newman’s theology has been Geertjan Zuijdwegt’s recent doctoral dissertation, An Evangelical Adrift.7 Zuijdwegt analyses the factors which led Newman to shed, one by one, the characteristic doctrines associated with evangelicalism. Following

3

See Stephen Morgan, The Search for Continuity in the Face of Change in the Anglican Writings of John Henry Newman, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2013). 4 For examples, see David Newsome, “Justification and Sanctification: Newman and the Evangelicals,” Journal of Theological Studies 15 (1964): 32-53; Timothy C.  F. Stunt, “John Henry Newman and the Evangelicals,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970): 65-74; John E. Linnan, The Evangelical Background of John Henry Newman, 1816-1826, 2 vols., unpublished doctoral dissertation (Louvain: Faculty of eology, Université Catholique de Louvain, 1965); Joseph A. Komonchak, John Henry Newman’s Discovery of the Visible Church (1816 to 1828), unpublished doctoral dissertation (New York: Union eological Seminary, 1976); Edward McCormack, The Development of John Henry Newman’s View of the Christian Life in His Anglican Sermons, 1824-1843, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2001); omas L. Sheridan, “Justification,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98-117, at 98-104. 5 Terrence Merrigan, “Numquam minus solus, quam cum solus – Newman’s First Conversion: Its Significance for His Life and ought,” Downside Review 103 (1985): 99-116. 6 Charles S. Dessain, “Newman’s First Conversion,” Newman Studien 3 (1957): 37-53, at 50. 7 Geertjan J. Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry Newman’s Theology, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Louvain: KU Leuven, 2019).

HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

5

Gareth Atkins, he shows that this was a longer and messier process of disengagement than previous accounts allowed.8 A key question which Zuijdwegt raised – what precisely took the place of evangelicalism? – requires fuller explication. is essay seeks to elucidate whether or not it was high churchmanship (what became known as ‘Anglicanism’9), how far Newman embraced it and how and why he finally abandoned and reacted against it. Several within the high church tradition in retrospect suggested that Newman took up ‘Anglicanism’ merely as a paper theory which he tested by criteria of his own and that his expressions of loyalty to the seventeenth-century divines were selective and based on affection and imaginative recreation rather than intellectual conviction.10 More recently, the late Frank Turner has gone further, arguing that Newman’s pursuit of an ideal ascetical Catholicism meant that he sat loosely to all theological traditions and that as a Tractarian leader he acted on purely sectarian principles. Turner claimed that in his Apologia, Newman sought to impose an orderly theological development on his religious career which was singularly lacking at the time.11 Newman’s essential test in his search for religious truth was always that of ‘reality’ and ‘realizing’. e imagination and intellectual conviction were not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, as Terrence Merrigan has argued, the experience of ‘realizing’ the concrete, existent ‘things’ as mediated by the imaginative faculty was a crucial facet of Newman’s theological understanding. All beliefs “must first be credible to the imagination,”12 the fruit of an interaction between the imagination and reason.13 e rise and fall of high church Anglicanism (in so far as that

8

Gareth Atkins, “Evangelicals,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 173-195, at 174. 9 See note 14. 10 Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Compiled and Edited by Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: Morehouse Publishing, 1935), xxx-xxxi. See also the “Conclusion” of this essay. 11 Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 9: “In Schism with All Christendom.” 12 Terrence Merrigan, “Newman the eologian,” in John Henry Newman 1801-1890, Louvain Studies 15 (1990): 103-118, at 109; id., “Newman’s Catholic Synthesis,” Irish Theological Quarterly 60 (1994): 39-48, at 40. 13 Terrence Merrigan, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, 47-72, at 60.

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term is appropriate at this date14) in Newman’s thought can be explained by his acceptance or rejection of its ‘reality’. 1. Early Adoptions of High Churchmanship is essay picks up from where Zuijdwegt’s study le off. Its starting point is a sermon Newman preached in 1826, on the manuscript of which he scrawled over thirty years later, the words – “one of the first, if not the first, declaration I made of high church principles.”15 is comment by Newman was penned in 1857 and was a descriptor made only with hindsight. In itself it reveals how the term ‘high church’ by that date was defined and applied. e title of the sermon which earned Newman’s own later descriptor was “On the One Catholic and Apostolic Church.” e question remains whether Newman’s turn towards an emphasis on the visible Church, itself a gradually unfolding process in three phases over several years in the 1820s,16 constituted the adoption of what can be classed as ‘high church principles’. is author has broadly defined the theology of pre-Tractarian high churchmen or ‘the Orthodox’ (as they preferred to be called) as emphasizing, to varying degrees, the doctrine of apostolic succession and episcopal and ministerial order, a doctrine of the visible Church with the Church of England a branch of the Universal Church, the supremacy of Holy Scripture but with due reference to authorized standards such as the Creeds, the Book of Common Prayer, the Catechism, the irty-Nine

14

e term ‘Anglican’ and ‘Anglicanism’, in a theological sense rather than denoting merely provincial autonomy, is a late construct. ‘Anglican’ was used by Alexander Knox in 1806, but one of the earliest usages of ‘Anglicanism’ was by Newman in the first edition of his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837). See Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39-41; Anthony Milton, “Introduction: Reformation, Identity and Anglicanism (c. 1520-1662),” in Oxford History of Anglicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), I, 1-27, at 7-8; Paul Avis, “What Is Anglicanism?,” in The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes, John Booty, and Jonathan Knight (London: SPCK, 1998), 459-476; Stephen Sykes, Unashamed Anglicanism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), xiv; Colin Podmore, Aspects of Anglican Identity (London: Church House, 2005), 26-42, at 35-37; Paul Avis, “Not Yet Anglicanism,” Theology 123 (2020): 198-203, at 198. 15 John Henry Newman, No. 157, “On the One Catholic and Apostolic Church,” Sermon 4, 42, n. 2. 16 Komonchak, John Henry Newman’s Discovery of the Visible Church (1816 to 1828), 347.

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Articles and the Book of Homilies. e writings of the early Fathers were valued especially as witnesses to and expositors, if not interpreters, of scriptural truth when a ‘Catholic Consent’ of them could be established. In this context, apostolic Tradition was a source of appeal, even if it was not binding or authoritative. A high churchman also laid stress on the primacy of dogma and the efficacy and necessity of sacramental grace, both in baptism and the Eucharist. He tended to cultivate a practical spirituality and soteriology based on good works nourished by sacramental grace and exemplified in acts of self-denial and charity rather on a purely subjective conversion experience or unruly manifestations of the Holy Spirit. He also upheld a Church establishment but insisted on the duty of the state as a divinely ordained rather than merely secular entity, to protect and promote the interests of the Church.17 By 1826, partly through his own parochial experience as a curate at St  Clement’s in Oxford, and partly through his intellectual experience as a Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, where he had come under the influence of key figures among the so-called Oriel ‘Noetics’. rough Edward Hawkins (on tradition), Richard Whately (on the Church), William James (on baptismal regeneration), and John Davison (on prophecy), Newman had embraced some elements of what constituted high churchmanship. Nonetheless, caution here is required. Anglican Church party labels were still fluid, theological parameters and boundaries porous, while a degree of cross fertilization and even consensus between evangelical and orthodox churchmen remained a marked feature.18 Many contemporary churchmen cannot neatly be categorized.19 Newman had come to accept baptismal regeneration by this time, but this did not in itself signify an abandonment of evangelicalism for high churchmanship. Rather, it is evidence of evangelicalism itself being in a state of flux and comprising a spectrum of views. e major influence prompting Newman’s change of heart was not the Anglican formularies but his reading of the evangelical John Bird Sumner’s Apostolical Preaching Considered (1815), a copy of which Hawkins had given him on August 19, 1824. Moreover, the evidence of the Oriel College Library records

17

Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 25-26. See Peter B. Nockles, “Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England 1750-1833: e ‘Orthodox’ – Some Problems of Definition and Identity,” in The Church of England c. 1689 – c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 334-359. 19 Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 26. 18

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suggests that at this time he borrowed other works on the controversy over Predestination and Free Will.20 e Arminian Sumner undermined Newman’s previous reliance on a Calvinist idea of efficacious grace by election which, according to Sumner, would have reduced baptism to little more than an external mark of admission to the visible Church.21 Sumner may not have been an entirely representative evangelical, and anyway Calvinists themselves held that grace attended baptism, so that it was not only high churchman who rejected a ‘low’ view of baptism. In adopting Sumner’s view, Newman did not reject evangelicalism per se but only the doctrine which denied “a spiritual change in baptism altogether.”22 If Newman was reacting against a predestinarian soteriology,23 his own parochial experience had already showed up the ‘unreality’ of sharply differentiating the converted from the unconverted, the regenerate from the unregenerate. Edward Hawkins’ Dissertation on the Use and Importance of Unauthoritative Tradition, as an Introduction to Christian Doctrine (1818)24 with its theological method of arguing from doctrine taught by the Church to scriptural evidence rather than vice versa, sat more awkwardly with evangelical principles. Newman had maintained a rigid distinction between the visible and invisible Church, a distinction undermined by his shi on the doctrine of baptism. However, in his sermon “On the One Catholic and Apostolic Church” preached in 1826, the Nicene Creed’s profession of belief marked a point of departure.25 Newman later maintained that his belief in the independence of the visible Church from the state, derived from Whately’s Letters on the Church (1826).26 It was the apparently latitudinarian Whately who argued “that individual Christians have no life in them unless they continue branches of the true 20

Atkins, “Evangelicals,” 182-183. John B. Sumner, Apostolical Preaching Considered, in an Examination of St Paul’s Epistles (1815), 6th ed. (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1826), 181. 22 John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings, edited, with an Introduction by Henry Tristram of the Oratory (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 78. 23 “I am almost convinced against predestination and election in the Calvinistic sense” – February 21, 1826, in Autobiographical Writings, 208. 24 John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled “What, then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 65-66. 25 McCormack, The Development of John Henry Newman’s View of the Christian Life, 60. 26 Whately had “fixed in him those anti-Erastian views of Church polity, which were one of the most features of the Tractarian movement.” Newman, Apologia, 69. 21

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Vine as members of the Body of Christ.” e Church was “the appointed channel through which grace is conveyed.”27 Oriel noeticism had always been more a frame of mind and religious temper than a distinctively liberal theological creed. It only later came to be presented as doctrinal liberalism with hindsight aer the rise of the Oxford Movement. Noeticism encompassed a range of views,28 including ‘high church’, as attested by Edward Copleston’s Bosworth Lectures and Hawkins’ treatise on tradition.29 Newman’s turn to the visible Church did not in itself signify the transfer from one theological system to another.30 Many evangelicals, conscious of charges of being ‘irregular’ or ‘Methodist’, increasingly stressed their churchmanship.31 Some evangelicals valued the Fathers. Newman’s own first interest in them was through having his imagination inspired by the evangelical Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ with its vivid portraits of the “age of the martyrs.”32 Zuijdwegt has shown that a more promising marker of Newman’s turn in terms of soteriology from evangelicalism to a more sacramental understanding of religion is to be found in his sermons.33 Newman’s emphasis ceased to be on faith over works and faith in the atonement as

27

R. Whately to E. Hawkins, September 3, 1830, Oriel College Archives 2/179. 28 e term noetic derived from the Greek word for knowledge. Noesis is the fourth and final stage in Plato’s chart for the growth of intelligence. David Newsome suggested ‘the free thinkers’ as its meaning in The Parting of Friends (1966), 66. However, this was more appropriate a term for their later activities aer 1829 rather than earlier. Michael Brock, “e Oxford of Peel and Gladstone,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VI, Part 1, ed. M. G. Brock and M.  C. Curthoys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 7-71, at 48. See also R. Brent, “Note: The Oriel Noetics,” ibid., 72-76. 29 W.  J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, D.D. Bishop of Llandaff (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1851), 47; William Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Oriel ‘Noetics’ (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1909), 45. 30 Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift, 141. 31 Gareth Atkins, “‘True Churchmen’: Anglican Evangelicals and History, c. 1770-1850,” Theology 115 (2012): 339-349. 32 Newman, Apologia, 62. 33 Zuijdwegt rightly questions the alternative interpretation by Paul Vaiss of a much later ‘evangelical phase’ to Newman based on selective evidence and a misdating of sermons. Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift, 116. Cf. Paul Vaiss, “Newman’s State of Mind on the Eve of His Italian Tour,” in From Oxford to the People: Reconsidering Newman and the Oxford Movement, ed. Paul Vaiss (Leominster: Gracewing, 1996), ch. 18-19.

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the only sure means to salvation in favor of the centrality of moral obedience to conscience.34 His unpublished critique of the Scottish evangelical Presbyterian divine, omas Chalmers, involved a rejection of Chalmers’ apparent teaching that the atonement was the sole instrument of conversion and that its effect was “to make religion a matter of feeling.”35 Moreover, for Newman the sacraments increasingly became the main channels and necessary means of salvation. Newman did not regard himself as yet aligned to the high church party as is clear from a letter to his friend, Samuel Rickards in November 1826. Newman pointedly refrained from identifying the historic Church of England and her divines with any one party: “I begin by assuming,” he wrote, “that the old worthies of our Church are neither orthodox nor evangelical, but untractable persons, suspicious characters, neither one thing nor the other.” He wanted Rickards to “give a summary of their opinions,” taking them as ‘the English Church’. He hoped for a consensus fidelium, achievable by “distinctly marking out the grand scriptural features of that doctrine in which they all agree.” He hoped that Rickards could present the ‘old divines’ as “a band of witnesses for truth, not opposed to each other (as they now are).” He wanted these divines to be treated “as a whole, a corpus theologorum et ecclesiasticum, the English Church.”36 Significantly, Rickards baulked at this challenge. e letter shows that Newman’s ecclesiological vision at this stage was inchoate and evolving. ere was no inevitability about his theological trajectory. Stephen Morgan has argued that the best way of treating Newman at any point in his history is “as a person with an open future, rather than reading back some future event” in the service of an “apologetic meta-narrative.”37 On the other hand, Newman’s comments to Rickards contain a hint that he would not long remain content with diversity and variation – the theological character of the English Church required systematization. A better case for Newman’s adoption of high churchmanship is provided by his attitude during the re-election contest of Sir Robert Peel as 34 Geertjan Zuijdwegt and Terrence Merrigan, “Conscience,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, 434-455, at 442. 35 [J. H. Newman], “Critical Remarks upon Dr Chalmers’ eology,” 1834?, Newman MS. A.9.1., p. 9. Birmingham Oratory Archives/Newman Digital Archive B123-A004. 36 Newman to Samuel Rickards, November 26, 1826, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, I, ed. Ian Ker and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 310. 37 Morgan, The Search for Continuity, iv.

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MP for the University of Oxford. In February 1829, Peel, Home Secretary in the Wellington administration, resigned his seat because he had come out in favor of Catholic Emancipation, an unpopular measure at Oxford University. Newman always professed to be ‘indifferent’ as to the merits of the measure itself. His was not the implacable opposition of the Protestant high church party on explicitly anti-Catholic grounds. For him, it was a matter of rejecting political expediency and reasserting against men of “rank and talent” the rights and independence of both Church and University, the latter, as a “place set apart.”38 It was to mark a decisive parting of the ways between Newman and his erstwhile Oriel noetic friends and mentors. e Noetics were out of tune with the prevailing Tory high church anti-Catholic emancipationist sentiment in the university. Newman, under Whately’s influence, had himself supported Catholic Emancipation and voted against the university’s anti-Catholic petitions in 1827 and 1828. us his volte-face on the subject dismayed the Noetics, especially Whately. Although there had once been some rapprochement between the Oriel Noetics and so-called ‘Hackney Phalanx’ high churchmen,39 this had broken down by the late-1820s. e so-called old high church party represented by divines such as John Hume Spry, himself connected to Oriel, came to dislike everything that the Noetics stood for. Whately was singled out as the, “mouthpiece and indefatigable supporter of a party in the Church which promises to do more harm to her doctrine and discipline than all the Calvinism, or dissent, or evangelism of the last century has effected.”40 Whately assumed that Newman must be allying with the ‘high and dry’ or ‘two bottle orthodox’ churchmen of popular caricature. Whately took mischievous pleasure as Principal of St Alban Hall in inviting and seating the fastidious Newman into the company of “a set of the least intellectual men in Oxford to dinner, and men most fond of port.” As 38 J. H. Newman to Mrs Newman, March 1, 1829, Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during His Life in the English Church, ed. Anne Mozley, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), I, 202. 39 Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9-20; Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 148-149. On the Hackney Phalanx, see Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 13-15; Clive Dewey, The Passing of Barchester: A Real Life Version of Trollope (London: Hambledon, 1991). 40 J.  H. Spry to H.  H. Norris, December 10, 1829, Ms Eng Lett. c.789, fos. 200-201. Norris Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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Newman recalled, Whately aerwards “asked me if I was proud of my friends.”41 e story of the genesis of the Oxford Movement, its reaction against both evangelicalism and liberalism and Newman’s direction of that reaction has been oen told. Likewise, Newman’s readiness to work with representatives of the old high church party, notably Hugh James Rose (1795-1838), a Cambridge divine, and William Palmer of Worcester College (1802-1885), in the early stages of the Movement, if only for tactical reasons, has been explored by the present author elsewhere.42 What concerns us here is the extent to which Newman actually drew upon and made his own, traditional high church Anglicanism. On what terms did he embrace it? Was it on a provisional basis or one of permanence? Newman claimed that without a belief in dogma, religion was “a mere sentiment,” “a dream and a mockery.”43 is belief, he insisted had guided him from the time of his first conversion at the age of fieen, throughout his evangelical period, even during the time he came under the liberal spell of Whately in around 1827. It became “the fundamental principle of the Movement of 1833.” It is possible of course to regard Newman’s later claim to a lifelong emphasis on dogma as an example of a retrospective representation of his religious history, concealing phases of his life and thought that do not fit this picture. It is clear that what constituted dogma for Newman changed over time. Moreover, dogma was never viewed in isolation from praxis. e Movement’s foundational dogma, in Newman’s words, was “that there was a visible Church with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace.” He thought that “this was the doctrine of Scripture, of the early Church, and of the Anglican Church.”44 A corollary of Newman’s emerging emphasis on the necessity of the mediation of the visible Church in the life of faith was an uncompromising attitude towards Protestant Dissenters who rejected any notion of an ecclesial body having authority over an individual and who indulged in unrestrained private judgment. In this, Newman was at one with the more rigid high churchmen of earlier generations.45

41

Autobiographical Memoir, 73. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 274-277. 43 Newman, Apologia, 120. 44 Ibid., 121. 45 For an example of Newman’s rigidity over Protestant Dissent, see the Jubber case when in June 1834 Newman refused to marry at St Mary’s the daughter of a Balliol College pastry cook who was a Baptist, because she was unbaptised. 42

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When it came to the Fathers, Newman himself owed a huge debt to several distinguished high churchmen. Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854), the aged President of Magdalen College, William Van Mildert (17651836), Bishop of Durham, William Rowe Lyall (1788-1857), Archdeacon of Maidstone, John Kaye (1783-1853), Bishop of Lincoln, and Charles Lloyd (1784-1829), whose private lectures as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Newman had attended in 1823-1824, were sources of inspiration for Newman. Newman was to inherit his evolving view of preNicene theology from his seventeenth-century Anglican forebears, notably William Cave and George Bull. His first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), started life as a proposed article on the irtynine Articles and Church Councils, which the editors of the Theological Library, Rose and Lyall, had invited him to contribute. In The Arians, with its discussion on the origins and causes of early heresies, Newman was writing primitive Church history within an Anglican tradition that sought a return to the primary sources.46 Newman also used and applied the history of the Arian controversy to the Church controversies of his own day in the early 1830s.47 Newman’s early steps into high church Anglicanism were slow and halting. For Newman, liberalism was the immediate and the most insidious enemy, not the threat to an establishment.48 While Newman increasingly deplored what he perceived as a subjective tendency in popular evangelicalism and its potentially liberalizing implications, he did not disown the evangelical tradition as a whole or even with the evangelical party in spite of his withdrawal of membership from evangelical societies. Newman’s assertion in his Apologia that the Oxford Movement was primarily directed against liberalism should be taken at face value rather than as the late Frank Turner fancifully suggested, a later smokescreen for Newman’s real contemporary bête noir, evangelicalism.49

Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), 128-129. 46 Benjamin J. King, “e Church Fathers,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, 113-134. 47 Stephen omas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-62. 48 “An abundance of champions will easily be roused to defend the Church as an establishment. For this reason, we have given our efforts exclusively to the defence of the Church against liberalism whether of doctrine or discipline.” J. H. Newman to Charles Marriott, [1834 or 1835], in Letters and Diaries, XXXII, ed. Francis J. McGrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11. 49 Turner, John Henry Newman, 9-11.

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ere is no reason to doubt Newman’s initially inclusive approach during his visits to rural clergymen during 1833 in order to rally support for the Tracts for the Times. As he later made clear: “I did not care whether my visits were made to high Church or low Church; I wished to make a strong pull in union with all who were opposed to the principles of liberalism, whoever they might be.”50 It would seem that Newman, as in that letter of Rickards, was still acting on the principle of assembling a ‘band of witnesses’, ‘harmonized’ in their opposition to liberalism. Newman made sure that some of the early numbers of the Tracts for the Times, notably Tract 8, “e Gospel a Law of Liberty,” appealed to evangelicals. Newman even commenced a series of letters advocating a revival of Church discipline which were published in the hard-line evangelical newspaper, The Record. ere were several issues – a protest against erastianism in the face of the Whig government’s interference in Church affairs, the importance of the ministerial office and of pastoral responsibility – which could unite Evangelical and Orthodox. Both would decry the so-called ‘fox hunting parson’ of an earlier generation. If anything, it was the so-called ‘high and dry’ Church party who initially were more unsettled by the new movement than evangelicals were. As long as there was a continuing sense of the ‘Church in Danger’ generated by challenges from without, the Movement could remain broad-based in its appeal. Newman later recalled that it was from 1834 onwards that he put the ecclesiastical doctrine which he had come to embrace “on a broader basis, aer reading Laud, Bramhall, and Stillingfleet and other Anglican divines on the one hand; and aer prosecuting the study of the Fathers on the other.”51 It has also been suggested that it was Martin Routh who had first directed Newman to the seventeenth-century divines.52 Apart from piecemeal reading (as evidenced by his Oriel Library borrowings) for particular controversial purposes, Newman’s more systematic study of and familiarity with the Anglican divines came relatively late. It followed his earlier systematic immersion in the Fathers. Newman complained that even the defenders of the Church in the crisis of 1833 appeared to know too little of its institutional and 50

Newman, Apologia, 111. Ibid., 121. 52 T. M. Parker, “e Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition,” in The Rediscovery of Newman: A Portrait Restored, ed. John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 31-49. 51

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theological past and inheritance. ey dwelt too much on temporalities and too little on the apostolic and spiritual basis of Church authority. He increasingly sensed that it was only secular and state interests, and not doctrinal consensus, that held the Church establishment together. “Viewed internally,” the Church was not one “except as an Establishment.” On the contrary, he maintained, it had been “the battle field of two opposite principles; Socinianism and Catholicism – Socinianism fighting for the most part by Puritanism its unconscious ally.”53 e Church of England needed to be re-catholicized before it could be successfully defended from its opponents. As he told his friend Maria Giberne in September 1835, there needed to be a revival of “the system which nourished our great divines of the 17th century, Taylor and the rest!”54 Newman’s debt to and reverence for the Anglican divines is clear from the content of the Tracts for the Times themselves. Of the series of ninety Tracts, sixteen were reprints of Anglican authors. It was necessary to show that patristic teaching and practice had persisted throughout the Anglican centuries. us, in Tract 38, Newman confidently asserted that “in the seventeenth century the theology of the English Church was substantially the same as ours is.”55 Newman adopted omas Wilson (1663-1755), Bishop of Sodor and Man from 1698, as an exemplar in the primitive Church mold in terms of a revival of ecclesiastical discipline. Wilson’s Form of Excommunication and Form of Receiving Penitents were reproduced as Tract 37 and Tract 39, while his Meditations of His Sacred Office formed another seven of the Tracts for the Times.56 Other reprints in the Tracts were of treatises on public prayers and liturgical offices of the Church, including by William Beveridge (1637-1708), Bishop of St Asaph from 1704. e project of a recovery of the ‘treasures’ of the Church was directly tied to overcoming the “ignorance of our historical position as churchmen” which he regarded as “one of the especial evils of the day.”57 Newman’s Tract 74 concerned the apostolic succession. A selection of extracts from 53 Newman to H. J. Rose, May 23, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, ed. omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 301, 302. 54 Newman to Maria Giberne, September 4, 1835, in Letters and Diaries, V, 135. 55 Tract 38: “Via Media. No. I,” 11. Tracts for the Times: By Members of the University of Oxford. Vol. I [1833-1834] (London: Rivington; Oxford: Parker, 1840). 56 Austin Cooper, “e Tracts for the Times,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, 137-150, at 141-142. 57 Tract 41. Tracts for the Times [1834], 6-7.

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forty-three Anglican authors provided the appropriate chain of witnesses to the doctrine. Other catenae patrum to the doctrines of Baptism and catholic Consent made up Tracts 76 and 78 respectively. Yet even while historic Anglicanism was being enlisted, Newman’s own future path remained uncertain. He was only one step ahead of the message which he was promulgating, gaining confidence as his views developed. e concept of the via media was a way of systematizing and unifying that “band of witnesses” which he felt necessary for the identity of the English Church. As Newman’s friend and a later biographer, R. H. Hutton, put it, it was an ecclesiastical “working hypothesis.”58 However, Newman still lacked a clear idea of “the foundation and limits of the Anglican consensus needed for a middle path between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.”59 As he famously put it: “We have a vast inheritance, but no inventory of our treasures. All is given us in profusion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, harmonize, and complete.”60 2. Newman’s Construct of an Anglican Via Media e Tracts for the Times were one such inventory.61 ere was nothing distinctively Anglican about the via media concept per se, as it had been part of the traditional representation of orthodoxy since the patristic era.62 e Aristotelian notion of a ‘golden mean’ was well known. It was a notion which the Restoration Church of England, following the lead of the Laudian divines, had taken up. However, recent scholarship has deconstructed the notion that the Church of England historically represented a middle way between the Roman Catholic Church and continental Protestantism. e via media was a fragile as well as an ideological

58

Richard H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1905), 57. 59 John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, ed. H. D. Weidner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), xxvii-xxviii. 60 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: Rivington, 1837), 30. 61 George Herring, The Oxford Movement in Practice: The Tractarian Parochial World from the 1830s to the 1870s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18. 62 Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 14.

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construct, devised for polemical or apologetic purposes.63 As Paul Avis observes, the “English Church was not in the middle of anything.” Rather, it was widely regarded for three centuries aer the Reformation as “belonging firmly within the family of European Reformed Churches.”64 Cranmer would have been shocked by Newman’s apparent application of the via media, as would the great Elizabethan apologist of the Reformed Church of England John Jewel. Cranmer’s concern is better understood as seeking a middle way, not between Catholicism and Protestantism, but between different versions of Protestantism or rather, a ‘third way’ bypassing both Rome and Wittenberg.65 Taking his cue from his friend, Hurrell Froude, who famously dubbed Jewel “what you would call in these days an irreverent Dissenter,”66 Newman privately jettisoned the Reformers. By 1838, he was confiding his sense of relief that he no longer needed “all sorts of fictions and artifices to make Cranmer or others Catholic.”67 In contrast, traditional high churchmen had celebrated the English Reformers, if on different terms from that of evangelicals. Jewel’s Apology (1559) was deemed sacrosanct. Newman got round the problem by claiming that Jewel and others had allowed themselves to be contaminated by the foreign Protestantism of Zurich and Geneva68 – a view which recent scholarship has shown to be an anachronistic misrepresentation.69 Conscious of lack of support for his vision of Anglican Catholicity to be found in the writings of the English Reformers, Newman called for a ‘second Reformation’, to complete, if not correct the work of the first.70 Yet if Newman was thereby seeking to forge a new consensus which obscured an Elizabethan and Jacobean Church past, imposing a heightened polarity between Anglicanism and Puritanism, this was only what some Laudian divines, such as Peter Heylin, had done in the seventeenth 63

See Herring, Oxford Movement in Practice, 15-20. Avis, “Not Yet Anglicanism,” 200. 65 Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 205. 66 Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, 4 vols. (London: Rivington; Derby: Mozley, 1838-1839), III, 379. 67 J. H. Newman to T. Henderson, March 1838 (copy), Ollard Papers, Pusey House Library, Oxford. 68 Tract 38. Tracts for the Times [1834], 6. 69 Peter B. Nockles, “Survivals or New Arrivals? e Oxford Movement and the Nineteenth-Century Historical Construction of Anglicanism,” in Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003), 144-191. 70 Tract 41. Tracts for the Times [1834], 3. 64

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century. Like Heylin, Newman sought to marginalize ‘Ultra-Protestantism’ (Heylin’s ‘Puritanism’) from a Church of England mainstream. It has been plausibly argued that ‘Laudian’ divines such as Andrewes, Overall, and Montagu, also promoted a strict imitation of primitive doctrine and practice as normative for the Church of England in their day. For them, as much as for Newman, the via media construct symbolized a determined exclusivity, rather than mere moderation. Neither was it a mere via negativa – as Newman privately recorded in 1834, that “they who fix their eye on the Mean between existing extremes instead of eyeing the goal, mistake the shadow for the substance.”71 Newman’s via media, fully developed in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) claimed Anglican precedents for the theological formulation of the concept. While he chose the term and “under it arranged my own attack and my defence,” he recognized that it was not “original with me, but as Hall’s and many others.’’72 He was particularly indebted to Bishop John Jebb’s The Peculiar Character of the Church of England (1815),73 while it was Jebb’s life-long friend and correspondent, the Irish lay theologian, Alexander Knox (1757-1831), who also had an influence.74 Nonetheless, Newman by no means regarded the Oxford Movement as a mere passive legatee of the whole Anglican inheritance. He looked beyond and behind the English Reformation and its formularies to the early and undivided Church. e key here was the well-known canon or dictum of St Vincent of Lerins from his Commonitorium, enshrining the idea of ‘Catholic consent’: – quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. e dictum, which Newman had applied in Tract 78, dictated that an assent of faith was demanded of that which had been held always, everywhere and by all.

71

Newman MS. D.5.13, “Revolution of 1688,” Birmingham Oratory Archives/ Newman Digital Archive B162-A013. Newman had written on the cover of this manuscript – “Perhaps about the year 1834 not worth anything.” 72 J. H. Newman to H. P. Liddon, December 18, 1877, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 283. Joseph Hall (1574-1656), Bishop of Exeter, later Norwich, was a moderate Calvinist but staunch upholder of episcopacy. He was the author of a Treatise on the Old Religion (1639), which Newman cited in Tract 38. 73 John Jebb (1775-1833), Bishop of Limerick, 1823. 74 Newman, Lectures on Certain Difficulties, 327. See Peter B. Nockles, “Church or Protestant Sect: e Church of Ireland, High Churchmanship, and the Oxford Movement, 1822-1869,” The Historical Journal 41 (1998): 457-493, at 464.

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Initially, Newman and the Tractarians, in line with the older high church tradition, upheld what Kenneth Parker has called a ‘successionist’ view of history.75 is took for granted the Church of England’s linear continuity with primitive Christianity. However, Newman’s approach soon emerged. e Church of England was no longer simply the voice of Antiquity. It had to prove that it was. is entailed what Parker calls a ‘supersessionist vision of history’ assuming a normative primitive Christianity partially weakened or lost in practice. is promoted calls for a recovery or restoration of lost riches.76 It also entailed a dynamic application of Church history to reshape the present and reorient the future direction of the Church.77 Unlike most traditional high churchmen, Tractarians, Newman felt a tension between the quod semper and the constraints of the Anglican formularies, notably the irty-Nine Articles and Article VI in particular which dictated that only those doctrines found in Scripture could be imposed as of necessary faith. Chafing against these restrictions, Newman sought to ‘reconstruct’ an ecclesiology for Anglicanism based on a fixed, binding authoritative timeframe, the early Church. is meant going beyond the status quo in doctrinal and liturgical standards. Although an advance on the high church position outlined by Hawkins in his Unauthoritative Tradition, this had been the position of later Nonjurors such as omas Brett and omas Deacon. For old high churchmen, Anglicanism and Antiquity were substantially identical with the Fathers marshalled in Anglican order and costume, as omas Mozley put it.78 On the other hand, for Newman the Church of England was identical with Antiquity only in so far as it espoused the doctrine of the Fathers. e selectivity of Newman’s appeal to Anglican testimony extended to his marginalization of the rising latitudinarian element in the later seventeenth and eighteenth-century Church of England. He blamed this trend on the apparent liberalizing and Erastianizing influence of Dutch Arminians such as Limborch79 and Hugo Grotius80 on Anglican divines 75

Kenneth L. Parker, “Tractarian Visions of History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, 151-165. 76 Ibid., 155-160. 77 Ibid., 164. 78 omas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), II, 400. 79 Philipp van Limborch (1633-1712), Dutch Remonstrant (anti-Calvinist) theologian. 80 Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was a celebrated Dutch jurist and Arminian theologian who dedicated himself to the reunion of the Churches.

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such as William Chillingworth.81 At first Newman remained surprisingly understanding of the reasons why the late seventeenth-century Church of England came to pursue a policy of Protestant unity. Nonetheless, Newman regarded the Revolution of 1688 as “a crisis in her fortunes” for the Church of England as “it bound her almost in slavery to a latitudinarian and secularizing policy.”82 What he called “Revolution Protestantism” was “too cold, too tame, too Socinian-like to reach the affections of the people.”83 Newman privately even feared that the revered Caroline Divine Henry Hammond was “tinctured as regards the Sacraments with Grotianism.”84 Newman was clearly in agreement with his disciple and friend Samuel Wood’s comment in May 1837 that he proposed to write an article in the high church journal the British Critic, pointing out, “that the Arminianism which succeeded the Calvinism of the Reformation and was its reaction, and which assumes to itself […] the name of Orthodoxy, is just as non-catholic and more Rationalistic, and as far removed from the Mysterious and True System as Calvinism.”85 For Newman, the Caroline Divines were to remain a selective band of witnesses, not to be accepted uncritically. Even in the compilation of catenae in the Tracts for the Times, the theology of the extracts was not claimed as normative or authoritative in every case. e purpose was simply to show that the particular doctrines involved had the testimony of an Anglican ‘chain of witnesses’. For example, Newman defended against Froude’s the reprint of John Cosin’s History of Popish Transubstantiation (1627) as Tract 27, on the ground that it was a useful weapon against the popularity of ‘low’ views on the Eucharist associated with the eighteenth-century ultra-latitudinarian divine, Benjamin Hoadly. Likewise, when an old high churchman, Godfrey Faussett, Oxford’s Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, denounced the Tractarians for a “revival of Popery” partly on account of a Eucharistic doctrine “closely bordering

81

[J.  H. Newman], “Le Bas’s Life of Archbishop Laud,” British Critic 19, no.  88 (April, 1836), 368. A godson of Archbishop Laud and briefly a Roman Catholic convert, William Chillingworth (1602-1644) was the author of The Religion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation (1638). 82 Newman MS. D.5.13, “Revolution of 1688,” Birmingham Oratory Archives/ Newman Digital Archive. 83 J. H. Newman to H. J. Rose, May 11, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, 295. 84 J. H. Newman to E. Churton, March 14, 1837, in Letters and Diaries, VI, ed. Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 41. 85 S. F. Wood to J. H. Newman, April 8, 1837, in Letters and Diaries, VI, 53.

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on consubstantiation,” Newman complained that Faussett was really attacking the teaching of Laud and Cosin etc.86 One of the most significant elements in Newman’s construct of an Anglican via media between Rome and Geneva was its tentative and provisional character. For Newman it remained, “to be tried whether what is called Anglo-Catholicism, the religion of Andrewes, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson, was capable of being put into practice.”87 For him, it was but “a fine drawn theory, which has never been owned by any body of churchmen” and which had “slept in libraries.”88 For Newman, such a theology could not compete with a living system, even one as corrupted as he then claimed Rome to be. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume, as some (including myself) have plausibly argued, that at this relatively early stage on his religious journey Newman was putting the Church of England on trial.89 ere was nothing predetermined about the outcome. As early as May 1836, Newman had confided to Rose that “the Anglican system of doctrine is in matter of fact not complete – that there are hiatuses which have never been filled up – so that, though one agrees with it most entirely as far as it goes, yet one wishes something more.”90 By appealing directly to Antiquity Newman advocated abandoned points of primitive practice such as prayers for the dead (in Tract 77) and a reintroduction of an at least modified form of monasticism (in the British Magazine, vii. 666-667). In Tract 41, Newman even suggested that the irty-Nine Articles be supplemented by the insertion of an explicit statement of a doctrine of apostolic succession. is may have been in line with later Non-Juror teaching but there was a subtle difference in 86

J. H. Newman, A Letter to the Rev. Godfrey Faussett, D.D. Margaret Professor of Divinity, on Certain points of Faith and Practice (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1838), 19-20. 87 Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 20. 88 John Henry Newman, Discussion and Arguments on Various Subjects (1872) (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 17-19; Wulstan Peterburs, “e Rise and Fall of the Anglican Via Media of John Henry Newman: Some Implications for Ecumenical eology,” Downside Review 129 (2011): 1-21, at 5. 89 For this view, see George Herring’s comment: like Luther three centuries earlier, Newman was “personally testing the beliefs, formulas and practices of the ecclesiastical body in which he had been born; did they answer the needs of both his intellect and spirit? Like Luther he would need time, but the emerging answer was just as negative.” George Herring, What Was the Oxford Movement For? (London: Continuum, 2002), 62; Nockles, “Survivals or New Arrivals?,” 161. 90 J. H. Newman to H. J. Rose, May 1, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, 291-292.

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tone here in Newman’s position from that of Alexander Knox whose emphasis was on a via media enshrining ‘mental freedom’. Whereas for Newman the Anglican faithfulness to Antiquity needed to be proved and any defects from primitive teaching needed to be made good and ‘realized’ by the current Church of England, for Knox such faithfulness was taken for granted and any dissonance between Anglican and patristic teaching was purely hypothetical.91 While for Newman the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church repudiated the ‘errors’ of both Protestantism and Romanism with the Church of England positioned as a ‘middle way’ between the two, in practice Newman was more dismissive of the former than the latter. When Newman as a Roman Catholic reissued the Lectures in 1877 with a new preface, he conceded that he had “acted far more as an assailant of the religion of the Reformation than of what he called Popery.”92 He thus gave retrospective credence to the fears expressed at the time of the original publication by some high church supporters of the Oxford Movement as well as by its fiercest evangelical opponents. In the Lectures, Newman invoked a Church Catholic which neither Canterbury nor Rome fully represented. e same assumption underscored Tract 71 in which Newman conceded that the sacramentum unitas, regarded as essential for the purity of faith, had been “shattered in the great schism of the sixteenth century.” In consequence, Newman argued that at least since that era, “Truth has not dwelt simply and securely in any visible Tabernacle.”93 Not surprisingly, Tract 71 le a disquieting impression on Newman’s high church allies, with Rose complaining that Newman had only contended that there was safety in allegiance to the Church of England upon the mere principle of “any port in a storm.”94 One scholar, on the evidence of this Tract, dates the beginnings of Newman’s “emotional inclination towards Rome.”95

91 David McCready, The Life and Theology of Alexander Knox: Anglicanism in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 41. 92 John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, 1877), I, xvi. 93 Tract 71. Tracts for the Times [1836], 29-31. Tracts for the Times. Vol. III [1835-1836] (London: Rivington; Oxford: Parker, 1836). 94 H.  J. Rose to J.  H. Newman, May 13, 1836, J.  W. Burgon, “Hugh James Rose: Restorer of the Old Paths,” in Lives of Twelve Good Men, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1889), I, 116-283, at 215-216. 95 Rune Imberg, In Quest of Authority: The ‘Tracts for the Times’ and the Development of the Tractarian Leaders, 1833-1841 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1987), 105.

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Newman’s Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838) represented an attempt to endow the via media with doctrinal as well as ecclesial meaning. e two were linked. e bête noir of the Lectures was the Protestant principle of private judgment and in reaction an attempt to assert the mediation of the visible Church in the life of faith. A via media was drawn between a Lutheran interpretation of justification by faith alone and a Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by obedience, by recourse to a justification formulated in terms of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the Christian.96 e relationship of faith and works in justification was construed so as to avoid an undue reliance on personal spiritual experience. It was on this issue rather than on that of the doctrine of a visible Church, that Newman parted company most decisively with evangelicals. Its main argument was “directed against the beliefs which he himself had held as an evangelical,”97 while it has also been criticized for its misrepresentation of Luther’s teaching.98 It represented a departure from the position of many protestant high churchmen such as Samuel Wilberforce,99 who combined a high doctrine of the visible Church and sacraments with a highly Protestant forensic view of justification by faith.100 It was with these sensitivities in mind, that Newman’s friend Samuel Francis Wood cautioned Newman to tread carefully when treating this subject. As Wood warned Newman: Is not the peculiar [i.e. evangelical] view of justification in some sense their stronghold as it is only false as being partial and distorted, and has there not been a great school on that side since the Reformation? […] men must be induced to drop their notions on this point by being made good Catholics, and not vice versa. e last thing is like pulling at a horse’s tail instead of his bridle.101

96 John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification (London: Rivington, 1838), 316-317. 97 Henry Chadwick, “e Lectures on Justification,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 287308, at 289. 98 Alastair McGrath, “Newman on Justification: An Evangelical Anglican Evaluation,” in Newman and the Word, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 2000), 91-107, at 107. 99 Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873), later highly influential Bishop of Oxford, then Winchester. 100 David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (London: John Murray, 1966), 334. 101 Samuel F. Wood to J. H. Newman, April 8, 1837, in Letters and Diaries, VI, 53. Modern scholarship bears out a theological consensus on the doctrine of Justification by Faith among Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Caroline

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However, the Caroline Divines, especially Bishop Bull, were invoked in support of Newman’s views on this doctrine. Newman later conceded that the summer of 1839 represented the high point of the Movement and also of his own Anglican allegiance. He later recalled that his article, “Prospects of the Anglican Church” in the April 1839 issue of the British Critic, represented his “last words as an Anglican to Anglicans.” How did this happen? As long as the Church of England could be proved to be at one with Antiquity, all was well. However, the confidence of that allegiance predicated in these terms, was dealt two hammer blows through his private study and reading during that late summer. As Newman later recalled, “About the middle of June I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites […] It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism.”102 Antiquity was Newman’s stronghold, but his reading of this history led him to conclude that it was difficult to regard the Monophysites as heretics, “unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did not tell against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the fih.”103 is appeared to leave Newman’s Tractarian party “in the position of the Oriental Communion, Rome was, where she now is.”104 According to Newman’s Apologia account, his first doubts about Anglicanism were also influenced by Wiseman’s comparison of Anglicanism with Donatism in the Dublin Review, which when Newman read it in September 1839, gave him ‘a stomach ache’ aer the completion of his Monophysite research. As Newman famously put it, Wiseman’s appeal in that article to the palmary words of Saint Augustine, ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’, could be applied to deciding the controversy with the Monophysites as well as the Donatists, ‘absolutely pulverized’ his theory of the via media. Recent scholarship has underscored the forcefulness of the impact of Wiseman’s article and citations on Newman.105 Catholicity was shown to have been even more important than apostolicity for the early Church.

Divines. Alastair McGrath, “Anglican Tradition on Justification,” Churchman (1984), 32; Louis Weil, “e Gospel in Anglicanism,” Study of Anglicanism, 64-71. 102 Newman, Apologia, 208. 103 Ibid., 209. 104 Ibid. 105 Morgan, The Search for Continuity, 152-154.

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From now on, any appeal to antiquity as proof of Anglican apostolicity had to depend on a different basis. Any vision of apostolicity and unity had to include the authority and unity of the contemporary Church. Newman’s review of William Palmer’s Treatise on the Church of Christ in the British Critic in 1838 had already hinted at his uncertainty over the viability of the traditional high church ‘branch theory’. Palmer had denied that unity in doctrine was a note of the Church.106 Newman considered Palmer’s theology to be the best and most authoritative representative of Anglicanism.107 However, Newman was already uneasy with the apparent separation of doctrine from the Church implicit in the Anglican theory. As he observed in the review, “What becomes of the notes of the Church? What purpose do they serve? What relief and guidance is afforded to the inquiring mind, if the Church thus indicated preaches Popery in Rome and Zwingli-Lutheranism in England? e difficulty is certainly considerable?”108 Wiseman’s article heightened this latent misgiving. Although Benjamin King has recently suggested that the force of the Donatist/Anglican and Monophysite analogies were retrospective emphases by Newman and that ‘doctrinal history’ rather than ecclesiology were primarily at stake,109 ecclesiology played a part in the first loosening of his Anglican allegiance. For the first time, Anglicanism was failing Newman’s ‘reality’ test. Nothing would be quite the same again, though some of Newman’s Tractarian allies, notably Pusey, did not realize this for many years. In a revealing exchange with Pusey on the matter of ecclesiology as late as August 1844, Newman wrote: “What am I to say but that I am one who, even five years ago, had a strong conviction, from reading the history of the early ages, that we are not part of the Church?”110

106 William Palmer [of Worcester College], Treatise on the Church of Christ, 2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1838), I, 96-97. 107 Essays Critical and Historical by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Vol. 1: With an Introduction and Textual Appendix by Andrew Nash (Leominster: Gracewing, 2019), “Editor’s Introduction,” xxvi. 108 [J.  H. Newman], “Palmer’s Treatise on the Church,” British Critic 24 (October, 1838): 363. 109 Benjamin J. King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 162-163. 110 Newman to Pusey, August 28, 1844, in H.  P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, II, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 406.

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3. Where Is the Church of Catholicism? e central question for Newman was becoming not so much what is the Catholicism of the Church but where is the Church of Catholicism?111 Newman’s article in the British Critic in January 1840, “e Catholicity of the English Church” was an attempt to allay his own nagging doubts, tackling the ecclesiological issue of Anglican Catholicity head-on. e ‘difficulty’ which Newman posed was that, “the Church being ‘one body’, how can we, estranged as we are from every part of it except our own dependencies, unrecognized and without intercommunion, maintain our right to be considered as part of that body?”112 Newman cited various Caroline and Non-Juror Divines as exponents of the ‘branch theory’ of independent episcopal churches but appeared to distance himself from it in the face of Saint Augustine’s famous dictum. Nonetheless, he took comfort in the fact that the Church of England had providentially survived and the fact that the Roman Church had a much less close connection with the faith of the primitive Church. is was hardly a ringing endorsement of Anglicanism. at Newman was not entirely convinced by his own apologetic was revealed in a private letter at this time in which he confided: A great experiment is going on, whether Anglocatholicism has a root, a foundation, a consistency, as well as Roman Catholicism, or whether (in the language of the day) it be a “sham.” I hold it to be quite impossible, unless it be real, that it can maintain its ground – it must fall to pieces – this is a day when mere theories will not pass current.113

‘Reality’ meant ‘living’. As the question of the notes of the Church in Anglicanism – catholicity or even apostolicity came to be contested and problematic in his mind, so the ultimate other note, that of holiness became ever more important for Newman. Without it the other notes would be superficial. Did the Church of England bear the marks of sanctity? Newman had already begun to wonder if the Church of England lacked “the provisions and methods by which Catholic feelings are to be detained.” His own translations of the Roman Breviary in Tract 75 had been a way of furnishing richer devotional models. He was on the lookout for signs of holiness and spiritual life in the past and present history

111

Morgan, The Search for Continuity, 215. Newman, “e Catholicity of the English Church,” British Critic 22, no. 60 (January, 1840): 53. 113 J. H. Newman to W. C. A. MacLaurin, July 26, 1840, in Letters and Diaries, VII, ed. G. Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 369. 112

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of Anglicanism. is took Newman back to a closer examination of Caroline and Non-Juror spiritual writing. One fruit of this renewed interest was Newman’s translation and arrangement of the prayers of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), which comprised Tract 88. However, Newman eventually was to conclude that while the Church of England had historically produced worthy examples of piety such as Bishop Wilson, it was outshone by the spiritual luster of Roman Catholic models of sanctity. Newman’s friend, Dean Church, put his finger on how and why Anglican spirituality failed to impress and hold Newman as he lost other grounds of confidence. For Newman, It had little taste for the higher forms of the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung virtues; it was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence, in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the common world, and working in them, took no care to disengage itself or mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them.114

Significantly, Newman’s support for the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology designed to showcase the theology and spirituality of the seventeenth-century divines was always half-hearted. It came perhaps too late for him – it was only established in 1841, five years aer the commencement of the Library of the Fathers in 1836. Newman emphasized from the start that the project was ‘no plan of mine’. He confided the basis of his misgivings in a revealing letter to the project’s secretary, Charles Crawley, in January 1841: “For myself, I have never had any desire, or made any effort to manage our divines – I do not want to make them better than they are – I do not wish to bring the early Church to their judgment seat – Really I think one can bear to differ from them.”115 As we have seen, the standard high church Anglican method had been to bring the early Church to the judgment seat of the Church of England and its formularies, whereas Newman increasingly preferred to take the Anglican divines to the judgment seat of the early Church. He had lost all patience with the idea which he had advocated in his 1826 letter to Rickards, to try to harmonize and unify their teaching and witness and instill what he regarded as consistency into Anglican theology. Gone now was a concern to treat with the Anglican divines ‘as a whole’ and create a ‘consensus fidelium’ or ‘corpus theologicum et ecclesiasticum’. However, 114

R. W. Church, “Newman’s Apologia” (Guardian, 22 June 1864), in Occasional Papers, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), II, 390. 115 Newman to C. Crawley, January 14, 1841, in Letters and Diaries, VIII, ed. G. Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 17.

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Newman was to engage in one more ‘throw of the dice’ in his attempt to ‘re-catholicize’ the Church of England. Within two weeks of his letter to Crawley throwing cold water on the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, Newman embarked on perhaps his most ambitious and problematic work of controversy as an Anglican. According to Newman’s narrative in the Apologia, Tract 90, “Remarks on Certain Passages in the irty-Nine Articles,” published January 25, 1841, represented his last attempt to maintain the Anglican via media between Catholicism and Protestantism. He hoped that it might resolve for him that tension which he felt existed between the Vincentian dictum and the Anglican formularies. Newman now claimed that the Articles condemned only what he called the “dominant errors” or “the actual popular beliefs and usages sanctioned by Rome in the countries in communion with it” rather than “the Catholic teaching of early centuries.”116 Newman attempted to distinguish popular abuses from the formal decrees of the Council of Trent. Moreover, in his parsing of the various Articles to make his point, Newman cited and took shelter behind an array of mainly Caroline Anglican Divines. One criticism of Tract 90, as I have shown elsewhere, was that Newman was highly selective in his citations from those divines.117 Moreover, Kenneth Parker and Michael Pahls have persuasively highlighted Newman’s reliance on a work published in 1634 by Francis a Sancta Clara, aka Christopher Davenport, an early seventeenth-century Oxford convert to Catholicism. e question posed by Parker and Pahls was whether Newman’s Tract 90 really was his last ‘throw of the dice’ to justify the tenability of Anglicanism, or rather, a more ambitious project – an attempt to reconstruct Anglicanism on a more Catholic basis as a springboard for reunion between Canterbury and Rome. Pusey, as in his “Historical Preface” to a new edition of the Tract 90 published in 1865, assumed the latter. However, given Newman’s notorious reluctance to go along with reunion or ecumenical schemes, the former seems more plausible. Nonetheless, as Parker and Pahls conclude, it may not have been a case of ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.118 116

Newman, Apologia, 159-160. Peter Nockles, “Oxford, Tract 90 and the Bishops,” in John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, ed. David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, O.P. (Bristol: e Bristol Press, 1991), 28-87, at 44-45. 118 Michael G. Pahls and Kenneth L. Parker, “Tract 90: Newman’s Last Stand or a Bold New Venture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, 304319, at 305. See also George H. Tavard, The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism (London: Catholic Book Club, 1963), 149-160. 117

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As is well known, the hostile reaction to Tract 90, with a relentless spate of censures from the Anglican bishops and university authorities, undoubtedly contributed to the ebbing away of Newman’s residual faith in Anglicanism. e establishment of an Anglican-Lutheran bishopric at Jerusalem in November 1841 was the final nail in the coffin.119 He had long previously rejected the Church and churches of the Reformation which Anglican high churchmanship had upheld. He had tested to destruction any existing Anglican consensus on the nature of the Church of England as both Catholic and Reformed, while also losing sympathy with those of its characteristics as national and established which older high churchmen had valued. Newman may have had nearly four more years within the Church of England, but his Anglican life as a committed Anglican was already effectively over, as symbolized by his retreat to Littlemore. As he famously put it in the final stages of his narrative in the Apologia: “From the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees […] A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back.”120 Such language points to the reasons for the slowness of the conversion process for Newman. Loss of faith in Anglicanism, which for a season led to his retreating to ‘pure Protestantism’, by no means directly correlated to a positive pull towards Rome. ere were further hurdles to come on that leg of his journey which culminated in his reception into the Roman Catholic Church by Blessed Dominic Barberi on 9 October 1845. It was through his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, based on the last of his University Sermons published in 1843, The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine, that he confronted and was able to provide answers to the Anglican apologetic which he had hitherto espoused.121 What on Protestant principles could be dismissed as doctrinal corruptions could now be seen as an elucidation of the original deposit of faith through the Spirit’s presence in the Church. In a famous analogy, just as a child could not exactly resemble the appearance of the man he becomes, so the Church of the day could not exactly resemble her early self.

119

See Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 157-164. Newman, Apologia, 257. On Newman’s long Anglican ‘deathbed’, see Gilley, Newman and His Age, 209-222; Sheridan Gilley, “Newman’s ‘Anglican Deathbed’,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, 320-329. 121 See C. Michael Shea, “Doctrinal Development,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, 284-303. 120

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4. Epilogue and Conclusions What the Tractarian Newman had sought in Antiquity was unity of faith. His patristic reading convinced him that he had found it there. Once he had started to shi from his earlier evangelical moorings towards a more sacramental view of religion with an emphasis on obedience, he became aware of a lack of unanimity over even some core doctrines within the Church of England. e high church Anglican tradition began to exert an appeal, though it remained unclear that his religious journey would take him in that direction. As early as 1826 he was looking for ways of forging a unified consensus of Anglican teaching from the ‘band of witnesses’ to higher truths which he was identifying from Anglican history. He wished to circumvent the extent to which those witnesses differed among themselves. Rickards was gently dismissive of Newman’s plan, and one of Newman’s later bitterest critics, Edwin Abbott, fastened on to this interchange as pregnant of future consequences. For Abbott, this plan was “characteristic of Newman, proceeding from him, as it did, at a time when he knew extremely little about” the Anglican divines. Of course, Newman would make the selection to suit his purpose, Abbott complained.122 Newman could be privately disparaging about “the old unspiritual high church” or ‘high and dry’ and, with the notable exceptions of Rose and Palmer of Worcester,123 never developed close social relations with members of that party. Yet he readily settled for an alliance of convenience with Anglican high churchmanship in the early and middle phases of the Oxford Movement. Yet just as the evangelical Newman struggled to claim Anglicanism as his own, so it was with the Tractarian Newman. His confessional identity in both cases was almost a secondary consideration. In both instances he had to harmonize his own religious allegiance and experience with the doctrinal and liturgical tradition of his Church. Both attempts proved ultimately unsuccessful.124 Tensions and differences between Newman and his evangelical coreligionists had widened in the late-1820s. A similar pattern followed from the mid-1830s onwards as tensions and differences widened between Newman and old high churchmen. Newman increasingly rejected the Reformers and the Protestant nature of the Church of England. He 122 Edwin Abbott, The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1892), I, 88-90. 123 Newman consulted Palmer when writing his Arians of the Fourth Century. Nockles, “Church or Protestant Sect,” 466. 124 Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift, 83.

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reluctantly concluded that even the Caroline Divines had their limitations. ey, including Hooker, were only serviceable when strictly “agreeable to Catholic doctrine.”125 His attempt to interpret the Anglican formularies by reference to the Fathers and Anglican divines reached an unsuccessful apogee in Tract 90. Newman’s sister-in-law Anne Mozley complained that when appealing to the Anglican divines, he selected “here a teacher, there an authority,” but accepted “them no further than they fell in with his views.”126 Newman had earlier come to fault evangelicalism for its theological inconsistency – evangelicals had to choose between Churchmen or Dissenters. In a similar way, he came to fault high churchmanship for not recognizing that the Church of England must choose between Protestantism and Catholicism. Like evangelicals, high churchmen rejected the stark polarities which Newman presented them with. Doubt has been cast on whether Newman’s via media was really a middle way.127 In the end, as Christopher Dawson has suggested, “it was not a Via Media but a Via Ultima,”128 – a steep and narrow way. Newman’s understanding of the via media was not in terms of an amalgam of Catholic and Protestant elements which it came to mean for others, as if it merely signified the Anglican spirit of comprehension, compromise or consensus, or was a mere via negativa.129 While Newman’s Broad Church theologian contemporary F.  D. Maurice may have reformulated the theory in these terms,130 for Newman, even while he remained a committed Anglican, this would have amounted to “an exercise in eclecticism.”131 As he explained years later, his argument “founded on the term via media did not lie so much in Anglicanism as being in the middle, as in ‘Romanism’ 125

Newman, Lectures on Justification, 442. [Anne Mozley], “Dr Newman’s Apology,” Christian Remembrancer 8 (July, 1864), 178. 127 Imberg, In Quest of Authority, 85. 128 Christopher Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement and Newman’s Place in History (1933) [New edition] Introduced by Dr Peter Nockles. With a Biographical Note by Mrs Christina Stott (London: e Saint Austin Press, 2001), 114. 129 Morgan, The Search for Continuity, 111. 130 Stephen W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London: Mowbray, 1978), 16. However, Jeremy Morris, the acknowledged authority on F. D. Maurice, disputes this, arguing that Maurice strenuously denied that his view was ‘eclectic’ or ‘systematizing’. Jeremy Morris, The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 202, 206. 131 John R. Griffin, “Cardinal Newman and the Eclectic Heresy,” The Heythrop Journal 52 (2011): 410-417, at 412. 126

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being in the extreme.” He did not argue that “that which is in the middle must be right.”132 Moreover, Newman’s abandonment of the via media was “far from being a sudden flight” but “was a slow and hard-fought retreat in which he stubbornly contested every inch of the ground.”133 e tenacity of Newman’s adherence to the Vincentian canon held him back.134 Yet ultimately the via media, as he interpreted it, failed to satisfy Newman because he concluded that it could not be realized in the Church of England as a whole. Newman never really recovered his confidence in Anglicanism aer the hammer blows dealt him in 1839 with his study of the Monophysite controversy and Wiseman’s article with its analogy between the Church of England and Donatism as heresies leading to schism. Both these blows upset his notions of a balance of the center and periphery of authority and unity within the Church. e Anglican Newman also had to face the uncomfortable fact that many of his anti-Tractarian opponents made the same appeals to Anglican history and theology as he had done but with startling different results and outcomes. is reaction tested to destruction any attempt to repackage them into a coherent or unified consensus. Even his methodology of citing in the Tracts for the Times long lists or catenae patrum of Anglican divines was copied by some opponents in refutation of the very doctrines and practices for which he claimed their sanction.135 Newman’s longstanding anti-Tractarian opponents, of course, interpreted his abandonment of the Church of England for Rome in 1845 as proof not only of Newman’s bad faith as acting as ‘a papist in disguise’ but as showing how the tradition of high churchmanship as a whole was crypto-Roman in its tendency. Yet even many of his former followers and some disciples felt let down and some in retrospect asserted that he had misled and abandoned them. e argument made was that Newman

132 J. H. Newman to H. P. Liddon, December 18, 1877, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 283. 133 Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 114. 134 Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, 171. 135 For example, see William Goode, The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice, 3 vols. (London: Herman Hooker, 1842), and id., Tract XC Historically Refuted (London: J. Hatchard, 1845). See also Peter Toon, Evangelical Theology 18331856: A Response to Tractarianism (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1979), 138-139; Kenneth L. Parker, “Newman’s Individualistic Use of the Caroline Divines in the Via Media,” in Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman, ed. G. Magill (Carbondale, IL: South Illinois University Press, 1993), 34.

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had taken up Anglicanism not as ‘a given’ but as a paper theory which he tested by criteria of his own making. His friend Hugh James Rose had privately chided him in the mid-1830s for suggesting that the apostolic succession was “a truth now first recovered”136 and that the theological system represented by the via media existed only on paper. On the contrary, Rose asserted, it was “already found for us” and had long existed.137 In an influential article in the wake of Newman’s secession, his former disciple James Mozley questioned whether, in effect, Newman had ever been “one of us” or ever understood historic Anglicanism as an insider.138 Newman’s one-time curate and disciple, Isaac Williams made a similar point. Williams felt that Newman had regarded the whole Tractarian movement as an experiment which “he did not know whether the Church of England would bear, and knew not what would be the issue,” the Church of England being put on a trial of his own devising.139 John William Burgon even used the evidence of Newman’s candid correspondence with Hugh James Rose in the 1830s to raise a question mark over his Anglican loyalty.140 Newman was aware of all this. He was scathing about the first version of Burgon’s account published in The Quarterly Review in 1878, complaining that Burgon had made out Routh, the venerable President of Magdalen, to be ‘a mere Anglican’. By implication, Newman probably thought that Burgon had similarly misrepresented Rose.141 A few advanced high churchmen such as W. J. E. Bennett, even raised the specter of “the sin of schism.”142 Frederick Meyrick was particularly scathing of Newman’s course, absurdly denying Newman’s status as leader of the Oxford Movement while at the same time denigrating him for misdirecting it in the direction of Rome,143 and for his ‘restlessness’, 136 H.  J. Rose to J.  H. Newman, May 9, 1836, Burgon, “Hugh James Rose: Restorer of the Old Paths,” 211. 137 H. J. Rose to H. E. Manning, March 20, 1837, Ms Eng Lett c. 654, fol. 107, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 138 [J. B. Mozley], “e Recent Schism,” Christian Remembrancer 11 (January, 1846): 167-218, at 178. 139 Williams, Autobiography, 104. 140 Burgon, “Hugh James Rose: Restorer of the Old Paths,” 164-166. 141 Newman to J.  R. Bloxam, March 8, 1879, in Letters and Diaries, XXIX, ed.  Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 66. 142 W. J. E. Bennett, The Schism of Certain Priests and Others Lately in Communion with the Church: A Sermon (London: W. J. Cleaver, 1845). 143 Fredrick Meyrick, Old Anglicanism and Modern Ritualism (London: Skeffington and Son, 1901), 231.

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carrying the movement beyond its original position as “taken up by the Caroline Divines of the seventeenth century.”144 Erik Sidenvall has recently analyzed the hostile high church reaction to Newman’s conversion and of a resurgence of ‘anti-Romanism’ even from within later Anglo-Catholicism.145 Some Anglican critics argued that Newman was simply impatient. If only he had been content to let Tractarian teaching do its silent work, all would have been well.146 is might seem to misunderstand the nature of Newman’s search for religious truth and his quest to ‘realize’ theoretical doctrine, though it can be argued that the via media was in fact ‘realized’ and embodied in the Tractarian parochial revival aer 1845.147 Some were more charitable, notably Pusey, who described Newman’s departure for Rome as just moving to ‘another vineyard’, while his old friend, Richard Church, later Dean of St Paul’s, remained personally loyal. Newman emerges as the hero in his classic The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years (1891). His diagnosis of Newman’s reasons for leaving the Church of England was closer to the truth. As Dean Church later put it, for Newman, “Anglicanism was too limited, it was local, insular, national, its theory was made for its special circumstances.”148 One must return to the question whether Newman was ever a high churchman or rather, did he himself think he was? If in his letter to Rickards in 1826 Newman seemed to step aside from party labels, in the Apologia when looking back on his early Tractarian phase he did the same. Belying his use in 1857 of the ‘high church’ descriptor for a sermon he had preached in the mid-1820s, in the Apologia Newman recalled that while having supreme “confidence in our cause, yet as to the high Church and low church, I thought that the one had not much more of a logical basis than the other.”149 e case for Newman’s detachment from high church Anglicanism has also been made by the late J. M. Cameron who commented: “One might well say that Newman was never really an

144

Frederick Meyrick, Scriptural and Catholic Truth and Worship. Or: the Faith and Worship of the Primitive, the Medieval and the Reformed Anglican Churches (London: Skeffington and Son, 1901), 268. 145 Erik Sidenvall, After Anti-Catholicism? John Henry Newman and Protestant Britain, 1845-c. 1890 (London: T&T Clark, 2005), chap. 4. 146 Memorials of William Charles Lake, Dean of Durham, 1869-1894 (London: Edward Arnold, 1901), 45. 147 Herring, Oxford Movement in Practice, 19-20. 148 Church, “Newman’s Apologia,” 390. 149 Newman, Apologia, 50.

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Anglican with a lively affection for the Church of England as it actually was and functioned.”150 In this, Cameron argued, Newman differed from Keble and Pusey. Newman’s candid admissions to Rose in the mid-1830s might seem to lend credence to this view. In one letter in May 1836, Newman even concedes the point to Rose: “You have spoken the truth, not that I would go and tell everyone at Charing Cross, I do not love the Church of England.” However, Newman’s immediate qualification is important: “I love it for its human traits so sanctified and assimilated into the substance of the Church apostolic; but I cannot endure, except by patience and resignation, the insults of the world which she has worn now three hundred years.”151 Clearly, the Church establishment in bondage was one thing, the pure Church apostolic another. ere is no reason to doubt that Newman’s confident commitment as an Anglican to the latter was anything but wholehearted – the frequency of the words ‘confidence’ and ‘confident’ is striking. It is too easy, and only with the benefit of hindsight, to explain away his championship of the via media merely as a staging-post on a pre-ordered religious odyssey.152 Newman was wounded by James Mozley’s taking this line, complaining to Mozley’s sister and his own sister-in-law Anne Mozley, that it involved a breach of confidentiality – “in his first writings against me, he said what he never would have said without private knowledge of me, intimate conversations with me.”153 It has also been claimed that Newman’s apparent attempt to reconstruct a ‘unique Anglicanism’, not allowing for diversity, was always doomed because based on a myth,154 and that Anglicanism is best defined as a theological method rather than the cut and dried theological system which Newman sought to construct.155

150

J.  M. Cameron, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine [1845] (London: Harmondsworth, 1974), 18. 151 Newman to Rose, May 23, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, 301-302. 152 Wilfrid Ward, “Some Aspects of Newman’s Influence,” The Nineteenth Century 28, no. 175 (October, 1890): 569. 153 J.  H. Newman to Anne Mozley, July 6, 1878, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 380. 154 Stephen W. Sykes, “Newman, Anglicanism and the Fundamentals,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, 365-366; H.  L. Weatherby, “e Encircling Gloom: Newman’s Departure from the Caroline Tradition,” Victorian Studies 12, no. 1 (September, 1968): 57-58. 155 Henry R. McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London: SPCK, 1965), v-vi.

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As a Roman Catholic, Newman had mixed views of his own Anglican past. He may have decisively rejected the tradition of high church Anglicanism, but he did not turn his back entirely on the tradition which he had made his own for so long and which had helped shape him theologically and spiritually. He was aware of the debt which he owed to it. I hold none of the distinguishing doctrines of Protestantism nor have I for these (almost) forty years. ose doctrines did not advance me to my present opinions. I simply discarded them, and thus I “owe them nothing.” But I do owe much to Anglicanism. It was in the divines of the Anglican Church, Laud, Hooker, Bull, Beveridge, Stillingfleet and others, that I found those doctrines which either are Catholic or directly tend in my own case to Catholic doctrine.156

In fact, Newman’s former championship of Anglicanism continued to have a long aerlife. He was claimed by some as “the founder of modern Anglicanism.”157 In particular, as Paul Avis has observed, his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church “remains a valuable exposition of the Anglican position.”158 Moreover, as was observed fiy years later, even Newman’s beleaguered defense of “the Catholicity of the Anglican Church” in the British Critic in early 1840 was to serve “as an armoury from which Anglicans have drawn most of their weapons, directly or indirectly ever since.”159 e process began almost immediately. High churchmen lined up to use the rhetoric of a via media against Newman’s Essay on the Development of Doctrine.160 In his early Roman Catholic years, Newman could be uncompromisingly polemical, stressing the grounds of separation from his former religious allegiance. In a letter to a friend, he maintained that the position of those who leave the Church of England, in the only way in which I think it justifiable to leave it, is necessarily one of hostility to it. To leave it merely as a branch of the Catholic Church, for another which I liked better, would have been to desert without reason the post where Providence put me. It is impossible, then, but that a convert, 156 Newman to unknown correspondent, 1 November 1864, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, XXXII Supplement, ed. Francis J. McGrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 262. 157 W. Meynell, John Henry Newman: The Founder of Modern Anglicanism and a Cardinal of the Roman Church (London: Kegan Paul, 1890). 158 Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 240. 159 Luke Rivington, The Conversion of Cardinal Newman (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1891), 9. 160 Benjamin J. King, “Protestant Receptions of the Essay on Development,” 9-29, at 19.

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if justifiable in the grounds of his conversion, must be an enemy of the communion he has le, and more intensely so than a foreigner who knows nothing about that communion at all.161

His Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1850) were predicated on self-defense against “a very formidable party,” those Protestants who he regarded as “the heirs of the Traditions of Elizabeth”162 rather than Anglicanism per se. However, in his On Certain Difficulties of Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church (1850), Newman argued that the providential direction of the Oxford Movement had ever been in the direction of Rome and that it had never aimed to remain content with creating a mere party in the Church of England. e initial goal had been to re-catholicize the Church of England as a whole. e search for a consensus fidelium in the English Church, which had begun with his letter to Rickards in 1826, eluded him. He was to conclude that AngloCatholicism was uncongenial to the Church of England. It could not be assimilated by it and was an alien substance. Tractarian teaching was never able to claim the sanction of authority. It could only survive in the Church of England on a purely party basis, by claiming the same latitude as that claimed by and granted to Latitudinarians. In the Apologia, in which he described the Anglican Church as “a time-honoured institution, of noble historical memories, a monument of ancient wisdom,”163 a mellower tone is evident. Newman was anxious there to show that he had championed historic Anglicanism for a season in entirely good faith and with conviction. Originating as it did as an act of self-defense against the charges of dishonesty raised by Charles Kingsley, it was important for him to rebut the claim that his conduct towards the Anglican Church, while he was a member of it, was in any way that of a ‘fih columnist’. He was thus anxious to enlist the sympathy of Anglican readers. In a letter to Sir John Taylor Coleridge in 1869 he conceded that while “severity in speaking against Anglicanism” might be “necessary in a Catholic” it could also become “an outlet of ill-natured and spiteful feelings.”164 In 1871, he published a two-volume edition 161 J.  H. Newman to T.  W. Allies, February 20, 1849, omas W. Allies, A Life’s Decision (London: Kegan Paul and Co., 1880), 176. 162 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England […] With an Introduction and Notes by Andrew Nash (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000), 364. 163 Newman, Apologia, 340. 164 John Henry Newman to Sir J.  T. Coleridge, February 7, 1869, in Letters and Diaries, XXXI, ed. C. S. Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 86.

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Essays Critical and Historical, which comprised a collection of articles from his Tractarian Anglican years, mainly taken from the British Critic (which Newman edited from 1838-41). It is significant that he made only minimal alterations to the texts of the original articles. On the other hand, he was aware that his earlier Anglican writings continued to be used to defend the Anglican position. us, his strategy in Essays Critical and Historical, as Andrew Nash shrewdly observes, was to show that the principles of the Oxford Movement really led to the Roman Catholic Church.165 Moreover, it has been argued that his famous Preface to the 1877 edition of the Via Media (the republication and new edition of his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church) was composed partly in response to reports in 1874 from his friend Emily Bowes that the Tractarian clergyman Francis Paget (1806-82), nephew and one-time chaplain to Newman’s former Anglican ordinary Bishop Bagot of Oxford, was using the original Lectures to help dissuade Bowles’ friend, Lady Downe, the fourth daughter of the Bishop, and thus Paget’s cousin, from joining the Roman Catholic Church.166 In the Via Media, Newman sought to correct or explain his former by his later self. Yet, at the same time, Newman could assure Pusey’s disciple, the leading Anglo-Catholic Henry Parry Liddon, that the republication of the Lectures was not directed against the Church of England as such, apart from a few words, which he could “not conscientiously help,” but was rather primarily “directed against myself, against my defence of the Church of England, against my assault upon the Church of Rome.”167 Another sign of Newman’s soer attitude towards his former creed was in his efforts to restore various broken Anglican friendships. In this, William John Copeland (1804-85), former one-time Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and curate at Littlemore, enjoyed pride of place. His renewed friendship with Copeland preceded the publication of the Apologia in 1864. For many of the facts which Newman related in the Apologia, he relied on the return of old letters which he had sent to his friends such as Copeland and which were willingly returned to him for this purpose. It was Copeland who went on to edit a new edition of Newman’s Anglican Plain and Parochial Sermons in the

165 A. Nash, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Essays Critical and Historical by John Henry Cardinal Newman, viii-ix. 166 Weidner, ed., The Via Media of the Anglican Church, xlvii. 167 J. H. Newman to H. P. Liddon, December 18, 1877, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 282-283.

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late-1860s.168 Richard William Church, one of his former disciples and by then Dean of St Paul’s was another recipient of Newman’s renewed hand of friendship. In 1873 Newman dedicated to him a new edition of his Oxford University Sermons, “as one of those dear friends who, in five trying years from 1841 to 1845 in the course of which this volume was written, did so much to comfort and uphold me.”169 A further example of the store that Newman put on his past Anglican ties was the record of lapidary dedications of his publications to Anglican friends and mentors.170 Some Roman Catholic writers indeed expressed surprise that Newman continued to have any Anglican friends at all. On the other hand, it was manifestly not the case that his renewal of contact with them was a sign of any wavering in his own new ecclesiastical allegiance as some contemporaries darkly hinted. Every so oen Newman himself outspokenly corrected these false rumors.171 e rise and fall of Newman’s faith in high church Anglicanism by no means represented the end of Newman’s religious journey. For him, the Oxford Movement was always intended to be far more than an abstruse dialogue about the theoretical nature of Anglicanism.172 It started life as an assault on religious liberalism as much as a defense of the Anglican establishment and had within it a life of its own. His part in it cannot be reduced merely to that of a chapter in Anglican church history. Both on the eve of, and aer his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman’s ideas continued to evolve and change, not least in terms of ecclesiology173 and the way he interpreted the Fathers.174 is was partly under the influence of new friends, authors, and events. Nonetheless, despite the crossing of the Rubicon in 1845, the Newman of the Apologia and the Grammar of Assent was closer in terms of theological vision to the Tractarian Anglican Newman of the early and mid-1830s than to the evangelical Newman of the 1820s. He brought into Roman Catholicism certain of his key Anglican teachings, notably on the sovereign role of 168 Kenneth Macnab, “Newman’s Turkey: Abiding Friendships aer 1845,” unpublished lecture. 169 Gunter Biemer, “e Anglican Response to Newman” (book review), Philosophical Studies 8 (1958): 66. 170 Henry Tristram, Newman and His Friends (London: John Lane, 1933). 171 Sidenvall, After Anti-Catholicism?, 32-33. 172 Herring, Oxford Movement in Practice, 1. 173 See Ryan J. Marr, To Be Perfect Is to Have Changed Often: The Development of John Henry Newman’s Ecclesiological Outlook, 1845-1877 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). 174 See King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers, chaps. 4-5.

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conscience and the importance of the laity. In spite of the searching critique of high church Anglicanism and pleas to former disciples to follow his path in his Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, enduring elements of common ground and affinity connected the Roman Catholic Newman with the Anglican Newman.

2 How to Argue with Unbelief Newman, Ward, and Manning Engage the Secular Geertjan Zuijdwegt

One can imagine many ways Christians could approach unbelievers, and the Church has tried quite a variety in its long history. Preach to them is one. Persecute them is another. A third option with a long pedigree is to engage in argument. “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have,” says 1 Peter, and this injunction has been used to sanction apologetics from the Patristic era to ours. But Christian conceptions of the role of argument and the scope of reason in addressing unbelief have varied considerably. In this paper, I analyze the apologetic response of three prominent Victorian Catholics to what they, along with many Christians of the day, perceived as the rapid secularization of English intellectual culture. e subject is suited to the occasion, not only because it deals with John Henry Newman, but also because one of Terry Merrigan’s long-cherished wishes is to write a book on the place of Christian faith in secular culture. Perhaps the exilic state of retirement will provide the conditions required for such a momentous effort. If so, the present modest contribution might prove of some use. Besides Newman, I will be considering William George Ward and Henry Edward Manning. All three were Oxford educated converts from Anglicanism, and despite considerable differences in their subsequent ecclesial careers, they all became leading Catholic intellectuals. Although good comparative work has been done about them, the present contribution directs attention away from the intra-ecclesial spectrum on which their thought is commonly mapped out. Usually, Ward and Manning are presented as unbending Ultramontanists, who could not tolerate diversity in Catholic theological opinion, and rejected nineteenth-century achievements in critical historiography and the natural sciences. eir intransigence is contrasted with Newman’s openness to the liberal Catholicism of the Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review and to pioneering work in the fields of ecclesiastical history or evolutionary

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biology by people like Ignaz von Döllinger and St George Mivart. Even ad intra, this simplistic opposition is hard to maintain, but ad extra, it breaks down completely.1 When their engagement with unbelief is compared, Ward and Manning prove surprisingly open, while Newman appears more intransigent than many would guess. is difference does not only exist on paper. It was part and parcel of how they approached actual unbelievers.2 More than other branches of religious thought, apologetics presumes engagement not only with a given society and its culture, but with concrete proponents of that culture. Just think of Origen’s Contra Celsum. Unlike Origen and Celsus, Newman, Ward, and Manning had the chance to meet and debate the unbelieving luminaries of their day. But while Ward and Manning pounced on the opportunity, Newman spurned it. 1. Encountering Unbelief in the Metaphysical Society In 1869, one of the most remarkable debating clubs of the Victorian era was set on foot, the Metaphysical Society. Originally conceived as a means to unite prominent Christian intellectuals against the rising tide of unbelief, it was soon adapted to include those unbelievers themselves. In fact, it was at one of the first meetings of the Society that the biologist omas Henry Huxley coined the term agnosticism in order to distinguish his intellectual position from both atheism and Christianity. Ward and Manning were founding members of the Society, whose ranks comprised most of the day’s important intellectuals.3 As the informal hub of midVictorian religious discussion, it brought them into direct contact with a variety of unbelievers, including agnostics like Huxley, positivists like Frederic Harrison, and atheists, such as William Clifford. Meetings took place at the Grosvenor Hotel in London about nine times a year, always on Tuesdays at 8.30 p.m. Aer dinner, a paper was read by one of the members followed by discussion. Both Ward and Manning played an active and esteemed role in the Society. Manning delivered six papers between 1871 and 1879. He served as the Society’s chairman in 1873.

1

See James Pereiro, Cardinal Manning: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 2 For present purposes, an unbeliever is defined as one who (i) does not affirm the existence of the Christian God, and (ii) does not identify with another religion. 3 Notable exceptions were John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer and, as we shall see, Newman.

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Ward too was chairman, in 1870, and read three papers between 1869 and 1874.4 Upon the recommendation of Ward and others, Newman too was requested to be among the Society’s founding members. Richard Holt Hutton, editor of The Spectator, was asked to invite him, and did so in February 1869. Newman respectfully declined. He averred he was too old and a bit too unworldly. Besides, he did not feel learned enough, always “having dabbled in many things, and […] mastered nothing.”5 Hutton repeated the invitation in March 1871 with some urgency. “e physicists are almost too many for us,” he explained, “we really stand in the deepest need of a mind of your order of power on the positive side of metaphysical and ethical questions.”6 Newman declined once again. He professed to be too shy, and not a good debater: “I am not a ready man, and should spoil a good cause.”7 A few years later, when he found out what actually happened at the Society, Newman was glad he had never joined. “I hear that you and the Archbishop of York (to say nothing of Cardinal Manning etc.) are going to let Professor Huxley read in your presence an argument in refutation of our Lord’s Resurrection,” he wrote in dismay to his old friend Richard Church, Dean of St Paul’s.8 Newman felt such a scene would compromise members of the clergy – Anglican and Catholic – and wondered how on earth a question of fact like the occurrence of the resurrection could “come under the scope of a Metaphysical Society.”9 “I thank my stars that, when asked to accept the honour of belonging to 4 See Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947); Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England, eds., The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869-1880: A Critical Edition, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5 John Henry Newman to Richard Holt Hutton, February 27, 1869, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, XXIV, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 225-226. 6 Richard Holt Hutton to Newman, March 21, 1871, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 303. 7 Newman to Richard Hold Hutton, March 22, 1871, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, 304. 8 Newman to Richard William Church, January 11, 1876, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11. e paper was Huxley’s “e Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection,” January 11, 1876, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, II, 366-372. 9 Newman to Richard William Church, January 11, 1876, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 11.

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it, I declined,” he confided to Church. Newman simply could not comprehend Manning’s acquiescence in such sacrilegious proceedings, adding wittily: “Perhaps it is a ruse of the Cardinal to bring the Professor in the clutches of the Inquisition.”10 But Manning was not hunting heretics at the Grosvenor Hotel, quite the contrary. He actively engaged with Huxley’s thought. In a paper read before the Metaphysical Society in November 1870, Huxley – with some irony – had discussed the question, Has a Frog a Soul? Huxley’s purpose was to bewilder rather than to argue. Still, his description of the data obtained in dissecting a living frog suggested that – as in frogs, so in humans – the soul was either purely material or did not exist.11 Two months later, Manning read a paper in reply. He directly challenged Huxley’s implicit contention that human consciousness “is no more than a function of the brain.”12 Integrating the then cutting-edge brainresearch of William Carpenter with fundamental insights from scholastic philosophy, Manning presented a systematic account of the relation of the will to thought and defended the immaterial nature of the soul. e paper was published in the Contemporary Review, and shows that far from being “out of his depth” at the Metaphysical Society, as Edmund Purcell notoriously maintained, Manning could hold his own.13 William Magee, the Anglican Bishop of Peterborough, was probably nearer the mark when he recounted Manning’s bearing in the Society as “clever and precise and weighty.”14 Ward’s intellectual capacities were valued no lower among the Metaphysical Society’s members. Huxley remembered Ward as “a quick-witted dialectician, thoroughly acquainted with all the weak points of his antagonist’s case.”15 Huxley would occasionally come over for dinner at the 10 Newman to Richard William Church, January 11, 1876, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 11. 11 omas Henry Huxley, “Has a Frog a Soul; and of What Nature Is at Soul, Supposing It to Exist?,” November 8, 1870, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, I, 177-184. 12 Henry Edward Manning, “What Is the Relation of the Will to ought?,” January 11, 1871, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, I, 205. 13 Cf. Henry Edward Manning, “e Relation of the Will to ought,” Contemporary Review 16 (February, 1871): 468-479; Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1895), 513. 14 William Connor Magee to Mrs. Magee, February 13, 1873, in John Cotter MacDonnel, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, Archbishop of York, vol. 1 (London: Isbister, 1896), 284. 15 omas Henry Huxley to Wilfrid Ward, in Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (London: Macmillan, 1893), 314-315.

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Ward’s, and one time, he and Ward were so engrossed in discussion that “each returned home alternately with the other some five or six times, ending in a final parting very near cock-crow.”16 “[W]e soon became the friendliest of foes,” Huxley reminisced.17 e Unitarian theologian James Martineau praised Ward’s “singular metaphysical acuteness” and described him as a “skilled logical detective of fallacies.”18 Although Ward was one of the most regular attendants at the Society’s meetings, he presented fewer papers than Manning. is was partly due to the fact that in contrast to Manning, the primary forum for Ward’s intellectual engagement with unbelief was the periodical press rather than the Metaphysical Society. As editor of the leading Catholic periodical the Dublin Review and occasional contributor to secular journals such as the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century, Ward consistently challenged the epistemological underpinnings of Victorian unbelief for over a decade. 2. Ward, Manning, and the Argument with Mill Already in his Anglican days, Ward actively pursued controversy with unbelievers. In 1843, he wrote a lengthy review of John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic for the British Critic, in which he developed in outline the core arguments against the empiricism of Mill that became the stockin-trade of his later writings. Ward believed that if Mill’s fundamental position, that all knowledge is derived from experience, was granted, “the whole fabric of Christian eology must totter and fall.”19 Five years later, with his usual frankness, Ward addressed Mill personally: “I am rather anxious to understand to the bottom your grounds of unbelief.”20 He promised Mill strict confidentiality and listed a series of religious subjects on which he would like to hear Mill’s opinion. Mill courteously replied and honestly stated his objections to Christianity, emphasizing his disbelief in miracles and dislike for St Paul.21

16 omas Henry Huxley to Wilfrid Ward, in Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, 317. 17 omas Henry Huxley to Wilfrid Ward, ibid., 314-315. 18 James Martineau to Wilfrid Ward, ibid., 312. 19 William George Ward, “Mill’s Logic,” British Critic 34 (October, 1843): 349-427, at 356. 20 William George Ward to John Stuart Mill, Winter 1848, in Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, 27. 21 John Stuart Mill to William George Ward, Spring 1849, in The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley,

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Between 1851 and 1858, while teaching at St Edmund’s Seminary, Ward systematized his thought, drawing on scholastic philosophy and theology. In 1860, he published the results as the Philosophical Introduction to a projected five-volume series On Nature and Grace. Its first section succinctly summed up the epistemological argument against Mill. According to Mill, human knowledge extends only to information derived from our present experience of phenomena. Ward termed this position phenomenism and countered it by arguing that the human mind has another way of arriving at truth, namely, rational intuition. is position he termed intuitionism. e core of Ward’s apologetic was to show that such intuitional knowledge was possible, and he took his stand on two grounds: mathematical truth and the trustworthiness of memory. In his Logic, Mill had argued that even our knowledge of arithmetical and geometrical truths, such as 2 + 2 = 4 and ‘two straight lines cannot enclose a space’, was derived from experience. Mill explained the fact that we perceive such propositions as necessarily true by means of association psychology. According to Mill, a proposition like 2 + 2 = 4 represents a matter of fact that we have experienced so oen and so invariably that we necessarily associate 2 and 2 with 4. But this necessity is merely psychological; the result, in effect, of conditioning. Ward strongly opposed this account. Geometrical propositions such as ‘all figures with three sides have three angles’ are known to be necessarily true simply through reflecting on them. e necessity involved is conceptual, not psychological: “So soon as I understand the meaning of this proposition […] I judge at once that this proposition is quite certainly true.”22 Ward called such judgments ‘judgments of intuition’. Another such judgment is the judgment that my current memory of a certain event corresponds to a past fact. If all knowledge is derived from our present experience of phenomena, as Mill argued, I have no ground to believe that I began writing this paragraph about five minutes ago. e only thing I know is that I have at present the impression that I did so. I have no means to determine the factual truth of my recollection, because I cannot appeal beyond my present experience. Such a conclusion is patently absurd. It would mean that I could not even form a syllogism, because in drawing a conclusion I could not be sure that Collected Works of John Stuart Mill 14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 25-30. 22 William George Ward, On Nature and Grace. I: Philosophical Introduction (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), 6.

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I actually held the premises. And thus, Ward argued that the judgment that ‘what I remember at present corresponds to past facts’ is intuitive; of the same nature as our intuitive convictions about necessary truth in mathematics and to be trusted as the mind’s correct perception of reality. Mill recognized the cogency of Ward’s appeal to memory but did not think it fatal to his theory. In 1865, he published An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, a comprehensive and extremely effective attack on the intuitionist position as represented by the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton and the Oxford theologian Henry Mansel. Mill conceded that: Our belief in the veracity of Memory is evidently ultimate: no reason can be given for it which does not presuppose the belief […] is point is forcibly urged in the Philosophical Introduction to Mr. Ward’s able work, “On Nature and Grace:” a book the readers of which are likely to be limited by its being addressed specially to Catholics, but showing a capacity in the writer which might otherwise have made him one of the most effective champions of the Intuitive school.23

Ward expressed his gratitude for Mill’s “kind notice” of him on receiving a presentation copy of the Examination.24 Yet, Ward believed Mill had not seen the true import of his argument from memory, and he reiterated it in a paper for the Metaphysical Society entitled On Memory as an Intuitive Faculty. In 1871, when the intra-ecclesial controversy over the First Vatican Council was subsiding, Ward began a series of articles in the Dublin Review challenging Mill’s philosophical position. Mill replied in new editions of the Logic and the Examination, but his death in 1873 cut short the debate. In the Dublin Review, Ward lamented Mill’s death as “a matter of severe controversial disappointment,” but continued his attack on Mill’s philosophy nonetheless.25 He also distributed his articles among the members of the Metaphysical Society. is proved too much for one of them, the religious critic, lawyer, and later judge of the High Court, James Fitzjames Stephen – a follower of Mill in epistemological (but not in political) matters. Raised in an evangelical home, Stephen gradually

23 John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), 174-175. 24 William George Ward to John Stuart Mill, April 28, 1865, in Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, 278-279, at 278. 25 William George Ward, “Mr. Mill’s Reply to the ‘Dublin Review’,” Dublin Review 21 (July, 1873): 1-49, at 4.

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dried away from Christianity, until he felt “altogether estranged from it and convinced in a quiet way […] that it is not true at all.”26 In March 1874, Stephen read a paper for the Metaphysical Society, attacking Ward’s position on necessary truth. As a thoroughgoing empiricist, Stephen lampooned the obscurity of Ward’s syllogisms, denied that there was a distinction between contingent and necessary truth and defended Mill’s associationism.27 Ward was not present at the meeting, but he read a reply at the July meeting of the Society. Unperturbed by Stephen’s critique, Ward argued, with due use of irony, that Stephen misunderstood the (logical) meaning of contingency and necessity, along with defending the necessary truth of certain axioms in geometry and challenging their derivation from experience.28 Because Ward published his reply in the Dublin Review, Stephen felt obliged to disseminate his original paper. He published it in the Contemporary Review with a word of explanation and lengthy additional comments on Ward’s reply.29 Ward had the last word, though, in the next instalment of the Contemporary.30 Little was gained through the debate; it did not get them any closer to one another, nor did it gain much in clarity, but it does remain instructive as an illustration of conflicting intellectual tempers. Unlike Mill, who regarded Ward as one of his ablest opponents, Stephen was unimpressed with Ward’s philosophic capacities. Never one to mince words, Stephen penned a summary dismissal to Emily Cunningham: “I think he writes great nonsense.” “His great object in life,” Stephen explained, “is to dig out of his own mind some sort of philosophical foundation for his creed, in which I think he fails – outrageously & egregiously – never even making the first steps.”31 Still, Stephen liked Ward, who struck him “as an honest but prejudiced bear;” “a rare specimen of a bigoted old English squire with a great deal of good 26 Stephen’s Autobiographic Fragment, in K.  J.  M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 243. 27 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Some oughts on Necessary Truth,” March 10, 1874, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, II, 128-140. 28 William George Ward, “A Reply on Necessary Truth,” July 14, 1874, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, II, 198-211. 29 William George Ward, “A Reply on Necessary Truth,” Dublin Review 23 (July, 1874): 54-63; James Fitzjames Stephen, “Necessary Truth,” Contemporary Review 25 (December, 1874): 44-73. 30 William George Ward, “Necessary Truth [In Answer to Mr. Fitzjames Stephen],” Contemporary Review 25 (March, 1874): 527-546. 31 James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, December 4, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8.

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humour & a certain sort of talent about him only that it is all perverted and so to speak poisoned by his religion.”32 He acknowledged, moreover, that Ward was “the champion of Roman Catholic reason, as Newman is of R.C. faith” and that debate was meaningful (even though he felt he had “kicked him into a cocked hat” in the Contemporary Review exchange).33 Ward certainly did not feel bested. He ploughed on with his apologetic project right up to his death, challenging William Clifford’s famous paper The Ethics of Belief and Alexander Bain’s determinist denial of free will. Ward’s object was always the same: to disprove Mill’s empiricism and demonstrate the capacity of the intellect for intuitive knowledge so as to open a way for conclusive proofs of theism based on necessary truths. He summed up his basic intuition in his last published article in 1882, “If there be Necessary Truth, there must be a Necessary Being, on Whom such Truth is founded.”34 Although Manning’s apologetic output was much more limited than that of Ward, he shared his fundamental philosophical framework. In a Metaphysical Society paper intended, as he told Gladstone, “to lay once more the flagstone under the intellectual certainty of the order of nature,”35 Manning offered a scholastic account of the mind and the way it reached truth parallel to Ward’s. He offered a similarly scholastic account of the soul in response to a paper by Frederic Harrison that denied the soul’s immaterial nature. In a brief paper on a similar subject, The Objective Certainty of the Immaterial World, he took a remark by Huxley on Descartes as his starting point to argue that our knowledge of the immaterial world is more certain than that of the material world.36 As chairman, in June 1873, Manning delivered what was arguably his best paper, and, as Allan Brown observes, one of the defining moments 32 James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, November 20, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8. 33 James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, December 4, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8; James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, December 24, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8. 34 William George Ward, “Philosophy of the eistic Controversy,” Dublin Review 7 (January, 1882): 49-85, at 74. 35 Henry Edward Manning to William Ewart Gladstone, May 21, 1872, in Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labours (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1921), 321. 36 Henry Edward Manning, “at Legitimate Authority Is an Evidence of Truth,” May 14, 1872, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, I, 362-379; “e Soul before and aer Death,” February 13, 1877, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, III, 45-52; “e Objective Certainty of the Immaterial World,” May 27, 1879, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, III, 258-260.

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in the life of the Metaphysical Society.37 In A Diagnosis and Prescription, Manning offered an analysis of the course of the debates in the Society so far and suggested improvements. Although he praised the personal – and occasionally intellectual – rapprochement achieved at the Society, the main part of his paper was devoted to an incisive analysis of the want of a common method in its debates. In line with Ward, Manning reduced the variety of positions among the members “to two ultimate schools, namely, to those who take their point of departure from the intuitions of the Reason, and to those who take their point of departure from the reports of Sense.”38 Although clearly preferring the former, Manning took a conciliatory approach, and proposed the critical philosophy of Kant “as a cobble-stone in the gulf between us.”39 He proposed, moreover, that the Society should aim for more unity in terminology and clarity in definition – a suggestion by which he himself faithfully abided. 3. Newman, Stephen, and the First Principles of Unbelief Although Newman dodged membership of the Metaphysical Society, he defended his controversial religious choices and theological views in writing. Just think of his theological justification for converting to Roman Catholicism in An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845), his defense of the integrity of his personal religious trajectory in the Apologia pro vita sua (1864) or his elaborate argument for the reasonableness of believing what you can neither demonstrably prove nor fully understand in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Although his works resonated with many, there was plenty of backlash too, especially from liberal Anglicans and agnostics. Newman, so their common critique went, defended superstition by means of skepticism. Aer demolishing the capacity of reason to arrive at religious truth, he argued for intellectual submission to Catholic dogma based on the experience of conscience. In doing so, he set up a false dilemma, proposing Catholicism as the only coherent alternative to atheism.40 37 Cf. Brown, Metaphysical Society, 71-85. I do not share Brown’s negative appraisal of Manning’s intellectual achievements in this paper – he seems too much influenced by Purcell’s slanted portrayal. 38 Henry Edward Manning, “A Diagnosis and Prescription,” June 10, 1873, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, II, 50. 39 Ibid., 57. 40 See my “Scepticism and Credulity: Victorian Critiques of John Henry Newman’s Religious Apologetic,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology 20 (2013): 1-24.

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Fitzjames Stephen was a vehement proponent of this strand of Victorian criticism. In fact, his engagement with Newman was almost cathartic. As one of his biographers notes, “[I]n unravelling the nature of Newman’s system of reasoning Stephen peeled away dead or dying layers of his own beliefs.”41 Stephen already formulated the gist of his persistent verdict on Newman’s apologetic in an 1856 book review. He claimed that Newman was a specialist at special pleading – apt “not to find the bottom of a question, but to put a bottom into it” – and that the “whole tendency of his theological speculation for years past has been to prove that no resting-place is possible between Romanism and Atheism.”42 In a lengthy review of the Apologia almost a decade later, Stephen reiterated this critique and objected especially to Newman’s understanding of probability, his disregard for factual evidence, and his defense of religious mystery. In the Apologia, Newman argued that religious certitude can be legitimately derived from probable evidence; it is the result “of the accumulative force of certain given reasons which, taken one by one, [are] only probabilities.”43 Stephen had no qualms with probable reasoning, but he did not think it could ever justify making up one’s mind once and for all. Any honest inquirer, he argued, ought “to keep himself open to conviction in case further evidence should occur.”44 Stephen also blamed Newman for ignoring factual evidence. Newman had admitted that he could not see God at work in society, so that without God’s “voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world.”45 For Stephen, this amounted to intellectual dishonesty: the facts point in one direction, but Newman takes another. And thus, Stephen concluded, “if Dr. Newman was thoroughly honest he would be an atheist.”46 A similar flaw vitiated Newman’s defense of religious mystery. In an early Catholic sermon, Newman had tried to show the inconsistency of objecting to Catholic doctrines like transubstantiation because they are mysterious, while at the same time believing in God’s existence – an equally mysterious 41

Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, 224. Stephen, “Dr. Newman on Universities,” The Saturday Review, December 13, 1865, 733-734, at 734. 43 Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled “What, then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 323. 44 Stephen, “Dr. Newman’s ‘Apologia’,” Fraser’s Magazine 70 (September, 1864): 265-303, at 274. 45 Newman, Apologia, 377; cf. Stephen, “Dr. Newman’s ‘Apologia’,” 275. 46 Stephen, “Dr. Newman’s ‘Apologia’,” 280. 42

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doctrine. “If I must submit my reason to mysteries,” Newman concluded, “it is not much matter whether it is a mystery more or a mystery less.”47 For a careful empiricist like Stephen, this was “reckless scepticism taking the form of the wildest superstition.”48 In the face of mystery, he later noted, we should simply confess “that we have got into a region of which we know nothing, and therefore ought to say nothing.”49 Newman read Stephen’s review in Fraser’s Magazine, but considered it more of a lawyer’s brief than a philosopher’s treatise. He saw too many “shallow,” “unfair” and “shameful” bits to give it much consideration.50 When Stephen proposed to visit him at the Oratory – which he did in October 1865 – Newman thought he had come to say sorry. Although Stephen did apologize when they met, his visit had a different purpose. He tried to thoroughly probe Newman for a defense of Christianity. e result was sorely disappointing. Stephen came away convinced that Newman “had nothing to say to anyone who did not go four fihs of the way to meet him.”51 When he asked Newman for proofs to convince an unbeliever, Newman simply replied – as Stephen recollected it – “I cannot work miracles,” or, as Newman remembered the conversation, “[am] I God, to make alive?”52 “I asked not for miracles but for proofs,” Stephen wryly commented.53 In 1874, Stephen summed up his earlier critique of the Apologia in the course of an attack on Manning in the Contemporary Review, attributing Newman’s “passionate belief ” to wishful thinking. A sly footnote reminded the reader that Newman had never answered his original criticism.54 e footnote did not go unnoticed. Lady Chatterton brought the charge to the notice of Newman, who responded with exasperation. “I have no wish to see Mr Stephen’s article, for ten years he has been at 47 Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (London: Longman, 1849), 290. 48 Stephen, “Dr. Newman’s ‘Apologia’,” 285. 49 James Fitzjames Stephen, “On a eory of Dr. Newman’s as to Believing in Mysteries,” January 12, 1875, in The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, II, 245. 50 Newman to Jonathan Henry Woodward, April 20, 1870, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, 103-104. 51 James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, September 23, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8. 52 Ibid.; Newman to Jonathan Henry Woodward, April 20, 1870, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, 103-104, 104. 53 Stephen to Emily Cunningham, September 23, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8. 54 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Caesarism and Ultramontanism,” Contemporary Review (December, 1873): 497-527, at 509.

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me and I have no intention to controvert with him.”55 In 1876, Stephen made a final attempt to talk about religion with Newman, once more proposing a visit to the Oratory. Annoyed with being cross-examined without realizing it on Stephen’s former visit, Newman declined. He replied that because of their different first principles, discussion was “a melancholy waste of time.”56 Stephen had gathered as much from their earlier exchange. “e substance of it was that he & I differed on first principles, & therefore could hardly discuss,” he wrote to Emily Cunningham. What Stephen really took away from it, though, was that Newman “was unable to argue at all against my principles.”57 Newman would probably have agreed. Describing their conversation to Jonathan Henry Woodward in 1870, he wrote: it never occurred to me to argue […] And this I should ever maintain, that there must be first principles which cannot be proved and must be assumed, and that, unless the phenomenon of conscience brought home to a man the existence of God, I could say nothing to convince him. Between such a man and me there was a difference so fundamental, that neither could argue with the other.58

In 1881, Newman gave a similar account of the conversation to William Lilly. “Aer hearing his arguments I had said to him ‘It is no good our disputing; it is like a battle between a dog and a fish – we are in different elements’ meaning what I have said at Grammar of Assent p. 416.”59 Newman’s reference to the Grammar is no coincidence, but it does take some explaining. Upon reading Stephen’s review of the Apologia, one of Newman’s close friends, the renowned naval architect William Froude, had confided to Newman that he strongly agreed with Stephen’s take on probability. Newman replied that he too had seen the concurrence with Froude’s view. “I should like to write on the subject in question,” he added, “most especially like and desire and pray to do

55 Newman to Lady Chatterton, March 5, 1874, in Letters and Diaries, XXVII, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 29-30, 30. 56 Newman to James Fitzjames Stephen, February 14, 1876, in Letters and Diaries, XXVIII, 25-26, 26. 57 James Fitzjames Stephen to Emily Cunningham, November 20, 1874, CUL Add MSS. 7349/8. 58 Newman to Jonathan Henry Woodward, April 20, 1870, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, 104. 59 Newman to W. S. Lilly, February 17, 1881, in Letters and Diaries, XXIX, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 337-338.

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so.”60 To Woodward, he later recounted how on reading Stephen’s review, he had thought to himself: “to answer an argument which makes a thousand assumptions, none of which I grant, is to write a book.”61 at book was the Grammar. It answered some of Stephen’s core charges, explaining at length how religious certitude can be justifiably based on an accumulation of probabilities and how belief in mysteries can be reasonable. But when it came to conscience as the basis of belief in God, Newman stuck to his guns. e Grammar’s argument for Christianity began with an important caveat. “I have no scruple in beginning the review I take of Christianity by professing to consult for those only whose minds are properly prepared for it,” Newman wrote. Such properly prepared people are “those who are imbued with the religious opinions and sentiments which I have identified with Natural Religion.”62 is state of mind can only be acquired by due attention to one’s conscience and moral sense, and includes a belief in God’s presence and in the unseen world, an overpowering awareness of sin, a desire to love God and to be reconciled with Him, and an eager looking-out for revelation. Downplaying sin, moral evil, and the supernatural dimension of reality, by contrast, characterize the opinions of “a civilized age.” Such modern opinions render argument futile. “I will not argue about Christianity with men who hold them,” Newman wrote, “because it is plainly absurd to attempt to prove a second proposition to those who do not admit the first.”63 It is clear that Newman regarded Fitzjames Stephen as one of those hopeless cases – the passage just quoted being on page 416 of the Grammar. e supreme irony of Newman’s relations with Stephen is that they concluded with Newman doing what he so studiously had tried to avoid: arguing with Stephen. In 1880, Stephen had a final dig at Newman’s apologetic. In St. James’s Gazette, he once more charged Newman with confining “his defence of his own creed to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative to Atheism.”64 e silent reference, of course, is 60

Newman to William Froude, September 30, 1864, in Letters and Diaries, XXI, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Edward E. Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 245-246, 245. 61 Newman to Jonathan Henry Woodward, April 20, 1870, in Letters and Diaries, XXV, 104. 62 Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 5th ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 1881), 415-416. 63 Ibid., 416. 64 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Old Creeds and New,” St. James’s Gazette (November 18, 1880): 11-12.

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once more to the Apologia, which argued that there is “no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other.”65 Before he learned that Stephen wrote the article, Newman responded to the charge in an appendix to the fih edition of the Grammar. Although disclaiming the crude interpretation of his words in the Apologia, he still argued: [T]here is a certain ethical character, one and the same, a system of first principles, sentiments, and tastes, a mode of viewing the question and of arguing, which is formally and normally, naturally and divinely, the organum investigandi given us for gaining religious truth.66

But there is also a negative corollary to this positive set of commitments, which operates in the other direction: “when a Catholic is seriously wanting in this system of thought, we cannot be surprised if he leaves the Catholic Church, and then in due time gives up religion altogether.”67 e same (bad) logic that leads one to reject belief in revelation, easily issues in a rejection of belief in God. is line of reasoning was foreign to Ward and Manning. As Manning put it, in a dimly veiled critique of the Apologia: “I do not believe that the alternative before us is Catholicism or Atheism.”68 Even if someone rejects Christianity, still, Manning contended, “the belief of God and of His perfections stands immutably upon the foundations of nature.”69 is disagreement is central to explain the contrasting ways Newman, Ward, and Manning engaged unbelievers. Whereas Newman postulated a set of positive existential commitments and attitudes required to attain religious truth, Ward and Manning merely demanded the absence of antagonistic attitudes and commitments. Newman maintained “that all concrete reasoning requires an act of Will to come to a conclusion.”70 Ward too believed in the role of the will, but only to stifle “adverse prejudices” that barred the inquirer from paying due attention to the

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Newman, Apologia, 322-323. Newman, Grammar, 499. 67 Ibid. 68 Henry Edward Manning, The Workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church of England, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), 24. 69 Ibid., 25. 70 Newman to Mrs. Christie, November 20, 1879, in Letters and Diaries, XXIX, 200-201, 201. 66

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evidence for theism.71 Characteristically, Ward described this evidence as ‘super-superabundant’. 4. Assessing the Divide Ward and Manning believed their intuitionist philosophy provided a secure epistemological basis to establish the truths of Christianity, evident to anyone who would take the trouble of inquiring. Newman was no intuitionist and believed prior moral and religious commitments were required to see the cogency of the argument for Christianity. Ward and Manning believed that they could appeal to a universal standard of reason, shared by believers and unbelievers alike. Newman, on the contrary, did not think such a standard of much avail: [T]he fact remains, that in any inquiry about things in the concrete men differ from each other, not so much in the soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its exercise, that those principles are of a personal character, [and] that where there is no common measure of minds, there is no common measure of arguments.72

In consequence, Newman opted not to debate with unbelievers like Fitzjames Stephen, whose first principles were so different from his own. Ultimately, then, Newman disagreed with Ward and Manning about the depth of the divergence between belief and unbelief. Newman by no means thought all interaction with unbelievers meaningless. He put, aer all, severe effort into understanding and reasoning with William Froude on religious subjects, and their discussion shaped his thought in the Grammar. Newman could do so, however, precisely because Froude already shared some of his first principles – principles which Stephen lacked. Ward and Manning did not think the ri between belief and unbelief ran as deep as Newman maintained. eir personal encounters with many of the leading unbelievers of the day convinced them that argument was meaningful, and could, at least in principle, be decided by appealing to shared standards of rationality.

71 72

Ward, “Philosophy of the eistic Controversy,” 82. Newman, Grammar, 413.

3 Newman, Frankl, and Conscience Individual Call and Ecclesial Belonging Christopher Cimorelli

One of the great blessings of my life was the encounter with Prof. Dr. Terrence Merrigan in an advanced master’s course, “eology of Christian Doctrine,” in the Fall of 2010 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. As a newly arrived international student in Belgium, I was in the process of adjusting to a new context with many novel challenges, and great uncertainty. Despite his having been in Belgium for several decades by that point, it was a rather simple question from this distinguished – and, in some sense, intimidating – professor aer class one day that was most disarming: “How are you doing?” A couple of classmates and I felt great relief through the ensuing conversation, which demonstrated genuine concern on the part of Prof. Merrigan, who decades earlier had also been a North American student in a new context and could easily empathize with our situation. He emphasized practical matters, like learning how to be a successful student in the Faculty, dealing with landlords, and even how to read the facial expressions of the Flemish. Despite beginning my time in Leuven in the research unit History of Church and eology, it was the personal connection with Terry that led me into systematic theology and Newman studies, for which I remain ever so grateful. In his role as my promoter and Doktorvater, Terry’s mentorship was critically important to my own development as a theologian and critical thinker. Our meetings were experienced by me as equal parts academic and spiritual direction. Scheduled appointments would oen go far beyond the allotted time, taking us in all sorts of (providential) directions. I recall a meeting in my dissertation years, in which we discussed the possible canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman. We were not sure if the canonization would come to pass – it did, of course, in October of 20191 – but we shared a laugh at the thought 1 “Cardinal Newman Declared a Saint by the Pope,” BBC News England, October 13, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-50032640 [accessed December 19, 2020].

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of what Newman would have made of two lay theologians (with their own families) discussing his own canonization! It has been a privilege to maintain our connection in the years since the dissertation was defended, and it is an honor to provide a contribution to this Festschrift volume. Terry has always emphasized the polarity and tension in Newman’s thought, which has influenced his own work navigating Newman studies, modern Christian thought, secularization, and interreligious dialogue. Rather than perceiving conflict as terminating in a higher, quasi-Hegelian synthesis, Newman had a proclivity for allowing elements to exist in dynamic tension, which is itself productive and non-reductive. Terry’s important work, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts,2 critically examines this feature of Newman’s oeuvre, and his own work, for example, on interreligious dialogue, exhibits this approach, which can support fruitful exchanges between Christians and non-Christians without neglecting particularities in the areas of history, doctrine, and metaphysics.3 In fact, putting such particularities front-and-center is what makes for a more dynamic exchange that is of greater benefit to the interlocutors and their respective traditions. Given this introduction and framing, this chapter will critically examine the writings of two figures who treated the notion of conscience and its implication for living a meaningful life: namely, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), a renowned psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor who prioritized the will to meaning. For the audience of this volume, Newman’s life and aspects of his thought are likely more well known, given his authoring of classic texts on doctrinal development, higher education, and religious epistemology, and how his work proved influential at the Second Vatican Council.4 Newman’s canonization has only further increased his profile and significance. is 2 Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991). 3 See the following by Terrence Merrigan: “Saving the Particular: Incarnation and the Mediation of Salvation in the eology of Religions,” in Orthodoxy, Process and Product, ed. Mathijs Lamberigts, Lieven Boeve, and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 227 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 299-322; “‘For Us and for Our Salvation’: e Notion of Salvation History in the Contemporary eology of Religions,” Irish Theological Quarterly 64 (1999): 339-348; “Religious Knowledge in the Pluralist eology of Religions,” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 686-707. 4 See, for example, John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 39, 76-77; Ian Ker, Newman on Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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chapter will thus attend to some of the biographical details of Frankl’s life in more depth as it proceeds. is investigation, in keeping with the approach outlined above, will examine the shared emphasis on conscience by Newman and Frankl, attending to their similarities and differences without seeking a reductive synthesis. Doing so will bear greater fruit and respect the work of two pivotal thinkers whose lives, respectively, spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Concretely, the chapter is structured in three sections. After a brief section featuring biographical notes, the second section will introduce Newman’s and Frankl’s understanding of conscience and what the experience of conscience implies about human existence, transcendence, and freedom. e third section will focus on the task and limits of conscience in view of responsibility and human fulfillment. It is here that I believe that the arguments of both thinkers are mutually enriching. Frankl’s attention to the individual’s will to meaning arising from an inner exercise of conscience in the here and now – and how this meaning cannot be supplied by any other person or institution – is of potentially great consequence for the psychological-spiritual journeys of many people, especially in more individualistic societies. Yet, Newman’s understanding of conscience and what conscience anticipates transcends the limitations of Frankl’s methodology, particularly in terms of the individual’s relational nature and potential communal and/or ecclesial belonging and fulfillment. As the world faces turbulent times, in calamities ranging from COVID-19 to climate change, a richer understanding of the exercise of conscience, individual meaning, and responsibility to community is needed, and this investigation will contribute to such an understanding through carrying out its stated objectives above. Before getting into the first section, however, I want to make a couple of notes about the source-material utilized in the preparation of this chapter. Given the centrality of the principle of conscience in his work, one could utilize a plethora of Newman’s texts in developing and analyzing his understanding of it. Nevertheless, selections from his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” Grammar of Assent, Philosophical Notebook (vol. 2), Oxford University Sermons, and Arians of the Fourth Century were most useful for this investigation.5 Regarding Viktor Frankl, three texts were 5

John Henry Newman, “A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation,” in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900), 246-261 – the letter itself was orginally published in 1875; id., An Essay in

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primarily utilized: Man’s Search for Meaning (1992 edition; first published in 1946),6 Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (2000 edition; first published in 1948),7 and The Will to Meaning (first published in 1969).8 A host of secondary literature exists for Frankl’s system of logotherapy and his approach to psychotherapy in general. Yet not many of these investigations focus sustained attention on the role of conscience in Frankl’s perspective and logotherapeutic approach.9 1. Biographical Notes is brief section will provide some biographical information, particularly on Viktor Frankl. As indicated above, the life and thought of John Henry Newman will be more familiar to the audience of this Festschrift.

Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903) – originally published in 1870; Edward Sillem and A. J. Boekraad, eds., The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 2 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts Publishing House, 1970); John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, between a. d. 1826 and 1843 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909) – originally published under a different title in 1843 and hereaer University Sermons; id., The Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908) – originally published in 1833. 6 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006). e original work was entitled, Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946). e English title was originally From Death-Camp to Existentialism. 7 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2000). is text, in its original Austrian edition, was titled Der unbewusste Gott: Psychotherapie und Religion (1948). e first English edition was titled The Unconscious God (1975). 8 Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, Expanded Edition (New York: Plume, 1988). is book was first published in the USA by World Publishing Co. in 1969. 9 For a critical – and somewhat myopic – treatment of Frankl’s spiritual approach to psychotherapy and knowledge, see the following: Éric St-Amant, “Critique des fondements épistémologiques des approches spirituelles en psychologie,” Canadian Psychology 37, no. 4 (1996): 210-222. Cf. Daniel A.  Helminiak, “Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy,” Counseling and Values 45, no. 3 (April, 2001): 163-189, which also makes use of Bernard Lonergan’s thought on ‘spirit’ (see p. 166 forward). For a comparison of the thought of Frankl and Karl Jaspers that contains several references to conscience, see Josip Bošnjaković, “Karl T. Jaspers and Viktor E. Frankl: Compared oughts of Two Psychiatrists,” Alcoholism and Psychiatry Research 51 (2015): 89-106. For more on Frankl and the influence of philosophy upon his thought, see Dominik Batthyány and Otto Zsok, Viktor Frankl und die Philosophie (Vienna: Springer, 2005).

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For Newman, ‘conscience’ or the faculty of conscience was a first principle of his entire project,10 which was historical and experiential in nature – one might say, personalist.11 e experience of conscience led him to the firm conviction of not only his own existence, but also God’s, as well as to considerations of the way conscience operates relative to natural and revealed religion(s).12 Newman’s understanding of conscience will be treated in much greater detail below. Frankl became a prominent survivor of the Holocaust, having been imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau, among other locations.13 While a well-regarded figure in psychotherapeutic circles prior to the events of the Second World War,14 Frankl rose to even greater prominence aer the war, which had taken much from him – including his first wife, mother, and father, who died in concentration camps15 – but not all; in fact, it was during the cruelty of the Holocaust that Frankl realized the fundamental desire for meaning which characterizes human existence, and which could not be taken away despite the brutality of the conditions he faced. He carefully observed not only his own experience of the camps, but also the characteristics which enabled people to survive. Aer the war, he wrote prolifically about his experiences and how they informed his therapeutic approach that he called ‘logotherapy’, which is built upon a more comprehensive picture of the human subject as a transcendent being for whom the will to meaning is central.16 10

See “e Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (Sermon II, April 13, 1830), University Sermons, 18-19; John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 48, 86-87, 179. Newman’s classic work on development was originally written in 1845, but was significantly edited and reorganized in 1878; I am citing from this latter edition. 11 See, for example, John F. Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington, DC: e Catholic University of America Press, 2014). 12 See Terrence Merrigan, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47-72, at 49-50. 13 Much of the biographical information comes from the 1992 edition of Man’s Search for Meaning (i.e., introduction, preface, and main text), as well as the following sources: “About the Author,” in Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 187-188; e Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Viktor Frankl: Austrian Psychologist,” Britannica, August 29, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/ biography/Viktor-Frankl/additional-info#history [accessed December 19, 2020]. 14 “Viktor Frankl: Austrian Psychologist.” 15 Ibid. 16 For a succinct presentation of the main elements of logotherapy, see Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 95-154. ese pages contain the sections, “Part II: Logotherapy in a Nutshell” and “Postscript 1984.”

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Logotherapy has thus been described as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, aer Alfred Adler’s school, focusing on the pursuit of status and power (will to power), and Sigmund Freud’s school, emphasizing the person’s struggle with instincts/drives and the superego while realizing the pleasure principle (will to pleasure).17 Frankl argues that the will to meaning is more fundamental to human existence and that the will to power and the will to pleasure are consequences of frustrated, misdirected, or failed attempts to satisfy the will to meaning. He published more than thirty books in all.18 2. Conscience and Its Referents In attempting to introduce the views of both thinkers on conscience, it is useful to do so thematically or using definite subjects. We will begin with conscience defined; the definitions will point to what is disclosed to and/or revealed in conscience. Generally speaking, I will begin with Newman’s reflections before moving to Frankl. 1. Working Definitions of Conscience From as early as 1830, Newman was exploring the nature and role of conscience for individuals and religious communities. He writes, Now […] it is obvious that Conscience is the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power […] for what is Religion but the system of relations existing between us and a Supreme Power, claiming our habitual obedience.19

Given this characterization of conscience as “the essential principle and sanction of Religion,” it is not beyond the pale to note its fundamental importance in Newman’s thought. In his Philosophical Notebook, Newman even remarks on the foundational role of conscience for the self and religious epistemology.20 Regarding the former, he believed that the 17

Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 89, 93, 130, 138; “Viktor Frankl: Austrian Psychologist.” 18 “About the Author,” in Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 187. 19 “e Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (Sermon II, April 13, 1830), University Sermons, 18-19. 20 For example, see his “Proof of eism,” in The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 2, 43-78.

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experience of conscience was just as much a warrant for confidence in one’s existence as the famous proposition, cogito ergo sum; yet, the experience of conscience implies much more than one’s own existence. Merrigan, commenting on this section from The Philosophical Notebook, writes that such a statement for Newman is akin to saying “Conscientiam habeo, ergo Deus est.”21 In his Grammar of Assent, Newman writes, “e feeling of conscience [… is twofold: – it is a moral sense, and a sense of duty.”22 e first feeling, or that of a moral sense, refers to the experience that there is right and wrong. e second feeling, or a sense of duty, refers to the “keen sense of obligation and responsibility,”23 “namely, to do good and avoid evil.”24 While this description might be ‘easy’ or ‘neat’ given its brevity, these two dimensions can involve a good deal of tension, in that one may sense that there is right and wrong, while also having to apply that sense to a particular situation and set of circumstances. Newman observes, in the “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” “that conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately upon conduct, on something to be done or not done. ‘Conscience,’ says Saint omas, ‘is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as evil’.”25 We shall see a similar understanding from Frankl regarding the importance of particular decisions here and now, but first we look to main elements of a definition of conscience. He writes, “conscience, along with responsibleness, is […] an irreducible phenomenon that is inherent in the human being as a deciding being […]. In fact, conscience reaches down into unconscious depths and stems from an unconscious ground,”26 and yet makes “momentous, authentic […] decisions that take place completely without reflection […]. In this sense conscience is irrational […] or better put, prelogical. Just as there is a […] prelogical understanding of being, so there is a premoral understanding of meaning, and this is conscience.”27 For Frankl, then, conscience is a phenomenon of 21

Merrigan, “Revelation,” 49-50. Grammar, 105. 23 Ibid., 107. 24 Terrence Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’: Newman and the (Post-) Modern Subject,” in Newman and Truth, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 34 (Louvain: Peeters, 2008), 16. 25 Newman, “A Letter to the Duke,” 256. 26 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 39. 27 Ibid. 22

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human existence rising from an unconscious or preconscious ground, and it cannot be reduced, say, to a drive or instinct. Similar to Newman, he speaks of the ability to make important decisions or judgments “completely without reflection;” Newman would perhaps say completely without demonstration in his Grammar.28 Frankl continues to elucidate what he means by conscience with the following statement on its ‘irrationality’. “In a sense, it is irrational, as well, because […] [w]hat is disclosed to consciousness is something that is; however, what is revealed to conscience is not anything that is but, rather, something that ought to be.”29 Conscience thus anticipates what should be made real; in that sense, it is intuitive. It is also “absolutely unique” and personal, in the sense that the person is called to actualize the dictates of conscience in unique situations that are not “comprehended in rational terms” or by a “universal law.”30 “Only conscience is capable of adjusting the ‘eternal,’ generally agreed-upon moral law to the specific situation in which a concrete person is engaged.”31 is latter argument is where Frankl wishes to distinguish between irrational conscience and animal instincts. Such instincts refer to predictable, similar patterns of response in animals to a variety of situations. ink of the squirrel crossing the road. In response to a perceived threat, it attempts to change direction several times before fleeing along a particular course; sometimes this instinct works, sometimes the squirrel becomes roadkill. Frankl believes that, while conscience is irrational, it is fundamentally different from an animal instinct or drive, responding to very particular, indeed unique circumstances and featuring a choice for or against meaning within them. In fact – and similar to Newman – conscience is transcendent in nature. In the quoted material above, Frankl speaks provocatively of conscience realizing what ought to be the case, and in this sense it is not purely rational.

28 I am thinking here of Newman’s understanding of the illative sense and ratiocination. See Grammar, 259ff. 29 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 40. 30 Ibid., 41. 31 Ibid., 42. Cf. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 145, which discusses conscience as a “prompter,” indicating “a direction in which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with, and this situation has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria, in the light of a hierarchy of values. ese values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level – they are something that we are.”

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For Newman, this idea would fall within the realm of a “theology of a religious imagination” and thus within the person’s moral life as realizing or obstructing the image of God experienced in and through conscience.32 Regarding the realization of what ought to be the case, Newman writes the following of persons: “the image of God, if duly cherished, may expand, deepen, and be completed, with the growth of their powers and in the course of life, under the varied lessons, within and without them, which are brought home to them concerning that same God, One and Personal, by means of education, social intercourse, experience, and literature.”33 Indeed the very task of one’s moral life is the expansion and growth of this image, the clarity of which is distinct in persons whose lives and conditions are particular. 2. The Transcendent Ground of Conscience It is here that we may pivot to the transcendent ground and theological view of conscience, without which any definition or understanding for both thinkers would be incomplete. In his Grammar, Newman writes that “conscience does not repose on itself, but vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self, and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them. And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice […] or the echo of a voice […].”34 is voice belongs to the “One to whom we are responsible,”35 and our positive response to this voice can lead to feelings of “lightness of heart,” while a disregard issues in shame.36 Newman goes on, reflecting on these feelings and what they mean: ese feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being: we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog […]. If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.37 32 33 34 35 36 37

See Newman, Grammar, 117. Ibid., 116. Emphasis my own. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 110.

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e person who experiences the voice of conscience, or the voice of God in conscience, also experiences feelings consequent upon his/her reactions to that voice. For Newman, such a process and experience denote a relationship with an intelligent, invisible being that is not contained within the world, but who in fact is beyond, holding the person to account for his/her actions. So, beyond a moral sense and sense of duty, conscience for Newman involves “dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us.”38 Newman was writing in a context that sought to reduce conscience to a merely human phenomenon, or a construction of humanity, and he resisted such a characterization of this fundamental human experience.39 To reduce conscience to the merely human, Newman believed that one would be undermining the creative principle of all ‘natural religion’, as well as the irreducible connection to and responsibility before the supreme moral governor.40 is idea regarding conscience as the creative principle of religion will be treated below, subsequent to an examination of Frankl’s thoughts in this general area. Like Newman, Frankl holds that conscience has a transcendent origin that is experienced in the subject, and that this origin is personal in nature. Authentic conscience is thus properly described as a dia-logos, not a mono-logos. 38

Newman, “A Letter to the Duke,” 255. See ibid., 247-250. 40 In his early writings, Newman reflects on distinctions between natural and revealed religion, the latter being associated with God’s work through Israel, culminating in the revelation of Jesus Christ. On so-called natural religion, elsewhere called “traditionary religions” (see Arians, 79ff.) arising in part out of the principle of conscience manifesting in the world, Newman writes: “When […] religion of some sort is said to be natural, it is not here meant that any religious system has been actually traced out by unaided Reason. We know of no such system, because we know of no time or country in which human Reason was unaided. Scripture informs us that revelations were granted to the first fathers of our race, concerning the nature of God and man’s duty to Him; and scarcely a people can be named, among whom there are not traditions, not only of the existence of powers exterior to this visible world, but also of their actual interference with the course of nature, followed up by religious communications to mankind from them. e Creator has never le Himself without such witness as might anticipate the conclusions of Reason, and support a wavering conscience and perplexed faith. No people (to speak in general terms) has been denied a revelation from God, though but a portion of the world has enjoyed an authenticated revelation.” “e Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (Sermon II, April 13, 1830), University Sermons, 17-18. ese ideas will be taken up below in Section III. 39

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rough the conscience of the human person, a transhuman agent personat – which literally means, “is sounding through.” It is not up to us to answer the question of what this “agent” is, since our concern with the origin of conscience is anthropological rather than theological. Nonetheless we may be justified in claiming that this transhuman agent must necessarily be of a personal nature. More correctly, however, we would have to speak of a transpersonal agent of which the human person is but the “image.”41

One may immediately sense Frankl’s Jewish and biblical background in this passage, but one should also note his explicit anthropological focus. Like Newman, Frankl was fighting against reductionism. Within the field and schools of psychoanalysis/therapy, he fought ardently against the reduction of human persons to instincts and drives that reached their apex at the psychological level;42 such would treat the human person as merely a more complex animal, since animals too can be described in terms of somatology and psychology. Consequently, Frankl coined the term noology,43 referring to the sphere that is authentically and specifically human, founded upon the individual will to meaning that is rooted in the transcendence of the subject. Pathologies and conditions may affect the somatic and psychological levels, or the body and mind, but need not be reduced exclusively to those levels. On this point, he writes, So conscience, which we have taken as our model of the spiritual unconscious, is seen to have a key position in disclosing to us the essential transcendence of the spiritual unconscious. e psychological fact of conscience is but the immanent aspect of a transcendent phenomenon; it is only that piece of the whole phenomenon that seeps into psychological immanence.44 41

Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 60. He has been critiqued for his spiritualized psychotherapy that assumes a transcendent foundation. See, for example, “Il reste que le fondement théorique de la logothérapie repose en grande partie sur l’existence d’un ‘Dieu’, ce qui la rend a priori inacceptable selon les critères scientifiques. Frankl n’ajoute d’ailleurs aucune évidence concluante à l’existence de ce dieu. Son seul argument est d’ordre phénoménologique, lorsqu’il dit que notre conscience morale est bien la preuve que nous sommes guidés par quelque chose de supra-humain. Ce refus de reconnaître à l’homme la capacité de s’élever au-delà de lui-même sans prendre Dieu comme modèle est d’ailleurs un thème récurrent dans ses écrits. Dans Le Dieu Inconscient (1975), il s’oppose à Sartre sur ce sujet.” St-Amant, “Critique des fondements épistémologiques,” available from ProQuest Central, https://search-proquest-com.caldwell.idm.oclc.org/central/docview/ 220810645/fulltext/FF072ED6D3204387PQ/4?accountid=26523 [accessed December 19, 2020]. 43 See Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 16. 44 Ibid., 61. 42

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In this passage, Frankl is articulating his position against somaticpsychological reductionism; he also argues elsewhere against its counterpart that sought to treat the person as a machine with which to be tinkered.45 So, while Newman in an age of liberalism fought for revealed religion and the divine, moral governor revealed in conscience,46 Frankl fought for the re-humanization of the subject in psychotherapy.47 His anthropological focus is thus connected to Newman through the emphasis on the transcendent and personal origin of conscience, while nevertheless remaining distinct. 3. Responsibility and Freedom through Conscience For both thinkers, the transcendent, personal nature of conscience reveals a lawgiver of sorts, as we heard with Newman previously, and yet, their reflections on this element of conscience diverge to some degree. Newman writes in Grammar, “If a man has been betrayed into any kind of immorality, he has a lively sense of responsibility and guilt;” this is true even when no one is offended by the act or the act is pleasurable in itself. He uses the language of feeling responsibility, as well as being ashamed and frightened. Relatedly, when remarking upon the moral sense of even a child, Newman cites the “implicit threat” perceived by the child in transgressing the supreme moral authority. While Frankl takes exception to this description of conscience, the fact is that Newman’s thought contains much more on this point, as we shall soon see below. Despite noting that “e self cannot be its own lawgiver,”48 Frankl writes, “true conscience has nothing to do with the fearful expectation of punishment. As long as a man is still motivated by either the fear of punishment or the hope of reward – or, for that matter, by the wish to appease the superego – conscience has not yet had its say.”49 Frankl quite consciously is elucidating his view of conscience against the backdrop of a milieu influenced by Freud and Carl Jung,

45

See Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 111. See John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 285-297. 47 See Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 105. On the humanized or rehumanized subject, see Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’,” 22ff. 48 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 64. “It is true that man is responsible for himself, but ultimately he is not responsible before himself.” True freedom requires “an intentional referent.” 49 Ibid., 115. 46

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among others.50 Freud’s conception of the Über-Ich, or Superego, is frequently associated or conflated with conscience (Gewissen), understood however as a human creation to help the Ego/Das Ich order the drives and passions of the Id/Das Es and taking the form of an introjected father image.51 us, unconscious drives determine the human person in this regard and are ultimately negative in tone. Jung similarly viewed the religious unconscious merely as an archetype of the mind that determined outward religiousness.52 While in the concentration camps, Frankl observed that freedom was not entirely taken away, because he was still able to discover the fundamental choice for meaning amid the horrific and dehumanizing circumstances. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that he reacts so negatively to psychotherapeutic conceptions that would reduce the person merely to drives and archetypes. Regarding freedom and conscience, he writes, All freedom has a “from what” and a “to what.” e “from what” of man’s freedom is his being driven, and the “to what” is his being responsible, his having conscience. ese two facets of the human condition are best expressed by a simple admonition from Mari[e] von Ebner-Eschenbach: “Be the master of your will and the servant of your conscience!”53

us, the ‘drivenness’, to use Frankl’s term,54 of the human subject is rooted in his/her transcendent origin and end, experienced in and through conscience. True freedom, then, involves deciding for responsibility and meaning, potentially even in the worst of circumstances. is is what true conscience involves for Frankl, and why he likely would take exception to some of Newman’s language involving fear of punishment and reproach. However, Newman’s understanding of conscience contains more depth on this point involving emotions experienced from conscience. In fact, he spends a great deal of time in Grammar elucidating the idea that conscience yields not only negative emotions, but also positive ones, such 50 Frankl notes quite a few figures with whom he both agrees and disagrees: Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hebbel, Oskar Pfister, Martin Heidegger, etc. 51 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 63. On the Latinizing of Freud’s German terms, see Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’,” 6-9. 52 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 70. 53 Ibid., 59. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) was one of the more important Austrian writers of the late-nineteenth century, writing a number of novels in the area of psychology. Frankl cites her work, but does not provide the original source information. 54 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 71.

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as happiness and approval.55 In addition, the authority of the moral governor experienced in and through conscience indicates the overall positive understanding of the experience, namely, that the emotions generated from conscience stem from a just source before Whom one is responsible.56 Positing a transcendent ground, Newman here is perhaps more ‘real’ in his analysis than Frankl – that is, in terms of the actual emotional experiences of one’s moral life, as one either follows or violates conscience, in the moment and/or understood in retrospect. Nevertheless, Newman has something more important and fundamental in mind than such emotions as fear or approval. Rather, “conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion.”57 In other words, conscience is the experiential bridge between Creator and creature, bringing to light the Other who grounds and centers our existence, and its cultivation fosters a real appropriation of theological truth. And, in his discussion of the moral life of children, Newman endeavors to show how even a child is able to experience this fundamental, personal relationship with God in conscience that facilitates one’s growth toward goodness and justice; hence, one may grow in love toward this lawgiver.58 A life lived in serious response to conscience yields knowledge of and love for God, the true ground of freedom and meaning. 3. The Limits of Conscience and Human Fulfillment While both thinkers posit the transcendent origin and end of conscience, and would advocate the importance of realizing the dictates of conscience and the fundamental relationship at the core of human existence, they differ more so on how conscience relates to human fulfillment understood historically and communally. I want to begin with Frankl, especially in light of the corrective which I believe Newman provides to his much more individualist approach – I should say that, given Frankl’s professional vocation as a therapist working with individual clients, I do not say this pejoratively. As the twentieth century advanced, Frankl noted with anxiety that youth are facing a crisis of society’s – indeed of our own – making. He felt that a deficient, reductive anthropology and withering materialism were 55 56 57 58

See Newman, Grammar, 105-110. On this point, see ibid., 113-114. Ibid., 117. See ibid., 112-114. Cf. Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’,” 25.

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facilitating an existential vacuum. 59 People were becoming hypercognizant of their own happiness as an object,60 while simultaneously becoming divorced from traditional communities and wisdom. ey were falling prey to a Freudian homeostasis principle by which it becomes important to reach a stasis through satisfying drives.61 Ultimately, he argues that this combination of factors was driving increasing rates of addiction, depression, and aggression.62 is anxiety prompted him to try and re-humanize psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, while centralizing the importance of the will to meaning of the transcendent subject. In terms of concrete recommendations, Frankl was well aware of the limits of individual conscience, but his methodology understandably limited his ultimate conclusions. To diagnose neuroses that stem from truly human frustrations, he argues that “Cognizance of self-transcendence […] is indispensable.”63 In combating “the age of meaninglessness” in which “Traditions and values are crumbling,” he calls for the logotherapist not to supply meaning or an answer to the patient, but to help the patient in being educated to responsibility, to find meaning for himself/herself in particular situations.64 e “principal assignment” of education, then, is “in refining the individual’s conscience – his only capacity still to find meanings despite the wane of traditions and values.”65 Yet, this tactic is fraught with difficulties, because “[conscience] not only leads us to meaning but may also lead us astray. Conscience may err, and I cannot know for certain whether my conscience is right and another’s conscience […] is wrong, or whether the reverse is true. Not that there is no truth: there is. And there can be only one truth. But no one can be absolutely sure it is he who has arrived at this truth.”66 Frankl is not against tradition or religion in themselves – in fact, he oen encouraged patients to explore their religiosity and even explicitly notes the importance of a future orientation in the pursuit of meaning, as well as the need for common values and denominators for human survival.67 Yet, given more current trends, he argues that, “If religion is to survive, it will 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

See Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 27, 63, 89ff. Ibid., 89-90. See ibid., 105-107, 137-138. See ibid., 15, 140. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 119-120. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 118. See ibid., 55-57, 134-135.

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have to become a profoundly personalized religion which allows any human being to speak a language of his or her own when addressing himself or herself to the ultimate being.”68 Given the benefit of more hindsight in the years since Frankl’s passing, I would say that the cultivation and experience of individual conscience is a necessity, but that such a linguistic pluralism and individualism put too much pressure solely on individual persons desperate for belonging in our present time. It is here that Newman’s thought has something to supplement Frankl’s perspective. Like Frankl, Newman believed in the education of conscience to responsibility. Terrence Merrigan writes, “e quality of the soul’s response to the voice of conscience determines, in no small measure, the evolution of the nascent relationship between itself and the Divinity […]. Newman insists that the ‘image’ of God must be expanded, deepened and completed ‘by means of education, social intercourse, experience, and literature’” – an idea referenced above in regard to the expansion of the image of God in conscience.69 In his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” Newman challenges the popular, reductive views of conscience by affirming that conscience only “has rights because it has duties” to its author, and so the person is responsible for its formation, particularly in matters of religious obligation: such formation involves “serious thought, prayer, and all available means of arriving at a right judgment on the matter in question.”70 While Newman spent a great deal of time later in his career articulating the experience of conscience and what that means for religious epistemology, one would do well to revisit some of his earlier works in order to see how conscience is understood in his theology of history, the development of which heavily marked his early career. In particular, his reflections in Arians of the Fourth Century and his 1830 university sermon, “e Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (April 30, 1830), are apropos. In these texts, Newman holds that, from the beginning of human history, God has been preparing peoples for the reception of the gospel. All persons experience “the active presence of Him, who aer all dwells intelligibly, prior to argument, in their heart and conscience.” 71 e image of God through conscience is reflected on, developed, and transmitted through what Newman calls “traditionary 68 69 70 71

Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 149. Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’,” 17, 19, citing Newman, Grammar, 116. Newman, “A Letter to the Duke,” 250, 258. Newman, Arians, 76.

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religion,” referring to non-Christian religious systems, which can be said to contain seeds of revelation.72 In fact, early Christians made use of such traditionary systems as they preached the gospel in new contexts, seeking necessary connections.73 Despite this remarkable view for the 1830s, Newman was clear that conscience, regardless of its dignity and function as the creative principle of natural religion, is “oriented towards a clearer image of the God on whom” all traditionary systems depend.74 e impression of God from natural religion is “philosophically inaccurate,” or even “very faint and defective,” despite the practical certainty it might afford and the action it enables.75 Revealed religion is distinct not in the ability of members to lead a moral life that pursues blessedness, but rather in its possession of “authoritative documents of truth, and appointed channels of communication with [God].”76 Revealed religion thus responds to the anticipations generated by natural religion itself for a clearer image of the transcendent source experienced precisely in conscience.77 Revealed religion also responds to the limitations of God’s image experienced in and through the subject’s background, abilities, context, and personal engagement with conscience.78 God’s revelations thus provide for the transmission of a clearer image of God that grounds moral life and religious commitment carried out in communal form; God’s revelations help to bind people together. For Newman, then, I have argued that history functions as a divine pedagogy for humanity,79 preparing peoples for revelations which can assist them in living out the relationships with God and each other. Ultimately, conscience is the principle of religious life and experience of God, but anticipates God’s own revelations that ‘recapitulate’, to use a term from Irenaeus of Lyons,80 the moral life of conscience given human finitude. While Newman was indeed personalist, even writing that “e religious

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Newman, Arians, 79. See ibid., 45-50, 65ff. 74 Christopher Cimorelli, John Henry Newman’s Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological ‘Imaginaries’, and the Development of Tradition, Studies in Philosophical eology 60 (Louvain: Peeters, 2017), 134. 75 Newman, Arians, 76-77, 82. 76 Ibid., 80. 77 Newman, Grammar, 422-423. 78 Merrigan, “‘Myself and My Creator’,” 17-22. 79 Cimorelli, John Henry Newman’s Theology of History, 136-139. 80 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, III.18.1-7, IV.1.2, in The Christological Controversy, trans. and ed. Richard A. Norris, Jr. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 49-55 (esp. 49 and 54), 59. 73

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history of each individual is as solitary and complete as the history of the world,”81 history demonstrated to him that God provided for not only a clearer image of the divine, but also for an image that would bind the people of God together in a community endowed with both authority and authentic channels of communication with God. It is somewhat ironic, then, that Frankl expended such effort to delineate the human quest for meaning, but that the limitations and anticipations of conscience are never met by the transcendent voice and source at the root of it all. Frankl’s beautiful – and, I would say, necessary work – terminates, unfortunately, in the individual’s potential satisfaction with the discovery of meaning, but does not truly facilitate the sharing of that discovery. He admitted that theology necessarily can go beyond the limits of psychology, and even noology,82 particularly with questions of religious belonging, and we must be thankful for that admission. 4. Conclusion Despite the summary conclusions above, this chapter will conclude with two analogies to foster greater appreciation of the connections and distinctions between Newman and Frankl. I was struck by the first analogy, which was briefly mentioned at a youth ministry conference in January 2017 by Kenda Creasy Dean of Princeton eological Seminary.83 Regarding the difficult process of theological/spiritual formation of youth – a demographic whose well-being in the contemporary context was of great concern to Frankl – Dean introduced the process of molting for lobsters.84 While lobsters enjoy a formidable degree of protection from their shells, they nevertheless outgrow them. To grow a larger, necessary shell, that is, in order to develop and mature using a power within them, lobsters need to molt or shed their old shells. As molting occurs, lobsters remain completely vulnerable to a number of predators as the new shells form and harden. is is analogous perhaps to how many persons experience the moral and spiritual life, but who, unlike lobsters, 81 “Steadfastness in the Old Paths” (March 21, 1830), Sermon 18, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 7 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 248. 82 Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, 16, 80-81. 83 is is referring to the 2017 meeting of the High School Youth eology Institute (HSYTI) initiative of the Lilly Foundation, in conjunction with the Forum for eology Exploration (FTE) (January 2017, Indianapolis, IN). 84 See “Lobster Biology: Physiological Processes,” Lobsters.org, http://www. lobsters.org/tlcbio/biology3.html [accessed July 25, 2018].

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have the choice to turn away from the voice of conscience, even repressing vulnerability to the ou disclosed in its operation. Moreover, if vulnerability is experienced in solitude, without the benefit of an ecclesia or community, such repression is all the more likely. When considering the individual lobster molting, Frankl’s view comes to mind, but perhaps a more communal analogy exists. Newman’s perspective on conscience holds that this fundamental faculty and capacity of human persons finds its true home in revealed, ecclesial religion. Contrary to the notion that such religion is an impediment to the individual search for meaning, Newman believed that a consideration of conscience demonstrates a loving God answering the deepest prayers and longings of the human condition. e particularities of history, as Terry Merrigan’s work has consistently indicated, are precisely where the living God encounters humanity. It is in the particular that transcendent truths are experienced and revealed, and that the real object of conscience becomes clear, gathering the human family together and promising it meaning and communion through times of joy and suffering. It is in this sense that a different analogy from the natural world emerges: namely, that of the giant spider crab, a creature that also molts. However, giant spider crabs have a particular tradition, wherein the normally solitary creatures gather together in mounds of tens of thousands, to molt in proximity.85 Each crab must individually molt, that is, grow through a difficult, painful process, but one that is intrinsic to their being. During this process, predators also abound. However, the spider crabs are vulnerable together, increasing their chances of survival.

85

See Jess Staufenberg, “ousands of Giant Spider Crabs Gather in Australian Port – and It’s Going to Get Bigger,” Independent, June 17, 2016, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/giant-spider-crabs-gather-intheir-thousands-in-melbourne-port-a7087281.html [accessed July 25, 2018].

4 Purgatory as Agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius An Essay on the Church’s Suffrages for the Dead1 Andrew Meszaros

e satispassio that accompanies an academic career dedicated to scholarship in the academy and service to students precedes a well-deserved rest. And for this reason, it is not altogether unfitting that an essay honoring that scholarship and service would reflect on the Last ings and, in particular, purgatory. 1. Introduction e doctrine of purgatory and the practice of praying for the dead have taken a severe blow in recent decades. In Newmanian parlance, one could say that where a belief in purgatory still exists, it tends to be a notional one, because a real one would spur the action concomitant with such a belief: namely, praying for the dead. In words that unfortunately do not shock us, Karl Rahner says through the voice of a fictional theologian: “to be honest […] it must be admitted that the doctrine of purgatory does not seem particularly important today even to the devout Christian.”2 Indeed, judging not only by advertising within the funeral industry, but even by the well-intended parochial praxis of calling 1 While living in Ireland for a number of years, where Catholic churches are replete with plaques and stained glass windows reminding visitors to pray for the soul of this or that person, may have exerted some inspiration for this essay, the real catalyst was the many different conversations in which Professor Merrigan either reflected aloud on the profundity of Christ’s agony in the garden, or lamented his parish’s inability to pray for the dead while instead simply ‘remembering’ them. While I have inferred these two – Christ’s agony and prayer for the faithful departed – to be themes close to Merrigan’s heart, I reflect on them together here in the humble gesture of a theological essay, and by no means presume that my reflections answer adequately to Merrigan’s concerns. 2 Karl Rahner, “Purgatory,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XIX: Faith and Ministry (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 181-193, at 187.

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a requiem mass a ‘Celebration of the Life of X’, the message is clear: funerals are for the living, not for the dead.3 Our ‘remembering’ the dead at mass, or in the month of November is not a reminder to pray for them, but amounts to recalling memories of our loved ones. In fairness to Hans Küng, who advocates praying for the dying but not for the dead, he seems to have had his finger on the theological-cultural pulse for some time now.4 e reasons for the decline in the praxis of, and urgency in, prayers and suffrages for the dead are complex and multiple. at we find it hard to believe that our beloved deceased are not this very minute enjoying paradise can be attributed, among other factors, to an understandable longing that they be happy, but also to a benumbed sense of sin and personal responsibility, a difficulty with the intrinsic relationship between sin and punishment (at least from a Biblical worldview),5 and perhaps an impoverished sense of God’s holiness and justice that is overshadowed by an unrelated and palatable mercy. And yet, from a Christian point of view, banal attempts at comfort such as, “I’m sure she’s happy with God in heaven,” though well-intended, can also trivialize the loss of a loved one by not taking seriously the deepseated human rebellion against such a loss, which is but one indication that something is not quite right about a world in which our beloved die. As Gabriel Marcel once put it, to declare your love for someone means telling her, “ou shall not die.” And yet our beloved die anyway because “the wages of sin is death.” However, Saint Paul continues, “But the gi of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). Praying for the dead is an act of true love. By it, one is saying with Marcel not only, “ou shall not die,” but also, “ou shall have life abundant; ou shall enjoy the highest good, the vision of God.” 3 Of course, this is true, but not merely from a sociological or therapeutic point-of-view. Laying the deceased to rest (or praying or doing penance for them) brings us consolation, from a theological point-of-view, precisely because those activities bring about an objective good in which all can delight and by which all can be consoled. See, e.g., omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [ST] Supp., q. 71, a. 12, cor. 4 Hans Küng, Eternal Life?, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1984), 176-177. 5 Yves Congar, Wide World My Parish: Salvation and Its Problems (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 66: “e idea of punishment cannot be separated from the idea of sin, nor the idea of making amends from that of having committed offence against God. e link between these things is part of religious harmony as the Bible teaches us to live it, and is involved in the true idea of Christian repentance.”

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In this essay, I will offer an interpretation of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius that draws a parallel between the soul’s experience of judgment and purgatory, on the one hand, and Christ’s agony in the garden, on the other. Such a parallel is rooted in the Dream’s textual allusions to the agony, but the elaboration of the parallel is my own. In a more adventurous spirit, I will argue that such an interpretation helps shore up the Church’s rationale behind her penance and prayer for the dead. What follows is an attempt, an essay in the strict sense of the word. 2. The Development of Newman’s View of Purgatory Given the speculative excesses of both Catholic theology and piety, issuing at times in a view of purgatory described by Yves Congar as “an organized torture chamber,” replete with a material fire, boiling oil, and a freezing department,6 Newman’s development – as well as more contemporary re-imaginings – of purgatory is, one might say, an effort to make the doctrine of purgatory “less terrible to the imagination.”7 Not a few have suggested that the doctrine of purgatory was itself in need of purification and that the uncontrolled speculation surrounding it was one factor in its practical abandonment.8 Scholars have, in general, and rightly, observed that Newman’s theology of purgatory follows the tradition of Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) and Francis de Sales (1567-1622), which is less melodramatic and vivid, and whose sparse attention to suffering is offset by descriptions of the joy of expected union.9 While the newly converted Catholic Newman’s writings about purgatory in his Sermon Notes (1849) resonate with the standard theology of the day – i.e., that a material flame is a cause of pain, that 6

Congar, Wide World My Parish, 62. Newman uses this expression about the doctrine of eternal damnation. (Newman, Apo., 6). [Unless otherwise stated, I use the Longmans Uniform edition of Newman’s works, along with the abbreviations from Rickaby’s Index.] No matter how one squares it, the doctrine of eternal damnation is terrifying. But it might be less “terrible to the imagination” if one conceives of it without an externally inflicted punishment such as fire and, instead, as a self-inflicted desolation for those so at odds with God that, were they to be in heaven in their present state, it would be intolerable for them. 8 E.g., Yves Congar, “Le Purgatoire,” in Le mystère de la mort et sa célébration, Lex Orandi 12 (Paris: Cerf, 1951), 279-336, esp. 312-313, 317-319. 9 St. Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, trans. H. E. Manning (London: Burns, 1858). Cf. Francis de Sales’ article on purgatory in The Catholic Controversy, trans. H. B. Mackey, Library of St. Francis de Sales 3, 3rd ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 1909), 363-392. 7

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the fire of purgatory is a lesser and temporary punishment of the righteous by the same fire that punishes the damned in hell, and this, as a consequence of purgatory’s proximate ‘location’ to hell10 – the later Newman’s Dream of Gerontius strikes a very different tone, with any talk of fire taken in a spiritual sense.11 While Newman maintains the penal dimension, he emphasizes the medicinal.12 Furthermore, Newman dwells comparatively little on suffering, pain, and fire, while echoing the most important characteristics of Catherine’s vision. And given Newman’s stature, his Dream is considered to have propelled this tradition forward, helping it to become the dominant one.13

10

Aquinas, ST Supp. (Appendix II) a. 2. E.g., “For e’en thy purgatory, which comes like fire, Is fire without its light” (“Dream of Gerontius,” in V.V., 323-370, at 351 [hereaer cited as Dream]. Cf. CCC, 1031. As the Church has not defined the precise nature of this purification, one need not hold with numerous Fathers (e.g., Gregory the Great and Augustine) and medieval Doctors (e.g., Aquinas and Bonaventure) that the fire is material or physical. I have not the space in this piece to adequately evaluate theologically the different understandings of penal fire in Newman, on the one hand, and more traditional understandings of it, on the other. Two brief points, however, are worth mentioning. First, “pain of sense” has been interpreted as physical fire by traditional theology, but it need not be, nor has it always been. Nor is it particularly helpful, or credible, to dismiss the teaching of Aquinas, Augustine, et al. on the corporeal fire simply on the grounds that a disembodied soul cannot be affected by a corporeal fire. is objection was a common one which many of the medieval doctors confronted. (See e.g., Aquinas, ST Supp., q. 70, a. 3.) e second point is that modern – seemingly more tolerable – images of purgatory do not do away with pain. Catherine of Genoa and Newman retain a pain, the pain of sorrow; it is a pain not caused by a material fire, but by an agony over one’s sins. Whether replacing pain of sense caused by a material fire with the pain of grief caused by guilt helps the credibility of the doctrine in a postmodern age is another question. at the pain of grief for one’s sins helps remove the need for punishment is affirmed by Aquinas in Summa contra gentiles III, 158. 12 E.g., Newman’s angel both nurses and immerses the soul in “penal waters.” 13 E.g., Congar is one who pairs Catherine and Newman together in Wide World My Parish, 67-68. Newman claims in a letter to Pusey in 1867, in L&D, XXIII, 256, that he had yet to see Manning’s translation of her work. For the development of Newman’s thought on purgatory, see Sean Hugh McLaughlin, Consumed Yet Quickened by the Glance of God: John Henry Newman’s Theology of Purgatory, DPhil esis, University of Oxford, 2014. e full thesis is available at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e4a96c3f-7383-4394b55b-3cde2b34b195/download _f ile?f ile_format=pdf&safe_f ilename= THESIS01&type_of_work=esis. 11

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More than simply leaving aside the more graphic and untoward speculations about purgatory, Newman’s re-imagining of purgatory has just as much, if not more, to do with infusing in his writings about purgatory – whether in the Sermon Notes or in the Dream – a certain Christocentrism. In 1849, Newman appeals first to God’s oikonomia, his plan for salvation, to justify the fittingness of the Church’s belief in the purgatorial state: God could have saved us without the passion and without pain, but he chose the cross instead. “Hence,” Newman summarizes, “‘through many tribulations we must enter’, etc., either in this life or next. As Christ [suffered] without sin, so we for our own sins. Suffering in next life is in purgatory.”14 And in his Dream, this same Christocentricity is brought home to us by the parallel Newman draws, subtly but no less truly, between purgatory and Christ’s agony in the garden. To be clear from the outset, the parallel that I develop below between post-mortem purgation, on the one hand, and Christ’s agony in the garden, on the other, is a parallel that I believe has a foundation in Newman’s Dream. e argument here is not that this parallel was fully intended or worked out by Newman, but simply that there are enough allusions to Gethsemane in the dream that justify a more sustained theological reflection on how the two are related. 3. Purgatory and Christ’s Agony: A Parallel In Newman’s Dream, there are both explicit textual references and more subtle allusions in content to the agony. e most obvious textual references are those which speak of the Angel of the Agony. Toward the McLaughlin’s thesis, though highly informative and possessing much merit, overstates, I believe, the dichotomization between the penal and medicinal representations of purgatory. All purgatory is in some sense penal, and if Trent did not define it, it took it for granted because all sin requires satisfaction or penance. A similar argument is made by Juan Rodrigo Vélez Giraldo, Death, Immortality and Resurrection in John Henry Newman, Doctoral esis, University of Navarra, Pamplona, 1999. Extract available at DADUN: Death, immortality and resurrection in John Henry Newman (unav.edu). A brief resume of his work on the topic can be found in his “Newman’s eology in the Dream of Gerontius,” New Blackfriars 82 (2001): 387-398. ere Vélez does not exclude the punitive dimension as such but distinguishes between ‘vindictive’ and ‘remedial’ punishment, claiming for purgatory the latter. 14 John Henry Newman, Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1849-1878, ed. Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), 24.

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beginning of the poem, a dying Gerontius prays for assistance as he faces the unknown: O Jesu, help! pray for me, Mary, pray! Some Angel, Jesu! such as came to ee In ine own agony… Mary, pray for me. Joseph, pray for me. Mary, Pray for me.15

ere are other occasions where Newman uses the word agony without necessarily denoting Christ’s own in the garden. But given the theological genre and the ability, but refusal, to use other words, it is not unreasonable to interpret these uses of the word, within a particular context of the poem that might refer primarily to Gerontius’ or another Christian’s own agony, as allusions to Christ’s own.16 For example, as Gerontius finally dies, he encounters an angel who guides him on a journey towards the Judge. When Gerontius asks why it is that he has such serenity and joy in approaching the judgment seat whereas while he lived he feared death and judgment, the angel replies that the “calm and joy” is “heaven begun,” a foretaste of the just judgment he will receive on account of the fact that he already lived a Godfearing life: It is because en thou didst fear, that now thou dost not fear, ou hast forestall’d the agony, and so For thee the bitterness of death is past.17

Gerontius’ fear of death and judgment – his fear of this agony – has, paradoxically, prepared him for it. And when Gerontius expresses unease at the angel’s warning about experiencing the brief sight of God, the angel clarifies by way of reference to Francis of Assisi that, by the Eucharist, which Gerontius received before he passed away, he learned that glorification is always preceded by suffering: ere was a mortal, who is now above In the mid glory: he, when near to die, 15

Dream, 329. e fluidity of the word ‘agony’ in relation to Christ’s suffering and our own – both physical and spiritual – is on clear display in pre-conciliar Catholic devotion. One need only peruse one of the many editions of the Raccolta to get a taste. An English version is The New Raccolta, or, Collection of Prayers and Good Works to which the Sovereign Pontiffs have attached Holy Indulgences (Philadelphia, PA: Peter F. Cunningham, 1903). 17 Dream, 342. 16

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Was given communion with the Crucified,– Such, that the Master’s very wounds were stamp’d Upon his flesh; and, from the agony Which thrill’d through body and soul in that embrace, Learn that the flame of the Everlasting Love Doth burn ere it transform.18

As the angel and Gerontius proceed closer to the Master, they begin to hear the choirs of angels singing God’s praise and narrating salvation history. Aer they have “pass’d the gate, and are within/ e House of Judgment,”19 the hymn begins to direct its words at Gerontius, and introduces for the first time the idea of the “double agony” of physical and spiritual pain that is necessary for atoning for sins committed. Yet still between that earth and heaven– His journey and his goal– A double agony awaits His body and his soul. A double debt he has to pay– e forfeit of his sins: e chill of death is past, and now e penance-fire begins

Aer the choir’s doxology, the guiding angel explains to Gerontius, “ey sing of thy approaching agony.”20 Gerontius’ agony, the angel informs him, will consist of two pains, “so counter and so keen–/e longing for Him, when thou seest Him not;/ e shame of self at thought of seeing Him,–/ Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory.”21 Coming ever closer to the “Presence-chamber,” they begin to ascend the sacred stairs, where a new band of angels begin to sing about God’s infinite goodness, a glance of which Gerontius is about to be permitted. is goodness and love of God, sing the angels, cannot be told of, let alone understood, by “fallen man.” “It needs, to tell the triumph ou has wrought,/ An Angel’s deathless fire, an Angel’s reach of/ thought.” And, more precisely, the angel most equipped to tell of God’s goodness and love is none but the angel of the agony: 18

Dream, 352. Ibid., 354. 20 Ibid., 358. 21 Ibid., 360. Here we see Newman’s departure from the standard theology of the day. With the first of these, Newman has maintained the classical ‘pain of loss’ or pain of delay of the beatific vision. But where the scholastic and baroque tradition would have expected a “pain of sense” (e.g., Aquinas, ST Supp. [Appendix I] q. 2, a. 1, cor.), Newman substitutes for it a pain of “shame of self.” 19

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It needs that very Angel, who with awe, Amid the garden shade, e great Creator in His sickness saw, Soothed by a creature’s aid, And agonized, as victim of the Law Which He himself had made; For who can praise Him in His depth and height, But he who saw Him reel amid that solitary fight?22

It is one thing to praise the Holiest in the height of His glory. But it is the angel who witnessed Christ in Gethsemane who can praise him in the “depth” of his agony. As the “presence-gate” is opened and entered, the angel and Gerontius hear the choirs rehearsing the fall of Adam and God’s sending a “second Adam to the fight.” And here, in that portion of the poem which has entered into English hymnody, Newman tells us that this second Adam defeated the enemy by enduring “the double agony in man/ For man should undergo.” And this double agony of spirit and flesh corresponds to the two major loci of the passion: Gethsemane and Calvary: “And in the garden secretly,/ And on the cross on high.”23 At this point, Gerontius is coming upon his impending judgment and entering into the “veiled presence of our God.” And the angel informs him that, Before the rone Stands the great Angel of the Agony, e same who strengthen’d Him, what time He Knelt Lone in that garden shade, bedew’d with blood. at Angel best can plead with Him for all Tormented souls, the dying and the dead.24

And then, as the accompanying angel hints, the Angel of the Agony intercedes for the soul of Gerontius: Jesu! By that shuddering dread which fell on ee; Jesu! By that cold dismay which sicken’d ee; Jesu! By that pang of heart which thrill’d in ee; Jesu! By that mount of sins which crippled ee; Jesu! By that sense of guilt which stifled ee; Jesu! By that sanctity which reign’d in ee; Jesu! By that Godhead which was one with ee; Jesu! Spare these souls which are so dear to ee; Souls, who in prison, calm and patient, wait for 22 23 24

Dream, 361. Ibid., 364. Ibid., 365.

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ee Hasten, Lord, their hour, and bid them come to ee, To that glorious Home, where they shall ever gaze on ee.25

Aerwards, Gerontius leaves the angel to go before the judge. We know not what exactly passes between the two except for what the angel tells us: namely, that the encounter with Emmanuel ‘seizes’, ‘scorches’, and ‘shrivels’ the soul of Gerontius, who now “lies/ Passive and still before the awful rone./ O happy, suffering soul! For it is safe,/ Consumed, yet quicken’d, by the glance of God.”26 Gerontius’ last words are a plea to be taken away to be purged, to sing, and sooth my stricken breast, Which ne’er can cease To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest Of its Sole Peace.27

And the poem closes with the angel gently and reassuringly dipping the soul into the “penal waters.”28 At this point, we can say that in the Dream, we have explicit descriptions of the purgatorial process as something agonizing. Gerontius’ purgatory is described with the same phrase as Christ’s passion: namely, as a “double agony.” But more than this, the Angel of Agony plays a conspicuous role in the drama. As he dies, Gerontius invokes the Angel of the Agony. e guiding angel teaches that it is this Angel of Agony who can most adequately convey the loving goodness of God. And later, Gerontius’ prayer is finally answered when the Angel of Agony intercedes for him before the rone of judgment. What is le to shore up the foundation for this parallel between purgatory and Christ’s agony is an inter-textual point. What Gerontius is confronted with at judgment is essentially the same as what, according to Newman’s interpretation, Jesus is confronted with in the garden: sin. e Dream’s “pain of shame” is the result of the glance that Gerontius is granted of God’s face at the seat of judgment. When Gerontius sees God, he encounters the chasm between Holiness and his current state. e angel tells Gerontius that, relative to God, Gerontius will see himself as “vile”; that he will “hate and loath” himself; that, though he can no longer sin, he will feel that he has sinned. His spiritual agony, then, is an 25 26 27 28

Dream, 365-366. Ibid., 366. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 369-370.

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intense humiliation: “e shame of self at thought of seeing him,–/ will be thy veriest and sharpest purgatory.”29 In his sermon, “Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion,” Newman describes Jesus’ agony in a similar vein. ere in Gethsemane, Jesus is having to confront sin, not his personal sin (of which there is none), but the sin of the world for which he must suffer. And now, my brethren, what was it He had to bear, when He thus opened upon His soul the torrent of this predestinated pain? Alas! He had to bear what is well known to us, what is familiar to us, but what to Him was woe unutterable […] He had, my dear brethren, to bear the weight of sin; He had to bear your sins; He had to bear the sins of the whole world.30

e object of encounter is the same – i.e., sin – as well as its effect (i.e., an agony), for in the two instances, the experiences of Gerontius and Jesus both show the ultimate incompatibility of sin with holiness. For Gerontius, a sinner, the holiness of God is agonizing. For the Word made flesh, the weight of sin is too. Sin is an easy thing to us; we think little of it […] But consider what sin is in itself; it is rebellion against God […] Sin is the mortal enemy of the All-holy, so that He and it cannot be together […]31

At issue is the lack of any connaturality between sin and holiness. As God’s holiness makes Gerontius sick and loathsome, so too does sin Jesus. ere He knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime[…]and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He never could be[…]Oh, the horror[…]His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the fall, in all regions of the earth.32

In this vision, Jesus sees everything from the awful, heinous cruelty of humanity, to its petty pride and selfishness. He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together;

29 30 31 32

Dream, 360-361. Newman, Mix., 335. Ibid., 335-336. Ibid., 336-337.

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for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, the real Penitent, all but the real sinner.33

Both Jesus and Gerontius see in their respective visions what it is that requires satisfaction and their contrition and sorrow is the beginning of it. e sin Gerontius sees is his own, whereas for Jesus it is not. But given their respective missions – one as saved, the other as savior – they each willingly undergo the necessary penance. Aer his agony, Gerontius: “Take me away, and in the lowest deep/ there let me be.”34 Jesus, aer his: “Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand” (Mt 26:46). e parallel between Gerontius’ purgatory and Christ’s agony in Gethsemane is, then, not founded only on the explicit allusions in the Dream to the Gospel story, but also on a similar drama. A closer examination of the angel who strengthens Jesus will assist in our reading of Newman’s Dream. 4. Developing the Parallel: The Angel of the Agony It is only in Luke’s narrative that we find the angel strengthening Jesus in the midst of his agony. And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”  And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow (Lk 22:41-45).35

Not only does Luke’s version include the angel, but his version is unique in indicating the reason for the disciples’ slumber: sorrow or grief. Accordingly, the disciples do not fall asleep because they had too much

33

Newman, Mix., 339. Dream, 366. 35 Much of contemporary literature on Lk 22:43 is taken up with the debate about its authenticity on the grounds that it only appears in Luke, and because the line appears irregularly in manuscripts. For a recent status quaestionis, see Lincoln H. Blumell, “Luke 22:43-44: An Anti-Docetic Interpolation or an Apologetic Omission?,” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 19 (2014): 1-35. Also arguing the possibility of its authenticity is Claire Clivaz, “e Angel and the Sweat Like ‘Drops of Blood’ (Lk 22:43-44): P69 and f 13,” The Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 419-440. For a theological interpretation of the angel, one is more successful in turning to older sources. 34

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to eat or drink, but because intense sadness cripples them.36 In this, Luke can be seen to be contrasting how the disciples and Jesus confront their respective spiritual challenges.37 Whereas the disciples fail to turn to God for aid, Jesus does so and God proves his fidelity and answers Jesus’ prayer, not by letting the cup pass, but by sending an angel to strengthen, comfort, and encourage him in consuming that cup.38 e Christian tradition has commented extensively on the angel’s strengthening of Jesus, and while it has offered multiple interpretations, one convergence that transcends denominational lines is that the episode in some way highlights Christ’s humanity.39 Another theologian observes that it is meant to emphasize the essentially spiritual struggle that Jesus faced, which could be comforted only by a pure spirit.40 As to how the angel strengthened Jesus, theologians can only offer speculations more or less fitting with antecedent theological principles. Classical theological assumptions would include, for example, that Jesus’ 36 See John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, vol. 3, trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: e Calvin Translation Society, 1846), 237. It is also notable that the Greek for sleep in Matthew’s gospel is καθεύδω, a stronger word that can connote a moral aspect and culpability. Luke, however, uses κοιμάω, which is a more neutral word. 37 Robert J. Karris, “e Gospel according to Luke,” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 675-721, at 717. 38 Darrell Bock, Luke 2: 9:51–24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 1761. See also Henry Wansbrough, “e Four Gospels in Synopsis,” in The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John Muddiman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1001-1027, at 1026. 39 For Aquinas (1225-1274), the angel strengthens Jesus, not for his sake, but for ours, so that our faith in his humanity might increase (ST III, q. 12, a. 4, ad. 1). For John Calvin (1509-1564), the angel’s coming brings home the distress undergone by Jesus (Calvin, Commentary, 237). And for the Baptist, John Gill (1697-1771), the episode is about God’s condescension: that the creator of the world is strengthened by a creature. (John Gill’s Exposition of the Old and New Testament [1746-1763], and his commentary on Luke 22 can be found online at https://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cmt/gill/luk022.htm [accessed October 23, 2020]. 40 John Hardon, “Christ Strengthened by the Angels,” Conference No. 14 for the Dallas Carmelites (February 28, 1996): “Only a spirit can strengthen the spirit. e angelic spirit strengthening the spirit of Christ’s soul. Only an angelic being can bring courage to the human soul. Not to know this is not to begin to begin to understand what the Agony in the Garden really means, and how much we have still to learn from the experience of our Redeemer in cooperating with Him in the redemption of our own soul and the soul of others.” http://www. therealpresence.org/archives/Angelology/Angelology_025.htm.

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human nature was full of grace and enjoyed the beatific vision (or at the very least enjoyed all that knowledge which was relevant for his saving work, including the salvific significance of his death and resurrection). Given these, then any strengthening that the angel performed was not interiorly changing Christ’s powers or illuminating him, but rather comforting him ‘externally’, meaning that the angel was giving voice to truths which Christ already knew, but would nevertheless address the very human fear of sin and death that Jesus expressed in the garden.41 As ‘let this cup pass’ expresses the natural human dread of what is to come, so too the angel’s message elicits a natural desire for the greater good that would be achieved out of the evil that is the passion. As Cornelius a Lapide speculates, e angel spoke the following, or like words to Christ. “O Lord, bravest of men, y prayer is most acceptable to y Father; because, notwithstanding y natural dread of death, ou resignedst yself wholly to the will of the Father […] Endure the cross for the joy that is offered ee, as the future author and perfector of the faith of very many […] us ou wilt cause SS. Peter and Paul, Laurentius, Vincentius, Agnes, Cœcilia and very many other martyrs and virgins, men, and noble heroes and heroines boldly to undergo martyrdom for God, and the faithful, with other holy men, who triumphed gloriously over the flesh, the world, and the devil. I know that ou, O Lord, hast no need of any strengthening of mine, who am myself strengthened by ee both to be and to live; but, that this my ministry which I execute as a steward at the command of God y Father may be acceptable to ee, I pray again and again.”42

is meditation of the angel’s (possible) words recognizes that, according to classical theological principles, Jesus needs no strengthening, but, according to God’s plan, receives it by God’s ordinance. In other words, when Jesus confronts all the sin in the world – past, present, and future – and fears how it will be unleashed upon him the next day, the angel’s strengthening amounts to ‘reminding’ Jesus, as it were, of all the fruit his passion would yield: the merit and virtue that humanity is capable of with God’s grace. e vision of sin is counter-balanced with a vision of sanctity. 41 Some modern theologians take issue with the traditional interpretation of Christ’s words in the garden (expressed in its most classical form by Maximus the Confessor) on the grounds that it does not take seriously enough Jesus’ humanity which, this line of argument believes, involves real doubt about God’s plan and a real struggle or oscillation between the object of Christ’s human and divine wills. 42 Cornelius a Lapide, The Great Commentary, S. Luke’s Gospel, trans. omas W. Mossman, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1908), 485-486.

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e strength provided by the angel can be contrasted with the failure and weakness of the disciples. eir failure to “keep watch” with Jesus is not simply a failure to follow his example in prayer to withstand all trials in general,43 or to ask for the requisite strength to withstand the coming temptation to abandon and betray Jesus,44 but is also, more immediately, a failure to stand in solidarity with a friend in distress. In theological commentary, the words of Psalm 69 have been used to express Christ’s disappointment: “I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none” (Ps 69:20).45 5. Prayer for the Dead according to the Newly Imagined Purgatory Significantly, the Church has never defined the precise way in which prayers for the dead aid the souls in purgatory. Only that our prayers aid the souls (and are not simply therapeutic exercises for ourselves) has been taught authoritatively.46 e theological tradition, however, has reflected on this matter and, based on liturgical practice, there is a consensus on there being two fundamental classes of offerings for the dead. To the first class belong those prayers and works that are united to the Church suffering by virtue of the individual’s charity (propter unionem charitatis). is is simply an application of the mystical body of Christ to the welfare of the dead. Because the many members are incorporated into one body by the grace which inheres in each, when one suffers, all suffer and when one benefits, all benefit.47 e second class of offerings for the dead – suffrages in the technical sense of the term – are those which are explicitly intended for the souls in general or for an individual soul. ese are united to the church suffering by an explicit intention (propter intentionem in eos directam). And 43 M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 272. 44 Ibid., 96-97. 45 Cornelius a Lapide, The Great Commentary, S. Matthew’s Gospel, Chaps. XXII to XXVIII, trans. omas W. Mossman, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1908), 205-209. 46 For the Council of Lyons (1274), see DH 856; for Trent (Sess. 25, 1563), see DH 1820 (Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals – Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Peter Hünermann, Robert L. Fastiggi, trans. Anne Englund Nash [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2012]). For a more popular and pious account see Frederick William Faber’s chapter, “Purgatory,” in All for Jesus (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1855), esp. 372. 47 Again, in a more devotional spirit, Faber, All for Jesus, 376.

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this second class of offerings include both prayer or supplication (per viam impetrationis) and penance or satisfaction (per viam satisfactionis).48 It might be tempting for some to blame a re-imagined purgatory that is soer and “less terrible to the imagination” for the decline in praying for the dead. When purgatory is imagined as a place of extrinsically imposed punishment (e.g., by material fire), the rationale for prayers for the dead is clear: the prayer aims either at begging God’s mercy to hasten the end of and/or to soen the blows of, the punishment, or at begging God to accept some penance on behalf of the soul in need. But when one opts for a more medicinal or restorative approach rather than a punitive or retributive one, one according to which the suffering is not extrinsically imposed but is intrinsic to the very confrontation between sin and holiness, and therefore necessary, then the rationale for prayers for the dead becomes less obvious.49 According to such a view, one would never wish the soul to forego the purification process in the same way that one would never want a beloved to forego a life-saving treatment, no matter how unpleasant the process and its side-effects. e difference, at least prima facie, seems evident: it makes sense to ask God to turn the penal fire down; but it is not at all helpful to ask God to spare the scalpel. Nor does it make sense to pray for a successful purgation in the same way one prays for a successful surgery. Here below the outcome – even of some routine procedure – is uncertain, but the ultimate issue of the purificatory process under the guidance of the divine physician is not. In other words, a greater sense of urgency seems to prevail if the soul is subjected to torments which can be abridged by our prayers and penances; but if the soul, which must undergo a necessary procedure, is in the safe hands of the divine physician, whether and how we can assist is far from clear.

48

e summary here is based on Charles Journet’s reading of Aquinas, Quodlibet II, q. 7 in The Theology of the Church (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004), 204-205. See also Aquinas’ treatise on suffrages in ST Supp. q. 71, a. 12. See also Charles Journet, “L’Église souffrante,” Nova et Vetera 7 (1932): 146-199. 49 I am not opting for the medicinal, restorative, or remedial over the penal, retributive, or juridical. Following Aquinas, I would say that all sin requires some sort of satisfaction and that this satisfaction both restores justice or right order (in both the agent and within relationships) and is medicinal (Aquinas, ST Supp. q. 13, a. 2, cor.; Supp. q. 12, a. 3, cor.). My focus in this piece on the medicinal here is contrasted with an image of extrinsic punishment (e.g., a material fire), not with the fulfilment of divine justice, which Catherine’s Treatise upholds (Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, 11, 20, 37, 39, 41, 47).

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What in this essay I attempt to show is that reading Newman’s Dream through the lens of Christ’s agony helps avoid a sense of helplessness, and instead provides a theological-imaginary foundation and incentive for our devotion to the dead, even if we opt to embrace a purgatorial tradition “less terrible to the imagination.” If the purgatorial process is indeed akin to Christ’s agony in the garden, it is no major leap to extend the agony’s relevance to the related theological question of suffrages for the dead. In Newman’s Dream, the prayers of those at Gerontius’ bedside resound at the throne of God, where the angel of the agony is also interceding: “I hear the voices that I left on earth,” says Gerontius. And his Angel replies It is the voice of friends around thy bed, Who say the “Subvenite” with the priest. Hither the echoes come: before the rone Stands the great Angel of the Agony, e same who strengthen’d Him, what time He knelt.50

Gerontius is surrounded by agents of help: his family is ‘behind him’ as it were, and the Angel of the Agony is before him. And his guiding Angel offers Gerontius this double-assurance of aid from both angels and from those whom he has le behind: Angels, to whom the willing task given, Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou Liest; And masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven, Shall aid thee at the rone of the Most Highest.51

With the afore-established allusion to the agony, it is not unreasonable to see the behavior of the apostles in the garden as the foil not only to the Angel who comes to Christ’s aid, but also to the faithful Christian who comes to support the souls in purgatorial agony. e apostles in the garden were commanded to keep watch, but failed, whereas Gerontius’ family and friends are succeeding, and Gerontius takes notice: “I hear the voices that I le on earth.” Christ, on the other hand, never hears the voices of those whom he le behind him in the garden. Christ’s grief in the garden is enhanced by his friends’ failure to accompany him in his

50 51

Dream, 364-365. Ibid., 370.

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time of torment.52 Christ is isolated, abandoned, and alone (with the exception of the Angel in Luke). We cannot know for sure what Jesus expected of his disciples when he commanded them to stay awake, keep watch, and not to undergo the test. But the narrative as a whole, and his disappointment in them in particular (especially with Matthew’s threefold repetition) strongly suggest that Jesus was not only stoically offering them a lesson in spiritual combat, but sought his friends’ solidarity, companionship, and some kind of support or even aid.53 Taking the disciples as a lesson and the Angel of the Agony as an example, the faithful have reason to make offerings specifically intended to benefit the deceased (propter intentionem in eos directam). Our prayer could be considered a consolation, like the angel consoling Christ in the garden, and like what the apostles should have done but failed: namely to offer spiritual support and accompaniment. Just as, according to various interpretations, the angel is said to console Christ in the garden by revealing to him the merits of the saints, so too our prayers could aid the soul by drawing God’s attention to all the merits of the deceased soul, akin to a diagnostician informing the physician what, in the patient, is still healthy and therefore in no need of treatment. (Of course, we pray not to inform an ignorant God. We ‘inform’ God, as it were – and pray to an omniscient God – because he has told us to; because it is by prayer that God has ordered his providence to be carried out.)54 Our prayers for the dead (per viam impetrationis) ask God to take into account the merits of the individual during the purificatory process, in a way similar to how the liturgical assembly begs God to look not on our sins, but on the faith of the Church. e spiritual support that the disciples could have shown to Christ in the garden brings home to us the importance of our active participation in the suffering of the soul by way of penance or satisfaction (per viam satisfactionis). Here I do not simply mean that the apostles could have shown an empathy with Christ by staying awake. In enjoining them to stay awake and keep watch, Jesus is issuing his disciples a spiritual 52 Cf. Dale C. Allison, Jr., “Matthew,” The Oxford Bible Commentary, 844885, at 880. 53 e commentators for The Navarre Bible describe the pericope as narrating the “failure of the disciples to keep him [Jesus] faithful company.” The Navarre Bible: New Testament (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008), 141. 54 In praying, we are not trying to persuade a fickle God or inform an ignorant one. Cf. Mt 6:7-13. God’s knowing “what you need before you ask him” is a reminder to avoid babbling, not an exhortation not to ask.

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challenge. Spiritual sleep or remaining awake are eschatological metaphors akin to being children of the day and not the night (1 ess 5:57).55 By staying spiritually awake, resisting the temptation to despair, and demonstrating fidelity, the apostles could have consoled Jesus by diminishing the intensity of the vision of sin that Christ had to bear. It is classical teaching that, in making sacrifices or committing penances on behalf of the departed soul, the Christian is restoring an order that was dislodged by the sins of the departed. To the extent that the consequences of past sins can be rectified, the purification of the soul is furthered.56 is reminder to stay awake and keep watch is also a reminder that, beyond performing penances with a specific intention for the dead, our first and most fundamental gi to the departed is the pursuit of holiness, the life of grace and virtue. Our good of holiness is not our own, but benefits the entire Church, including the departed members propter unionem charitatis. In his commentary on the Gospels, John Calvin brings the reader’s attention to the fact that in Luke’s gospel, the evangelist tells us the reason for the apostles’ succumbing to sleep: from immoderate sorrow. For Calvin, the cause is not food- or drink-induced fatigue, but a paralysis that stems from being overwhelmed by fear and sadness. ere is, for Calvin, a twofold danger:

55 Boring and Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary, 163. Further in the narrative, Jesus says, upon his capture, “When I was with you day aer day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.” David L. Balch, “Luke,” Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 1153. e command to keep watch is also the same as what Jesus asks of all his disciples with respect to a Christian vigilance about God’s visitation. Mk 13:36-37: “Watch therefore – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning – lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: ‘Watch’.” 56 It is worth noting that the efficaciousness of applied penance (per viam satisfactionis) depends on the via impetrationis. What we are praying for is not that a debt or punishment disappear, but that our work of devotion or charity satisfy for the debt of another; that a work of love compensate or contribute in some small way towards re-ordering a world that is dis-ordered. It is by God’s mercy for which we pray, that our own merits are accepted on behalf of the suffering soul, for by justice, our merit is our own. God’s mercy permits the ‘suffrage’ on behalf of another. Such an arrangement is according to God’s economy, whose pattern he set with the incarnation and passion of his Son.

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For if we dread no danger, he [Satan] intoxicates and drowns us in sleep; and if we experience fear and sorrow, which ought to arouse us to pray, he overwhelms our senses, so that they do not rise to God; and thus, in every respect, men fall away and forsake God, till he restores them.57

If we continue to apply the dynamics of the agony to purgatory, Calvin’s observation about the apostles – paradoxically to be sure, as one who had no time for the Romish doctrine – is applicable to the Church’s attitude towards the dead. e pilgrim Church is liable to “dread no danger” and therefore refrain from keeping watch with the soul in distress, or it can be overwhelmed with sorrow at the loss of a loved one, and thereby also fail to keep watch. e former is a presumption that issues in indifference; the second is a despair that issues in paralysis. In his poem, “e Golden Prison,” Newman asks those he leaves behind to avoid both of these errors. Weep not for me, when I am gone, Nor spend thy faithful breath In grieving o’er the spot or hour Of all-enshrouding death; Nor waste in idle praise thy love On deed of head or hand, Which live within the living Book, Or else are writ in sand; But let it be thy best of prayers, at I may find grace To reach the holy house of toll.58

at we pray for the dead is an exercise of the virtue of hope, which overcomes despair but not without confronting the challenges and obstacles that hinder the goal’s achievement. Christ’s perseverance and reliance on God in his sorrow exhibits for us the virtue requisite for praying for the dead. 6. Conclusion In the mystical tradition of Catherine of Genoa, Newman’s poetic depiction of purgatory avoids images of an externally-imposed fire torturing a soul begging for mercy. So while Newman’s representation cannot do away with the penal aspect of purgatory, he does succeed in rendering

57 58

Calvin, Commentary, 237-238. Newman, “Golden Prison,” V.V., 303.

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the doctrine “less terrible to the imagination.” But in doing so, the pastoral challenge remains of maintaining the practice of – let alone the urgency in – praying for the dead, in conformity with the Church’s faith and earliest tradition. e practice of prayers for the dead stands or falls with faith in their efficaciousness and necessity. We will not pray if we do not believe it accomplishes anything; and we will not pray if there is nothing to accomplish. My contention has been that, to better understanding the compatibility and even unity between the penal and medicinal (or penitential and ameliorative), and to provide a rationale for our prayers for the dead, it is helpful to read Newman’s Dream Christocentrically. For in Christ’s passion, these two aspects – the penal and medicinal – converge: “by his wounds, you have been healed” (1 Pt 2:24; cf. Is 53:5). And in the agony we find a pattern for our intercession. e agony in the garden offers two stark allusions relevant to purgatory. e first is the vision of sin, and the second the role of mediation. Both Jesus and Gerontius experience an agonizing vision of sin, while the Angel of the Agony assists them both. We have, then, not only a concentration of sin and its consequences in the vision, but also, with the Angel, an instance of mediated assistance or intercession. And whereas Jesus’ companions le behind in the garden fail to assist, those Gerontius leaves behind him offer prayers whose echo consoles him on his journey. Newman’s Dream thereby dramatizes purgatory as the doctrine with which the Catholic imagination takes seriously God’s holiness, our fallenness, and the theological gi of hope in Christ. It answers to that perennial human longing for eternal communion with God and our loved ones. What is more, the doctrine of purgatory coheres with and shores up the doctrine of the Incarnation and, in particular, the true humanity of Christ. Seeing purgatory as our own agony in the garden highlights this coherence. e one through whom all things were made, the Lord of all creation, is strengthened by a creature in his agony. e Christian’s suffrage for the dead is also a continuation of this incarnational logic because creatures strengthen creatures and thereby participate in God’s redemptive work. at a Christian can intercede and assist in another’s agony is the dignity of the Christian vocation and manifests the Son’s continual condescension.59 God calls creatures to assist one another, in 59 To use the phrase of Faber, “at He should let us do with His satisfactions what we will” (Faber, All for Jesus, 377).

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the way that he took on a created human nature to do the same. e pilgrim Church on earth is called to minister to the dead like the angel did to Christ, and to stay awake and keep watch and accompany the dead, who, like Christ, must confront sin to overcome it. Reading Newman’s Dream Christocentrically, with special attention to the agony, places purgatory in a more paschal framework and thereby reveals the efficacy of our prayers and penances. at is why it is crucial to see our prayers and penances as contributing to the re-establishing of an order that was dislodged by sin, a continuation of Christ’s work on the cross. If we are tempted to think that we need not pray for the dead, or that the soul is on a conveyor belt that automatically – mechanically – leads it through its purgation like a metal being tested – that “God’ll take care of ‘em,” as it were – then it behooves the Christian to examine his spiritual posture before Christ in agony: had we been in the garden with the apostles, what would we have done?

5 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent Or: On Liturgy’s Spirituality Joris Geldhof

e title of the present contribution is an obvious allusion to John Henry Newman’s famous study with the intriguing title An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent,1 a book I came to know through the engaging classes of Professor Terrence Merrigan in the late 1990s. What I learnt (to appreciate) was that Newman’s tome was basically an ingenious attempt at underpinning, and at developing compelling reasons in support of, strong reality and truth claims that are intrinsic to the Christian faith. In other words, it was a kind of foundational theological epistemology, standing in the extraordinary tradition of British common sense philosophy but with unique Christian accents. Newman argued that for truth to be real it is not only important that assertions are correct, but also that ideas are incorporated in life. One could say that, for Newman, a truth to live from is ultimately more significant than mere theories and the systems of propositions of which they consist. e assent of the faith, then, is rather based on the embrace and interiorization of an encompassing vision than on the checking of a series of individual statements through processes of reasoning alone. Famous in Newman’s argument are the distinction between ‘notional’ and ‘real’ assent and the role of the ‘illative sense’. e latter is notoriously difficult to define, but its essence lies in a mental act of inference based on an accumulation of sufficient evidence on the ‘objective’ side and a serious commitment on the ‘subjective’ side. Inasmuch as the Christian faith relies on the apostles’ witness and the Church’s tradition, it will never be the outcome of individual thinking only. As a consequence, theology must not only deal with the content of beliefs, but also, equally, with believers’ reception of them. In this context, Jan Hendrik Walgrave, a renowned specialist of Newman’s work, very dear 1 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. Ian T. Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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to Professor Merrigan, and a fine Dominican theologian all throughout, lucidly observed: Faith is therefore at the same time and essentially both a dogmatic assent and a personal commitment. As real, faith is prolonged in the Christian life in search of holiness; as notional, it is prolonged in theological reflection in search of clear knowledge.2 e two movements are not alien to each other. […] Uniting in a balanced way the notional clarity of the dogma with the intensity of Christian experience is therefore for Newman the ideal condition of faith.3

In other words, Newman brilliantly exposed an intrinsic tension between rationalism on the one hand, which is mainly interested in the cognitive content of dogmas, and experientialism on the other hand, which tends to exclusively insist on the lived reality of Christian faith as the sole standard for truth. His point is to always keep a well-reflected balance between the two. As a corollary, he calls to not exaggerate on either side, so that theologies neither become dry speculations detached of any connection with existential queries nor cheap and woolly stories to all too easily identify with. Sadly, however, one of the flaws of Newman’s exposé on the grammar of faith as a real assent is a thorough and pervading Liturgievergessenheit.4 Like so many theologians of his age, the liturgy hardly appears on his intellectual horizon, and when it appears, it is usually not taken seriously as an eminent theological and scholarly resource. Liturgy for Newman seems not to be primarily the celebration of the fullness of the paschal

2

See in this context Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Leuven Pastoral and eological Monographs 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991). 3 Jan Hendrik Walgrave, “Foi et dogme dans la théologie de Newman,”  in Selected Writings – Thematische Geschriften: Thomas Aquinas, J.  H. Newman, Theologia Fundamentalis, ed. Georges De Schrijver and James Kelly, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 58 (Louvain: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 1982), 232-241, at 235: “La foi est donc en même temps et essentiellement et un assentiment dogmatique et un engagement personnel. En tant que réelle, la foi se prolonge dans la vie chrétienne en quête de sainteté; en tant que notionelle, elle se prolonge dans la réflexion théologique en quête de connaissance claire. Les deux mouvements ne sont pas étrangers l’une à l’autre. […] Unir d’une manière équilibrée la clarté notionelle du dogme à l’intensité de l’expérience chrétienne est donc pour Newman la condition idéale de la foi” (the translation above has been made with the help of DEEPL and revised by the author). 4 For an exploration of this notion, see Joris Geldhof, Liturgical Theology as a Research Program (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), 16-23.

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mystery. Clearly, he worked with another understanding of the concept of ‘mystery’, whereby he exclusively focused on its being enigmatic and incomprehensible. According to him, “mystery is a proposition” and “the assent which we give to mysteries, as such, is notional assent.”5 Of course, it is crucial to avoid anachronisms. It makes very little sense to employ twentieth-century conceptualities, like e.g. Odo Casel’s encompassing theory of Mysteriengegenwart, to evaluate nineteenth-century theologies. Neither is it advisable to apply insights from one field of expertise – in this case sacramental theology and patristics – to thereby suggest that progress made in another area – here theological epistemology and fundamental theology – is obsolete or insignificant. So, the abovementioned blind spot in Newman’s thinking should not elicit any dismissive criticism let alone a vehement rejection. Rather, the oblivion of liturgy in Newman’s work should be taken as a mere observation and, at the same time, as a warning and an incentive for future theologies: to neither forget nor neglect liturgy. eologies today should be construed in such a way that their variegated investigations into the lex credendi of the Church can at least be corroborated by its longstanding lex orandi, if the lex orandi itself is not the explicit starting point for their research and reflections. e goal of the present contribution is to do exactly that with respect to Newman’s ‘grammar of assent’. In trying to expound what a ‘grammar of ascent’ means, I hope to deliver relevant support for Newman’s account of the Christian faith from a contemporary perspective. It will be shown how a thorough reflection about the fundamentals of liturgical spirituality meaningfully complements as well as undergirds Newman’s theological epistemology. To do that properly, however, implies certain choices and, therefore, of necessity, limitations. In particular, it is fitting to select a well-chosen case study, which in this case is provided by the oenoverlooked solemnity of the Ascension – usually, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost receive most attention from the side of theologians. Liturgical scholars however agree that the feast of the Ascension exhibits essential elements of the paschal mystery as a whole and that it has its rightful place in Easter time.6 It is worth highlighting those elements first before embarking on a critical discussion of some interesting theological scholarship around the motif of ascent in Christian faith. Of particular interest in this double movement – i.e. the heortological exploration and the 5

Newman, Grammar of Assent, 36. Matias Augé, L’anno liturgico: È Cristo stesso presente nella sua Chiesa (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2011), 153-165. 6

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review of theological literature – is how an authentic Christian spirituality is engraed on, embedded in, and expressed by the liturgy. 1. Elements from the Solemnity of the Lord’s Ascension in the Roman Rite As for the present discussion of the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, reference will be made to its current form in the Missale Romanum including the lectionary and the Breviarium Romanum. In other words, our exclusive focus will be its shape and content in the Roman rite and its celebration in the Catholic Church. In addition, it is important to include both the regime of the Eucharist and the regime of the liturgy of the hours, because a systematic heortology cannot consist of an analysis of the readings and the prayers of the mass only. I will subsequently discuss the prefaces of the Ascension, the orations, the New Testament readings of the mass during the day (in die), psalms 47 and 68, which have a special significance for the feast of the Ascension, and the readings from the Fathers of the Church provided for the office of readings in years I and II. Together this selection of liturgical and Biblical material allows a profound insight into the composition of the solemnity of the Lord’s Ascension (In ascensione Domini), as the feast is officially called. e goal of these brief investigations is to show how the themes of ascent and ascension are interwoven with other images, ideas and visions, and how they can incite a liturgical spirituality. 1. Two Prefaces e most recent version of the Roman missal – i.e. the emended reprint of the third typical edition which came out in 2008 – offers two prefaces for the feast of the Ascension of the Lord.7 ey can both be used in the time between Ascension and Pentecost, too. While the first one is a new composition which came into being in the context of the liturgical reforms aer Vatican II, the second one is the same that was already there in the 1570 missal of Pius V and which originally stems from the

7

Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia, reimpressio emendata (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 2008), 535-536. Translations are taken from the official English translation that was approved for use in the dioceses of the US by the USCCB, of which there are many separate editions.

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Hadrianum, the sacramentary which Pope Hadrian offered to Charlemagne for use in his empire.8 e first preface excels in a rich theological content, in particular through making use of an abundance of Christological titles. Christ is called king of glory (Rex gloriae), conqueror of sin and death (peccati Triumphator et mortis), mediator between God and humanity (Mediator Dei et hominum), judge of the world (Iudex mundi), and Lord of hosts (Dominusque virtutum). It is rather rare that Christ is described with such a wealth of images in the euchology of the Roman rite. For the composition of this prayer, the reformers were inspired by prayers from the ancient Verona collection, which in its turn resonates with ideas from Leo the Great’s ascension homilies. More important, however, is that they underscore the central idea of the traditional ascension preface. is latter text emphasizes the petition that Christ “might make us sharers in his divinity” (ut nos divinitatis suae tribueret esse participes). In other words, the ascent of Christ to heaven is not meant to create an insurmountable distance. Rather, it shapes the opportunity to go where He has gone before. Furthermore, the two prefaces unanimously underline that this is a reason for immense joy.9 2. Four Orations for the Mass during the Day e Roman missal provides two options for the collect of the mass during the day, which is highly exceptional. e situation is the same as with the prefaces: the first alternative is a new composition of the reformers based on patristic material, in particular Leo the Great, and the second one is the traditional collect with roots in the Hadrianum. Whereas the first two editiones typicae of the Roman missal had omitted the traditional collect, the third one took it up again.10 ematically, the prayers advance the idea of joy because of Christ’s ascension, for it is to be considered as a kind of promotion for humankind staying behind. It is an

8 Patrick Regan, Advent to Pentecost: Comparing the Seasons in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 285, 282. 9 e formula with which they connect the mirabilia Dei to the singing of the Sanctus is the same in the two texts: “erefore, overcome with paschal joy, every land, every people exults in your praise.” Literally, the Latin text says: Quapropter, profusis paschalibus gaudiis, totus in orbe terrarum mundus exsultat. 10 Regan, Advent to Pentecost, 284, 282.

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incentive for the Church to follow Christ: “where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” e prayer over the offerings continues this line of development inasmuch as the missal mentions the “most holy exchange” (commerciis sacrosanctis) between Christ and humanity, to which it also refers on Christmas.11 Christ’s ascension, again, does by no means cause alienation but on the contrary establishes a profound connection beyond his death and resurrection. Finally, the prayer aer communion reinforces this once more: “grant, we pray, that Christian hope may draw us onward to where our nature is united with you.” 3. Readings from the New Testament e identity of the feast of Jesus’ ascension into heaven is obviously marked by the opening verses of the Acts of the Apostles. Luke reports that aer the resurrection Jesus appeared to the apostles and that he showed them that he was alive (Acts 1:3). He also urged them not to leave Jerusalem and to wait for the Spirit to come (Acts 1:5, 8). e subsequent story of the actual ascension, however, is very concise and does not contain many narrative details. It is simply said that Jesus was elevated before the eyes of the apostles and that a cloud hindered their sight (Acts 1:9). e interpretation of what happened is laid into what two men in white cloths, who suddenly appeared on the scene, declare: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? is Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11; NRSV). is latter verse, with the notorious addressing ‘Men of Galilee’ (Viri Galilaei), has exerted a quite considerable influence on the history of the liturgy. It is there as the introit of the mass during the day and in the antiphons of the liturgy of the hours. It is important to realize that this account in Acts 1 is certainly not the only passage from Scripture which has impacted on the understanding of Christ’s ascension as a whole. Together with Adrien Nocent, who wrote a noteworthy and extensive commentary on the revised liturgical year, one could even contend that “if we had only Luke’s account, we would be unable to elaborate a theology of the ascension.”12 e readings 11 Missale Romanum, 155 (in the prayer over the offerings in the mass during the night). 12 Adrient Nocent, The Liturgical Year II: Lent, the Sacred Paschal Triduum, Easter Time, trans Matthew J. O’Connell, intr., em. and ann. by Paul Turner (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 398.

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from the gospels in years A, B and C constitute one additional element. In each case it is the last verses from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that are read. ey concern the farewell of Jesus, which in all cases goes along with words of comfort and instructions. Moreover, the fact that Jesus’ destiny is ‘up’ in ‘heaven’ is key for understanding the point of the ascension. Normand Bonneau explains: ese gospel passages amplify and elaborate various dimensions of Jesus’ enthronement at the right hand of God, figurative language signifying that through his resurrection Jesus is exalted as Lord and thus shares fully in God’s power. rough his resurrection, ascension, and exaltation, Jesus has been established henceforth as the only mediator between God and humankind.13

In addition to the gospels, there are also the second readings. Originally, it was only a passage from Ephesians 1 that was foreseen for the three years A, B and C. It is still possible to do that, but the lectionary now provides an alternative for years B and C. None of them adds anything narrative to the understanding of the ascension; they rather deepen its theology through images. e three selections proposed for the feast of the Ascension bring out different dimensions of Jesus’ enthronement at God’s right hand. e Year A reading from Ephesians 1 stresses Jesus’ power over all earthly rule and dominion and describes him as the head of his body, the Church. In Year B, Ephesians 4 elaborates on the Christ-Church relationship, explaining that it is Christ the head of the Church who creates unity and makes the body grow. e passage from Hebrews for Year C develops the salvific aspects of Jesus’ ascension. As the high priest, Christ enters, not the Holy of/ Holies in the temple at Jerusalem, but the heavenly sanctuary not made by human hands and thus fulfills once for all the sacrifice that takes away sin.14

4. Psalms 47 and 68 In addition to the abovementioned texts, psalm 47 is instrumental to comprehend the liturgical theology of the ascension. It is a relatively short psalm but it prominently figures both as the responsorial psalm in the Eucharist in years A, B, and C, and as the second psalm of the second

13 Normand Bonneau, The Sunday Lectionary: Ritual Word, Paschal Shape (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 83. 14 Bonneau, Sunday Lectionary, 91-92.

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vespers.15 e psalm stands out in a certain triumphalism in that it depicts God as a mighty ruler who subdues the nations. e appropriate response to his victories is endless praise, as is strongly put forward in verse 6: “Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises” (Ps 47:6; NRSV). However, the privileged position of psalm 47 in the liturgy actually depends on the previous verse: “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet” (Ps 47:5). For in the Latin of the Vulgate, the first part of this verse simply says Ascendit Deus in iubilo. Clearly, the liturgical tradition of the Church has seen in this verse an allusion to Christ’s ascension aer the resurrection. It is therefore no coincidence that it is taken as the refrain in the responsorial psalm and as the antiphon in the vespers. Psalm 68 is a much longer piece of text than psalm 47 (36 verses instead of 10), but shows large correspondence with respect to its content and overall tone. Psalm 68 praises God for his mighty interventions, mightier than any earthly king can achieve. Again, the appropriate response is abundant and unceasing praise, as it is concisely put in one verse towards the end of the psalm: “Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth; sing praises to the Lord” (Ps 68:32). But it is once more one single verse that directly connects the psalm to the feast of the Ascension: “You ascended the high mount, leading captives in your train and receiving gis from people” (Ps 68:18). e first part of this sentence in the Latin of the Vulgate is Ascendisti in altum, with a verb form of the root ascendere, akin to the noun ascensio. It is again not a coincidence that this verse is used as the second antiphon in the office of readings. Antiphons in the liturgy of the hours help focus the ones who pray them by putting salient accents; their function can be compared with the alleluia verses preceding the reading of the gospel in the Eucharist. 5. Readings from Leo the Great and Augustine of Hippo In addition to a hymn and psalms, the office of readings essentially consists of a reading from Scripture and one which is traditionally taken from the Fathers of the Church but which can nowadays also be drawn from contemporary spiritual authors. For the solemnity of the Ascension, however, this latter possibility has not been taken as an option. e office of ‘matins’ in the tradition already had a reading from one of Leo 15 e first vespers are sung on the eve of the feast, the second on the day of the feast itself. Lauds and vespers are considered the ‘hinges’ of the liturgy of the hours in Sacrosanctum concilium (#89a).

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the Great’s famous homilies, and that choice was reinforced by the liturgical reforms aer Vatican II. For the second cycle of readings – there is now a Year I and Year II in the office of readings – an excerpt from a homily of Saint Augustine of Hippo was selected. Leo the Great underscores that the ascension must be seen in continuity with the risen Jesus’ appearances to his disciples, which are to be interpreted as an encouragement of the early Christian community’s faith. Leo correspondingly reassures his audience that Christ’s ascension into heaven, although it was a farewell, is not a reason for sadness but instead a source of immeasurable joy.16 It is this joy which the Church should join in. In his turn, Augustine likewise states that Jesus’ disappearance into heaven is neither a removal nor an alienation but the deepening of a bond of love. He makes it clear that the ascension is something which happens ‘today’ (hodie), and that it is thus an event which people can associate themselves with at any time. By way of concluding this first section, three elements stand out. First, the concise heortological analysis of the feast demonstrates that the ascension is a complex and multi-layered mystery of faith. It is not only dependent on the story of the risen Jesus’ vanishing before the eyes of his disciples as told by Luke. e liturgy weaves many more themes and images through the feast and so offers a rich palette of meanings. Second, there is an intrinsic connection between the ascension and the Christ event, which makes it impossible to suppose that the ascension of Jesus Christ is only a minor element in the event as a whole. erefore, it is theologically inappropriate to consider Christ’s ascension into heaven as less important than e.g. the incarnation. As the ascension is an integral part of the Easter cycle, so much so that the Easter cycle is impossible to imagine without it, so it is the case that it is at once an integral dimension of the Christ event. ird, the ascension involves the community of the Church. e role of the apostles is not to be reduced to a narrative detail. On the contrary, the roots of a Christian-and-ecclesial life of 16 e famous and oen-quoted line that “what was to be seen in our Redeemer has passed over in the sacraments” is likewise taken from an Ascension homily by Leo the Great. e idea expressed in this line has nearly acquired the status of a principle. For an interpretation of it, see my essay “Paschal Joy Continued: Exploring Leo the Great’s eology of Christ’s Ascension into Heaven,” in Preaching after Easter: Mid-Pentecost, Ascension, and Pentecost in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard W. Bishop, Johan Leemans, and Hajnalka Tamas, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 136 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 386-404.

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mission, service, and testimony lie in the culmination of the post-resurrection appearances in the ascension of Christ the head of his Church. Taking together these three observations, which were made on the basis of an exploration of the liturgy of the feast of the Lord’s ascension as it is currently celebrated in the Roman rite, and using well-known systematic-theological vocabulary, one could say that the ascension functions as the hinge between the economic and the immanent Trinity. Moving from a reflection on how the triune God is operative in world and history to a contemplation of who God is in Godself, means making a transition via the ascension. 2. The Motif of ‘Ascent’ in Liturgical Theology and Spirituality is latter assertion is now to be elaborated in some more detail. e goal of the present section is to find evidence for it in sound theological scholarship which has explicitly dealt with the age-old motif of ascent and ascension in Christian faith and theology.17 An interesting and most fitting starting point for these explorations is David Fagerberg’s definition of liturgy: “Liturgy is the Trinity’s perichoresis kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent into deification.”18 It gives rise to reflections about different aspects related to the central topic of this essay, the grammar of ascent. 1. Ascent and Participation One of the thought-provoking aspects of Fagerberg’s definition of liturgy is the combination of kenosis and theosis, which makes one think of the exitus-reditus scheme underlying not only omas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae as a marvelous intellectual construction, but also faith as such. As Julie Canlis says in her book about ascent and ascension, “[t]he 17 at this motif is centuries old, and that it has deep roots in both the Old and the New Testament, can be derived from an encyclopedia entry such as “Ascent of the Soul” by Frederick van Fleteren in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999), 63-67. 18 David W. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: e Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 9 (italics in the original), 113-114. In more recent publications, Fagerberg has repeated and further elaborated this definition. See e.g. id., Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016), 6; id., Liturgical Mysticism (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019), xvi.

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Summa is less a sterile intellectual apologetic, as it is oen caricatured, than an invitation prayerfully to consider humanity’s beginning and end, a beginning and end that are ordered wholly to God.”19 Faith can thus be understood as the sharing of the permanent movement which originates in God, which permeates and encompasses the entire creation and which will finally return in God. Fagerberg’s definition implies that humankind has been equipped to cooperate with the upward part of this movement (hence the allusion to ‘synergy’), the goal of which is to overcome anything which hinders the full reconciliation between God and humankind. Or, as Canlis expounds with a reference to Calvin, “[t]he entire Christian life is an outworking of this ascent – the appropriate response to God’s descent to us – that has already taken place in Christ. us, […] the only appropriate human ascent is a matter of participating in Christ.”20 e conviction that it is possible to participate in this grand dynamic, is absolutely fundamental and requires some further elaboration. According to Canlis, it is “impossible to deny that the concept (and praxis) of participation is at the center of Christian faith.”21 One of the arguments she puts forward to underpin this claim is based on an interpretation of what koinônia (communio) means, and how it is related to different aspects of the Christian faith. “As such, koinônia is at the center of Christian theology (the study of God), anthropology (the study of ourselves), and spirituality (the Christian pattern of experience: being led by the Spirit into God’s own triune communion).”22 e concept is used both in Hellenistic philosophy and in the Bible, primarily in the corpus of Paul’s letters. As a consequence, a Christian understanding of koinônia interweaves ontological and scriptural undertones into a fascinating whole, in such a way that one cannot simply dismiss it as something alien which was borrowed from Greek metaphysics, or else as something equally alien which cannot be matched with contemporary worldviews. “e early Christians so readily appropriated the language of participation because it offered a conceptual way into how they perceived their altered reality and worship.”23

19 Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 37. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Ibid., 5. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Ibid., 17.

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Put differently, participation is real and not only notional. It is not only the result of an individual subject undertaking rational considerations; it is an awareness of sharing a reality like and with others. is awareness and this sharing shed an interesting light on the concept of active participation, which became the key notion in the history of the Liturgical Movement.24 is concept has oen been misunderstood, as if it could be reduced to offering more prominent roles to the laity in celebrations of the Sunday Eucharist by the parish community. Before such practical consequences are drawn – and they are by no means insignificant – it is crucial to have a sense of why they matter. ey matter because active participation in the liturgy is first and foremost a real sharing in the upward movement from humanity to divinity. Before active participation is a pastoral program it is a doxological necessity and an ontological possibility. As a corollary, liturgical spirituality is and has to be profoundly mystagogical, in that it initiates in this mysterious reality and prepares for a growing familiarization with what it means to ‘ascend into deification’. 2. Ascension and Christ e only and unique mediator in that process is Jesus Christ, the one whose self-emptying flows forth from the Trinitarian perichoresis, which is nothing but a mystery of love. e purpose of the Son of God’s incarnation and earthly mission and ministry is to unite humankind, to extend the invitation for salvation universally, and to prepare all people for the ascent to heaven. In his noteworthy exploration of what an “ascension theology” would be, Farrow notes that this ascent, as a sharing in Christ’s ascension, is not a static business but a dynamic undertaking, one moreover with deep roots in Old Testament symbolism: “Just as the ark, with its mercy seat, moves from Sinai to Zion, tracing out the mighty arc of God’s saving hand among the people of Israel, so Jesus moves from the earthly Zion to the heavenly, tracing out God’s salvation both for Israel and for all the world.”25 Canlis meaningfully adds: “It is Jesus’ ascent back to the Father into which humanity is included and which completes the economic mission of the second person of the Trinity. 24 Jozef Lamberts, ed., The Active Participation Revisited: La participation active 100 ans après Pie X et 40 ans après Vatican II, Textes et études liturgiques / Studies in Liturgy 19 (Louvain: Peeters, 2004). 25 Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 46.

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Ascent thus becomes the metaphor that governs the entire Christian life – a life marked by a ‘return’ to God and inclusion in the triune life of love.”26 Two classical images having Christ at their core stand out to further elucidate this mysterious reality. e first one is Christ the High Priest, a Christological image with close ties to central themes in the Letter to the Hebrews. Its author sketches a contrast between the worship of the old covenant, in the context of which animal sacrifices took place on a regular basis, and the worship of the new covenant, which no longer requires any bloodshed and which is moreover meant to endure forever. Still according to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ replaced the figure of the high priest whose responsibility it was to offer the right sacrifices in the temple and to enter yearly into the holy of holies. Christ himself became “the high priest of the good things that have come” (Heb 9:11) and, as such, the “mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 9:15). e text continues: “Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb 9:24) – a verse which is read in the liturgy of the mass in Year C (cf. supra). It is there, in the heavenly realm, where he intercedes for humankind and where he continues to assure them of salvation in his name. Dom Columba Marmion, who wrote an intriguing spiritual commentary on the mysteries of Christ as represented by the liturgy, accordingly emphasizes that “Christ does not enter there alone. Our High Priest takes us with Him, not in a symbolic way but in reality. […] On the day of His ascension, Christ, Supreme High Priest of the human race, took us with Him, by right and hope, to heaven.”27 Orthodox theologian Boris Bobrinskoy, who profoundly reflected on these same realities, draws the attention to the fact that the Letter to the Hebrews connects the idea of Christ being a new kind of high priest with his being a ‘forerunner’ (prodromos in Greek). Its author encourages Christians and assures them of an unshakable hope. “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 6:19-20). Bobrinskoy explains:

26

Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 93. Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, trans. Alan Bancro (Leominster: Gracewing, 2009), 366. 27

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is passage expresses a truth which is of the utmost importance for an understanding of Christian worship, namely that it was not only in his capacity as High Priest, but also as ‘forerunner for us’ that Jesus entered heaven. By penetrating within the Holy of Holies, he draws us aer him into the intimacy of the life of the Trinity, which had hitherto been inaccessible to fallen mankind, into the very heart of the divine Glory.28

e second image is arguably less centrally Christological but obviously inconceivable without strong Christological import. It is the (mystical) Body of Christ, which has evident ecclesial and sacramental aspects, which are interwoven with each other in complicated but fascinating ways.29 e emphasis on these sacramental and ecclesial dimensions, however, should never form an excuse to look away from Christ’s bodily nature, as Canlis knows. “Ascent is primarily Christ’s, yet his mission was to include us in his ascending return to the Father. Union with God is only through his body, his humanity, his ‘weakness’. Ascent is with Him and is ‘up’ to his physicality, where he lives and reigns with the Father.”30 In other words, the threefold meaning of the ‘Body of Christ’ – Jesus’ earthly existence, the Church of which he is the head, and the consecrated host – cohere and may never be torn apart. is implies that Christ’s ascension as the capacitation for humankind’s ascent infuses meaning into all three mentioned dimensions of his Body. In this context, Marmion concludes that “the members share in the glory of the head, and the joy of one person is reflected in the whole body. at is why we share in all the treasures Christ possesses; His joys, His glories, His beatitude become ours.”31 A genuine liturgical spirituality, therefore, will unfold itself as a series of attempts to join and, where necessary, to heal and to relieve the Body of Christ, so that its ascent is made smoother. 3. Ascent and Eucharist It will come as no surprise that the Eucharist situates itself precisely at this crossroads between vertical and horizontal dimensions. Hence it is instructive to briefly investigate how the motif of ascent resonates with the many meanings of the Eucharist. First of all, it can be noted that the central prayer of praise and thanksgiving, which since antiquity has been 28 Boris Bobrinskoy, “Worship and the Ascension of Christ,” Studia Liturgica 2 (1963): 108-123, at 113. 29 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds et al. (London: SCM Press, 2006). 30 Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 114-115. 31 Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, 357.

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the central part of Eucharistic celebrations, is called the anaphora. Literally, the Greek verb anapherein means to carry up and corresponds with the Latin verb offerre, from which the noun oblatio is derived. e Eucharistic oblation is that which is brought to the altar, from where it is taken up into heaven, as the Roman canon, the sole Eucharistic prayer in use in the West for one and a half millennium,32 beautifully expresses: We humbly beseech you, almighty God, bid these things be borne by the hands of your angel to your altar on high, in the sight of your divine majesty, that all of us who have received the most holy body and blood of your Son by partaking at this altar may be filled with all heavenly blessing and grace; through Christ our Lord.33

Another relevant liturgical component is the “sursum corda” call, the second of three elements of the introductory dialogue with which the people gathered for the Eucharist are invited to prepare themselves for the Eucharistic prayer containing the words of institution, which were traditionally considered to constitute the consecration of the bread and wine. is call is commonly rendered as “Li up your hearts” and responded to with, “We li them up to the Lord.” e Latin original is more succinct and interestingly has no verb in the first part: “sursum corda” – “habemus ad Dominum.” It actually simply says “up with the hearts” and thereby affirms the overall tendency of the anaphora at its very outset: up to where the Lord is. is upward movement finds its point of culmination in the final doxology with which the Roman canon – as well as all the other Eucharistic prayers of the post-Vatican II Roman missal – ends: “rough him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, for ever and ever.” e accompanying rubric stipulates that at this point the chalice and the paten are both

32 Enrico Mazza, The Eucharistic Prayers of the Roman Rite, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004 [1986]). 33 Ronald C. D. Jasper and Geoffrey J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, 4th ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), 208. For the Latin original of this part of the prayer, the Supplices te, see the standard edition of Anton Hänggi and Irmgard Pahl, Prex eucharistica: Textus e variis liturgiis antiquioribus selecti (Fribourg/CH: Éditions Universitaires, 1968), 435. Whereas the Latin text currently in use in official liturgical books such as the Missale Romanum hardly deviates from this latter source, the common English translation in liturgical use shows a bit more variety. e stability of the text, however, is a remarkable given of the liturgical tradition.

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‘raised’, a ritual gesture which again symbolically alludes to the general ascending move which the Eucharist makes. is upward movement, however, is not a simple liing but goes along with, and conditions, a substantial transformation, as is clearly put forward by Canlis: “[C]ommunion in the Lord’s Supper is not a human activity but the Spirit’s means of grounding and reconstituting our very being. As such, the Eucharist is an extension of that all-radical, alltransforming communion we share, by invitation, with the Trinity.”34 Marmion is aer something similar, when he connects the Eucharistic communion with Christ’s glory: “rough holy communion, we are united to Jesus; and in coming to us, Our Lord grants us to share in hope the glory He enjoys in reality.”35 at perspective of glory is at once an invitation to permeate all of reality with it, and from there the role of Christian faithful in the world can be adequately described. It comes down to assisting in the work of the abovementioned sweeping change of reality. Fagerberg captures this very accurately, when he evocatively writes: “e laic in the city should become as dead to sin as the hermit in the desert, for the laic has been thrown back into the world to obey the King’s commands: beget justice, spiritualize creation, sit on the throne as royal homo adorans,36 and gather up the cosmos into the liturgical ascent to God.”37 Inasmuch as it is true that all these aspects converge in the Eucharist, it ought to play a premier role in any Christian and liturgical spirituality. 4. Ascent, Heaven, and Theosis A further aspect of the motif of ascent in Christian faith and liturgical spirituality concerns heaven. ‘Heaven’ is the place where the ascended

34

Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 171. I would nuance, however, the harsh denial of the Lord’s Supper being a human activity, and say that it is ‘not only’ a human activity. It is likely that here plays a difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. 35 Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, 358. 36 e use of the image of the human being as first and foremost homo adorans, is an allusion to the groundbreaking liturgical theology of Alexander Schmemann, who, in line with traditional teachings of the Orthodox tradition, interpreted Adam primarily as a priest and the fall as a rupture in the ‘natural’ communication with God. Christ, the Son of God and High Priest, came to rectify this rupture, so that the human beings’ sacrifices of praise again reach God, and so that genuine communication between the two partners is restored. 37 Fagerberg, Liturgical Asceticism, 146.

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Christ went to and where he is sitting, or seated, as the words of the creed have it while repeating several passages from Scripture, at the right hand of the Father. e word ‘heaven’ moreover appears in the German and Dutch name for the feast of the Ascension (Himmelfahrt resp. hemelvaart). However, the spatial implications of this imagery are by no means uncontested; they are widely considered obsolete, dependent on prescientific cosmologies (and thus useless), even deceiving and unnecessary for a contemporary understanding of Christianity. Some philosophers, who still ask the God-question, propose to finally leave behind any spatial presuppositions when one talks about God and to resolutely opt for the route of interiorization.38 is proposal implies that any metaphysical idea of God is problematized and that any such presentation is replaced by a subtle yet profound awareness of the givenness of being, including our own being, within which God’s existence can slowly, but always in a vulnerable fashion, be suspected or (re)discovered. e problem with this proposal is not that it has no promising potential for the future of Christian faith, especially in so-called post-secular cultures. Rather, the problem is that it is untenable if Bible, liturgy, Church, and tradition are to continue to play a role in shaping the Christian imagination. Farrow competently captures the paradox involved here: e place to which Jesus goes in his ascension – the ‘there’ and ‘then’ of the life which he lives at the Father’s right hand as founder of the new Jerusalem – is really a place, yet it is not one to which we can refer on our own terms, cosmological or otherwise. It is not somewhere in this world, a Lebensraum attainable by political or technological conquest; nor yet is it somewhere in addition to this world, an ‘outside’ to which one escapes. Rather it exists by virtue of the transformation or reconstitution of this world in the Spirit. Hence it can be referred to only indirectly […], and can be touched only sacramentally.39

is sacramental touch is definitely a touch by grace enabling a share in Christ’s eternal glory.

38 Ignace Verhack, Wat bedoelen wij wanneer wij God zeggen? (Kalmthout: Pelckmans; Zoetermeer: Klement, 2011); id., Gegevenheid: Pleidooi voor een postseculier geloven (Averbode: Uitgeverij Averbode, 2019). 39 Farrow, Ascension Theology, 47. Elsewhere Farrow clarifies: “[T]he ascension is not merely removal from a place but also to a place. If in the resurrection Jesus is already transfigured and transformed – the mortal being made immortal – in the ascension he is also translated or relocated. at is, he is taken up and placed by God where he properly belongs, just as God once took Adam and put him in Eden” (ibid., 45).

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From this perspective, the Christian life is a journey (in growing) in mystery. To the question “where this path leads,” Fagerberg straightforwardly responds that “the end of a human being is theosis,” and he continues: e purpose of the descending incarnation was to enable an ascending deification. To overlook that last act of the paschal mystery is to miss the purpose of the whole economy. In the Ascension, the divine nature of Jesus was not returning from whence it came aer docetically discarding a temporary humanity. His human nature also ascended into heaven.40

Farrow concurs: “Ascension, in other words, is deification, and deification nothing but the fulfillment of man’s creation. It is not a return to the eternal past aer an unhappy episode in time. It is the setting of man, once and for all, within the open horizons of the trinitarian life and love, where he may flourish and be fruitful in perpetuity.”41 As was done at the end of the previous section, it is useful to resume three central thoughts, which ran through the above discussion of some pertinent scholarship on the motif of ascent and ascension. e goal of drawing out these ideas is to profile a contemporary liturgical spirituality. First, while having Jesus Christ as a focal point of one’s attention, the ascension functions as a universal invitation for ascent. His ascension is seen as preparing the way for anyone who wishes to follow him. However, there are no restrictions for whom that can be, since literally any person on earth is both invited and capable of following him. Second, this very awareness poses a continuous challenge to the Church and to the ways in which it offers, interprets, and lives communion. It is not because the Church is communion with Christ that it possesses and controls his Body, for it ascended into heaven. In other words, Christ’s ascension is above all an immense gi to humanity, a treasure which no one can measure. ird, it has become clear that the ascension is above all a “mystery to be understood,” much more than that it would be a “miracle to be believed” – to employ a most apt formulation by Henri de Lubac.42 As a mystery which allows itself to be understood, it is also porous, and the porosity of mystery is both an ontological and a doxological reality. It means that a Christian and liturgical spirituality is geared to permeating the mystery through letting oneself be permeated by it. It is a spirituality situated at the ongoing transition of economic and immanent Trinity. 40 41 42

Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism, 186. Farrow, Ascension Theology, 36. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 240.

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3. Concluding Reflection is latter exercise is never only something notional but always something real. It does not suffice to investigate the mystery if one obstinately refuses any kind or degree of absorption by it. Liturgy requires real assent as much as it supposes real ascent. And, as Walgrave thoughtfully noted, this of course involves a movement towards God; the assent becomes a well of the ascent: “Real assent is in the believer the source of a movement towards God.”43 Or, as Farrow says: e doctrine of the ascension, properly understood, does not articulate an optimistic faith in an era of progress in unity or equality, and of advance towards God. It articulates the most primitive and the most costly of all Christian confessions: Κυριος Ιησους, Jesus is Lord. Pastorally speaking, its primary purpose is to put to the church the Sinaitic question, which is the question of faithfulness to its Lord in the time of its hiddenness.44

Put differently, dogma and doxa are intimately intertwined. e understanding of the dogma, or indeed mystery, of Christ’s ascension is rooted in, as well as conducive to, prayerful confession and communion. It marks one’s faith commitment as much as it establishes a sacramental, i.e. real and symbolic, connection with God and his people. To this insight Bobrinskoy adds that it is all about a sharing in and of the same Spirit: e Ascension of the Savior and the historical Pentecost (Acts 2) are two events that mark a boundary between the evangelical mode of the presence of Christ (manifested in the flesh, 1 Tim 3:16), and the ecclesial mode of his presence. If during the time His life on earth, the Savior was the favorite, plenary locus of the presence of the Spirit, from then on the Spirit, who animates the ecclesial body of Christ, is, in turn, the locus, the proper space of the presence of Christ, of ‘the One who is, who was, and who is to come’.45

Maybe this is the reason why Marmion confesses a particular preference for the solemnity of the Ascension: “Of all the Feasts of Our Lord, I dare to say that, in a certain sense, the Ascension is the greatest, because it is the supreme glorification of Christ Jesus.”46 e life of the Christian

43

Walgrave, “Foi et dogme,” 238: “L’assentiment réel est dans le croyant source d’un mouvement vers Dieu.” 44 Farrow, Ascension Theology, 61. 45 Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), 168-169. 46 Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, 347.

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consists in becoming better and better at speaking the language of that glorification; it is a matter both of genuineness and skill, of humble sharing and a willingness to continuously learn. e acquisition of this language is none other than a thoroughly liturgical one, including a devotion to the feast of the Lord’s ascension and a sharpening of one’s ‘oblative sense’.47 But, in any case, it can be concluded that the vocabulary of Christian spirituality only makes sense inasmuch as it is engraed on, and if it aids, a liturgical grammar of ascent.

47

I am hoping to develop the conceptual potential of this notion at some point in the future. In doing that I would like to further honor Professor Terrence Merrigan, whose fine theological intuitions have always been and will always be an inspiration to me.

Part II

Christology, Trinity, and Church

6 Tilling the Ground for a Later Christology Raymond F. Collins

Writing an essay in honor of a former student and distinguished colleague is always a challenge, especially when the writer remembers the younger colleague’s foray into theological studies as a first-year student in the (then) Faculty of eology of the Catholic University of Leuven. e challenge is all the more daunting when this former student has made a name for himself in the contemporary academic world through his writings on (St) John Henry Cardinal Newman, on Christology and the Trinity, on interreligious dialogue, and on the significance of secularization. Contributing further to the challenge is that the writer is a scholar who has worked in none of these fields but is a biblical scholar, a New Testament scholar who had the honor of teaching the young Terry Merrigan when the latter first arrived in Leuven and who cherishes the memory of turning the keys of his office on the third floor of the Maurits Sabbe Library over to a still young Professor Merrigan when he himself le Leuven in 1993. Given my long history with Terry, I dare to go back to the beginning and enter a reflection drawn from Terry’s own introduction into a disciplined study of the New Testament, his first course in New Testament, devoted particularly to Paul’s oldest extant letter, his first to the essalonians. Using a close reading of that letter as a starting point, I would like to highlight those passages in the letter that can usefully be exploited in the development of New Testament Christology because they explicitly draw attention to the Christ. ese passages are like clods of soil in which later Christology has its roots. 1. The Beginnings Any systematic reflection in Christology must necessarily begin, if not always explicitly, with the text of the New Testament. It is there that we find our oldest extant evidence of the existence and significance of an individual ‘nicknamed’ the Christ. I write of a nickname since, insofar

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as I know, there is no evidence of a person with the given name of Christ in the first century of the Common Era. e English word ‘Christ’ is a derivative of a Greek adjective, christos, meaning rubbed with, smeared with, or – in a ritualized but not necessarily religious setting – anointed with oil. It is not uncommon for nicknames to be substantivized adjectives, or neologisms derived from adjectives. Christology (Christo-logos) is nothing other than rational and systematic discourse about a person nicknamed Christ, the anointed one. To be understood, such discourse must be elaborated in the language of the people to whom it is addressed. Otherwise it is but meaningless gibberish. So, let us go back to the beginning, the first lodestone of Terry’s delving into Christology. is beginning is the first words in the New Testament, that is, a collection of writings, twenty-six ‘books’ individually composed during the course of almost a century, beginning less than a score of years aer the death of one Jesus of Nazareth. is Jesus seems to have acquired the nickname ‘Christ’ in death. Within the Jesus movement which emerged aer Jesus’ death, the nickname was almost exclusively used of this Jesus. ‘Christ’ was used of Jesus, either as a stand-alone designation of the person whose given name was Jesus or as a complimentary epithet for him. roughout the following centuries, Jesus was so oen called Christ that many, both within and outside of the Jesus movement consider Jesus’ proper name to be Jesus Christ, oblivious to the reality that the binomial designation consists of a proper name and a time honored-epithet. 2. The Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ e first written words of the New Testament are the greetings of a letter of Paul to a small community of believers in essalonica, then a free city in the Roman province of Macedonia. ese words are: “Paul, Sylvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the essalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to you and peace” (1 ess 1:11). ese words conform to the pattern of a typical letter written in the Hellenistic culture of Paul’s day. e reader recognizes traces of the classic ‘X to Y, greetings’ formula with which a typical Hellenistic letter began.

1 e translation is that of the New Revised Standard Version. is is the English language version of the Bible that will be used throughout this essay.

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ere are, however, significant differences between what Paul wrote, or rather dictated, and the simple greetings found in the epistolary handbooks. In fact, major differences can be identified in all three elements of the epistolary formula. To begin, Paul’s letter opens with the names of a trio of individuals who are joined in sending greetings to the essalonians, instead of the name of a single author,2 as is typically the case with the vast majority of Hellenistic letters discovered to date. Each member of the trio is identified simply by his given name.3 Absent is any epithet that would identify the relationship between any of these individuals and the community of essalonica.4 e designation of the letter’s addressee is, however, rather expanded. Rather than being addressed to a single individual, this letter is addressed to a group that gathers, an assembly.5 e group is demarcated from other groups by means of two qualifying phrases, each of which employs what we would call proper nouns to set this group apart from others. e first is a geographical indicator, “of the essalonians,” which indicates that those who gathered were inhabitants6 of the Macedonian capital. In addition to this demonym, Paul employs a two-part religious identification of his addressees, “in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” e first part of this complex phrase identifies Paul’s addressees as a religious group but does not distinguish them sufficiently from other religious groups that might happen to meet in Corinth – and there were a number of these. e second part of this identification distinguishes Paul’s addressees from other religious groups, most notably Jewish groups who would have embraced God, that is, Yahweh, as Father but would not readily use ‘Lord’ for the relatively insignificant and unknown Jesus. 2 To this day, epistolary critics continue to discuss the role that these cogreeters had in the composition of the letter, that is, how much of a say did Silvanus and Timothy have in the writing of the letter. at is, were they actual co-authors of the letter or did Paul merely conjoin their names to his in sending greetings because they were with Paul in evangelizing the believing community at essalonica. 3 ‘Paul’ identifies himself by means of a name drawn from that of an Aemelian gens, as was his wont in dealing with Hellenists, rather than by his given name, Saul, the name of the legendary Hebrew king. 4 See, however, 1 ess 2:7. 5 e translation of ekklēsia as ‘church’ introduces unnecessary nuance, and most likely an anachronism, into the term. e Greek term simply connotes a group of those called together, an assembly. 6 Cf. 1 Cor 1:2; 2 Cor 1:1. In the Corinthian correspondence, Paul would cite the proper name of the city rather than a noun that refers to its inhabitants.

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e third part of the Hellenistic epistolary greeting is the greeting itself. A simple ‘greetings’ (chairein) suffices in ordinary Hellenistic correspondence, but Paul uses a more complex greeting, one of whose words, ‘grace’ (charis) echoes the common epistolary greeting of Paul’s day. Most probably Paul’s greeting is an epistolary appropriation of a ‘liturgical’ greeting used in bi-lingual assemblies of believers. In sum, the first element in the development of a New Testament Christology and, ultimately, the foundation of the Christology of later generations of Christian theology, including our honoree, is a rather benign identification formula.7 It indicates that the nickname Christ was attributed to a person named Jesus, but it does not offer any indication of the nickname’s connotation nor does it offer any evidence of the appropriateness of the sobriquet for a person named Jesus. at Paul complements the identification of Jesus with a nickname suggests that there is some degree of familiarity, perhaps even intimacy, between himself, the community, and the one named Jesus. at Paul is not constrained to explicate the proper nouns in his identification implies further that at least some of the nuances of his terminology were grasped by members of the community. ey may have been aided in their understanding by the use of ‘Lord’ in the religious language of the devotees of the various cults in essalonica as well as in the religious language of Jews in essalonica.8 Indeed some members of the church of the essalonians, though admittedly in small numbers, may have been members of the synagogue, before becoming members of the ‘church’ of the essalonians.9 Despite our inability to grasp the full meaning of Paul’s language, there is no doubt that Paul’s identification formula was significant for both himself and for the community to whom he was writing. It is of the nature of a letter that it be understood by both its author and its

7 ere is a similar two-part identification formula in 1 ess 2:14, with both a geographic and a religious component. In this case the theological component is used principally to distinguish communities that owe allegiance to God but not to Jesus Christ from communities that do acknowledge allegiance to God and to Jesus Christ. 8 It is, of course, anachronistic to speak about interreligious dialogue in the first century church, but in recognition of Professor Merrigan’s commitment to interreligious dialogue and his abiding interest in Christology, it is worth noting that the religious language of non-believers contributed significantly to the early emergence of first-century  Christology. 9 Cf. Acts 17:1, 4.

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addressee(s). Otherwise, it fails to function as a medium of communication and it would fail in its function as a letter. e simple identification marker “in […] the Lord Jesus Christ” is thus the oldest extant manifestation of a Christology whose significance needs to be unpacked by subsequent generations of theologians. Since Paul failed to expand on the elements of his identification marker, it is clear that the recipients of his letter were familiar with who Jesus was. ey recognized him as the one to whom the community’s allegiance was sufficient to set them apart from other God-fearing assemblies in essalonica. And they were aware, at least to some degree, of the connotations of what it meant for him to be called Christ. 3. Faith, Love, and Hope in Our Lord Jesus Christ As Paul continues his letter to the essalonians,10 he continues to provide his readers with snippets of information that provide further insights for the development of Christology. In 1:3, describing the activity of the community, Paul uses a formula, “in our Lord Jesus Christ,” that resembles the identification formula of 1:1 but adds a pair of nuances to his earlier usage. e first person plural pronoun, ‘our’ (hēmōn) indicates that there is a relationship between the Lordship of Jesus and the community itself. Jesus is not said to be Lord absolutely without further qualification; he is acknowledged as Lord (kyrios) of the community, the ‘church’. e second nuance adds that the relationship between Jesus and the community extends particularly to its defining activity, namely, its life of faith, love, and hope. ere is an “in Christ”11 quality to its members’ activity, their way of being. 1 essalonians 1:10 adds additional material for the further development of Christology. is single verse is particularly important not only because it offers significant new dimensions to the relationship between Jesus and the community but also because it offers new insights into the relationship between Jesus and God. Jesus is the Son of God, whom, the verse implies, dwells with God in heaven. As the significance of Paul’s words continues to unfold, we read that God has raised him, Jesus, from the dead. Jesus no longer abides among the dead. is enables the community to enjoy a different type of relationship with Jesus. ey await the appearance of Jesus from heaven. Jesus is an 10 Since scholars generally consider 2 essalonians to be pseudepigraphic, it is appropriate to qualify 1 essalonians as Paul’s letter to the essalonians. 11 Cf. Acts 1:26.

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awaited one, the expected one. is expectation would eventually cast Jesus as an eschatological figure but not necessarily at this point in history. Jesus is awaited at some point in the future, but Paul offers no intimation that the realization of this expectation will be a final, definitive, or ultimate, reality. Jesus, according to 1 ess 1:10, is not simply (the) one for whom the community awaits. He is awaited as the deliverer, the rescuer. He is, in effect, the expected Savior of the community. e corollary of this is that the members of the church of the essalonians are to be a saved community. In effect, the community’s understanding of Jesus, the foundation of later Christology, develops in tandem with its understanding of God and its own self-perception, its own self-awareness. 4. Apostles of Christ As Paul turns his attention from what he, Silvanus, and Timothy recall about the essalonians, to a short rehearsal of what they are presumed to remember about him, the burden of 1 essalonians 2, he notes that they might have made demands as apostles of Christ (hōs Christou apostoloi).12 is brief mention of something that Paul and his companions did not do opens up a new chapter in Christology. e Jesus who is called Christ13 is someone who sends out emissaries; emissaries who have authority over those to whom they have been sent, sufficient authority for them to make compelling demands upon those to whom they have been sent. Reflecting on the essalonians’ situation, Paul observes that they became “imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea” (2:14b). Praising them for their active faith, Paul perceives them as following the way of life of the first generation within the Jesus movement. To do so, he uses a two-part identification formula similar to the one found in 1:1. As that earlier formula, it contains both a geographic and a religious component. In the case of the churches in Judea, the theological component of their identification, “in Christ Jesus,” is used principally to distinguish communities that owe allegiance to God but not to Jesus Christ from communities that do acknowledge allegiance to God

12

Cf. 1 ess 2:7. is is the first of three absolute, that is, unqualified uses of Christos (Christos) in 1 essalonians. e others are to be found in 3:2 and 4:16. 13

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and to Jesus Christ, Christian communities, Christian churches, in today’s jargon. One similarity between those Judean communities and the church of the essalonians is they both suffered at the hands of their neighbors. e Judeans were, however, also guilty of a particularly egregious deed. Paul’s thought is rooted in a biblical tradition relative to the killing of the prophets.14 He writes that the Jews killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets. is is the only time in Paul’s correspondence that he describes the Jews as being active participants in the Lord’s death.15 Jesus’ death at their hands is all the more serious in that he is identified as ‘lord’ (kyrios), as someone more than a mere prophet, although in some ways comparable to the prophets of yore. 5. A Co-worker for God in Proclaiming the Gospel of Christ Letters, by their very nature are a form of virtual presence. ey are an author’s way to be present to his addressee(s) in spite of whatever it may be that separates them from each other. Oen letters explicitly profess an author’s wish to be with and physically see the person or persons to whom he is writing. As Paul writes to the essalonians, he speaks of his intense personal desire to visit them.16 Unable to do so, Paul employs the next best options. His letter itself represents one of those options. A letter is a way of being present when one is absent. An alternate mode of being present, in spite of one’s absence, is sending an emissary, a personal representative. Paul took this option before deciding to dictate his letter.17 His choice of emissary was Timothy, one of those whose greetings the letter was intended to convey.18 To commend Timothy to the essalonian believers, Paul writes of him as a “co-worker for God in proclaiming the gospel of Christ” (en tō euangeliō tou Christou) (3:2). e reference to Christ is an objective genitive.19 e good news (euangelion) is about Jesus Christ, who he is and 14

Cf. 2 Chr 36:15-16; Neh 9:27, 30; Jer 2:30. Cf. 1 Cor 2:8. 16 Cf. 2:17–3:5. 17 e occasion for writing the letter was Timothy’s return from essalonica. Cf. 1 ess 3:6. 18 Cf. 1 ess 1:1. 19 Cf. Rom 15:19; 1 Cor 9:12; etc. Contrast with 1 ess 2:2, 8, 9, where the qualifying genitive is a subjective genitive, suggesting that the message originated with God. 15

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what he has done. is second use of the stand-alone nickname for Jesus in 1 essalonians indicates that already by this time in the history of the Jesus movement (ca. 50 ) a narrative, a story about Jesus had been developed by believing missionaries. Having rejoined Paul, Timothy shared with him good news about the essalonians’ faith and love. On the whole, this report encouraged Paul. In this letter, he shared his joy with one caveat, namely, that “they stand fast in the lord” (hymeis stēkete en kyriō). Once again Paul speaks of their desired way of life as being in the lord, that is, in Christ, with total allegiance to him. Timothy’s return to Paul (3:6-10) was a source of great joy for Paul. e report was upbeat and strengthened Paul’s resolve to visit those believers in Macedonia. He prayed constantly for the opportunity to do so. ere were any number of reasons as to why he wanted to see them face-to-face. Paul mentioned one such reason in particular. He wanted to restore whatever was lacking in their faith (3:10c). Paul does not specify what the deficiency was, but First essalonians 3:6 might well provide a first clue. What Paul had to say about the essalonians’ faith and love was indeed good news but the returning emissary had nothing to say about their hope. At least Paul does not refer to what Timothy might have said about their hope. eir hope was, nonetheless, a feature of the essalonians’ lives which Paul had commended in his initial praise of the essalonians (1:3). 6. And May the Lord Make You Increase and Abound in Love Paul’s desire to visit the church at essalonica leads him to pray for divine help to realize his desire (3:11-13). Mention of “the coming of our Lord Jesus,” with the same words that Paul used in 2:19, appears at the end of his short wish prayer, in 3:13. A striking feature of the coming is that our Lord Jesus is not expected to come by himself. Rather, he will be accompanied by a retinue of all his saints (meta pantōn tōn hagiōn autou). But who are these ‘saints’, these holy ones? In his later letters, Paul frequently uses this designation to speak of faithful believers but there does not seem to be any trace of this usage in the first of his letters. It is an idiosyncrasy that Paul used in later correspondence. It is possible that in 3:13 the apostle may have been dependent on Zech 14:5, “en the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.” In Paul’s scriptural source, the holy ones are angels. is wish prayer is exceptional insofar as it is addressed to “our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus” (1 ess 3:11). is is the sole

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prayer to Jesus, albeit in tandem with God our Father, in Paul’s extant writings. eir tandem relationship builds on what Paul had written in 1:10. Here the apostle’s plea is that God and his Son take a role in ensuring that the small band of missionaries have the follow-up visit to the believers at essalonica for which they so eagerly and incessantly desired. at prayer is addressed to Jesus as well as to God and places him in the same sphere as God himself. It remains for systematic theology to determine the tandem relationship of their activity and the nature of their being jointly addressed in prayer. Of particular interest may be that Paul uses a qualifying ‘our’ (hēmōn) with respect to both God our Father and our Lord Jesus in the joint address of 3:11. Immediately thereaer (3:12), however, Paul modifies his wish prayer by adding a petition that it is addressed to Jesus alone. It is directed to the Lord (kyrios). Given Paul’s use of this title as a qualifying epithet for Jesus in verses 11 and 13, there can be no doubt that the intended recipient of the petition in v.12 is Jesus. Without mentioning his addressee by name Paul continues with a prayer addressed to Jesus in v. 13. It should be noted that, whereas the petition addressed to God and to Jesus has the band of missionaries as the intended recipients, it is the community whose relationship with Jesus has already been indicated in 1:1 that is the intended beneficiary of the petitions addressed to Jesus. Paul initially prays, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all” (1 ess 3:12) and then adds that he keep them blameless until the coming of the Lord Jesus.20 Immediately aer his striking wish prayer, Paul addresses the essalonians in paraenetic discourse. He begins with an encouraging prelude (4:1-2) which twice speaks of the Lord Jesus. “We ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus,” Paul writes. With reference to von Dobschütz’s commentary of more than a century ago,21 the late Abraham Malherbe insightfully observed, “It is therefore better to understand ‘in the Lord Jesus’ as qualifying both the subject and objects of the verbs. Paul’s exhortation takes place within a relationship defined by the Lord Jesus.”22

20

By this point in his letter, “the coming of our Lord Jesus” had become almost a conventional formula. 21 Ernst von Dobschütz, Die Thessalonicherbriefe, Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, 7th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1909), 156. 22 Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, e Anchor Bible 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 219.

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Paul’s short preamble concludes with a reminder of the ethical instructions that he had previously imparted to them, presumably on the occasion of his earlier missionary visit. He writes of the precepts that he had given “through the Lord Jesus.” e preposition ‘through’ (dia) bespeaks an authoritative precept. is notion is reinforced with the use of the ‘Lord’ title for Jesus. e very title suggests serious authority. In effect, the ‘instructions’ that the missionaries had given to the essalonians were commands of the Lord Jesus himself. It may be Paul’s desire to think of being present to the essalonians, his parousia to them, his own hopes in that regard, and what he is going to do to assuage his longing that prompts him to think about another hope and another presence. He writes about “our Lord Jesus at his coming” (parousia).23 Undoubtedly this ‘coming’ is the event for which the essalonians were waiting, according to the description of them which Paul has limned in 1 ess 1:10. e Lord Jesus whose coming Paul and his fellow apostles await is the Son of God who has been raised from among the dead. 7. The Dead in Christ A break in Paul’s thought occurs immediately aer the two snippets of paraenesis in 4:3-12. A disclosure formula seems to mark a new beginning. ere is something about which Paul does not want his addressees to be in the dark. He says so explicitly. “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (4:13). Paul’s concern is two-fold. He does not want the community to worry about the fate of its members who have died. Moreover, he does not want the community to lose its sense of identity by grieving as do those who have no hope. To achieve his goal, Paul resorts to an image that would have been familiar to anyone who lived in a relatively large city in the Hellenistic world, the victory parade. At its most impressive, the parade would be that of a victorious Emperor passing through one of the cities of the Empire on his way to Rome. On a lesser but still grandiose scale, the parade would feature a victorious conqueror returning in triumph aer a victorious military excursion. It is not my intention to fully analyze this exercise in Paul’s religious imagination. I only wish to briefly look at the elements in this scenario

23

Cf. 1 ess 2:19.

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that would contribute significantly to a developing Christology. e most significant is the unadorned two-part creedal formula of 4:14, “We believe that Jesus died and rose again” (pisteuomen hoti Iēsous apethanen kai anestē). e use of a deponent verb is noteworthy. e use of a deponent verb rather than the transitive verb egeirein, which most commonly appears in Paul’s creedal formulae,24 allows him to focus initially on Jesus rather than on God. God appears almost immediately thereaer as the actor in a soteriological drama but he acts through Jesus. Jesus is God’s agent in the salvation of those who are gathered in the presence of God: “rough Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died” (4:14b). e grounds for this assertion are to be found in “the word of the Lord” (4:15). In this phrase the ‘Lord’ designates Jesus, but not the historical Jesus. “e word of the Lord” is not a remembered word of the historical Jesus who had lived a decade and a half earlier; rather it is an utterance of a Christian prophet who speaks with the authority of Jesus, the risen Lord. Paul describes the scenario which he has constructed as “the coming of the Lord” (hē parousia tou Kyriou).25 Undoubtedly this ‘coming’ is the event for which the essalonians were waiting, according to the description of them which Paul has limned in 1 ess 1:10. e Lord Jesus whose coming Paul and his fellow apostles await is the Son of God who has been raised from among the dead. Paul develops his imagery since he wants to offer a scenario in which those who have already died are not in a disadvantageous position vis-àvis those who are alive at the time of the Lord’s coming. e victory march provides the raw materials for Paul’s active religious imagination. Everything is under the control of the Lord. It is Jesus who assembles the parade. At the indicated moment the Lord will descend from heaven26 and the first unit will be assembled. It will consist of those whom Paul calls the dead in Christ (hoi nekroi en Christō), those who belonged to Christ at the time of their deaths. Aer these have been raised, the second unit will be assembled. is unit will consist of those still alive at the time of the Lord’s coming. e members of this second unit will join with members of the first unit in the heavens. Together they will meet with the Lord in the heavens and be with him forever. eir salvation will have been achieved.

24 25 26

Cf. 1 ess 1:10; 1 Cor 15:4; etc. Cf. 1:10; 2:19; 3:13; 5:23. Cf. 1:10a.

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In the final chapter of his first writing, Paul turns his attention from the unknown future to the immediate present. e coming of the Lord continues to impinge upon the day-to-day existence of the community. e awaiting community must remain convinced of the certainty of that coming and be aware, not only of its inevitability but also that it will come as a surprise. ere is no telling exactly when the Lord will come. 8. This Is the Will of God in Christ Jesus for You Paul changes vocabulary as he begins to write about how the believers at essalonica should live as they await the coming of the Lord. Instead of writing about the coming of the Lord Paul writes about the day of the Lord (5:2), using an expression that he borrows from his Scriptures.27 at day was to be a day of judgement for some and a day of salvation for others. As such, it was a good image for Paul’s paraenesis. Images of day and night, light and darkness, classic in Hellenistic moral exhortation were easily associated with the image of a day of the Lord. Moreover, the title ‘Lord’, used so oen of Jesus throughout this missive, created a literal link with the biblical motif, even though in its scriptural use the title referred to Yahweh. For Paul’s addressees,28 the day of the Lord is a day of salvation. e reality places them in one diptych of the day of the Lord, rather than the other, the day of wrath.29 e salvation that these faithful believers shall obtain is “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (dia tou Kyriou hēmōn Jēsou Christou). On the day of the Lord, Jesus’ day. Jesus will be God’s agent in the conferral of salvation.30 e fullness of having accepted Jesus as Lord and belonging to him will be a reality. Aer the general paraenesis imparted under the rubric of the coming of the day of the Lord,31 Paul addresses a series of brief exhortations on organized life in the community. First of all, he addresses the issue of leadership, telling the members of the community to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you “in the Lord” (en kyriō) (5:12b-c). e qualifying phrase suggests that the authority of those who are in charge of the community is an authority under Jesus the Lord and exercised in his name. 27 28 29 30 31

Cf. Amos 5:18-20; Zeph 1:14-15; etc. Note the hēmas in 5:9. Cf. 5:9a. Cf. 4:14b. Cf. 5:2.

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On a personal note, Paul urges the members of the community to pray ceaselessly and to give thanks always and everywhere.32 e rationale? “For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (5:18b). Paul adduces a motif developed in late Judaism in order to urge his addressees to give thanks in all circumstances. Some commentators suggest that the desired prayers of thanksgiving bear upon particular conditions in essalonica. is may well be the case; the focused paraenesis of chapter 5 concerns the life of the essalonian community. Moreover, the descriptive phrase God “in Christ Jesus,” while in the first instance, implies that God’s will is mediated through Christ Jesus, might also denote some particular direction towards those who are in Christ Jesus. 9. Farewell Paul concludes his first letter with a final wish prayer (5:23-24), a request (5:25), a greeting (5:26), a formal command (5:27), and a final blessing (5:28). e exegete will find much to discuss in his or her interpretation of the letter’s final elements, but they present less of a challenge for one who reads the letter with a desire to discover early traces for the development of Christology. e wish prayer (5:23-24) is the third and final wish prayer in Paul’s first letter. Its interpretive issues are primarily anthropological,33 not Christological. Its eschatological focus is mediated by the use of the now familiar formula, “at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:23c).34 A final formal command such as appears in 5:27 is a rarity in Hellenistic letters. Nonetheless, there is something that Paul wants the essalonians to do. He appears constrained to make sure that they do so. Using a rare appeal to the Lord’s authority over the essalonians and himself – both he and they stand under the Lord’s authority – Paul orders his addressees to ensure that his letter be read to the entire community: “I solemnly command you by the Lord (enorkizō hymas ton kyrion) that this letter be read to all the brothers and sisters.” Paul’s oath underscores the importance of his order. A final blessing (5:28) appears in all of Paul’s letters but no two are alike. Typically, they reflect the language of the opening salutation of his letter but the initial greeting of 1 essalonians, the first of Paul’s letters,

32 33 34

Cf. 5:16-18a. Cf. 5:23b. Cf. 2:19; 3:13; 4:15.

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is unusually short.35 In his farewell, his final salutation, Paul prays that the gis of God accrue to the essalonians through our Lord Jesus Christ: “e grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” (5:28). What a comprehensive prayer! What a final wish! What an acknowledgement of Jesus’ role as Lord of the church of the essalonians!

35

Cf. 1:1c.

7 From Mountain to Mountain The Tremendous Significance of Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation Jeffrey C. K. Goh

When I first arrived in Leuven in September 1989 as a nomikόs (as Professor Raymond Collins would call me, a lawyer from Malaysia) desiring only to leisurely read some theology, little did I suspect I would end up writing a doctoral dissertation under the tutelage of Professor Terrence Merrigan. Teaching Christology and Interreligious Dialogue at the time, he had a special interest in incarnational theology. To him I dedicate this theme-choice, with special reference to issues of salvation with which Asian students of mine seem particularly concerned. Since the rise of modern technology, nature and history have become increasingly contingent on humanity instead of the other way around. As mystifying forces in nature and history diminish in the face of scientific enlightenment, so too do the gods and demons lose territorial hold on human allegiance.1 In the field of creation studies, the question of pressing urgency is how the earth that came into being as a gi from the Creator, but has become so ravaged by human creatures, may again be humanized.2 With modern technology, the human condition is no longer oppressed by finitude which we experience in solidarity with all other creatures; nor do we share the world as a sacrament of communion with God and neighbors. Instead, the main problem is now the humanity of the human world.3 Just as this humanity has been impaired in various

1 So Jürgen Moltmann observes in The Crucified God (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 92. 2 See Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 33-39. Pope Francis raises alarm bells in the human roots of the current ecological crisis, promotes awareness on integral ecology, and sounds a clarion call for “ecological conversion” in his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (2015). 3 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 9. Moltmann’s sentiment is echoed in Pope Benedict’s stress on “the human threat to all living things” in the opening words

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ways, from “oppression from without,” through “contamination,” and “wounded within,”4 the corrective must entail a complete reinsertion into the social milieu the true humanity singularly displayed in Jesus Christ. In Jesus’ true humanity, God endured our forgetfulness of finitude in creatureliness and entered into it to do the necessary work of restoration to our true selves.5 Jesus’ fully incarnated, true human nature holds the key, his spiritual openness and obedience to God replacing Adam’s rebellion6 and inaugurating a new creation. “True humanity and true Christianity are one.”7 1. The Necessary Messiness e Incarnation is about truly assuming the human body and the human nature. Docetic claims have no place here. Instead, in Jesus’ assumption of the human body, three elements constantly cohere. First, God became entangled in human existence and its necessary mess. Second, Jesus in his earthly mission, identified and entered into solidarity with “the human condition – its problems, longings, sufferings, failures, dreams, and hopes.” ird, we are called “to get involved in human beings.”8 is call to “get involved in” the suffering body appears in many Gospel stories, a pair of which are notably graphic and instructive. At the Last Supper, Jesus taught by getting involved in his disciples to whom he was bidding farewell, knelt to wash their feet, and told them that they would be blessed if they followed his example and did the same

of In the Beginning where chapter 3 on sin and salvation brings the focus back to the cross of Christ, the place of human obedience. 4 Unpacked in Gerald O’Collins, Interpreting Jesus (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1983), 135-139. 5 “us the Old Testament account of the beginnings of humankind points, questioningly and hopefully, beyond itself to the One in whom God endured our refusal to accept our limitations and who entered into those limitations in order to restore us to ourselves”; Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, 74. 6 In the  New Testament, an explicit comparison is twice made by Paul between Jesus and Adam. See Rom 5:19 and 1 Cor 15:22 while in verse 45 he calls Jesus the ‘last’ or ‘ultimate’ Adam. 7 Herman-Emiel Mertens, Not the Cross, But the Crucified (Louvain: Peeters, 1992), 91, 105-107, referencing Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich. See Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17; Eph 2:10; N. T. Wright, The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 44; Monica K. Hellwig, Understanding Catholicism (New York: Paulist, 1981), 48-49. 8 Cardinal Luis Antonio G. Tagle, Easter People (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 114.

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(Jn 13:15-17). So by word and deed shall an evangelizing community get involved in people’s daily lives, embracing them by “touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others,” and taking on the “smell of the sheep.” e Church’s missionary mandate is best reflected in a field hospital attending to wounded bodies. Far from being “a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” Pope Francis much prefers a “church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets.”9 Little of these activities will be evident, however, if Catholics remain piously prayerful but supine ‘cryptoMonophysites’ as Karl Rahner accuses them of. Rahner’s prognostication aims to see a Church that is mission-diligent, rather than prayerfully orthodox but indolent and failing to remember the words and deeds of Jesus. And then, in his post-resurrection encounter with Christ (Jn 20:2429), omas was invited to put his finger into the nailed hands and pierced side of the previously savaged and now raised body of Jesus. at invitation was necessary, for omas would not and could not be a seriously believing and properly acting disciple following aer the footsteps of Jesus the Suffering-Servant Messiah, unless and until he had touched – gotten involved in – the wounded body of the crucified and risen Lord. To be really involved in the vicissitudes of human existence, Scripture calls us to get into human wounds and human woundedness. For the Easter people, to truly serve someone who suffers, to be truly in solidarity with them, our resurrection-practices10 in Christian ministry first require of us to stay with their wounds. e post-resurrection omasepisode tells us not to avoid the wounds, nor run away from them. You come close to a person only if you come close to their wounds.11 Wherever Jesus’ divinity is over-emphasized, or when Jesus is worshipped exclusively as God, his profound insights get eclipsed, his greatness deprived, and his stark challenge gets muted.12 is man of full 9

Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), 24, 49. A phrase coined by Wendell Berry, “Manifesto,” in The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt, 1973). 11 In The Wounded Healer (New York: Image Books, 1990), Henri Nouwen suggests how Jesus shows the way to be wounded healers. To authentically minister to wounded bodies requires of us not to hide our own wounds, but to first get in touch with our own woundedness. Only when our wounds cease to be a source of shame, can they become a source of healing, and we become wounded healers. 12 N.  T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2015), 11. 10

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humanity with “extraordinary independence, immense courage, and unparalleled authenticity” gets underrated,13 and his role as mediator of God’s love and grace in all human messiness gets eclipsed, which in turn affects the work of authentic humanism in society, and impedes the emergence of a free, compassionate, and warm social order.14 is significance of Jesus’ humanity enjoys impeccable precedents in the New Testament. On the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, Peter spiritedly proclaimed: “This Jesus whom you crucified, God has raised him up and made him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:1-4, 36). is pristine apostolic kerygma bolted out of the urgency of the resurrection-proclamation, the disciples’ most desperate need at the time being to overcome the colossal scandal and humiliation of the Roman-style crucifixion of their leader. Proclaiming “Jesus crucified is risen” and “Jesus is the Christ” became the apostles’ first and most pressing task, and Pentecost accorded them both the clarity in wisdom and the courage in spirit to launch that Easter Christology. We have here the New Testament root of the raising of a human being to God, to be the Messiah for whom generations of Jews have been waiting.15 It represents the equating of a first-century peripatetic preacher in ancient Palestine who died a violent and humiliating death, with the one Messiah sent by God. is linking of the particular with the universal, trans-historical,16 discloses an original, ‘from below’ approach as being crucial in shaping the way Christians imagine Jesus, beginning in history with his real life events, and in the early disciples’ struggle with his identity.17 13 Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 117. 14 See Kurien Kunnumpuram, Jesus (Bombay: St Paul’s Society, 2011), 197. 15 is raising of the human Jesus by God was so central to the faith of the early Church that within 15-20 years aer Jesus’ death, by around the year 50  when he began writing to young communities that he had evangelized, Paul was already referring to the ‘tradition’ that he had received (παρέλαβον) and which he had faithfully passed on (παρέδωκα) to the communities (1 Cor 15:3). 16 Walter Kasper puts it succinctly in Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1976), 15-16: “When we say that Jesus is the Christ, we maintain that this unique, irreplaceable Jesus of Nazareth is at one and the same time the Christ sent by God: that is the Messiah anointed of the Spirit, the salvation of the world, and the eschatological fulfillment of history.” 17 See Karl Rahner, “e Two Basic Types of Christology,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XIII: Theology, Anthropology, Christology, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975), 213-223. Rahner thinks the low and ascending approach more appropriate today, which contrasts with the official Vatican

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Centered on the resurrection and glorification of Jesus, this earliest apostolic kerygma18 first spoke of the active agency of God. Second, God’s action was upon Jesus as the human subject who did not rise, but was raised from the dead by God whose action the disciples perceived as affirming everything Jesus taught and did and stood for as being very good. In that vindication, God ratified and authenticated Jesus’ authentic human life and mission. ird, God’s action was ultimately carried out pro nobis, as the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the decisive advent of salvation of humanity19 – in raising Jesus from the dead, God began the process of raising the dead. Disciples came to see Jesus in his life and work – his earthly, human existence – as having been endowed with messianic and saving power. is is of profound implications to Christian spirituality and Christian living. All our work, our sacrifices, in service of the kingdom of God, and in the spirit of Christ, shall not be in vain. God who raised Jesus from death is faithful. He did it for Jesus; He will do it for us. Aer the New Testament period, attempts to unveil the mystery surrounding the person of Jesus disclose issues that include a heretical tendency towards Christological maximalism so that exclusive divinityclaims always had to be balanced with Jesus’ historical specificity.20 Of note is the eventual success of the Antiochene school at Chalcedon in balancing Nicaea’s divinity-emphasis in homoousios21 with Jesus’ full and methodology exemplified in the CDF “Notification on the works of Father Jon Sobrino, SJ” of November 26, 2006. “Official Christology of the church is a straightforward descending Christology which develops the basic assertion: God in his Logos becomes man.” See Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 286; John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM Press, 1990), 371ff. 18 e importance of resurrection would later diminish, notably so in the Fourth Gospel. In virtue of his preexistent divine glory, Jesus became a god-like man, a theios anēr, and was already the “resurrection and the life” (Jn 11:25). See Peter C. Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit (London: SCM Press, 1994), 247. 19 Jacques Dupuis, Who Do You Say I Am (Quezon City: Claretian, 1994), 61-62. 20 George A. Lindbeck suggests that in the face of all those controversies over the identity of Christ, what ultimately became universal orthodoxy was the joint pressure of three rules: monotheistic, historical specificity, and christological maximalism. See The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1984), 94-95. 21 On how the debate over Jesus’ degree of divinity escalated from heated argument to violence and bloodshed at Nicaea, see Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God (New York: Harcourt, 1999).

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complete humanity.22 History attests that a turn back to the historical figure of Jesus, is a helpful corrective against distorting ideologies. For starting with the earthly Jesus and moving from there to an understanding of him making present God’s eternal Word, both in his person and in his words and deeds, is a helpful way to avoid the utilitarian manipulation of Jesus’ image.23 Here, Chalcedonian insights on the genuine subjectivity and the conscious and free will in Jesus’ human nature are essential to an integrated model of salvation. e two natures in the Chalcedonian hypostasis being unmixed, Rahner insists that the wholeness of Jesus’ human nature is not diminished. is insight must be preserved for purposes of countering monothelitism, as well as a piety amongst the ordinary faithful and an ‘official’ theology which are tinged with monophysitism. In this way the genuine subjectivity, the created human nature of Jesus, his conscious and free will – “a created energeia” – shall not be so constantly forgotten.24 Jesus’ true humanity is an indispensable key in soteriological issues. 2. How Jesus Achieved Our Salvation In the Western dominant debt-repayment model of redemption, humanity’s unrepayable sin-debt to God necessitated the incarnation of the Son 22

By ‘true God’, Council Fathers meant ‘true God’ in the experience of human beings and not the doctrinal statement of a sole metaphysical category, so it is “more sensible to talk about the intent of Chalcedon than about its actual content.” See Tarsicius van Bavel, “Chalcedon: en and Now,” Concilium 153, no. 3 (1982): 55-62, at 61. Rahner sees Chalcedon as “not end but beginning, not goal but means, truths which open the way to the – ever greater – Truth.” See Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 149-200, at 149. Aloys Grillmeier in Christ in Christian Tradition (Atlanta, GA: Knox, 1975) sees hypostasis used in an “intuitive and not a speculatively refined way,” thus always needing further elucidation. 23 Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, “What Are eologians Saying about Christology?,” America, September 17, 2007. 24 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 287. If the divinity over-stress no longer runs in academic settings today, anecdotal evidence abounds to testify to the continuing power of Rahner’s ‘crypto-Monophysitism’ in the pulpits and the pews, and in popular Christology. See Enda Lyons, Jesus: Self-Portrait by God (Dublin: Columba, 1994), 17; Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 7-8 and 157; Gordon Fee, “e New Testament and Kenosis Christology,” in Exploring Kenotic Christology, ed. C. Stephen Evans (Vancouver: Regent College Publications, 2010), 26-27 and 71.

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of God. Redemption became the inner motive of the Incarnation. In Anselm’s 1098 classic treatment of the satisfaction theory of redemption,25 only the death of Jesus Christ the Son of God alone could be a sufficient vicarious satisfaction for the sins of the world, which was possible because of the sinlessness of his human nature and its hypostatic union with the Second Person of the Trinity. at was redemption wrought on the cross, a theory that held sway for centuries. Salient elements of Anselm’s thoughts reign even in contemporary times,26 waning only with cultural sensitivities. Critical remarks in rejecting Anselm’s theory include: the honor-rule of the medieval feudal system and the debt-repayment-rule of the Latin juridical system current in his Sitz im Leben on which his theory is reliant;27 the negative image of a vindictive and wrathful God quite contrary to the God of mercy portrayed by Jesus in the Gospels;28 the conferring of exclusive redemptive value on Jesus’ death without taking into account the entire paschal mystery, let alone Jesus’ entire life and ministry;29 erroneous premise of physical suffering, imposed or freely accepted, being sufficient to cancel out evil;30 and too much emphasis on sin and too little emphasis on love.31 And yet, in all this, the significance of Jesus’ humanity in Anselm’s thoughts is easily overlooked. He posted a very healthy reminder on 25

Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became a Man (Toronto: Mellen, 1976). Morphed perhaps in some ways, to such as the Penal Substitutionary Atonement model which still runs strong in the Evangelical circles. 27 Mertens, Not the Cross, 70-74. 28 In Mercy (New York: Paulist, 2013), Walter Kasper insists on mercy as God’s most important attribute. is inspired Pope Francis’ The Face of Mercy (Misericordiae Vultus – the papal bull of indiction for the Jubilee Year of Mercy). O’Collins calls the language of anger, punishment and propitiation in any penal substitutionary theory a “monstrous view of God” and a “misinterpretation of the New Testament” in Interpreting Jesus, 150-152. 29 Maurizio Gronchi, Jesus Christ (Rome: Urbaniana University Press, 2013), 107. Jesus’ life, suffering, death, and resurrection, seen as a unit, is God’s liberating deed on behalf of humanity. See Robrecht Michiels, “Jesus and Suffering,” in God and Human Suffering, ed. Jan Lambrecht and Raymond F. Collins (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 39. 30 Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107-108. Indeed, to suggest “a defensiveness, even a petty vengefulness on the part of God,” is to misidentify “the God whose power is his compassion.” Hellwig, Understanding, 97. 31 Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107. Benedict XVI stresses God’s fundamental love and forgiveness reconciling justice and love on the cross in Deus caritas est (2005), 10. Rejecting legalistic satisfaction, Peter Abelard opted for Christ’s example of love and stressed the human response. 26

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human sin as something that leaves behind a dreadful aer-effect which continues to plague society, even when the sin has been punished or its continued commission halted. So God’s honor which demands iustitia and debitum is not claimed for God’s own egotistic good, but for human goodness and the integrity of creation.32 Correcting a common misinterpretation of Anselm, Gisbert Greshake points out what matters is not God’s honor that has been offended, but the consequences such an offence redounds to the “marred and derailed world.” Le unresolved, humans dishonoring God remain “deranged creatures in a disrupted world.”33 Ultimately, the theory is about the human good, not the good of God. What is key here is the way Anselm understands God’s honor anthropologically. Indeed, Greshake accords value to Anselm’s stress on the exercise of Christ’s human freedom and in his insistence that salvation is a public act – the removal of the public consequences of sin. In this light, God is neither vindictive nor seeking revenge. To this, Kasper adds the link between divine justice and God’s fidelity as Creator in Anselm’s theory. God could not simply secure the restoration of God’s honor out of pure love, without involving humanity. Instead, by binding Himself to the order of justice, God safeguards human honor, respects human freedom, and retains faith in creation. God’s self-binding to the order of justice is the expression of his fidelity as Creator.34 e significance in human contribution in freedom thus retained by Anselm, Pannenberg incisively observes a turning point in Christology. Salvation no longer turns directly on the divinity of Jesus, but on his true human nature. Humans have a crucial role to play.35 3. An Integrated Model of Love, Non-Violence and Human Freedom To overcome the negative aspects of Anselm’s satisfaction theory, a few elements must be integrated, amongst which three are notably requisite: love, non-violence, and freedom.

32

Gronchi, Jesus Christ, 107; Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 220; Gerard H. Luttenberger, An Introduction to Christology (Mystic, CT: Twenty-ird Publications, 1998), 209. 33 Mertens, Not the Cross, 71-72. 34 Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 220. 35 Wolart Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man (London: SCM Press, 1968), 42-43.

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1. Salvation by Love God’s love, which stands at the origin both of creation and redemption (Gen 1:1; Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:9-10; Rev 21:5), is the fundamental starting point in comprehending God’s project of human salvation. Redemption operates in terms of Jesus’ supreme example of love manifested not just in his death but throughout his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus preached love in his kingdom-building mission on one mountain (the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7), and he freely lived what he preached to the very end on another mountain (Golgotha, Mt 27:33). From mountain to mountain,36 in the Matthean grand schema, Jesus preached and lived the message of God’s kingdom, and called his disciples to do the same. God’s love and grace in human salvation is a paramount Scriptural key. To appreciate the depth of Jesus’ self-giving love and courage, two dimensions of his excruciating experience are of singular importance. First is the devastating power of the passion and the cross as they lay before him, of which his triple passion-predictions (Mark 8–10) and the Gethsemane Garden blood-sweating agony (Lk 22:39-46) are indicative. Second is his apprehension as those critical events unfolded and penetrated his entire being. Unless we truthfully face Jesus’ apprehension, we will not do justice to the human suffering he bore. Attempts to mitigate the magnitude of his suffering risk de-humanizing him and proportionately surrendering to monophysitism and a magical interpretation of salvation. Jesus was truly human (Heb 4:14-16), and he inspires all the more when we face in clarity and truth the inevitable dread and darkness as he anticipated the cross, and the immense suffering he endured in the ensuing events.37 In Jesus on the cross, the Church recognizes with clarity a truly and fully human being who was the most singularly faithful and most beloved Son of God (Mk 15:39). His victory over fear and suffering is an expression of the presence and victory of God’s love and life.38 But, Scriptures also insist with equal clarity that, as an element of great significance for understanding salvation, the salvific work of Christ demands positive human response to God’s love. Reconciliation affects the inner disposition of the human subject. Abelard thus spotlighted personal conversion and turning away from sin as liberating the human

36

A phrase I used in the CANews April 2011 article, posted as “30. Easter: From Mountain to Mountain,” at www.jeffangiegoh.com of 16.4.2011. 37 Luttenberger, Introduction, 194. 38 Ibid., 196-197, 359, n. 21.

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person for a life of love. He avoided the mythical vision of human sins having vanished upon God’s Son dying on the cross. Instead, he saw clearly that giving his life on the cross out of love, Jesus wanted to transform human hearts by love. From mountain to mountain, from preaching to living, suffering and dying, Jesus invited a responsive love in humans. So Abelard rightly insisted on human agency – the subjective need of the human person to embark on a journey of ethical liberation.39 We are saved by positively responding to Jesus’ love, not by some magical vicarious punishment on the Son of God, so we might escape punishment. Jesus, in real time, responded to God’s love, lived, suffered, and died to show us how to live better, in authentic humanity. What Jesus wanted was that we remember – the Gospels stressing this in unison – and do the same. 2. Salvation by Non-Violence Today more than ever, a violence-saturated world needs to re-imagine and showcase the non-violence of God in the death of Jesus, in contrast to a wrathful and violent God who planned and willed the death of His Son. Senseless massacres and oppressive power that darken an already broken world must be decisively interrupted. Only when more and more individuals and the institutions of civil society choose active, creative non-violence as a way of life, will we have a chance of creating a more non-violent society that moves towards a culture of peaceful co-existence. As people across the globe daily lament a growing reality of violence, all the more is this task urgent. A fundamental internal conversion from violence to non-violence is a very hard step, but the most courageous and the most needed moral and spiritual turning for work in human rights, justice, and peace. roughout his public ministry, Jesus was a maker of peace, an agent of restorative justice, and a proponent of non-violence. Jesus, the human face of God (Jn 14:9), was singularly absorbed in advancing the kingdom of God on earth ‘as it is in heaven’.40 While the hated oppressive Roman

39

Mertens, Not the Cross, 75. Mark 1:9-15 renders three veritable catechetical panels on Jesus’ baptism, temptation and kingdom-preaching and offers a blueprint for Christian life and mission. Energized by the Spirit at River Jordan, and emerging victorious against Satan in the wilderness, Jesus began to live and preach the kingdom of God all the way to the cross. See Jeffrey C. K. Goh, “Family: Seedbed of Vocation,” in Slightly More Theological category at www.jeffangiegoh.com. 40

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occupation marked the historical time of his earthly ministry, Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God and called the peace-makers ‘blessed’.41 He proclaimed a new, non-violent order rooted in the unconditional love of God, calling all to love their enemies (Mt 5:44), to offer no violent resistance to one who does evil (Mt 5:39). From mountain to mountain, Jesus’ life and ministry dramatized this call, including urging Peter to put down his sword at his Gethsemane arrest (Mt 26:52), and praying on the cross for forgiveness for his persecutors (Lk 23:34). On the cross, Christ died for peace; in death, he conquered violence. In this, Jesus showcased his kingdom-mission to humanize a not very human situation and opened up new possibilities other than violence for humanity, including the imitation of God’s universal love and nonretaliation. He broke the pattern of sin, absorbing hate and malice without passing them on. By his attitude and behavior, Jesus showed humanity how even in an extreme situation to submit to divine grace. We are saved by imitating Jesus’ non-violence, not by an alleged violent plan of God to have His Son killed on the cross to appease His anger. roughout the history of the Church, every explanation of the atoning effect of the cross had to explain why God’s saving act involved a violent death. Yet, explanations slide downhill once they co-opted the idea that God used or accepted violence for the greater good of our redemption. From his study of ancient myth and Greek tragedy, however, René Girard realized that the idea of redemptive divine violence has an ancient pedigree. It dominated the ancient world of ritual sacrifice and myth, a world firmly convinced that violence and the sacred were intertwined for the good of the many at the expense of the few. Making startling connections between religion, violence, and culture, his groundbreaking work42 enlivens theological debates, especially on the question of whether and how we are to understand Christ’s death as a ‘sacrifice’. His theory of non-violence seriously affects the doctrine of the atonement, helps us to see our savage-souls, and is good teaching for a weary world that its salvation rests not in violence but in non-violence. 41 e God of gracious forgiveness, peace, and non-violence has a standing and urgent call to all to enter upon the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18). See Emmanuel Katongole, The Journey of Reconciliation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017). 42 Starting with Violence and the Sacred  (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), Girard has attracted a huge following. See S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006); Scott Cowdell, René Girard and the Nonviolent God (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2018); Grant Kaplan, René Girard, Unlikely Apologist (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2016).

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Unlike others, Girard interprets the Passion and crucifixion of Jesus as God’s unmasking of the powers of violence in the world. God is antiviolence. God exposes violence for what it is, rather than willing the violent death of Jesus. For Girard Jesus’ death on the cross was not a sacrifice, for what God wants is “mercy, not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6; Mt 9:13; 12:7). Jesus’ death on the cross was not a violent penal atonement; it was to expose and to end all scapegoating violence. Violence and exclusion in the scapegoat mechanism had served as forces of social bonding in ancient societies, but when Jesus fell prey to that mechanism and died as countless others did, Girard insists that the Gospel texts unmask the process and reveal it as a fraud and an attack on the God who is nonviolent love. at unmasking is attested in two points. First, Jesus was not the guilty scapegoat but an innocent victim. e fraudulent use of the scapegoat mechanism on him is proven in the very words of Caiaphas the high priest, who gives voice to the ways of this world when he pronounces the formula rationalizing ancient sacrificial systems: “[…] it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation perish” (Jn 11:50). e judgment passed upon Jesus – a prime instance of the scapegoat mechanism unconsciously at work – is thus a human deed, not a direct divine act. Responsibility for Jesus’ death lies entirely with human beings – “is Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). On this count, Girard identifies the angry divinity at the cross who demanded the sacrifice of an innocent substitute victim as the same angry divinity at the ancient sacrificial altars. But this divine being was not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – it was us! We are the ones who need our anger appeased. What God did through the death and resurrection of Christ was to reveal that the sin we needed redemption from, was the way we have constructed human culture on the graves of sacrificial victims. Jesus, by taking the place of one of our victims, revealed that God was not on the side of the perpetrators. Rather the opposite – it was God we had been persecuting all along. And so, God did not will the death of Jesus; humanity did. God did not demand violent punishment; humanity did. God was not the perpetrator; God was the innocent victim. And, God-in-Jesus died on the cross, to expose our violence against all innocent victims, and to put an end to scapegoating sacrifices. But how was that exposure of fraud finally achieved? e answer lies in the resurrection.43 43 See Leo D. Lefebure, “Beyond Scapegoating,” Christian Century 115 (1998): 372-375.

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Second, therefore, Jesus’ response in love and non-violence is affirmed as good by God who raised him in the resurrection. While his opponents plotted his death, Jesus acted in a manner consistent with his own preaching. His response to evil was not retaliation by mimetic violence, but intensification and expansion of his love to encompass even the misdeeds of his foes. In the face of violence, his response was love and nonviolence. And so, in raising Jesus from the dead, God simultaneously declared that the scapegoating of Jesus is a fraud and calling him guilty is a lie, and that Jesus is an innocent man and a victim of violence. e resurrection exonerated him of all charges from the victimizers. By raising Jesus from the dead, God vehemently and definitively delivers the message that the crucifixion of Jesus is an unacceptable violence, an affront to God. All that Jesus stood for is being affirmed by God as ‘very good’. His values of love and non-violence vindicated, humanity is saved from the false claims of violence. Furthermore, in Jesus’ death and resurrection, he has made all things new again, for darkness, sin, violence, and death no longer have the last word. Now, there is possibility of new life: humanity is no longer bound to death, but saved for the possibility of life eternal. e Dutch New Catechism states the case with force and clarity, placing focus on the human person, instead of ‘guilt and evil’ and ‘the right order of things’ stressed since the Middle Ages. A wrong is not put right through the simple expedience of inflicting pain and punishment, but ‘by regrets, works and love’. In fact, for order to be restored, and for redemption to be achieved by Jesus, Scripture points not primarily to his pain and his death, but rather in the direction of ‘the service and goodness of his life’ which made for the ‘satisfaction’ on our behalf. And then, the Dutch New Catechism articulates the truth in these memorable words: The Father did not will the pain and the death, but a noble and beautiful human life. at it ended in such a death was due to us. Jesus did not shrink from it. His death was his total obedience. And so in fact he made satisfaction for us. In this sense, his death was the will of the Father. at suffering and death appear precisely at this moment of rendering satisfaction is a great mystery. But it would be wrong to explain it by saying that the Father willed that blood should flow.44 [Emphasis added.]

e Old Testament is in a sense a long love story of God who, suffering the infidelity and the covenant-breaking Israelites as the chosen people,45 44 45

A New Catechism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 281. See Peter Fransen, The New Life of Grace (New York: Seabury, 1969), 16.

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entered into a new covenant with them again and again. To claim that God the Father turned His face away from sinning humanity until the violent, punishing death of His Son, is antithetical to Jesus’ preaching. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, by which Jesus taught the world who God is and who we are, the Father never turned away from his two sinning sons.46 His face and his suffering heart were always turned towards them, in love and mercy, yearning for them to turn their hearts home and to truly stay home where kingdom values reign over narcissistic interests. 3. Salvation by a Reorientation of Human Freedom to God e Chalcedonian dogma that was directed against monophysitism and monothelitism has a human, creaturely, subjective center of action. In the hypostatic union, the Council has actually laid down that Jesus is really, and in every deed is truly and fully, human. Soteriology cannot rest on an objective principle of God’s will and plan to save where such a principle inactivates or worse renders Jesus’ subjective will vacuous. Instead, a helpful soteriology is one that features prominently and gives credit for the authentic exercise of Jesus’ human freedom, which is always a human struggle with the incomprehensible God. Only in the resurrection was Jesus vindicated of all that he stood and suffered for. So, if salvation rests upon a reorientation of human freedom to God, all the more must we credit Jesus for the terrible and radical experiences he underwent. In order not to betray God’s love and compromise human freedom, it was “necessary” (Lk 24:26) for Jesus to suffer and die as the only way to bring God’s love to a recalcitrant humanity.47 In Jesus, an unconditional, allembracing love went to Calvary. e painful story of Jesus thus witnesses to an unconditional self-giving in utter freedom to the Father for the project of human redemption, thereby setting an exemplary, kingdompromoting life of faith for all the world. From mountain to mountain, absolute obedience48 to God’s kingdom vision constituted Jesus’ mission, 46 Pope Francis said graphically that the father did not stay inside the house, or change the lock or locked the door! 47 Karl Rahner, “e Position of Christology in the Church between Exegesis and Dogmatics,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XI: Confrontations, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 185-214, at 198. 48 e Gospel narratives render the identity of Jesus Christ as the one who enacted our redemption through obedience to God. ‘He was what he did and underwent: the crucified human savior’. See Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207.

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marking a definitive break and replacement of the prototypical Adamic sinning humanity. Jesus the Christ is the archetype of the true human.49 Some renowned thinkers help strengthen this view. As early as the second century, in rebutting the Gnostic spiritualizing tendency, Irenaeus rigorously affirmed the positive value in Jesus’ full humanity. Anselm and Abelard diversely did the same. From omas Aquinas, a profound emphasis on the intrinsic value of human acts is again evident. In raising Jesus from the dead, God the Father affirmed the human acts of Jesus in his loving obedience to the Spirit and will of God. In turn, our own human actions in imitation of Christ, will likewise receive approval from God, towards our salvation. Unlike Anselm’s satisfaction by offering the one offended something over and above what was already owed, Aquinas shied to satisfaction by offering the one offended something that he or she loves more than they detest the offence. Applied to Jesus, what makes his death count as satisfaction is the love and obedience to God that it expresses.50 Of special note is that human redemption for Aquinas is not limited to the effect of Jesus’ death on the cross, but must be seen in the goodness of Jesus’ entire earthly life, so that all those Jesus-events recounted in the Gospels have a salvific value. In an absolutely unique and unprecedented perfect way, Jesus during his earthly life followed the will of the Father. Jesus’ God-approved “noble and beautiful human life” is his fundamental obedience, in interior self-dedication, by which he confronted human sins. In this way, all that he stood for merited exaltation and glorification at the resurrection. God’s ‘vindication’ is a salvation that heals. us Aquinas affirms that like all human acts, “the human acts of Jesus had an intrinsic proportion to his future.” Good and evil have their own sanction in human future. From mountain to mountain, Jesus chose to put the seal on constant self-renunciation as the absolute affirmation of the Other, the Father. is meant steadfastly preaching and living God’s kingdom-values till death. Towards the end, especially at the Last Supper, Jesus performed and explained a number of symbolic acts by which his disciples were to make ever present to future believers the reality of his life and death. Whenever his life and death were proclaimed during communal gatherings, believers would be summoned to proclaim Jesus’ obedience and in turn profess their own commitment to self-dedication. In communal fellowship and in the power of Christ, they were to overcome

49 50

Mertens, Not the Cross, 91, referencing Schleiermacher. Cf. omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa, q. 46, a. 1, ad 3.

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the root of sin, to renounce egoism, for without self-renunciation, there could be no affirmation of the other.51 Obedience bespeaks a choice of actions, of a lifestyle. We always have a choice. Jesus chose to do what was right by God; we can do the same. Jesus saw the larger picture, the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, without which he could not be so focused on conquering violence and the cross the way he did, or be able to hold back self-interest and triumph over temptations, or see what the death-bound humanity needed. Salvation is freedom that comes through the cross. Old Testament prophets looked forward to the cross and the saints of the New Testament looked back to it for guidance.52 From that perspective Christians learn the key lesson that the freedom of which the Scriptures speak is not the freedom to do whatever we want in life, but the liberty to choose what we ought. But obedience presupposes the total commitment of the person. at requires a human openness to God and all that God represents, and an exercise of human freedom by Jesus which Rahner “accents without abbreviation.”53 God the Infinite Mystery gives self-offering love to the world. Humans are created with a transcendental openness and the freedom to accept God’s love and to promote or neglect it in the world. e more one is open to God and the Gospel, the more human and free one becomes. Scriptures relentlessly offer the vision of that irreversible point where the history of God’s self-offering meets with the free acceptance of this in the world. Jesus stood precisely at that point “at which God accepts the world in such a way that he can no longer let it go.” In Jesus then, God is pleased to receive “that gi of creaturely freedom in which this freedom of the world definitely accepts God’s offering of Godself.” is is the definitive contribution of Jesus the true man, for then, “we are standing at that point at which one person,54 from the ultimate roots of his own

51 In The Reality of Redemption (Montreal: Herder, 1970), 59-60, Boniface Willems synthesizes what he sees as Aquinas’ “very realistic sacramental notion of redemption.” 52 As true divinity is revealed in self-giving love, so the humility of God and the nobility of true humanness belong together; Wright, Challenge, 193-194. 53 John Galvin, “Jesus Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John Galvin (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 249-324, at 318. 54 Gerhard Lohfink suggests that to cure human misery, God has to change society at its roots. Without taking away its freedom and its humanity, God’s work of liberation would have to start out small, with one person, at a single place. See “the Abraham Principle,” in Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who

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being, signifies the definitive address of God to the world, and at the same time the assent of the world to this God.”55 God’s history thus has a human history which attains its highest point with the definitive actions of one who is the “absolute bringer of salvation.” is is the one who “surrenders every inner-worldly future in death,” and who is thereby “accepted by God finally and definitively.” His complete surrender of life to God reached its fulfillment which became historically tangible precisely in the resurrection.56 To Schillebeeckx, the redefinition of God and humanity in Jesus’ proclamation and way of behavior attained ultimate significance at his crucifixion.57 is individual, Jesus of Nazareth, has exemplary significance and is the “effective prototype” for the world as a whole. He is what is meant by an “absolute saviour.”58 Jesus lived and died for a cause, the establishment of the kingdom or reign of God on earth as in heaven, and his followers are empowered to carry on his mission and spread his message. Disciples did not have to see his death as a “penal victimization” but as “heartbreaking empowerment.”59 Jesus on the cross witnesses to a quality of life which is the true life for all.60 Triumph, disciples then understood, came through failure. eir resurrection faith no longer saw Calvary as a catastrophe. Instead, the cross is now the healing symbol of Jesus’ selfemptying, self-giving, self-transcending work and has become a source of joy, peace and liberation for them. e prayerful suffering and death of Jesus has transformed them.61 But how did Jesus overcome the inevitable fear and suffering to achieve what he did? From Gabriel Marcel’s philosophical idea of the “domestication of circumstances,” Herman-Emiel Mertens describes what Jesus did as a “mastery of the Golgotha-situation.”62 In the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we see the actual application of the parables illustrating God’s love for He Was, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 44-46. 55 Rahner, “Position of Christology,” 201. 56 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 279 and 284. 57 Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus in Our Western Culture (London: SCM Press, 1987), 24. 58 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 211; id., “Experiencing Easter,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. VII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 159-168, at 167. 59 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 159. 60 John F. O’Grady, Models of Jesus Revisited (New York: Paulist, 1994), 51. 61 John J. Navone, Triumph through Failure (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), 165. 62 Mertens, Not the Cross, chapter 8.

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humanity. His ideal was to love, despite everything, till death if necessary. As his meaningful life-ministry was moving inexorably to the cross, that which empowered Jesus to master his fear and suffering turned on his inner attitude with its twin elements of positive non-acceptance and meaningful behavior. Positive non-acceptance differs from its opposite negative form and its negativities in inner imbalance – rancor, anger, rebellion, disgust, violent reactions and so on – that leads to self-alienation. In the positive form, non-acceptance is freed of the dominating rebelliousness and grimness. e sufferer takes the trials and suffering as part of life, inseparable from oneself and therefore as something that has to be assumed and transformed in a creative process. ere is no resignation or alienation, no masochism or victim-syndrome, but self-affirmation, and a true exercise of one’s freedom. “Domestication of circumstances” means the achievement of mastery or domination over an adverse situation, thus empowering one to affirm the goodness of one’s mission against the inevitable suffering along the way. It involves an attitude of the will which allows one to rise above the circumstances without, however, evading them. Conditions are not changed by violence and external force, but from within. Upon the twin dimensions of the non-acceptance of the meaninglessness of the situation in itself, and a determination to approach the situation with a meaningful behavior, Jesus exercised mastery over the Golgotha-situation with a key difference. On the one hand, in itself, the situation was meaningless because the crucifixion of a good man was a fraud, a terrible lie and a gross injustice. Judging Jesus guilty and a heretic and putting him to death was simply absurd. Against Jesus, the Obedient One of God, therefore, the cross was a cruel absurdity, a violence against God. On the other hand, Jesus confronted the meaningless situation with possibilities for a meaningful behavior. Not rebelling and altogether non-violent, he loved to the very end. It led ultimately to peace, both interiorly and exteriorly. Jesus thereby bore witness to the words of Cicero: “My enemies have taken from me everything, but myself.” Everything was taken from him: his disciples, his fame, his life, everything except his inner freedom, his ideal, ‘himself ’. For that reason, the hour of kenosis is also the hour of glorification. Shuddered before the Mystery, He went to his death in darkness, but the situation of deepest misery is at the same time the culminating point of his existence. e story of Jesus teaches that in an authentic theology of the cross, God, triumph and glory come through failure, ruin and death. e healing which Jesus accomplished on the cross, culminated the historical dimension of his ‘Abba’

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relationship.63 Jesus who became the redemptive person, is now a model, the ultimate standard, and a living principle which continues to work efficaciously in the world through his followers. ey minister, neither in purely spiritual things, nor in purely practical things, but to human persons upon the ultimate goal of Christianity, which is to help people become the best human persons they possibly can – the children of God. Imitation of Christ means the steadfast acceptance of our own human existence with its goal – to authentically assume our human nature as the eternal Logos did.64 4. Conclusion At the beginners’ theology class in Leuven, it was lens-changing to hear Professor H. E. Mertens say, “Christianity, according to Schillebeeckx, is first and foremost a story and a practice, rather than a set of doctrines, canon laws, or liturgies.” Revealing who God is and what God wants, the never manipulative but always healing and recreating life story of Jesus, his ministry and passion that climaxed in his crucifixion and resurrection, taken as a whole, makes up the stuff of true Christianity. It showcases the relationship between humanity and the deepest convictions about life lived as if God reigns, a relationship grounded most strongly in a self-giving love,65 an inner disposition of defenseless non-violence, and a human will freely oriented towards God’s kingdom-vision. With these, Jesus the true human decisively interrupted the overpowering pattern of sin in society. Imitating Jesus, we build upon his foundation (1  Corinthians 3), stop becoming carriers of sin-contagion, and avoid being death-bound.66

63

John J. Navone, Triumph through Failure, 165-167, 182-183. On Jesus’ Abba experience, see Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Vintage, 1981), 256-271. Vatican II teaches that the Holy Spirit offers to everyone “the possibility of being associated with Christ’s paschal mystery” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). 64 Rahner, The Content of Faith (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 348-349. 65 For the deconstructed postmodern self to find itself by giving itself away, see Wright, Challenge, 167-173. 66 William A. Barry, God’s Passionate Desire (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1993), 122.

8 Who Is Christ for Us Today? Some Soteriological Reflections along the Lines of Bonhoeffer’s Theologia Crucis Annemarie C. Mayer

1. Prelude: Formulating the Question “Who is Christ actually for us today?”1 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer (19061945) asks this question in a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge dated April 30, 1944 sent from prison in Berlin Tegel, where the Nazis held him captive. It is a question that has concerned Bonhoeffer for quite some time. Already in December 1928 at a lecture during his vicariate in Barcelona, in 1933 in his extremely popular Christology lectures in Berlin, which unfortunately can only be reconstructed from students’ notes,2 and now in his correspondence with Bethge. Asking about Christ is certainly nothing new. e question “Who is this?” (Mt 8:27; Lk 7:49) is the core question of the Christian faith and arises again and again in the New Testament when people encounter Jesus. e church of the first centuries struggled hard for the best conceptual description of the person and work of Jesus Christ, until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 established the formula of the two natures “true God and true man.” e original intention of this formula was to guarantee the role of Jesus Christ as universal mediator of salvation for all humankind and the entire creation. Yet, instead of continuing to ask who Christ is, the question of the how began to prevail: how do God and man relate to one another in Jesus Christ? How do divine and human natures come together in this particular person? Bonhoeffer deliberately 1

Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Letter to Eberhard Bethge” (April 30,1944), Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 362. 2 His Christology lectures in the summer of 1933 were structured around the themes of ‘who’ and ‘where’, cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1978) and id., Who Is Christ for Us?, ed. Renate Wind, trans. Craig L. Nessan (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002).

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skips this detour of christological history and returns to the original question of the New Testament: who is it I meet in Jesus Christ? By personalizing this question, Jesus Christ is no longer just someone who lived some 2000 years ago in Palestine and can only be encountered in history. e essential identity of Christ lies in his being pro nobis and pro me. For Bonhoeffer, this for me shows the kenosis, the self-emptying of God in incarnation. In his chapter on Bonhoeffer in Christ the Heart of Creation, Rowan Williams explains the link of the for me with kenosis, “If Christ for a moment sought to coerce my response, that would mean that he ceased to be ‘for me’ in this radical sense; he would be seeking to implement his will as a rival to mine, and this is precisely what he has foregone in becoming human.”3 For Bonhoeffer the issue is not that God accepts human flesh, as if two totally incompatible entities, divine and human nature, were magically combined with one another; nor is it the divine Logos getting rid of his divine attributes and becoming human in a sort of “metaphysical surgery.”4 By accepting human flesh God does not adapt one of the components of the incarnation, the human or the divine one. e incarnation does not want to destruct its own vehicle. Rather, the stumbling block is that God’s incarnated life is what it is for every human being: vulnerable, degrading, and controlled by others. e problem lies with this kind of being human, a being human that equates precisely with the battered, powerless, and godforsaken. God reveals Godself in the poor life of a suffering person. Already in his lecture Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer’s who-question about Christ necessarily leads him to the follow-up question: “What does the cross say to us, today?”5 2. Bonhoeffer’s Question for Today ere are three reasons for which I have chosen Bonhoeffer’s specific way of formulating his question about Christ as a prelude for the following reflections:6 Firstly, Bonhoeffer’s pointed question about ‘today’ needs to 3 Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury and Continuum, 2018), 190. 4 Ibid., 189. 5 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity,” in Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 10, ed. Clifford Green, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 342359, at 358 (italics in the original). 6 All three have also got to do with the theology of my dear colleague Terrence Merrigan. Firstly, his theology is down to earth and highly relevant for

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be asked by any Christology that claims to be up to date. e task of Christology is not limited to tracing the beginnings of the theological reflection on Christ and the later doctrinal developments. Above all, current ‘focal points of Christology’7 and areas of tension must be addressed. ey comprise as a fundamental question the suffering of God in the suffering of Jesus and why this suffering is salvific.8 Secondly, the emphasis on ‘for us’ in Bonhoeffer’s question highlights the close connection between Christology and soteriology. In the testimony of the New Testament as well as in the Early Church, the person and acting of Jesus Christ are inseparable from each other and form an inner unity. In high scholasticism, omas Aquinas begins to distinguish between the person and work of Jesus Christ. He differentiates between Summa Theologiae IIIa, qq. 1-26 and qq. 31-59 for the sake of clarity. Yet in Neo-Scholasticism this leads to two separate treatises: Christology deals with the person of Jesus Christ and soteriology with his work. By a renewed orientation along the lines of the New Testament today one recognizes again: person and work come together in the one reality of Jesus Christ; they are two dimensions that are mutually illuminating and justifying each other. at is why today soteriology gets again directly

today; secondly, he also investigates the intersection of Christology and soteriology; and thirdly, he focusses on the implications of the cross for the understanding of human suffering, as show publications like Terrence Merrigan, ed., Godhead Here in Hiding: Incarnation and the History of Human Suffering, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 234 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012); Luc De Saeger and Terrence Merrigan, eds., “Die geleden heeft onder Pontius Pilatus”: God en/in het lijden van de mens, Logos 12 (Antwerpen: Halewijn, 2017), and broadening inter-religiously, “Voor ons mensen en omwille van ons heil: Gods heilshandelen in de geschiedenis en de hedendaagse theologie van de godsdiensten,” in Volk van God en gemeenschap van gelovigen: Pleidooien voor een zorgzame kerkopbouw, ed. Jacques Haers, Terrence Merrigan, and Peter De Mey (Averbode: Altiora, 1999), 570-583. 7 Cf. Karl-Heinz Menke, Jesus ist Gott der Sohn: Denkformen und Brennpunkte der Christologie (Regensburg: Pustet, 2008). Recently several German christological publications seem to have raised the issue of focal points, cf. e.g. Gegenwartsbezogene Christologie: Denkformen und Brennpunkte angesichts neuer Herausforderungen, ed. Marco Hoeinz and Kai-Ole Eberhardt, Dogmatik in der Moderne 29 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). 8 Cf. Christoph Böttigheimer, “Menschliches Leid und göttliches Mitleid,” in Mein Herr und mein Gott: Christus bekennen und verkünden. Festschrift für Walter Kardinal Kasper zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. George Augustin and Klaus Krämer (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2013), 313-333 as well as Helmut Hoping, Jesus aus Galiläa: Messias und Gottes Sohn (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2019), above all 269-299.

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linked to Christology. Both are best developed as an integral unity.9 is is clearly shown by the way Bonhoeffer formulates his question. irdly, as demonstrated in the brief sketch of Bonhoeffer’s thought, his formulation of the question allows a focus on the salvific meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. e death of Jesus on the cross is always to be seen in connection with the resurrection, on the one hand, and the earthly life and work of Jesus, on the other. is is the way to explain the Christian belief that in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ God himself approached human beings in a salvific way. roughout the ages, but today more than ever, the offense taken because the cross is a symbol of torture makes it necessary to clarify in what way Jesus’ suffering and dying on the cross is salvific and how it can be spoken of today in a theologically responsible manner. is justifies the subsequent focus on Bonhoeffer’s reformulated question what does the cross say to us today, when answering his original question who is Christ for us today. e following reflections that closely link these two questions first focus on the criticism that, from the first moment so to speak, was directed against the cross as the alleged proof of God’s being too weak to prevent suffering, even for himself, and on the liturgical response against this allegation developed in the Early Church (3). Despite this response the challenge of God’s suffering has to be addressed, either by distinguishing between God’s impassibility and the suffering human nature of Christ, as traditional Roman Catholic soteriology suggests (4), or by emphasizing the participation of God in the human nature’s suffering of Christ, as Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Protestant soteriology in general contend (5). Both responses, though contradicting each other, are indebted to the Chalcedonian formula of “true God and true man” and emphasize that God redeems the world out of love for his creation. e crucial question is whether this love necessarily involves divine compassion, understood as helpless commiseration expressed in an ability to suffer which might call into question God’s ability to save. Gerald Vann’s interesting solution makes it possible to concentrate on the notion of love as the essence of God when discussing redemption and the cross (6). e fact that God’s love is vouchsafed by the cross prevents any naïve, starryeyed idealization of this love (7). is, in turn, recalibrates and captures more concisely the idea of kenosis as divine compassion with the battered and godforsaken that Bonhoeffer emphasizes.

9 Cf. Georg Kraus, Jesus Christus – der Heilsmittler (Frankfurt a.M.: Knecht, 2005), 4.

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3. Criticism of the Salvific Value of the Cross e cross is the symbol of what the Christian faith stands for. Already Saint Paul wanted to preach nothing else than the “word of the cross” (1  Cor 1:18), knowing full well the scandal and the folly of this word. From the very beginning it sparked discussion and argument. Already the disciples of Jesus asked themselves how God and suffering could be thought together, since Jesus’ death on the cross radically called into question God’s self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. According to Paul, the scandal of the cross lies in the fact that in the weakness of his crucified love God realizes the salvation of the world quite differently from what human logic would have expected from an almighty God. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:22-25). Yet this clarification did not settle the issue. A mocking crucifix, discovered in 1856 on the Palatine Hill in Rome, dates from around 123 to 126 AD. It depicts the crucified with a donkey’s head, who turns to a matchstick figure that, as a gesture of adoration, holds up one hand to the crucified. e inscription reads “Alexamenos worships his God” (AΛΕΞΑΜΕΝΟΣ ΣΕΒΕΤΕ ΘΕΟΝ). It caricatures the worship of a god who hangs helplessly on a cross and suffers, instead of being omnipotent, perfect, and incapable of suffering. e Christian understanding of God is falling short of anything that the (Neo-) Platonic idea of the supreme Good or the Aristotelian conception of the Unmoved Mover ever stated about the divine10 or, philosophically speaking, about the first principle. It is not compatible with absolute perfection.11 As Justin Martyr summarizes, “they proclaim our madness to 10 Cf. Herbert Frohnhofen, APATHEIA TOU THEOU: Über die Affektlosigkeit Gottes in der griechischen Antike und bei den griechischsprachigen Kirchenvätern bis zu Gregorios Thaumaturgos (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1987). 11 Cf. Plato, Politeia 381C, Platonis Opera. Vol. 4: Tetralogia VIII, ed. John Burnet, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Aristotle, Metaphysics 12, 1072A, ed. William D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). Cf. Alois Grillmeier, “Jesus von Nazareth – ‘Im Schatten des Gottessohnes?’ Zum Gottesund Christusbild,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar et al., Diskussion über Hans Küngs “Christ sein” (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1979), 60-82, at 68: “Wenn die griechische Philosophie der damaligen Zeit gegen etwas empfindlich war, dann gegen dies: als oberstes Prinzip, als arché, etwas anderes zu setzen als das

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consist in this, that we give to a crucified man a place second to the unchangeable and eternal God, the Creator of all.”12 is criticism hit the Early Church to the core. In particular in its liturgical language the Early Church sought to counter these critical allegations by extolling the cross of Christ as the ultimate redemptive victory, albeit acknowledging this victory’s paradoxical nature. e paradox is poignantly put by Augustine (354-430) as, “killed by death, he killed death” (morte occisus mortem occidit).13 e hymns of Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 540-ca. 609) follow in Augustine’s footsteps and praise Christ’s victorious fight for redemption. In the Roman Catholic liturgy some of them are still used today.14 Christ’s redemptive victory is a recurrent topic of other liturgical elements of the paschal triduum. e Easter Sequence “Victimae paschali laudes” by Wipo of Burgundy (ca. 990-ca. 1048) is dedicated to this theme: Wipo’s hymn depicts death and life dramatically clashing and praises the victory of redemption that Christ achieved through his death, “Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign” (Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando; dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus). e image of redemption as victory also dominates the Exultet, sung during the Easter Vigil in front of the candle. As Gerald O’Collins explains, “By repeating ‘this is the night’, the Easter Proclamation intensifies a central conviction of faith: the redeeming events of Israel’s history and of Christ’s resurrection from the dead have lost nothing of their saving impact in the present.”15 us the Early Church’s contestation of the foolishness of the cross continues to influence Christian thinking until today. It does so not only in a Roman Catholic liturgical context but to varying degrees in different denominations. To give but exklusiv-absolute ‘Hen’. Diesem gilt die eigentliche Liebe der Philosophen. Nous und Psyche sollten im Grunde gar nicht sein.” 12 Justin Martyr, First Apology, 13, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, trans. Marcus Dods et al., vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867), 17. 13 Augustinus, In Evangelium Ioannis Tractatus 12,10, in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 35 (Paris: Migne, 1864), col. 1379-1976, at 1489. 14 Cf. e.g. his hymn Vexilla regis prodeunt that is still sung at Vespers during Holy Week: Vexilla regis prodeunt, e Banners of the King issue forth, fulget crucis mysterium, the mystery of the Cross does gleam, quo carne carnis conditor where the Creator of flesh, in the flesh, suspensus est patibulo. from the cross-bar is hung. 15 Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 303.

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one example, based on the cosmological interpretation of Christ’s victory over “thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” (cf. Col 1:15-20) Pentecostal Christians – and a certain number of Southern Baptists in the USA – are currently advocating a Christus-Victor view of soteriology, which takes God’s wrestling with demons as its conceptual premise and starting point.16 4. The Main Challenge: God’s Suffering e paradoxical nature of the Early Church’s answer to the criticism of the cross, however, does not do away with the main theological difficulty related to the cross. Christoph Böttigheimer concisely pins down the problem, e death of Jesus is a massive challenge to God. e cross only does not negate the creative power of God and his historical revelation if God can surrender himself to death without thereby losing his freedom vis-à-vis creation, without contradicting his divinity and without canceling his promise of revelation. In the death of Jesus, God must prove himself to be the one who has the power to surrender himself to death without ceasing to be the originator of life.17

If God is not to contradict his divinity, it is vital that Christ’s suffering and powerlessness, symbolized by the cross, are countered and weighed out by the notion of God’s impassibility, immutability, and transcendence. Only thus authentic Christian hope is safeguarded and distinguished from self-delusion and unfounded vain optimism. Historically speaking it was rather for theological than philosophical reasons that Christian theology strove to protect and emphasize the immutability and impassibility of God which originally had been advocated by ancient Greek philosophy. e Christian notion of impassibility itself goes back to the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, the interaction of properties in the 16 Cf. Gregory Boyd, “Christus Victor View,” in The Nature of Atonement: Four Views, ed. James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 23-65. 17 Böttigheimer, “Menschliches Leid und göttliches Mitleid,” 316: “Der Tod Jesu ist eine massive Anfrage an Gott. Das Kreuz negiert nur dann nicht die Schöpfermacht Gottes und seine geschichtliche Offenbarung, wenn sich Gott in den Tod begeben kann, ohne dadurch seine Freiheit gegenüber der Schöpfung zu verlieren, seinem Gottsein zu widersprechen und seine Offenbarungsverheißung aufzuheben. Im Tod Jesu muss sich Gott also auf eine alles überbietende Weise als der erweisen, der die Macht hat, sich dem Tod auszuliefern, ohne aufzuhören, Urheber des Lebens zu sein.”

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divinity and humanity of the person of Jesus Christ, that was a logical consequence of the above-mentioned formula of Chalcedon “true God and true man.” As the Tomus Leonis, a letter by Pope Leo to the Bishop of Constantinople, sent in 449, explains, So it is on account of this oneness of the person, which must be understood in both natures, that […] the Son of God is said to have been crucified and buried, since he suffered these things not in the divinity itself whereby the Only-begotten is co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father, but in the weakness of the human nature.18

Already Augustine had pointed out that God as such cannot suffer, i.e. is “impassibilis.”19 is idea was taken up and adapted by a group of Scythian monks who during the eopaschite Controversy in 513 coined the formula “one of the Trinity suffered” (unus ex trinitate passus est),20 namely with regard to his human nature. eir formula, though first contested, was eventually vindicated at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.21 It became the classic way of thinking about God. We can here only briefly sketch some of the hallmarks of the further development. Anselm of Canterbury (ca. 1033-1109) conceived of God simultaneously as “greater than can be conceived” (maius quam cogitari possit)22 and as “something, a greater than which cannot be conceived” (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit).23 Anselm’s formula became the classic logical concept of conceiving God during the Middle Ages, yet it begs the question whether there would not be something conceivable that would be greater than a God who suffers, namely a God who does not suffer and is immutable. Consequently, for Aquinas, for instance, God’s very nature is immutable.24 18

DH 302, in Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals – Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Peter Hünermann, Robert L. Fastiggi, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2012). 19 Augustine, Contra Fortunatum disputatio 6, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 25, ed. Joseph Zycha (Vienna: Tempsky, 1891), 86, 22f. 20 Alois Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Council of Chalcedon (451) to Gregory the Great (590-604), vol. 2, trans. Pauline Allen and John F. Cawte (London: Mowbray, 1995), 318. 21 Cf. DH 432. 22 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion ch. 15, in Patrologia Latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne, vol. 158 (Paris: Migne, 1863), col. 223-248, at 235C. 23 Ibid., ch. 2, 228A. 24 Cf. omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [ST] Ia, q. 9, a. 2; q. 13, a. 7; q. 19, a. 7. e works of omas Aquinas are easily accessible in the edition of Robert Busa at www.corpusthomisticum.org.

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Catholic soteriology held on to the axiom of immutability and impassibility, not so much because it felt traditionally indebted to the Chalcedonian formula but, above all, because of the soteriological importance of that axiom. For, as a contemporary of Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner (19041984), once unambiguously put it, “If I want to escape from my filth, mess and despair, it doesn’t help me one bit if, to put it bluntly, God is in the same mess.”25 Rahner strongly questions that humanity can be saved, if the very God in whom human beings place their hope is subject to the same suffering as they are. Nevertheless, when it comes to immutability, Rahner with regard to the incarnation concedes, “God can become something, he who is unchangeable in himself can himself become subject to change in something else.”26 Since this seems contradictory, he explains, “here ontology has to be adapted to the message of faith and not be schoolmaster to this message.”27 What applies to immutability is, according to Rahner, also true of impassibility. Even during the death on the cross God does not lose impassibility. “Jesus’ fate does not impinge on God’s own life, with its metahistorical character and its freedom from suffering and its beatitude without guilt, since God’s reality and Jesus’ creatureliness remain unmixed.”28 Rahner stays absolutely loyal to the four adverbs of the Chalcedonian Creed “inconfusedly (ἀσυγχύτως), unchangeably (ἀτρέπτως), indivisibly (ἀδιαιρέτως), inseparably (ἀχωρίστως).” e life and death of Jesus Christ do not resemble a form of ‘docetism’. Rahner strives to apply the communicatio idiomatum and claims, “If someone says that the incarnate Logos ‘merely’ died in his human reality, and implicitly understands this to mean that this death did not touch God, he has only said half of the truth and has le out the

25 Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons, eds., Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1982, trans. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1986), 245. 26 Karl Rahner, “On the eology of the Incarnation,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. IV: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 105-120, at 113. 27 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction of the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978), 221. On a critique of Rahner’s statements in this regard cf. Heather Meacock, An Anthropological Approach to Theology: A Study of John Hick’s Theology of Religious Pluralism, Towards Ethical Criteria for a Global Theology of Religions (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 136. 28 Karl Rahner, “Jesus Christ – e Meaning of Life,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XXI: Science and Christian Theology, trans. Hugh M. Riley (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1988), 208-219, at 215.

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truly Christian truth.”29 He continues, “e death of Jesus belongs to God’s self-expression.”30 Proceeding from there to develop his theologia crucis in relation to the love of God, Rahner states, “e cross is the signum efficax of the redeeming love that communicates God himself, because the cross establishes God’s love in the world in a definitive and historically irreversible way.”31 e redemptive significance of the cross consists in its being an efficacious sign that God has eternally willed and always already communicates. As signum efficax it brings along the grace which it denotes, God’s love. is love, however, is not bringing about any passion or change in God. It is mediated and made unsurpassably definitive in history by Christ’s death. e categorical event of Christ’s death on the cross renders the grace of God’s love historically “tangible” (greifbar), “irreversible” (irreversibel), and eschatologically “victorious” (siegreich),32 while God’s eternal salvific will remains the fundamental changeless ground of this grace. To sum up, the core concern of Catholic soteriology is concisely recapitulated by Joseph Selling who writes, “In the end, the image of a God who suffers along with creation is incapable of challenging the tragedy of human suffering itself… For if God suffers – experiencing pain without meaning or justification – then we are more alone and hopeless than our fear and anxiety could imagine.”33 5. Contesting Protestant Soteriological Answers Bonhoeffer does not take sides with Rahner but follows Martin Luther (1483-1546) to whom the theology of the cross is absolutely central.34 29

Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 305. Ibid. 31 Karl Rahner, “e Christian Understanding of Redemption,” in id., Theological Investigations, XXI, 239-254, at 250. 32 Ibid., 250-251. Cf. also Henry Shea, “Internal Difficulties in the eology of Karl Rahner,” Modern Theology (online version before inclusion in an issue) 1-23, at 8, https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12652 [accessed October 12, 2021]. 33 Joseph Selling, “Moral Questioning and Human Suffering: In Search of a Credible Response to the Meaning of Suffering,” in God and Human Suffering, ed. Jan Lambrecht and Raymond F. Collins (Louvain: Peeters, 1989), 155-182, at 170; cf. also more extensively omas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). 34 Cf. Martin Luther, Operationes in Psalmos (1519-1521), WA 5, 176, 32-33: “CRUX sola nostra eologia.” e Weimarer Ausgabe is easily accessible online at http://www.lutherdansk.dk/WA/D.%20Martin%20Luthers%20Werke,%20 Weimarer%20Ausgabe%20-%20WA.htm. 30

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Luther, too, relies on the communicatio idiomatum and even wants to strengthen it. As we have seen, due to the axiom of God’s impassibility, suffering had been restricted during centuries to the human nature of Christ that was hypostatically united with the Logos. e innovation in Martin Luther’s theology of the cross consists in expanding the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum in such a way that one nature in the person of Jesus Christ fully participates in what can be attributed to the other and vice versa. us, on the cross, God himself truly participates in the suffering of Christ, because “everything that Christ does or suffers is surely done and suffered by God, even though it happened to only one nature.”35 is innovation in Luther’s theology is prompted by his specific way of receiving Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of vicarious satisfaction.36 By giving up the distinction between satisfaction (satisfactio) and punishment (poena), that Anselm strictly upheld, Luther develops the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious punishment. When interpreting “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal 3:13), Luther speaks of the Crucified as “maledictus,” “cursed,”37 which means “condemned to vicarious punishment,” to satisfactio vicaria poenalis. According to Paul, the Crucified One is indeed cursed, but in the sense of his becoming a salvific substitute for us.38 Yet the crucified Christ himself was never cursed by God. Luther tries to cushion this final consequence of his idea of vicarious punitive satisfaction by the innovation discussed above, that one nature in the person of Jesus Christ participates in the suffering that can be attributed to the other. For this reason, Protestant soteriology reckons with God’s ‘compassion’, literally understood as God’s suffering alongside the human being. is is more than mere pity or solidarity. Admittedly, Jesus freely bestowed compassion for the sick, the suffering, the grieving, and even

35 Martin Luther, Weihnachtspostille, WA 10/1, 150, 22f.: “alliß, was Christus thut odder leydet, hatt gewißlich gott than unnd gelieden, wiewol doch nur eyner natur dasselb begegnett ist.” Cf. also Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). 36 Cf. Timothy George, “e Atonement in Martin Luther’s eology,” in The Glory of Atonement: Biblical, Historical and Practical Perspectives, ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004), 263-278. 37 Cf. Martin Luther, Kommentar zum Galaterbrief (1535), WA 40/1, 434f. 38 Cf. Michael eobald, “‘Verflucht ist jeder, der am Holz hängt’: Die Deutung des Todes Jesu nach Gal 3,6-14,” Bibel und Kirche 64 (2009): 158-165.

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the dead. He wept over the fate of Jerusalem, was himself despised and rejected by many, and even tortured and killed. Yet does this mean that God was affected by this and suffered? Bonhoeffer points to Christ as always being the humiliated ‘man for others’, the lodestar of Christian commitment and service, thus introducing his concept of “Stellvertretung” as vicarious representative action.39 To make his approach less theoretical, he coins the metaphor of the ‘God who bears’ and explains, “e Son of God bore our flesh. He therefore bore the cross. He bore all our sins and attained reconciliation by his bearing.”40 Bonhoeffer is convinced that “only the suffering God can help.”41 For God’s suffering is not caused by weakness or anything like the frailty of the human condition. It is suffering out of the most genuine love, it is God freely and selflessly letting Godself be weak and vulnerable out of love. “e one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he also opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love, and remains superior to it by virtue of his love,”42 as the Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann explains. Yet this “remains superior” is where Catholic soteriology strongly hesitates: how can one talk at all about God’s suffering without being aware of the problem that when speaking of ‘suffering’ one applies human predicates to God, thus risking to use “this term not in analogical way but in an

39

Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 120, note 9, where the translators of Sanctorum Communio explain what is meant by Bonhoeffer’s concept of “Stellvertretung”: it “[…] is one of Bonhoeffer’s fundamental theological concepts through his writings. Literally the word means to represent in place of another – to act, advocate, intercede on behalf of another; we translate this as ‘vicarious representative action.’ As a theological concept in the strict sense it is rooted in Christology and refers to the free initiative and responsibility that Christ takes for the sake of humanity in his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection – it is not just a soteriological concept applied only to the cross (as ‘vicarious’ might suggest). By anthropological analogy, Stellvertretung involves acting responsibly on behalf of others and on behalf of communities to which one belongs.” 40 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 90. 41 Bonhoeffer, “Letter to Eberhard Bethge” (July 16, 1944), Letters from Prison, 480. 42 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. John Bowden and R. A. Wilson (London: SCM Press, 1974), 230.

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illegitimate, univocal manner”?43 And, even more importantly, how can one assert that ‘God suffers’ without compromising divine transcendence as well as God’s ability and power to save? 6. God Is Love Aer the Second World War, when theodicy reached a new existential level because people were wondering how such a disaster could have happened with a loving God looking on, the English Dominican Gerald Vann (1906-1963) developed an interesting solution to the apparent dilemma. He wrote, When I share in the suffering of someone I love, that actual sharing is the expression of something deeper, something permanent: the will-to-share, which is what we call love. And so in the mystery of redemption: the actual sharing is done through the humanity of Christ, but that actual sharing is the expression of the deeper and permanent mystery in the Godhead, the will-to-share, i.e., the will to be a companion.44

Vann is fully aware of the reservations on the Catholic side to a suggestion like his and addresses them by pointing out the implicit Arian tendency of such reservations, When we say that God became man in order to suffer with and for His creatures, we must not fall into a sort of practical (or imaginative) Arianism. We must not think that God, in order to be somehow involved, created a Christ to suffer while the Godhead itself remained immune, unperturbed in its immutable beatitude. God suffered. at does not mean that the divine nature underwent a diminution and became subject to evil. But it does mean that in the divine nature there is a quality, to speak humano modo, of which the human quality of pity and compassion is the expression and, so to say, the evocation. God is love, and therefore, to say that love, given the fact of misery, implies pity is to say that God, given the fact of misery, implies pity.45

e actual act of love is the expression of God’s immutable inner being that can be designated as God’s permanent, unchanging will-to-share, God’s will-to-save. Given that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16), the key to God’s work of salvation is love understood as permanent will-to-share.

43 John ompson, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63. 44 Gerald Vann, The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God: Lenten Meditations (London: Blackfriars, 1949), 66-67. 45 Ibid., 66.

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Is this merely a modern concept devised out of the pressing need in the twentieth century to find some solution to the exacerbated question of theodicy? According to the testimony of the New Testament, the cross of Christ is the free act of God’s love (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10; 2 Cor 5:19ff; Rom 5:8-10). God is the subject of reconciliation, the reconciler. He reconciles (actively), he is not reconciled, or somehow moved to, let alone forced to reconcile. e contexts of the two classic biblical passages on God’s actions of reconciliation (Rom 5:10-11; 2 Cor 5:18-20) are clearly reminiscent of the love that moved God to seek reconciliation with sinners (Rom 5:5.8; 2 Cor 5:14). On this biblical basis also Lutherans emphasize the importance of God’s saving love. One prominent example is Johann Sebastian Bach, though not a theologian, announcing at a crucial point in his St Matthew’s Passion (BWV 244) “My Saviour wants to die for love” (“Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben”)46 in one of the most moving soprano arias ever composed. It is interesting to trace the paradigm of love as motivation for redemption (instead of justice, satisfaction or other explanations) through history. e “wonderful exchange” (admirabile commercium), for instance, which the Greek and Latin Fathers valued as a key concept of salvation, remains inappropriately interpreted without divine love as its driving force. As an alternative theory to Anselm’s famous and very influential doctrine of vicarious satisfaction, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) developed an interpretation that is based on the moments of love and kenosis. It does not reckon with God as an avenging judge, but with a God who goes to extremes in self-denying love. In his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Peter Abelard states, Now it seems to us that we have been justified by the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this way: through this unique act of grace manifested to us – in that his Son has taken upon himself our nature and persevered therein in teaching us by word and example even unto death – he has more fully bound us to himself by love; with the result that our hearts should be enkindled by such a gi of divine grace, and true charity should not now shrink from enduring anything for him.47

46

e German text reads: “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben,ǁ von einer Sünde weiß er nichts.ǁ Daß das ewige Verderbenǁ und die Strafe des Gerichtsǁ nicht auf meiner Seele bliebe.” – “Out of love my Saviour is willing to die,ǁ Of any sin he knows nothingǁ So that eternal ruinǁ And the punishment of judgementǁ May not remain upon my soul.” 47 Eugene R. Fairweather, ed., A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, e Library of Christian Classics 10 (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1956), 283;

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Abelard emphasizes that the cross is the sign of a divine love that goes to the limits, by which God himself woos the affection of the human beings and thus inspires their repentance and their overcoming of sin by good acts. Abelard thereby breaks the logic of paying, swapping, and making amends in favor of a logic of kenotic love. “And with that he maps out how one can speak of salvation by the cross of Christ even under modern and postmodern conditions.”48 It has become common practice to follow in the footsteps of Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090-1153) and criticize Abelard’s idea that Christ “by His life and teaching […] handed down to men a pattern of life, that by His suffering and death He set put a standard of love. Did He then teach righteousness and not bestow it; reveal love and not infuse it; and so return to His own place?”49 In other words, Abelard is still criticized, “because Christ is only seen as a template of self-denying, all-enduring love that can only succeed via the moral attitude of all who want to follow him.”50 Surely, the cross of Christ must play its own, genuine role in soteriology, a role which means more than emphasizing the exemplary character of a somehow heroic or uncomplaining death. However, Petrus Abaelardus, Commentaria in epistolam Pauli ad Romanos 3:26 (II, sollutio), in Petri Abaelardi opera theologica, ed. E.  M. Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), 117: “Nobis autem videtur, quod in hoc iustificati sumus in sanguine Christi et Deo reconciliati, quod per hanc singularem gratiam nobis exhibitam, quod Filius suus nostrum susceperit naturam et in ipsa nos tam verbo quam exemplo instituendo usque ad mortem persistit, nos sibi amplius per amorem adstrinxit, ut tanto divinae gratiae accensi beneficio nihil iam tolerare propter ipsum vera reformidet caritas.” 48 omas Schärtl, “‘Eine unerhörte und ungerechte Geschichte?’: Soteriologie jenseits einer ökonomistischen Grammatik,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 132 (2010): 482-504, at 490: “Und damit legt er eine Spur, wie auch unter modernen und postmodernen Bedingungen von Erlösung durch das Kreuz Christi gesprochen werden kann.” 49 Bernard of Clairvaux, Tractatus ad Innocentium II Pontificem contra quaedam capitula errorum Abaelardi, quoted in Laurence W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of Atonement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), 106. 50 Schärtl, “Eine unerhörte und ungerechte Geschichte?,” 490: “weil Christus nur noch als Exemplar der selbst-verschwenderischen, alles erduldenden Liebe gelte, das nur durch die moralische Einstellung aller, die ihm nachfolgen wollen, wirken könne”; for an analysis and defense of Abelard, cf. Philip L. Quinn, “Abaelard on Atonement: ‘Nothing Unintelligible, Arbitrary, Illogical or Immoral About It’,” in Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology: Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, vol. 1, ed. Michael Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 348-364.

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Abelard reckoned with the transformative power of love and correctly saw that God’s love is the key that best unlocks our understanding of salvation history. Another prominent example for using this key is omas Aquinas (ST IIIa, qq. 46-48). For Aquinas, God’s mercy and justice cannot contradict one another.51 God’s mercy precedes all righteousness and justice as the ultimate possible destination.52 Without mercy, that is, love, there can be no justice and also no satisfaction for Aquinas. In this respect he, too, concretizes and corrects Anselm. Satisfaction is effective only through love.53 For Aquinas, the broader context is decisive: Christ, the Redeemer, heals and ‘deifies’ sinful humankind not only through his cross, but also through his incarnation. Human faith, hope and love are kindled through the incarnation.54 In Jesus’ cross and resurrection, the human being meets the goal of his or her own existence, communion with God, who is the ultimate object of love. rough Christ’s suffering for our sins, human beings realize how much God loves them. In the sacraments, salvation founded in Christ is given to human beings. Salvation consists in the justification and sanctification of the sinner, the aim of which is the eternal communion with God, opened up for humankind through the risen Crucified One. e idea of a benevolent and merciful God is decisive for the soteriology of Aquinas.55 Today, Gerald O’Collins, among others, emphasizes the importance of love for the understanding of salvation. He starts with the Johannine statement “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16), which understands love as the constitutive essence of God. e classic axiom “acting follows being” 51 Cf. ST IIIa, q. 46, a. 1, ad 3: “hominem liberari per passionem Christi, conveniens fuit et misericordiae et iustitiae eius. Iustitiae quidem, quia per passionem suam Christus satisfecit pro peccato humani generis, et ita homo per iustitiam Christi liberatus est. Misericordiae vero, quia, cum homo per se satisfacere non posset pro peccato totius humanae naturae, ut supra habitum est, Deus ei satisfactorem dedit filium suum.” 52 Cf. ST Ia, q. 21, a. 4, co.: “Opus autem divinae iustitiae semper praesupponit opus misericordiae, et in eo fundatur.” 53 Cf. ST IIIa, q. 14, a. 1, ad 1: “non enim esset satisfactio efficax nisi ex caritate procederet.” 54 Cf. ST IIIa, q. 1, a. 2, co. 55 Cf. Peter Hünermann, Jesus Christus – Gottes Wort in der Zeit: Eine systematische Christologie, 2nd ed. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1997), 207: “Gerechtigkeit ist immer Güte in bezug auf irgendetwas. Die Barmherzigkeit aber ist in sich unbegrenzt, unbegründet. Hier äußert sich Güte rein an sich selbst. Solche Güte in der Form der Barmherzigkeit liegt damit jeder Gerechtigkeit vorauf und ist letzte mögliche Zielbestimmung (Vgl. S I q.21, a.4c).”

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(operari sequitur esse) indicates that love also determines God’s redemptive action.56 In addition, the Johannine corpus (Joh 1:3-4, 9-18) together with other New Testament references (e.g. Col 1:15-20; Heb 1:2-3) brings salvation into connection with creation. According to the christological hymn in Col 1:15-20, creation is there “for the sake of redemption.”57 e incarnated Logos, who mediates divine revelation and salvation, was already at work in creation. Paul was the first to identify this Logos as the one who created the world in the beginning (1 Cor 8:6). e mystery of love, which was creation, culminated in salvation, with both creation and salvation coming about through the action of the same Logos. 7. Conclusion: The Cross as Pledge of God’s Love Christian theology is faced with the task of explaining the understanding of the cross as a pledge of God’s love. is is not an easy task, because the reality of love is far more complicated than any pre-made labels might suggest. Yet the fact that this love is realized by the cross safeguards against a naïve or starry-eyed understanding of love: it is not confined to the comfort zones of the human existence. Since naive wishful thinking about God’s love is not helpful, it is both legitimate and necessary to criticize inadequate representations of this love, as C.  S.  Lewis demonstrates, By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by love, in this context, most of us mean kindness – the desire to see others than the self happy […] What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing: ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven […] whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.58

e fact that God is love, but not necessarily the ‘dear grandfather’ whom we are prone to imagine begs the following conclusions: e cross is the Christian sign of God’s love for humanity and the reconciliation of the world. is is what makes it topical and lends it political power. From a Christian point of view, there must be no doubt that any

56 Cf. Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 307. 57 Hans Hübner, Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990-1995), 352. 58 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 39.

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misanthropy – be it in the name of reawakening nationalisms, in the course of growing conflicts between religions, or as a consequence of whichever reason – is unacceptable and incompatible with the Christian faith. With this we come full circle returning once again to Bonhoeffer, who stated in a letter to Rüdiger Schleicher (April 8, 1936), If it is I who says where God is to be found, then I will always find a God there who in some manner corresponds to me, is pleasing to me, who is commensurate with my own nature. But if it is God who says where he is to be found, then it will probably be a place that is not at all commensurate with my own nature and that does not please me at all. is place, however, is the cross of Jesus.59

It has now been for quite some time that we, too, are in a place that does not please us at all. A medieval plague cross from the church of San Marcello al Corso in Rome is symbolic of this. It was carried through Rome in the plague year of 1522 with thousands participating in the procession. On March 27, 2020 in a world suffering severely from Covid19 the pope was the only one praying in front of this cross on a ghostly deserted Saint Peter’s Square. To me this cross is a strong image of who Christ is for us and what the cross says to us today.

59

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Letter to Rüdiger Schleicher” (April 8, 1936), Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 14, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 166-170, at 168.

9 A Cumulative Approach to the Resurrection Gerald O’Collins, S.J.

When considering the resurrection of Jesus Christ, omas Aquinas proposed a “cumulative” approach.1 e adjective “cumulative” can express the tasks that face those who set themselves to explore a case for faith in Jesus risen from the dead. ey must deal with issues of at least three major kinds: philosophical, biblical/historical, and theological/spiritual. As we will see, these areas overlap, notably over the nature of God and what is involved in acknowledging God’s action in raising Jesus from the dead. is chapter attempts a mapping operation and details major issues to be handled in constructing a case for the resurrection. 1. Philosophical Issues Given the epistemological turn of modern philosophy, any apologist who claims to know and accept the resurrection of Jesus must tackle the nature and limits of human knowledge.2 To maintain that it is reasonable to believe in the resurrection implies that one has already reasoned about reason, evidence, and knowledge. Serious questions abound. How far, for instance, can reason take us in knowing present and past reality, including the reality of a transcendent God? What counts as appropriate evidence (meaning evidence from the external world) for what we can know and claim to know – specifically, about God acting to raise the dead Jesus to new and glorious life and Jesus appearing to individuals and groups aer this resurrection?

1

omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 55, a. 6, ad 1; see also Summa contra gentiles III, ch. 38. 2 See Jonathan Daucy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Stemp, eds., A Companion to Epistemology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Michael Huemer and Robert Audi, eds., Epistemology: Contemporary Readings (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2002); George S. Pappas, “Epistemology. History of,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), III, 371-384.

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Hence apologists for the resurrection may not ignore contemporary contributions and debates in the area of epistemology. What are the conditions for the possibility of knowing the resurrection? What, for example, do philosophers like William P. Alston propose about validating truth claims and justifying beliefs?3 Unquestionably, belief in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection involves much more than epistemological considerations and is not to be reduced to the conclusion of a philosophical argument. Nevertheless, if believing in the resurrection is to remain an intellectually honest and humanly responsible act, we may not flatly refuse to hear the epistemologists. At the same time, philosophical reason is both like and unlike historical reason and theological reason. e kind of evidence to which philosophers appeal, for instance, differs somewhat from the evidence typically cited by historians and theologians. While evidence can be expected to come from the external world, their diverse disciplines prompt philosophers, historians, and theologians into seeking and accepting different kinds of evidence. eir disciplines enjoy a certain autonomy, and it would be always a mistake to maintain in the matter of evidence that “one size fits all.” If we take evidence to be information bearing on the truth or falsity of propositions, by comparing debates in philosophy, history, and theology, we will notice the variety in the evidence cited. In his Memorial, written aer an intense religious experience during the night of November 23/24, 1654, Blaise Pascal famously contrasted “the God of philosophers and the scholars” with “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Pascal had in mind, among others, omas Aquinas who held that “to know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by God.”4 On the basis of an Aristotelian scheme of causality, Aquinas proceeded to clarify matters by developing philosophical arguments for the existence of God, the so-called Five Ways.5 Aquinas and Pascal present a basic choice for those seeking a philosophical propaedeutic to 3

William P. Alston, Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 4 Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 2, a. 1, ad 6. 5 See John F. Wippel, “e Five Ways,” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Brian Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 159-225; Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010).

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faith in the resurrection. Should they embrace (a) the reasoned arguments of philosophical theology or (b) the way of direct encounter with the risen Jesus and the God revealed in his resurrection? If they opt for (b), they will need to face the question: how can we justify what is conveyed by allegedly immediate, religious experience?6 In modern times the exponential growth and success of sciences and, above all, of the natural sciences lured many towards the epistemological conclusion that science is the only source of genuine knowledge about anything.7 Such full-blooded scientism may have waned, but its epistemological progeny in “objectivism” still enjoys numerous supporters. In the name of “objective” and “scientific” knowledge, they expect authentic knowledge to be and remain independent of human interests, perspectives, and commitments. Only pure, uninterpreted “facts” are reliable. Followers of “objectivism” need to read Michael Polanyi and others who have argued that all knowledge, including knowledge in the realm of the sciences, is always personal and affected by human interests, perspectives, and commitments.8 ere is no such thing as knowledge that is purely “objective.” We cannot expect to enjoy a “view from nowhere.”9 ere are always conditions that should prompt us into recognizing that knowledge is always both objective and subjective, involving interaction between the knower and the known. Diverse ideological outlooks and diverse religious faiths have their impact on what we “know” about the resurrection. Similarly, pure nuggets of non-interpreted facts do not exist. Personal experiences, choices, and evaluations inevitably affect what are deemed to be “the facts.” In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, one needs to ask, among other things: did the claims and activity of Jesus make him an appropriate person to be vindicated by God by being raised to a new, transformed life? Here we rely on reaching reliable conclusions on the basis of the gospel records, while recognizing that those records derive from such eyewitnesses as Simon Peter, Mary Magdalene and other 6

See e.g. Phillip H. Wiebe, Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); id., God and Other Spirits: Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 7 See Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 8 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (rev. ed., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 9 omas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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disciples who began interpreting Jesus from their very first meetings with him. To be sure, significant convergence characterizes what they reported and proclaimed about Jesus. But there never was a set of non-interpreted “facts” about Jesus. e nature of human experience and personal knowledge rules that out. Philosophical reasoning also affects what we can say about historical conclusions that concern the case for the resurrection: for example, the reliability of the tradition that on the third day Jesus’ tomb was found to be open and empty. Does this tradition do justice to the evidence in a way that alternate scenarios fail to do? Is it a verdict “beyond reasonable doubt” which a jury might accept? Testimony and doing justice to evidence are matters that philosophers and jurists ponder.10 Historians also constantly put the question: are these conclusions historically reliable? In any case, what is historical reliability? We will hear from historians in the next section. Philosophy is heavily involved in debates about the status and function of religious statements. ese statements may concern, for instance, a reality such as the existence of God and an event such as the resurrection of Jesus. Do such statements assert “facts” and are they informative, or do they merely evoke attitudes? Before leaving philosophical considerations, we can recall one cautionary tale, which exemplifies an epistemological failure in addressing the question of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Gerd Lüdemann aimed at a “ruthlessly honest quest for truth,” one that would take “an undistorted look” at the evidence and “look in a purely historical and empirical way at the historical testimonies to the resurrection.” Inevitably those he disagrees with find themselves charged with “dogmatism,” “prejudice,” and even with knowing “a priori what needs to be proved.”11 Lüdemann’s view of human knowledge provides an instance of that naïve realism criticized by Bernard Lonergan and others for presuming knowledge to be merely a matter of taking an “honest look.”12 e profession of ruthless, undistorted honesty repeats what many philosophers 10 See C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 11 Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 6, 14-15, 19, 69, 178, 211. 12 See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 344, 449-450; id., Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972), 238.

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have long ago challenged: namely, the claim to make a purely objective and scientific approach to some controversial issue. e truth of Christ’s resurrection, a matter of enormous personal significance, is not a merely “historical” matter to be kept at arm’s length, looked at dispassionately, and pronounced upon accordingly. Lüdemann alleges that he is pursuing a totally honest inquiry and doing something that others fail to do: he looks without any bias at the evidence, or rather at the evidence that he allows to count. Any debates with him should begin with his flawed background theories about knowledge in general and historical knowledge in particular. He alleges the impossible, to be personally free of “distortions” and bias. Any honest quest of truth requires an awareness of personal biases, not the pretense of engaging in presuppositionless research.13 2. Historical/Biblical Issues Among the different ways in which historical studies touch arguments about the resurrection are the status of conclusions, the role of analogies, and the concern for historical truth in the first-century Mediterranean world. Let me take up in turn these three topics. 1. Status of Historical Conclusions As regards conclusions, are there only two categories available: (a) the historically certain (e.g. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo) or (b) the historically indeterminate? If we endorse this stark choice, we seem to be justified in holding, for instance, the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb to be simply historically indeterminate. But is the scheme of only two categories at fault? Should we acknowledge conclusions based on strong evidence which may be strong but still falls short of conclusive evidence that would rule out all possibility of error? We should recognize innumerable historical conclusions that responsible scholars firmly hold, even if they do not claim to have reached utter certainty. us J.  N.  D. Kelly marshalled evidence to draw the conclusion that what we know as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (used by all Christians at the Eucharist) does in fact come from the First Council of Constantinople (381 ).14 ere had been considerable diversity of views on this matter. 13 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989). 14 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1974).

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at did not lead Kelly to conclude that no one really knows where the creed in question came from and how it fell into its final shape. Without claiming historical certainty for his conclusion, he argued for it as solidly probable. Historical studies teem with such examples of leading scholars reaching firm conclusions that they believe to do better justice to the evidence currently available. Although they cannot pretend to have reached the kind of utter certainty that simply discounts the possibility that further evidence might come to light and seriously qualify or even discount their conclusion, they do not throw up their hands and declare the issue they are interested in to be simply “indeterminate.” One needs to recognize the range of possibilities for conclusions to historical research: from the utterly certain, through the highly probable, the solidly probable, the probable, and various shades of possibility, right down to the genuinely indeterminate. In the city where I live, a courier service for parcels advertises itself as “delivering certainty.” e firm uses “certainty” in the sense of “may be relied on.” ey deliver punctually and can be trusted not to lose or misdirect any parcels. e firm does not claim to deliver certainty in the sense of always providing some undisputed fact or conclusion which should command our unqualified assent: that is to say, an utter certainty which allows us to discount the possibility of future evidence ever emerging that would challenge, seriously modify, or even disprove some alleged fact or conclusion which we have accepted. Historical investigation does not regularly “deliver certainty” in that sense, by providing conclusions which are not only undoubted but also can never be doubted. “Delivering probability,” even high probability, describes more accurately the task of competent historians. Delivering probability applies to areas of human activity that carry serious consequences for those involved: for instance, in trials for murder and other serious crimes. Members of the jury are expected to weigh the evidence and reach a “safe” verdict, that is to say, one which is beyond reasonable doubt but not necessarily one which is utterly certain. Over the years I have attributed this kind of historical status to the conclusion that the tomb of Jesus was discovered to be open and empty. It is not open to reasonable doubt, especially when set over against counter-explanations.15

15 See e.g. Gerald O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Jesus (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012), 80-99; id., “Buried by His Enemies? Acts 13:28-31,” Expository Times 130 (2019): 399-403.

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Here it is worth reminding ourselves that in matters deeply affecting our human lives we constantly rely on historical conclusions for which, at least in theory, we cannot discount the possibility of evidence one day challenging or even disproving these conclusions. Take, for example, the unqualified trust towards spouses and other close relatives that provides the ongoing and unchallenged framework for the existence of many human beings. ey live, so to speak, “at the mercy” of other people, but do not spend their days morbidly preoccupied with the possibility of betrayal.16 2. Role of Analogies In 1898, Ernst Troeltsch identified the basic analogical “postulate of the historical method”: it maintains that “agreement with normal, customary, or at least frequently attested happenings and conditions as we have experienced them is the criterion of the probability for all events that historical criticism can recognize as having actually or possibly happened.”17 In the twentieth century Troeltsch’s principle of analogy shaped much understanding of history and, for many writers, rendered questionable the historicity of the resurrection and events pointing to the resurrection: for instance, alleged appearances of the risen Christ (e.g. 1  Cor 15:5-8). ese appearances have been explained away as ancient examples of hallucinations and bereavement experiences, “frequently attested happenings” that historical criticism can acknowledge. Lüdemann and others have judged the Easter appearances to be the experiences of hallucinated persons who, aer Jesus’ death and burial, expected to meet him again and, through a kind of chain reaction, mistakenly imagined that they saw him.18 ey mistakenly attributed to an external source what they had produced themselves: the “presence” of the risen Christ. e post-resurrection appearances would then be totally internal, psychological events that took place in the minds and imaginations of the first disciples and were not produced by any external stimulus. In short, these so-called appearances were purely subjective visions, with no external reality corresponding to them.

16 See Gerald O’Collins, Easter Faith: Believing in the Risen Jesus (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003), 33-38. 17 Ernst Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in eology,” in id., Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 11-32, at 13-14. 18 See e.g. Lüdemann, Resurrection of Jesus, 79-84 (on Paul as hallucinated).

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e evidence that we have from the four Gospels does not, however, support any picture of Jesus’ disciples excitedly expecting to meet him risen from the dead. Instead of persuading themselves into thinking that they saw him, they had to be persuaded that he was gloriously alive again (e.g. Mt 28:16-18; Luke 24:36-43; John 20:24-25). What the gospels record seems credible: the crisis of Jesus’ arrest and disgraceful death on a cross le the disciples crushed. Only by ignoring the evidence can we picture them as anxiously awaiting his return from the dead and out of their imagination hallucinating his appearances. e theory of an ecstatic group hallucination might be more plausible if the New Testament had reported only one appearance, and that to a particular group on a particular day. Instead, it witnesses to appearances taking place over a period of time and to different groups as well as different individuals (e.g. 1 Cor 15:5-8). As regards the groups to whom Jesus appeared, the New Testament presents us with at least six cases: the Twelve (1 Cor 15:5); “all the apostles” (1 Cor 15:7; who seem to be a more extensive group than the Twelve); Simon Peter and six others (John 21:1-14); “more than five hundred brothers [and sisters]” (1 Cor 15:6); Cleopas and his companion (Luke 24:13-35); and Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (Mt 28:9-10). e variety of these traditions makes it quite unconvincing to reduce the six groups to one group, who on a specific occasion and by a kind of chain reaction imagined one aer another that they saw Jesus. A psychiatrist, Joseph W. Bergeron, has joined forces with a New Testament scholar, Gary Habermas, to produce a landmark article on the hallucination hypothesis. Bergeron supplied technical, clinical considerations about the “complex and varied psychiatric and neuro-physical milieu required for hallucinations to occur,” naively ignored by those who indulge hypotheses about the disciples hallucinating the presence of the risen Jesus. Such hypotheses are “at odds with current medical understanding.” In particular, they offer “no acceptable explanation for the simultaneous group encounters of the disciples with the resurrected Jesus,” but “prove to be unconvincing and implausible.”19 e hallucination hypothesis depends on what the disciples already believed and expected before Jesus died. is hypothesis cannot account for two remarkably new things that the disciples began to proclaim.

19 Joseph W. Bergeron and Gary Habermas, “e Resurrection of Jesus: A Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Story of Easter,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80 (2015): 157-172.

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First of all, what options were open to the disciples aer Jesus was executed as a messianic pretender and blasphemer? Could they have modified their incipient messianic belief in Jesus and claimed him to be another martyred prophet, like John the Baptist? Hardly, it seems to me. To be crucified meant not only to suffer an utterly cruel and humiliating form of execution but also to die under a religious curse (Gal 3:13) and “outside the camp” of God’s people (Heb 13:12-13). In other words, crucifixion was seen as the death of a criminal and godless man who perished away from God’s presence and in the place and company of irreligious persons.20 In fact, the disciples began preaching the crucified Jesus as the divinely endorsed Messiah risen from the dead to bring salvation to the whole world. e notion of a messiah who failed, suffered, was crucified, and then rose from the grave was simply foreign to pre-Christian Judaism, and hence could not have shaped any alleged hallucinations on the part of the disciples.21 Since their previous religious beliefs could not have prompted them into making such startling claims about Jesus, what triggered this religious novelty? Where did it come from, if not from the resurrection of Jesus himself, now made known through his appearances and the discovery of his empty tomb? e second novelty concerned a striking shi in religious expectations. By the time of Jesus, some or even many Jews cherished a hope that a resurrection of all the dead would bring an end to human history. But no one imagined that one individual would be raised to a new, transformed existence in anticipation of the last day. But then the followers of Jesus began proclaiming that one individual (Jesus) had already been raised to a glorious life which anticipated the end of all history.22 What prompted this remarkable change in expectations that had no precedent in Jewish faith and hope, and so could not have fed into alleged hallucinations experienced by the disciples? Once again the plausible cause can only be the actual resurrection of Jesus, followed by his Easter appearances.

20

On the crucifixion, see Gerald O’Collins, “Crucifixion,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1207-1210. 21 e Servant of Isaiah 53 suffered to atone for the sins of others. But he was neither presented clearly as a messianic figure nor said to have been crucified and raised from the dead. 22 See N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 85-128.

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Lüdemann, Dale C. Allison,23 and others have used the analogy of bereaved persons who experience their beloved dead to argue that the Easter appearances may have been nothing more than ancient episodes in the psychobiography of bereaved persons. But these writers persistently ignore decisive differences between the experiences of bereaved persons and those of Jesus’ disciples shortly aer his death and burial. Undoubtedly, we can make some positive comparisons between (a) the experiences of widows and widowers studied by Dewi Rees and others and (b) the experiences of the disciples shortly aer the death and burial of Jesus.24 For instance, in both cases we learn of contact with the beloved dead, and it is contact that is life-giving. In both cases those who remain behind have experienced grief, even shattering grief, then followed by unexpected contact with the dead. e analogy between (a) and (b), however, turns out to be not that close and illuminating. In Believing in the Resurrection, I drew attention to numerous points of dissimilarity.25 First, the bereaved experienced through visions and in other ways their dead ones who had died, but never claimed that these deceased had risen from the dead. Second, that major Easter witness, St Paul, cannot be credited with a bereavement experience. He never seems to have known Jesus during the time of the public ministry, still less become a close and loving disciple. He met the risen Jesus as a hostile persecutor, not as a grief-stricken follower. ird, the manner of death in cases of (a) never included a case of death by public execution, still less a horrible and shameful death on the cross. e 293 widows and widowers studied by Rees lost their beloved ones through accidents or deaths by natural causes. He did not report any suicides or homicides, still less any executions. Fourth, apropos of the place of the spouses’ death, 270 died at home (161 cases) or in hospital (109 cases). e places, no less than the manner, of death examined by Rees do not parallel what the Gospels report about the dramatic and terrible death that took Jesus away in the prime of life. A fih reason for differentiating between the Easter experiences of the disciples and those 23 See Lüdemann, Resurrection of Jesus, 79-84, 97-100. For details of Allison’s position, see Matthew Levering, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 40-47. 24 See Dewi Rees, “e Hallucinations of Widowhood,” British Medical Journal (October 2, 1971): 37-41. Later Rees regretted using the term “hallucinations”; it implied that the experiences of the bereaved were merely imaginary and not real. On Rees and his successors in his research, see O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection, 72, 175-191, 214-218. 25 O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection, 179-189.

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of Rees’s widows and widowers emerges from the New Testament reports of appearances to groups, as well as to individuals. e pioneering study by Rees reported only individuals who saw, heard, spoke to, or even felt touched by their dead spouses. e individual nature of these experiences moved them away from the resurrection witness in the New Testament, for which appearances of the risen Christ to groups are at least as significant as the appearances to individuals. A sixth dissimilarity arises when we notice that 40% of Rees’s widows and widowers continued to experience their deceased spouses for many years. But the appearances of the risen Christ to individuals and groups took place over a limited amount of time and did not continue for many years. is should be enough to illustrate some of the major dissimilarities between (a) and (b). Readers who are interested can consult the full list of dissimilarities in my Believing in the Resurrection. Years ago in his now famous Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of Christian Eschatology, Jürgen Moltmann described Troeltsch’s principle: It is generally acknowledged that historical understanding nowadays is always analogical understanding and must therefore remain within the realm of what is understandable in terms of analogy. e omnipotence thus attaching to analogy implies […] the basic similarity of all historical events. [is] presupposes that there is always a common core of similarity, on the basis of which the differences can be sensed and approved.

Moltmann realized that the “presupposition of a fundamental similarity underlying all events” raised serious difficulties against accepting Christ’s resurrection and the Easter appearances, events which are strikingly new and even unique. Moltmann briefly insisted that dissimilarity forms “the other side of the analogical process.” Hence, absolutely speaking, analogical understanding does not exclude the resurrection and subsequent appearances of the risen Christ.26 is insight must be developed. When analogies for the resurrection of Christ and his Easter appearances are offered, we deal with things that are both like and unlike. We face both similarities and dissimilarities. We need to ask: does this analogy enjoy enough similarities to make it a close and illuminating comparison? Or is it characterized by too many dissimilarities, so that it fails to be a useful analogy? Sadly, such a calculus of similarities and dissimilarities is something that rarely, if ever, turns up in studies of Christ’s resurrection.

26

Trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), 175-178.

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3. Concern for Historical Truth in the First-Century Mediterranean World Challenges to Jesus’ resurrection which turn up every now and then can take the form of alleging that first-century writers and their readers had no firm grip on the difference between unfounded myths and historical events. Writers are supposed to have been free of any scruples about dressing up such myths (read “the miracles, resurrection, and Easter appearances of Jesus”) as history and selling them to a gullible public. Readers are supposed to have been naïve and incapable of recognizing that they were being deliberately deceived. ere is an unintended irony in such a picture coming from modern authors. Notoriously claims in 2003 about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq deceived millions of people but proved to be a false “myth” created by western governments. But this is only one among many examples of unscrupulous fabrications that at least for a time have succeeded in hoodwinking a contemporary, gullible public. Nowadays dressing up myths and other fictions as true “facts” has assumed plague proportions. We live in a disinformation age when truth is persistently manipulated in politics and much popular culture but also, to some extent, in academia.27 Furthermore, such a picture of the first-century cultural standards normally disdains to recall the intellectual advances made in GraecoRoman culture right up to the time of Jesus: by philosophers (e.g. Plato and Aristotle), historians (e.g. ucydides), and mathematicians (e.g. the Pythagoreans). In their different fields, famous Mediterranean intellectuals and their practical counterparts in engineering, architecture (e.g. Vitruvius) and law (e.g. Demosthenes and Cicero) cultivated and encouraged the pursuit of truth. Beyond question, they could be driven to write by propagandistic reasons: for instance, Julius Caesar (100-44 ) in his Gallic Wars. But this work, so far from being a mere tissue of fictions and myths, provides a reasonably reliable guide to the Roman conquest of ancient Gaul. Let me cite one example of the less than satisfactory approach to the issue of historical truth in the first century: M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths.28 For a presentation 27 See Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018); Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda (London: Faber & Faber, 2019). 28 M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

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of this book on August 13, 2019 at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne), Litwa offered the following summary: Did the early Christians believe their myths? Like most ancient and modern people, early Christians made efforts to present their myths in the most believable ways. [is book] explores how and why what became the four canonical gospels took on a historical cast […] the evangelists responded to the pressures from Greco-Roman literary culture by using well-known historiographical tropes like the mention of famous rulers and kings, geographical notices, the introduction of eyewitnesses, vivid presentation, alternative reports, and a historical preface highlighting careful research. e evangelists deliberately shaped myths into historical discourse to maximize their plausibility for ancient audiences.

e “well-known historiographical tropes” that make up the heart of this summary enjoy their cross-cultural counterparts in innumerable modern works of history. Such works also mention famous rulers, provide geographical detail, cite eyewitnesses, aim at vivid presentation, record alternative reports, and claim to be based on careful research. Does the presence of all of these “tropes” in William Manchester’s two volumes on Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Robert Caro’s (still to be completed) life of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), for instance, mean that these remarkable works of contemporary biography are myths masquerading as history? Just because features of historical writing, either in the past or today, follow existing conventions does not by any means point to their mythical falsity. ey are simply styles or ways of writing and do not automatically convict works of untruth. Has Litwa confused methods with content? But let us take point by point Litwa’s summary. First of all, the very title of his book presumes an implausible startingpoint: a tissue of myths about Jesus constituted the original material that was then dressed up and presented historically in the four Gospels. A full debate with Litwa would involve confronting his position with major contemporary studies on Jesus (e.g. by James Dunn and Richard Bauckham) and major commentaries on the Gospels (e.g. by François Bovon, Ulrich Luz, and Joel Marcus). Such scholars converge in agreeing that the evangelists, for all their editing, interpreting, and embellishments, drew on historically reliable material recalling what Jesus said, did, and suffered. We should remember also that many of the ancient myths about heroes either dealt with people who most probably never existed, like the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. In some myths, these brothers were credited with being twins born of a vestal virgin raped by the god Mars. Other ancient myths dealt with figures who were genuinely historical but lived centuries earlier: for example, Plato. He was

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sometimes supposed to have had the god of wisdom, Phoebus Apollo, as his father. In the case of Jesus, however, we face someone whose existence is historically certain and who lived and died only a few decades before the Gospels were written.29 Second, Litwa answers his opening question (“Did the early Christians believe their myths?”) with a strange picture. Early Christians may have believed in myths about Jesus, but these were myths created by themselves! ey knew also that many people would not accept their mythical message unless it appeared to be based in history. Hence “the evangelists deliberately shaped myths about Jesus into historical discourse to maximize their plausibility for ancient audiences.” ey consciously decided to give their myths an “historical cast.” To name this decision in ethical terms, deliberately shaping mere myths into true history is a form of lying. at would seriously denigrate the moral standards of the evangelists and understand Christianity to have originated in a “world of lies.” e vast majority of New Testament scholars, not to mention others, would have great difficulty in taking seriously the hypothesis that Christianity began with such dishonesty on the part of the evangelists and their associates. Has a worldwide and vast effect, the history of Christianity, been caused by a huge deceit that concerns its key founding documents, the four Gospels? ird, Litwa’s “admission” that, “like most ancient and modern people, early Christians presented their myths in the most believable ways,” may seem a gracious recognition that ancient people were not so different from us modern people. But more is at stake here. What of Litwa himself? As a not so different modern person, does he too want to present his “myths in the most believable ways”? Or does he pretend to belong to some privileged minority (among both “ancient and modern people”) who refuse to indulge such a practice? Critics may easily think of Litwa’s own conclusions as myths which he has himself created and which he dresses up as the true history about the foundation of Christianity. Fourthly and finally, Litwa dismisses the references in the Gospel to “eyewitnesses” as example of a non-historical trope; the so-called eyewitnesses were merely literary and not true eyewitnesses. Naturally the beloved disciple, an eyewitness in the Fourth Gospel, is written off as a purely literary figure. In recent years, Richard Bauckham has strongly and, for many, persuasively disputed both points. Genuinely historical

29 See Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

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eye-witness fed into all four Gospels, and the beloved disciple was a truly historical figure.30 3. Theological Issues Besides philosophical and biblical/historical issues, exploring faith in Jesus risen from the dead also involves various theological issues. Let me attend to two of them: the nature of the divine action at work in the resurrection of Jesus, and the differences that belief in the resurrection has made in human life. 1. The Divine Activity The Resurrection of God Incarnate by Richard Swinburne31 contains much that is relevant and convincing, but I must protest against his reducing Jesus’ resurrection to the category of miracle and describing miracles as “violations of natural laws.”32 First, the resurrection should not be called a “miracle” or even a “super-miracle.” Jesus’ miracles are, to be sure, signs of what he wishes to do for us in the final kingdom (in the perfect bodily “healing” of the resurrection). Nevertheless, they happened and happen within our historical world of space and time, even while they point to what is to come. e resurrection of Jesus goes well beyond any such miracles: it was and is the real beginning of the world to come, the event which initiates a sequence of final events that will fulfil and complete his personal rising from the dead (1 Cor 15:20-28). Second, violate has four meanings, all of them negative and even ugly: (1) disregard or fail to comply with; (2) treat with disrespect; (3) disturb or break in upon; (4) assault sexually. Presumably Swinburne wants to use violate in sense (1). But when working miracles occasionally and for good reasons, God is surely better described as suspending or overriding the normal working of the laws of nature. Since it was God who first created the precise shape and functions of the laws of nature, it seems odd to speak of God “disregarding” or “failing to comply with” them. Suspending or overriding seems more appropriate language to describe the divine causality at work in the resurrection. 30 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017). 31 Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 32 Ibid., 186, 190.

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What might we say about this causality?33 ree principles may help to clarify matters a little. First, it is easier to grasp and talk about effects than about causes. Effects can oen be obvious; causes and their precise nature can remain shadowy and mysterious. Creation itself offers a basic example. We see and in other ways experience a vast sample of created reality every day. But we never directly observe the cause of this effect: God’s activity in creation and conservation. At best we glimpse God’s creative action only in and through its effects. In its mythical way, the Book of Genesis symbolizes this point by picturing Adam being plunged into “a deep sleep,” so that he could not observe the creation of Eve (Gen 2:21-22). Second, a traditional adage about “every agent bringing about something similar to itself” (omne agens agit sibi simile) reminds us that efficient causes are also exemplary causes. Effects reflect the “form” of their causes. Children resemble their parents, not only through their common humanity but also genetically and in other ways. In their color, shape, and scent, new roses will take aer the bushes from which they have been grown. Causes leave their impression on their effects. ey are present in their effects, which participate in them. Hence all effects, albeit in varying ways and degrees, participate in God and share the divine life. Israelite history illustrates a third principle or characteristic of divine activity. God’s different acts on behalf of the chosen people took place in view of a future completion. Together they formed a dramatic movement towards a final goal, a progressive assimilation to God that aimed at full participation in the divine life and presence. Admittedly, God oen had to write straight with crooked lines. Human freedom and human dissidents saw to that. Nevertheless, God’s acts are never disconnected, still less arbitrary. Paul can read off a final divine unity in God’s ceaseless activity for the salvation of Jews and Gentiles (Romans 9–11), even if the apostle must admit a deep mystery in the unfolding story (Rom 11:3335). Israel’s special history wrote large what many spiritually sensitive people continue to experience: God’s providential activity for each one moves progressively towards its final goal: the fullest possible assimilation to God and participation in the divine presence.34

33 See Paul Gwynne, Special Divine Action: Key Issues in the Contemporary Debate (1965-1995) (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1996); Rupert J. Read and Kenneth A. Richman, eds., The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2000). 34 See William Hasker, “Providence,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, VII, 797-802.

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If these reflections are acceptable, how do they fare when applied to the resurrection of the crucified Jesus? Here the first principle stated above is dramatically exemplified. Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul and the other Easter witnesses saw the primary and immediate effect of the resurrection manifested to them, the living Jesus himself. ey gave their causal explanation: “he has been raised from the dead.” But they never claimed either to have witnessed the divine cause in action (the very resurrection itself) or to understand how it worked. In faith, they knew the cause, the resurrecting power of God, but, unlike its effect, that cause remained shrouded in deep mystery. Second, in the resurrection, the divine agent brought about something sibi simile. God’s resurrecting power le its impression on the effect, Jesus’ raised and glorified humanity. In his transformed human existence, Jesus became even more like unto God, as the Son in whom one can recognize even more fully the image of his Father (Rom 1:3-4). Christ’s risen humanity reflects and resembles to the ultimate extent possible its divine cause. In the highest degree possible, through his risen life he also participates in God (Rom 6:10). Finally, the third principle we detected in divine activity towards human beings is realized par excellence in the case of Jesus’ resurrection. e divine activity at work, from the incarnation on, formed a dynamic movement towards its future completion: Christ’s full participation in the divine presence when he “sits at God’s right hand” (Rom 8:34) aer he has “subjected all things” to God (1 Cor 15:20-28). 2. The Resurrection and Human Lives Apologetical theology raises questions about the differences which belief in Jesus’ resurrection has made in human lives. Levering, while finding my arguments for the resurrection “quite powerful,” believes a “major problem” remains: “if Jesus truly rose from the dead, the world would surely be now a much better place than it is. Why should anyone pay attention to arguments about Jesus’ resurrection nearly 2000 years aer the event was supposed to have taken place, given that in many ways the world has only gone from bad to worse?”35 In Jesus Risen: An Historical, Fundamental and Systematic Examination of Christ’s Resurrection,36 I did raise this question: “what testable and 35

Levering, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?, 27. Gerald O’Collins, Jesus Risen: An Historical, Fundamental and Systematic Examination of Christ’s Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 144-145. 36

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valuable differences has belief in the resurrection made to human lives?” e question was then filled out: “have the lives of those who accepted Christ’s resurrection proved (i) deeply satisfying and worthwhile to them, and (ii) productive, even heroically productive, to others?” By way of an answer I cited signs of the presence of the risen Lord “in recognizable examples of saintliness.” en I added other “testable and valuable effects” of the living Christ working through his Holy Spirit: “the personal witness of Christians and their various movements concerned with education, medical care, and work for refugees, drug addicts, prisoners and the powerless poor.” In many ways there have been signs of the world becoming a better place through faith in the risen Christ. Questioning the effects of faith in the resurrection to be recognized in the last two thousand years calls for a book-length response. In part such a response has been provided by a work published by Mario Farrugia and myself.37 But I say “in part,” since our work focused on past and present Catholic life and would need to be supplemented to achieve a truly global vision of Christian history and the signs it displays of the risen Christ’s presence and activity. Such signs come, above all, from the lives of such saintly men and women as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Pope John XXIII, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Jean and érèse Vanier. As is obvious above, biblical and philosophical considerations converge with theological insights for those who wish to reflect on the uniquely special activity of God that effected the resurrection of Jesus and on the valuable differences belief in the resurrection has made in human lives. ese are closing examples for a chapter that has aimed to map some of the major, cumulative tasks facing scholars who explore Jesus’ resurrection. ey need to possess considerable gis in philosophy, historical/biblical studies, and theology. Finally, I feel privileged to have been invited to contribute to a volume in honor of Professor Terrence Merrigan, a scholar who has consistently shown himself to be a truly Easter person.

37 Gerald O’Collins and Mario Farrugia, Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity (rev. ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

10 Christology and Ecology in Dialogue Dermot A. Lane

e increasing acceptance of Integral Ecology as a methodology for dealing with the climate crisis is of significance for theology. Integral Ecology is about adopting an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the climate crisis and the breakdown of biodiversity. According to Sean Kelly, a philosopher at the Californian Institute of Integral Studies, the time has come to go beyond “the spiritually deadening, mechanistic and materialistic view of reality that much contemporary culture takes for granted.”1 Integral Ecology can be found in the Earth Charter (2000), in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015), and in the groundbreaking encyclical of Pope Francis entitled Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015) which devotes a whole chapter to Integral Ecology. Within this acceptance of Integral Ecology, there is a recognition that the voice of religion has a part to play in the global conversation about the environmental crisis. is in turn has opened up the possibility of a new dialogue on the relationship between eology and Ecology. In particular, the adoption of an Integral Ecology suggests a mutually critical interaction between Christology and Ecology is possible. e emergence of what some call a Deep Ecology presents new challenges and opportunities for the development of a Deep Christology as articulated by the Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen and others.2

1 Sean Kelly, “Five Principles of Integral Ecology,” in The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era, ed. Sam Mikey, Sean Kelly, and Adam Robert (New York: SUNY Press, 2017), 189-227, at 193. 2 Niels Henrik Gregersen developed the concept of Deep Incarnation in the context of an evolutionary Christianity in an article entitled “e Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 40 (2001): 192207. Since then Gregersen has, in a variety of articles, applied the concept of Deep Incarnation to the whole of Christology. An extensive analysis of deep Incarnation and its application to Christology can be found in Niels Henrik Gregersen, ed., Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015).

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1. Framing the Question e purpose of this essay in honor of Professor Terrence Merrigan is to explore what might be involved in developing a new dialogue between Christology and Ecology. In broad terms this paper will look at some of the questions coming from Ecology to Christology and from Christology to Ecology.3 More specifically it will select a small number of New Testament Christologies that are connected to creation and have something to say to the ecological crisis. irdly, this essay will examine the contribution that the Danish theologian, Niels H. Gregersen, makes to this debate through the concept of Deep Incarnation. In conclusion, we will locate this debate within the wider parameters of the relationship between creation and Incarnation as proposed by Karl Rahner. We can begin with a sample of ecological questions for Christology. Why is there such a separation between the natural world and Christology? Does Christology have anything to offer to an ecological understanding of nature? Where does Christology fit in the new cosmic story? And, what does Jesus have to say about the earth? Concerning this last question, care must be taken to avoid giving the impression that somehow twenty-first century questions about Ecology can be answered by the early church’s understanding of the Christ-event or the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. It is, however, possible that Christology can offer a new vision and open up wider horizons in support of the ecological movement. Alongside these questions from Ecology to Christology, there are also questions from Christology to Ecology. Can an Integral Ecology help Christology to better understand the organic unity of all things in Christ? Is it possible that Deep Ecology can open up a new pathway for the incorporation of the natural world into Christology? How might Deep Ecology pave the way for a much-needed recovery of the cosmic Christ? It is not our intention to answer these questions directly; instead the questions set the context for what is to follow. Further, these questions pose a series of new internal challenges and opportunities for Christology in the twenty-first century. ese challenges include the following foundational issues for the conduct of Christology in the light of the ecological emergency: • e need to overcome the separation of creation and Christology. 3 is paper draws on and expands material originally published in chapter 4 of my book Theology and Ecology in Dialogue: The Wisdom of Laudato Si’ (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2021).

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• e importance of invoking the teaching of Chalcedon (451) in a way that embraces the unity between Jesus as a child of the cosmos and the Word made flesh. • e necessity to outline a unified Scotist view of salvation as an alternative to the dualistic understanding of salvation as separate from creation. • A retrieval of Jesus as the Wisdom of God incarnate. It is interesting to note how Rahner had highlighted a variation of these questions before the advent of the ecological crisis. roughout his life, Rahner was keenly aware of the need to unify the relationship between creation and Incarnation. He sought to present creation and Incarnation as one divine action “with two moments within the one process of God’s self-communication to the world, although it is an intrinsically differentiated process.”4 Towards the end of his life, Rahner highlighted the need for Christology “to find an intelligible and orthodox connection between Jesus of Nazareth and the cosmic Christ, the omega point of world evolution.”5 How is it possible to establish an underlying unity between the Jesus of history and the cosmic Christ of faith which, at the same time, acknowledges the transformation that takes place within this unity. In the last century much time was given to the quest for the historical Jesus. e focus has now shied to the quest for the cosmic Christ as important for a critical interaction between Christology and Ecology. 2. The Presence of Wisdom, Word and Spirit in the Hebrew Bible One way to address these questions and challenges is through the adoption a low-ascending Christology, that is, a Christology that attends first to the experience the disciples had of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in contrast to an approach that starts from the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 .6 Further, in beginning with Jesus of Nazareth, we must locate him within his own context of Judaism.

4 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978), 197. 5 Karl Rahner, “Christology Today,” in Theological Investigations. Vol. XXI: Science and Christian Theology, trans. Hugh M. Riley (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1988), 220-227, at 227. 6 On the meaning and value of a low-ascending Christology see Dermot Lane, The Reality of Jesus: An Essay in Christology (1975) (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2000) and Stepping Stones to Other Religions: A Christian Theology of Interreligious Dialogue (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2011), 277.

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e Jewishness of Jesus is all-important in understanding the theological significance of the Christ-event. An important part of the Jewishness of Jesus is the various elements that make up the faith of Jesus. ese include the foundational presence of an Exodus-faith in the life of Jesus. is Exodus-faith celebrates the liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. is historical liberation was led by Moses in the thirteenth century  and gave rise to a legal agreement drawn up at Sinai described as a Covenant between Yahweh and the people of Israel for their formation. is foundational moment is sometimes referred to as Exodus-1 because it was followed by a new Exodus or a second Exodus, when the people of Israel returned to Jerusalem from their captivity in Babylon in the sixth century . At the time of Jesus, some Jews expected another Exodus-event and, for Christians, this came with the death and resurrection of Jesus, sometimes referred to as Exodus-3.7 A second key element within the faith of Jesus would have been the presence of a strong creation-faith. is creation-faith of Jesus would have been formed by different, but mutually enriching experiences of God, especially personal encounters with the Wisdom of God, the Spirit of God, and the Word of God, each of which is closely bound up with different aspects of creation. ese experiences are central to Israel’s faith-understanding and Jesus’ faith understanding of creation and Exodus, and therefore the faith understanding of his disciples. A brief, schematic summary of Wisdom, Spirit, and Word is essential background to the development of Christologies in the New Testament.8 e figure of Wisdom is prominent in the Hebrew bible. ere are six books describing her activities: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Sirach, and Wisdom. Wisdom, in the Book of Proverbs, is personified and portrayed as representing the feminine face of God: “before the beginning of the earth, I (Wisdom) was brought forth, when there were no springs” (Prov 8:23-24). And “when he established the heavens, I was there” (Prov 8:27). Equally important is the Book of Wisdom which describes Wisdom as “more beautiful than the sun” and the One who “excels every constellation of the stars” (Wis 7:29). 7 is scheme of Exodus 1–3 is taken from Richard Clifford. See podcast by Richard Clifford at bc.edu/encore “e Old Testament in the Christian Bible,” accessed on July 23, 2019. It is also discussed by Richard Clifford and omas D. Stegman in “e Christian Bible,” in Paulist Biblical Commentary, ed. Jose E. A. Chiu et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2018), 1640-1650, at 1648-1649. 8 I am influenced here by a helpful article by Gerald O’Collins on “Word, Spirit, and Wisdom in the Universe: A Biblical and eological Reflection,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, 59-77.

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e Spirit (breath) of God is a key presence throughout the Hebrew bible. According to the Jewish scholar John R. Levison, the word ‘spirit’ (ruach) is found in 378 places in contrast to the word ‘covenant’ which appears in 289 places, or ‘mercy’ which is mentioned in 251 places, or ‘peace’ which occurs 237 times.9 e Spirit of God is described as the creative source of life (Gen 1:2 and 2:7; Ps 104:29-30), the one who inspires and guides prophets (Is 61:1-2; Ezek 3:12; 8:3; 11:1) and the one who renews the face of the earth (Ps 33:6 and 104:29-30). At times, the Spirit is closely connected to the figure of Wisdom, so much so that some books talk about “the spirit of Wisdom” (Wis 7:7; Deut 34:9). And, thirdly, there is a strong presence of Word, of the Word of God, throughout Judaism. e Word of God is creative (Gen 1:1ff. and Ps 33:6) and personified in the Book of Wisdom (Wis 18:14-16) and embodied in the utterances of the prophets who hear the Word (Jer 1:2; Ezek 1:3). Further, the Word is a guide and a light (Ps 119:147), the source of life and healing (Deut 8:3), the one “who is very near to you” and is “in your mouth […] and in your heart” (Deut 30:14). ese perspectives on Wisdom, Spirit, and Word are different; yet they represent mutually overlapping expressions of the presence of the One and same God. Each represents activities of God in creation, in history, in the lives of leaders and prophets. What is striking about these actions of God is the equivalency, parallelism, and intimate relatedness between all three, though perhaps not so surprising because they derive from a strict monotheism as the hallmark of Jewish faith, in contrast to its neighbors. It would be misleading to give the impression that there was a worked-out theology of Wisdom, Spirit, and Word in the Hebrew scriptures. It is perhaps more accurate to suggest that there is a scattered, largely consistent, presence of Wisdom, Spirit, and Word at work in the lives of the people of Israel. is is a presence seeking further clarification and completion. It is the formal claim of the New Testament that this completion takes place in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Without reference to this Jewish background of Wisdom, Spirit, and Word, as expressions of the Exodus-faith and creation-faith, it would be difficult to make sense of the New Testament and the plurality of Christologies it contains.

9 John R. Levison, The Jewish Origins of Christian Pneumatology, Holy Spirit Annual Lecture, Duquesne University, 2017, 5.

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3. A Plurality of Christologies in the New Testament We begin with Wisdom Christology because it is the earliest Christology of the New Testament. It was the Wisdom traditions that served in the first instance as the “generative matrix” of early Christology.10 Further, according to J. D. G. Dunn, it was Wisdom Christology that paved the way for the doctrine of the Incarnation.11 Additionally, according to Raymond Brown in his commentary on the Gospel of John, Jesus is “the culmination of a tradition that runs through the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament.”12 Much of the language and theology of the Hebrew bible on Wisdom resonates within the Gospel of John and is oen explicitly applied to Jesus. Raymond Brown finds at least twelve clear parallels between Jewish Wisdom and the teaching of John on Jesus.13 We will limit ourselves to four explicit parallels between the Logos prologue of John’s Gospel and the figure of Wisdom in the Hebrew bible. First of all, Wisdom existed with God from the beginning (Prov 8:2223) just as the Logos existed in the beginning (Jn 1:1). Secondly, Wisdom is said to be a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty (Prov 17:5) and the Logos in John reflects the glory of God (Jn 1:14). irdly, Wisdom is said to be a reflection of the everlasting light of God (Wis 7:26), whereas in John’s Gospel, the light of the Logos is the light of world (Jn 1:4-5). And, fourthly, Wisdom is described as having descended from heaven to dwell with the people (Prov 8:31; Sir. 24:8), whereas in John the Logos descended from heaven to earth (Jn 1:14). According to Elizabeth Johnson, behind every line about the Word/Logos, there lies a story of Wisdom; she adds: “e Prologue, we might say, transposes into the key of Logos the music that was originally written in the key of Sophia.”14

10 Martin Hengel as quoted by Niels Henrik Gregersen in “Christology,” in Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives, ed. Michael S. Northcott and Peter M. Scott (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 33-50, at 43. Gregersen is quoting from an article by Hengel in German, “Jesus als messianischer Lehrer der Weisheit und die Anfänge der Christologie,” in Sagesse et Religion: Colloque de Strasbourg (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), 304-344. 11 James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Enquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1980), 212. 12 Raymond Brown, The Gospel according to John I–XVII (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 122. 13 Ibid., 123-124. 14 Elizabeth A. Johnson, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril (New York: Orbis, 2018), 170 and 177.

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is language of wisdom is also present to a lesser degree in the Synoptics. For example, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says that “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children” (Lk 7:35), whereas in Matthew, Jesus says “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds” (Mt 11:19). ere is a shi taking place here from Jesus as a child of Wisdom to being Wisdom in person. In brief, it is possible to discern a gradual development in the Gospels from Jesus as a teacher of Wisdom to being a child of Wisdom, to being Wisdom in person, to Wisdom Incarnate. In addition to the Gospels, reference must also be made to the explicit Wisdom-Christologies in Paul and Deutero-Pauline Letters. We will confine ourselves here to just two examples. In Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, in answer to the question “Where is the one who is wise?,” Paul affirms that “God has made foolish the wisdom of the world” and then goes on to affirm that: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23-24). At the end of that Chapter, Paul goes on to say that God “is the source of your life in Christ Jesus who became for us Wisdom from God” (1 Cor 1:30). In Chapter 2 of 1 Corinthians, Paul also points out that “we do speak Wisdom, though it is not a Wisdom of this age” (1 Cor 2:6). “But we speak God’s Wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory” (1 Cor 2:7). A second example of Wisdom Christology can be found in Colossians 1:15-20 which presents Christ as: e first-born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and in earth were created […] All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together […] He […] is the beginning, the first born from the dead.

Whenever Christ is given a role in creation, or is present at the beginning of all things, the intention is that Christ is taking on a role that was previously given to the figure of Wisdom in the Sapiential literature. is theme of Christ as the Wisdom of God is continued in Eph 1:3-10, Phil 2:5-11, Heb 1:2-3, and the Prologue of John’s Gospel which we will analyze presently in his Logos Christology. In conclusion to this brief overview of Wisdom Christology, it must be pointed out that the word ‘Wisdom’ as used in the Hebrew bible is feminine and as such is applied to Jesus. Sophia, in the Sapiential literature, expresses features of what was seen as ‘feminine’ in the mystery of the one God, features that have been forgotten and neglected within the

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largely Patriarchal reception of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. If Christology is to be inclusive as originally intended, then the strong emphasis in Paul and John on the unity, equality, and dignity of all ‘in Christ’ and ‘in the Spirit’ must be recognized, and if the Patristic principle of what is not assumed is not redeemed is accepted (e.g. Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa), and if the carefully chosen language of Chalcedon (451) which talks about homo and not vir is to be respected, then the Patriarchal bias of traditional Christology will have to be critiqued, christologically in itself, but especially in the light of the centrality of the Wisdom Christologies of early Christianity. ere are good theological reasons why Wisdom Christology should be given greater emphasis at this time: • It connects Christology with the theme of creation which is prominent in the Sapiential literature of the bible; • It serves as a bridge in the dialogue between Christology and Ecology; • It retrieves the impulse towards a radical inclusivity that was part of the earliest understanding of the Christ-event (for example, Gal 3:28; Rom 16:1-27); • It recognizes that aspects of the Christ-event oen thought of as feminine are part of the Gospel of Christ; • It contributes important dimensions to the twenty-first-century quest for the Cosmic Christ; • It relativizes the dominance of Patriarchy in ways that are important for the renewal of Ecology and Christology; • It overcomes the perceived tension between historical Christology and cosmic Christology. Closely linked to the centrality of Wisdom Christology in the New Testament is the presence of a Spirit-Christology. Given the connection seen between Wisdom and Spirit in the Hebrew bible, one would expect some similarity as well as difference between Spirit-Christology and WisdomChristology. As mentioned, spirit (ruach) is prominent in the Hebrew bible. Most significantly, the spirit in Judaism is an “earth-loving-spirit,”15 dwelling 15 Erin Lothes Biviano, “Elizabeth A. Johnson and Cantors of the Universe: e Indwelling, Renewing, and Moving Creator Spirit and a Pneumatology from Below,” in Turning to the Heavens and the Earth: Theological Reflections on a Cosmological Conversion. Essays in Honour of Elizabeth A. Johnson, ed. Julia Bumbaugh and Natalia Imperatori (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), 182.

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in dust, nostrils, and the matter of creation. Similarly, the activity of the Spirit in the New Testament is bound up with bodies. For example, Luke, who has most to say about Spirit, especially in the infancy narratives and in the Acts of the Apostles, outlines what the angel says to Mary: “e Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy” (Lk 1:35). e image of the Spirit overshadowing Mary reminds us of the Spirit hovering over the face of the primeval waters in Gen1:2. For Luke, Elizabeth and Zachariah and John the Baptist are “filled with Holy Spirit” (Lk 1:41 and 67) and the Holy Spirit, we are told, “rested” on and “guided” Simeon (Lk 2:27). e public ministry of Jesus begins with the descent of the Spirit at his baptism by John the Baptist. In Luke, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Lk 4:1). Aer forty days in the desert, Jesus returned to Galilee “filled with the Holy Spirit” and enters the synagogue on the Sabbath and opens the scroll where it says: e Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor […] to proclaim release to the captives […] sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour (Lk 4:16-19)

e public ministry of Jesus is animated by the Spirit and reaches a high point with the journey up to Jerusalem and the death of Jesus on the cross. Matthew’s apocalyptic interpretation of this event is worth quoting in full: en Jesus cried with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. e earth shook, and rocks were split. Tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised (Mt 27:50, 52).

Jesus breathing forth his Spirit (Mt 15:37; Mt 27:50; Jn 19:30) at his death echoes the Spirit of God breathing over the void and darkness in Gen 1:2. Matthew’s interpretation of this event, in terms of the earth shaking, rocks splitting, and tombs opening, marks a transition from the Spirit active in the historical life of Jesus to the Spirit of Jesus now becoming active among his disciples and abroad in the cosmos. is transition from the ministry of the historical Jesus to the beginnings of the cosmic Christ is recognized when Paul uses “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” interchangeably (Rom 8:9-11). e third Christology in the New Testament that is of central importance for our purposes is the Word Christology/Logos Christology,

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summed up in the prologue of John’s Gospel 1:1-14. e Logos Christology of John can be interpreted as a cosmic hymn in which the eternal Word of God enters into personal engagement with the community of creation and the history of humanity symbolized by ‘flesh’. e Logos Christology of John has dominated the landscape from the second century onwards, especially on the rocky road from the Council of Nicaea (325) to Chalcedon (451). Some of the key verses in this 14-verse hymn are: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God And the Word was God (1) He was in the beginning with God (2). All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in Him was life. And the life was the light of all people. e light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it (5) […] And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory (14).

Many background influences are at play in the composition of this unique Christological hymn: the Jewish theology of the Word, the centrality of Wisdom within Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy and its many variants. e hymn starts out “In the beginning,” clearly echoing the opening verses of Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning” and again in the second verse we are told “he was in the beginning with God” which is an explicit reference to Wisdom who was present to God “at the first, before the beginning” (Prov 22:22-31 at 22-23). is echo of Genesis continues in the prologue through the images of life, light, and darkness (Gen 1:4-5). is cosmic activity of the Word comes to a climax with the eternal Word descending down into humanity in verse 14: “And the Word was made flesh and lived among us, we have seen His glory.” ese verses of John’s prologue have been analyzed down through the centuries, and will continue to be exegeted until the Eschaton, because of the multi-layered history attached to the words Logos (Word) and sarx (flesh). It should be noted that the Logos/Word did not become a human being (homo) nor did the Word become man (vir); instead, and far more radically, verse 14 claims that “the Logos became sarx.” Everything hinges around the meaning of Logos and the multiple meanings attached to sarx. We have already seen some of the meanings attached to the Word (Logos) in the Hebrew bible. e word flesh/sarx is wider and deeper than that of a human being (anthropos). From a biblical point of view, the flesh/sarx means at least the whole of the human being, and not just

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the soul or the spirit, but the whole corporeal reality of what is involved in being human: materiality, weakness, perishability, transience, vulnerability, and mortality. e expression “all flesh” (Gen 9:15-17; Jer 32:27; Is 40:15; Joel 2:28) in the bible remind us that humans belong to each other and the wider flesh-community of creation. ere is a growing consensus that flesh means not only the full reality of a human being, but also includes at least the whole of biological creation in its beauty and brutality as found with particular intensity in the life and death of every human being. is summary of the meaning of ‘flesh’ is important background to Gregersen’s Christology of Deep Incarnation. is wider understanding of the meaning of the word ‘flesh’ has been facilitated by two related developments in the last fiy years. 4. Gregersen’s Christology of Deep Incarnation In the early 1970s, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the expression ‘Deep Ecology’. is term suggests that we need to go beyond a purely scientific approach to Ecology. A Deep Ecology claims that nonhuman life-forms have “intrinsic value” and this value is “independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes.”16 In 2001, the Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen adopted, with some reservations, Naess’s Deep Ecology. He moved the debate from a purely scientific-philosophical view of Deep Ecology to a theological consideration of Deep Incarnation. Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation is a carefully worked out response to the presence of so much pain, suffering, and death within biological evolution, and human history. It is no longer feasible to say such suffering is caused by the ‘sin of Adam’ since we know that biological suffering and death preceded the emergence of humanity. To address the question of suffering, Gregersen develops a theology of the Cross. Drawing on the theology of Martin Luther, he sees the cross of Christ as the revelation of the true character of God, the God who co-suffers with the suffering within the evolutionary processes that, over millions of years, issued in the emergence of the human. e God revealed on the cross of Christ is a kenotic God, a self-giving God, whose 16 Arne Naess and David Rathenberg, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29. See also “Introduction,” in A Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture and Knowledge in a Planetary Era, ed. Sam Mickey, Sean Kelly, and Adam Robbert (New York: SUNY Press, 2017), 6-7.

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love is “also the co-carrier of the costs of evolution.”17 For Gregersen, “the death of Christ on the cross becomes an icon of God’s redemptive cosuffering with all sentient life.”18 Gregersen grounds this understanding of God as suffering within biological evolution and human history in his theology of Deep Incarnation. He describes Deep Incarnation in different articles in the following way: • that “God’s own Logos ([…] Wisdom and Word) was made flesh in Jesus Christ by assuming the particular life-story of Jesus the Jew from Nazareth,” • that God “also conjoined the material conditions of creaturely existence (all flesh),” • that God “shared and ennobled the fate of all biological life forms (‘grass’ and ‘lilies’) and experienced the pain of sensitive creatures (‘sparrows’ and ‘foxes’) from within,” • that Deep Incarnation is about “a divine embodiment which reaches into the roots of material and biological existence as well as the darker sides of creation,”19 • that “the cross of Christ is here both the apex and the depth of Incarnation.”20 Gregersen’s perspective will only make sense in the context of ‘big history’, namely the new cosmic story that traces the origins of the universe back some fourteen billion years to embrace an expanding cosmology, biological evolution, and human emergence. Within this story, there are lines of continuity from matter to life and from life to mind which are included in Gregersen’s understanding of sarx. is particular perception of the world in which we live is accepted in broad outline by many commentators. e new cosmic story requires a reconfiguration of what it means to be human. In whatever way one might describe the human, it must include reference to the underlying relationships that exist between cosmology, evolution, and human beings. is is part of the necessary backdrop for understanding the meaning of Deep Incarnation. 17

Gregersen, “e Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 204. Ibid., 205. 19 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “e Extended Body of Christ: ree Dimensions of Deep Incarnation,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, 225-251, at 225-226. 20 Gregersen, “e Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World.” See also Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Christology,” in Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Prespectives, ed. Michael Northcott and Peter M. Scott (London: Routledge, 2014), 33-50. 18

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e flesh/sarx adopted by God in Jesus is part and parcel of the flesh/sarx that was born out of the expanding elements of the Big Bang story fourteen billion years ago and subsequent evolution. In this sense, Jesus of Nazareth is a child of the cosmos and so when the Word/Logos was made flesh/sarx, the Word adopted the materiality of cosmic and biological evolution as well as the full reality of the human condition in Jesus. is activity of the Word did not begin with the Christ-event, but within the act of creation wherein the Word spoke: “Let there be light […] a dome […] dry land […] vegetation […] lights in the dome […] swarms of living creatures […] great sea monsters and every living creature […] human kind” (Gen 1:3-28). e Word of God active “In the beginning” in creation is continuously active in the world, in the history of Israel, and now personally in the Christ-event. e entry of the Logos into the sarx of Jesus is not the first entry of the Logos into the world, but rather the culmination of the continuous activity of the Logos in the world from the dawn of time. For Gregersen the Christ-event is a microcosm of what is continually taking place in the macrocosm of creation.21 5. Initial Evaluation of Gregersen’s Deep Incarnation It is time to offer some initial evaluation of this account of Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation. Does Deep Incarnation help to overcome the gap between creation and Christology? Will Deep Incarnation reconnect Jesus with the natural world? Does Deep Incarnation provide a way forward for the construction of a cosmic Christology? Does Deep Incarnation offer a Christological bridge to ecology? According to Elizabeth Johnson Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation “has set off a fruitful train of thought.”22 At the same time, she signals “several pitfalls that need to be avoided as this symbol continues to be developed.”23 e first signal is that the Hellenistic view of the Word/Logos is centered around an orderly view of the world which ignores the disorder of random events that pervade the natural world. Further, disruptive events are found in the prophetic ministry of Jesus that questions the prevailing order. e suffering and death of Jesus on the cross is a deeply disruptive event. On the other hand, it should be 21 Niels H. Gregersen, “e Emotional Christ: Bonaventure and Deep Incarnation,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 55 (2016): 247-261, at 254. 22 Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Jesus and the Cosmos: Soundings in Deep Christology,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, 133-156, at 134. 23 Ibid., 151.

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acknowledged that Gregersen is aware that the Logos of John’s Gospel is not only the Logos of Hellenistic philosophy, but also the Logos of Jewish theology24 which are not the same. e second signal that Johnson issues is that the Word/Logos is masculine and is normally designated as ‘He’. is gives the impression that when the Word became flesh, it became male, and this presents a male view of the incomprehensible mystery of God. But, as we have seen, the word sarx goes beyond male and female. e Logos of Deep Incarnation, therefore, needs to be balanced by a Wisdom Christology and its representation of aspects that are oen labelled feminine in the mystery of God. e third signal of Johnson is that the dominance of the Logos Christology tends to drown out the equally important Spirit Christology. In this regard, Gregersen does say, in passing, that “Deep Incarnation […] involves a pneumatological perspective no less than a Christological view.”25 However, this condensed pneumatological reference needs to be expanded. Another participant in this debate about Deep Incarnation is the U.S. philosopher, Holmes Rolston III. He is concerned that the meaning of the word sarx in the prologue “has been so stretched out that it begins to lose any specificity.”26 Rolston III questions the extension of the Incarnation to animals, plants, stones, and all cosmic life systems. If the language of Incarnation is extended in this way, then one must recognize and emphasize the symbolic character of the extension. Further, one must surely talk about differentiated degrees or modes of Incarnation. e Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus must be differentiated from the presence or, more accurately, the co-presence of the Logos in the history of Israel and throughout the community of creation. e universal presence of the Logos in creation is not the same as the Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus. ere is a difference between various ‘incarnations’ of the Logos in creation, in the world of religions, in the history of Israel and the Incarnation of God in the very particular person of Jesus of Nazareth. In distinguishing various modes of ‘incarnation’, care must be taken that one does not allow the various modes of ‘incarnation’ slip into separate events of the Incarnation.

24

Gregersen, “e Extended Body of Christ,” 233. Ibid., 242. 26 Holmes Rolston III, “Divine Presence – Causal, Cybernetic, Caring, Cruciform: From Information to Incarnation,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, 255-287, at 264. 25

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A further point about the possible loss of specificity, not mentioned by Rolston III, is the possible neglect of what tradition calls ‘the scandal of particularity’. Once again, in fairness to Gregersen, he anticipates this concern. He points, briefly, to a three-fold expression of the scandal of particularity: the scandal of materiality, the scandal of suffering, and the scandal of uniqueness.27 What is at stake here is the very particular, historical specificity of the Incarnation: it took place at a very specific time in history, in a very particular place, and in very particular circumstances, namely the life and death of Jesus on the cross, captured starkly by Paul in 1 Corinthians when he states: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). is historical particularity of the Incarnation does not rule out the universal significance of the Christ-event which is captured, not just in the Logos Christology of Deep Incarnation, but also in the universal significance of Wisdom Christologies and Spirit Christologies. While the focus on Christ’s particularity is crucial, it must avoid the pitfall of exclusivity. is is one of the contributions of Deep Incarnation: it refuses to separate the Christ-event from the rest of creation. It is this relationship to the cosmos, the earth, society, religious traditions, and other people that balances the potential pitfall of exclusivity. Deep Incarnation as presented by Gregersen is Christologically suggestive and timely in the light of the ecological emergency. It requires, however, further exploration, critique, and refinement. It is not a Christology that can substitute for all other Christologies. On the credit side Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation helps us to hear the prologue of John’s Gospel in a new register and provides new insight into the announcement that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Further, Deep Incarnation helps to spell out the implicit ecological theology of the Incarnation in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner. In addition, Deep Incarnation provides a new point of entry into the ongoing debate around the enormous amount of pain and suffering and death within our evolutionary world. Moreover, Deep Incarnation challenges Christian faith to move towards the adoption of a full-fledged theology of Deep Resurrection, Deep Pneumatology, and Deep Christian Eschatology.28

27

Gregersen, “e Extended Body of Christ,” 225. is challenge is addressed by Dermot A. Lane in Theology and Ecology in Dialogue: The Wisdom of Laudato Si’ (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2021), in chapters 3 and 5. 28

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Without wishing to undo the above positive points around Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation, there are some areas that would benefit from further discussion. More needs to be said about the historical life and ministry of Jesus: the centrality of creation faith; his closeness to nature; the fact that most of his life was lived out in deserts, mountains, the sea of Galilee and gardens of Gethsemane and resurrection; his extensive familiarity with the animal world and the life of nature; his use of the natural world in parables to teach about the coming reign of God. ere are seeds here of a new nature-based Christology waiting to be developed. At times Gregersen displays a clarity and certainty in some theological statements that some theologians would prefer to shun by professing a ‘learned ignorance’ (docta ignorantia). For example: “from the perspective of divine life (which comprises temporal distinctions within eternity) there never was, is, or will be a disembodied Logos (Logos asarkos). e Logos was always embodied and will always be embodied (Logos ensarkos).”29 Further, if God is so deeply immersed in the pain, suffering, and death of all flesh as compellingly proposed by Gregersen, then care must be taken to avoid giving the impression unwittingly that such pain can be attributed to the will of God or is part of the plan of God. For instance, when Gregersen says “the world is a package deal,” he comes close to attributing the existence of suffering to God.30 No matter how deep the Incarnation of God is in the world, and of course this is a cornerstone of Christian faith, there comes a moment when the Incarnation yields to the dazzling darkness of God’s Transcendence. Every Christology is challenged to balance the intimacy of God in the flesh with the hidden otherness of God. Lastly, Gregersen points to the importance of the Spirit in a theology of cosmology, biological evolution, and human emergence. More could and needs to be said about the centrality of the Spirit in Christology. His presentation of a robust Christology needs to be balanced by an equally robust Pneumatology. In brief, this initial evaluation of Gregersen should be seen as belonging to the “sic et non” of Aquinas, or the famous “placet iuxta modum” of Vatican II. e real value of Deep Incarnation is that it builds a bridge between Jesus and the natural world, and provides a basis for new dialogue between Christology and Ecology. Moreover, it opens the way for recovering the cosmic Christ found in the Pauline literature of early 29 Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation: Opportunities and Challenges,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, 361-380, at 369-370. 30 Gregersen, “e Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 200 and 201.

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creation-centered Christological hymns, such as Col 1:15-20; 1 Cor 15:20-28; Eph 1:3-10; and Phil 2:5-11. In doing just that, Deep Incarnation enables Christology to go beyond gender binaries. In addition, Deep Incarnation confers a new dignity on the earth, recovers the intrinsic value of the earth’s life processes, and points to an underlying solidarity of God in Christ with the whole community of creation. Lastly, Deep Incarnation provides a supportive background for understanding Rahner’s eology of the unity of creation and Incarnation which we must now address briefly. 6. The Underlying Unity of Creation and Incarnation ere have been two views on the relationship between creation and Incarnation. e more traditional view sees Incarnation as an ‘add-on’ to creation, a second act aer creation. In this view, associated with Aquinas, God sent his Son to remedy the arrival of sin through our first parents. e Incarnation, accordingly, appears as ‘Plan B’ by virtue of the failure of ‘Plan A’ in creation. In contrast to this outlook, there is the Franciscan view, found in Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and others, which sees the Incarnation as built into creation ab initio and this of course is of importance in the dialogue between Deep Incarnation and Deep Ecology. is Scotist view has made a comeback in the light of our evolutionary understanding of the world. It was championed by Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner in the twentieth century, and promoted by Elizabeth Johnson, Denis Edwards,31 and others in recent times. At the risk of oversimplification, we can summarize Scotist-Rahner’s views on the unity of creation and Incarnation in the following way. ere is an important sense in which the beginning involves the end and the end informs the beginning. Incarnation is built into the interiority of creation from the dawn of time. e purpose of creation is to provide a suitable context for the advent of the Word/Wisdom/Spirit made flesh. Creation is about the outreach of God’s self-communication in love to the world. is divine outreach in creation carries with it the gi of self-transcendence 31 Denis Edwards died in 2019. He made an outstanding contribution to ecological theology throughout his life in many publications. His most recent book was Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2019). I have not included this particular contribution of Edwards in my review of Gregersen’s Deep Incarnation because Edwards’ book deserves consideration in itself to do justice to it. Generally, in this last book of Edwards and in other articles he takes a favorable view of Gregersen’s theology of Deep Incarnation, with nuanced qualifications.

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bestowed on the whole of creation as the effect of God’s outreach. Nature is graced from the beginning of time. ere is a dynamic orientation within creation towards self-transcendence. is dynamic gi of selftranscendence is expressed in the evolution of the world: in the unfolding of Cosmology, in the advent of biological evolution, and in the emergence of the human, and in the distinctive unity of the Logos of God and sarx that took place in the Christ-event as the goal of creation. ere is an underlying unity, therefore, between creation and Incarnation. Creation is the expression of God’s desire out of love to share God’s self with the world. at self-communication of God in creation finds its fullest realization in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as Wisdom personally embodied in the flesh of Christ. Creation is orientated towards Incarnation, and Incarnation is the fulfilment of creation. Creation and Incarnation, therefore, are “two moments and two phases within the one process of God’s self-giving and self-expression, although it is an intrinsically differentiated process.”32 God implants, as it were, a dynamic orientation within creation through the gi of Word, Spirit and Wisdom. is orientation issues in the Incarnation of God in Jesus and in the light of the Incarnation continues in the world towards its final consummation ‘in Christ’ at the end of time. ere are a number of advantages to this unified view of creation, Incarnation and the unity of all things ‘in Christ’. e gi of selftranscendence, built into the orientation of all matter in creation and in the dynamism of humanity provides a Christology that can engage with the science of evolution and the science of ecology. is Christology does not have to come across as an interventionist Christology but rather emerges as an unfolding of the dynamic interiority of material creation from the beginning in a way that resonates with the evolution of the cosmos as described by science. e Incarnation therefore is not a manifestation of a presence that was previously absent, but rather the unique expression of a divine presence already in the world. Within this unique instance of God in Jesus we find that God is at God’s most typical in that the universal self-communication of God throughout the world becomes particularized and personified in the Christ event. In other words, this particular personification of God’s self-communication in Jesus is perfectly consistent and in character with God’s overall selfcommunication in creation. Further, the unity that exists between creation, Incarnation, and consummation provides a perspective capable of

32

Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 197.

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entering into dialogue on the specific relationship between Deep Ecology and Deep Incarnation. Deep Ecology provides a matrix for appreciating the possibility of Deep Incarnation. To conclude these sketchy reflections on Deep Christology as found in the Incarnation of Wisdom, Spirit, and Word in Jesus as the Christ, we can sum up the overall direction of this essay in a few sentences. Christology can be understood as ‘concentrated creation’ and this connects Christ with the rest of creation. e crucified and risen Christ is a microcosm of the drama taking place in the macrocosm of creation, including the groaning of creation. Christology embodies the drama of life in its many and various expressions, but especially in the context of the ongoing presence of so much pain, suffering, and death in the world. Secondly, there is a need to give more attention to the prominence of Wisdom Christology in the New Testament. e development of Wisdom Christology is one of the urgent imperatives for Christian faith in the twenty-first century, not only because of its cosmic orientation, but also because Wisdom Christology has the potential to open the way for the development of a fully-fledged eco-feminist Christology, as a balance to the dominance, up to now, of male-centered Christologies. In addition, Jesus as the Wisdom of God incarnate has internal resources for opening up the necessary dialogue between eology and Ecology. irdly, the time may be ripe to expand Congar’s principle of “No Christology without Pneumatology, and no Pneumatology without Christology” into “no Christology without reference to Wisdom, Spirit, and Word,” and vice versa. In effect, it is essential that Wisdom Christology, Logos Christology and Spirit Christology mutually interact and balance each other in ways that open up the dialogue between Deep Ecology and Deep Incarnation.

11 Thomas Aquinas: An Indispensable Contribution to the Renaissance of the Theology of the Trinity1 Herwi Rikhof

e title is a claim, or rather a set of claims. It is widely accepted that the last decades show a remarkable renaissance of the theology of the Trinity. One of the features of this renaissance is a prominent attention to the role, or better to the various roles, of the Father, Son, and Spirit in the history of salvation, be it that the role of the Spirit is oen less highlighted than the role of the Son. Part of that renaissance is also a critical assessment of the theology of the Trinity in the past. Karl Rahner, who, one can say, has set the agenda for the Trinitarian renaissance, expressed a historical judgement, blaming especially omas Aquinas for the demise of the theology of the Trinity because of a concentration on the oneness of God.2 e result of this concentration is that all relevant issues related to God’s action in our reality are discussed in the treatise de Deo Uno leaving for de Deo Trino only those issues related to the inner life of God. ese are, moreover, oen treated in highly abstract terms adding to their irrelevance to the history of salvation. is judgement is oen repeated and has become almost a cliché. So, Aquinas’ contribution to the current renaissance of the theology is a rather negative one. Rahner, to be fair, expressed some caution in footnotes.3 at caution was lost in the later literature, but fortunately not completely. Research has shown that Rahner’s judgment was mainly based on a modern, theistic, philosophical, apologetical reading of Aquinas. A highly questionable interpretation. 1 In my contribution to this book honoring Terry Merrigan I draw upon earlier research, publications and lectures, and especially on the BrenninkmeijerWehrhahn guest lecture I gave in Jerusalem on May 30, 2018. 2 Karl Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte,” in Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik, vol. 2, ed. Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer (Einsiedeln, Zürich, and Cologne: Benziger, 1967), 317-401, at 323-327. 3 Ibid., 324, n. 12; cf. also 433-435, n. 46.

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While this correction might lead to another, less negative assessment of Aquinas’ contribution to the current renaissance, it is not sufficient to explain the central claim of the title, namely that Aquinas’ theology is an indispensable contribution to the current renaissance of Trinitarian theology. In order to substantiate that claim, I want to take two steps. First, I will concentrate on one of the characteristic features of his theology in general and of his Trinitarian theology in particular: his negative theology. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I shall indicate the implications of this negative theology (1). Consequently, I can show how Aquinas uses it in two discussions important to the theology of the Trinity (2). For my second step, I will concentrate on the role of the Spirit in Aquinas’ theology of the Trinity (3). I will look at the discussion with which Aquinas concludes his inquiry into the distinctions of the divine persons: the missions of Son and Spirit, q. 43 of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. is quaestio is important and pivotal in his inquiry into God and shows the influence of his negative theology. But this quaestio shows also that Aquinas is not neglecting the Spirit. On the contrary, his remarks are mainly about the mission of the Spirit and show the importance of the role of the Spirit in the theology of the Trinity 1. Aquinas’ Negative Theology4 When Aquinas decided to write a book for students in theology, he started with a discussion on what theology is. eology is about God and everything related to God.5 e next two steps are self-evident too: whether God is and who God is. But the way he answers those questions show some extraordinary features, most clearly in the immediate reformulation of the second question where Aquinas considers ‘how God is

4

e edition of Aquinas’ text I use can be found via the website of the omas Instituut te Utrecht (Tilburg University): www.thomasinstituut.org. e translations of Aquinas’ texts are mine. I have consulted the Blackfriars translation (London and New York: Eyer & Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964 etc.) and the translation by Alfred J. Freddoso: www3.nd.edu/~ afreddos/summa-translation/TOC.htmthe and I indicate when I quote them. 5 “Omnia autem tractantur in sacra doctrina sub ratione Dei vel quia sunt ipse Deus vel quia habent ordinem ad Deum ut at principium et finem. Unde sequitur quod Deus vere sit subjectum hujus scientiae.” ST I, q. 1, a. 7co; cf. “Quia igitur principalis intentio huius sacrae doctrinae est Dei cognitionem tradere, et non solum secundum quod in se est, sed etiam secundum quod est principium rerum et finis earum, et specialiter rationalis creaturae.” ST I, q. 2, prooemium.

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or rather how God is not’.6 By phrasing the inquiry this way he draws attention to the correction and so emphasizes how God is not. Aquinas repeats that phrase and correction again, when he starts his discussion of what God is. “Aer we know that a thing exists, the next question is how it exists, so that we can know what it is. But, because we cannot know about God what he is, but what he is not, we cannot consider about God how he is, but rather how he is not.” Specifying this ‘how not’ he speaks about excluding attributes that are not appropriate such as “composition, motion and so on.”7 It is somewhat tempting to think that when what is inappropriate is removed what is le is what is appropriate. But that would be an erroneous expectation and incorrect conclusion. We should take Aquinas on his word: he wants to show how God is not. e method of removal might result in some kind of awareness of what and how God is, but that awareness is firmly rooted in the how not. It is like indicating a hole by pointing to the borders. e elements to be removed are “composition, motion and so on.” He is clearly not referring to the corporeal or even the intellectual, but rather to esse as found in creatures. Aquinas moves here to a meta-physical level, on a level where one tries to gain insight into the underlying structure of reality in order to understand the reality we experience. Aquinas starts with discussing God’s simplicity. It would be clearly wrong to think that despite his emphasis on quomodo non, Aquinas gives some kind of positive description. When he mentions ‘simplicity’ he immediately adds: “by which composition is removed.” And when Aquinas in article 7 of quaestio 3 mentions ‘simplicity’, it is the conclusion of a series of denials: “it is clear that there is no way in which God is composite but that he is completely simple.”8 ose denials are on the metaphysical level: composition of form and matter, of esse and existere, of genus and differences, of substance and accidents. 6 “[…] primo considerandum est an Deus sit; secundo, quomodo sit, vel potius quomodo non sit […].” ST I, q. 2, prooemium. 7 “Cognito de aliquo an sit, inquirendum restat quomodo sit, ut sciatur de eo quid sit. Sed quia de Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de Deo quomodo sit, sed potius quomodo non sit […] Potest autem ostendi de Deo quomodo non sit, removendo ab eo ea quae ei non conveniunt, utpote compositionem, motum, et alia huiusmodi. Primo ergo inquiratur de simplicitate ipsius, per quam removetur ab eo compositio.” ST I, q. 3, prooemium. 8 “Manifestum est quod Deus nullo modo compositus est sed omnino simplex.” ST I, q. 3, a. 7co.

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Aquinas moves on this level, since he wants to make clear – right from the beginning – that God, the cause and end of all there is, is not part and parcel of all that there is, that the Creator is not to be considered and treated in any way as a creature. Aquinas’ negative theology is therefore not a form of agnosticism, but rather a training-exercise in the awareness that God transcends all our categories and concepts. Aquinas’ negative theology is a careful and reverend method to let God be God. In order to show how this type of negative theology influences Aquinas’ thinking about God and how this is an indispensable contribution to the current renaissance of the theology of the Trinity, I want to concentrate on what Aquinas considers the root of all God’s actions: mercy. I will briefly refer to a topic that belongs to Christology, but that is clearly crucial to the theology of the Trinity: the motivum incarnationis. I discuss this since Aquinas mentions it in his explanation of the power of mercy. 2. Secundum magnam misericordiam tuam Aquinas, in his commentary on the fourth of the seven penitential psalms, psalm 50, explains why in the opening verse God’s mercy is called ‘great’: Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. Aquinas lists a number of reasons or aspects each time with a reference to a passage from Scripture: incomprehensibility, sublimity, duration, power and effect.9 e first impression one gets from at least some of those five terms is that they belong to a ‘negative’ discourse. When Aquinas explains those reasons, that first impression is confirmed: Aquinas uses in three of the five cases terms like ‘all’, ‘everything’, 9 “Et dicitur magna sua incomprehensibilitate, qua implet omnia. Ps. 32: misericordia domini plena est terra. Et in omnibus habet locum: nam justi innocentiam servaverunt propter misericordiam Dei. Augustinus: domine gratiae tuae deputo mala quae non feci. Item peccatores sunt conversi ad justitiam propter Dei misericordiam. 1 Tim. 1: misericordiam consecutus sum. Item in peccato existentes misericordiam Dei experti sunt. ren. 3: misericordiae domini multae, quod non sumus consumpti. Item dicitur magna sublimitate, quia miserationes ejus super omnia opera ejus; nam misericordia non signat in Deo passionem animi, sed bonitatem ad repellendam miseriam. Item magna duratione. Isa. 54: in misericordia sempiterna misertus sum tui. Item magna virtute, quia Deum hominem fecit, de caelo Deum ad terram deposuit, et immortalem mori fecit. Eph. 2: Deus autem qui dives est in misericordia. Item magna per effectum, quia ex omni miseria potest homo per misericordiam elevari. Ps. 85: misericordia tua magna est super me, et remisisti impietatem peccati mei, Ps. 31. Et ideo confidenter peto: miserere mei Deus.” In Psalmos 50, no. 1.

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‘everywhere’; in one case the related term ‘everlasting’. e term used for the first reason is clearly a negative term: incomprehensibility, cannot be grasped, cannot be seized, cannot be comprehended. Aquinas mentions three categories covering all of humankind: the just, the converted, and the sinners. ere is a difference between the first two groups, the just and the converted, and the third group, the sinners. In the first two groups, God’s mercy is something of the past, in the third group something of the present. But as the quotation from Lamentations makes clear: it is also something of a surprise. “e mercy of the Lord is manifold, that we are not consumed, for his commiserations have not been put aside.” e surprise is the continuing, the constant, the endless mercy when one does not expect mercy but rather punishment or even death. But also, in the other cases, one can discern the type of terms that belong to negative theology: mercy is above (super) all his works. And the term ‘richness’, a quotation from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, suggests inexhaustible abundance. e term power, virtue, seems, at first sight, to be an exception in that ‘negative’ discourse, but a closer look shows this not to be the case. For that closer look I refer to a text about God’s mercy from the Prima Pars and another about the incarnation from the Tertia Pars of the Summa Theologiae. In quaestio 21 of the Prima Pars, Aquinas discusses mercy and justice together and starts with justice. Why he discusses them together and why he starts with justice becomes clear in his discussion of mercy, in article 3. One of the objectiones of this discussion, arguing that mercy does not fit God, sounds rather modern: mercy implies a relaxation of justice. But God cannot allow the omission of anything that is required by his justice.10 e sed contra, arguing that mercy does fit God, is a quotation from psalm 110: miserator et misericors Dominus. Aquinas starts his answer with an unusually strong statement: “especially mercy we should attribute to God but then with regard to his activity not with regard to his feelings.”11 And in his reaction to the argument about mercy being a relaxation of justice, Aquinas specifies that activity in an important and revealing way. Acts of mercy do not contradict or destroy justice but exceed it or fulfil it. Aquinas ends his reaction with

10

“Misericordia est relaxatio justitiae; sed Deus non potest praetermittere id, quod ad justitiam suam pertinet.” ST I, q. 21, a. 3, obj. 2. 11 “Respondeo dicendum quod misericordia est Deo maxime attribuenda, tamen secundum effectum, non secundum passionis affectum.” ST I, q. 21, a. 3co.

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a quotation from the letter of James (2:13): “mercy exalts itself above judgment.”12 e two short examples he gives are illuminating and deserve some further analysis. Suppose someone owes somebody else 100 dinars, but gives the other person 200. He then does not go against justice, but he acts liberally or mercifully. Aquinas does not give here a reference to a passage from Scripture, but 100 dinars evokes the parable told by Jesus when asked by Peter how oen he should forgive. A servant owes his king the enormous amount of 10000 talents, some 60 million dinars; the king cancels his debt because he is moved by the plea of this servant. But this servant refuses to have some mercy with another servant who owes him only 100 dinars.13 e servant uses his rights, but the king goes beyond that. One can also think about another parable: a man hires early in the morning workmen for his vineyard and agrees with them a certain wage: one dinar. Later he finds other men without work and hires them as well, some for just one hour. He gives them all the same one dinar. When those who have worked all day protest, the owner points to the fact that he has given them what they agreed upon and asks whether they are angry because he is good towards the others.14 e other example is forgiving an offense. Aquinas connects, using a saying by Paul, ‘to forgive’ with ‘to give’. e reference to Christ giving or forgiving, indicates that the type of giving Aquinas has in mind is not the kind of exchange that turns gis into obligations to return the same amount: do ut des. To (for)give is a reaction as all our actions are reactions to certain conditions, but at the same time it is (can be, should be) unconditional and then it belongs to the sphere of grace. As such it is surprising. e common reaction to an unexpected present – ‘you should not have done that’, ‘that is too much’ – illustrates nicely the extraordinary character of a true gi. I will come back to this in the discussion of quaestio 43. 12 “Ad secundum dicendum quod Deus misericorditer agit, non quidem contra iustitiam suam faciendo, sed aliquid supra iustitiam operando, sicut si alicui cui debentur centum denarii, aliquis ducentos det de suo, tamen non contra iustitiam facit, sed liberaliter vel misericorditer operatur. Et similiter si aliquis offensam in se commissam remittat. Qui enim aliquid remittit, quodammodo donat illud, unde apostolus remissionem donationem vocat, Ephes. V, donate invicem, sicut et Christus vobis donavit. Ex quo patet quod misericordia non tollit iustitiam, sed est quaedam iustitiae plenitudo. Unde dicitur Iac. II, quod misericordia superexaltat iudicium.” ST I, q. 21, a. 3, ad 2. 13 Mt 18:21-35. 14 Mt 20:1-16.

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In article 4, Aquinas raises the question of whether mercy and justice are to be found in all God’s work. He gives an affirmative answer but makes clear that mercy has priority: it is the root of all God’s actions.15 It belongs to justice that God gives the creatures what they need, but the source of the creation as such is not some kind of obligation but is goodness. e human person needs hands because he or she has a rational soul – otherwise the implementation of ideas and plans is impossible. e human person needs a rational soul in order to be a human person, since that is characteristic for the human person. But the human person exists because of God’s goodness. Creatures, the creation would not be there at all without God’s goodness. God’s creative acting is not caused or provoked by anything outside God – creation is creatio ex nihilo – but only by God’s inner goodness. at permeates and determines also God’s acting in history. If one looks at history and only sees God acting to obligation (justice), one does not see sufficiently enough. […] even the things that are owed to a given creature are such that God, out of the abundance of His goodness, dispenses them more generously than is demanded by what is fitting for the thing’s nature. For what would be sufficient to preserve the order of justice is less than what is in fact conferred by God’s goodness, which exceeds what is merely fitting for each creature.16

In other words, justice would be sufficient, but God does always more and exceeds expectations. at is exactly what Aquinas’ negative theology is about. When Aquinas gives an example of the power of mercy in his commentary on psalm 50, he mentions the incarnation, touching on the center of our Christian faith. “For it [God’s mercy] made God man, it brought God down from heaven to earth and made the immortal to die.”17 In order to appreciate the importance of this example, the discussion with which Aquinas opens the inquiry into the mystery of the

15 “in quolibet opere Dei apparet misericordia, quantum ad primam radicem ejus.” ST I, q. 21, a. 4co. 16 “Et propter hoc etiam ea, quae alicui creaturae debentur, Deus ex abundantia suae bonitatis largius dispensat, quam exigat proportio rei. Minus enim est, quod sufficeret ad conservandum ordinem justitiae, quam quod divina bonitas confert, quae omnem proportionem creaturae excedit.” ST I, q. 21, a. 4co (trans. Alfred J. Freddoso). 17 “Item magna virtute, quia Deum hominem fecit, de caelo Deum ad terram deposuit, et immortalem mori fecit.”

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incarnation can help us. at discussion concerns the convenience of the incarnation.18 An inquiry into the convenience of an event is rather a special inquiry. It does not try to establish the fact of that event but tries to understand that event better. One of the questions Aquinas discusses is whether God would have become incarnate if man had not sinned.19 Aquinas knows of two schools of thought: one arguing that the Son of God would have become incarnate even if man had not sinned, and the other arguing the opposite, the Son of God became man because man has sinned. Aquinas chooses very carefully and cautiously a position in this debate. He thinks the second position is better, and the arguments he gives are revealing in the way he formulates them. First, Aquinas introduces the distinction that also features in his discussion of mercy: what is due to creatures and what goes beyond that. What is due we can know, but what goes beyond we cannot know, unless it is revealed to us by God, i.e., from Scripture.20 Secondly, Aquinas points to the fact that in Scripture the reason for the incarnation is always the Fall. And so it seems more convenient to conclude that the incarnation is the remedy against sin.21 irdly, Aquinas adds as a kind of nota bene that, however, God’s power is not limited by this. erefore, even if there had been no sin, God could have become incarnate.22 So, Aquinas combines in his argumentation the fact that in Scripture incarnation is linked to sin with the possibility that it might not. e reason why he favors this combination seems to be that he does not want 18 ST III, q. 1. For a thorough analysis of this quaestio: Michel Corbin, L’inouï de Dieu: Six études christologiques (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1980), “Étude III: La Parole devenue chair,” 109-158. 19 “utrum si non fuisset peccatum Deus incarnatus fuisset.” ST III, q. 1, a. 3, prooemium. 20 “Respondeo dicendum quod aliqui circa hoc diversimode opinantur. Quidam enim dicunt quod, etiam si homo non peccasset, Dei filius fuisset incarnatus. Alii vero contrarium asserunt. Quorum assertioni magis assentiendum videtur.” ST III, q. 1, a. 3co. 21 “Ea enim quæ ex sola Dei voluntate proveniunt, supra omne debitum creaturæ, nobis innotescere non possunt nisi quatenus in sacra Scriptura traduntur, per quam divina voluntas innotescit. Unde, cum in sacra Scriptura ubique incarnationis ratio ex peccato primi hominis assignetur, convenientius dicitur incarnationis opus ordinatum esse a Deo in remedium peccati, ita quod, peccato non existente, incarnatio non fuisset.” ST III, q. 1, a. 3co. 22 “Quamvis potentia Dei ad hoc non limitetur, potuisset enim, etiam peccato non existente, Deus incarnari.” ST III, q. 1, a. 3co.

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to limit in any way the beyond, or to put it differently, to understand the reference to the Fall as a cause that determines God’s action in the sense that God was forced to incarnate.23 With these discussions from the Summa Theologiae in mind we can now return to Aquinas’ commentary on psalm 50, and appreciate his explanation of power when he explains the greatness of God’s mercy: “for it made God man, it brought God down from heaven to earth and made the immortal to die.” e incarnation is not to be understood in terms of justice, but of mercy. It is the beyond par excellence. e incarnation, the mission of the Son, has to be understood right from the beginning in this ‘negative’ way. e same is true for the mission of the Spirit, as becomes clear when we turn to Aquinas’ discussion of the missions of Son and Spirit. 3. De missione divinarum personarum (ST I, q. 43) In the current renaissance of the theology of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity is oen used to explain the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. In the so-called Spirit-Christology the focus of attention is on the role of the Spirit in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But it seems to me that this is not sufficient to counter the oen-voiced criticism of the forgetfulness of the Spirit. An important, even crucial requirement is to consider the theology of the Trinity as an explanation of who we Christians are. e term ‘Christian’ – as the term ‘Christ’ – refers to the role of the Spirit. As Paul puts it: “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.”24 Like Jesus, who received the Spirit at his baptism and was revealed as the Christ, so we receive the Spirit at our baptism and become Christians. e discussion of the missions of the Son and the Spirit with which Aquinas concludes his reflection on the variety of persons in God contains insights that are indispensable to understanding who we Christians are. ‘Missio’ is a term found in Scripture. In the first two articles Aquinas quotes in the sed contra “I am not alone, but I and the Father who sent me” (John 8:16) and “When the fullness of time was come God sent his Son” (Gal 4:4). But in the course of quaestio 43, it becomes clear that Aquinas uses missio on two levels. First, as referring to the incarnation 23

is is precisely Abelard’s argument against the patristic theory that the incarnation is a kind of misleading the devil, as if the devil determines (or can determine) God’s agenda. Peter Abelard, Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, 3, 2. 24 1 Cor 12:3.

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of the Son and then missio or mitti are paired with datio and dari, terms used in Scripture in connection to the Spirit. is is the way missio is used in Scripture. Second, as referring to the more abstract category to which both the concrete missio of the Son and the datio of the Spirit belong. Aquinas introduces this conceptual level to clarify and specify the meaning of missio when used for the divine persons. As always Aquinas takes into account the common understanding and usual associations and he specifies which of these associations are at play when missio is used to talk about God’s activity in our history. Under the concept missio a distinction is made between who sends, what or who is being sent and who receives. is distinction serves to structure part of the quaestio.25 But it serves also to specify the relevant meanings. One can discern even a certain emphasis on the destination, in reference to those who receive the mission. For instance, right at the beginning Aquinas remarks with regard to the destination: “‘being sent’ indicates the beginning of a presence, in the sense either that the one sent was not previously there at all or not present in this new way.”26 It might come as a little surprise that Aquinas makes this distinction between ‘starting being present’ and ‘changing being present’. ‘Starting being present’ is the most common association or meaning: a person is sent to a place where that person has never been. Why does Aquinas add ‘changing being present’? A clue can be found in the reference Aquinas makes to the gospel according to John: the Son is sent by the Father to the world, although he was already in the world.27 e full answer becomes clear when Aquinas in article 3 refers to two ways of talking about the presence of God. One way is talking about creation: “there is a common mode in which God is in all things by his essence, power and presence, as the cause existing in the effects that take part in his goodness.”28 e other way is talking about the history of salvation of a people and that history is determined and structured by the missio of the Son and the

25

Cf. a. 4: “Utrum cuilibet personae conveniat mitti. [the Father sends, is not sent]; a. 5 Utrum invisibiliter mittatur tam Filius, quam Spiritus Sanctus”; a. 6: “Ad quos fiat missio invisibilis.” ST I, q. 43, prooemium. 26 “Ostenditur etiam habitudo ad terminum, ad quem mittitur, ut aliquo modo ibi esse incipiat: vel quia prius ibi omnino non erat, quo mittitur: vel quia incipit ibi aliquo modo esse, quo prius non erat.” ST I, q. 43, a. 1co. 27 John 1:10. 28 “Est enim unus communis modus, quo Deus est in omnibus rebus per essentiam, potentiam, et praesentiam, sicut causa in effectibus participantibus bonitatem ipsius.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3co.

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datio of the Spirit. at is the reason why Aquinas needs the less common association of ‘changing being present’. At this stage another element of the meaning of missio has to be taken into account. Part of missio, whether it is about starting or changing being present, is that it takes part in time and entails change.29 Missio entails a new presence. But one of the objectiones in article 2 states that this temporal element, this change, is something that cannot be applied to God. It is a reminder of the negative theology, of the fundamental distinction between Creator and creature.30 Aquinas, in his reaction to this objectio, does not deny the connection between missio on the one hand and time and change on the other, nor does he subtract from his negative theological starting-point, but locates the change in the creature.31 He does not give an explanation, but refers to an earlier discussion about temporal predications used for God.32 e impact of this answer becomes clear when Aquinas inquires what the missions of Son and Spirit amount to in article 3. As I already have indicated, Aquinas distinguishes between two types of presence or two ways of talking about God’s presence in our reality: the presence on the level of creation, a presence common to all that is, and a special presence in rational creatures, a presence on the level of history. e rational creatures, the human persons, have two characteristic faculties: they can know and they can love. Knowledge refers to the intellectual side, love to the practical. e human person can know God and can love God, or as Aquinas formulates it: “God is in the knower as known and in the lover as loved.” Aquinas repeats then the formulation ‘a new mode’.33 From not knowing and not loving God the human person becomes a knower and lover of God. 29 “Quaedam vero cum habitudine ad principium important terminum temporalem, sicut missio, et datio.” ST I, q. 43, a. 2co. 30 “[…] cuicumque convenit aliquid temporaliter, illud mutatur sed persona divina non mutatur; ergo missio divinae personae non est temporalis, sed aeterna.” ST I, q. 43, a. 2, obj. 2. 31 “quod divinam personam esse novo modo in aliquo, vel ab aliquo haberi temporaliter, non est propter mutationem divinae personae, sed propter mutationem creaturae: sicut et Deus temporaliter dicitur Dominus propter mutationem creaturae.” ST I, q. 43, a. 2, ad 2m. 32 See ST I, q. 13, a. 7. 33 “Super istum modum autem communem, est unus specialis, qui convenit creaturae rationali, in qua Deus dicitur esse sicut cognitum in cognoscente et amatum in amante. […]. Sic igitur nullus alius effectus potest esse ratio quod divina persona sit novo modo in rationali creatura, nisi gratia gratum faciens.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3co.

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ese changes occur in our ordinary life: a visitor to a concert becomes a doctor when called for, or a neighbor becomes over the years a friend, a colleague becomes a lover or an enemy. ese changes occur or rather can occur also in our religious life. Everyone is created as image of God, or as it is also formulated, we all are capax Dei. But whether this capacity is in fact realized in the concreteness of our lives is another matter and involves change. Aquinas is careful not to locate those changes in God but in us. Again, the main reason for this new manner involving a change on our side and not on God’s, seems to be the refusal to bring God into the normal human pattern of action as reaction. e Savior acts as Creator, re-creation is creation, grace is freely and unconditionally given (gratia gratis datur). God always takes the initiative in an almost unimaginable and unconditional way. Apart from this example of Aquinas’ negative theology, this central article of the quaestio on the missions shows also his prominent attention on the role of the Spirit. When Aquinas discusses the missions more specifically, one cannot but notice that his main attention goes to invisible mission, more precisely to the invisible mission of the Spirit. When Aquinas discusses the visible mission of the Spirit (a.7) he argues for the convenience of the visible mission as a pointer to the invisible. He pays attention to the three elements that can be discerned in mission: who sends (the Father, a. 4), who are being invisibly sent (Son and Spirit, a. 5), to whom are they invisibly sent (a. 6). e article preceding these three discussions is, as I indicated already, about what the invisible mission of the Spirit amounts to: does it give people charismatic grace, that is, gis that benefit others (donum gratiae gratis datur) or does it give people the gi of sanctifying grace, which makes people holy (donum gratiae gratum facientis)? But right from the beginning it is clear that there is a third possible answer: the gi of the Spirit’s self. In his respondeo Aquinas accepts all three answers: it is because the mission consists of the coming of the divine person that the human person both becomes holy and receives the gis that can benefit others. It might seem somewhat overstating the case to say that article 3 is about what the invisible mission of the Spirit amounts to, since Aquinas introduces the question without mentioning the Spirit explicitly.34 But

34 “Secundum quid divina persona invisibiliter mittatur. Prooemium. Cf. also: Videtur, quod missio invisibilis divinae personae non sit solum secundum donum gratiae gratum facientis.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3, obj. 1.

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there are several signs that he has the invisible mission of the Spirit in mind. Of the four objectiones three are concerned with the Spirit, one with the Son. I will return later to that objection and to Aquinas’ reaction to it. Further, it is remarkable that Aquinas introduces in the first sentence of his respondeo a parallel between ‘to send’ and ‘to give’: “the verb ‘sent’ rightly applies to a divine person in that he is newly present in someone; the verb ‘given’ in that he is possessed by someone.”35 Although the formulation in the prooemium suggests a continuation of the more conceptual discussion of mission in the first two articles, Aquinas here clearly indicates that he moves in this third article to the concrete missiones, to the way these missions are mentioned in Scripture. And ‘to give’ is a reference to the way the Spirit is mentioned in Scripture. Moreover, in the respondeo he adds a short analysis of ‘to give’ aer what can be considered to be the answer. is addition is an echo of the earlier discussion about the term ‘Gi’, one of the discussions about the proper names of the Spirit.36 I will mention a few significant features of that earlier discussion, for they can clarify what Aquinas mentions here in article 3. First, a proper gi is unreturnable. Aquinas refers here to Aristotle. A proper gi is not given with an intention of repayment in mind. It is a ‘gratuitous donation’. e basis for such a donation is love. And Love is the other proper name for the Spirit.37 Second, only rational creatures can possess the divine person, but they cannot have that person by their own power: the person has to be given to them ‘from above’, or from elsewhere. Otherwise, the term ‘gi’ does not make sense.38 ird, the term ‘gi’ means that when someone receives a gi, it belongs to that person. “Now ‘to possess’ means to have something at our disposal to use or enjoy as we wish.” e distinction use-enjoy (uti-frui)

35 “Respondeo dicendum quod divinae personae convenit mitti, secundum quod novo modo existit in aliquo; dari autem, secundum quod habetur ab aliquo.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3co. 36 ST I, q. 38 de Dono; cf. q. 37 de nomine Amoris; the names for the Son are ‘Word’ (q. 34) and ‘Imago’ (q. 35). 37 “Donum proprie est datio irreddibilis, secundum Philosophum, idest quod non datur intentione retributionis et sic importat gratuitam donationem.” ST I, q. 38, a. 2co. 38 “Unde sola creatura rationalis potest habere divinam personam. Sed ad hoc quod sic eam habeat non potest propria virtute pervenire; unde oportet quod hoc ei desuper detur; hoc enim dari nobis dicitur quod aliunde habemus.” ST I, q. 38, a. 1co.

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originates in Roman philosophy and Augustine has used this couple to speak about dealing with God: we should not use God, but enjoy God, as we should not enjoy created things but use them. Aquinas applies this distinction to the divine person (enjoy) and the workings of that divine person (use).39 When we turn back to article 3 with these elements in mind, we can unpack Aquinas’ addition about giving and having.40 Aquinas’ first step is to introduce the notions of enjoy (frui) and use (uti): when we have something we can either enjoy or use it freely. In what follows only frui occurs, not surprisingly in connection with divine person: we have the power to enjoy a divine person. e second step is to specify that frui, by stressing that creatures cannot enjoy a divine person by their own power: it is a (proper) gi. e third step is to identify that divine person as the Holy Spirit. Aquinas’ formulation shows an emphasis: it is the Holy Spirit himself (ipsemet) and he uses the term inhabitat: inhabits, dwells in. By using this term Aquinas evokes again a biblical theme he had used in the main part of his respondeo. When Aquinas indicates that the new way or the special way of presence for rational creatures is related to knowing and loving God, he refers, as mentioned already, to the two characteristic faculties of the rational creatures. at could have been sufficient. He adds, though, something about the intensity of that knowing and loving. Because by these acts of knowing and loving the rational creature touches Godself (attingit ad ipsum Deum), “God is not only said to be in that rational creature, but even to inhabit it as his temple.”41 Aquinas does not indicate passages in Scripture. One could point to the Farewell address about the indwelling of Father and Son, and of the Spirit,42 but the term ‘temple’ evokes especially the sayings of Paul about the inhabitation of

39 “Non tamen sic quod in potestate earum sit frui divina persona et uti effectu ejus,” ST I, q. 38, a. 1co. 40 “Similiter illud solum habere dicimur, quo libere possumus uti, vel frui. Habere autem potestatem fruendi divina persona est solum secundum gratiam gratum facientem. Sed tamen in ipso dono gratiae gratum facientis Spiritus Sanctus habetur et inhabitat hominem. Unde ipsemet Spiritus Sanctus datur et mittitur.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3co. 41 “Et quia cognoscendo, et amando creatura rationalis sua operatione attingit ad ipsum Deum, secundum istum specialem modum Deus non solum dicitur esse in creatura rationali, sed etiam habitare in ea, sicut in templo suo.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3co. 42 “[…] and we will come to him and make home with him.” John 14:23; “another Counsellor […] for he dwells with you and will be in you.” John 14:16-17.

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the Spirit in the believer.43 Aquinas’ response to objectio 3, the only objection where the Son is mentioned, goes in the same direction: “though the Son may be known to us through various effects, he does not dwell in us nor do we possess him through just any effect.”44 Another discussion, a little later in the quaestio, confirms this strong emphasis on the role of the Spirit. In article 5 Aquinas turns to the invisible mission of the Son. All three objectiones support the answer that an invisible mission does not fit the Son but the Spirit. Aquinas’ respondeo does not contain really new insights. He repeats earlier arguments. On the basis of John 14, 23, “we will come to him and make home with him,” Aquinas argues that the whole Trinity abides in the soul, be it that ‘being sent’ does not apply to the Father, but fits both Son and Spirit.45 e reactions to the three objectiones, though new insights can be found, read like three connected steps. First, Aquinas makes an important distinction. All gis as gis are attributed to the Spirit and he refers to the two names of the Spirit: Love and Gi. Some gis are appropriated to the Son, namely those concerned with the intellect. Appropriation is a way of talking in which something that is common is used specifically for one instance. So in the Creed creation is appropriated to the Father, although both Son and Spirit are involved in creating. In other words, Aquinas is appealing to the rule in the theology of the Trinity that ad extra the Trinity acts as one, but also to the conviction that within that unity the different roles of the three persons can and have to be specified. In this first step he does so rather formally, by pointing out that ‘being sent’ does not fit the Father. In the next two steps he is less formal when distinguishing the role of the Son from the role of the Spirit. Second, Aquinas evokes the effect of grace, of the missions. He does not use the formula he used in article 3, that the human person by knowing and loving God touches Godself and the connected theme of indwelling, but mentions another important theme: the soul becomes ‘Godlike’.46 By the missions of the divine persons the human person is 43 “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you.” 1 Cor 3:16. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.” 1 Cor 6:19; cf. Rom 8:9, 11; 2 Tim 1:14. 44 “quod, licet per aliquos effectus Filius cognosci possit a nobis, non tamen per aliquos effectus nos inhabitat, vel etiam habetur a nobis.” ST I, q. 43, a. 3, ad 3m. 45 Cf. also a. 4: “utrum Patri conveniat mitti.” 46 “[…] quod anima per gratiam conformatur Deo,” ST I, q. 43, a.  5co. Cf. also A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union, Deification in Aquinas and Palamas

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assimilated to those divine persons. In the case of the Spirit this is charity. In the case of the Son this is understanding (word), but Aquinas adds immediately, not just any understanding, but an understanding breathing love. “Consequently not just any enhancing of the mind indicates the Son’s being sent, but only that sort of enlightening that bursts forth into love.”47 In other words, the mission of the Son is ‘colored’ or determined by the mission of the Spirit. ird, Aquinas stresses that the mission of the Son and the mission of the Spirit have grace as their common root, but he repeats that the effects are different: the enlightening of the intellect and the inflaming of the affections. e one effect cannot take place without the other, since the one divine person cannot be separated from the other.48 In other words, Aquinas returns to what he had said in the first reaction about the diversity in the unity. In my reading of these reactions as three steps, the second is central. Aquinas quotes a remark from Augustine in de Trinitate that when he is speaking about the Word he has in mind ‘a knowledge with love’ (cum amore notitia).49 is quote is not an ornamental one but a true foundation. Aquinas shows this also in the remarkable formulation prorumpat in affectum amoris, ‘bursts forth into the affection of love’. e discussions in article 3 and article 5 show how prominent and decisive Aquinas’ attention to the role of the Spirit is on two levels: on the level of the missions of Son and Spirit, and on the level of the mission of the Spirit. It might seem strange to point to that second level. Why should the role of the Spirit not be prominent when talking about the mission of the Spirit? Aquinas remarks that we need knowledge of the divine persons to understand our salvation correctly, “which is perfected through the Son becoming incarnate and by the gi of the Spirit.” Sometimes instead of the singular ‘gi’ the plural ‘gis’ is used and even defended.50 e plural does not only destroy the symmetry clearly (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999); Gilles Emery, La théologie trinitaire de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 439-464. 47 “Non igitur secundum quamlibet perfectionem intellectus mittitur Filius, sed secundum talem instructionem intellectus qua prorumpat in affectum amoris […].” ST I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2m. 48 “Et sic manifestum est quod una non potest esse sine alia, quia neutra est sine gratia gratum faciente nec una persona seperatur ab alia.” ST I, q. 42, a. 5, ad 3m. 49 Augustine’s de Trinitate IV, 20. 50 See e.g. Blackfriars edition vol. VI, note h, at 108-109: “[…] ultimately it is of small importance which reading we choose since we have the gis of the Holy

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intended by Aquinas but betrays also a fearfulness to take the indwelling of the Spirit seriously. In other words, the uncreated grace is replaced by the created grace. Although this replacement might be part of the later theological tradition, Aquinas does not share that later fearfulness. On the contrary, and precisely that lack of fearfulness is indispensable for any theology of the Trinity. 4. Conclusion On the basis of the reading of texts that are central to Aquinas’ understanding of God’s acting in our reality and dealing with us, I have tried to substantiate the claim that Aquinas’ theology is an indispensable contribution to the current renaissance of the theology of the Trinity because of his ‘negative’ tone and the clear insistence on the role of the Spirit. Because of his ‘negative’ tone, mercy can correctly be understood as the root of all that God does, even the incarnation of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit. Because of his explicit emphasis on the Spirit’s self (ipsemet Spiritus Sanctus) who is given and sent to us, Aquinas’ theology of the Trinity serves also to explain who Christians are. Without Aquinas’ explicit emphasis texts like “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God and so we are,”51 “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying ‘Abba, Father’,”52 and “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God […] When we cry ‘Abba Father’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God […]”53 become a mere figure of speech without serious consequences for a truly Christian spirituality. Without a theology of grace, that is firmly based on the Gi of the Spirit, sacraments like baptism and confirmation are perhaps nice initiation rituals, but not essential for our identity. When we do not understand our baptism-confirmation properly and profoundly, this lack of understanding does not only hamper our personal spirituality, but also prevents a true understanding of the Church.

Ghost only if the Holy Ghost is given to us and dwells in us; cf. 1a 43.3,5. 1 Sent. 14, 2, 2.” 51 1 John 3:1. 52 Gal 4:6. 53 Rom 8:14-16.

12 “The Doctrine of Divine Unrest” Pneumatological Perspectives from Karl Rahner Declan Marmion, S.M.

Karl Rahner’s reflections on the Holy Spirit occur sporadically across his wide-ranging publications. ere are pieces on the Holy Spirit in his retreat conferences and sermons and in his writings on the Trinity, the Church and on grace. In an early essay, “eos in the New Testament,” some of Rahner’s theological presuppositions are already apparent, convictions underlying all his writings, including those on the Spirit: firstly, the world “as a whole is ordered to the personal Trinitarian God,” that is, to a supernatural end and predestined to salvation; secondly, the human person, by virtue of their transcendental or spiritual nature, is a potential “hearer of the word” or recipient of revelation; and thirdly, while the living God revealed in Jesus Christ is at work even outside Christianity, “God’s central and definitive saving act […] is the single inner unity of Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, in which he definitively and radically communicated himself to the world.”1 What Rahner takes from the conception of God in the Old Testament is that, pace the approach of cosmological metaphysics, the “experience of God” comes first – “God as a free Person active in the world” as “the Lord of history” and creation. And this “unquestioning assurance of God’s existence” persists into the New Testament, where the early Christians saw “an indissoluble bond” between “their experience in faith of the reality of Christ and their knowledge in faith of God.” is knowledge brought them “into a real relationship with the living God as saviour.” It was not so much a “carefully constructed philosophical conception of God” as “the living, tangible experience of Christ.” Knowledge of God, therefore, comes from God’s activity in history, the culmination of which is God’s

1 Karl Rahner, “eos in the New Testament,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 79-148, at 80-81, 84, and 88.

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self-disclosure in Christ, “in which God’s inmost life is communicated to humankind.”2 Rahner further argues that, although ὁ ϴεός in the New Testament generally signifies only the Father and is never used of the Spirit, “it implicitly states something about the Son and the Spirit.” We need to look elsewhere, however, for the working out of his conception of relations within God, namely, to his trinitarian theology. In the “eos” article, Rahner only makes cursory mention of the Spirit – the Spirit is the one who “realises in us” God’s self-communication in Christ, taking us “up into the most intimate community of life” with God.3 But, in his writings on the Trinity, Rahner speaks about “two complementary aspects” or “two modalities” of the one self-communication of God in history and transcendence: “In the salvific economic Trinity the unoriginated and permanently sovereign God is called Father; in his selfcommunication to history, Logos; in his self-communication to the individual’s transcendentality, Holy Spirit.”4 God is by nature self-communicating and relates to us in a threefold manner. Logos and Holy Spirit are not simply mediating realities but “mediate God as such in his innermost reality.”5 e Son sends the Spirit; the Spirit “sanctifies” by bringing about the acceptance in faith, hope, and love of this self-communication.6 ese two modalities of God’s self-communication constitute salvation history: “the incarnate Logos is revealed as the self-utterance of the Father in truth […] the Pneuma is revealed in his intrinsic reality as love.”7 Rahner’s contribution to the renewal of trinitarian theology focused on his linking of the ‘immanent’ and the ‘economic’ Trinity: God truly is as God reveals God’s self to be and vice-versa. “Without our experience of Father, Son, and Spirit in salvation history, we would ultimately be totally unable to conceive at all of their subsisting distinctly as the one

2

Rahner, “eos in the New Testament,” 93, 95, 99-100, and 123. Ibid., 124. 4 Karl Rahner, “Oneness and reefoldness in God in Discussion with Islam,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XVIII: God and Revelation, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983), 105-121, at 115. 5 Ibid., 116. 6 Cf. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1967, 21998), 86. 7 Karl Rahner, The Content of Faith: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Theological Writings, ed. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt, trans. Harvey D. Egan, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 1979, 1994), 378. 3

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God.”8 At the heart of the mystery of the triune God is the self-communication of God: “e relations of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to us – relations which are expressed in Scripture – are fundamentally the immanent Trinity itself.”9 is led to a more experiential and soteriological emphasis in his trinitarian theology and theology of grace. Not that Rahner focused solely on the subjective experiences of the Spirit. He also reflected on the charismatic factor in the Church and suspected that most Christians – both progressive and traditionalist – were afraid of the Spirit or at least only wanted him “in small doses.”10 e backdrop to this pessimistic assessment was his perception of a ‘restorationist’ dynamic operative at official levels within the Church in the last decades of his life. Rahner had been heavily involved in Vatican II – in the preparatory phase and during the Council itself – and promoted its orientations wherever possible. He regularly encouraged Church officials to “have the courage to allow fresh and hitherto unknown forms of the charismatic factor in the Church to appear.”11 1. Experiences of the Spirit – Experiences of Grace When preaching on Acts 19:1-2, where Paul enquires of the disciples at Ephesus whether they had received the Holy Spirit, Rahner takes their response: “We have never even heard of the Holy Spirit” to maintain that Christians, even today, rarely claim to have had any experience of the Spirit.12 But Scripture, he points out, does not speak merely about a doctrine of the Spirit, but itself appeals to an experience of the Spirit.13 Although there is testimony to such experience of the Spirit in both Scripture and in the lives of the mystics and the saints, possession of the

8

Rahner, The Content of Faith, 380. Karl Rahner, Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kenneth Baker (New York: Herder, 1965), 251. 10 Karl Rahner, Opportunities for Faith, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 41. 11 Karl Rahner, “Observations on the Factor of the Charismatic in the Church,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XII: Confrontations II, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 81-97, at 88. 12 Cf. Rahner, Opportunities for Faith, 40. 13 Apart from the testimony of Scripture (he has in mind here Paul’s letter to the Galatians and other Pauline and Johannine writings), Rahner also refers to the testimony of the saints and the mystics who are “people of the Spirit.” Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” in id., Theological Investigations, XVIII, 189-195. 9

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Spirit is assumed to lie outside one’s consciousness and liable to be overlooked among the myriad other experiences of living.14 Central to Rahner’s contribution to the renewal of Catholic theology in the twentieth century has been his contention that God/grace/the Holy Spirit can be experienced. He frequently used the terms experience of God, of the Holy Spirit, of grace, of transcendence, synonymously and without clear demarcation.15 For him, whatever we discover about human experience in general will help illuminate our experience of God. e dynamic of our experience of God, he believed, is comparable (but not identical) to what happens in experiences such as joy, faithfulness, trust, and love. His point is that the experience of God or of the Spirit is not so much given in addition to other experiences, but rather lies hidden within them. e experience of God, of grace, or of the Holy Spirit is always mediated, not experienced directly, but in conjunction with something else: Wherever there is selfless love, wherever duties are carried out without hope of reward, wherever the incomprehensibility of death is calmly accepted, wherever people are good with no hope of reward, in all these instances the Spirit is experienced, even though a person may not dare give this interpretation to the experience.16

e experience of the Holy Spirit is not to be thought of as one experience among many other experiences but constitutes “the ultimate depths and the radical essence of every spiritual and personal experience (of

14

Experience of the Spirit is not simply one encounter with a particular object that happens to come upon us from outside but begins at the very heart of our existence, at what might be called its subjective pole. It has a ‘transcendental’ character because it takes place at the innermost depth of the human person, and constitutes “the singular, original, primordial experience by the subject of itself, always and everywhere present behind all representational experiences.” Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 191. Yet, like any other experience, the transcendental experience of the Spirit is mediated; it must be given concrete (categorial) form. 15 For a helpful discussion of how the term ‘experience’ is used in contemporary theology, see George P. Schner, “e Appeal to Experience,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 40-59. 16 Karl Rahner, “How Is the Holy Spirit Experienced Today?,” in Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1982, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 142; see also Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Experience of Grace,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), 86-90, at 88-89.

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love, faithfulness, hope, and so on).”17 In his homilies and meditations on the Spirit, Rahner draws attention to this experience in order to enable others to discover it within themselves. is experience of God as the absolute mystery, he continues, is not confined to the individual ‘mystic’, or to those who interpret their lives in explicitly religious categories but is open to everyone. Rahner’s contribution to the renewal of the Catholic theology of grace influenced, in turn, his understanding of the role and working of the Holy Spirit in and outside the Church. In positing that grace can be consciously experienced, he opposed the scholastic claim that grace, because it is supernatural, is something beyond the region of consciousness.18 Instead, grace is the gi of Godself to human beings, a communication of the personal Spirit of God to humankind. God loves human beings first, and all the other effects of God’s love flow from this a priori ‘gracedness’ of humankind. He was convinced that both Scripture and genuine theological tradition within the Church point to this different understanding of grace. “Grace, the Holy Spirit, the working of the Spirit of God in the proper sense of divinizing grace […] all this is something new which in our view […] operates within human consciousness.”19 In affirming the Holy Spirit as “the gi in which God imparts Godself to humankind,”20 Rahner moves beyond traditional extrinsicist views that contrasted nature and grace as two layers of reality that hardly intersect. Instead, there is a dynamism within the human person – the desire for ‘more’, the transcendental dimension, which is much more than a dynamism of nature; it is itself a gi. We are oriented to a supernatural end, ‘drawn’ by God to share in God’s own life (divinization). And all the while, God’s transcendent presence to humankind takes place only in conjunction with the ‘categorial’, that is, in the concrete, in history, in creation and culture.

17 Karl Rahner, “e Experience of God Today,” in Theological Investigations. Vol. XI: Confrontations, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973), 149-165, at 154. 18 For a good overview of how the notion of ‘religious experience’ has been incorporated into Catholic theology via Rahner and others and the implications for Catholic-Pentecostal dialogue, see Ralph Del Colle, “e Implications of ‘Religious Experience’ for Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue: A Catholic Perspective,” Journal of Theological Studies 45 (2010): 525-542. 19 Karl Rahner, “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace,” id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XVI: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland (New York: e Seabury Press, 1979), 35-51, at 38-39. 20 Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 189.

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A favorite scriptural quotation of Rahner, on which he based his convictions about the universality of God’s salvific will and the ubiquity of grace, and from which he drew pneumatological implications, is the reference in Paul’s letter to Timothy: “God wants everyone to be saved and reach full knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). For Rahner, God’s universal salvific will cannot remain an abstraction. “eology has been too long and too oen bedeviled by the unavowed supposition that grace would no longer be grace if it were too generously distributed by the love of God!”21 e implications of his position are far-ranging: it means the whole of human life, even in its most secular aspects, is potentially ‘graced’. It breaks down barriers separating Church and the world, and presents a vision of grace and the operation of the Spirit beyond the Church. It occasioned a new Christian consciousness aer the Second Vatican Council: e holy occurs not in distinction from the everyday, but in and through it, what Rahner calls a ‘mysticism of everyday life’. On this view, every Christian is called to a mysticism of everyday faith, hope, and love that differs only in degree, and not in kind, from the extraordinary experiences of recognized mystics. Mysticism is understood here not simply as the final stage of Christian perfection.22 When Rahner says that the Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, he believes a Christian’s faith-conviction will be intimately related to a genuine and wholly personal experience of God: e Christian of the future will be a mystic or he or she will not exist at all. If by mysticism we mean, not singular parapsychological phenomena,

21

Karl Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. IV: More Recent Writings (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 165-188, at 180. is principle was also endorsed by Vatican II: “All this holds true not for Christians only but also for all people of good will in whose hearts grace is active invisibly. For since Christ died for all, and since all are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery.” See Gaudium et Spes, no. 22, in Vatican Council II. Vol. I: The Conciliar and Postconciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 924. 22 Not that Rahner believed there were no stages of growth in the spiritual life. Quite apart from Ignatius, he was well acquainted with the classical mystical works of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. He regarded such mystics as ‘almost irreplaceable teachers’ in rendering intelligible their experience of God. See Karl Rahner, “Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Church,” in id., Opportunities for Faith: Elements of a Modern Spirituality, trans. Edward Quinn (London: SPCK, 1970), 123-126; and Rahner’s article “e Church of the Saints,” in id., Theological Investigations, III, 91-104.

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but a genuine experience of God emerging from the heart of our existence, this statement is very true and its truth and importance will become still clearer in the spirituality of the future […] Possession of the Spirit is not something of which we are made factually aware merely by pedagogic indoctrination as a reality beyond our existential awareness, but is experienced inwardly.23

e context of Rahner’s writings on the experience of the Spirit was the charismatic renewal movement flourishing (particularly in America, but also in Europe) towards the end of the seventies and early eighties. He was not, however, an uncritical observer of this movement, and reflected: how naively such people absolutely identify their inspirations, their sense of peace, freedom and being led by the Holy Spirit with the immediate and direct intervention of God […]. Such a theology can easily go awry when, for example, its ideas are immediately experienced as the pure gi of God, when in fact they come from somewhere much closer to home.24

On the other hand, the more ‘ordinary’ examples he provides of experiences of the Spirit include: forgiving another even when one gains no reward for it, renouncing something without receiving recognition from others or even a feeling of inward satisfaction, or making a decision purely in the light of the innermost dictates of one’s conscience without being able to make this decision understandable to others. When we act in such ways, then God is present with His liberating grace, then we experience the mysticism of everyday life, “the sober intoxication of the Spirit of which the Church Fathers and the early liturgy spoke.”25 But what is the difference between the ‘ordinary’ examples of the experience of the Spirit above, and those found in charismatic circles (e.g., baptism in the Spirit, speaking in tongues), which he is unwilling to interpret absolutely as a special, direct intervention of God? For Rahner, to assume that the experience of the Spirit is limited to isolated special occasions is to adopt a mythological understanding of the relationship of God to the world. Even those who do not feel particularly attracted to charismatic groups and practices can still have an experience of the Spirit amid the routine of ordinary life: “In everyday life this transcendental experience of God in the Holy Spirit remains anonymous, implicit, unthematic, like

23 Karl Rahner, “e Spirituality of the Church of the Future,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XX: Concern for the Church, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), 143-153, at 149. 24 Rahner, “Approaches to eological inking,” in Karl Rahner in Dialogue, 33. 25 Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 203.

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the widely diffusely spread light of a sun which we do not directly see, while we turn only to the individual objects visible in this light of our sense-experience.”26 Alongside Rahner’s concern to link the experience of the Spirit with the ordinary routine of life is his disdain for elitist conceptions of spirituality. us, he resisted any ‘separatist’ vision of Christianity and groups within the Church who liked to set themselves apart from so-called ordinary Christians. Rahner stressed instead how the Spirit could be experienced in a whole variety of situations, above all in the unselfish love of neighbor, and in “the observance of the harsh duty of ordinary life and the resigned acceptance of death.”27 At the same time, he wanted to acknowledge the experience of the Spirit in phenomena such as prayergroups, group meditation, and other spiritual ‘exercises’. ese, he believed, constitute ‘rehearsals’ for admitting and accepting fundamental experiences of the Spirit when and wherever they occur in life. Such ‘exercises’, however, are not the sole place where such experiences of the Spirit occur. Irrespective of where such an experience of the Spirit takes place, a person is ultimately led to a decision or choice which embraces the whole of one’s existence. e experience of the Spirit is connected to what Rahner calls ‘existential commitment’, examples of which include the choice of career, a specific form of behavior towards another, the decision to marry, a particular religious act, and so on.28 In a different context, 26 Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 199. Rahner grounds this claim in his analysis of human knowledge and freedom, an analysis which reveals the human person as a being of transcendence oriented to mystery. e experience of one’s orientation to mystery forms the condition for the very possibility of everyday knowing and willing and he concludes: “If we were to use the term ‘mysticism’ to describe this experience of transcendence in which we always, even in the midst of everyday life, extend beyond ourselves and the specific thing with which we are concerned, we might say that mysticism occurs in the midst of everyday life, but is hidden and undeclared, and that is the condition of the very possibility of even the most ordinary, sober and secular everyday experience.” Rahner, The Spirit in the Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1975), 14. 27 Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 208. “Experience of the Spirit in the sense meant here as such occurs always and everywhere in the life of someone who has awakened to personal self-possession and to the act of freedom in which one disposes of oneself as a whole. But in most cases in human life this does not come about expressly in meditation, in experiences of absorption, etc., but in the material of normal life: that is, when responsibility, fidelity, love, etc., are realized absolutely” (207). 28 Rahner’s discussion of ‘existential commitment’ in terms of a ‘choice’ which necessitates a ‘discernment of spirits’ is deeply influenced by the Spiritual

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a meditation on Pentecost, he claimed that the irrevocable and triumphant presence of the Spirit compels the human person “to an ultimate decision,” the radical character of which recurs “again and again in Scripture.”29 Further, on his understanding of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – which reflect a unity of spiritual experience and existential decision – Rahner believed that God can communicate his will to a person. In other words, it is possible, through a real guidance by the Holy Spirit, to choose one particular option from a variety of possible, good alternatives. At issue is a discernment of spirits, or of finding the will of God in daily life, which involves more than a mere rational consideration of general moral principles. 2. Charismatic Phenomena Closely associated with the experience of the Spirit are certain phenomena such as speaking in tongues, uttering prophecies, and the experience of radical conversion. Such phenomena, evident in various charismatic movements form part of what has been termed religious enthusiasm, and offer, in Rahner’s view, a real and concrete expression of Christianity.30 His concern is to ascertain under what conditions a charismatic phenomenon may be considered an experience of the Spirit. We have previously noted his reservations towards those ‘100 percent pentecostalists’ who too hastily ascribe such phenomena to a direct and special intervention

Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. For a fuller discussion, see Karl Rahner, “e Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola,” in The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae 12 (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder; London: Burns & Oates, 1964), 84-156. 29 Karl Rahner, “e Spirit at Is Over All Life,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. VII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971; orig. 1966), 193-201, at 198. 30 We follow here Rahner’s reflections on the subject in “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace,” 35-51, and his article “Enthusiasmus,” in Praxis des Glaubens: Geistliches Lesebuch, ed. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt (Zürich: Benziger, 1982), 124-128. e term, enthusiasm, has historically been regarded with suspicion. e term – derived from the late classical Greek enthousiasmos (from entheazein, “to be God-possessed”) – means to be inspired or even possessed by a god or a divine, superhuman power. In a footnote (p. 35), Rahner notes how, in Protestant circles since Luther, the concept has been associated with emotional excess. For a lengthy historical study of enthusiasm, see Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). Knox likewise viewed enthusiasm as a kind of religious eccentricity, linking it with fanaticism and an uncontrolled emotionalism.

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of God. And even if Rahner’s preference is not for the extraordinary, but rather for a more ‘sober’ spirituality, it cannot be denied that he had an appreciation for the Charismatic movement as a whole.31 Rahner tried to steer a middle course between two opposing positions. e first discounts expressions of religious enthusiasm from the start, regarding such phenomena (e.g., charismatic enthusiasm) as having nothing to do with Christianity as such, since they are found in various forms in most religions. In the second position, such expressions are recognized as the unadulterated operation of the Holy Spirit. For Rahner, despite the variety of expressions of religious enthusiasm, all these experiences, to the extent that they are genuine, have some generic sense in common, and “this consists in a transcendent experience which touches the centre of the religious subject and in which the subject has an experience of God.”32 However, despite the transcendental experience involved in religious enthusiasm, the ‘categorial’ or concrete element plays a greater role in the objectification of the experience. In fact, phenomena of religious enthusiasm contain ‘categorial’ content of various kinds (which needs to be critically evaluated). But this does not mean that such phenomena cannot enable a person to clearly experience their own transcendence and inner reference to God. His point is that while expressions of religious enthusiasm can be experiences of grace, this is not always the case. Rahner situated religious enthusiasm midway between what he calls mysticism in the strict sense, and the day-to-day awareness of ordinary Christians “who do not encounter with any clarity either the heart of their own subjectivity or God himself in his true self-communication.”33 e spirituality of many Christians is, unfortunately, characterized by the lack of such an authentic experience of God, and they remain stuck at the conceptual level, resting in ‘the expressions of religion’. His understanding of the experience of religious enthusiasm is of course intimately 31 Rahner envisaged two basic types of spirituality in the future. e first type is a “wintry piety” (eine winterliche Frömmigkeit) which, while firmly Christian and sacramental, can identify with the situation of the worried atheist (without itself becoming atheistic). e second type corresponds to the charismatic and enthusiastic movements, whose adherents, at times, claim an almost naive immediacy to God. While Rahner appears rather skeptical about such Pentecostal movements, he does not deny that such movements could represent a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Church. 32 Rahner, “Religious Enthusiasm and the Experience of Grace,” 42. 33 Ibid., 44. “But the day-to-day awareness of the pious Christian rests on these conceptual and propositional expressions; it is dissolved and remains fixed in them; it confuses, in the words of Scripture, the letter with the spirit, the word about God with the Word of God and with God himself.”

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connected with his understanding of grace, the essence of which is not captured in propositional formulae, but in the self-communication of God to the transcendent spirit of the person.34 Rahner’s conviction, therefore, is that genuine experiences of grace do exist, and that they can, in principle, occur in experiences of religious enthusiasm, though they are not limited to these. Further, such experiences must be critically analyzed as to their origin and nature, and their possible consequences and distortions.35 It must be remembered that the ‘categorial’ content of such experiences of enthusiasm are of human origin, and cannot be interpreted simply as divine inspiration. In testing the authenticity of the categorial content of such an experience, he maintained the usual rules for the assessment of theological statements should be applied: conformity to the message of the Gospel, to Scripture, to the faith and mind of the Church, etc.36 His main fear about experiences of religious enthusiasm (e.g. prophecies, private revelations, and visions) was that they could be presented as a short-cut towards holiness at little cost.37 34

For a more recent account of the role and significance of charisms in the life and mission of the Church, focusing on the specific charisms of prophecy, healing, and the discernment of spirits, see “‘Do Not Quench the Spirit’: Charisms in the Life and Mission of the Church. Report of the Sixth Phase of the International Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue (2011-2015).” Available at: http:// www.stucom.nl/document/0417uk.pdf [accessed March 14, 2021]. 35 Rahner has elsewhere examined the question of criteria for genuine experiences of religious enthusiasm, particularly in relation to visions and prophecies. See Karl Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, Quaestiones Disputatae 10 (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder; London: Burns & Oates, 1963), 76-106. ere he highlights the importance of a correct attitude towards visions and prophecies: “And if a vision (mystical or prophetic) be recognized in itself as genuine, our reaction to it may still be wrong. One may be deaf, or refractory, to the message. Who can deny that most people do not welcome a call to penance or to a devotion that would be salutary for a given time? But the other extreme is also possible, especially among people of a piety too intuitive and unenlightened. Where private revelations (even genuine ones) are abused to gratify a spiritual sensationalism, those revelations are not correctly understood. If we crave prophecies which are so clear and definite that they take from us the burden of responsible decision and loving abandonment to God’s inscrutable Providence, then what we want is sooth-saying and we are no longer capable of interpreting true prophecy aright should such emerge from a real ‘apparition’” (84). 36 “Even saintly people […] can still be subject to error and to the influence of their age; they are not able on their own to clearly distinguish between the leadings of the Holy Spirit and their personal contributions, something only the spirit in the office of the church can do.” Karl Rahner, The Mystical Way in Everyday Life, trans. Annemarie Kidder (New York: Orbis, 2010), 95. 37 “Where the entire spiritual life is reduced to revolving round one revelation (however genuine in itself), whose content, in comparison with the whole

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3. “Do not Stifle the Spirit”: The Charismatic Element in the Church For Rahner, the Church is called to bear witness in history as a ‘Spiritendowed society’ and ecclesiastical office and ministry are charismatic in character. e Church is holy, and the grace of God promised to the Church is more powerful than sin. While aware of the sinful dimension of the Church, Rahner did not believe that office and charism stand against each other in a kind of dialectical relationship. Nor was he advocating the hierarchy as the only vehicle of the Spirit – a ‘false totalitarian view’ that equates office and charisma.38 Instead, he interpreted Paul’s statement (1 ess 5:19) not to block the Spirit as recognition of the permanent validity of the charismatic principle in the Church and an “imperative for our own particular time, disconcerting, accusing, shocking us out of our complacency” and emboldening us to take risks, especially in ecumenical questions.39 In an address at the Austrian ‘Catholic Day’ in Salzburg on June 1, 1962 entitled “Do not Stifle the Spirit” he alluded to the temptation for the individual and for the Church as a whole, including ecclesial authority, to be overly defensive, closed in on itself, and lagging “pitifully behind the times.”40 In short, “the activity of the Spirit […] can never find adequate expression simply in the forms of what we call the Church’s official life, her principles, sacramental system and teaching. ese can never be the sole or exclusive forms in which the Spirit has, so to say, made himself available to the Church.”41 So, while Rahner acknowledges the charism of office, he also calls for recognition of ‘non-institutional charismata’, that is, the recognition “that there are persons in the Church endowed with charismatic gis of the Spirit outside the sacred ministry” through whom Christ is also directing his Church.42 In moving beyond a narrow conception of charism, Rahner refers to Paul’s teaching on the spiritual gis in the Church (1 Cor 12-14; Rom 12:1-8; 16:1; and Eph 4:1-16) – gis bound up not only with ecclesial office but even “the most commonplace service can be wide world of Christian truth by which we should live, is bound to be meagre – we can conclude that even genuine revelations have certainly been misunderstood and misapplied.” Rahner, Visions and Prophecies, 84. 38 Cf. Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, 49. 39 Karl Rahner, “Do not Stifle the Spirit,” in id., Theological Investigations, VII, 72-87, at 81. 40 Ibid., 78. 41 Ibid., 75. 42 Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, 51; see also Karl Rahner, “Paul, Apostle for Today,” in id., Mission and Grace, vol. III, trans. Cecily Hastings (London and Melbourne: Sheed & Ward, 1966), 1-21.

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a charisma of the Spirit.”43 e charismatic element is not restricted to the rare and the extraordinary. Nevertheless, the Spirit can be stifled. We can be afraid of him because he is too incalculable for us: For we always want to know what we are involved in, we want to have the entries in our life’s account clearly before us and to be able to add them up to a figure that we can clearly grasp. We are frightened of experiments whose outcome cannot be clearly foreseen […] We want the Spirit therefore in small doses […].44

Yet, not stifling the Spirit implies having the courage to take risks. It entails moving beyond a childish understanding of obedience towards the established authorities of the Church. In this context, Rahner speaks of “the burden of charisms,” of how individuals who take up their ecclesial responsibilities and exercise their gis “have to endure the sufferings of the charismatic.”45 It entails, further, “the courage to endure the inevitable antagonisms in the Church,”46 recognizing that “one’s own gi is always limited and humbled by another’s gi.”47 Promoting a diversity of gis and opinions in the Church in a spirit of patient tolerance and love is possible because the Church is not a totalitarian organization but an ‘open system’, one whose reference point is not any form of authoritarian papalism but the reign of God.48 It is to move beyond a solely juridical view of Church, beyond the tendency “to understand the Church as a closed and totalitarian system” to recognizing “a certain inalienable pluralism.”49 Gamaliel’s intervention in Acts 5:34ff. does not mean putting the spirit “to the test on the largest possible scale,” but rather “that one must be as tolerant as possible towards a spirit whose origins one cannot yet clearly make out.”50

43

Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, 55. Karl Rahner, The Great Church Year: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Homilies, Sermons, and Meditations, ed. Albert Raffelt and Harvey D. Egan, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 217. 45 Rahner, “Do not Stifle the Spirit,” 82. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 77. 48 Cf. Rahner, “Observations on the Factor of the Charismatic in the Church,” 88-94. 49 Ibid., 90 and 92. 50 Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, 80 and 81. Is this way of thinking not very similar to Pope Francis’ emphasis on pastoral discernment or gradualness in pastoral care in Amoris Laetitia, Ch. 8 with its acknowledgement of the complexity of family life, where there are no easy recipes and where new general rules are not the answer? 44

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4. “The Spirit Blows Where It Will” Rahner did not restrict the activity and effects of the Spirit solely to the intra-ecclesial sphere but, starting with God’s universal salvific will (1 Tim 2:4), worked out the implications for a renewed theology of grace using interpersonal categories. His approach would, in turn, influence the emerging theology of religions in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly with his controversial notion of the ‘anonymous Christian’. No longer was grace scarce or seen as exclusively mediated through one religion; on the contrary, no sphere of human life was excluded from the saving presence of God. Such optimism about salvation led him to ask whether Christians could hope that most of humanity will, in fact, attain salvation. Rahner’s work led to a more positive conception of the relationship between Christianity and other religions, paving the way for a Christian vision of a kingdom of grace beyond the Church. It would become an axiom of post-Vatican II Catholic theology that salvation is available to all people of good will (Gaudium et Spes, no. 22). Rahner claimed that when members of other religious traditions accept their transcendental openness to God and practice a radical and selfless love of neighbor, they are living out a form of anonymous Christianity. “ere are supernatural, grace-filled elements in non-Christian religions,” and so “it would be wrong to regard the pagan as someone who has not yet been touched in any way by God’s grace and truth.”51 Not that anonymous Christianity has the final word. Rahner’s theology of nature and grace oscillates between acknowledging an implicit, unthematic and transcendental experience of God and the need for this experience to become more explicit, thematic and historical. ere is explicit as well as anonymous faith. Members of other religious traditions may well live out an implicit or anonymous Christianity, but Rahner insists such implicit faith carries an intrinsic dynamism towards full and explicit realization. Anonymous Christianity is his attempt to portray the tension between the particularity of Christianity on the one hand, and God’s universal salvific will on the other. It is also connected with his ‘searching Christology’: humankind is searching history for a bearer of salvation and a genuine searcher may find what she is seeking in Christ. Rahner’s anthropology, including his analysis of the transcendental orientation of the human person as a questioner, as oriented to mystery,

51 Karl Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. V: Later Writings, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 115-134, at 121 and 131.

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issues in Christology. God’s universal salvific will has a Christological referent: God’s self-communication to humanity reaches its climax in the event of Jesus Christ, the definitive, irreversible, and eschatological revelation of God. In him, the transcendental openness to God is fully realized. Ultimately, for Rahner, anonymous Christianity remains a partial, unfulfilled reality that requires an explicit Christocentric and ecclesial focus for its completion. Rahner’s theory has been criticized as presumptuous, as a form of Christian imperialism which sees the religious other only as an implicit reflection and lesser version of Christianity rather than as genuinely other. Other religions are viewed as stepping-stones finding their fulfilment in explicit Christianity, while their savior figures only anticipate or point to Christ. Moreover, in positing an underlying sameness to how various religions experience God, Rahner tends to downplay the real differences between the religions. As Francis X. Clooney has noted, Rahner’s consistent attention to the nuances of the Christian tradition is not matched by a similar care for the nuances in other religious traditions.52 Further, von Balthasar and others claim that Rahner is insufficiently Christocentric, thus undermining the newness of the event of Jesus Christ and neglecting the biblical narrative that grounds the specific form of Christian discipleship. On the other hand, pluralists like Paul Knitter argue that Rahner is too Christocentric in stressing the singularity of Jesus to the detriment of other possible incarnations and savior figures.53 In brief, Rahner’s position is ‘inclusivist’ in that all salvation comes through Christ. All people are ‘included’ in Christ’s saving work. Christ’s operative presence is concealed and implicit in non-Christian religions, explicit and conscious in Christianity. His starting with God’s universal salvific will means he acknowledges a saving function to pre-Christian and non-Christian religions, while highlighting the significance of moving from an anonymous or transcendental experience of grace to a more explicit interpretation and appropriation in the context of Christian faith. Yet what is less clear is the connection between his Christology and pneumatology. In conceding that “Christ is present and efficacious in the

52 Cf. Francis X. Clooney, “Rahner beyond Rahner: A Comparative eologian’s Reflections on Theological Investigations 18,” in Rahner beyond Rahner: A Great Theologian Encounters the Pacific Rim, ed. Paul G. Crowley (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 3-21, at 8. 53 Cf. Paul F. Knitter, Jesus and the Other Names: Christian Mission and Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 79.

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non-Christian believer through his Spirit,”54 he is implying that the Spirit cannot be confined to Christianity. His is an attempt to combine the axioms of God’s universal salvific will and the necessary mediation of Christ, while remaining conscious of Eastern criticisms of the ‘Christomonism’ of the West. Contemporary theologians, including Jacques Dupuis and Gavin D’Costa, taking their cue from Rahner, Congar and others, develop a theology of religions with a greater insistence on the role of the Spirit in the economy of salvation. For Dupuis, Christology and pneumatology go hand in hand as complementary elements within the one economy of salvation. He affirms the unbounded influence of the Spirit, who “blows where it will” (Jn 3:8), while relating the Spirit’s presence and action to Christ. “e Spirit of God is, at one and the same time the Spirit of Christ, communicated by him by virtue of his resurrection from the dead. e cosmic influence of the Spirit cannot be severed from the universal action of the risen Christ.”55 Yet just as the work of the Spirit in history did not begin with, nor is it limited to being given by, the risen Christ, neither is the Logos of God limited by its historical becoming in Christ. e Word made flesh in Jesus is not the only form of God’s appearance in the world. e hypostatic identities of, and order of relationships between, the Son and Spirit within the immanent Trinity must be respected, and are mirrored in their distinct but related ‘missions’ in the economy. It is through the Spirit and the Son that the Father is disclosed.56 Like Dupuis, D’Costa affirms God’s Trinitarian presence in other religions. In his opinion, we risk limiting or domesticating the Spirit if we refuse to recognize her presence and activity in other faiths or give nonChristians a narrative space within our theology. ere may not only be ‘seeds of the Word’ in these religions, but shoots and branches as well. ere is an eschatological surplus to God’s self-revelation in Christ. As he puts it, “the Holy Spirit allows the particularity of Christ to be related to the universal activity of God in human history.”57 e Spirit deepens 54

Karl Rahner, “Jesus Christ in the Non-Christian Religions,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XVII: Jesus, Man, and the Church, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), 39-50, at 43. 55 Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 197. 56 Cf. Gavin D’Costa, “Christ, the Trinity, and Religious Plurality,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 16-29, at 18. 57 Ibid., 18; see also Gavin D’Costa, “Toward a Trinitarian eology of Religions,” in A Universal Faith? Peoples, Cultures, Religions, and the Christ,

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and universalizes our understanding of God’s work in Christ. His point is not simply that God speaks outside Christianity, but that through recognizing God’s Spirit at work in other faiths, Christians penetrate more deeply into the mystery of Christ. Such committed openness will not eschew the complex issue of interpretation and assessment of a particular religion. e plurality of religions calls for a plurality of responses, yet these should always be a posteriori judgements resulting from specific encounters with other faiths. One cannot determine in advance what one will learn from engagement and dialogue. Finally, D’Costa not only connects the Spirit with Christ, but also with the Church. His historical study of the traditional axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus has shown how this was not intended to be applied indiscriminately to non-Christians but reflects an intra-Christian claim that salvation comes through Christ and his Church.58 5. Conclusion: Spirit Christology beyond Rahner In the previous section we saw how theologians developed seminal insights of Rahner in the context of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue. Similar developments have occurred in pneumatology, beyond Rahner, and we will conclude by highlighting some of these. In his critique of the Scholastic trinitarian tradition, which claimed that any of the divine persons could become incarnate, Rahner points to the “very special differentiation of persons” in the Trinity and how each of the divine persons communicates himself to humanity in his own particular manner. e Son is the historical self-communication of the Father (incarnation) while the Spirit brings about the acceptance of this self-communication (sanctification). Rahner’s trinitarian theology begins in the economy, and the Word or Logos “is really as he appears in revelation […] the one who reveals to us […] the triune God.”59 e immanent and the economic Logos are the same. Yet Rahner does not pursue a similar line of enquiry about the Spirit. While acknowledging that “the difference between the incarnation and

ed. Catherine Cornille and Valeer Neckebrouck (Louvain: Peeters, 1992), 139154, at 150. 58 Cf. Gavin D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 101-132. 59 Rahner, The Trinity, 28 and 30. As he puts it, “What Jesus is and does as man reveals the Logos himself […] here the Logos with God and the Logos with us, the immanent and the economic Logos, are strictly the same” (33).

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the descent of the Spirit, insofar as both of them are soteriological realities, is not clear,” he does not address the specific manner in which the Holy Spirit is a person or the full implications of the claim that the Spirit also has a proper mission.60 It was Ralph Del Colle who, building on the work of David Coffey, developed a Spirit Christology as a way of completing and enriching traditional Logos Christology. “It seeks to understand both ‘who Christ is’ and ‘what Christ has done’ from the perspective of the third article of the creed: ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life’.”61 is means clearly distinguishing, but not separating, the christological and the pneumatological missions. Spirit Christology shows how the mission of the Holy Spirit informs and enables the mission of the Son and how “every aspect of the mystery and work of Jesus Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit.”62 John’s Gospel captures this Spirit-endowed life and ministry of Jesus as the one “who gives the Spirit without measure” (Jn 3:34). In short, Spirit Christology argues for a proper mission of the Holy Spirit and conceives the union between Jesus and God in the first instance as the work of the Holy Spirit. e humanity of Jesus is anointed, transformed, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the whole life of Jesus from conception to death and resurrection is perceived as taking place in the power of the Spirit. Jesus’ life is portrayed as a ‘return’ in the Spirit to the Father.63 is ‘return’ model of trinitarian relations is a complement and corrective to the ‘procession’ model in that, while the latter is concerned with the outward movement from God – Jesus is sent by the Father, the former focuses on his return to the Father and his being united with Him. Here the Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son. Humanity too is included in this return to the Father: the Spirit unites us to Christ and thus to the Father. Spirit Christology, therefore, recognizes the role of the Holy Spirit in the incarnation rather than only aer it. Christology and pneumatology are simultaneous rather than successive phases of God’s relationship

60

Rahner, The Trinity, 85. Ralph Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit: Spirit-Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. 62 Ralph Del Colle, “Spirit Christology: Dogmatic Issues,” in A Man of the Church: Honoring the Theology, Life, and Witness of Ralph Del Colle, ed. Michel René Barnes (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 3-19, at 7. 63 Cf. David Coffey, Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35-45. 61

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with the world.64 As Yves Congar pithily put it: “No Christology without pneumatology and no pneumatology without Christology,” while the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that, “in their joint mission, the Son and Holy Spirit are distinct but inseparable.”65 Pneumatology is not simply immanent Christology. For his part, Del Colle maintains that ‘impersonal metaphors’ to describe the Spirit (e.g. wind, fire, water, etc.) and ‘the personal agency of the Spirit’ are key components of any robust pneumatology.66 e Spirit is more than a metaphor for God’s action; the Spiritus praesens is “the giving gi of God,” or, what Del Colle describes as, “the donative and presentative dimensions of divine being.”67 e sending of the Spirit, therefore, entails a real self-communication or selfgiving of God, and here again we find echoes of Rahner’s theology of grace. e distinct mission of the Holy Spirit is to ‘indwell’ the just person and the Church. Del Colle speaks of an “enhypostasis or being inpersoned by the Holy Spirit […] [which] is processively enacted as we attentively live in the Spirit.”68 is reflects the self-effacing personhood of the Spirit who “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears [from the Father]” (Jn 16:13). Both Christ and the Spirit refer in different ways to the Father. Spirit Christology complements but does not displace Logos Christology: “Pneumatology is the means whereby we apprehend the person and work of Christ, and Christology is the means whereby we apprehend the person and work of the Spirit.”69

64

Cf. John Zizioulas, “e Pneumatological Dimension of the Church,” in The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today, ed. Gregory Edwards (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010), 75-90, at 76. 65 Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit (London: Chapman, 1995), 1; see also Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 198. 66 Cf. Ralph Del Colle, “e Holy Spirit: Presence, Power, Person,” Theological Studies 62 (2001): 322-340, at 323. 67 Ibid., following omas Smail, The Giving Gift: The Holy Spirit in Person (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988). 68 Ibid., 338. 69 Andrew Grosso, “Spirit-Christology and the Shape of the eological Enterprise,” in A Man of the Church: Honoring the Theology, Life, and Witness of Ralph Del Colle, 206-222, at 218.

13 Theological Theology and the Quest for Salvation Soteriological Reflections on a Theology of Non-Christian Religions Kristof Struys

I would like to begin my contribution to this Festschrift by returning to the 90s of the past century, during which I attended the then Faculteit Godgeleerdheid of our Louvain Alma Mater. I remember being intrigued by the lectures on the Theology of Non-Christian Religions. Both the subject matter and the didactic concept fascinated me, and this was largely due to the person and theologian, Terrence Merrigan. As the then senior lecturer of the aforementioned subject, as well as of the discipline Dogmatic Theology: Christology and Trinity, he captivated generations of students with his masterful and inspiring lectures, during which he oen focused on the question of salvation. As a PhD fellow of the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) during my doctoral research into the theology of Walter Kasper, Terrence Merrigan proved to be a much-valued promoter. e following contribution is the expression of my deep gratitude and sincere friendship to my former professor and current colleague, Terrence Merrigan. ematically, many of his publications balance on the lines between Christology, trinitarian theology, and soteriology. In my contribution, I will offer a theological reflection on the issue of salvation. 1. Pluralist Theologies of Religions – Epistemology and Criteriology 1. Kantian ‘Phenomenon’ A Christian theology of non-Christian religions offers a response to one of the signs of our times, mainly with regard to the postmodern pluralization and its request to re-legitimize the traditional postulate of unity along new lines. e theology of non-Christian religions considers this issue from its very own Christian theological perspective. is postmodern pluralist tendency, which to a certain extent distances itself from the

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classic principle of unity, urges Walter Kasper to theologically reflect on the question of a balanced ratio between unity and plurality, as can be found in trinitarian theology. Another characteristic of post-modernity is the nihilistic tendency which leads to the abandonment and the deconstruction of the great historical narratives with their ultimate (salvific) finality, as can be found in Christology, more specifically in Christian eschatology. A short analysis of a few current implications of what is considered post-modernity brings us to the question of the precondition for an operative soteriology or doctrine of salvation. e postmodern focus is not so much on the tolerance of plurality, but rather a considered choice in favor of pluralism – a ‘new quality of pluralism’, which is irreconcilable with universal and absolute norms and values, as well as with a salvific universality.1 e challenge faced by Christianity is twofold: on the one hand, the aspect of her universality, and particularly the universal salvific mission of the Church, following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ; on the other hand, the aspect of her unicity: Jesus Christ as the one and only Mediator of salvation between God and the human being.2 e pluralist theologies of religion, as developed by thinkers such as John Hick, Paul Knitter, and Raimon Panikkar, take a critical view of the Christian divine revelation and its accompanying idea of salvation.3 Hick bases his philosophical-epistemological thinking, among other things, 1

Cf. Walter Kasper, “Jesus Christus – Gottes endgültiges Wort,” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 30 (2001): 19-20: pluralism in itself is not new. Modernity as such can count as an experience of pluralism, especially when modernity is considered a process in which the different realms of reality discover their own autonomy and in which religion becomes its own separate realm within a larger plurality. Kasper refers to this modern process of ‘Differenzierung’ as pluralization. e previous postulate of unity or the unifying function must then be re-examined and re-assessed: Walter Kasper, “Die Kirche angesichts der Herausforderung der Postmoderne,” Stimmen der Zeit 215 (1997): 250-253; id., “Kirche und neuzeitliche Freiheitsprozesse,” in Walter Kasper, Theologie und Kirche II (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1999), 213-228, at 225. A new factor, however, is the ‘quality of pluralism’ as experienced in the global village, which is the world today: cf. id., “‘Qui pourra nous séparer de l’amour du Christ? Ni mort ni vie…’ (Rm 8,35.38),” in Walter Kasper, L’espérance est possible (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2002), 116; id., The Church and Contemporary Pluralism (New York: National Pastoral Life Center, 2002), 5ff. 2 Cf. Kasper, The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 14-16. 3 Cf. Walter Kasper, “L’universalité du Christ et le dialogue interreligieux: Conférence de Mgr. Walter Kasper au Congrès missiologique international,” La documentation catholique 8 (2001): 367-372. Cf. Kasper, Jesus Christus – Gottes endgültiges Wort, 20. Cf. id., The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 12ff.

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on the Kantian separation or distinction between noumenon and phenomenon.4 According to Kant, only the phenomenal aspect of things (the thing as it appears to us) is knowable, unlike the noumenal aspect (the thing in itself) which cannot be known. e noumenon can never be known in itself, but only insofar as the phenomenon appears to us. Moreover, Hick does not consider the phenomenon to be truly the noumenon.5 Furthermore Hick adheres to the philosophy of the so-called ‘weak thought’ (G. Vattimo),6 which, according to Kasper, entails relativizing and dismissing the question of truth, as well as any form of metaphysics. e search for truth risks being relegated into mere hermeneutics.7 2. Hegelian ‘Geschichte’ As a theologian with a thorough understanding of German idealism and post-idealism, Kasper interprets the emergence of pluralist theologies of religion against the backdrop of this German idealism, especially that of Hegel (who himself reacted against the ‘aufklärerische Relativierung’).8 Hegel views the historical process (the Kantian phenomenon) as the process of God himself (the Kantian noumenon). e historical manifestations of God ultimately coincide with the Divine gradually becoming himself. History is identical to the process of the logos. God risks being reduced to history, contained by an understanding of history and by history itself. Nowadays idealistic thinking is sometimes regarded as 4 Cf. Kasper, “Die Kirche angesichts der Herausforderung der Postmoderne,” 254. Id., The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 12ff. Cf. John Hick, “Eine Philosophie des religiösen Pluralismus,” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 45 (1994): 314-316. Cf. Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Religiöse Vielfalt als theologisches Problem: Optionen und Chancen der pluralistischen Religionstheologie John Hicks,” in Christus allein? Der Streit um die pluralistische Religionstheologie, ed. Raymund Schwager, Quaestiones Disputatae 160 (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1996), 29-31. 5 Cf. Keith Ward, “Divine Ineffability,” in God, Truth and Reality: Essays in Honour of John Hick, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 210-220, at 216ff. Cf. Schmidt-Leukel, “Religiöse Vielfalt als theologisches Problem,” 30-31. 6 Such thinking distances itself from any form of metaphysics and reduces the question of truth to mere hermeneutics: cf. Kasper, The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 12. Cf. id., “Die Kirche angesichts der Herausforderung der Postmoderne,” 260-261. 7 Cf. Walter Kasper, “‘Interventionen’ des Lehramtes im Bereich der Philosophie: Kommentar zur Enzyklika Papst Johannes Paulus II. ‘Fides et Ratio’,” in Osservatore Romano, December 11, 1998, 5. 8 Cf. Kasper, “L’universalité du Christ et le dialogue interreligieux,” 370.

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responsible for totalitarian ideologies. Hegel’s thinking is criticized as being “Eurocentric, imperialist and totalitarian,” without valorizing the intrinsic plurality of reality.9 e pluralist theology of religions and its plea for the right of existence of plurality should therefore be seen against the backdrop of the aforementioned idealism with its inherent totalitarianism refusing to acknowledge the historical plurality of reality. e adherents of pluralist theologies of religions see this as a form of inclusivism that fails to take into account the plurality and alterity of other religions, reducing them in a rather discreetly imperialist manner to anonymous variants of their own identity, namely to anonymous Christian religions.10 Although someone like Kasper will, for example, not theologically identify himself unquestioningly with Rahnerian inclusivism and its anonymous Christianity,11 which according to him does at times show blatant idealistic tendencies,12 he still proceeds to criticize the aforementioned pluralistic take on inclusivism as being “a weighty and dangerous step that far outreaches the inclusivist perspective and as such bypasses it completely.”13 3. Ethical-practical Criteriology According to pluralist theologies of religions, interreligious dialogue can only be considered truly authentic and valuable when the claims to truth 9

Cf. Kasper, “L’universalité du Christ et le dialogue interreligieux,” 370 (own translation). 10 Cf. ibid., 373. Cf. Kasper, “Qui pourra nous séparer de l’amour du Christ?,” 116: the pluralist theologies of religion “voient […] dans les théories inclusivistes un absolutisme et un totalitarisme chrétiens à l’œuvre auxquels elles opposent leur vision du pluralisme religieux.” 11 Cf. Walter Kasper, “Are Non-Christian Religions Salvific,” in Evangelization, Dialogue and Development, ed. Mariasusai Dhavamony, Documenta Missionalia 5 (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, 1972), 157-158, at 161. 12 Cf. Walter Kasper, Jesus der Christus (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1974), 60. Cf. id., “Christologie von unten? Kritik und Neuansatz gegenwärtiger Christologie,” in Grundfragen der Christologie heute, ed. Leo Scheffczyk, Quaestiones Disputatae 72 (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1975), 141-170, at 156; id., “Wer ist Jesus Christus für uns heute? Zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion um die Gottessohnscha Jesu: Karl Rahner zum 70. Geburtstag,” Theologische Quartalschrift 154 (1974): 203-222, at 208. Cf. id., “Offenbarung Gottes in der Geschichte: Gotteswort im Menschenwort,” in Handbuch der Verkündigung, ed. Bruno Dreher, Norbert Greinacher, and Ferdinand Klostermann (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1970), 78: Kasper considers what he calls a ‘Metaphysizierung’ of the Christian position, whereby the specificity of other religions is domesticated, a very real danger. 13 Kasper, “Qui pourra nous séparer de l’amour du Christ?,” 116.

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of the various religions are able to coexist undifferentiatedly. According to these theologies, the unique divine mystery manifests itself in all religions, be it in a distinct manner, precluding any religion’s claim to universality. However, this does not imply that they consider all religions to be equal: the criteriology for evaluating a religion is not so much of a cognitive nature, but rather belongs to the realm of practical ethics.14 According to Kasper suchlike criteriology falls short theologically: at best, it can evaluate the humanistic gradation and primacy (Höchstgeltung) of a religion, but by no means it can assess its theological unicity (Alleingeltung).15 2. Theological Question of Truth 1. Condition of Possibility for Salvation According to Kasper, a criterion of practical ethics can only be meaningful on the condition that it is supported and fueled by a presupposed qualitative theoretical, cognitive criterion.16 A meaningful practice or ethics of the ‘humanum’ presupposes a qualitative vision of it. e ultimate question of truth belongs to theology, including theology of religions and interreligious dialogue. Failure to answer this question will come at a price. According to Kasper, the question of truth, which relates to the question of salvation, can never be disregarded, even within the scope of interreligious dialogue: “erefore an encounter between religions must essentially always include the specific theological question of the true religion.”17

14

Cf. Kasper, The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 14. Cf. id., “L’universalité du Christ et le dialogue interreligieux,” 374: John Hick uses the process of self-centeredness to reality-centeredness as his criterion. According to Hick, ‘Reality’ or ‘the Real’ indicates the transcendent reality of the Divine. Cf. Hick, “Eine Philosophie des religiösen Pluralismus,” 305 and 307. 15 Cf. Kasper, Jesus Christus – Gottes endgültiges Wort, 22. 16 Cf. Kasper, The Church and Contemporary Pluralism, 13ff. Cf. id., Jesus Christus – Gottes endgültiges Wort, 22: According to Kasper ‘being’ (indicative) philosophically takes precedence over ‘doing’ (imperative): cf. id., “Zustimmung zum Denken: Von der Unerläβlichkeit der Metaphysik für die Sache der eologie,” in Kasper, Theologie und Kirche II, 15. 17 Walter Kasper, “Das Christentum im Gespräch mit den Religionen,” in Dialog aus der Mitte christlicher Theologie, ed. Andreas Bsteh, Beiträge zur Religionstheologie 5 (Mödling: Verlag St. Gabriel, 1987), 105-130, at 108: “Deshalb muβ die Begegnung der Religionen von der Sache her notwendig auch die spezifisch theologische Frage nach der wahren Religion einschlieβen.”

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e theological question of truth is by its very nature a question of salvation: as a transcendental question, it is primarily aimed at the condition of possibility for salvation, as well as at its unicity and criterion. Only then can it proceed, in second instance, to the question of praxis and ethics. Terrence Merrigan writes along the same lines: “e pluralistic orientation towards a praxis aimed at the all-encompassing salvation and deliverance, will fail to impress. A theology that does not account for divergent visions typical to the world religions, reduces the ‘sôtèria’ to an empty concept, a formal category with no positive or liberating power whatsoever.”18 According to Merrigan, a dynamic re-examination of the doctrine of incarnation will offer a satisfactory answer to the “legitimate demand of post-modernity to honor the modern historic consciousness, the increasing cultural and religious pluralism and the universal longing for salvation.”19 Merrigan is not necessarily referring to the classic incarnation terminology, but rather to what John Henry Newman refers to as the idea or image of Christ, which is substantively determined by the history of Jesus of Nazareth who, in accordance with the New Testament writings, is as the Christ of divine salvation for all of mankind. He also describes the ‘radicalization’ of the doctrine of incarnation, especially “with regard to a (mainly suffering) mankind and its history in God’s salvific plan.”20 2. Humanist Atheism Called into Question In humanist atheism, the salvation of humankind is only conceivable on the condition and to the extent that every notion of a transcendent deity is silenced and denied in its reality. A full and salvific human existence is inversely proportionate to the existence of the Divine. In humanist atheism, the relation between God and man is an exclusive relation: the one necessarily excludes the other. Cultural and ideological critique teach us that the transcendental question regarding the conditions of possibility for human salvation are more complex than rabid humanist atheism has led us to believe. Dominant atheist ideologies from the

18

For what is to follow, cf. Terrence Merrigan, “De geschiedenis van Jezus in haar actuele betekenis: De uitdaging van het pluralisme,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 34 (1994): 407-429, at 408 and 427-429. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. Reference to Edward Schillebeeckx, “Identiteit, eigenheid en universaliteit van Gods heil in Jezus,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 30 (1990): 259-275, at 260-261 (my translation).

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twentieth century have demonstrated that they can hardly be considered the guarantors of authentic humanity and human salvation. On the other hand, the axiom of humanist atheism cannot be disproved by its mere reversal, as this would imply that the formal acceptance of a transcendent deity would provide an answer to the preconditions of salvation. History has shown that human salvation and humanity are not necessarily guaranteed under the banner of a divine transcendence. A mere formal and undifferentiated reversal is, in itself, inadequate – it does not take into account the substantive consideration and qualification of what is meant by salvation and deliverance. erefore, the crucial question is an integral one, both formal and substantive, taking into account that the formal acceptance of a divine transcendence is the condition of possibility for the deliverance of the human being. Indeed, without the acceptance of a divine transcendence, which cannot be reduced to innerworldly immanence, the human person will be tempted to take the place of the deity and to give in to hubris ultimately leading to disaster and inhumanity. History has shown that whoever pushes God off his throne, will most likely succumb to the temptation to ascend the throne themself and, true to human nature (and its inherent sinfulness), will bestow divine power and authority on themself. is raises the issue of a substantive criterion for discernment. e formal argument in which the acceptance of transcendence is a prerequisite to the question of human salvation, will also lead to the recognition that this transcendence facilitates authentic deliverance and true salvation by virtue of its substantive qualification. 3. The Integral Question of Salvation in Protology and Christology In theology, the question of salvation is an integral one: it is situated in the realm of both the doctrine of creation or protology and Christology. In the doctrine of creation, it is the acknowledgement of the transcendence of God (Creator) as prerequisite to the potential of the freedom of the human being (creature) and, therefore, the formal reversal of the humanist atheist axiom. In Christology, it is the acknowledgement of the unique incarnation of God’s Word in and through the event of Jesus Christ as an eschatological salvific event: it is what Merrigan calls the ‘idea of Christ’ as substantive qualification of this God-idea and as prerequisite for an integral promotio humana. In the New Testament, the God-event reveals itself as a trinitarian monotheism, manifesting itself within history in the Christ-event as an incarnation-event, with an intrinsic realization of human salvation and humanity. e remaining

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part of this article will be a reflection on the Christ-event as a prerequisite to the safeguarding of divine transcendence on the one hand and, by extension, to the safeguarding of human salvation on the other hand.21 1. The Creation Axiom – the Secret of True Humanity e Book of Genesis tells us of a God who, as Creator, creates man in His own “image and likeness” (Gen 1:27).22 e act of creation reveals a God who is Creator on the one hand and a human person who is creation on the other hand, brought forth by the Creator but not identical to the Creator. e word ‘creation’ as such suggests both unity and differentiation between Creator and creation. It suggests reciprocity and connectedness, but not a substantial identity, as can be found in the doctrine of emanation. In the human person created aer His ‘image and likeness’, God finds a creation with whom He, as Creator, can enter into a relationship. And, in turn, in God as his primal image or his original, the human being finds a Creator with whom a relationship is possible. When the human being recognizes his/her unicity, i.e. his/her creational identity, he/she has implicitly acknowledged the Creator as a transcendent reality with whom he/she is connected, but to whom he/she is not identical. And in turn, the acknowledgement of the transcendent Creator is the formal prerequisite for the human person to acknowledge his/her own deepest being: creature and not Creator, human being and not God. Kasper views the formal relationship between Creator and creature as a reciprocal proportionality: unity with God as Creator does not devalue the human person (as a creature) with regard to his/her unicity but rather values the creature in its deepest being, namely as creature-human person and not Creator-God. Herein lies the theological formal argument that the acceptance of a transcendent God as Creator does not devalue but rather values the human person as human person. e creation axiom states: “e radical dependence and true reality of those dependent on God increase in equal measure and not inversely.”23 e human 21 Walter Kasper, “Natur – Gnade – Kultur: Bedeutung der modernen Säkularisierung,” in Kasper, Theologie und Kirche II, 202. Cf. id., “Kirche und neuzeitliche Freiheit: Evangelium und Menschenrechte als Basis eines geeinten Europa” (September 1998); http://www.kirchen.de/drs/bischof/199809.htm. 22 ‘Man’ is intentionally used in its inclusive meaning. 23 Walter Kasper, “Autonomie und eonomie: Zur Ortbestimmung des Christentums in der modernen Welt,” in id., Theologie und Kirche I (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1987), 153: “Radikale Abhängigkeit und echte Wirklichkeit des von Gott herkünig Seienden wachsen im gleichen und nicht

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being as creation will therefore become more ‘real’ or more himself/herself as he/she increasingly relates to his/her divine Creator in dependence. e opposite is represented in the story of the fall of the human being. When the human person fails to recognize his/her unicity as a creature, his/her ‘likeness’ to God, and considers himself/herself ‘equal’ to God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, death appears and freedom and salvation cease to exist (Genesis 3). is relates to two distinct entities of one and the same relational context: in other words, Creator and creature are inconfused (they exist in their distinct unicity) and indivisible (they exist in one indivisible relational context). True freedom or transcendence of God and the recognition thereof, is the conditio sine qua non for the proportional recognition and validation of the human being’s freedom and transcendence. e formal logic of the biblical creation narrative presupposes that only God as true God can render the human being a true human being and elevate him/her in his/her unicity. ‘e greater the unity with God, the greater and more fulfilling the freedom of man’.24 e true freedom or the true salvation of the human person (autonomy) therefore is formally guaranteed to the proportional extent in which the human person relates to God as God (theonomy). Without this last premise, the attainability of authentic humanity and authentic human salvation remains far off. e formal logic of the biblical creation axiom engenders the reversal of the logic of modern humanist atheism.25 God as God is the prerequisite condition for true freedom: a freedom set free, i.e. salvation of mankind. 2. Christology – Jesus’ Salvific Humanity e revelation of the fullness of God in Jesus Christ constitutes the basic and challenging conviction of Christianity – God linked mankind’s freedom and salvation to a specific historical person. Christianity’s heart is at the same time its skandalon. e aforementioned terms ‘inconfusedly’ and ‘indivisibly’ are two of the four adverbs used by the christological creed of the Council of Chalcedon (451) to denote the particular relation im umgekehrten Maβe.” Id., “eologische Bestimmung der Menschenrechte im neuzeitlichen Bewuβtsein von Freiheit und Geschichte,” in Kasper, Theologie und Kirche I, 180. 24 Walter Kasper Der Gott Jesu Christi (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2 1993), 66: “Je gröβere Einheit mit Gott bedeutet je gröβere und je erfülltere Freiheit des Menschen.” 25 Walter Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1982), 66.

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between the divinity and humanity in the person Jesus Christ.26 e formal logic of the biblical creation narrative is therefore significant for later christological and trinitarian thinking, from which it derives its salvific criterion. Parallel to the formal proportional relation between unity (indivisibly) and distinctiveness (inconfusedly) of the Creator and the creature in the creation axiom, is the relation between the divinity and humanity in the person Jesus Christ. Not only does Jesus reveal who God is, He also reveals the human person at his/her very best. e pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes (GS 22) states: e truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. […] Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. […] He Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), is Himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam, He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since the human nature He assumed was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too.27

As the Word of God, according to Gaudium et Spes, He assumed human nature ‘without annulling it’, but by raising it up to ‘a divine dignity’ and truth. e key to a truthful understanding of Jesus’ true humanity, is His intimate union with God whom He refers to as His beloved ‘Abba’. Herein implicitly lies His unique indirect claim to being the Son of the Father. His deep love for His Father is an indication of His own selfconsciousness as the Son of that Father (implicit Christology). His unity (indivisibly) and His autonomous distinctness as true man (inconfusedly) are also proportionally related. What has been revealed in the man Jesus, is an incomparable degree of philanthropy and humanity. e New Testament testimonies demonstrate beyond a doubt that the secret to this humanity is God the Father Himself through His Spirit. e secret therefore is not primarily

26 Heinrich Denzinger and Adolfus Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 321963), 108. e Latin version reads as follows: “Unum eundemque Christum Filium Dominum unigenitum, in duabus naturis inconfuse […] inseparabiliter.” 27 Gaudium et Spes. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.

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anthropological, but rather theological as it proceeds both in and from God. Precisely because of Jesus’ incomparable intimacy towards God the Father, his approach to life will be incomparably human.28

4. Soteriology – Theonomy and Autonomy rough Jesus Christ, the human person once again becomes aware of his/her original calling to live in the image of his/her invisible Creator. In Christ, he/she can take part in the divine life in a ‘sublime’ way, which is the prerequisite for his own freedom and salvation: through Christ, the human being was “set free for freedom” (Gal 5:1). True humanity, as in ‘freedom set free’, appears in Christ, who is Man above all men and the Son of God. is clearly reveals a connection between the theological anthropology, as found in the Old Testament (the story of creation in Genesis) and the christological anthropology of the New Testament. e former formally indicates a proportional relation between the creatureman and the Creator-God. e latter indicates a parallel relation between the divinity and the humanity in Jesus Christ, including the eschatological criterion of salvation and freedom. 1. The Salvific Prerequisite of Jesus’ Humanity and Divinity e earliest Christologies already were primarily soteriologically motivated – the concrete experience of salvation (sotêria) in and through Him was the foundation for a christological creed.29 e ontological Christology of Chalcedon also has a primarily soteriological motivation to proclaim both the true humanity as well as the true divinity of Jesus in the reciprocal relation. “e doctrine of the enhypostasis of Christ’s humanity does not indicate a loss, but rather an ultimate fullness of the humanity of Jesus. e highest form of union with God does not amputate or reduce humanity, on the contrary, it brings it to its true and complete

28 Kristof Struys, “De trinitair-christologische paradox: Een ‘hemel’ van ‘verschil’. Over menselijk heil en de drie-ene God in Christus,” in Wijselijk onwetend: De paradox in het christelijk geloof, ed. Bert Daelemans and Christophe Brabant (Averbode: Altiora, 2014), 57. 29 Luther’s question: “is He God’s Son because He saves us or does He save us because He is God’s Son” indicates he wishes to exclusively defend a functional Christology counterposed to an ontological Christology. We consider the question to be legitimate in both directions and therefore to be considered as inclusive.

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fulfilment.”30 e doctrine of hypostatic union herewith confirms the fullness of both natures in their mutual relation as a theological – existing in God – prerequisite for human salvation. e first premise of the New Testament is that Jesus was a true human person.31 During their encounters with Him, the disciples experienced an extra-ordinary salvific experience – an experience ultimately reaching its culmination in the crucifixion and resurrection. It led them to the conviction that He was the Messiah, the Son of the living God in whom the eschatological salvation of mankind and the world would be decided. is conviction from the bottom up prompted the Early Church, soteriologically motivated, to proclaim Jesus’ divine and human identity – in which both aspects in their inconfused and distinct reciprocity are salvific prerequisites. 2. Deification – Salvation Through God’s Humanization in Jesus In the God-Man Jesus Christ, God enters into an ‘admirable exchange’32 with humankind: the Word of God becomes human in Jesus, opening up a viable path for humankind – a path of true humanity – to share in the Divine. Sharing in the Divine is the path of deification as the road to salvation. e genuine and true humanity of Jesus – inextricably bound to and existing only by grace of the union with the Divine – is therefore a salvific prerequisite for the human being.33 e fundamental secret of Jesus’ full and true humanity (a salvific prerequisite) is His intimate union with His God and Father. Based on the previous premises and reflections, one can theologically state that humankind’s ultimate salvific guarantee lies in He who is God and to whom John refers as Love (1 Jn 4:8). God’s love reveals itself and is realized in truth and in fullness in the human person of Jesus. In Him

30 Walter Kasper, “‘Einer aus der Trinität…’: Zur Neubegründung einer spirituellen Christologie in trinitätstheologischer Perspektive,” in id., Theologie und Kirche I, 225-226: “die Lehre von der Enhypostasie der Menschheit Christi bedeutet keinen Mangel, sondern eine letzte Vollkommenheit der Menschheit Jesu. Die höchstmögliche Einheit mit Gott amputiert und reduziert nicht das Menschsein, sondern bringt es zu seiner wahren und ganzen Erfüllung.” 31 Cf. Terrence Merrigan and Kristof Struys, eds., Verleden openen naar heden en toekomst: Meedenken met de christologie van Piet Schoonenberg (Averbode: Altiora, 2001), 126. 32 O admirabile commercium – Laudes antiphon octave of Christmas. 33 Quod non assumptum est, non redemptum est: Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329-390).

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and through Him, the time has come for men and women (kairos – Mk 1:15) to share in God’s love which is salvation and redemption, along the path of humanity. Naturally this route of deification cannot be separated from the horizon of the freedom of history, which includes the ethos and praxis of the human person. 3. Theological-soteriological Foundation of the Practical-ethical Criterion e route of deification also has a practical ethical impact and consequence. Because God in his perfection is love, the human person is called to share in this perfection in the praxis of his or her own life (Mt 5:48). But no matter how much this praxis is focused on an ‘all-encompassing deliverance and redemption’, or on a dynamic of ‘self-centeredness’ to ‘reality-centeredness’, it can hardly be perceived as the ultimate criterion of salvation and deliverance.34 Surely, abandoning a salvific criterion solely qualified in the God-idea, and consequently finding the salvific criterion in the human praxis, carries the risk that the human person with his/her praxis will take the throne for himself/herself and that he/ she will deify his/her praxis. e human person runs the risk of playing God, based on his/her belief that God’s throne is vacant. Such ideologization has oentimes led to the most inhumane systems and praxes. e human person deprives himself/herself of the chance to be who he/she truly is, creature-human being and not Creator-God and Savior-God. 5. Conclusion Both creation anthropology and christological anthropology show that the human person finds himself/herself only in the inextricable recognition of and in his/her relationship to his/her Creator-God; whereby the idea of Christ offers the human person a criterion and viable salvific path. True humanness is an essential soteriological precondition in Christ as well as in every other human being. e condition of possibility for this true humanity is theological, in other words situated in God as God. From a Christian point of view, soteriology cannot bypass the theological question of truth and salvation. Soteriology presupposes a ‘theological theology’ – a theology that does not circumvent the question of God as God. In the same way, a Christian theology of non-Christian 34 Cf. Merrigan, “De geschiedenis van Jezus in haar actuele betekenis,” 408 and 427-429.

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religions always presupposes the question of a ‘theological theology’. “erefore, an encounter between religions must essentially always include the specific theological question of the true religion.”35

35

Kasper, “Das Christentum im Gespräch mit den Religionen,” 108.

14 The Absolute Newness of Love: An Innovative ‘Agapology’ in the Trinitarian Metaphysics of Miklós Vetö Beáta Tóth

[T]here is nothing contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, nothing inconsistent with the fullness of Christian love, in having our affections directed in an especial way towards certain objects, towards those whom the circumstances of our past life, or some peculiarities of character, have endeared to us. ere have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals […] Saint John Henry Newman, Sermon Immortal Love, author of this great frame, Sprung from that beauty which can never fade, How hath man parcel’d out y glorious name, And thrown it on that dust which ou hast made, While mortal love doth all the title gain! George Herbert, Love (I)

Recent decades have witnessed an upsurge of studies exploring the perennially present mystery of love from a specifically Christian perspective, and one may even wonder whether there has been any room le for a genuinely new account of this both traditionally and currently muchdiscussed theme. Hungarian-French philosopher, Miklós Vetö’s two latest volumes are telling proof that the inexhaustible richness of the concept and the phenomenon of love can be approached in ever novel ways yielding a truly original contribution to philosophical as well as theological reflection.1 Without attempting to exhaust the fullness of Vetö’s 1 e works we shall examine are Miklós Vetö, The Expansion of Metaphysics, trans. William C. Hackett (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), eBook (EBSCOhost),

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thought, or trying to give an all-encompassing account of his ambitious project, we shall restrict our investigation to a preliminary assessment of the novelty and the theological significance of what he terms ‘agapology’, namely, his systematic account of love. In what ways does it further previous emblematic discussions (think, for example, of Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon or a host of recent studies on the topic)? Where does its originality lie and, how does it seem to be relating to the preceding philosophical-theological tradition? What are the salient points of Vetö’s intellectual edifice? And, last but not least, what might be the theological significance of Vetö’s findings; in what ways do they invite one to rethink traditional theological themes? Before directly approaching Vetö’s account of love, a few remarks must be made concerning the overall shape of his philosophy and the methodology adopted in his works. Vetö’s main interest lies in the relationship between religion and philosophy and, more specifically, the relationship between God and the world from a distinctively Christian perspective.2 He stands in the the original French edition: L’élargissement de la métaphysique (Paris: Hermann, 2012); and Court traité sur l’amour (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2020). Miklós Vető (1936-2020) was born in Hungary into a Jewish family. In 1941, he was baptized in the Catholic Church as a young child and in 1954, as an adolescent he consciously embraced the Catholic faith following a mystical experience. He always considered himself as having the triple identity of being at once Jew, Christian and Catholic. Aer the Revolution of 1956 he le Hungary and went to Paris and later to Oxford where he pursued philosophical studies (besides philosophy he also earned doctoral degrees in literature and theology at later stages of his career). He taught philosophy at Yale University (U.S.), at the National University of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and at the French universities of Rennes and Poitiers. His complex oeuvre combines studies of representative figures of German Idealism (Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel) with an interest in the history of mystical-religious thought (Fénélon, Bérulle, Jonathan Edwards, Simone Weil). He published extensively in English, German, and French, but he felt most at home in the French-speaking Christian intellectual tradition. Aer illuminating analyses of the thought of various religious thinkers and philosophers, his interest recently turned towards the more explicit articulation of his own metaphysical system and the development of an, in his term, ‘expanded’ metaphysics and a new vision of love as a consequence and the basis of such metaphysics. His last work, in which he was elaborating a Christian philosophical concept of God, remained unfinished due to his death in January 2020. (His Hungarian name – Miklós Vető – is spelt in different ways in his various publications: Miklós Vetö or Miklos Vetö). 2 For illuminating assessments of Vetö’s project see the following review articles of L’élargissement de la métaphysique: W. Chris Hackett, “No Neutral Metaphysics: Miklos Vetö,” Research in Phenomenology 44 (2014): 301-314; Balázs

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continental philosophical tradition and combines a formative Kantian influence with contemporary phenomenological research in an attempt to reinvigorate both types of thinking by a renewed metaphysics which is open also to the theological dimensions of God. Joining thus phenomenologists of the ‘theological turn’, he at the same time follows his own path by retrieving the transcendental tradition of metaphysics as an overall framework for his eidetic explorations (‘eidetics’ in the Husserlian sense). Besides the philosophy of Kant, his thinking is marked by the profound influence of Emmanuel Lévinas, whose ethical concern and sustained reflections on the nature of absolute otherness make a decisive impact on Vetö’s own approach. As a third source of inspiration, mystical and religious authors (Fénelon, Bérulle, J. Edwards), and eminently Simone Weil among them, provide him with valuable insight on the intriguing question of the conceptual possibility of a real encounter and a genuine love-bond between the finite human being and God.3 As a consequence of such intellectual background and decisive influences, a major endeavor of his metaphysics is to lay bare the theological content lying at the core of philosophical assumptions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to rethink traditional theological themes in a novel conceptual way (for example, the meaning of creatio ex nihilo, grace as God’s love donated to free beings, the idea of personhood and Trinitarian theology). He defines the role of theology as being one of “ancilla philosophiae” – a humble and silent servant assisting but never constitutively dominating the autonomous discourse of philosophical reflection which has an ultimate content in common with theology.4 ough always staying in the background, its assistance is seen as being twofold: theology provides paradigms, themes, and ideas to be conceptualized by metaphysical inquiry, but it also serves as an overall depth dimension, a perspective over against which metaphysics may situate and understand its own quest and which animates its search. While Mezei, “A szeretet metafizikája [A Metaphysics of Love],” Filozófiai Szemle 59 (2015): 177-187; and Mezei’s more recent evaluation of the entire oeuvre: “Miklós Vetö – Un philosophe à la recherche de la veritable nouveauté,” Communio 45 (May-August 2020): 161-171. See also various essays in Balázs Mezei and Dániel Schmall, eds., Megújító újdonság: Tanulmányok Vető Miklós gondolkodásáról [Nouveauté novatrice: Studies on the ought of Miklós Vetö] (Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 2020). 3 He is also indebted to eminent figures of the Hungarian philosophical tradition, such as László Gondos-Grünhut (1903-1962). 4 On the relationship between philosophy and theology in his quest see, for example, Vetö, Court traité sur l’amour, 11-14.

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theological themes are integrated into metaphysical concepts, at the same time they point to a transcendental source of origin which ultimately escapes conceptual exhaustion, but which also shapes reason’s enquiry. Joining the company of French philosophers who voice various critiques of ontology (e.g. Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Lévinas, Marion), Vetö likewise sets ontology and metaphysics in a sharp contrast, emphasizing the essential inadequacy of the former to capture what is beyond being, in other words, reality in its entirety. Ontology is understood here as a discourse narrowly concerned with être – construed on the basis of particular instances of being, mostly in the material order and in isolation from one another – and therefore having a negative connotation on account of conceptualizing being as purely immobile sameness, dead separation, and a closed-in circularity. It is in this sense that essence, nature and the natural are devalued as a realm lacking dynamism and a creative openness to a real other. By contrast, metaphysics is viewed as a quest aiming to overcome such an infertile universalization of being by concentrating on the reality lying beyond it and by disclosing the complete otherness of an original donation as the source of being which opens up the isolated instances of closed-in sameness towards an ultimate relationality. As we shall see, the fertile tension between the twin ideas of otherness and relationality play an important part in Vetö’s metaphysical construal of love. In order to understand the philosophical universe in which it is couched, let us examine some of the major building blocks of his expanded metaphysics. 1. An Expanded Metaphysics: Newness, Singularity, and Love5 In what does Vetö’s expansion of metaphysics consist? According to him, the true vocation of metaphysical enquiry is to unlock immanence, in other words, to think beyond the closed circle of an ontology of nature (characterized by him as the indifferent ‘kingdom of the same’ and the sphere of ‘violent refusal to what is different’) and elaborate innovative conceptual tools for the comprehension of the possibility of true novelty (as part of Vetö’s distinct path to the question of otherness). e central theme, the overall concern of such expansion may therefore be conceived as a systematic and all-encompassing investigation into the essence and forms of newness at all levels of the structures of this world. During the course of his enquiry, Vetö takes inspiration from the Kantian idea of

5

See Vetö, The Expansion of Metaphysics.

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a priori synthesis as both a creative explanation of the arrival of epistemological novelty and an interpretative tool that he then extends to various dimensions of reality, universalizing in this manner the validity of Kant’s original insight and applying it to the operation of metaphysical investigation.6 What is at stake for Vetö is to demonstrate that an originary creative synthesis is operating at the heart of reality, and to do this, he must be able to conceptualize the intelligibility of the new. His Expansion of Metaphysics is a sustained reflection on the phenomenon of newness of an all-embracing metaphysical scope through analyses of the themes of the image, moral action, and the singularity (resulting in the ‘unicity’) of the person. While in his innovative metaphysics the image of a person is freed from a secondary status as a powerless copy of the original and is credited with autonomous existence (just as in art), nonetheless its newness is recognized as being merely relative because it has no inherent source of creativity and remains stably tied as the self-expression of its author. As a next step, free moral action seems to be better placed to fulfil the requirements of genuine novelty because human freedom is – theoretically at least – a realm of unlimited possibility and a source of unforeseeable acts in which one is able to overcome the restraining confinement of nature and achieve genuine self-exit and self-surpassing. However, free moral action still does not realize radical newness since it is unable to create a fully autonomous new reality, one that could freely respond in reciprocal action, in other words, it “still remains mid-way between the subjectivity and the new meaning for which it calls.”7 is new meaning must exist as an autonomous other to the moral subject: another subject, another free being. Vetö thus concludes that the event of absolute newness arrives in the form of a free and irreplaceable person, who is not only singular with regard to other persons, but also unique in itself, beyond any qualitative or quantitative comparison or differentiation. erefore, the radical event of newness is the birth of a child. e person is unique as such, considered in and for itself, without reference to other persons, and irrespective of whatever properties it has (these can always be interpreted in the context of extrinsic or intrinsic differentiation). Unicity is not a quantitative or a qualitative category. e unicity of another person exists as a new meaning that 6 In his Critique of Judgment, Kant has famously distinguished analytic and synthetic judgments. While the former is simply an analysis of the given, the latter delivers new insight which is non-deducible by a simple analysis of its constituent parts. 7 Vetö, The Expansion of Metaphysics, 67.

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must be recognized as such and the ‘effective recognition’, the acknowledgment and interpretation of such new meaning can only be a work of love. Vetö’s concept of newness breaks away from the common idea that regards the new in essential continuity with the old as an organic development or an addition. True novelty is discontinuous with what was the case before; it occurs at the price of ruptures and its preeminent sphere is free human action where the leap of self-surpassing leads nature beyond itself and opens a way for becoming a different being and the constant possibility of ‘being otherwise’. e highest instance of novelty, therefore, is linked to the highest degree of freedom and the truest form of otherness. is is what Vetö terms ‘renewing newness’ (nouveauté novatrice): an unforeseen and unforeseeable dynamic reality, the creative power to change into a different being and the potential to construe the unparalleled unicity of the other person. e major paradigms of such renewing newness are God’s free and autonomous acts of creatio ex nihilo, on the one hand, and the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, on the other, since both acts disclose originary structures of openness to become different and bring about radical change. Underlying such an account of novelty is a non-traditional understanding of the metaphysical concept of potentiality where potentiality means more than the simple actualization of the possible or a lesser state compared to actuality. What Vetö terms ‘active potentiality’ is a dynamic and creative principle of becoming, an access to a more; it is the aptitude and capability for growth and effective self-surpassing which brings about the opening of nature towards a prolific excess characteristic of Otherness by leaving behind the sealed kingdom of the same. Such renewed understanding of active potentiality results in a departure from the traditional concept of perfection as the highest accomplishment of actualized potentiality and leads to the surprising claim that – rather than being the fulness of self-realization – perfection is the power of self-limitation, of becoming less, of being otherwise. e concepts of newness and love are both determined by the logic of active potentiality and self-limiting perfection. Vetö’s expanded metaphysics as “the chronicle of the occurrence of novelty”8 is at the same time a “metaphysics of love”9 where investigation into the reality and operations of renewing newness leads to the 8

Vetö, The Expansion of Metaphysics, 21. On the various facets of Vetö’s metaphysics of love, see Balázs Mezei “A szeretet metafizikája [A Metaphysics of Love],” 177-187; and Mezei, “Megújító 9

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discovery of its ultimate ground as love. Newness and love are interconnected in his account in several ways and although the theme of love receives a discursive treatment only at some stages of the discussion, implicitly it governs the entirety of its themes.10 For ultimately, in his vision novelty as an act of freedom is a work of love and can only be recognized as such under the regime of love. Moreover, these two realities show a structural likeness and display analogous operations by realizing a leap, a rupture, a self-surpassing with regard to what is simply given according to nature. e features of leap, rupture, and selfsurpassing recognizable in newness point to the ecstatic self-exit of a donating source. True novelty – according to Vetö – obeys a logic which is not of the ontological order, but the order of love. And while he lays down the metaphysical foundations of his innovative ‘agapology’ in the expanded metaphysics, he offers a more systematic and in-depth treatment in his treatise on love which at the same time demonstrates the fruitfulness of a novel conceptual framework in actual operation.11 2. What Is Love? – Some Sources of Inspiration Before considering some of the key features of Vetö’s agapology, it may be useful to take a short look at what seem to be important sources of inspiration underlying his account: the classification of medieval conceptions of love by Pierre Rousselot and the trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.12 While there are only a few explicit references made to these authors in Vetö’s book, their ideas are illuminating for a better understanding of the shape of Vetö’s project. In a classical study, Rousselot offers an analysis of texts by twelhthirteenth century theologians and mystical writers and discerns in them újdonság: Vető Miklós gondolati architektonikája [Renewing Newness: e Architectonics of the ought of Miklós Vetö],” in Megújító újdonság, 117-131. 10 e parts explicitly devoted to the discussion of love can be found in the second half of Chapter ree (titled: “Newness: Figures and Paths”): “Love,” “Sacrifice,” Double Asymmetry,” “Faithfulness,” “Towards the ird” (67-75) and in various passages of the next two chapters (IV and V) on “e Singular” and “e Unique.” It also figures prominently in the final, synthesizing chapter (XIII) in the discussion concerning the good. 11 Vetö, Court traité sur l’amour. 12 I do not attempt here to give a full overview of authors who have inspired Vetö’s thought (the list would be numerous), but I want to restrict the discussion to what I take as two representative accounts which may help in the understanding of Vetö’s main concerns and which serve as focal points where the rest of influences converge.

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two distinct models concerning the essence of love: one he describes as the Greco-omist physical conception, and another he identifies as the ecstatic conception.13 Authors of the Greco-omist physical conception embrace a metaphysical framework where love is understood in terms of a natural (hence ‘physical’ ) inclination of all beings towards the good. Such universal appetition characterizes the entire reality of beings from inanimate objects to rational human persons: they all display an inherent natural desire for their own good. e free acts of human love – defined as willing the good of another person – are regarded as being founded by this universal metaphysical dynamism. Since God is the supreme Good, the various forms of love discernible in the hierarchical structure of created beings show a certain continuity by ultimately and implicitly having a common intentional object, namely, God. Accordingly, various modes of human love – love of self, of one’s neighbor and God – are viewed as forming a seamless continuity among themselves by being instances of the same universal craving for the good identified with God. What comes to the fore from Rousselot’s explorations is the interesting fact that while this medieval model of love is metaphysically well founded, it is phenomenologically rather thin when it comes to accounting for the richness and essence of interpersonal love. By contrast, the ecstatic conception – although it lacks a clear metaphysical foundation or a systematic conceptual framework14 – is particularly rich in intuition concerning the interpersonal act of human loving. Love in this context is exclusively linked with personhood, it is not seen as an operation of nature but as a free personal act of self-abandonment and an ecstatic reaching from one person to another. inkers of this trend emphasize the essential duality of love which, as they argue, can only occur between two independent persons, being at once a reciprocal gi and a bond between them that brings about the union of two autonomous partners. Consequently, adherents of the ecstatic model posit an essential discontinuity between love of self and the love of another person whereby self-love is dismissed as a non-representative instance of love. According to them, love is in essence relation to a real and autonomous other, it always tends toward someone else. Moreover, such ecstatic

13 Pierre Rousselot, The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages, trans. Alan Vincelette (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001). (e French original was published in 1908). 14 As Rousselot notes, the ecstatic model can be found in texts of various standing and without a concern for systematization (in sermons, meditations, lyrical passages).

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turning towards another person whereby one is pulled out of oneself towards the other has no cause outside of itself, it carries with itself its own justification as well as its final end. It occurs as a violent force within the person, without any reason or cause, pushing him or her towards ecstatic self-exit. In these discussions the idea of person is implicitly set over against the idea of nature and the superiority of the former is assumed. While Rousselot’s preference goes for the Greco-omist conception, it is not difficult to infer from what has been said so far that Vetö, by contrast, draws inspiration from the ecstatic model which he develops into an innovative systematic account where key elements of an expanded metaphysics (especially the concepts of newness, singularity, and personhood) provide sound metaphysical foundations for a wealth of phenomenological detail. Unlike authors of the ecstatic model, Vetö does not deny the continuity of various forms of love. However, – unlike members of the Greco-omist tradition –, he does not base continuity on a metaphysics of the good as a natural and ultimate object of love, but takes the idea of intersubjective generous self-exit for another person’s sake as an alternative paradigm for the ultimate unity of various types of love. For the implementation of this project he finds reliable ally in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s trinitarian theology where the inner life of the trinitarian persons is described in terms of a mutual gi of self in an eternal communion of love.15 Famously, von Balthasar’s aim is to complement a mostly one-sided tradition of psychological trinitarian models by a renewed social model which takes seriously the biblical statement that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). If the divine essence is love, then it must coincide with the love-relations of the trinitarian persons who are not simply subsistent relations, but also the outcome of such relations as divine persons and their mutual love is the supreme realization and the original archetype of love as an interpersonal reality. Such interpersonal divine love is characterized by von Balthasar as an eternal dynamism of superabundant donation, selfopening, the giving away of all one has, an unconstrained gi of self and an equally free reception of such a gi. e divine processions are understood here in terms of a primal kenosis (Urkenosis) where the eternal love of the Father consists in giving his entire divinity away to the Son in the manner of a kenotic self-emptying whereby a mysterious separation of 15 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. IV: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1984).

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God from Godself occurs which grounds the possibility of every other separation. e Son’s answer is an equally kenotic reception of his consubstantial divinity as the Father’s gi. e Balthasarian idea of kenotic love displays the unity of divine omnipotence and powerlessness. Kenotic love underscores a specific understanding of the divine perfection as a dynamism of constant becoming, an ever greater, ever more which is open to the surprising novelty of mutual giing and also the possibility of omnipotent and free self-limitation. is is the basis and archetype of the kenotic act of creating the world as autonomous other to God and of the Son’s historical salvific mission in the Incarnation.16 Very cursorily, these are the major Balthasarian insights which apparently inspire Vetö’s thought on the nature of love and elicit the working out of a corresponding metaphysical scheme. 3. Love in Operation: Innovations In the Court traité sur l’amour, Vetö proceeds by small steps in concentric circles, constantly deepening and widening the perspective in which the essence of love becomes intelligible. His primary aim is not to give a proper definition of what love is, instead, what interests him most is the way love conditions human existence and human action as an overall horizon. Within this framework, any definition can only be the result of a careful and attentive analysis of how love operates. To complement such a task he introduces a series of innovations that help in setting the issue in an entirely new light. e first and key area of innovation is a radical shi in perspective, a move away from a naturalist account of love (see the Greco-omist physical conception identified by Rousselot) as a universal inclination for the good towards what one may term a social model (in the analogy of social models of the Trinity) transposed to the personal sphere of intersubjectivity (heir to Rousselot’s ecstatic model). Vetö’s surprising and repeated claim is that – despite a long Aristotelian-Christian tradition to the contrary – the intentional object of love must not be regarded as being the good, but another person in its singularity and irrespective of

16 On Vetö’s analyses of the way the divine kenosis is turned into a paradigm of human love in the thought of Simone Weil see Emmanuel Gabellieri, “Kenózis és teremtés: Simone Weiltől a metafizika kiterjesztéséig” [original title of the conference paper: Kénose et creation: de Simone Weil à l’élargissement de la métaphysique], trans. Anikó Ádám, in Megújító újdonság, 141-155.

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his or her properties.17 Love is a category which cannot be understood from the operation of nature (regarded as a realm of necessity); it has nothing to do with natural inclination or desire for a quality, such as, the good; it is the free act of turning towards another person, and aims at her or his entire being as a person. Love aims at nothing else but love, it targets a person equally capable of loving. Vetö re-reads the entire tradition of naturalist interpretation as a failed effort to personalize the Ultimate Good in terms of self-diffusion and demonstrates its insufficiency to leave the sphere of the natural (self-diffusion being aer all still an act following from nature) and enter the free realm of moral action which – according to him – is the only true horizon of donation and love. For it is precisely the Aristotelian-omistic reply to the question of what the intentional object of God’s love is that reveals the conceptual impasse a naturalist conception of love necessarily leads to. To maintain that God loves the supreme good which is Godself is, in Vetö’s view, narcissistic circularity, lacking any real insight into the true nature of love that can only be understood by approaching the dynamism of inner-trinitarian life, the foundational paradigm of inter-relationality. And here we touch upon another innovative feature of Vetö’s approach which – albeit its primary goal of exploring human love – nonetheless starts from above, from a consideration of the love between the trinitarian persons, their love towards the finite human being and the love of the human being for God.18 Such starting point is necessary because divine love is the condition of possibility of all loves as their originating source and initial archetype. Divine love also allows for the replacement of a metaphysics of nature (in terms of the general craving for the good) with a metaphysics of freedom. Vetö is convinced that love is not to be understood on the basis of God’s essence or nature, but from the trinitarian relations, although, obviously, the two coincide in the Godhead. He reads elements of the Balthasarian theology of inner-trinitarian relationships in this light and deduces from it his own conceptual construal of a social model of love which takes into account the entire reality of the process of loving as a complex dynamism between a plurality of actors – and this points to the third area of innovation. Rather than describing the characteristic features of love as a static noun, Vetö primarily regards it as action (aimer), as an exchange of free acts of loving between autonomous persons, the founding principles of which he finds in the inner trinitarian life of love and in the economic 17 18

See, for example, Court traité, 19-28. ese are the themes of the first three chapters (19-62).

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trinitarian love between God and the free human being. He interprets trinitarian love as a paradigmatic synthesis of the two key dimensions of relation and otherness where relation creates the difference of true otherness and otherness ensures genuine relation epitomized by the trinitarian relations as described in the theology of von Balthasar.19 To love is to relate to another as a real other and the union it creates does not abolish the radical autonomy of lovers. Trinitarian love is the open exchange of unconditional and gratuitous self-giving and reception which is ceaseless renewal and growth, without ceasing to be perfection – notably, Vetö’s idea of divine perfection is not incompatible with positive/active potentiality as a power to realize the always ‘more’ of love and the surprise of novelty. Divine love is renewing newness and the supreme a priori synthesis of relation and otherness where the radical autonomy of lovers consists in their equally radical unity. Relation and otherness are both rooted in this original and mysterious synthesis. Can one conceive God’s love for the created finite human being in continuity with the dynamism of inner trinitarian love? How can the infinite love the finite and in what way may the finite be loveable for the infinite? ese are the questions Vetö seeks to answer by widening his critique of the naturalist scheme. In the case of such descending love and an asymmetrical relation the intentional object of love must be likewise thought in personalist terms: divine love aims at neither the good inherent in the created world nor the goodness of the human subject, but at the free human person who is capable of loving. As Vetö argues, the highest degree of donation is to give – besides one’s existence – the ability to love. God’s creative love is the counterpart of the love between the trinitarian persons in letting otherness be truly other and in accepting the self-gi of another. However, it is within such a relationship that the kenotic element of divine love comes more visibly to the fore. Vetö interprets the act of creation in terms of a kenotic self-limitation, a gi of letting otherness exist and the sovereign freedom to make oneself needy, a ‘beggar of human love’. What is at stake here is the possibility of an asymmetrical but nonetheless entirely real relationship between divine

19 e key concepts of otherness and relation/openness/love would have served as the two pillars of Vetö’s uncompleted philosophy of God, the outlines of which are presented in two of Vetö’s papers on the topic: “Isten filozófiai megközelítése [Approche philosophique de Dieu],” in Megújító újdonság, trans. Dániel Schmall, 178-186; and “Dieu. Concept philosophique,” an unpublished lecture delivered at Sapientia College of eology, Budapest (30.11.2017).

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and human freedoms which imitates in a non-identical manner the dynamism of intra-divine love. It is self-exit and self-abandonment, even diminution for the sake of another and the reception of a counter gi of finite love. While there is ontological inequality between the lovers, the love between them is not to be measured on a quantitative scale, the two respective freedoms are genuine counterparts to one another. Love between unequal and asymmetrical partners does not mean noncorrespondence or the lack of real exchange. A corresponding question concerns the way the finite being should love God and here Vetö stresses the analogy between what he terms ‘descending inequality’ (an essential feature of God’s love for the human being) and ‘ascending inequality’ (characterizing the human person’s love for God) since both forms of love operate according to a similar kenotic logic; both of them are realized through ‘ruptures, gaps, and fissures’ since they do not belong to the continuity of nature, but follow the logic of free self-exit for another. In this context too the good as the intentional object of love is excluded. True love for God is the counterpart of divine kenosis since, in the final resort, one should not love God for any of God’s gis (that is, the good) but solely for Godself – as mystical writers insist by paradoxically separating gi and giver. And here again, one can see the essential continuity between the way God loves and the operation of finite human love: neither God, nor the human being aim at the good, but the loving subject. Against such transcendental-vertical background, aer an analysis of the ‘eidetic prehistory of love’,20 Vetö turns to the investigation of various forms of human loving and demonstrates, throughout his insightful analyses, the structural likeness between vertical and horizontal operations of love. What are the basic principles of Vetö’s social model as a creative synthesis of relation and otherness in the horizontal realm? A remarkably innovative feature of his conceptualization of the complex dynamism of loving is a move away from a radical economy of unilaterality towards duality as the quintessence of love.21 While he carefully avoids the pitfalls of situating love-exchange within the horizon of

20

See Court traité, 63-74. Marion, for example, thinks in terms of such radical unilaterality, stressing also the strictly non-reciprocal nature of love: “I have the sovereign freedom to make myself a lover […] I become amorous simply because I want to, without any constraint, according to my sole, naked desire.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 93. 21

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univocal give-and-take reciprocity, he likewise steers clear of the twin danger of denying any reciprocity at all. In his scheme, love as relation between two subjects who are capable of loving is gratuitous gi of self which calls for a real response, but which is characterized by ‘double asymmetry’ whereby the partners love unconditionally and gratuitously, without a veritable counterpart (because the end of their love is a genuine other who is entirely different) or a proportional object (because the qualities of the intentional object do not determine their love). is does not mean, though, that there is non-correspondence or non-correlation between the two loves. It only reveals the non-quantitative and noncalculable nature of mutual acts of loving be it one between partners of an equal status (in conjugal love or in the love between siblings) or one of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of partners (the descending love of parents for their children or the ascending love of children for their parents): the principle of asymmetry and, what we may call, paradoxical nonreciprocal reciprocity equally apply to all. e other pole of the social model – the concept of otherness – is likewise set in a new light by Vetö’s approach which puts great emphasis on demonstrating that love both generates and guarantees true otherness. Love as union and ‘being-with-another’ does not result in fusion or the loss of one’s autonomous self but is creative and procreative in analogy with God’s act of creation which brings about beings who are genuine others and preserves them in their autonomy. Similarly, human love has the power to ‘create’ new others (through the procreative act of calling children into being) and is also capable of confirming the other in his otherness, making the other more other (rendre l’autre plus autre).22 e insightful coherence of Vetö’s novel perspective becomes even more visible when this principle is applied to the traditionally difficult test-case of self-love. Taking issue with proponents of the medieval ecstatic model or Marion’s recent skepticism concerning the real possibility of self-love,23 Vetö convincingly argues that self-love becomes more meaningful when interpreted in the reversed perspective of otherness rather than sameness. In other words, it is not self-love that must serve as a basis for the love of others, conversely, the logic of love for another is equally at work in love of the self. One must love oneself as another, as a real you and see others as sui generis others, not simply as other 22

See the chapter on the other as the intentional object of love. Court traité, 99-113. 23 In The Erotic Phenomenon Marion finds self-love problematic because love, in his view, needs a genuine other who alone can deliver one to oneself, 41-66.

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instances of me. Once again Vetö argues for the inadequacy of the naturalist interpretation which thinks in terms of the good as the intentional object of self-love: to love oneself for the good one has/is renders the idea egoistic and to say that in loving oneself one loves a transcending greater good, does not solve the problem. e intentional object of self-love too is a real other, a you: myself as another. 4. Perspectives So where does this leave one? Our necessarily cursory overview of this grand project has revealed the benefits of an interesting interaction between philosophical enquiry and theological reflection. In the new role of ancilla philosophiae theology witnesses the deconstruction of its neat system. However, at the same time it receives a new possibility to start innovative construction work on the basis of its philosophically recast building blocks. e reappropriation of such metaphysically reworked and phenomenologically enriched theological themes may fruitfully fertilize reflection on the nature of trinitarian personhood, the hopelessly complicated debate on the relationship between human freedom and grace, or theological anthropological issues concerning human love commitments towards God and fellow humans. Vetö’s social understanding of love as a dynamic and permanent process between interacting partners may also be illuminating for moral theology in its reflections on marriage (and Vetö’s insightful phenomenological analyses of the dynamism of conjugal love may prove particularly helpful in this respect).24 e demonstration of the relationship between love and the unicity of the person may be inspirational for a moral theological grounding of the worth of personhood, especially in extreme cases, such as the worth of embryonic existence, and on this issue too one finds valuable insight in Vetö’s thought.25 One thing is sure: Vetö’s expansion of metaphysics has resulted in a genuine widening of the horizon where love may be discussed and his comprehensive survey of the basic principles of loving has definitely given new impetus to the study of this perennially intriguing creative source of novelty.

24 25

See the chapter on conjugal love in Court traité, 149-163. Ibid., 189-194.

15 Toward a Dialogical Approach of Tradition, Allowing for Coherent Self-Criticism Emmanuel Durand, O.P.*

From the point of view of systematic theology, it is common to conceive of Revelation as a primordial event whose transmission and interpretation is ensured by tradition. Such a representation bears some element of truth, but it must be inserted into a broader vision, which goes back to God the Trinity, in order to be fully consistent with the evangelical witness and its goal of conversion. We will begin here by stating some defining features of Revelation along the biblical axis and by identifying three polarities of it: its eventful and everyday character, gestures and words, external manifestations and internal teaching. We will then see how the Gospels situate the act of tradition, not only downstream but also upstream of the revelation accomplished by Christ Jesus. e act of tradition ultimately goes back to God the Father who generates the Son and commissions him. We will pay attention to the various subjects of active tradition. Finally, we will examine the growth or progress of tradition, as well as the need for reforms or purifications, especially those required by a true understanding of the Scriptures. Here we support a ‘high’ conception of tradition, in the sense that it is initiated by God and remains theological in nature. However, such a vision must be counterbalanced by attention to the distinction, sometimes uncertain in concrete terms, between the tradition of Revelation and the religious or cultural traditions that accompany it. According to an empirical approach, before being a theological reality within a salvific design, tradition is an anthropological, social, and cultural phenomenon. * For their suggestions when reading a first dra of this essay, I express my gratitude to Jeremiah Batram, Christophe Chalamet, Catherine E. Clifford, Guillaume Cuchet, Hervé Legrand, Christoph eobald, and Guido Vergauwen. Of course, their suggestions and criticisms do not make them responsible for any errors or statements taken in these pages. I am delighted to offer this text as an homage to my doctoral thesis co-supervisor, Terrence Merrigan, whose theological guidance, realism, and hospitality I greatly appreciated in Leuven.

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Every tradition, even that of the Gospel, can be questioned from this angle.1 In order to avoid giving in to the mirage of a chemically pure transmission, a high conception of tradition must also give way to a ‘conversation’ among the people of God (including other churches) and to listening to the cries of the world. is fosters a dynamic of growth in the perception of the Gospel, with potential coherent criticisms or corrections of the tradition by itself, by virtue of a deeper reception of God’s word. 1. The Revelation, Event and Teaching Divine revelation is basically God’s communication of his very life and his plan of salvation.2 God reveals himself in stages to his people Israel, following the unfolding of election, with a view to a long-term companionship. God chooses and elevates a particular people, without worldly power, to the rank of witness par excellence of the divine predilection. Israel has the vocation to be a sign for all nations. e Chosen People oscillates between fidelity and counter-witness. Divine revelation then follows the paths of a long-term parental education, with frequent disappointments and a commitment to inexhaustible resources (cf. Hos 11:111; Ezek 16). A dialogue of revelation is established. God always keeps the initiative in the addressed word. is conversation is oriented toward a growing communication of life that constitutes the foundation for the friendship of grace between God and humanity.3 e covenant draws the horizon of Revelation. According to the biblical narrative, divine revelation is delivered through encounters, words, and actions that oen become a significant event in the memory of the Chosen People. From this angle, let us recognize the eventful character of Revelation. Following a phenomenological approach, the event upsets the usual and predictable course of a domesticated world, insofar as the irruption of the unexpected provokes a new deal. is forces the protagonists and witnesses of the event 1 See Pierre Gisel, Qu’est-ce qu’une tradition? Ce dont elle répond, son usage, sa pertinence (Paris: Hermann, 2017), especially 11-35 and 145-156; MarieDominique Chenu, “Tradition et sociologie de la foi,” in Église et tradition, ed. Johannes Betz and Heinrich Fries (Le Puy: Xavier Mappus, 1963), 225-232. For a philosophical analysis, inspired by Plato, see Josef Pieper, Über den Begriff der Tradition (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1958). 2 See Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, no. 2. 3 See Paul VI, Ecclesiam suam, no. 67; Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, nos. 2, 8, 21, and 25.

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to reconfigure their vision of the world and their commitment to it, because it is no longer the system to which they were accustomed, in which they could act with confidence.4 e characteristics of the event are well suited to key moments in the (told) story of the Revelation. e great narrative of the people of Israel can be read as a succession of periods inaugurated by the gi of a new revelation – new by its degree, scope or purpose. us, the prophets, judges, and kings of the biblical narrative are the key links in a chain of narrated events. e new thresholds and pivotal moments in the Revelation narrative open up new sequences of reception, exploration, and appropriation of the gi received. Each new occurrence of the Revelation implies an upheaval, initiates a reconfiguration and calls for a long and progressive assimilation. It is therefore possible to identify phases of biblical prophecy. For example, omas Aquinas believed that prophecy follows three great temporal sequences in terms of the knowledge of the mystery of God: before the Law, under the Law, and under grace. Within each of these periods the following rule applies: the initial revelation is the major one, in the period that it inaugurates. At various stages of the great Revelation narrative, a major prophetic figure receives a higher revelation, which is then unpacked and deepened by other prophets and interpreters, through the sequence that the first prophet inaugurated.5 Although biblical revelation is historically based, with a dominant emphasis on events, the unfolding does not depend solely on events, whether these are God’s deeds or events of speech, such as decisive challenges or missionary commissions. Revelation is also delivered through the continuous witness of creation and through the secular wisdom that circulates in the daily life of the common world of the Jews. e laws governing ordinary activities or relationships, the song of creation and the maxims of wisdom manifest that divine revelation is not only heard in an event-driven way. In the tradition of Israel, God’s sovereignty is confessed even in the non-events of ordinary life, even in the desolation that makes one cry out to God. A constant feature of biblical revelation is to be accomplished by the conjunction of actions and words. Without the witness of actions, gestures or signs, words would be constantly subject to doubt or suspicion. 4 See Claude Romano, L’événement et le monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 35-77. 5 See omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 174, a. 6. Aquinas considers that Abraham knew God’s omnipotence; Moses, his simplicity; the Apostles, the Trinity.

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Without the determination of words, communicated orally or in writing, actions would be deprived of their revelatory interpretation. e complementarity between gestures and words espouses the noetic condition of human witnesses and listeners of divine revelation. e synergy between action and word gives to our incarnated minds an appropriate access to the graces and mysteries communicated by God.6 Actions and words are not intended to fascinate the recipients of Revelation, at the risk of erecting a barrier, but to lead them to the depths of God’s wisdom through the appropriation of his plan of grace. For a divine revelation to be received, it is not enough for God to manifest himself through outward actions and words. It is also necessary that he address at the same time the mind and heart of the recipients of his revelation. e human heart must be opened by God himself in order to enter into the spiritual intelligence of the sensitive and intelligible components of the Revelation delivered in terms of signs, actions, and words. God’s inner teaching, whether seen as a word or as an “anointing” (1 Jn 2:20), enables the recipients of the tangible signs and external words to be led to their spiritual meaning and to access the divine realities thus communicated. e synergy between inner and outer teaching, by word and deed, is most evident in the ministry of Christ in the gospels.7 As the Word made flesh, he combines external preaching, gestures of salvation, and intimate action in the hearts of its listeners. e polarities of Revelation are found in its tradition. Tradition is a transmission not only of words but also of gestures, not only of discursive knowledge but also of know-how and a way of life. Tradition is underpinned not only by a memory of salvific events and by a longlasting external teaching, but also by an internal teaching addressed by God to each believing subject. In Revelation, God uses both external manifestation and internal revelation in synergy, as part of his design.

6 See Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, no. 2. e dogmatic constitution on Revelation avoids, on the one hand, an intellectualist reduction of Revelation identified only with words and, on the other hand, the alternative position that univocally places Revelation in events. Instruction is here included into an integral and personal communication. See Henri de Lubac, “Commentaire du préambule et du chapitre I,” in Vatican II: La Révélation divine, vol. I, ed. BernardD. Dupuy (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 66-71; Emmanuel Durand, “Understanding Revelation according to a Sacramental Mode,” Nova et Vetera 18, no. 2 (2020): 443-459. 7 See Pawel Klimczak, Christus Magister: Le Christ Maître dans les commentaires évangéliques de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Fribourg/CH: Academic Press, 2013), 113-209.

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erefore, without reception by human individuals and by a community of faith, it would be incomplete. Without such an intimate revelation in the heart of believers, public revelation would not be recognized and welcomed.8 e inner dimension of the revelation transmitted makes possible the maturation and actualization of the tradition, especially on the part of simple or holy souls. By virtue of such an interior anointing, tradition implies not only teaching transmitted by an authority, but also a dimension of conversation between pastors and faithful.9 2. Tradition, Revelation, Tradition rough the memory of the Chosen People, a tradition of faith links the key moments of the (told) story of Revelation. Tradition plays a different role before and aer Christ. From a Christian perspective, the tradition of Israel tends towards a fullness and supports the possibility of its coming, without being able to actualize it. e tradition that comes from Christ is the transmission of the fullness, kept alive and made actual by the Spirit in the time of the Church. Before the coming of Christ, the tradition of Israel carries the Revelation in the process of unfolding. A dynamic of transmission, newness, and reception is repeatedly accomplished through the successive phases of the narrative of prophetic revelation. e tradition of the Chosen People provides the Revelation with its supporting axis. Genesis offers here a beautiful illustration. Genesis 5–11 unfolds the generations that stretch

8

According to omas Aquinas in the Lectura super Ioannem, Christ is the only Master who can teach human beings both from within and without (see Sup. Io. 1, 43, ed. Marietti, 1952, no. 313; 3, 2, no. 428; 13, 13, no. 1775), in synergy with the Spirit (see Sup. Io. 14, 26, no. 1958). By interior revelation, we do not mean here a ‘private revelation’ of new contents, but the intimate gi of the light of faith (and possibly of a prophetic light) which allows us to shed light with accuracy and depth on what public revelation gives us to believe, to deepen or to rediscover. 9 In his brief philosophical treatise on tradition (see n. 1), Josef Pieper formally excludes the dimension of dialogue, because of the non-reciprocity of the relationship between the one who transmits and the one who receives. It seems to me that this feature must be adjusted when applied to Christian tradition, because of the interior teaching received from God by each believer in order to adhere to the transmitted revelation and, eventually, to transmit it in turn. ere is indeed an objective authority of what is transmitted, which induces an asymmetry in the relationship between transmitter and receiver, but the active receiving part of the believing subjects can foster a conversation between transmitters and receivers, as the innovative teachings of the saints testify at will.

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from Adam to Abram through Noah and Shem. Abram’s father set out before the word of the Lord was spoken to his son (Gen 11:31). Abram’s call is implied by his father’s unfinished migration. An immemorial chain of transmission of the election precedes the newness of the covenant between God and Abraham. Christ Jesus is both the heir and the turning point of this long chain of tradition, as is evident in the final unhooking of the genealogy according to Matthew: “Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was begotten, who is called Christ” (Mt 1:16). From the advent of Christ and the Easter sequence (Passion, Resurrection, Pentecost), Revelation, now accomplished, is handed over through a long tradition, of which Jesus Christ is the initiator and the apostolic generation the relay. e tradition does not intervene only aer the Revelation, from the point of view of reception. e Revelation is prepared, accompanied, and carried by a tradition in act. However, a few distinctions must be made, both temporal and essential. From a Christian perspective, the tradition of Israel is dispositive in relation to Old Testament revelation which tends towards fulfillment. Tradition is then the support and the vector of a revelation in the process of unfolding. Starting from the revelation accomplished by Christ Jesus, tradition becomes the reception and transmission of the fullness that has come to pass. Apostolic tradition intervenes as the first complete objectification of the Revelation. It is a constitutive moment of the Christian faith as an integral response to the accomplished revelation. Ecclesial tradition gathers the fullness of grace received from Christ through the apostolic generation and actualizes the transforming power of the Gospel in various contexts throughout the ages. Tradition is, therefore, the vehicle of Revelation and opens the field for a prolonged conversation between God and his people. In the experience of Christian communities, listening to Revelation and its active reception go hand in hand. In the apostolic generation, a first response to Revelation has been integrated into its transmission through the canon of the Scriptures.10 In each era, the reception of the Revelation transmitted is part of the constitution of the ecclesial tradition that carries on to the following generations.11 In order to be able to listen in truth, one must allow oneself to be transformed. ere is no neutral perception. e 10

See Michel Gourgues, “Plus tard tu comprendras”: La formation du Nouveau Testament (Paris: Cerf; Montréal: Médiaspaul, 2019), 167-171. 11 See Yves Congar, La Tradition et les traditions. II: Essai théologique (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1963), 76.

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innovative (and at times astounding) contents of Revelation unfold over time and are updated in practice through a long work of tradition. e fullness of the Gospel has not finished unfolding its effects of challenge and conversion. Certainly, the Church is holy in her mystery, proclamation, and sacramentality, but she is not yet holy in all her members nor in all her concrete ways of living her mystery, preaching and sacramentality.12 e pilgrim Church remains challenged by her Lord for the conversion of her members (cf. Revelation 2–3). e relationship between Revelation and tradition would be better understood as an actualization of fullness than as a sequence from simple listening to prolonged reception. Actualization concerns the power of interpellation and conversion stemming from this wholeness, which can be obscured in many ways in the complex process of tradition, not only by the receiving subjects but also by de facto traditions, falsely confused with the transmitted Gospel.13 3. The Act of Tradition Goes Back to God Himself Finally, tradition cannot be considered only according to a temporal logic, for the act of tradition goes back to God himself in his own life. To see this, we must turn to the witness of the synoptic gospels. In a primordial way, God transmits all his goods to Jesus, his Son, so that he in turn may communicate them to the recipients of Revelation (Mt 11:27; Lk 10:22; Jn 16:15). Let us focus here on the third gospel.14 In the Lukan composition, the exultation of Jesus in his mission of Revelation immediately follows the initiation into joy given to the seventy-two disciples when they return from their first mission with enthusiasm. Jesus invites them to pass from the joy of the first successes, somewhat exhilarating, to a higher joy, that of the election that presides over every sending (Lk 10:20). e reason for joy lies at the beginning of the mission, in the act of receiving everything in order to transmit the Gospel, according to the Father’s benevolent design (eudokia), leaving to the Father the singular primacy of hiding or revealing. Following this 12 See Emmanuel Durand, Jusqu’où ouvrir le livre? Brève théologie des Écritures (Paris: Cerf, 2021), 95-103 and 196-199. 13 See Joseph Ratzinger, “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. III, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 183, 185, and 193. 14 Allow me here to draw from observations already sketched as the conclusion of my book entitled: Dieu Trinité: Communion et transformation (Paris: Cerf, 2016), 221-229.

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sequence of initiation, Jesus rejoices and marvels at the gi of Revelation, of which he is both witness and mediator. At that same hour [Jesus] rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden (apokruptô) these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to infants (nèpiois); yes, Father, for such was your gracious will (eudokia). All things have been delivered (paradidômi) to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Lk 10:21-22 RSV Cath. Ed.).

Surprisingly, the actions of hiding and revealing, of veiling and unveiling, are presented by Jesus as two symmetrical acts of the Father. It is not said that the object of revelation is hidden by nature, in a habitual way, in such a way that the proper act of God would be exclusively to reveal it. Not only unveiling but also veiling are positive acts of God. ere is no permanent state of veiling followed by an act of unveiling, but of two symmetrical acts: veiling to some, unveiling to others. e act of hiding challenges the believer. e verb used (apokruptô) comes up three times in the Pauline corpus, in connection with ‘wisdom’ or ‘mystery’ kept hidden (1 Cor 2:7-10; Eph 3:8-11; Col 1:25-27). e mystery is kept in reserve to be revealed to the saints. Hiding would not be a definitive act of closure or refusal, but a moment within the complete economy of Revelation. However, God’s two acts of veiling and unveiling are not arbitrary. ey are related to two instances: first, the various categories of recipients, and secondly, the Father’s benevolent design (eudokia), that is, a will imbued with goodness. With respect to the recipients, there is a clear contrast between the wise and the little ones. is expresses the noncontinuity between the wisdom of the world and divine revelation. Divine revelation is not the end point of worldly wisdom. More than a simple discontinuity, there is a clear inversion between the claim of human wisdom and receptivity to divine revelation. However, the veil does not depend on the supposed wisdom of the wise, but wholly on God, who hides or discloses as he wills. Jesus attributes to God the initiative to hide what he wants from the wise and reveal what he chooses to the little ones. Although there is a correspondence between hiding from one and revealing to the other, their respective conditions do not command such veiling or revealing by God. Rather, it is determined solely by the sovereignty of the Father, who is Lord of heaven and earth – and of both the wise and the little ones. Eudokia is another name for such sovereignty, a term that indicates that it is both free and good.

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Implicitly, Jesus places himself, not on the side of the wise and skillful, but on the side of the little ones, since he will soon say that he himself has received everything from the Father. e Greek word used here is nepios, which means ‘child’. Jesus will soon call himself the Son. He is the child par excellence, the one who first receives everything from the Father. Aer having blessed the Father and enunciated the Father’s proper role, Jesus includes himself in the process of tradition. From this precise angle, he is the first of the little ones. To assert that everything has been given to him by the Father is theologically loaded, for two reasons. First, Jesus receives his whole life from the Father and transmits out of this very life the totality of things revealed to him. is implies that there is no other mediator of Revelation in its fullness. Further, the verb used to qualify the act of handing over everything is paradidômi. It means both to transmit and to deliver, with the afore-mentioned double possibility of meaning: to hand over and/or to betray.15 Since everything has been handed over by the Father to Jesus, and Jesus in turn hands over everything, the very logic of TraditionRevelation already alludes to the Passion and the Cross.16 e reception of everything by the Son is the birth certificate of an active tradition-reception. is tradition is actualized in the mission of Jesus because it is fulfilled in a primordial way in God himself, through the transmission of eternal life from the Father to the Son. Jesus reports to the Father the initiative of the primordial act of tradition, which concerns the totality of things to be transmitted through the entire economy of Revelation. e totality given to Jesus is then qualified or sealed by the mutual, exclusive and ordered knowledge between the Father and the Son. Mutual knowledge is a consequence of total transmission. Indeed, the movement of knowledge (from the Father to the Son, then from the Son to the Father) presupposes the movement of the primordial tradition (from the Father to the Son). It is first affirmed that only the Father knows the Son, and then, reciprocally, that only the Son knows the Father. e path 15 Besides Lk 10:22, see Lk 9:44; 12:58; 18:32; 20:20; 21:12, 16; 22:6-21, 22, 48; 24: 7, 20. 16 Without taking the traditio back to the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, as we propose, the connection between (1) the ‘tradition’ of a man to the violence of men (Mk 1:14), (2) the ‘tradition’ of the Son through the Father (Rom 4:25; 8:32), (3) the ‘tradition’ of Christ through himself (Eph 5:2, 25; Gal 2:20), and (4) the ‘tradition’ of Revelation, is reflected, in particular, by Hansjürgen Verweyen, Gottes letztes Wort: Grundriß der Fundamentaltheologie (Regensburg: Pustet, 32000), 51-56.

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of mutual knowledge follows the movement of tradition-reception initiated by the Father. e primordial tradition establishes here a higher form of ‘conversation’, reciprocal though asymmetrical, in the mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son. An eternal tradition commands the conversation of the Father and the Son, of which Revelation is the extension offered to human beings. e Son is the depositary of such a totality and gives it as a gi to whomever he wishes. In an astonishing way, the will of the Son operates here as a singularization of the Father’s plan. e eudokia justified a preferential relationship to the little ones, approached as a category, while the will of the Son joins the singular recipients – the particular ones whom he is actually addressing. In the narrative perspective of the gospel, the will of the Son refers to his calls, his encounters, his choices, his predilections. He addresses himself not only to individuals, but also to crowds. Moreover, the act of the Son is qualified by the same verb as the positive act of the Father: to unveil-reveal (apokaluptô). It is not said of the Son that he hides anything, but that he reveals just as the Father does. According to the semantics of revelation attested in Matthew and Luke, the tradition does not only begin with the transmission of the Gospel (words and gestures) to the Twelve/Eleven and their companions, be it at the time of Jesus’ public ministry or in the aermath of Easter. Certainly, a solemn act of definitive tradition is performed by the Risen One, as recounted in the finale of Mt 28. However, the dynamic of transmission comes from much further away, as it goes back to the Father in his eternal life with the Son. Tradition originally links the Son who receives everything to the Father who gives everything to him, in view of Jesus’ ministry. Further, in Matthew, the chain of reception goes back to the Father: “He who receives you receives me; and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (Mt 10:40). As for the fourth gospel, the culmination of the tradition accomplished by Jesus is found in the gi of the Spirit. e transmission begins when Jesus explains the significance of the washing of the feet and enjoins his disciples to practice his gesture of humiliation (Jn 13:15). Here again, the chain of reception goes from the disciples to Jesus and from Jesus to the Father: “He who receives any one whom I send receives me; and he who receives me receives him who sent me” (13:20). Jesus’ final conversations with his disciples at the Last Supper resonate like a testament and announce the coming of the Spirit. According to the fourth gospel, the Spirit’s coming is fulfilled at Jesus’ death. e glorification of Jesus coincides with his ultimate downfall. erefore, the Spirit is received from the Cross. Jesus’ expiration is presented, with the help of the verb

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paradidômi, as a tradition of the Spirit to Mary and the beloved disciple (19:30; cf. 7:39). A second outpouring of the Spirit to the group of Twelve will take place on Easter evening (20:22). e same verb paradidômi is used by Paul in 1 Cor 11:23 and 15:3 to stamp the apostolic tradition of the Eucharist and the Gospel, a relay of the tradition operated by Jesus himself, through his preaching and at the Last Supper. Let us recapitulate. e tradition accomplished by Christ Jesus is evental and temporal, through his public ministry and then the Easter sequence. However, the tradition of the Gospel originates in the eternal relationship of the Father to the Son, where everything is transmitted in view of the revelation-tradition accomplished by Jesus, inclusive of the gi of the Spirit that opens a new temporal dimension. e Spirit accompanies the Church in the reception, understanding, and actualization of all that she has received from the revelation of Christ and from the apostolic tradition. 4. The Active Subjects of the Tradition To identify the subjects of the active tradition, we will proceed in a topdown manner. God is the first subject of the tradition, insofar as he is Father. As such, he begets the Son and gives him all his goods for the ministry of revelation and salvation. Only God the Father is author (auctor) in the proper sense, as the first origin.17 Here tradition is conceptually situated at the junction between eternal begetting and the sending of the Son into the world. rough the eternal gi of divine life to the Son, the Father equips him de facto for his mission as Revealer and Savior. It is the Son’s responsibility to communicate to those he chooses the riches of grace, the sharing of divine life, and the knowledge of God’s design. Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus Christ thus intervenes as the second subject of the actual tradition. He transmits the Gospel by his preaching, by his gestures and actions, by his way of life, by his familiarity with the disciples and by his commensality with sinners – in other words, by an integral ‘conversation’.18 e way of being of Christ Jesus and the sharing

17 See Congar, La Tradition et les traditions, II, 78; John Baptist Ku, God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 149-169. 18 See omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 40; Emmanuel Durand, “L’incarnation comme ‘conversation’ selon saint omas d’Aquin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 102 (2018): 561-610.

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of his life are teaching, formation, and transmission. As omas Aquinas states, “almost everywhere in the actions that [Christ] performs, the human is read as mixed with the divine and the divine with the human.”19 Christ forms his disciples by sharing his missionary life and he allows them to gradually appropriate what he reveals, so that they in turn can live it and transmit it to others. However, such an appropriation presupposes the gi of the Spirit, which intervenes as the third subject of the tradition. e latter takes over from Christ Jesus. e Spirit mediates in the Christian community and in hearts the active presence of the Risen One, once he has ascended to heaven.20 e Spirit spoke through the prophets of the Old Testament. He led the man Christ Jesus through his mission as Revealer. Beginning at Pentecost, the Spirit actualizes the teaching and formation that the apostles received from Christ during his pilgrim life with his disciples. roughout the life of the Church, the Spirit of the Risen One is the interior principle of unity of the true tradition of the Gospel, which must always be actualized in fidelity through the relay of human mediation.21 Beginning at Pentecost, the apostles are fully equipped to become, in turn and together, subjects of the tradition that passes through them from Christ to the Church. e mediation of the apostles is not limited to the group of Twelve, since Paul is constituted an apostle and others also receive this title, such as Barnabas (Acts 14:14). It belongs to the entire apostolic generation to live the pivotal stage of the tradition of faith as the first confessing and doctrinal objectification.22 e whole Church is in a position of both listening to and transmitting Revelation. She receives the tradition of Christ Jesus and the witness of the apostolic generation. e bishops, whose preaching office takes over from the mission of the apostles, are the guardians of the authenticity of the Christian faith. All the people of God are committed to the act of tradition from one generation to the next. e transmission is accomplished through Christian initiation in its dimensions of confession and practice: sacramental life, exercise of diakonia, witness and martyrdom, 19 omas Aquinas, Lectura super Ioannem 11, 33, n°1532: “ubique fere in factis suis mixta leguntur humana divinis, et divina humanis.” 20 See Marie-Laure Chaieb, “La Tradition, œuvre de l’Esprit selon Irénée de Lyon,” in La Tradition, œuvre de Dieu, ed. omas Alferi (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2013), 71-93. 21 See Congar, La Tradition et les traditions, II, 105-106. 22 A distinction must be made between the Twelve, the apostles and apostolicity; see Régis Burnet, “La notion d’apostolicité dans les premiers siècles,” Recherches de science religieuse 103 (2015): 185-202.

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learning of communion, modes of government, relationship to the world, etc. Ultimately, all members of the Christian community are the active subjects of the tradition, insofar as they witness to Christ the Savior, transmit the Christian faith (beginning with parents) and practice the various dimensions of charity. By virtue of their baptism, the faithful receive the “sense of faith” (sensus fidei), which is a property of the theological virtue of faith.23 It is a spiritual instinct that believers have to discern whether a particular teaching or practice is in conformity with the Gospel of Christ. It is an intuitive discernment, not a discursive one. It differs, however, from a mere opinion, whether individual or common, because it is based on baptismal participation in the prophetic function of Christ. Ideally, the sense of faith is expressed in a consensus of the entire Church, pastors and laity being animated by the same and unique Spirit. Historically, many of the Church’s doctrinal crises or indecisions have been overcome because of the firmness of the sensus fidei of the laity, while bishops have been divided or hesitant.24 rough a ministry received from Christ by the Church, pastors exercise a function of authentication and confirmation of the faith. is specific mission is realized when pastors experience and discern in the communion of the Church with the Spirit of Christ. e sensus fidei of the faithful and the cries of the world (challenges, provocations…) could lead the Church to include more lucidly the recipients of the Gospel in the process of tradition in action. On the one hand, the recipients of the preaching of the Gospel are themselves active – and at times inspired – subjects in the reception and transmission of the Gospel; on the other hand, their various modes of reception or challenge – listening, conversion, indifference, refusal, interpellation, scandal – reflect on ecclesial life and on the way the Church interprets divine tradition, so that the latter may make the “living voice of the Gospel” resound in this world as it is.25 23

See International eological Commission, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church” (2014); Lukasz Wisniewski, L’instinct ecclésial de la foi (Lumen Gentium 12, Dei Verbum 8) (Paris: Cerf, 2020), especially 247-254. 24 See John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859) (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 75-101. For a contrasted assessment, see Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Traditions, revised ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 25 See Christoph eobald, “Sensus fidei fidelium: Enjeux d’avenir d’une notion classique,” Recherches de science religieuse 104 (2016): 207-236, at 228-236.

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5. The Progression of Tradition and the Need for Reform e tradition of Revelation grows, not by adding new extrinsic contents, but by deepening and clarifying the events, graces, and mysteries of the revelation accomplished by Christ and completed by the sending of the Spirit. e Second Vatican Council described such progression as growth in the perception of the realities and words transmitted (cf. Dei Verbum, no. 8, §2). From generation to generation, believers never cease to appropriate the revealed mysteries, to meditate on them, to explore their depth and to reveal their implications. Such deepening is accomplished not only in a contemplative way, through attentive study or spiritual intelligence, but also in an apostolic way, in the face of the pastoral and contextual challenges of each age.26 In a notable way, the holy founders of new missionary movements have seen how the Gospel tradition could respond to new situations or cultural ruptures. To perceive in this way the relevance of the Gospel in new fields or hitherto unexplored implications of the salvation offered by Christ, is part of the growth of tradition as the transmission and consequent actualization of the one Gospel of Christ. 1. Identity and Continuity of Subject in Change e progression of tradition presupposes a fundamental identity of the Gospel transmitted. is implies a strong coherence and continuity of subject.27 If growth were to take place in the form of successive mutations, it would result in an alteration of the subject or the creation of another subject. ere would then be a substantial discontinuity. Such models of progress are not applicable to the Gospel of Christ. e indispensable identity of the transmitted subject was clearly formulated in the fih century by the monk Vincent of Lérins in his Commonitorium. It is debated whether or not this treatise, dated 434, fits into

26

It is legitimate to understand the crescendo of Dei Verbum, no. 8 in the literal sense as the affirmation of a simple homogeneous development of dogma, but it is also possible to broaden the perspective to better integrate historical factors, as was proposed aer Vatican II; see Yves Congar, “Church History as a Branch of eology,” Concilium 7 (1970): 85-96; Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 182-187. 27 My attention was drawn to this issue by Reinhard Hütter, “Progress, Not Alteration of the Faith: Beyond Antiquarianism and Presentism,” public lecture given at the Angelicum (Rome) on December 7, 2019.

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the context of the controversy (known as the semi-Pelagian) between the monks of Provence and Saint Augustine, concerning the role of will in the preparation to receive grace.28 e Commonitorium has oen been received as an indirect justification of the semi-Pelagian posture as opposed to the ‘novelty’ defended by Augustine, namely the radical priority of grace toward any act of the human will positively oriented toward the reception of grace. Whatever the controversial or uncontroversial context of the treatise, Vincent shows no attraction for novelty or change in doctrinal matters. Today, he would be considered an uncompromising ‘conservative’. is is not our focus here. We simply note the Commonitorium’s substantive argument. He argues that by fidelity to the tradition of Revelation, we must stick to what has been believed “always,” “everywhere” and “by everyone.” e criteria of true Catholic doctrine are thus antiquity, universality, and the broadest consensus of the fathers in the faith.29 Vincent gives the counterproof of his thesis by a genealogy of the main heresies. is illustrates the dismissal by heretics of antiquity in favor of novelty, whereas the deposit of faith is “what you have been entrusted with, not what you have discovered.”30 Aer many qualified readers of Vincent of Lérins,31 we must acknowledge that the criterion of antiquity is not very effective in discerning between truth and error in dogmatic matters, except once the debates have been decided by an ecumenical council. For example, the divinity of the Holy Spirit progressively affirmed in the fourth century by Athanasius of Alexandria and Basil of Caesarea, before being professed by the Council of Constantinople (381), could not be easily justified by recourse to the criteria of antiquity, universality, and consensus. e semi-Arian thesis according to which the Spirit was not God could take advantage of the (direct) non-attribution of the divinity to the Spirit in the Scriptures. us, indirect arguments had to be developed, based on the operations and works of the Spirit, to reach at the confession 28 For a review of the issue, see omas G. Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), xv-xxix. 29 See Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, II, 5. We use the edition provided by CSEL: Commonitorium pro catholicae Ecclesiae antiquitate et universalitate adversus profanas omnium haereticorum novitates, in Fausti Reiensis et Ruricii Opera, ed. Augustus Engelbrecht, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 21 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1891), 102-157. 30 See Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, XXII, 1. 31 Notably John Henry Newman, Yves Congar, and Joseph Ratzinger; see Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 3.

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that the Spirit is co-adored and co-glorified with the Father and the Son. In retrospect, it became evident that faith in the divinity of the Spirit was an integral part of the faith of the Apostolic Church, but such objective evidence was not at all agreed upon in the third and fourth centuries. e criterion of antiquity alone did not permit a distinction to be made between the semi-Arian heresy and the Orthodox faith. In order to overcome this difficulty, omas G. Guarino proposed that the criterion of antiquity be understood not as a reference to the origin or the past, but as a reference to the apostolic faith as it is confessed and formulated by the ecumenical councils,32 here – in the Commonitorium – that of Nicaea (325) and that of Ephesus (431). Let us leave open the debate on the correct understanding of the criterion of the antiquity of orthodox doctrines. Vincent must also be heard on another aspect of dogmatic criteriology. Anticipating a well-founded objection against his fierce attachment to antiquity, Vincent gives way to a real progress, which must be understood in a homogeneous manner: But perhaps one will say, “Shall there be no progress in religion in the Church of Christ then? Certainly, there must be, and it must be considerable! Who would be enemy enough of humanity, hostile enough to God, to try to oppose it? But this is on condition that it is really for faith a progress (vere profectus) and not a change (non permutatio), since what constitutes progress is that each thing is increased by remaining itself, while change is that something from elsewhere is added to it. erefore, how much intelligence, science, and wisdom grow and progress, both that of individuals and that of the community, both that of a single man and that of the whole Church, according to age and generation! But on condition that it be exactly according to their particular nature, that is to say, in the same dogma, in the same sense, and in the same thought.33

Vincent goes on to explain that the doctrinal progress thus qualified is analogous to the coherent growth of a human body that passes from childhood to old age, while remaining one and the same person. Organs and limbs develop and change in appearance, but with substantial continuity. Conversely, if one part of the body adopted a form foreign to the human species, the body would become monstrous or perish. e Church plays a positive role in the growth of Christian dogma, but without exogenous additions. Dogmas “can receive more evidence, more light and more precision.”34 erefore Vincent assigns three related 32

See Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 5, 14, 22-23, 29-33, and 41-42. Guarino argues that antiquity identifies itself with the authentic conciliar tradition. 33 Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, XXIII, 1-3. 34 Ibid., 10.

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tasks to the Church in doctrinal matters: “to perfect and polish what, from antiquity, has received its first form and its first outline”; “to consolidate and strengthen what already has its relief and its evidence”; “to keep what has already been confirmed and defined.”35 Intervening in the course of time and amid crises, the decrees of the councils allow the Church “to ensure that what was previously believed in all simplicity is now believed in a thoughtful manner.”36 e task of keeping the faith is not only the responsibility of the pastors, but also of the faithful, as illustrated by the moments when Christ’s sheep testify to the Catholic faith against a deviant shepherd.37 e sense of faith belongs to the whole Church, pastors and faithful in communion. 2. Articulate the Consistency of Statements of Faith over Time If tradition progresses through the explicitation and refinement of dogmatic statements issued from Revelation, human intelligence must be capable of articulating the successive expressions of the Catholic faith in a coherent manner over time.38 e statements of tradition form a homogeneous constellation referred to its dynamic principle: Revelation accomplished by Christ and completed by the Spirit. e very idea of tradition presupposes a vital continuity in a homogeneous growth, following the analogy of the body used by Vincent of Lérins. is implies that the human subject of tradition, namely the Church of Christ, discerns organic developments and foreign outgrowths. Certainly, the mysteries of God surpass all humanly formulable propositions, including dogmas in the materiality of their statements. However, human intelligence is created by God and is endowed with the capacity to know him in various degrees. e knowledge of God is accomplished according to several modes of operation: narrative, intuitive, discursive, contemplative. ese registers are assumed by the gi of prophecy to the people of God and by the witness of Holy Scriptures. In this way, God offers to the human intelligence the possibility of receiving and formulating true proposals regarding the mysteries of God and his design of grace. God remains incomprehensible in his mysteries and in 35

Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, XXIII, 16. Ibid., 18. 37 See ibid., XI, 5 against the heresy of Photinus. 38 e fourth characteristic note of homogeneous dogmatic developments, logical sequence, implies such intelligibility according to John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), chap. IV, 189-195. 36

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his plan, but he makes himself accessible to the faith, language, experience, and thought of human beings, so that they may live the friendship of grace that is offered to them. Such a dispensation of God’s knowledge grounds a tradition of faith that keeps an organic coherence of multiple expressions of faith throughout the ages. Coherence should be discernible both from a diachronic and a synchronic point of view. Beyond the documentary discontinuities or obscurities of history, coherence is hoped for and guaranteed by the continuity of the subject of the living tradition, the Church founded on Christ and the apostolic generation. 3. Theological Conviction and Empirical Approach Such a theological perspective on the homogeneous development of dogma should not lead us to neglect the contingency and complexity of the history of dogma. ough situated at two different levels of intelligibility, theological conviction and empirical approach are in law compatible. However, care must be taken to ensure that one of these approaches does not exclude the teachings of the other. It may be reassuring for some to live in denial of history for the sake of dogma, just as it is easy for others to dismiss dogma out of attachment to the dissemination and complexity of history. If we take into account historical contingencies, we must acknowledge that tradition does not develop in an irenic way. In order to declare it homogeneous, one must first believe that it is, and then try to make explicit a fundamental coherence through the contingency of trial and error, conflicts of influence and historical setbacks, successive phases of successful inculturation and problematic acculturation, etc.39 In addition to heresies that require clarifications, purifications, and arguments of the ecclesial faith, there are all kinds of situations in which the gap between the hitherto available statement of doctrine and the actual reality (ecclesial or anthropological) is such that it calls for a resolution.40 Depending on the case, this can be pastoral, doctrinal, or both. Ideally, the crisis due to a glaring discrepancy calls for a ‘theoretical

39

Under such a premise, Providence might be said to assume, according to a certain degree of instrumentality, historical circumstances, and human actors in order to achieve its ends in dogmatic matters. See Meszaros, The Prophetic Church, 215-239. 40 Ensuring such creative resolutions is a job for prophets in biblical history, according to George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984).

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recasting’ of the doctrinal statement that resolves the tension without, however, contradicting previous formulations of the doctrine. e historian Guillaume Cuchet has thematized such a ‘historical dialectic’ between the ‘doctrinal thesis’ and the ‘pastoral hypothesis’. Several issues of contemporary Catholicism illustrate the resolution, failed or successful, of hot spots where doctrine and practical belief have begun to diverge in an almost intolerable way: the small or large number of the elect; limbo and the fate of children who died without baptism; belief about hell and purgatory; monogenism induced by the doctrine of original sin; the right to religious liberty integrating the duty to seek the truth.41 is last case proves to be the one for which the doctrinal resolution has been intellectually successful. It is therefore necessary to ensure that a highly theological conception of the homogeneous development of dogma does not rule out the contingency and complexity of the history of dogmatic determinations. e high vision refers the development of dogma to the guidance of the Spirit of Christ, while the historical perspective emphasizes the causes and factors of the world. In a well suited epistemology, these two levels of intelligibility, theological and historical, are compatible and not directly competing. It is desirable, however, that theology should integrate the complexity of history and that the latter discipline should not exclude an explanatory register other than its own.42 4. The Limits of the Image of the Organic Development of a Living Being e image of the organic development of a living person, chosen by Vincent of Lérins and taken up by John Henry Newman,43 has a strong 41 See Guillaume Cuchet, “‘èse’ doctrinale et ‘hypothèse’ pastorale: Essai sur la dialectique historique du catholicisme à l’époque contemporaine,” Recherches de science religieuse 103 (2015): 541-565. Regarding ethical issues such as slavery, see John T. Noonan, A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005). 42 On the integration of history among theological loci and the challenge of being consistent in this direction, see Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Les lieux théologiques chez Melchior Cano,” in Le déplacement de la théologie, ed. Claude Geffré (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), 45-50. 43 See Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, chap. IV, 169-206. Vincent of Lérins is explicitly mentioned twice. e analogy of a living body is frequently used by Newman to illustrate his argument about the seven characteristic notes of homogeneous development. It should be noted that the examples and applications are drawn from several historically documented

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persuasive value. e example of a living individual is within the reach of our senses and offers a convincing analogy of a substantial and coherent development. However, it must be recognized that the transposition of the properties of an organic living being to the development of a doctrine in history is an intellectual operation that must be carefully assessed in relation to other possible conceptions of historical development.44 Would the development of Christian tradition be rather dialectical, tracing its path by a mode of overcoming tensions in the midst of heresies that offer multiple antitheses to the Orthodox faith? Or would it be better to acknowledge that the historical development of Christian faith is unified by an eschatological perfection that transcends it, so that total coherence would come at the end and could only be grasped retrospectively? It seems to me that a certain fertile tension must be maintained between the original fullness and the final fullness. As for its substance, nothing is lacking in the Revelation accomplished in Christ and by the Spirit for the apostolic generation. us the tradition of Revelation grows, as a matter of principle, following an organic and homogeneous development. Nevertheless, certain dogmas, notably the late Marian dogmas (Immaculate Conception and Assumption), are not discernible in the apostolic stage of receiving Revelation. A strict application of the criteria of Vincent of Lérins would rather lead to admit that they are outgrowths, not having been held for all time, by everyone and everywhere. For a faithful Catholic, the historical development of Marian doctrine nevertheless sheds light retrospectively on the virtualities of the “full of grace” of Lk 1:28. Here one must have faith in the Church as subject of tradition in order to receive and recognize a homogeneous development. files. is avoids an unequivocal projection of the biological model on the continuity of history. Moreover, the flexibility with which Newman illustrates the first note (preservation of type) leaves a favorable margin for the unfolding of forms in the move from the implicit to the explicit. It seems, however, that the promulgation of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of the infallibility of the Pope finally led Newman to accentuate the warrant that falls to the authority of the Church for discernment between true and false developments; see Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 62-68; Meszaros, The Prophetic Church, 207. 44 On philosophical conceptions of development (biological model, historical vitalism, spiritual continuity) related to various theories of doctrinal development (Newman, Loisy, Blondel), see Henri Gouhier, “Tradition et développement à l’époque du modernisme,” in Herméneutique et tradition, ed. Enrico Castelli (Rome: Istituto di Studi filosofici; Paris: Vrin, 1963), 75-99, followed by an interesting contribution by Henri de Lubac in the subsequent discussion, 100-101.

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It also presupposes the belief that the Spirit of Christ leads the Church to an eschatological fullness that will be the full unfolding and reception of Revelation. However, there are other, more delicate cases. It happens that some of the data of the Revelation have been le for a long time as if they were dormant, unnoticed or neutralized, even though they are undoubtedly attested by Scriptures. It is possible that certain facts may be obscured or certain injunctions silenced because their implications in terms of conversion are perceived as too costly or disturbing within a homogeneous and coherent religious tradition, and an irenic time. 5. The Risks of Confusion, Blindness or Blockage If we maintain that the development of Christian dogma is homogeneous, we must also avoid the risk of blindness, through overconfidence, in the face of the forgetfulness, deviances, and cultural excrescences of the Christian tradition. Vigilance is necessary in every age, not because, in essence, the tradition of Revelation could wander, but because it is not always easy to discern finely between the tradition of Revelation and the religious or cultural traditions that accompany or intermingle with it. us, for example, the tradition of the Eucharist is carried by various rites: Roman, Ambrosian, Byzantine, Chaldean, Syriac, etc. ese legitimate rites are more or less ancient. ey have their own history and they are more or less aligned, in the articulation or accumulation of their parts, to the Eucharistic mystery in its fullness. ey are venerable authentic traditions through which the Eucharist is transmitted. Tradition and traditions are closely intertwined. Moreover, the tradition of the Eucharist is accompanied by various forms of devotion (in the broadest sense) according to rites and times: frequent or annual communion, separation or proximity of the Eucharistic action, very diverse liturgical participation of the laity, various practices of Eucharistic adoration, emphasis on the Eucharistic reserve or on the Eucharistic body composed by the assembly, etc. In fact, the transmission of the sacrament of the Eucharist is almost inseparable from dogma, rites, and devotions. However, not everything has the same fittingness in the act and form of transmission. Enlarging the field of analysis finally leads us to take into account a serious risk: it is possible that cultural factors, more or less adjusted to the transmission of Revelation, may in practice be confused with it. Worldly habits then de facto obscure the power of the Gospel to challenge us. e cultural domestication of Christian faith, which is one of the

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drawbacks of any successful inculturation, can lead to the neutralization of this or that aspect of Revelation in its disturbing character and its call to conversion. For example, the demand for a theological renewal of the relationship between men and women within the Christian community, because of the new belonging to Christ through baptism, may have been neutralized by the adoption of the Greek domestic code within the Christian household and, by extension, within the congregation of the faithful. is is a drawback of the successful inculturation of the Gospel in the Greek world under the impulse of Paul’s preaching. is is the somewhat disturbing conclusion of the exegete Michel Gourgues at the end of his analysis of the various phases of the Pauline tradition on this subject.45 Two millennia later, we are not yet evangelized in a consistent way when it comes to relations between men and women in the Catholic Church in its present state.46 It took so many centuries for Paul’s recommendation to Philemon to be heard and applied, enjoining him to welcome Onesimus, the fugitive slave, “as a dear brother,” “according to the world and according to the Lord.”47 Facing the cruel slavery of natives during the colonization of America, their suppressed lament had to wait until it was heard by an Antonio de Montesinos in Santo Domingo in 1511 for him to take the risk of denouncing this “mortal sin” and for some consciences to gradually turn around.48 It oen seems possible to stifle the cry of the oppressed 45 See Michel Gourgues, Ni homme ni femme: L’attitude du premier christianisme à l’égard de la femme. Évolutions et régressions (Paris: Cerf, 2013); see also Aurélie Caldwell, Paul, misogyne ou promoteur de l’émancipation féminine? Étude de 1 Co 11, 2-16, Études bibliques 72 (Louvain: Peeters, 2016). 46 See Anne-Marie Pelletier, “Lire encore plus loin,” in L’Église, des femmes avec des hommes (Paris: Cerf, 2019), 87-116; Luca Castiglioni, Filles et files de Dieu: Égalité baptismale et différence sexuelle, Cogitatio Fidei 309 (Paris: Cerf, 2020). 47 See Phm 16; James B. Prothro, “History, Illocution, and eological Exegesis: Reading Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” Nova et Vetera 18 (2020): 1341-1363. 48 One could argue that, even though Paul asserts a truth that goes beyond his culture, he does return the slave as a slave, and does not tell the owner to free him. For that reason, this episode was used by professed Christians to justify slavery, particularly in the American south. It proves more complex regarding the treatment of Indigenous people. Antonio de Montesinos and his Dominican brothers were heroic, but slavery of Africans was widely practiced in Brazil and elsewhere into the 1860s, and denial of Indigenous rights remains part of many cultures. e legacy of systemic racism is a negative example of the way cultural norms may in fact choke the Gospel. I thank Jeremiah Batram for this comment.

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or to caricature it. It might nevertheless pass through the filters of protection and justification of the status quo, which sometimes turns out to be very distant from the demands of conversion stemming from the Gospel. 6. Renovate, Purify, Reform… by Accepting a Part of Self-Criticism e setting up of deviances, blindness or structural blockages in the life of the Church does not formally result from the tradition of Revelation, but a state of affairs may at one time be confused with it. Hence the need for renewal, purification, and reform in the life of the Church. e Second Vatican Council emphasized this need by a relatively abundant use of the verbs renovare, purificare and reformare.49 From several perspectives, the Council makes the purification and renewal of the Church depend on the guidance of the Spirit. While the Church painfully acknowledges the shortcomings of some of her members and structures, the discernment of the paths of renewal is not only a matter of human prudence but also of divine illumination. From a historical point of view, John W. O’Malley suggests that we distinguish various types of reforms centered respectively on (1) the renewal of leadership in the Church, (2) the adjustment of a system or the remedy of abuses, (3) doctrine, practices, values or mentalities.50 It is not easy to reconcile the presupposition of homogeneous doctrinal development with the need for doctrinal reform in the life of the Church. Yet reform sometimes requires a re-evaluation of the way doctrine has been formulated and defended in the past, as the Decree on Ecumenism pointed out: Every renewal of the Church is essentially grounded in an increase of fidelity to her own calling. Undoubtedly this is the basis of the movement toward unity. Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth. e Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. us if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated

49

See in particular Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium, nos. 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15; Unitatis Redintegratio, nos. 4 and 6; Gaudium et Spes, nos. 21 and 43. See Peter De Mey, “Church Renewal and Reform in the Documents of Vatican II: History, eology, Terminology,” The Jurist 71 (2011): 369-400. 50 On different historical types of reform, see John W. O’Malley, “‘e Hermeneutic of Reform’: A Historical Analysis,” Theological Studies 73 (2012): 517546, especially 521-522.

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– to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself – these can and should be set right at the opportune moment.51

Addressing the question of the relationship between development and reform from the perspective of ecumenical dialogues, Catherine E. Clifford, in turn, offers an interesting typology.52 She distinguishes two classical types of doctrinal development. e first, relating to Antiquity and the Middle Ages, is a progressive clarification. e second, dominant in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, consists in the unveiling or explicitation of a ‘living idea’ of Christianity through a new dogmatic statement, an idea that had hitherto remained implicit in the life and prayer of the Church. is is essentially the theory of development formulated by John Henry Newman.53 To these two types of development, Clifford proposes to add a third one. It aims at giving more importance to a dialectic of self-correction of the Church, particularly sensitive through ecumenical dialogues that advance the Church’s historical consciousness in doctrinal matters. According to this logic, several Christian confessions have agreed to revisit the conflicts of the past and the resulting condemnations or caricatures, to the point of applying significant corrections to certain normative texts.54 e dynamics of self-correction by successive adjustments is already verified in the Scriptures. is is notably the case with regard to retribution in the Old Testament. Such a dynamic is also noticeable in the New Testament, for example, with regard to the delicate balance between justification by faith and demonstration of faith by works. It is not surprising that the scriptural testimony given to Revelation, being discursive, is subject to such balances, adjustments, even self-corrections. A fortiori, the long reception of the Revelation through tradition calls for balancing, adjustments, even self-corrections. e objective fullness of the gi accomplished by Christ and the Spirit, from the Incarnation 51 Second Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 6, trans. taken from the Vatican website, accessed on January 25, 2021. 52 See Catherine E. Clifford, “Reform and the Development of Doctrine: An Ecumenical Endeavor,” The Jurist 71 (2011): 35-58. 53 Besides An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, see also John Henry Newman, “e eory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, ed. James D. Earnest and Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Sermon XV, 211-235. 54 e most eloquent example to date remains the Lutheran-Catholic agreement on justification, preceded by the liing of the mutual anathemas of the sixteenth century; see Catholic Church-Lutheran World Federation, The Doctrine of Justification: Joint Declaration (signed October 31, 1999).

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to Pentecost, is thematized and appropriated over a long period of time in a more or less integral and balanced way. For example, over a relatively short period of twenty years, the proposition of Christ’s identity unfolded through Ephesus (431), the Act of Union of 433, and Chalcedon (451) following a dynamic of progressive balancing between the pole of the unity of the subject and that of the distinction of natures, followed by the integrity of their specific operations in communion. In reference to the objective fullness of Christ, the journey of tradition could be experienced as a process of self-correction, whose solidity and coherence we measure a posteriori. Over much longer time sequences, the dynamics of self-correction are oen the result of paradigm shis. Consider, for example, the contrasting assessments of the value of the rites of Judaism by the Catholic tradition. Gavin D’Costa has proposed a hermeneutic of this complex issue in a recent work.55 Drawing on Rom 11:29, Lumen Gentium, no. 16 and Nostra Aetate, no. 4, he asserts that God’s gis to the Jewish people – first and foremost the gi of election – are without repentance. Does such a dogmatic affirmation apply to post-biblical rabbinic Judaism? In this regard, a significant development has occurred in the teaching of Pope John Paul II since 1980. D’Costa identifies and evaluates this ongoing development in the ecclesial discourses and texts that have appeared since then, right up to the document of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism published in 2015.56 e recent Catholic conviction that the irrevocable character of God’s gis applies to rabbinic Judaism raises a serious question: once the ancient accusation of deicide against the Jewish people, which was accompanied by a supposed divine curse, has been lied, can the ritual practices of Judaism still be regarded as ‘dead’ and ‘deadly’ or should they rather be seen as valid and life-giving? How can we conceive of their positive value? D’Costa argues that the novelty of the ongoing development remains compatible with the earlier Catholic magisterium, although the presuppositions underlying the various dogmatic assertions – of 55 See Gavin D’Costa, Catholic Doctrines on the Jewish People after Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For my complete review of this work, which also deals with other much debated issues relating to the land of Israel and the absence of Christian missions to the Jews, see Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 103 (2019): 565-567. 56 See Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “‘e Gis and Call of God Are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29): A eological Reflection on the Relationship between Catholics and Jews on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate (n. 4)” (2015).

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various but literally opposite orders – have changed markedly.57 is is what we call a paradigm shi. Regarding the ritual practices of Judaism, D’Costa conducts a fine dogmatic hermeneutic of the bull Cantate Domino (1442). Resituated in its historical context, this magisterial document does not condemn Jewish practices as ‘dead’ and ‘deadly’ when considered in a non-contextual manner, but denounces their practice or accommodation by Christians, in this case Egyptian Copts (known as Jacobites), through the circumcision of male children, the observance of the Sabbath on Saturdays and certain dietary restrictions. Let us observe here how much the doctrinal statement belongs to a system within a particular context, a determined stake and a given state of theological language. To provide a rational basis for the doctrinal development in progress, D’Costa resorts to the division of salvation history into three periods by Saint Augustine. ese are related not only to the decisive event that is the passion of Christ, but also to the noetic conditions of the reception of this event by believers: (1) before the Passion, (2) aer the Passion but before the universal diffusion of the Gospel, (3) aer the effective preaching of the Gospel to all. D’Costa argues that “rabbinic Jews,” although they lived or are living objectively aer the Passion of Christ, are subjectively situated, for the most part, in the first or second period. is position is supported by recourse to the classical doctrine of invincible ignorance. In certain cases, therefore, the ceremonial practices of contemporary Judaism should be considered effective and sanctifying, although they are not by themselves salvific, for their virtue is derived from the one salvation accomplished by Christ Jesus. D’Costa thus defends a nuanced theory of fulfillment without “hard supersessionism” from the Church to Israel.58 Clearly, we are witnessing a paradigm shi in the Catholic tradition’s view of contemporary Judaism. It is up to historians to identify the parameters that have led to such a change. Highlighting these shis makes it possible to acknowledge the dynamic of self-correction of tradition, without confusing it with a betrayal of the past.

57 See D’Costa, Catholic Doctrines on the Jewish People after Vatican II, 7-14 and 188. 58 See ibid., 55-57 and 62-63.

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6. Conclusion e Catholic tradition is a mixed reality, theological and human. We have proposed an integral approach to it, one that goes back to God the Father and takes into account historical complexity. Aer establishing several defining features of Revelation and identifying the main active subjects of its tradition, we have attempted to combine Trinitarian theology with empirical realism regarding the progression of tradition. e development might prove to be ‘homogeneous’ only a posteriori, from an eschatological perspective, but it leaves room along the way for coherent self-corrections. ese are desirable when facing the annexations or blockages that sometimes neutralize the Gospel as a call to conversion. e question remains, however, as to how far the pluralism of expressions of faith can be integrated into the unity of Revelation and carried into ecclesial communion. Since burning issues that divide its members continue to intervene again and again in the life of the Catholic Church, as in that of other Christian confessions, reference to the Gospel and its tradition is to be the principal criterion for critical discernment with regard to the present of ecclesial life. Tradition is an instance of otherness in relation to the cultural evidences of the day. In fact, such evidences are almost inevitably accompanied by accommodating annexations, partial blindness, and cultural sleepiness. In order to live the fullness of tradition in every age, however, it is also necessary to take into account the complex demands of a growth in charity in the present, since communion is also one of the criteria of truth in doctrinal matters. In the pilgrim Church there are conflicts, not only between the good and the wicked, but also among the good ones.59 In fact, each side of such conflicts has both a (just but partial) view of the good and, consequently, an acute lucidity about the part of the truth le in the shadows by those who hold the opposite view. We are all believers whose human intelligence remains in a historical condition, with all the conditioning and limitations that this entails. Simple souls, prophets, and saints – whether they are found among pastors or among the faithful – play a decisive role in challenging us, both in word and deeds, aiming at a refined perception and inventive practice of the Gospel facing the challenges of the present time.

59

See Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei, XV, 5.

16 The Ecclesiology of Marie-Dominique Chenu A Paradigm for Service to Humanity Gabriel Flynn

1. Evolution of an Idea Study of the life and work of Marcel-Léon Chenu (1895-1990), one of the great thinkers of the epoch and a founding father of the vital ressourcement movement,1 brings us to the heart of the French Church in the twentieth century. He was at the forefront of the intellectual and pastoral flowering that illuminated French Catholicism at mid-century and facilitated innovation and renewal on a grand scale. Chenu was, above all, a man of ideas; it was his classic text, Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir (1937), that influenced Yves M.-J. Congar and the other leading ressourcement theologians, thereby shaping twentieth-century theology and Vatican II.2 He made a series of vibrant historical, theological, and praxisoriented contributions to the original renewal and reform movements of his time.3 e ressourcement movement was animated by its closest 1

See Janette Gray, “Marie-Dominique Chenu and Le Saulchoir: A Stream of Catholic Renewal,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in TwentiethCentury Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 205-218. 2 See Gabriel Flynn, ed., Yves Congar: Theologian of the Church, new and expanded ed., Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 45 (Louvain: Peeters, 2018). 3 See André Duval, “Bibliographie du P. Marie-Dominique Chenu (19211965),” in Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu, ed. André Duval et al., Bibliothèque omiste 37 (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 9-29; also Timothy Radcliffe et al., eds., Congar and Chenu: Friend, Teacher, Brother, Interface eology 3/1 (Hindmarsh: ATF eology, 2017); Michael Schmaus, The Church: Its Origin and Structure, trans. Mary Ledderer, Dogma 4 (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972), 75; Gabriel Flynn, “e Twentieth-Century Renaissance in Catholic eology,” in Ressourcement, 1-19; Michael Kelly, “‘Catholicisme ondoyant’: Catholic Intellectual Engagement and the Crisis of Civilization in the 1930s,” in God’s Mirror: Renewal and

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theological precursor, the Catholic Tübingen School, notably, its greatest theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838), by means of the closest possible communion with the thought and spirit of the Fathers.4 Tübingen introduced a principle of renewal into nineteenth-century theology with a conception of faith which integrates its historical, psychological, and pastoral dimensions. Chenu articulates precisely his hopes and aims regarding Tübingen. It’s there, right down to its vocabulary, the principal theme of the Catholic theologians of Tübingen (Drey, Mœhler), and we wish the Saulchoir to borrow from these masters of the Catholic Renaissance of the nineteenth century in Germany […] With them we reject the abstract intellectualism of the Aufklärung and its indifference regarding history.5

Chenu’s work would ultimately yield a universal harvest on a global scale. His highly original, patristics-based ideas on the church, with complementary pneumatological and Christological elements, and its incisive focus on method, penetrated Catholic ecclesiology, transformed theological learning, and contributed to the reforms of Vatican II. e historian Émile Poulat (1920-2014),6 provides an epigrammatic tribute to Chenu based on his intellectual prowess, on which so much would depend for the Catholic Church in his time. A born historian, Father Chenu could lean on the example of two great Dominicans: Mandonnet and Lagrange, then, on the encouragement of Étienne Gilson, the great pioneer of medieval thought. He saw there the necessary condition to access an historical understanding of the faith and to give to theology a scientific status, hence his first important book, La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle (1935).7

Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century, ed. Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 28-49. 4 See Flynn, “Ressourcement, Ecumenism, and Pneumatology: e Contribution of Yves Congar to Nouvelle Théologie,” in Ressourcement, 219-235; Grant Kaplan, “e Renewal of Ecclesiastical Studies: Chenu, Tübingen, and eological Method in Optatam Totius,” Theological Studies 77 (2016): 567-592; Gabriel Flynn, Yves Congar’s Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Oxford: Routledge, 2016 [first published by Ashgate, 2004]), 6, 7, 90-92, 202. 5 Marie-Dominique Chenu et al., Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir, éologies (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 141. 6 See Yvon Tranvouez, “‘Émile Poulat’, Archives de Sciences sociales des religions,” https://journals.openedition.org/assr/25698?lang=en. 7 Émile Poulat, “Souvenir du Père Chenu,” Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1990): 171-177, at 173-174; ierry Paquot, “Émile Poulat (1920-2014): Un apôtre

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omas F. O’Meara says that Chenu was “a remarkable theologian who both pioneered modern medieval studies and worked with important pastoral movements.”8 Or as Jean-Pierre Jossua, his close friend at Couvent Saint-Jacques remarks, not without emotion. “His fundamental optimism and communicative genius made him an incomparable brother and teacher. e French Dominicans owe to him the splendid vitality of this period of their lives, and so does the Catholic Church even more, although she has never been willing to acknowledge it.”9 Careful study of the sources in the archives of the Dominican Province of France reveals Chenu as a profound thinker whose response to rejection, dismissal, and severe censure on the part of his order and the Roman Church was one of loyalty, fortitude, patience, and creative obedience.10 Étienne Gilson (1884-1978),11 one of the most eminent scholars of the twentieth century and a renowned historian of medieval philosophy,12 points to his inimitable contribution. “People like Father Chenu are rare; they come only once in a century.”13 His fundamental idea, from which he never deviated, was that of service to humanity. He was its prototypical exemplar, rendering service de la laïcité,” La Revue 71 (2015): 308-311, https://www.cairn.info/revue-hermesla-revue-2015-1-page-308.htm. 8 See Marie-Dominique Chenu, Vatican II Notebook: A Council Journal, Critical Edition and Introduction by Alberto Melloni, trans. Paul Philibert (Adelaide: ATF eology, 2015), book jacket. 9 Jean Pierre Jossua, “La Mort du Père M. D. Chenu,” Le Monde, 13 February 1990. 10 See Dominicans, Province of France, http://www.dominicains.fr/ rechercher/archives/409/387/3; also Poulat, “Souvenir,” 174-177. 11 See Brian J. Shanley, O.P., The Thomist Tradition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 10. “Étienne Gilson was uniquely suited to rehabilitate the legitimacy of medieval philosophy against the rationalist claim that the preCartesian period was a philosophical wasteland because he backed his way into it from the study of modern philosophy. […] e best way to get at Gilson’s claim is not by a formal analysis of terms, however, but rather through his examination of the actual history of medieval philosophy. e historical reality, as laid out most perspicuously in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, was that medieval philosophy owed its originality and depth to its theological context.” 12 See Francesca Aran Murphy, “Gilson and Ressourcement,” in Ressourcement, 51-64; Philip Daileader, “Étienne Gilson (1884-1978),” in French Historians 1900-2000, ed. Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 285-305; Laurence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson, e Étienne Gilson Series 6 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984); Laurence K. Shook, “Étienne Henry Gilson, 1884-1978,” Medieval Studies 41 (1979): vii-xv. 13 Cited in Yves Congar, “Témoignage du P. Yves Congar après son décès,” Archive Province Dominicaine de France (hereaer, APDF), M.-D. Chenu 2.

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with classic graciousness and profound integrity, not only to theology and the church, but also to society and, above all, to people without regard to status or religious affiliation. As Congar remarks: “A constant nourishment from within permitted him to make a constant gi of his heart and mind. It was a kind of intellectual generosity on the same plane as his extraordinary openness to others.”14 e dual concerns of this paper are, therefore, to introduce his rich, innovative, and dynamic vision of the church and to denote his mutually beneficial relationship with the popular Catholic movements of France and Belgium during one of the most fructuous periods of Catholic life in the modern era. e paper proceeds in three steps. First, it examines the spirituality that Chenu initially articulated as a student in Rome and that quickly became foundational in his life as a priest and intellectual and which he exhibited among the worker priests of France and Belgium, and as a chaplain to the Young Christian Worker and Young Christian Student movements. Secondly, it considers his theological methodology, burgeoning from the heart of his spirituality, in order to assess its capacity as a transformative leaven in the church and an innovative mode of change in an unexpected universal forum, namely, an ecumenical council of the church. As Grant Kaplan, who in an important essay expertly assesses the full impact of Möhler on Chenu, observes: “Only by tracing the influence of Tübingen on Chenu can one appreciate the methodological revolution that it inspired in him.”15 irdly, it envisions the fecundity of his ecclesial vision for the church of the future. Following the completion of his doctoral studies at the Pontifical University of St omas, also known as the Angelicum (1914-1920), in what was perhaps the most momentous decision of his life, the brilliant young Dominican declined the invitation of his thesis supervisor Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) to remain on in Rome,16 choosing instead

14 Yves Congar, “e Brother I Have Known,” trans. Boniface Ramsey, The Thomist 49 (1985): 495-503, at 496. 15 Kaplan, “Renewal of Ecclesiastical Studies,” 567, 576-579. Note should be taken of two important related texts cited by Kaplan. Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Les hautes études religieuses en France et en Allemagne autour de 1830,” La Vie intellectuelle 6 (1930): 52-56; Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Position de la théologie,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 24 (1935): 332-357, republished as “La foi dans l’intelligence,” La Parole de Dieu 1 (1964): 116-138. 16 See Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (Chicago, IL: St Augustine’s Press, 2015); Richard Peddicord, “Another Look at the eological Enterprise of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP,” Angelicum 82 (2005): 835-848;

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to return to Le Saulchoir, then in exile at Kain-la-Tombe near Tournai in Belgium because of the anti-clerical legislation of the French ird Republic.17 From its beginnings, under the direction of Ambroise Gardeil and Pierre Mandonnet, the bold objective for the Saulchoir studium was to achieve university-level standards in theology, using a multidisciplinary approach. Gardeil had a marked influence on a brilliant generation of young Dominicans through his work Le donné révélé et la théologie,18 which was set to become the grammar of Le Saulchoir’s methodology and, along with other innovations, was embraced confidently in the adoption of Lagrange’s méthode historique.19 Père Lagrange: Personal Reflections and Memoirs (1985) is of historical importance as it documents the early history of the École Biblique et archéologique française de Michael Kerlin, “Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Defending the Faith from ‘Pascendi dominici gregis’ to ‘Humani Generis’,” U.S. Catholic Historian 25 (2007): 97-113. See also Joseph A. Komonchak, “eology and Culture at Mid-Century: e Example of Henri de Lubac,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 579-602, at 601, note 67. is refers to a letter from Jacques Maritain to Garrigou-Lagrange in which he defends himself against the charge of doctrinal deviation because of his support of General de Gaulle, Garrigou-Lagrange being a resolute advocate of the Vichy regime, as Peddicord notes in The Sacred Monster of Thomism, 99. Also André Laudouze, Dominicains français et Action française: 1899-1940: Maurras au convent (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1989), 31; Paul Raymond Caldwell, Yves Congar, O.P.: Ecumenist of the Twentieth Century, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Marquette, WI: Marquette University e-Publications 2009). 17 See Evelyn Martha Acomb, The French Laic Laws, 1879-1889: The First Anti-clerical Campaign of the Third French Republic, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law 486 (New York: Octagon Books, 1967). 18 Ambroise Gardeil, Le donné révélé et la théologie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1932); Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Regard sur cinquante ans de vie religieuse,” in L’hommage différé au Père Chenu, ed. Claude Geffré et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 259-268, at 261-262. In a series of warm tributes, Chenu reveals his esteem for the great generation that preceded his own. “Fr Gardeil remains the master in doctrine, in method, in spirit. […] If there was at Le Saulchoir ‘a school of theology’, he was truly its founder and its soul. […] It is thanks to Fr Mandonnet that Le Saulchoir applied itself to the study of the works of St omas and the resources of the historical method, still a great novelty at that time. While Fr  Lagrange, the author of the famous pamphlet La Méthode historique who though he only ever passed through Le Saulchoir; exerted considerable influence there. […] Fr Lemonnyer, regent of studies (1912-1929), psychologically and deliberately modest, was the chosen heir of Fr Gardeil, including as exegetetheologian.” 19 Chenu, Une école, 138; Jean Guitton, Portrait du Père Lagrange: Celui qui a réconcilié la science et la foi (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992); Richard Murphy, O.P., ed., Lagrange and Biblical Renewal (Chicago, IL: Priory Press, 1966).

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Jérusalem (1889-1913), the progress of the Catholic biblical renewal, and an initial assessment of Modernism. Chenu records his memories of this bountiful period in a way that manifests his esteem for the friars who “though enmeshed in the modernist crisis, had serenely articulated a theology which combines scientific principles, contemplative richness, and apostolic roots.”20 Mandonnet also exerted a vital influence on Chenu through his insistence on the historical study of medieval texts, a rich vein that would also yield lasting fruit for future generations. Chenu, with his close fellow workers Yves M. J. Congar, Henri-Marie Féret, and the faculties of Le Saulchoir, was now doing for theology and philosophy what Lagrange had done for scripture studies, namely, the rigorous application of historical-critical methods in all branches of theology.21 Le Saulchoir was effectively realising a formula dear to Chenu according to which “theology is faith in statu scientae.”22 As a young professor, Chenu embarked on a vast programme of medieval and omist research.23 Like his erstwhile ressourcement colleagues, 20

See Olivier de la Brosse, Le père Chenu: La liberté dans la foi (Paris: Cerf, 1969), 24. 21 See Gabriel Flynn, “eological Renewal in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II, ed. Richard R. Gaillardetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 19-40, at 29-35; also Minlib Dallh, The Sufi and the Friar: A Mystical Encounter of Two Men of God in the Abode of Islam (New York: State University of New York: 2017), 24-32. 22 Chenu, Une école, 31. 23 See Étienne Fouilloux, “Marie-Dominique Chenu,” in Dictionnaire biographique des frères prêcheurs: Dominicains des provinces françaises XIXeXXe  siècles, https://journals.openedition.org/dominicains/85; Jacques Le Goff, “Le Père Chenu et la société médiévale,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 371-380; Jean Jolivet, “M.-D. Chenu, médiéviste et théologien,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 381-394; Jean-Claude Schmitt, “L’œuvre de médiéviste du Père Chenu,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 395-406; Alain Boureau, “Le Père Chenu médiéviste: Historicité, contexte et tradition,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 407-414; Henri Donneaud, “M.-D. Chenu et l’exégèse de sacra doctrina,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997): 415-437; Xavier Debilly, La théologie au creuset de l’histoire: MarieDominique Chenu et son travail avec La Mission de France, Cogitatio Fidei 304 (Paris: Cerf, 2018); “Antoine Lemonnyer,” in Dictionnaire biographique des frères prêcheurs; Lemonnyer was the co-founder of the RSPT, Biographical texts available online from 1 April 2015 http://journals.openedition.org/dominicains/1420; “Pierre Mandonnet (26 February 1858, in Beaumont, Puy-de-Dôme – 4 January 1936, in Le Saulchoir, Belgium) was a French-born, Belgian Dominican historian, important in the neo-omist trend of historiography and the recovery of medieval philosophy. From 1891 to 1919, he was a professor of church history at

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he practiced his métier in the normal milieu of the world and in the concrete life of the church. As he writes: “I find my theology in the living church, as it lives today in a real world.”24 During the inter-war period, along with other scholars, he helped to initiate the scientific and technical study of medieval texts. In an interview published in 1965, he lauds the brilliant architects of a omist ressourcement and documents his own part in it. In this context, he refers to his enduring friendship with Étienne Gilson.25 Crucially, he attributes the Catholic enlightenment of the era to the indispensable ressourcement movement. Aer the war, my studies in Rome ended in 1920. I returned to the Saulchoir at the moment when Père Mandonnet and Père Lemonnyer set to work. ey were a team who were engaged in an historical study and analysis of the work of St. omas. e doctrinal understanding of the text had to come from a reconstruction of its genesis. e return to the sources, there as elsewhere, offered enrichment and freshness. e team furnished their collaborators with the Bulletin Thomiste; I became secretary for the publication of Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques. It was then that I got to know Étienne Gilson, who remains my very dear friend.26

Chenu’s life was a reflection of the witness and teaching of St Dominic de Guzmán (1170-1221) and St omas Aquinas (1225-1274).27 Like them, he possessed a unique ability to traverse cultural, linguistic, and

the University of Fribourg. In 1902/03 he served as university rector.” https:// peoplepill.com/people/pierre-mandonnet/. 24 Marie-Dominique Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” trans. Joseph P. Philibert, Informations Catholiques Internationales 233 (February 1, 1965): 136-143, at 139, also available at Dominicana Journal 50:2 (1965), https:// www.dominicanajournal.org/dominicana-1916-1968-archive/dominicana-502summer-1965-2/. 25 Ibid., 140; Francesca Aran Murphy, “e ‘Chosisme’ of Étienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu,” in Philosophies of Christianity at the Crossroads of Contemporary Problems, ed. Balázs M. Mezei and Matthew Z. Vale, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31 (Berlin: Springer, 2019), 153-168. 26 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 140; Dominique Avon, Les Frères prêcheurs en Orient: Les Dominicains du Caire 1910-1960, Histoire (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 185; “Hamès Constant, Dominique Avon, Les frères prêcheurs en Orient. Les dominicains du Caire (années 1910-années 1960). Paris, Le Cerf, coll. ‘Histoire,’ 2005, pp. 1029,”  Archives de sciences sociales des religions 136 (2006): 123-283. 27 See Jean-René Bouchet, “Portrait de Saint Dominique,” in Dominicains: L’Ordre des Prêcheurs présenté par quelques-uns d’entre eux, ed. Alain Quilici et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1980), 13-27.

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ideological boundaries in the service of the gospel and humanity. A vital factor in his personal and intellectual life, was his innate ability to form bonds of connection with others and to rise above the ideological flashpoints of his day. He inspired others and helped to set in motion a series of intellectual currents of renewal and movements of reform in the Catholic Church. In his solitary vocation, he also knew that he needed people; it was they who gave direction and fulfilment to his life. He devoted himself unstintingly to their service and liberty: “As a theologian I need them! People are my obsession. […] And even as a young religious, I felt the openness to others, communion with my whole self with the affairs of the world, was essential to the life of a Dominican, an ideal which comes from the beginning of the Order.”28 In a personal tribute, Congar wrote movingly of his mentor as a person of high intelligence and originality of thought. Whoever came to the Saulchoir would encounter Father Chenu first in his courses. […] e course on the history of doctrines was marked by the strong conviction of a man who believed in ideas with his whole being. One of the people responsible for his having come under suspicion told me one day that Father Chenu did not hold for metaphysics and affected an all-embracing relativism. I have encountered few people, however, who believed as he did in intelligence, in its act and in intellectuality.29

When Chenu entered the Dominican novitiate in November 1913, he took the name Marie-Dominique in religion. He was drawn to the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, precisely because they “owe their foundation to the evangelical somersault of a Church which rescued itself from the comfortable situation it enjoyed in feudal society.”30 Much later, in pensive mood, he described the other vital source of his religious vocation with intense emotion: “I entered the order by the contemplative door. […] ere are two doors by which one may enter the house of St. Dominic: apostolic engagement and the contemplative life. […] At the Belgian Saulchoir, the ambiance was intensely contemplative. […] I have remained faithful to the contemplative life.”31

28

Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 136, 138; André Duval, “Une organisation au service de la liberté,” in Dominicains: L’Ordre des Prêcheurs, 177-187. 29 Congar, “e Brother,” 495. 30 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 138. 31 See J.-P. Manigne in L’actualité religieuse dans le monde, October 15, 1987, 32; cited in Joseph Doré, “Un Itinéraire – Témoin: Marie-Dominique Chenu,”

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2. The Spirituality in the Theology of the Church of MarieDominique Chenu 1. Brother, Master, Friend His original contribution to spirituality is best understood in the context of his life’s work and service to the church and society. Janette Gray’s portrayal of his œuvre demonstrates his concern for spiritual and theological equilibrium and situates his spirituality at the genesis of the Catholic theological renewal of the twentieth century. “Chenu’s thesis on contemplation launched the ressourcement of Aquinas’ theological method and development. […] His scepticism about neo-scholastic metaphysics came through his preference for historically locating omas’ teaching.”32 In common with other leading theologians of the era, he had a deep concern for wholeness (la totalité/le tout). While avoiding compartmentalisation in his opus, he lived and breathed theology, St omas, and church history, in the service of a wide range of pastoral ministries. His life and vocation, his mission to the Young Christian Student/Young Christian Worker movements, the prêtres ouvriers, as well as his intellectual and academic work were woven seamlessly in service to God, humanity, and the church. Claude Geffré’s L’hommage différé au Père Chenu (1990), a volume in the same vein as André Duval’s Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu (1967) together constitute an exposition of his life and service in an honor roll of the Paris enlightenment in Catholic thought during the first half of the twentieth century and, most important, a living historical record by those who were there. As Geffré remarks: It is undoubtedly too soon to evaluate properly the place that Father Chenu will hold in the theology of the twentieth century, as a historian of the Middle Ages, a brilliant interpreter of St omas, as a theologian of the incarnation and of the ‘signs of the times’. Nor is it the objective of this Festschrift. Its great merit is to make us relive day by day this eminent person whom we have loved as brother, Master, friend, as a witness to the Gospel, and simply as a man.33

in Les Catholiques français et l’héritage de 1789, ed. Pierre Colin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), 313-339, at 315. 32 Janette Gray, M.-D. Chenu’s Christian Anthropology: Nature and Grace in Society and Church (Adelaide: ATF eology, 2019), 29. 33 Geffré, “Preface,” in Chenu, -, at -.

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2. The Brother I Have Known Congar expresses his appreciation of Chenu’s spiritual and intellectual matrix, expressed in the context of his vision of the church. He presents Chenu as a brave man, possessed of fortitude and, therefore, willing to suffer for a high cause. “Others have been able to glimpse behind the veil of this life that is so authentically one of a friar preacher, a life hidden with Christ in God. And in all of this, what constant resourcefulness, what freedom in the faith! […] Yes, a man truly free in faith!”34 Congar sketches the contours of his spirituality in omistic terms. His conception of the faith was that of Saint omas, as was his conception of theology: he saw this latter as the promotion of the faith in and by the cultivation of a historical and rational understanding. Who has spoken better than he of theology as a branch of knowledge subordinated, by faith, to the knowledge of God and the blessed?35

He was, however, fiercely opposed to a certain “spirit of faith” added in an extrinsic manner with a narrow moralism, as Congar demonstrates in his presentation of Chenu’s theological vision. For him the supernatural knowledge of God that the faith gives was intrinsically and ontologically religious, alive and fervent. ere was no need at all of a ‘spirit of faith’ where one would meet with a rather pale and somewhat moralizing piety, inasmuch as the faith was radiated in its living supernaturality, indissolubly intellectual and motivating Christian behavior.36

Congar places himself, with Chenu and Féret, among the founders of one of the most influential movements in Catholic theology since the Reformation. “Projects came into being. I had taken on the publication of the collection Unam Sanctam. What would a little later be called ‘ressourcement’ was then at the heart of our efforts.”37 Chenu was ‘persecuted’ within his own spiritual family. Based on the pathological fears of senior Dominicans, he was intimidated into signing a list of ten brief doctrinal propositions destined for Rome.38 It was only when the heat of battle cooled, and the light of a new day illuminated the past that Congar would ask musingly: “Ubi sunt qui te accusabant?”39

34 35 36 37 38 39

Congar, “e Brother,” 497. Ibid., 498. Ibid., 499. Ibid. Chenu, Une école, 35; note 2, 11. Congar, “e Brother,” 500.

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Possessed of a sharp mind and a noble spirit, Chenu appears to have avoided the burden of bitterness and recrimination. As Congar writes: But, enjoying an exceptionally broad range of possibilities for making contact with others and for work, he was in particular a man with a remarkable ministry among small gatherings of friends and study groups. Priests, teachers, engineers, sociologists, economists, worker priests and the Mission de France.40

3. Chenu and Contemplation: A School of Wisdom for the Modern World Chenu viewed contemplation as the highest ideal of the spiritual life, the golden thread that illuminates the constituent elements of his Dominican calling, from preaching and service to intellectual and spiritual formation. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, an acknowledged master of Dominican spirituality, contributed to his intellectual and spiritual development through his acclaimed volumes on contemplation with their rigorous omist methodology.41 As Congar remarks: He said that he owed to Father Garrigou-Lagrange his vital perception of the supernatural quality of the faith, just as he owed to Father Schultes his sense of the development of dogma. His conception of the faith was that of Saint omas, as was his conception of theology: he saw this latter as the promotion of the faith in and by the cultivation of a historical and rational understanding.42

Chenu referred to Aquinas as “my St. omas” who permeated his whole being, his theology, and spirituality. “e work of St. omas has been my constant sustenance. He is better equipped than others to understand the modern world. […] His manner of knowing human and Christian reality is what I would like to have in the Church today.”43 Chenu’s vision of the contemplative life was modelled on that of Aquinas with its indispensable focus on the other. us, for him the whole aim of the spiritual life was “to contemplate, and to share with others what one has contemplated.”44 He points to an antinomy in the art of 40

Congar, “e Brother,” 497. See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books: 2019); Reprint of Les trois âges de la vie intérieure, 2 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1939/1939); Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1958). 42 Congar, “e Brother,” 498. 43 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 140. 44 Vivian Boland, Saint Thomas Aquinas (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 41

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contemplation: “We are certainly passive with regard to contemplation; but in this passivity there is maximum activity.”45 Like his Dominican and ressourcement fellows, Chenu was deeply committed to the discovery of truth. “God accepts to be the food of our spirit but on condition that the truth actually becomes the life of our spirit.”46 Convinced that contemplation is the major problem, he held that Christians advance in perfection to the extent to which they “have a fuller sense and a more explicit control of the interior life as a whole.”47 He urged theologians to strive for spiritual freedom by doing theology in a spirit of disinterestedness and, like innocent children, to attain the whole gamut of gospel virtues. “eology is audacious, because, in the self-forgetfulness of contemplation, it is pure; it can have every boldness as long as it is pure – the science of the children of God.”48 e search for truth and freedom through the medium of pure contemplation, with its necessary abnegation of the ego, provides an indispensable foundation for radical social action. As an historian of the medieval period, Chenu had a rich sense of the interconnectedness of things and worked assiduously for the transposition of theology into the social domain for the betterment of humanity, in particular, of those at the lower echelons of society.49 At a dogmatic level, his vision of the relationship between the church and the world rests on the incarnation as the pivotal foundation of his theology and social mission. As he remarks: “I felt very strongly the exigencies of the Incarnation. If Christianity is about God incarnate in matter, the divinisation of man implies that it include matter. […] Humanisation is already a capacity for divinisation.”50 Indeed, Chenu’s cosmic theological anthropology is grounded in the reality of the present moment. 45

Marie-Dominique Chenu, “La Contemplation,” APDF, 1-6 (2). Ibid. 47 Ibid., 3. 48 Chenu, Une école, 150; also Emmanuel Vangu Vangu, La Théologie de Marie-Dominique Chenu: Réflexion sur une méthodologie théologique de l’intégration communautaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). 49 See “Marie-Dominique Chenu: Moyen Âge et Modernité,” Colloque organisé par le Département de la recherche de l’Institut catholique de Paris et le Centre d’études du Saulchoir à Paris, les 28 et 29 octobre 1995 sous la présidence de Joseph Doré et Jacques Fantino in Les Cahiers du Centre d’études du Saulchoir V (Paris: Cerf 1997). Source: “Marie-Dominique Chenu, A.” Archives of the Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of eology and Religious Studies (KU Leuven). 50 Chenu, “Une théologie pour le monde,” no. 31, 1967, 17; cited in Christophe Potworowski, Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 116-154. 46

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e cosmos is humanized by human beings, I would go so far as to say ‘divinized’ – if it is true to say that the Creator wished his great enterprise to be led by humans. […] is consubstantiality of Humanity and the Cosmos is at once communion and confrontation, complacency and control, exaltation and despondency.51

It is unsurprising, therefore, that Chenu, while studiously avoiding the twin dangers of absolutism and relativism, worked steadfastly for global peace and communion, by placing the intellectual life and the spiritual life at the service of Christian unity and that of all humanity.52 In his programmatic “La fin de l’ère Constantinienne” (1961), he points to the renewal of Western Christianity and its transformation into a global church. In his new vision of the relationship between church and state, Chenu envisaged the Christianisation of the world as the old mutually-beneficial alliance between church and state of the Constantinian era came to a close. “What is at stake is not the Church building for itself a Christian world of its own alongside ‘the world’, but proceeding to Christianize the world in the process of being built.”53 He lived providentially in the era of giants. As Jossua notes: “In 1932, M. D. Chenu became Regent of Studies, and along with his friends Henri-Marie Féret and Yves M.  J. Congar, he would give Le Saulchoir an international reputation. Chenu was present at Le Saulchoir in Kain from 1920 onwards. He was a friar gied with a marvelous human spirit and a spark of genius.”54 3. Chenu’s Methodological Revolution at Le Saulchoir As Regent of Studies (1932-1942), Chenu launched his methodological revolution in theology that contributed, in a singular way, to the revivification of ecclesiology, albeit with dramatic consequences for his own 51 “Letter of M.D. Chenu to Mr. Albert Vallet concerning his work L’Argile. L’Homme. Le Feu (Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1973),” APDF, V 832, 120, (0). Ch.0/9. 52 See P.-R. Régamey, “Une école de sagesse,” in Chenu, 184-193, at 191-192. 53 Marie-Dominique Chenu, “La fin de l’ère Constantinienne,” in Un concile pour notre temps, ed. J.-P. Dubois-Dumée et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 59-87; see also Gianmaria Zamagni, “Re(dis)covering Humanity: e Catholic Church and Human Rights,” in The Quest for a Common Humanity: Human Dignity and Otherness in the Religious Traditions of the Mediterranean, ed. Katell Berthelot and Matthias Morgenstern, Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions 134 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 349-361. 54 Jean-Pierre Jossua, “Preface: A Remarkable Evolution,” in omas F. O’Meara and Paul Philibert, Scanning the Signs of the Times: French Dominicans in the Twentieth Century (Adelaide: ATF Publications, 2013).

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life and career, the full drama of which has been judiciously documented by Étienne Fouilloux.55 He was effectively a harbinger of ressourcement, then taking shape and soon to become the dominant movement in Catholic theology, a position it retained throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond.56 is stream of renewal became a confluence to which some of his brightest students contributed on a global stage, one that would change forever the face of the church in France and in the Catholic world. His major concern, in fact, was to form closer links with the Tradition for a better adaptation to the contemporary world. Motivated by the impoverished state of Catholic theology and philosophy, he published Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir in 1937. He provided an account of the genesis of the text while also illuminating the indispensability of the “historical critical method” in theological discourse as part of an interview with Jacques Duquesne. is book started as an improvised short pamphlet. In fact, it was a good occasion to take stock of our deep motivations. I did so as the Rector of the Saulchoir in a short address. My paper impressed students and faculty alike and they took notes and decided to publish it. Aer all the first dra was improvised, so I decided to rewrite the entire paper and further clarify my views on the historical critical method in theological studies.57

Notwithstanding the charged political atmosphere of the time in Catholic ecclesial circles in France affecting scripture, theology, and philosophy, as well as the polemical tone in Chenu’s own text or “manifesto,” as it came to be called, the amazing success of his “pamphlet” was as a direct result of its methodology, with its essential interdisciplinary and inclusive approach. Its most profound impact was felt at Vatican II which effectively transformed how theology and catechesis were delivered at all levels from the See of Rome to the remotest country seminary, in the universities, schools, and church kindergartens. A gied team of

55 Étienne Fouilloux, “L’Affaire Chenu,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 98 (2014): 261-352; also Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Le sens et les leçons d’une crise religieuse,” La Vie intellectuelle 13 (December 1931): 357-380. 56 Reinhard Hütter, ed., Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Scripture, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. and Matthew Levering, eds., Ressourcement after Vatican II: Essays in Honor of Joseph Fessio, SJ (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2019). 57 See Chenu, Une école, 7; Jacques Duquesne, Jacques Duquesne interroge le père Chenu: Un théologien en liberté (Paris: Centurion, 1970).

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academics and researchers worked together at Le Saulchoir on the new methodology exemplified in a new journal, Revue des sciences [plural] philosophiques et théologiques (1907 and the years following), the title of which demonstrated the intention of its founders to respect “the plurality of methods, and objects, in the domain – so united compared to other fields of human knowledge – of philosophy and theology.”58 Following Lacordaire, Chenu worked assiduously for “good theology” with its essential locus in the life of the church engaged with the present experience of Christianity and the world. He held that the foundation for delivery of “such a programme in philosophy and theology was by recourse to the sources in a direct study of the masters.”59 He asserts that “historically the return to the sources is equivalent to the return to principles in speculation: the same spiritual power, the same rejuvenation, the same fecundity, as one becomes the guarantor of the other.”60 His bold strategy was inherently dangerous, as Fergus Kerr points out. “For GarrigouLagrange and many who shared his views, Chenu’s project risked forfeiting the objectivity of speculative theology as a quasi-scientific discipline in favour (as they feared) of a morass of piety, subjective experience and fideism.”61 e inevitable clash of titans that followed took place at the dawn of a new era, as an essentially personalist system effectively displaced the supposedly impregnable omism, synonymous with Garrigou-Lagrange and his coterie. Chenu exhibited “the patristic sources of St omas” and exuded the spirit of freedom of St Dominic. With Congar, he was at the forefront in the renewal of ecclesiology and the realisation of the church’s missionary task at a time of new “evangelical contact with a world unequalled in centuries.”62 In a profound concern for a true Dominican ressourcement, he urged his fellows to witness to that original character of the “preachers.” Recognizing the social fermentation of the age, Chenu called on church leaders to abandon all vestiges of the feudal system, based on honor and privilege. As he writes prophetically: Dominic, himself (like Francis of Assisi), expressly rejected all that apparatus, and with it, the social and authoritarian culture that it represents. […] e avid desire to know and the ambition of the culture became

58

Chenu, Une école, 121. Ibid., 124. 60 Ibid., 127. 61 Kerr, Twentieth-Century, 22-23. 62 Yves M.-J. Congar, Dialogue between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. Philip Loretz (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), 32. 59

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widespread: the universities were born, where the Dominicans and the Franciscans occupied the first places because they are its first fruits. Albert the Great and omas Aquinas revealed Aristotle and Greek reason there in the context of the construction of this new world.63

4. Chenu’s Ecclesial Methodology and the Popular Catholic Movements At the height of Chenu’s career, the Catholic Church experienced an unexpected flowering of new ideas and original initiatives in history and liturgy, scripture and patristics, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, youth ministry and mission, theology of the laity and pastoral studies. Vatican II became the living theatre of what has appropriately been called the “epoch of movements” that flourished simultaneously with Nouvelle théologie and Action Catholique.64 As part of that flowering, Chenu’s renewed vision of the church based on a return to the ancient sources was taking shape. It facilitated a true reading of the signs of the times for the renewal of contemporary society. e beating heart of his ecclesial methodology was spirituality. He collaborated with Père Louis Augros, the organizer of the “Mission de France,” a seminary founded by Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard in 1941, with the agreement and cooperation of the bishops of France, in order to break down the wall separating the church and the great mass of people.65 rough his involvement with Père Henri Godin, the founder of Mission de Paris,66 he was actively engaged with the worker-priests.67 His methodology is at once

63 Marie-Dominique Chenu, “La liberté dominicaine,” Année Dominicaine (1936): 283-287, at 286-287; APDF, M.-D. Chenu; omas O’Meara, ed., Albert the Great: Theologian and Scientist: Bibliographic Resources and Translated Essays (Chicago: IL: New Priory Press, 2013); also the Albertus-MagnusInstitute, Bonn, http://www.albertus-magnus-institut.de/; “e Sacra Doctrina Projects: omistica,” https://thomistica.net/news/2011/12/5/digital-edition-ofthe-works-of-albert-the-great.html. 64 See Gilles Routhier, “Introduction,” in La théologie catholique entre intransigeance et renouveau: La réception des mouvements préconciliaires à Vatican II, ed. Gilles Routhier, Philippe J. Roy, and Karim Schelkens, Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 95 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 5-9, at 5. 65 See, https://vocations.missiondefrance.fr/la-mission-de-france/le-pereaugros-et-les-fondations/. 66 Nathalie Viet-Depaule et al., eds., La Mission de Paris: Cinq prêtresouvriers insoumis témoignent (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2002). 67 See Michel Lémonon, Laurent ou l’itinéraire d’un prêtre-ouvrier (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000); Paul Valet, Prêtre-ouvrier: Itinéraire d’un jociste

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a methodology of liberty and of liberation for the poor and the marginalized. Its core elements are as follows: 1. “My Missionary Movement” Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens (1904-1996), one of the Moderators of Vatican II, whose influence permeated the entire council, viewed that assembly as the rightful heir of the great movements of renewal. At the same time, when Chenu was engaged in the publication of his most important works on omas and the medieval church, he took a bold, spontaneous step. “I launched out on my missionary movement. […] With my historical and theological methodology, my Dominican vocation, my idea of the Church in the world.”68 As Regent of Studies, Chenu committed himself and the faculties of Le Saulchoir to support the nascent Young Christian Workers. He saw a close connection between his “work situating St omas in history, and these encounters with people engaged in apostolic, even social, warfare.”69 His experience with the Young Christian Workers / Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC) provided the key to his entire mission and kept him in close contact with those at the head of his next missionary project. He was closely involved with the Mission de France / Mission de Paris along with Suhard and Godin.70 is work was not without its difficulties as “painful tensions” emerged between Godin who advocated for a general mission to the working class of France and Georges Guérin, the founder of the JOC in France, who, according to Chenu, viewed everything in terms of the Young Christian Workers. In 1951, when the worker priests came under severe scrutiny, he fearlessly defended the integrity of their mission and ministry.71 A veritable champion of openness, Chenu held that one cannot be prepared intellectually to welcome new ideas if socially and institutionally one remains closed in on oneself.

(Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2008); Paul Anglade, Prêtre-ouvrier forgeron: Ce que c’est qu’obéir (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2001). 68 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 142. 69 Duquesne, Duquesne interroge le Père Chenu, 57-58. 70 See ierry Keck, Jeunesse de l’Église 1936-1955: Aux sources de la crise progressiste en France (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2004). 71 See Chenu, “Le Sacerdoce des Prêtres-Ouvriers,” La Vie intellectuelle (February 1954): 175-181.

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2. An Historian of the Church As an historian of the church, Chenu made an original contribution to the embryonic renewal movements of his time. His great gi was theological and historical reflection focused on contemporary society, its opportunities, and its problems. He did not study history for its own sake. “I’ve never studied the history of the Church alone, isolated, but always in the light of the history of civilizations.”72 He was greatly helped in his métier as historian by his strict adherence to science and his innate ability to engage in open dialogue. He considered it an abuse for theologians to arrive at conclusions that had not passed through the lens of science. He envisioned Le Saulchoir “as a centre of reflection and theological / historical research, faithful to omist inspiration as well as possessing a capacity to engage with the problems confronting Christians in contemporary culture.”73 He also worked with his fellow Dominicans, in a spirit of profound unity, for “the renewal of the whole of the theology of the Church, in which Congar had been one of the greatest crasmen.”74 Féret’s vital contribution was in history while Jean René Louis Dumont (Christophe in religion) contributed to the ecumenical movement at its inception through the Istina centre and journal.75 Yves Congar accentuates Chenu’s leadership skills and ecumenical acumen in a generous tribute. “Father Chenu, an incomparable inspiration to a whole generation of young Dominicans, spoke to us on one occasion of the ‘Faith and Order’ Movement during his course on the history of Christian doctrine, as he also spoke of the Lausanne Conference and of Möhler.”76 In an interview given in 1975, Chenu stated that he and Congar effected a rediscovery of Möhler. In order to transcend the juridical idea of the church, Chenu, together with Congar and Henri-Marie Féret, embarked on an enterprise to eliminate “baroque theology,” a term they coined to describe the theology of the Counter-Reformation.77 72

Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 139. Giuseppe Alberigo, “Christianisme en tant qu’histoire et ‘éologie Confessante’,” in Chenu, Une école, 9-35, at 12. 74 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 141. 75 See Istina: Centre d’études œcuméniques, https://istina.eu/; also Fouilloux, “Jean René Louis Dumont,” https://journals.openedition.org/dominicains/ 1228. 76 Congar, Dialogue between Christians, 3. 77 Jean Puyo, Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar: “une vie pour la vérité” (Paris: Centurion, 1975), 45-46; also Kaplan, “Renewal of Ecclesiastical Studies,” 578ff.; James Ambrose Lee II, “Shaping Reception: Yves Congar’s Reception of Johann Adam Möhler,” New Blackfriars 97 (November 2016): 693-712, https:// 73

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3. A Disciple of Saint Thomas in the Modern World Chenu’s approach to St omas was defined by affectivity and a profound regard for his mission, œuvre, and legacy. He promoted omas throughout his long life because he was an effective pontifex linking the church, religion, and the world. Chenu also expressed his appreciation for Mandonnet’s vital work on omas, with its indubitable focus on ressourcement. “e return to the sources, there as elsewhere, offered enrichment and freshness.”78 He lauded omas as the grand model of the intellectual life. “I want my communion with the divine life in Christ to be rooted firmly in rational foundations. […] St omas’s manner of knowing human and Christian reality is what I would like to have in the world and in the Church today.”79 In response to Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, the French Dominicans made a significant contribution in two areas, first, the rehabilitation of medieval philosophy as genuine philosophy, and secondly, the ongoing project to produce critical editions of the works of St omas, the Leonine Commission, so called because of its connection to Leo XIII.80 With regard to the former, the most important point, notwithstanding significant differences, was agreement “that genuine philosophy of the highest order had taken place in the period; it was not a philosophical dark age.”81 Secondly, as Brian J. Shanley has noted, in his important study, there was “a tremendous upsurge of scholarly interest in the history of medieval philosophy.”82 With the turn to the historical-critical sources, a different omas “emerged from behind the Scholastic veil.”83 Chenu was the undisputed leader of the recovery of the historical omas.84 His aim, in common with his Dominican onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nbfr.12142; Donald J. Dietrich and Michael Himes, The Legacy of the Tübingen School: The Relevance of the Nineteenth Century Theology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1997). 78 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 140. 79 Ibid.; for evidence of a new omistic ressourcement see, Gilles Emery, ed., “omist Ressourcement Series,” Catholic University of America Press, https:// www.hfsbooks.com/series/thomistic-ressourcement-series/. 80 For an account of the history of the Leonine Commission, see https:// www.commissio-leonina.org/category/histoire/. 81 Shanley, Thomist Tradition, 7. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Marie-Dominique Chenu, Introduction à l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Montréal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1950); English trans. Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. and ed. A. M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago, IL: Regency, 1964).

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confrères, was not “a deeper understanding of the historical Aquinas for its own sake, but rather as a resource for contemporary theology (ressourcement).”85 In the wake of Chenu’s vital work for the recovery of the authentic St omas, there was a flourishing of intellectual activity in ecclesiology, moral theology, and philosophy. Rejecting the “theological imperialism” of the ancien régime, with its inherent “intellectual clericalism,” Chenu labored for true spiritual freedom born of contemplation which was nothing other than what he referred to as “Dominican Liberty.”86 He knew that a correct understanding of doctrine depended on the historical knowledge of its genesis, evolution, and development. Success in this great enterprise depended on spirituality with truth as its compass. As Chenu recalls: “en, in 1932, I found myself the regent of a corps of teachers enlarged through the addition of young men. Spiritual filiation is an amazing thing, and it is a joy to think back on those days.”87 5. Chenu’s Legacy: Fruitful Ideas of the Future Chenu stands as an inspirational figure for the present-day citizens of a newly resurgent post-secular society by virtue of his personal integrity and humility, his love of truth and fearless defense of justice.88 In the words of Oscar L. Arnal, a Lutheran commentator: “Of the major theologians of Vatican II Father Chenu seems to be among those most forgotten. […] In spite of his relative obscurity, Chenu remains one of the most creative and innovative theologians of this century. […] His voice is fiercely relevant today where the model of his life and thought can continue to inspire.”89 By championing contemplation at the heart of his entire theological enterprise, he anticipated the threshold church of the

85

Shanley, Thomist Tradition, 7-8. Chenu, “La liberté dominicaine,” 287; Chenu, Une école, 122. 87 Chenu, “A Conversation with Père Chenu,” 141. 88 Paulette Lescot, “Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu,” “Alongside an admirable simplicity, he possessed that rare virtue: humility, he was always self-effacing before others. […] A rare charism shone from him, a predilection for the poor and for the third world.” (P. Lescot was Chenu’s nurse). Source: Chenu, APDF. 89 Oscar L. Arnal, “eology and Commitment: Marie-Dominique Chenu,” Cross Currents 38, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 64-75, at 64; also Duquesne, Jacques Duquesne interroge le Père Chenu, 50; Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004). 86

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future, no longer confined by ecclesiastical boundaries or civil borders.90 He envisioned a frontier church capable of responding to urgent needs and requests as they emerge, whether denominational or socio-economic, in the city or the country. He inspired hosts of church volunteers and workers to join together and organize for action and service of all in order to alleviate, wherever possible and by whatever means, the isolation, emptiness, injustice, and disenchantment of the age. His apostolic vision, founded on hope and solidarity with workers, though largely forgotten in the church and neglected by the academy, retains relevancy for the present age. Its roots were set “into the nourishing soil of silence” to borrow a phrase of Josef Pieper’s. e greatest challenge, however, remains the reception of Chenu’s vision of the church, with its innovative methodology, which is effectively the vision of Vatican II. As Ormond Rush writes: “A text is dead until it is read, so too Vatican II needs its receivers to transform its vision into reality.”91 Acknowledgements: I express my thanks to Jean-Michel Potin, O.P., Archivist of Archive Province Dominicaine de France, Paris for his unfailing courtesy and assistance. I am also deeply grateful to Leo Declerck † (KU Leuven) for his helpful comments on an earlier dra of this paper.

90

See Yves Congar, “What Belonging to the Church Has Come to Mean,” trans. Frances M. Chew, Communio 4 (1977): 146-160. 91 Ormond Rush, “Conciliar Hermeneutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II, 94-112, at 106.

 Ecclesia semper reformanda Karl Rahner, Pope Francis, and Theology as Radical Critique Jerry T. Farmer

Theologia semper reformanda may be a very apt description to honor and recognize the teaching, scholarship, research, and collegiality of Terrence Merrigan, now that he becomes emeritus professor of KU Leuven. is article is dedicated to Terry in celebration of all that he has done in serving the academic community, in particular for his work with his students and his colleagues, both at KU Leuven, and in collaboration with so many others from the global academic community. He has sought to bring us all together in so many ways and he has succeeded in doing that throughout these many years. As Peter De Mey has argued, some statements of Vatican II seem to affirm the remaining significance of the famous Protestant adagium Ecclesia semper reformanda.1 In this chapter this will be illustrated in reference to two theologians and to Pope Francis. Karl Rahner’s Christology is incarnational, his ecclesiology is sacramental, and both must always be seen as developing over the years in a dynamic way. In his ecclesiology, Rahner speaks of both sinners in the Church and the sinful Church. Sin is affirmed at both the personal and structural level. One can find traces of Rahner’s theology in the proclamations of Pope Francis, specifically the Motu Proprio, Magnum Principium, his Message for the 104th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, and his Apostolic 1

Peter De Mey, “Church Renewal and Reform in the Documents of Vatican II: History, eology, Terminology,” The Jurist 71 (2011): 369-400, at 369. Peter De Mey notes, at 369, that this famous Protestant adagium was “most probably used for the first time by Voetius in the Synod of Dordt in 1609.” And while De Mey points out that the terminology is not found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, he stresses that “the council comes very close when it states about the Church in Lumen gentium 8 that she is ‘at one and the same time holy and always in need of purification’ (sancta simul et semper purificanda) and in Unitatis redintegratio 6 that she is called ‘to continual reformation’ (ad hanc perennem reformationem).”

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Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World. Magnum principium challenges and disrupts the epistemopolitical hegemonic power that has been forged as a repudiation of the Second Vatican Council. When one looks to the message of Pope Francis on Migrants and Refugees, it is a message that critiques and seeks to disrupt the hegemonic narratives, among others, of Islamo-phobia and Nationalism. And Gaudete et Exsultate discloses and critiques the tension between Catholic social morality and Catholic sexual morality. In section three we will pay close attention to the work of Judith Gruber. Today theology as radical critique is a local critique that reveals a subversive narrative. e discernment and decision-making process is one which embodies and brings forth the task and the grace of an Ecclesia semper reformanda. 1. Karl Rahner e importance and the influence of the theology of Karl Rahner before, during, and aer the Second Vatican Council is well documented. And certainly that becomes very evident when focusing on the topic of reform and purification. Starting from a pastoral point of view, Karl Rahner raises the question as to why there is oen so much conflict and tension in the Church regarding structural change, noting in particular an acute antagonism between conservative and progressive tendencies in the Church.2 His response is that in secular societies (profanen Gesellschaften) structural change is concerned fundamentally with matters that are of relative importance. In the Church, structural change is also concerned with matters that are of relative importance, that is, inner-worldly (innerweltlichen) and human realities (menschlichen). But precisely these realities are seen to be related “sacramentally” (sakramentaler) to the “divine sphere,” to human beings’ eternal destiny and salvation.3 2

Karl Rahner, “Structural Change in the Church of the Future,” in id., in Theological Investigations. Vol. XX: Concern for the Church, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), 115-132, at 130-132. 3 Ibid., 131; Original: Schriften zur Theologie. Vol. XIV: In Sorge um die Kirche (Einsiedeln: Benziger), 352-353. Rahner notes that such a “sacramental” approach is fundamentally justified: “aber solche Wirklichkeiten haben für den kirchlich Glaubenden (grundsätzlich mit Recht) eine Beziehung gewissermaßen ‘sakramentaler’ Art zu dem eigentlich göttlichen Bereich, zu der ewigen Bestimmung des Menschen und seinem Heil.” e English translation in Theological Investigations is, at times, wrong. For example, the translation of the above

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ese realities, stresses Rahner, take on an importance that goes beyond purely secular realities. Realities such as the word of scripture (das Wort der Schrift) and actual sacramental signs (die eigentlich sakramentalen Zeichen) are mediations of the relationship of the believer to that which is eternal.4 And so if a believer has the impression that ordinary Church realities mediate really and in a vital way her relationship to God and her salvation, or, on the contrary, that such Church realities are hindering or blocking his relationship to God and salvation, this individual is going to be committed to maintaining what works and changing what doesn’t. e intensity of the struggle that can and does occur in the Church concerning earthly realities (das Irdische) results from the fact that the earthly and the eternal “cannot very easily be clearly distinguished either objectively or emotionally.”5 e “solution” that Rahner suggests is that both those with a conservative tendency and those with a progressive tendency do not conclude that their own position is absolute. In effect, “conservatives and progressives can prematurely and by over-simplification associate (verbinden) or even identify (identifizieren) what is relative and historically conditioned with

“kirchlich Glaubenden” is rendered as “churchgoing believers.” Such an imprecise translation blatantly contradicts Rahner’s own insistence that “churchgoing” is not an adequate or appropriate criterion in terms of faith. See, Karl Rahner, “On the Structure of the People of the Church Today,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XII: Confrontations II, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 218-228, at 224-225: Rahner cautions that the Church “must not adopt an attitude of latent and unexplicitated Novatianism by acting as though […] only the ‘attendants at Sunday Mass’ […] really belonged to her, while the rest had to be patiently put up with as ‘bad Catholics’.” Rahner goes on to stress that “so long as we divide the people of the Church into those who fulfill their Sunday and Easter duties and those who do not, we are, in a strange way, deciding whether individuals shall be accounted Catholics or not, not according to whether they fulfill a divine commandment, but according to whether they fulfill a precept of the juris ecclesiastici.” 4 Rahner, “Structural Change in the Church of the Future,” 131; original: Schriften zur Theologie, XIV, 353: “Diese Dinge (das Wort der Schri, die eigentlich sakramentalen Zeichen, aber auch vieles, was darüber hinaus mit den konkreten Strukturen der Kirche gegeben ist) sind die Vermittlungen des Verhältnisses des Glaubenden zum Ewigen.” e ET wrongly translates “diese Dinge […] sind die Vermittlungen des Verhältnisses des Glaubenden zum Ewigen” as “these things […] secure the relationship of the believer to the eternal.” is translation contradicts the very point that Rahner is here emphasizing; the meaning of the key word Vermittlungen – “mediation” – seems to be ignored. 5 Ibid., 131; Schriften zur Theologie, XIV, 353. e ET wrongly translates the verb “vermitteln” as “establish.”

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what is eternal and perennially valid.”6 Rahner’s basic principle – implicit – regarding sacramentology, which is radically Christological, is that the human and divine are affirmed as inseparable (ungetrennt) and also unconfused (unvermischt). Rahner’s Christology is incarnational, and his ecclesiology is sacramental, and both must always be seen as developing over the years in a dynamic way. In the context of his Christology, Rahner speaks of Jesus as the Ursakrament, translated as the “primordial sacrament.” He uses the term Grundsakrament, translated as “basic sacrament,” with regard to the Church.7 6 Rahner, “Structural Change in the Church of the Future,” 132. Rahner refers to the same reality in less explicit sacramental terms in Karl Rahner, “Basic Observations on the Subject of Changeable and Unchangeable Factors in the Church,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XIV: Ecclesiology, Questions in the Church, The Church in the World, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 3-23; original: Schriften zur Theologie. Vol. X: Im Gespräch mit der Zukunft (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1972), 241-261; given as a lecture in 1970. “We should not oversimplify the task of distinguishing (Unterscheidung) between the changeable and unchangeable elements in the Church, and that for this reason a certain anxiety among the Church’s members and a certain antagonism between conservatives and progressives such as cannot immediately be resolved are perfectly understandable […] e only point of real conflict can be whether the new historical form (Gestalt) in which the enduring unchangeable element still is present is opportune (opportun), that is, whether it is accepted by the individual and it serves the task of the Church today and tomorrow better than the past forms, or that it is precisely that which one wants to relegate even now to the past” (emended translation; the ET is inexact on p. 23; German, p. 261). 7 In Karl Rahner, “e eology of Symbol,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. IV: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 221-252, Rahner uses the term Ursakrament to describe the Church, but he notes that “the Church is of course the ‘primary’ sacrament (‘Ur’sakrament) in relation to the single sacraments, not to Christ,” 241, n. 14. However, it must be pointed out that in his later writings one sees a development in which Rahner uses the term Grundsakrament to describe the Church and uses the term Ursakrament to speak of Jesus Christ. See Karl Rahner, “e One Christ and the Universality of Salvation,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol.  XVI: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), 214-215, particularly n. 17, where, in reference to this terminology, Rahner cites an earlier work, Karl Rahner, Die siebenfältige Gabe: Über die Sakramente der Kirche (Munich: Ars Sacra, 1974); subsequently published in ET: Karl Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments (London: Bloomsbury, 1977). See also the contention of Rahner that this “more comprehensive and more appropriate view of the sacraments as such and of the concrete sacraments in particular” has been arrived at since Vatican Council II, in which Jesus Christ is the Ursakrament and the Church is characterized as

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A more nuanced terminology can be seen in his 1966 article. But it is more than a question of a refining of terminology. ere is a new theological emphasis. Rahner uses the term sacramentum in the context of the Church’s relationship to the world, and not primarily as descriptive of the constitutional structure of the Church. And one notes an equivalency in terminology in describing the Church as sacramentum and Grundsakrament.8 But fundamental to Rahner’s understanding of the Church as Grundsakrament is first affirming the Church as a diaspora Church, a Church that exists in a pluralistic society.9 Consequently, the Church is seen as the Grundsakrament which is a reference to (ein Verweis auf ) the grace of God precisely where that grace is not manifested in its full ecclesial expression. But the Church is also the Grundsakrament inasmuch as it is the manifestation of God as grace in its social and historical fullness. And it is in this dialectic that the terminology Ursakrament and Grundsakrament particularly contrast

Grundsakrament, in Karl Rahner, “Introductory Observations on omas Aquinas’ eology of the Sacraments in General,” in id., Theological Investigations, XIV, 149-160, particularly n. 24, 159-160. In an article first published in 1947, and later updated in regard to the notes, Karl Rahner, “Membership of the Church according to the Teaching of Pius XII’s Encyclical ‘Mystici Corporis Christi’,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. II: Man in the Church, trans. Karl H. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963), 1-88, his use of the term Ursakrament as applied to the Church does not yet manifest a more nuanced approach. At this point he simply wishes to stress that “there is the notion of the Church as incarnate presence of Christ and his grace, together with Christ and his grace, and, on the other hand, the notion of the Church in as far as she must be essentially distinguished from this grace and inner divine union,” 73-74 [emphasis in original]. In this same context he speaks of the sacramental dimension of membership in the Church as a sakramentales Urzeichen (sacramental primordial sign). In another article also first published in 1947, Karl Rahner, “e Church of Sinners,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1969), 253-269, Rahner uses the term Ursakrament for the Church, still insisting, however, on the distinction between the Church as sign of grace and the Church as filled with grace. 8 Karl Rahner, “e New Image of the Church,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. X: Writings of 1965-67 (2), trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973), 3-29, particularly 12-14, esp. 14. 9 Karl Rahner, “On the Presence of Christ in the Diaspora Community according to the Teaching of the Second Vatican Council,” in id., Theological Investigations, X, 84-102. Rahner himself refers (wrongly cited in TI) to an earlier foundational treatment of this topic in his 1954 presentation, Karl Rahner, “A eological Interpretation of the Position of Christians in the Modern World,” in Mission and Grace, vol. 1 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 3-55.

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with each other. For the pledge of salvation manifests itself above all as a primordial-sacramental pledge (ursakramentale Zusage) in Jesus the Christ. And then it is the Church which, as the historical continuation of Jesus’ existence, manifests this pledge as a fundamental-sacramental pledge (grundsakramentale Zusage).10 us, to speak of the Church as Grundsakrament is not simply to contrast this in a negative way with Jesus the Christ, the Ursakrament. Naming the Church as Grundsakrament is to positively recognize the Church as the affirmation of the salvation of the world that takes place “outside” the Church. is salvation that takes place in the “non-ecclesial” world is what can be described as anonymous Christianity. is relationship between Church and world is dealt with explicitly by Rahner in 1968. In his article on this topic in Sacramentum Mundi he describes the Church as the Grundsakrament which manifests that “in the unity, activity, fraternity, etc. of the world, the kingdom of God is at hand.”11 Rahner’s theology has been extremely helpful and important in emphasizing the incarnational nature of the Christian faith. He asserts that if we say that ‘God is made man’ […] we either think automatically of God being changed into a human being or else we understand the content of the word ‘human being’ in this context as an outer garment […] But both interpretations of this statement are nonsensical and contrary to what Christian dogma really intends to say. For God remains God and does not change, and Jesus is a real, genuine, and finite human being with his own experiences, in adoration before the incomprehensibility of God, a free and obedient human being, like us in all things.12

And on another occasion he puts it very simply: “We could still say of the creator, with the Scripture of the Old Testament, that he is in heaven and we are on earth. But of the God whom we confess in Christ we must say that he [God] is precisely where we are, and can only be found there.”13

10

Rahner, “e New Image of the Church,” 13-16. Karl Rahner, “Church and World,” in Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 1, ed. Karl Rahner et al. (London: Herder and Herder, 1968), 346-357, esp. at 348. 12 Karl Rahner, “‘I Believe in Jesus Christ’: Interpreting an Article of Faith,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. IX: Writings of 1965-67 (1), trans. Graham Harrison (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972), 165-168, esp. at 166. 13 Karl Rahner, “On the eology of the Incarnation,” in id., Theological Investigations, IV, 105-120, esp. at 117. Rahner comments that the finite “has been given an infinite depth and is no longer a contrast to the infinite.” And, 11

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In his ecclesiology, Rahner speaks of both sinners in the Church and the sinful Church.14 Sin is affirmed at both the personal and the structural level. Rahner holds that one must conclude that the Church can be sinful in its actions. is Church, which never ceases to be human, remains in life-filled solidarity with Jesus, the Christ, who is the source of all holiness. And the Church’s sin can never so distort the visibleness of Jesus, the Christ, in the world so that the Holy Spirit would depart from the Church or be unable any longer to manifest God historically and visibly. is is because the Holy Spirit has inseparably (untrennbar) united itself to the Church. Rahner has done a great service to us through his theology, in particular his Christology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. But even Rahner, as probing as his theology is, does not have the last word. 2. Pope Francis On September 9, 2017, the New York Times published an article entitled: “Pope Francis Shis Power from Rome with ‘Hugely Important’ Liturgical Reform.” e article proclaims that “Pope Francis, who has used his absolute authority in the Vatican to decentralize power from Rome, made a widespread change Saturday to the ways, and words, in which Roman Catholics worship by amending Vatican law to give national bishop conferences greater authority in translating liturgical language.” And, not of minor importance, the announcement of the Motu Proprio, Magnum Principium, which took effect on October 1, 2017, was made while Pope Francis was in Medellín, Colombia, the site of the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops that took place in 1968 that embodied and interpreted at the local level the reforms that had been promulgated at the Second Vatican Council.15 is decision by Pope

“in the incarnation, the Logos creates by taking on, and takes on by emptying himself.” 14 Karl Rahner, “e Church of Sinners,” in id., Theological Investigations, VI, 253-269, and Karl Rahner, “e Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” in id., Theological Investigations, VI, 270-294. 15 Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis Shis Power from Rome with ‘Hugely Important’ Liturgical Reform,” in New York Times, September 9, 2017, available from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/world/europe/pope-francis-liturgicalreform.html. Interestingly, in the print edition that appeared on September 10, 2017, the same article had a different headline: “Pope Gives Nod to Liberals in ‘Liturgy Wars’,” [accessed March 14, 2021].

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Francis can be seen and interpreted through the lens of theology as radical critique, as a subversive message. A few weeks earlier, on August 15, 2017, Pope Francis released his Message for the 104th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, scheduled for January 14, 2018, (entitled: “Welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating migrants and refugees.”) In his message he emphasizes that these four verbs, welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating migrants and refugees should guide world leaders, specifically referring to those who gathered at the United Nations Summit, September 19, 2016, who “clearly expressed their desire to take decisive action in support of migrants and refugees to save their lives and protect their rights.” And a goal of this summit is the draing and approval, “before the end of 2018,” of “two Global Compacts, one for refugees and the other for migrants.”16 is message of Pope Francis can also be seen and interpreted through the lens of theology as radical critique, as a subversive message. Finally, on Monday morning, April 9, 2018, the Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, was issued by the Vatican. e headline in the New York Times reporting on the release of the Apostolic Exhortation proclaimed, “Pope Francis Puts Caring for Migrants and Opposing Abortion on Equal Footing.”17 In Paragraph 101, Pope Francis states: Our defence of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the

16 Pope Francis, Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for the 104th World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2018, available from https://w2.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/messages/migration/documents/papa-francesco_20170815_worldmigrants-day-2018.html, [accessed March 14, 2021]. 17 Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis Puts Caring for Migrants and Opposing Abortion on Equal Footing,” in New York Times, April 9, 2018, available from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/world/europe/pope-francis-migrantsabortion.html, [accessed April 29, 2018]. Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, available from http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/ papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_gaudete-et-exsultate.html, [accessed March 14, 2021]. ough publicly released on April 9, 2018, the note at the conclusion of the exhortation indicates: “Given in Rome at St. Peter’s, on 19 March, the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, in the year 2018, the sixth of my Pontificate.”

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vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.

And he continues in Paragraph 102: We oen hear it said that, with respect to relativism and the flaws of our present world, the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue. Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the “grave” [scare quotes in original] bioethical questions. at a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable, but not a Christian, for whom the only proper attitude is to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children.18

e New York Times article quotes an earlier paragraph of the exhortation and adds this comment: “‘In their daily perseverance, I see the holiness of the Church militant’, [Paragraph 7] Francis wrote, using a phrase that has been appropriated by archconservatives critical of his papacy. e Pope’s allies have described the fringe Catholic website Church Militant as openly in favor of political ‘ultraconservatism’.”19 Here, again, all of these words of Pope Francis can be seen and interpreted through the lens of theology as radical critique, as subversive messages. Anne Patrick, by contrast, interprets the writings of Pope Francis with an explicit innocence, without any hint of the perspective presented by a theology as radical critique: “Without criticizing the hierarchy or his predecessors in papal office – on the contrary, his writings quote many statements of popes and episcopal conferences appreciatively – Pope Francis is opening up new lines of thought […]”20 Whereas theology as radical critique is indeed a critique beyond such innocence, explicit or implicit. 18 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, Paragraphs 101-102. 19 Horowitz, “Pope Francis Puts Caring for Migrants and Opposing Abortion on Equal Footing.” e complete text of Paragraph 7 provides a fuller context: “I like to contemplate the holiness present in the patience of God’s people: in those parents who raise their children with immense love, in those men and women who work hard to support their families, in the sick, in elderly religious who never lose their smile. In their daily perseverance I see the holiness of the Church militant. Very oen it is a holiness found in our next-door neighbours, those who, living in our midst, reflect God’s presence. We might call them ‘the middle class of holiness’.” 20 Anne Patrick, “e Rhetoric of Conscience, Pope Francis, Conversion, and Catholic Health Care,” in Conscience and Catholic Health Care, From Clinical Contexts to Government Mandates, ed. David DeCosse and omas Nairn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017), 17-32, at 24.

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3. Theology as Radical Critique Judith Gruber presents an outline of a genealogy of critical theories which themselves are critical of Immanuel Kant’s absolutization of reason. Twentieth-century critical theories argue that Kant’s presupposition of pure theoretical reason “allows him to conceal, first of all, that his (and any) critique is a (specific, and therefore contingent) practice and, second, that knowledge is always and inextricably conditioned by social, historical, and economical forces.”21 Even more crucial, stresses Gruber, “post-Enlightenment critical theories expose that this ‘blind spot’ in Kant’s critique is not politically innocent. In fact, quite the contrary: Max Horkheimer and eodor Adorno, who are crucial in exposing some of the issues at stake, argue that the original emancipatory notion of enlightenment (emancipation through the use of reason) endorsed repressive and oppressive behaviors.”22 erefore Gruber argues that “theology lives up to its own normative foundation only if it is done as radical critique.”23 Gruber goes on to highlight the contributions of Michel Foucault, who insisted that “critique, too, is a discursive practice and, as such, irresolvably entangled into the relations of knowledge and power. Critique, Foucault says, does not transcend the hegemonic relation of society but can only be at work within it; it is and remains local critique.”24 “Critical

21

Judith Gruber, “Revealing Subversions: eology as Critical eory,” in Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, ed. Anthony Godzieba and Bradford Hinze (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017), 179-202, at 181. 22 Ibid., 182. With regard to the “problematic relation between validity of investigation (guaranteed by method) and meaningfulness of interpretation (truth),” see Sandra Schneiders, “Biblical Hermeneutics since Vatican II,” in Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence, 3-17: “e whole problematic was symbolically captured in the title of what was perhaps the most important book on the subject in the last half of the twentieth century, Hans-George Gadamer’s, Truth and Method, which, in fact, was really an attempt to challenge and reverse the accepted relationship between these two terms. According to Gadamer, method does not, as the high priests of the Scientific Revolution and then the Enlightenment would have us believe, control our access to truth nor determine the validity of our engagement with it. Rather, the hegemony of method is actually an obstacle to the search for truth, because it defines (and thereby limits) truth rather than using method to facilitate the quest for truth,” 15. 23 Gruber, “Revealing Subversions,” 179 (emphasis in original). 24 Ibid., 185 (emphasis in original).

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theory,” argues Gruber, “no longer looks for the one universal form of reason, knowledge or truth which is believed to facilitate emancipation but in reality reinscribes the epistemo-political logic of hegemony; instead it traces the forging of knowledge in an – uneven – tug of war between hegemonic and subversive narratives.”25 With respect to the formulation of the Christian tradition, “a radical critique of church history thus discloses that structures of oppression have inscribed themselves deeply into the texture of its master narrative – and, once in place, have served to perpetuate the hegemonic forces which gave it its shape […] ose in power have the power to shape knowledge in a way that reinforces their power.”26 And Gruber emphasizes that “the reemergence of silenced theologies troubles the established tradition in an even more profound way: their critique reveals just how deeply and inextricably Christian tradition is entangled in the particular social, historical, and economic situations out of which it has been forged

25

Gruber, “Revealing Subversions,” 188. Ibid., 189. Gruber adds [in note 30] that “the discursive history of the concept of original sin is one of many examples for this epistemo-political dynamics at work in the Christian tradition. Feminist theologians have exposed the interplay of patriarchal power and theological knowledge in the formation of the dogma of original sin,” citing, for an overview, Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 153-178. See, also, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Between Mountain Peaks and a Crumpled Handkerchief, Hermeneutics and Critical eory,” in Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence, 18-39: “Habermas argues that hermeneutics works out of a translation model that assumes meaning. When one translates one assumes that the text is meaningful […] But Gadamer’s approach is much more fundamental than the translation model [emphasis in original] […] For Gadamer […] a text is understood only when one understands its practical application […] Habermas offers yet another, more basic critique beyond the one of the translation model. is critique takes issues with the appeal to practical application that assumes that the tradition can be understood primarily in terms of having an authority or a claim upon us. Such an understanding, he believes, glosses over the hidden mechanisms of power. is fundamental critique goes against the universalism of hermeneutics. Tradition not only expresses a meaning but also reveals and incorporates power and domination that are present in the hidden mechanisms and societal structures of the past and up to the present [my emphasis]. Consequently, a need exists to critique the tradition through open discourse by all who are affected by the tradition. Habermas introduces the categories of the transcendental conditions of discourse that are counterfactual and consequently raises the possibility that every consensus can be revised and thrown into question” (19-22). 26

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[…] It highlights political, social, historical and economic conditions as decisive factors in the forging of the church.”27 Finally, Gruber brings us back to the incarnational foundation of the Christian faith. e event of the incarnation is a prime example of this logic of the event: the belief that God revealed God’s self in Jesus from Nazareth could emerge only against the discursive background of revelation as understood in the Hebrew Scriptures. It depends on the Hebrew belief that God’s salvific presence becomes manifest in the history of God’s people. Yet, at the same time, the event of incarnation shis and unsettles this discourse: proclaiming the crucified as the Messiah (and the Messiah as the crucified) is ‘impossible’ for Hebrew theology, which tends to conceive of the messiah as a powerful, kingly figure.28

erefore Gruber insists that if we want to hold on to the historicity of incarnation as the foundation of the church, we can therefore not assume a linear relation between the historical event of revelation and the theological discourse of the church. Instead, there is a hermeneutical circle between revelation and theology, in which God’s revelation and ecclesial theology are in a relation of mutual dependence. As an event in history, incarnation provides a foundation for the church which manifests itself only through its proclamation by the church. eologically speaking: the body of Jesus the Christ is available only as the ecclesial body of Christ; incarnatio necessitates the incarnatio continua of the church.29

27

Gruber, “Revealing Subversions,” 189-190 (emphasis in original). Gruber insists, for example, that “the texts and practices of the basileia tou theou in the gospels do not simply pitch God’s reign versus Roman reign in a binary fashion. ey do not envision God’s kingdom as a reversal and replacement of the Roman Empire but develop a more complex and profound critique of its hegemonic rule” (191). She points to the work of John Dominic Crossan and his study of the basileia texts of the gospels: “By advocating an ethical rather than an apocalyptic eschatology, the basileia texts and practices of the New Testament become a theological tool which transforms rather than replaces the violent logic of hegemonic power: the Roman Empire is not simply to be substituted by God’s kingdom; instead, the texts envision a more profound critique of hegemony. ey employ strategies that undermine the structures of oppression necessary to establish and keep imperial power in place” (193); the reference is to John D. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 260, 283, and 284. 28 Gruber, “Revealing Subversions,” 196. 29 Ibid., 196-197.

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4. Conclusion e Motu proprio of Pope Francis, Magnum principium, his message on Migrants and Refugees, and Gaudete et Exsultate can each be seen and interpreted through the lens of theology as radical critique and as subversive documents. Magnum principium challenges and disrupts the epistemo-political hegemonic power that has been forged as a repudiation of the Second Vatican Council. It shis the decision-making away from centralized Vatican control and power to the local leadership of national Bishops Conferences. And why, in this instance, is this so important? e adagium, legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi [Prosper of Aquitaine, fih century, oen shortened to lex orandi lex credendi], stresses that the prayer and worship of the believing community is a foundation for belief itself.30 And as noted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1126, “since the sacraments express and develop the communion of faith in the Church, the lex orandi is one of the essential criteria of the dialogue that seeks to restore the unity of Christians.”31 (Even the language of “restoring” the unity of Christians is itself veiling a hegemonic narrative. For the challenge of Christian unity is not a return to a past golden age, however that might be identified.) But theology as radical critique does not idealize Magnum principium in a naive way, but sees that the hegemonic power of the national Bishops Conferences must also be critiqued and disrupted by other subversive narratives. And when one looks to the message of Pope Francis on Migrants and Refugees, it is a message that critiques and seeks to disrupt the hegemonic narratives, among others, of Islamo-phobia and Nationalism. e questions addressed here are similar, but distinct: “Where is the grace of God present, or absent, for the Church as sacrament of the grace of God precisely where that grace, or its absence, is not manifested in its full ecclesial expression.” And the question addressed relating to the ways 30 Rick Hilgartner, “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: e Word of God in the Celebration of the Sacraments,” in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catechetical Sunday, September 20, 2009, available from: http://www.usccb.org/ beliefs-and-teachings/how-we-teach/catechesis/catechetical-sunday/word-ofgod/upload/lex-orandi-lex-credendi.pdf, [accessed March 14, 2021]. For a more thorough study of the text of Prosper of Aquitane, Hilgartner cites Kevin Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994). 31 Vatican, Catechism of the Catholic Church, III. Sacraments of Faith, Paragraph 1126. Available from: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P32. HTM [accessed March 14, 2021].

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and words in which Roman Catholics worship: “Where is the grace of God present, or absent, for the Church as sacrament inasmuch as it is the manifestation of God as grace in social and historical fullness.”32 And it is Gaudete et Exsultate that discloses and critiques the tension between Catholic social morality and Catholic sexual morality. Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler succinctly point out that in social morality […] the Catholic Church offers principles for reflection, criteria for judgment, and guidelines for action. In sexual morality, however, it offers propositions from past tradition, not as principles and guidelines for reflection, judgment and action, but as laws and absolute norms to be universally and uncritically obeyed […] Since social and sexual morality pertain to the same person, this double and conflicting approach seems illogical.33

In paragraphs 101 and 102, Pope Francis rejects the view that the situation of migrants is a “lesser issue,” “a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ [scare quotes in original] bioethical questions,” and that the “lives of the poor, those already born,” are not equal to the innocent unborn. His words constitute a subversive narrative critiquing a double and conflicting approach to social morality and sexual morality. ough not offering the last word, Rahner’s reflections, analysis, and support of the deliberatio communitaria of Ignatius of Loyola is insightful and pertinent. e spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola has a profound influence on Rahner’s theology, specifically his pneumatology. Rahner views the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius as a “fundamental document” of the modern period.34 But the Spiritual Exercises do more than affirm modernity, they transcend it. Rahner emphasizes, Ignatius developed a logic of existential decision by means of his rules of choice, which had not existed in this form before, despite the traditional doctrine of the discernment of spirits. Since then, there has never been sufficient theological study of the real meaning and presuppositions of this Ignatian innovation. Its importance remains valid today, but it must be removed from the context of the choice of a vocation in the Church and clearly expressed in terms of its general significance for human existence. Hesitation and opposition in the mind of the Church against the 32

See above, notes 10 and 11. Todd Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, eds., Sexual Ethics: A Theological Introduction (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 4. Salzman and Lawler, ibid., 40, n. 12, note that “this notion of individual responsibility is brilliantly analyzed by Jean-Yves Calvez in Morale sociale et morale sexuelle: Etudes 378 (1993): 642-644.” 34 Karl Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” in id., Theological Investigations, XVI, 135-155, at 138. 33

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spirit of the modern period prevented the real understanding and the proper expansion of this logic of existential and practical reason, which cannot be given an adequate theoretical basis.35

Peter Fritz argues that “Ignatius’ modernity is an alternative to the modernity that has hitherto prevailed.” And referring to Louis Dupré, Fritz states: “Ignatius entirely redefines the emerging modern idea of freedom. In contrast to his humanistic contemporaries, and more like the Protestants, he defines freedom as ‘a divinely inspired surrender within which action itself becomes grounded in passivity’. Freedom is primarily God’s, and God shares this with human creatures.”36 Rahner finds in Ignatius one who is situated at the beginning of the modern period, but who, at the same time goes beyond it. It is a movement away from the radical autonomy and self-sufficiency of the individual. To what is Ignatius drawn? Rahner describes it in this way: […] Ignatius did not regard himself as the single founder of his order, but rather saw the group of his first companions, united by the spirit of the Exercises, as the real founders of the order. We are not, I think, justified in dismissing this notion simply as the expression of saintly humility. For he knew and practiced the ‘deliberatio communitaria’ with his companions (deliberation not only in the group but of the group), where the logic of existential choice was to apply and operate for the group as a whole.37

eology as radical critique is a local critique that reveals a subversive narrative. e discernment and decision-making process is one which embodies and brings forth the task and the grace of Ecclesia semper reformanda.

35

Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” 140-141, n. 11. Peter J. Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 134. Fritz comments: “Prior to reading Rahner’s Ignatian texts, it would help briefly to set up a hermeneutical structure for understanding Rahner’s Ignatius […] From Dupré [Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 224-227] we shall get a sense of how Ignatius works at the dawn of the modern worldview to transform it. From Guardini [Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956] we shall learn how a transformation of the modern worldview heralds that worldview’s terminus” (132). 37 Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” 145. 36

Part III

Theology of Interreligious Dialogue

18 Revisiting the Redaction History of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in Response to a Recent Debate in Catholic Theology of Interreligious Dialogue Peter De Mey

Ever since the publication of the 2012 monograph by Ralph Martin, a Catholic priest and professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, I have been fascinated by its challenging title: Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization.1 e 50th anniversary of the opening of the Council during the Pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI seemed the perfect occasion for Martin to present the program of New Evangelization as the faithful heir of Vatican II’s teaching on mission. What is really crucial in what Vatican II actually teaches about the chances of salvation outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church, according to Ralph Martin, is a line towards the end of Lumen Gentium [LG] 16 which has been overlooked by most commentators. In his opinion only the English translation by Flannery faithfully renders the meaning of the Latin text: But very oen (at saepius), deceived by the Evil One, men have become vein in their reasonings, have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and served the world rather than the Creator (cf. Rom. 1, 21.25). Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair. Hence to procure the glory of God and the salvation of all these, the Church, mindful of the Lord’s command, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mk. 16, 16) takes zealous care to foster the missions.

On the basis of this line, Martin is convinced that the interpretation by Karl Rahner, that LG 16 represents “the theological optimism of the Council regarding salvation,” is no longer tenable.2 In his opinion, 1 Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). 2 Karl Rahner, “Observations on the Problem of the ‘Anonymous Christian’,” in id., Theological Investigations. Vol. XIV: Ecclesiology, Questions in the Church, The Church in the World, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 280-294, at 286.

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Rahner belongs to those who “have made the leap from ‘possibility’ to ‘probability’ to ‘presumed universal salvation’.”3 In his plea to take the message of Vatican II regarding mission and evangelization most seriously,4 he feels supported by Gérard Philips, the peritus who as of the first intersession coordinated the redaction of the different dras of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in the eological Commission and who already in 1967 wrote the following commentary on LG 17: We cannot remain silent on a paradoxical situation, stirred up by a misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Council. Under the influence of an extension of conciliar perspectives, the missionary zeal of some has been weakened. No ecclesial document has ever emphasized with such insistence the universal missionary obligation as Lumen Gentium did, not only in this text, but throughout the Constitution, from the first to the last page. True missionary zeal is the fruit of a pure faith and unselfish charity: that is what Vatican II aimed at, not indifference.5

Gavin D’Costa, who is professor of Catholic theology at the University of Bristol and a major voice in theology of interreligious dialogue, supports the interpretation of Martin in his 2014 book Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews & Muslims, while at the same time offering a more complete picture of the teaching of the Council on Jews and Muslims.6

3

Martin, Will Many Be Saved?, 58. See for a critique of Martin’s view on other religions Terrence Merrigan, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Breaking the Impasse in Contemporary Catholic eology of Interreligious Dialogue,” in Res Opportunae Nostrae Aetatis: Studies on the Second Vatican Council Offered to Mathijs Lamberigts, ed. Dries Bosschaert and Johan Leemans, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 317 (Louvain, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2020), 469-482, at 479: “e position advanced by Martin seems incapable of accommodating either the reality, or the theological significance, of non-Christian religious life and practice. Neither does it seem to take much account of the achievements of the value(s) of those traditions, some of which predate Christianity and continue to provide moral and spiritual sustenance to countless numbers of people. e non-Christian traditions are, as it were, reified, reduced to the perceptions of critical Christian outsiders, and found deficient or at least wanting.” 5 Martin, Will Many Be Saved?, 203. is is Martin’s own translation of Gérard Philips, Dogmatische constitutie over de Kerk “Lumen Gentium”: Geschiedenis – tekst – kommentaar. Eerste deel (Antwerpen: Patmos, 1967), 227. 6 Gavin D’Costa, Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews & Muslims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See, e.g., the section on “Sin, Satan and Salvation Optimism in Lumen Gentium 16,” ibid., 107-112. 4

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Even if Martin and D’Costa have only a limited interest in historical research on Vatican II,7 in view of the many imperfections of their reconstructions,8 in this chapter I will present an unavoidably detailed analysis of the redaction history of LG 16-17 in four stages: the clash of opinions in the pre-conciliar eological Commission on the question whether non-Catholics can be called members of the Church (1), the preparation of De Ecclesia 8-10 during the first session and intersession (2), the division of n° 10 in a number on non-Christians and another on mission during the second session and intersession (3) and the final modifications of LG 16-17 during the third session (4). 1. The Pre-Conciliar Theological Commission’s Chapter on the Members of the Church 1. The Initial Expectations of the Members and Advisors Soon aer his appointment as secretary of the pre-conciliar eological Commission on June 15, 1960, Sebastian Tromp received the task from Cardinal Ottaviani to coordinate the draing of an outline for four dogmatic constitutions. e outline for a Dogmatic constitution on the Church (De Ecclesia) in twelve chapters was his work.9 e constitution

7

See e.g. D’Costa’s support of the critical view on Alberigo’s History of Vatican II project by Agostino Marchetto: “Obviously private diaries are illuminating, popes do have different visions and emphases, and cardinals work out strategies in smoke-filled rooms, but none of these factors allows the final texts to be other than normative. e text’s genesis is important, as is the debate on the Council floor but ultimately the agreed text is the agreed teaching.” Vatican II, 23. 8 To mention only a few shortcomings in their historical account: as to the pre-conciliar period they only focus on “the original dra of De ecclesia prepared by the Curia” (Martin, Will Many Be Saved?, at 11); if LG 14-16 is seen as “a triptych” and only “some attention” is given to LG 13 and 17 (ibid., xii), one wonders whether Martin is aware that during the second session the decision was taken to split the previous n° 10 in two coherent numbers 16-17 with Congar as major draer; the authors only refer to the relationes de singulis numeris (ibid., 12, n. 13-14; D’Costa, Vatican II, 80, n. 49 and 102, n. 96; cf. for LG 16, Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II [AS] III/1, 206-207) but seem to be unaware of the relatio generalis on chapter two pronounced by archbishop Garrone immediately before the crucial vote on chapter 2 during the third session (see AS III/1, 500-504). In the conclusion of this chapter, we will contrast our findings again with the work of Martin and D’Costa. 9 Sebastian Tromp, Konzilstagebuch mit Erläuterungen und Akten aus der Arbeit der Theologischen Kommission II. Vatikanisches Konzil, ed. Alexandra von Teuffenbach (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2006), I/1,

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would start with treating general ecclesiological themes: ‘e nature and mission of the Church’, ‘e Church and the communion of the Saints’, ‘e members of the Church and its juridical subjects’ and ‘e necessity of the Church for salvation’.10 Towards the end of the Dogmatic Constitution, Tromp planned chapters on ‘e Church and the return of the separated brethren’ and on ‘Christian tolerance’.11 On September 22, they received the observations by the Pope which contained, among others, the request to insert a chapter on missions.12 In the following weeks, Tromp received the first comments on the proposed structure, but Congar had already submitted his reflections on the four constitutions soon aer receiving his nomination as consultor of the eological Commission.13 Congar hopes that the Council will pay attention to the eschatological dimension of the Church and will present the Church as “the sacrament of eschatological salvation.” In his opinion, “an essentially missionary aspect” equally is “at the heart of one’s notion of the Church.” For him, the notion of the unity of the Church is not static, but “dynamic.” “Catholic unity” requires “perpetual growth” and “is the goal of missionary efforts.”14 Among a few ‘additional remarks’ he mentions that the Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus needs to be better explained to Protestants.15 70. Henceforth this source will be abbreviated as Konzilstagebuch, followed by the series number. 10 In line with the tradition that a Council was usually convened in response to doctrinal challenges, the consultor of the Holy Office added in brackets the word “indifferentismus.” 11 Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (henceforth: AAV), busta (henceforth: b.) 736, n° 64: “Lavori della commissione teologica,” 13.6.1960, 3. 12 AAV, b. 736, n° 67: Card. Tardini to Card. Ottaviani, “Osservazioni ai quattro schemi di costituzione,” 22.9.1960, 3 p. 13 See the 17-page letter of Congar of 24.9.1960 in the archive of Philips, which is preserved in the Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (henceforth: F. Philips), here at n° 54. On September 28, Tromp writes in his diary: “H. Pater Congar schickte ein groβes französisch geschriebenes Memorandum, das er selbst allen Mitgliedern und Beratern zugeschickt hat” (Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 82). 14 Cf. “Congar’s Initial Proposals for Vatican II Translated by Joseph A.  Komonchak,” 5. Cf. https://jakomonchak.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ congars-plan-for-the-council.pdf. 15 Ibid., 10. Congar had developed a strong interest in this theme in the previous decade, starting with “‘Hors de l’Église, pas de salut’, destin et sens d’une formule,” Vers l’unité chrétienne 58 (December 1953): 109-111. In 1959, he had written a book for a wide audience on this theme: Vaste monde ma paroisse: Vérité et dimensions du salut (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’homme d’action, 1959);

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e Louvain theologian Gérard Philips, who had been appointed as member of the eological Commission, only reacted to the proposed chapters of the schema De Ecclesia. He approved the attention to the “mission and intrinsic finality of the Church, which needs to lead all people to salvation in Christ.”16 e second chapter announced by Tromp inspires him to make a comment on the salvation of non-Christians: “ose who are not ‘really’ members of the Church but are nevertheless living in a state of grace, are not foreign to the communion of saints.”17 As regards the question of the ‘members and subjects of the Church’, he argues that both notions are not identical but that it is an urgent and important topic.18 A remark made about the chapter on tolerance is equally relevant for our theme. Philips wonders whether “no better word can be found to indicate the attitude of Catholics towards nonCatholics.”19 Even if his expectation would not be met during the work on the pre-conciliar dra of De Ecclesia, professor Michael Schmaus of the university of Munich made already a general remark about the importance for the theology of missions of recognizing the values present in other religions.20 English translation: The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and Its Problems (London: Darton, Longmann & Todd, 1961). See for a thorough study of this theme in Congar: omas F. O’Meara, “Yves Congar: eologian of Grace in a Wide World,” in Yves Congar Theologian of the Church. New and Expanded Edition, ed. Gabriel Flynn, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 45 (Louvain: Peeters, 2018), 453-481. See also Terrence Merrigan, “e Appeal to Yves Congar in Recent Catholic eology of Religions: e Case of Jacques Dupuis,” ibid., 509-540. 16 Gérard Philips, “Schema I: De Ecclesia,” s.d., 2: “Hoc elementum ut maxime fundamentale apparet, neque plena notio mysterii huius exspectari potest, si negligeretur indicatio missionis et finalitatis intrinsecae Ecclesiae, quae omnes homines ad salutem in Christo perducere debet” (AAV, b. 736, n° 69). 17 Ibid., 3: “Quidam qui non sunt ‘reapse’ Ecclesiae membra, sed tamen in statu gratiae inveniuntur, a Communione Sanctorum non sunt extranei.” 18 e sensitive nature of this topic also appears from a remark made by Tromp in his diary on October 1 (Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 85): “Heri vespere mihi dixit R.P. Hürth Cardinalem Beam secundum Baseler Nachrichten in sermone quodam dixisse omnes baptizatos simpliciter esse membra Ecclesiae. Quod non facile creditur. Essent enim apostatae et haeretici malae fidei membra Ecclesiae: Forsan locutus est de dissidentibus bonae fidei.” 19 Philips, “Schema I: De Ecclesia,” 6: “Quaeritur utrum forsan aptius vocabulum inveniri posset ad indicandam habitudinem catholicorum erga acatholicos, ita nempe ut libertas actus hominis ad fidem accedentis, clare agnoscatur.” 20 Michael Schmaus, “Bemerkungen zu den vier Schemata, welche der Pontificia Commissio eologica pro Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano II vorgelegt werden,” 24.10.1960, 3: “Es ist zu prüfen, ob echte religiöse Werte in den

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2. The First Drafts by Hugo Lattanzi e members were invited for a first meeting of the eological Commission on October 26-27. Aer the first meeting of the sub-commission De Ecclesia on October 28, Tromp asked the Cardinal whether he could be appointed as draer of the schema, since the obvious candidate, Philips, could only irregularly attend their meetings.21 Since the Cardinal considered this task incompatible with that of a secretary,22 on November 15 he nominated Rosario Gagnebet as chair of the commission and the dean of the Lateran University, Hugo Lattanzi, as additional member.23 e latter was asked to write a first dra of De Ecclesia, which was discussed in a meeting of the sub-commission on January 5, 1961 and qualified by Tromp as “a concatenation of texts.”24 Two things are obvious in the general outlook of this 6 page document without subtitles: the author has done a huge effort to support his views with a total of 50 biblical references and he has inserted four explicit condemnations. Two of these pertain to the topic of salvation outside the Church: even among Christians the unacceptable opinion is heard that “the way to eternal salvation” is open in other religions,25 but Lattanzi’s document equally blames those who hold that an explicit desire is necessary for salvation.26 Briefly it is mentioned that the Church “continues the mission of the incarnated Word as an alter Christus.”27 ose who know the three conditions to be considered real members of the Church but do not live according to nicht-christlichen Religionen, insbesondere in den grossen Weltreligionen, bejaht werden und in die Ausdrucksgestalt des katholischen Glaubens einbezogen werden können. Diese Prüfung ist deshalb wichtig, weil durch ihre Ergebnisse die Arbeitsweise der Missionen bedingt ist” (AAV, b. 736, n° 69). 21 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 103: “Philips optimus, non nisi raro adesse potest.” 22 Ibid.: “Noluit Cardinalis: plures sibi dixisse me minutalem urgere propriam sententiam. Me autem ut secretarium assistere debere omnibus subcommissionibus non ut observatorem tantum, sed cum iure dicendi.” 23 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 115. 24 Ibid., 147: “Est concatenatio textum: Dixit Prof. Schauf tali modo fieri constitutiones pulcherrimas, quae a catholicis suo, ab haereticis suo sensu explicari possint.” 25 Hugo Aemilius Lattanzi, Pars schematis Constitutionis de Ecclesia, 2.1.1961 (F. Philips 105), 6: “Damnamus ergo illorum errorem qui, quavis in communitate christiana, immo vero qualibet in religione, aeternae salutis viam patere arbitrantur […].” 26 Ibid.: “Errorem ergo damnamus eorum qui implicitum hoc votum, quod ad extremum in fide charitate formata continetur, sperentes, explicitum votum, quod in catechumenis inest, ad salutem aeternam omnino requiri contendunt.” 27 Ibid, 5: “Docemus ergo per Ecclesiam tanquam per alterum Christum, Incarnati Verbi missionem continuandam esse […].”

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these, cannot be saved.28 At the same time, however, Lattanzi also paraphrases the 1949 response of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston in the Feeney case, as will be continued till the final version of LG 16.29 In preparation of the January 12 meeting of the sub-commission, Lattanzi submits a revised version, divided in 8 paragraphs.30 Lattanzi underlines that the Church is a necessary means (necessitas medii) and not just a necessary precept (necessitas praecepti).31 e next morning, Tromp is asked by Gagnebet, with the support of Ottaviani, to replace Lattanzi as draer but Tromp prefers to wait till the second plenary session of the eological Commission, scheduled for February 13-16.32 Lattanzi’s third version, received on February 3, was sent to the members of the eological Commission in preparation of this session.33 e paragraph on ‘salvation of unbelievers’ contained an explicit reference to the 28 Hugo Aemilius Lattanzi, Pars schematis Constitutionis de Ecclesia, 2.1.1961 (F. Philips 105), 6: “[…] nullam salutem illis futuram esse declaramus.” 29 Ibid.: “Attamen docemus eos qui circa Ecclesiam invincibili eaqua inculpabili ignorantia laborant et naturalem legem, cuius praecepta in cordibus hominum insculpta sunt, honestam vitam agendo, servant, quod quidem sine gratia fieri plane non potest, qui porro in omnibus parere Deo parati sunt, ipsa hac mentis ipsorum dispositione, tanquam implicito voto ad Ecclesiam ordinari.” Cf. DS 3870: “[…] sed ubi homo invincibili ignorantia laborat, Deus quoque implicitum votum acceptat, tali nomine nuncupatum, quia illud in ea bona animae dispositione continetur, qua homo voluntatem suam Dei voluntati conformem velit.” – Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Henricus Denzinger and Adolfus Schönmetzer (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1967). 30 Hugo Aemilius Lattanzi, Pars schematis Constitutionis de Ecclesia, s.d. [manu scripto “2° red.”] (F. Philips 106). e prologue is followed by the following paragraphs: ‘Incarnati Verbi exsecutio’, ‘Mysterium Ecclesiae’, ‘Spiritus S., anima Eccesiae’, ‘Definitivum salutis institutum, Ecclesia’, ‘eandrica natura Ecclesiae’, ‘Necessitas Ecclesiae’, ‘Membra Ecclesiae’ and ‘Votum implicitum ingrediendi Ecclesiam’. 31 Ibid., 4: “[…] cui adhaerere homines non praecepti modo, verum etiam medii necessitate tenentur, ut in ipsa et per ipsam, suam quisque consequatur salutem.” Cf. Yves Congar, Chrétiens désunis: Principes d’un ‘œcuménisme’ catholique, Unam Sanctam 1 (Paris: Cerf, 1937), 294: “Les théologiens précisent qu’il s’agit non d’une nécessité de précepte, qui tiendrait seulement à une disposition positive, mais d’une nécessité de moyen, tenant à la nature des choses.” Lattanzi borrows this from the 1949 letter of the Holy Office (DS 3868). 32 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 149. 33 See Constitutio de Ecclesia, 4.2.1961 (F. Philips 111), 5 p. e name of Lattanzi is no longer mentioned and a preliminary note from Gagnebet asks for the judgement of the members of the eological Commission, “cum discussiones […] in Subcommissione nondum ad finem pervenerint.” e order of the last three paragraphs has changed: ‘Membra Ecclesiae’, ‘Infidelium salus’, ‘Ecclesiae necessitas’.

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salvific will of God34 and also stipulated that people with an implicit desire towards the Catholic Church would once be united with their Catholic brethren “in one and the same communion of saints.”35 Philips informed Congar, who had not been invited to the meeting, about a discussion on the salvation of non-Catholics. He supported the position of Tromp that one could make a distinction between the communio sacramentorum and the communio sanctorum and that “non-Catholics would possibly belong to the communio sanctorum.”36 During the meeting of the sub-commission De Ecclesia on February 15, Cardinal Ottaviani insisted that one had to respect the teaching of Mystici Corporis and the letter of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston.37 e sub-commission had to make sure to “avoid danger, so that non-Catholics would not say that they can easily reach salvation outside the Church.”38 A few days later Tromp received a visit from Gagnebet, since he had missed the second meeting of the sub-commission. Some members had been concerned about the position defended by Cardinal Bea, who relied on Mediator Dei, another encyclical of Pius XII, to argue that non-Catholics could be considered members of the mystical body of Christ. One was even wondering whether Bea was not spreading such ideas with the support of the Pope.39 Gagnebet had therefore invited the members and consultors to submit further reflections on this topic and Tromp was asked to take the lead in draing the first two chapters and also prepare the final redaction of the entire constitution.40

34

Constitutio de Ecclesia, 4.2.1961 (F. Philips 111), 4: “[…] quippe Deus, sincera quidem voluntate vult omnes homines salvos fieri et ad agnitionem veritatis venire (1 Tim. 2,4).” 35 Ibid., 5: “Omnes tamen eos qui implicito hoc voto ad Catholicam ordinantur Ecclesiam, in unam eandemque Communionem Sanctorum pariter coalescere declaramus.” 36 Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council (Adelaide: ATF Publications, 2012), 39 (3-4.3.1961). In general, however, Philips was not really satisfied about the quality of the dras prepared by Lattanzi. 37 Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 627. 38 Ibid., 628. 39 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 183. In the same period, Mgr Willebrands, the secretary of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, had asked Tromp whether the topic of membership in the Church could not be treated by a mixed commission so that the ecumenical implications could also be discussed. Aer solicitating the opinion of Cardinal Ottaviani on this issue, Tromp informed Willebrands that dogmatic discussions are the sole prerogative of the eological Commission but that they were free to prepare a votum for them. Ibid., 158 and 178. 40 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 183.

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e communis opinio which Philips summarized at the start of his contribution definitely goes beyond the first dras prepared by the eological Commission on this theme.41 In his opinion, non-Catholics who have been baptized bona fide in another Church are not members of the Catholic Church in the fullest sense of the word, but they are also not complete “outsiders” (extranei). e major reason why – Philips uses a traditional expression here42 – belonging (pertinentia) to the Church cannot be entirely denied to them is that they have received the indelible mark of baptism. In contrast with the first dras of the eological Commission, Philips also pays attention to “all people, even the non-baptized.” eir chances of salvation depend on how they respond to “their call and destination to be incorporated in the Church.”43 His optimism regarding baptized non-Catholics is based on his contacts with Catholics who are no longer strictly following the prescriptions of the Catholic Church, but still one feels that they are blessed with “sanctifying grace.”44 His recommendations are that the dra would not put any blame on Christians who have become committed followers of Christ in communities outside the Catholic Church. We would, however, also hurt them by considering them as members of the Catholic Church, which they do not want to be. In so doing, we would moreover give them the impression that they no longer have to convert to the Catholic Church.45 In Philips’ opinion, “many spiritual goods” are not only found with individual non-Catholic Christians but also in their communities.46 In conclusion, he proposes to substitute a more sensitive description of the religious landscape – making divisions between those who are “really” (reapse) members of the Church; “imperfect” (imperfecte) members and “non-members” 41

Gérard Philips, “De membris Ecclesiae,” 7.4.1961, 7 p. (F. Philips 119). Cf. Ward De Pril, “Yves Congar, Extra Ecclesiam and the Identity of the Church,” Louvain Studies 37 (2013): 179-194, at 187. 43 Philips, “De membris Ecclesiae,” 1: “Omnes homines, etiam non baptizati, ad plenam rationem membri vocantur et destinantur, sicque ad Ecclesiam spectant, utique incorporandi.” 44 Ibid., 2. 45 On the same basis, Philips would also be opposed to Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity. It also becomes clear that Philips still has a long way to go before being able to no longer insist on the identification between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. Ibid., 5: “Ex quo sequeretur error, quod Ecclesia romana non esset simpliciter Ecclesia Christi, et quod baptizati acatholici ad plene ei adhaerendum non deberent aspirare neque excitari.” 46 Ibid.: “Agnitio multorum bonorum spiritualium extra coetum catholicum non restringenda est ad casum mere individualem, sed applicanda est etiam coetibus dissidentibus, licet cum debita restrictione.” 42

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(non-membra) – to the old adagium which only distinguished between those inside and those outside the Church. His major intention at this point seemed to be the promotion of ecumenism in the Catholic Church,47 and he shared the view of many of his colleagues that a clear distinction needs to be made between “the Orthodox churches” and “the groups issued from the Reformation.”48 As a result, he is aware that adherents of other religions are much further removed from the Catholic Church.49 Congar submitted a 12 page reflection on how the Council could articulate the relations of those living outside the visible structure of the Church with the Church understood as mystical body.50 Already the title of the document indicates that Congar is no longer willing to accept the strict identification of the mystical body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church as articulated in Mystici Corporis.51 Congar points to an important development in the interpretation of the adagium Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Whereas the Church fathers applied the notion to the chances of salvation of individuals, it now has become a general statement about the Catholic Church as “unique and perfect sacrament of universal salvation.”52 e Council should not repeat the mistake of 47 Philips, “De membris Ecclesiae,” 6: “Non tamen paganis aequiparari possunt qui solo voto ad Ecclesiam pertinent.” 48 See e.g. Christophe-Jean Dumont, “Rome, Constantinople et Genève: L’œcuménisme au tournant,” Istina 6 (1959): 415-432, at 422: “Du point de vue de la foi catholique une distinction fondamentale doit être faite entre les Églises orthodoxes et les communions issues de la Réforme protestante.” Cf. Peter De Mey, “Preparing the Ground for Fruitful Dialogue with the Orthodox: An Important Motivation of the Ecumenical ‘Avant-garde’ during the Redaction History of Lumen Gentium, Unitatis Redintegratio and Orientalium Ecclesiarum (1959-1964),” in Le souci de toutes les Églises: Hommage à Joseph Famerée, ed. Benoît Bourgine, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 314 (Louvain, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2020), 57-85. 49 Philips, “De membris Ecclesiae,” 7: “Non-baptizati, saltem bene dispositi, per solam internam iustitiam, id est per gratiam ad Ecclesiae coetum ordinantur. […] Longissime vero absunt qui, extra Ecclesiam catholicam viventes, insuper peccatis personalibus indulgent.” 50 Yves Congar, “Quomodo exponi exprimique possit nexus inter homines extra Ecclesiam visibilem exstantes, et corpus mysticum,” 18.5.1961 (F. Philips 123). 51 Cf. De Pril, “Yves Congar,” 189. 52 Congar, “Quomodo exponi,” 1: “Dicere ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’ idem est ac dicere: Ecclesia (catholica Romana) est unicum perfectum sacramentum universalis salutis.” Congar repeats ideas which he has exposed elsewhere, such as in The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and Its Problems (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), where he had said that the adage “is not a declaration of the salvation or non-salvation of any man whatever, it is a principle about the

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Mystici Corporis of not including a positive statement “about the Christian quality of our separated brethren” and perhaps better completely refrains from repeating the old formula.53 In line with his typical distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘life’ Congar distinguishes the relationship of non-Catholics to the “Church” from their relationship to “the body of Christ.” Whereas the former describes the economy of salvation as experienced on earth, the latter points to eternal salvation as depending upon the action of Christ.54 Differently from Mystici Corporis55 Congar is convinced that theologians need to treat in a different way the relation to the mystical body of Christ of (i) non-Christians and (ii) baptized non- Catholics. (i) e first line of his exposition on the ‘nonbaptized’ reminds his readers of “the salvific will of God,”56 which, however, does not deny the efforts these people have to accomplish with the help of the grace of Christ.57 e ‘non-baptized’ are “oriented” (ordinati) towards the visible structure of the Church, and perhaps, albeit in an eschatological sense, they even can be called “members of the People of God,” since this expression refers to the action of God.58 (ii) Also in the next point Congar continues to criticize the theology of Mystici Corporis. In his opinion, ‘baptized non-Catholics’ can be called members both of Christ and of the Church, because of “the objective link of baptism.”59 In the strongest terms he admits, however, that their membership is

Church: she is the institution to which universal salvation is committed.” Ibid., 139, as quoted in De Pril, “Yves Congar,” 181. 53 Congar, “Quomodo exponi,” 1: “[…] insufficiens esset si Concilium Vaticanum II […] se tali modo Encyclicae Mystici Corporis litterae obstringeret, ut nil positivi, nil novi, nil benigni diceret de christiana qualitate Fratrum nostrorum separatorum. Maxima esset deceptio, intra et extra Ecclesiam! Nonne melius esset, ad omnem ambiguitatem tollendam, si Concilium formulam ‘Extra Eccl.[…]’ deliberate praetermitteret?” 54 Ibid., 3. 55 Ibid., 2: “Indistincte tangit statum acatholicorum baptizatorum et paganorum sive non-evangelizatorum; nullam inter eos differentiam exprimit.” 56 Ibid., 4: “Extant omnes sub voluntate salvifica Dei.” 57 Ibid.: “Non tamen salvabuntur nisi in hora mortis inveniantur amantes Deum!” 58 Ibid., 5: “Populus Dei significat in recto homines quos Deus Sibi congregat ex omni gente. Non multo haesitarem quin iustos non baptizatos vocarem membra Populi Dei, non vero membra Ecclesiae, quia ‘Populus Dei’ non tam dicit visibilem formam ac Ecclesia.” 59 Ibid., 6: “Omnis vere baptizatus membrum fit, et Christi et Ecclesiae.” Ibid., 8: “Haec impossibilia essent nisi vinculum obiectivum baptismi servaret aliquod titulum reale membri Corporis Christi.”

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severely damaged.60 Congar is also convinced that both groups share in a different way in the means of salvation.61 Finally, a different pastoral praxis is needed in both cases: “mission towards those not yet evangelized, ecumenical action towards baptized non-catholics.”62 3. Tromp’s tabula rasa Already during the plenary session of February 15, the secretary of the eological Commission had described the twofold task for the draer of this chapter. It should be explained who can be qualified as members of the Church and which spiritual links do exist with those who are baptized in good faith.63 Once Tromp was officially assigned with the task to prepare the next dra, he followed exactly this plan and on April 14 he finished a dra with a paragraph on ‘e necessity of the Church for salvation’ (necessitas Ecclesiae ad salutem) and another one on ‘Spiritual union with our separated brethren’ (unio spiritualis cum fratribus separatis). Tromp chose to completely ignore the previous versions of Lattanzi, let alone individual submissions such as those by Philips and Congar. Errors are no longer explicitly mentioned but the teaching on the necessity of the Church is accompanied by a threefold warning that neglect of this teaching will imply the loss of eternal salvation.64 It is explained who are “really members of the Church” (reapse membra Ecclesiae) and who “are oriented to the Church by desire” (voto ad Ecclesiam ordinantur): the catechumens and the non-Catholics. Both membership 60

Congar, “Quomodo exponi,” : “Sunt membra separata, abscissa, reiecta. Sunt desertores.” See also the description of the paradoxical situation on p. 7: “Sunt vere membra, imperfecta et aegrota, quamvis non plene dici possint vera membra.” is position is according to Congar’s opinion in line with c. 87 of the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici: “Baptismate homo constituitur in Ecclesia Christi persona cum omnibus christianorum iuribus et officiis, nisi, ad iura quod attinet, obstet obex, ecclesiasticae communionis vinculum impediens, vel lata ab Ecclesia censura.” 61 Ibid., 8-9. 62 Ibid., 11: “Tam per Missionem erga non-evangelizatos, quam per Oecumenicam Actionem erga baptizatos acatholicos, tendit Ecclesia ad adaequandum extensive interiorem influxum Christi in homines.” 63 Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 627: “Notat Secretarius ex una parte clare dici debere, quinam sint reapse membra Ecclesiae, et deinde erga eos qui voto sunt membra, maxime baptizatis bonae fidei, existere ligamina spiritualia, maxime oratione et fide in Christum.” 64 Sebastian Tromp, “De membris Ecclesiae et de eius necessitate ad salutem,” 14.4.1961, 3 p. (AAV, b. 793, n° 117) as found in Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 855-856: “ideoque neminem salvari posse […]; Sicut autem nemo salvari potest […]; sic nemo salute obtinere valet […].”

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and desire need, however, to be complemented by faith and charity. e teaching is largely borrowed – oen while maintaining the exact terminology – from the 1949 letter of the Holy Office.65 At the start of the second number, Tromp enumerates some qualities that can be found among non-Catholics and especially among those baptized, and which connect them spiritually to the Church. ereaer, however, he returns to Mystici Corporis to argue that it is much safer for non-Catholics to follow their desire to take part in the mystical body of Christ. e chapter ends with a warning to the Catholic faithful to live according to their privileged condition.66 No consensus was reached on Tromp’s dra during the meeting of the sub-commission on May 25. Among others his Jesuit confrere Johannes Witte believed that further distinctions should be made among separated brethren: those who received baptism have entered into a “sacramental and real relationship to the Church.”67 On June 25, Tromp manages to make a slightly amended version of this chapter in preparation of the ten day working meeting of the sub-commission De Ecclesia in Ariccia from July 6-15, 1961. In the first number he revises the following quotation from § 22 of Mystici Corporis: “ey, therefore, are truly and properly to be said to be members of the Church who, washed in the bath of regeneration, profess the true Catholic faith, and who have not been so unfortunate so as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body, or have been cut off from the structure of the Mystical Body because of very serious offences.”68 In the positive part of the definition he adds the third vinculum in Bellarmine’s definition of a Catholic believer, i.e. acknowledging the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. On the negative side he no longer states that non-Catholics are personally responsible for the sin of separation.69 e final phrase indicates that they are not real 65

Cf. DS 3867, 3870, 3871, and 3872. e footnote added to this line is the only one of chapter 2 containing biblical references. 67 Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 857. 68 If changes are made that will remain in the final version of the preconciliar dra, then we cite from the official version in the Acta Synodalia and also thankfully make use of the online translation made by Joseph A. Komonchak and entitled ‘Dra of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’. 69 First redaction Tromp: “Sunt autem ii solum reapse membra Ecclesiae, qui regenerationis lavacro recepto veram fidem profitentur, neque a Corporis Mystici compagine semetipsos misere separarunt vel ob gravissima admissa a legitima auctoritate seiuncti sunt” (Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 855). Second redaction Tromp: “Sunt autem ii solum reapse membra Ecclesiae, qui regenerationis lavacro recepto veram fidem profitentur, Ecclesiae catholicae auctoritatem agnoscant, nec ob gravissima admissa a legitima auctoritate ex toto seiuncti 66

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members of the Church though. is line is followed by the longest footnote in the chapter, quoting magisterial teaching from Clement VIII to John XXIII.70 As was asked in the discussion on Tromp’s first dra, in the second paragraph explicit attention is given to baptism as establishing a link between Catholics and non-Catholics. is version was presented for discussion during the meeting of the sub-commission in Ariccia. On July 12, a proposal of Schauf was accepted to divide the same material into three numbers. e final part of the number ‘e necessity of the Church for salvation’ (necessitas Ecclesiae ad salutem) henceforth will be entitled ‘Who the members are’ (quinam membri). e title of what is as of now the third number will be changed into ‘Union with non-Catholics’ (unio cum acatholicis).71 Schauf’s further suggestion that the new second number would start with “a general declaration that they only are members of the Church who belong to the visible Roman Catholic Church” was only partially followed.72 Tromp borrows more lines from Mystici Corporis to argue that those who are “really” (reapse) members of the Church “are joined in its visible structure to its Head, Christ, who rules it through his Vicar.”73 Moreover, it is even said in stronger words that it remains possible for people to be “completely (ex toto) cut off from the structure of the Mystical Body.” However, also a subordinate phrase was added which already anticipates the next number and states “that many real relations exist in the juridical and sacramental order, and indeed can exist in the mystical order, by which every baptized person is linked to the Church.”74

sunt” (Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano  II Apparando [AD] 2.2.3, 990). Even if quotation marks are missing, the exact text – including the omitted words – is found in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 35 (1943): 220. Footnote 10 explains: “Mutata sunt verba Mystici Corporis, quia inter baptizatos, qui auctoritatem Ecclesiae non agnoscunt, perplures sunt qui nunquam sese personaliter ab Ecclesia separaverunt […].” Cf. “De membris Ecclesiae eiusque necessitate ad salutem,” 2a red., mense Iunio 1961, 2 p. (F. Philips 126). 70 Cf. AS I/4, 20-22. 71 Heribert Schauf, “Animadversiones ad Const. De Membris Ecclesiae (2 red.),” 12.7.1961, 1 p. (F. Philips 128). 72 Ibid.: “Incipere posset illa doctrina cum generali declaratione eos tantum membra ecclesiae esse qui ad ecclesiam visibilem catholico-romanam pertinent.” 73 AS I/4, 18: “[…] in compagine visibili cum Capite eius, Christo videlicet eam regente per Vicarium suum.” Cf. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 35 (1954): 211: “Unum solummodo Caput constituere Christum eiusque Vicarium […]” 74 AS I/4, 18: “Etsi plures relationes reales exsistunt in ordine iuridico et sacramentali, immo exsistere queunt in ordine mystico, quibus omnis omnino baptizatus cum Ecclesia connectatur, tamen […].”

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Tromp’s diary indicates that he had a private conversation with Philips on July 12 in which the latter agreed with the proposed dra.75 A small note preserved in his archive indicates, however, that the theologian who would one and a half year later take the lead in the preparations for the revised De Ecclesia was far from satisfied. Philips had no difficulties with the doctrine itself but with the theological presentation thereof. e chapter does not make any difference among non-members and shows insufficient appreciation for the reality of the sacraments among dissident groups. e note, however, also suggests that Philips experienced some pressure not to oppose to the consensus.76 Maybe in response to Philips’ critique the paragraph on ‘Union with non-catholics’ was further improved as well. It is now said that the Church is linked to them “on many counts” (plures ob rationes). A new reason was added to the already existing list: they “excel in faith and devotion towards the Most Holy Eucharist and in love for the Mother of God.”77 In preparation of the third plenary session of September 18-29, the members and consultors were invited to suggest further changes to the constitution De Ecclesia. e reference to canonical obstacles to baptism will be expanded78 and about those “ignorant of Christ” it will be stated that they “sincerely desire to fulfil the will of God their creator.”79 Requests by Congar to enhance the ecumenical quality of the chapter

75

Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 245: “In colloquio privato cum Mons. Philips obtineo plenam concordiam cum Mons. Philips de membris.” 76 Gérard Philips, “Schema de membris Ecclesiae,” s.d., 2 p. (F. Philips 127), 2: “Quae theologica systematisatio a pluribus non admittitur, et quamdiu non imponitur, ei subscribere non possum. Si autem imponitur, admittam.” 77 Remarkably even the plenary commission of the eological Commission accepted this formulation and thus it was included in the dra sent to the Central Commission: “fide et devotione erga Sanctissimam Eucharistiam et amore erga Deiparam eminent” (AD 2.2.3, 991). 78 AS I/4, 18: “per Baptismus […] quo quis non ponens obicem incorporationis.” Cf. “Animadversiones membrorum et consultorum in constitutionem De Ecclesia,” 13.8.1961 (F. Philips 89), 2: “D. D. Si retineatur ‘ponens obicem’, dicatur quid sit. D. B. Discussioni subiciatur, utrum post verba ‘non ponens obicem’ convenienter additur genetivus declarativus: ‘aggregationis’.” 79 “Animadversiones,” 4: “P. P  T. Ubi legitur ‘Sincere adimplere desiderant voluntatem Dei ac Creatoris’, mihi non ita placet quod nihil habeatur de sic dictis atheis speculativis bonae fidei. […] Non convenire videtur quod tempore quo marxismus atheus per orbem diffunditur, Concilium de atheis non loquatur, deque eorum morali responsabilitate coram Deo.” e addition of the word “sui” was probably the response to this request by the Carmelite consultor Philippe de la Trinité.

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were not attended to.80 During the plenary discussion of the chapter on September 29, Metropolitan Hermaniuk asked why the catechumens are mentioned before the Orthodox among those having a votum baptismatis. e president answered that only catechumens can have a votum explicitum.81 e chapter was approved with only one negative vote by Joseph Fenton, for whom the entire constitution was unacceptable.82 4. Final Changes after the Revision by the Central Commission On May 7-9, 1962, the first two chapters were assessed by the Subcommissio de schematibus emendandis of the Central Commission. e presence of “different theological tendencies” was for Tromp “the prelude for the discussions that were to come during the Council.”83 At the end of the discussion, both chapters were only accepted iuxta modum and Tromp notes the lament of Cardinal Bea that the views of the Secretariat for Christian Unity on the matter had almost not been taken into account.84 On May 29, the remarks made in the Central Commission were passed on to the eological Commission, but due to the heavy work on different constitutions only on July 3 a Textus emendatus could be sent to the Cardinales revisores. On July 20, Tromp unofficially is informed that, a few details notwithstanding, the entire Dogmatic constitution was found acceptable.85

80 “Animadversiones,” 1: “P. C. Christiani dissidentes multum animadvertentur caput hoc. Optandum est ergo ut cum ipsa doctrina Concilium breviter det aliquas rationes explicationesque.” His request to mitigate the reference to the Pope as vicar of Christ by referring to his role as head of the college of bishops was equally dismissed. Ibid., 4: “P. C. Ut obviam Orthodoxis procedamus, optandum est ut dicatur: ‘Christo videlicet et Summo Pontifice ipsum repraesentante et Collegio Episcoporum praesidente’.” Cf. also Congar, Journal, 48 (24.8.1961): “ere is no trace of an ecumenical perspective or concern […] Everything goes on as if promoting the reunion of Christians was not the ultimate aim of the Council.” 81 Konzilstagebuch, I/1, 289. 82 Ibid.: “[…] Intercedit iterum Dom. Fenton: ‘Deleatur tota constitutio’. Tromp equally notes in his diary: “Omnes Episcop. dicunt Secretario placuisse constitutionem de membris.” 83 Konzilstagebuch, I/2, 752. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 756: “Ut aliquomodo appareat magnitudo laboris, notare iuvat observationes ad totam Constitutionem de Ecclesia (incluso tractatu de B.M.V.) contineri 197 paginis, et responsa Subcommissionis Revisoriae 72 paginis, multo magis compactis.” See also AAV, b. 750 and 751.

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We learn from the relatio of Cardinal Ottaviani that the preparatory eological Commission during the last revisions still decided to change the title of chapters 1 and 2. By speaking about the ecclesia militans it is better emphasized that Catholic doctrine defends the identity of the mystical body of Christ and the Catholic Church.86 e great effort in chapter 2 to explain that only Catholics are fully members of the Church was needed to thereaer explain “that not all ties are destroyed between the sons of the Church and the separated brethren.”87 Interestingly he explains that, even if the expression communio sanctorum has not been used because of the existence of different interpretations, the commission is convinced that Catholics and non-Catholics who live in a state of grace belong thereto.88 e eological Commission first addressed the general observations of the members of the Central Commission, not however aer seriously questioning the right of the Central Commission to evaluate the work of the eological Commission.89 Which requests were attended to? e proposal by Cardinal König was accepted to change the title of the second paragraph in ‘Members in the proper sense’ (quinam membra sensu proprio). One also accepted the request of the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal William Godfrey, to affirm that the Catholic teaching on who can be considered members of the Church is “according to the most ancient tradition” and to establish a connection with the discussion on the nature of the Church in chapter one by qualifying the Church as “one

86 AD 2.2.3, 995. In their response to the work of the Central Commission, the eological Commission was willing to accept the expression Ecclesia peregrinans (AD 2.4.3.2, 194 and 197) but on the printed version chapter one is entitled ‘De Ecclesiae militantis natura’ (AS I/4, 12) and chapter two ‘De membris Ecclesiae militantis eiusdemque necessitate ad salutem’ (AS I/4, 18). 87 AD 2.2.3, 997: “Dum Commissio eologica maximam curam habuit, ut clare appareret solos catholicos esse reapse membra Ecclesiae (consequentiae doctrinae oppositae sunt reapse tremendae, et in dubium vocant oecumenicitatem et infallibilitatem Ipsius Concilii Vaticani II); ex altera parte quoque strenue adlaboravit, ut clare exponeret, non omnia vincula esse destructa inter filios Ecclesiae et fratres separatos.” 88 Ibid.: “Nec dubitandum est fratres separatos in statu gratiae viventes cum filiis Ecclesiae in statu gratiae viventibus iungi Sanctorum Communione. Licet in Constitutione res ipsa clare expressa sit, tamen vox Communio Sanctorum adhibita non est, utpote non semper eodem modo intellecta.” 89 AD 2.4.3.2, 188-189. e limitations of this chapter do not allow to study the general reactions in detail. Cf. ibid., 190-194.

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and indivisible, indefectible and infallible.”90 e eological Commission also changed the second half of the number speaking about those “ordered by desire towards the Church” by insisting that this requires the assistance of divine grace.91 e critical readers of the Central Commission believed that some formulations in the third number could sound offensive to non-Catholic ears. Already the title now speaks about the ‘Union with those separated’ (unio cum separatis). Instead of the problematic word votum it is now said that non-Catholics “still desire, even unknowingly” (desiderio, etsi inconscio) the communion sub Petro.92 Upon the request of Cardinal Döpfner, the final version differentiates those implicitly longing for the faith – maybe even non-Christians –, those who are baptized – the Protestants – and those with a strong sacramental and devotional life – the Orthodox.93 According to the corrected version baptized non-Catholics “do not believe with Catholic faith” and one thus explicitly points to the fides qua. Another correction, in response to an observation by Cardinal Richaud, states that the Holy Spirit is potentially even active outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church with “sanctifying grace.”94

90

AS I/4, 18: “[…] tamen ii soli, ex antiquissima traditione vero et proprio sensu Ecclesiae membra vocantur, ex quibus ipsa Ecclesia, ut est una et indivisibilis, indefectibilis et infallibilis, in unitate fidei, sacramentorum et regiminis, coalescet: iis igitur, qui […]” Cf. the response and correction in AD 2.4.3.2, 197-198. During the final assessment of this report by the Central Commission on July 17, Cardinal Browne successfully proposed to break up this long phrase into two parts. Cf. AD 2.4.3.2, 236. 91 AD 2.4.3.2, 198: “Ut melius appareat tam necessitas gratiae quam certitudo eius, ubi adest bona voluntas, Commissio eologica revisoria proponit has tres additiones: 1) ‘qui, Spiritu Sancto movente, conscio et explicito desiderio […]’; 2) ‘tamen, gratia Dei, implicito et inscio […]’; 3) In fine addantur verba Pii X ex Alloc. Singulari quadam: ‘Gratiae autem caelestis dona nequaquam illis defutura sunt, qui luce divina recreari sincero animo velint ac postulent’.” 92 Ibid.: “Sed quia vox voti videtur acatholicis veluti pannus ruber tauri obiectus, legi potest lin. 7-8, quod ad idem redit: ‘tamen desiderio, etsi inscio, ea anhelant’.” 93 AD 2.2.3, 1012: “Potius climax iam ponenda est: praeter omnes mero voto ad Ecclesiam ordinatos singulari modo iis Ecclesia se coniunctam scit, qui sunt baptizati et ideo christiani nomine gloriantur et amanter in Christum credunt; magis adhuc vicini sunt, si insuper devotione erga S. Eucharistiam et amore erga Deiparam eminent.” 94 AD 2.4.3.2, 199: “[…] legatur: ‘qui non solum donis et gratiis, non exclusa sanctificante, in ipso mystico Corpore operatur’.” e president of the subcommission for amendments, Cardinal Confalonieri, even was willing to accept a late request by the absent member Cardinal Siri asking to substitute “aliqua

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2. The Debate on the Pre-conciliar De Ecclesia and the Preparation of a New Scheme: First Session and Intersession 1. The Assessment of the Pre-conciliar De Ecclesia during the First Session e discussion on De Ecclesia started on December 1, 1962. e dra was only sent to the Council fathers one week earlier. On the first day Cardinal Ottaviani gave his famous short speech anticipating the critique on the scheme.95 e Croatian bishop Frane Franić described the content of the different chapters in his relatio. He admitted that it had taken the commission a long time before reaching a consensus on this topic. e dogmatic constitution only focuses on those who are members in the fullest sense of the word, and therefore theologians maintain the freedom to form their own opinion on whether or not it is not possible to extend this membership in an analogous sense.96 e commission also had tried to describe the relation of baptized non-Catholics with the Catholic Church in “a somehow positive way” (modo quoque positivo).97 Already the first speaker during the opening day, the bishop of Lille, Cardinal Achille Liénart defended the view that the mystical body of Christ has a much wider extension than the Roman Catholic Church.98 saltem communio” for “orationum, expiationum et beneficiorum spiritualium communio.” Cf. AD 2.4.3.2, 240-241. 95 AS I/4, 121: “Exspecto audire solitas litanias Patrum Conciliarium: non est oecumenicum, est scholasticum, non est pastorale, est negativum et alia huiusmodi.” 96 One wonders whether Franić was not reacting in his Relatio against a criticism made by Edward Schillebeeckx in his “Animadversiones in ‘Secundam seriem’ schematum constitutionem et decretorum,” 30.11.1962 (F. Philips 441), 2: “Distinctio enim inter membrum Ecclesiae ‘vero et proprio sensu’ et membrum, ‘tantummodo voto’ non est exhaustiva, cum haec notio ‘membri Ecclesiae’ non sit univoca sed analoga. Datur enim ‘membrum Ecclesiae’ vero et proprio sensu sed secundum analogiam attributionis intrinsecae, i.e. secundum maiorem vel minorem sed intrinsecam approximationem ad integram veramque Ecclesiam unam Christi.” 97 AS I/4, 123. 98 AS I/4, 127: “Et quid dicam de christianis separatis, qui tamen per baptismum validum in Christo sunt sepulti ut in eo ad vitam supernaturalem reviviscant et in eo inserti maneant? Doleo quod Ecclesiae romanae alieni non gaudeant nobiscum de omnibus donis supernaturalibus quorum illa est dispensatrix; sed non auderem dicere quod nullo modo Corpori Christi Mystico adhaereant, quamvis non sint in Ecclesia catholica incorporati.” A good overview of the oral and written interventions regarding the different chapters of the first De Ecclesia was prepared by the secretary of the eological Commission himself. Cf.

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Also Joseph Zimmermann, who was bishop in Madagascar, argued that all the baptized are in a certain sense members of the mystical body of Christ and sometimes even excel Catholics in virtue.99 According to Cardinal Bea, speaking on December 4, the question of the membra Ecclesiae is a quaestio disputata and the Council did not have to conclude this discussion now.100 Marinus Bergonzini, the bishop of Volterra, argued that the links with the separated brethren should be better articulated. He also believed that one should first treat about the necessity of the Church and only thereaer about the members. e necessity of the Church for salvation is not only an individual but also a collective issue.101 Cardinal König from Vienna was hoping in the same vein that the Council would not only reflect about membership of the Church as an individual member but also learn from theologians who consider the Church as sacramentum mundi.102 François-Albert Bougon, the bishop of Moulins, asked for a profound reformulation of De Ecclesia, with the help of the secretariat for Christian unity. e links “of all people” with the Church needed to be clarified and Bougon proposed to distinguish three categories: Catholics, non-Catholics (thereby making distinctions between Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants) and non-Christians.103 According to the Benedictine superior Benedictus Reetz, the whole Tromp, “Relatio de observationibus factis a Patribus Concilii circa primum Schema constitutionis de Ecclesia,” 26 p., presented at the plenary session of 5-26.7.1963, included in Konzilstagebuch, II/2, 620-653, here at 637-639. 99 AS II/1, 582: “Libenter autem concedimus, fratres baptizatos separatos, uti membra corporis Christi mystici, cooperante Spiritu Christi virtutibus christianis excellere vel membra Ecclesiae catholicae, gratiam Christi respuentia, virtute superare posse et superare.” 100 AS I/4, 228. 101 AS I/4, 423-425. Similar points were also made in the Adnotationes criticae ad Schema de Ecclesia of the Episcopal Conference of Germany and Austria, which were prepared by the Jesuits Karl Rahner and Otto Semmelroth. Cf. AS II/1, 604: “Titulus ordinem rerum convertit: Ex necessitate Ecclesiae ad salutem resultat quaestio, qui sint ejus membra. […] Necessitas Ecclesiae describi deberet non tantum pro salute hominis singularis individualistice considerati, sed etiam pro genere humano ut collectiva unitate. Ecclesia est sacramentum generis humani, quod est magni momenti etiam quoad eos, qui non baptismate ad eam pertinent.” 102 AS I/4, 133: “Mihi videtur, ostendenda esse etiam necessitas Ecclesiae pro toto genere humano in quantum est entitas collectiva.” 103 AS II/1, 482: “Schema describere posset: eos, qui pleno sensu Ecclesiae incorporantur; eos, qui simul et diversis aspectibus Ecclesiae religantur et nondum in ea perfecte inseruntur: orthodoxae, anglicani, protestantes; eos, qui nondum christiani ad Ecclesiam ut novum Dei populum vocantur.”

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chapter needed to be rewritten in order to comfort Christians and nonChristians. He deplored that the text does not speak about non-Christians. In his opinion, they can receive sanctifying grace – albeit never apart from Christ and his Church – by following natural law, repent and live according to their conscience.104 According to the apostolic vicar emeritus of Guam, Leon Olano y Urteaga, the adagium Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus had to be carefully explained. e bishop believed in first instance in the universal salvific will of God as he finds it confirmed by Scripture (1 Tim 2:3-4). God offers non-Christians the necessary means so that they can follow the natural law and God’s commandments and enables them to receive his sanctifying grace so that the door to the kingdom of heaven is opened to them.105 Finally, the attention in later dras to both the themes of the salvation of non-Christians and of mission was anticipated in some reactions of Council fathers as well. Especially the archbishop of Reims, François Marty, was convinced that reflecting on salvation outside the Church asks for a theology of missions. e goal of mission is not to spread the news that it is the Church which possesses salvation, but “to announce and transmit salvation.”106 A more academic flashback on the debate De membris within the preconciliar theological commission is found in an article which Gérard Philips wrote in the first months of 1963, in which he described two tendencies in contemporary theology.107 One of the case studies which he discusses is whether Protestants or Orthodox, who are “sacramentally, juridically and especially spiritually connected to us,”108 can be called members of the Catholic Church. For one group of theologians, Church membership does not allow for gradations. According to them non-Catholics are only “ordered” towards the Catholic Church, without 104 AS I/4, 544-546. Also bishop Zimmermann ended his long essay by asking an “actus caritatis seu deditionis perfectae praeprimis a Iudaismo et Mohametanismo suis asseclis commendari videtur.” Cf. AS II/1, 582. 105 AS I/4, 537-538. 106 AS I/4, 192: “Sicut et Christus missus est, ita et Ecclesia in Christo est missa. Quae missio intrinsecae est necessitatis: ‘Vae! Mihi si non evangelizavero’. Non igitur in hoc est missio Ecclesiae, ut salutem hominum possideat. Haec enim salus semel pro omnibus per Christum est acquisita. Sed Ecclesiae missio in hoc stat, ut salutem hanc annuntiet et transmittat. Axioma ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’ significat omnem hominem, quisquis sit, qui in mundo salvatur, per Christum salvari, ideoque per Ecclesiam. Voluntas salvifica universalis, essentialis est missioni Ecclesiae, quae in mundo illam adimplet.” 107 Gérard Philips, “Deux tendances dans la théologie contemporaine: En marge du IIe Concile de Vatican,” Nouvelle revue théologique 85 (1963): 225-238. 108 Ibid., 231.

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belonging to it. According to a second group of theologians, a body may include deficient members. With an allusion to canon 87, Philips believes that through conversion they can remove the obstacle which separates them from full membership in the Catholic Church. Philips, however, is at the same time opposed against too easily “proclaiming that welldisposed dissidents are without any restrictions members of the true Church. […] It would be highly inappropriate to suggest that one could belong to Christ or relate to Him without belonging to or relating to His Church in the same proportion.”109 He would for this reason not wish “to impose a fatally imperfect vocabulary.”110 2. The Drafting of an Alternative De Ecclesia under the Leadership of Gérard Philips Soon aer the start of the first session, Cardinal Suenens had entrusted it to Philips to rewrite De Ecclesia in a shorter and more pastoral manner. e Cardinal should dispose of this version as soon as the public debate would start.111 e structure Philips proposed to Congar on October 18 already shows that he prefers to maintain but “adapt Tromp’s schema” as far as the second chapter is concerned.112 A first version was finalized with the help of Congar on October 24,113 one day later discussed by a larger group of theologians and by the Secretariat for Christian Unity114 and thoroughly expanded by the end of the month.115 Towards the end of November, the text is approved by Suenens, translated in French and widely distributed among the Council fathers.116 During a meeting in 109

Philips, “Deux tendances,” 232. Ibid. 111 Karim Schelkens, ed., Carnets conciliaires de Mgr Gérard Philips, secrétaire adjoint de la commission doctrinale, Instrumenta eologica 29 (Louvain: Peeters, 2006), 5. 112 Congar, Journal, 97 (18.10.1962). 113 Ibid., 121 (24.10.1962). Cf. “Schema Constitutionis De Ecclesia,” 24.10.1962 (F. Philips 421). 114 Cf. “Schema Constitutionis De Ecclesia,” s.d. (F. Philips 422). Aer another visit by Philips, Congar notes in his diary that “the Secretariat feels that it is better not to speak of ‘members’ and to settle for giving an entirely positive description, in descending order, of the various ways of sharing in the life of the Church: in full, and on all counts, in the case of holy Catholics, incomplete in the case of Catholics who are sinners, etc.” Ibid., 124 (28.10.1962). 115 F. Philips 425. 116 According to Congar’s diary, the dra was finished on November 26. Cf. Congar, Journal, 208. Its major output was a document in French that was 110

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Mechelen, organized by Cardinal Suenens on January 12-13, 1963, Philips’ schema is improved further.117 e first version of the Schema Philips returns to the original title of Tromp, De Ecclesiae necessitate ad salutem. e four ideas presented to the Secretariat for Christian Unity start with a principle – the necessity of the Church for salvation, which can be responded to by way of desire – and then focuses on the situation of those “really members of the Church,” the “other Christians” and “those who did not yet come to the faith.”118 As in the previous dra, the activity of the Holy Spirit among non-Catholics is not denied, but the role of the Spirit is especially to help them return to the true Church in which the means of salvation can be completely enjoyed.119 Different from the pre-conciliar dra one paragraph suggests that non-Christians who are sincerely searching the Church, “may be saved”120 though their situation is not without danger. Also the commentary underlines the importance to distinguish between both groups.121 e final dra of the so-called Schema Philips reflects the desire expressed by Cardinal Suenens as relator of De Ecclesia on January 23, 1963, during the first session of the Coordination Commission. In his opinion, the first two chapters of the previous dra needed to become widely distributed among the Council fathers: “Ce que nous attendons et espérons de la Constitution dogmatique sur l’Église” (F. Philips 434). 117 Cf. Congar, Journal, 252 (12.12.1962). It was mainly Congar who insisted to pay more attention to the mission of the Church in the opening chapter and the second chapter would have to summarize “the essential points De membris, but without using this term and presenting the motherhood of the Church in a positive manner.” e final version, “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia,” 27.2.1963 (F. Philips 595) will form the basis for the discussion in the Sub-commission De Ecclesia. 118 “Schema Constitutionis De Ecclesia,” 24.10.1962 (F. Philips 421), 5-6: “1. Ecclesia, in Scriptura luculenter descripta, est institutio necessaria ad salutem, quia extra Christum nemo salvatur […]; 2. Reapse (et sensu pleno) ii tantum sunt membra Ecclesiae […]; 3. Alii christiani […]; 4. Ecclesia, ut omnes qui ad fidem nondum pervenerunt […]”. In the following dras the newly interpreted doctrine of the Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is said to be found in “Sacra Traditione, in Scripturis fundata.” Cf. “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 595), 6. 119 Ibid., 7: “A Spiritu Sancto aguntur, ut ad veram Ecclesiam perfecte pertineant, ut […] abundantibus mediis salutis verae Ecclesiae totaliter gaudeant.” 120 Ibid.: “Illi sane qui sincero voto, etiam inscio, veram Ecclesiam Dei et Christi quaerunt, salvantur quidem […]” 121 Ibid., 8: “Manifestius praeterea indicat notabilem differentiam inter christianum acatholicum et non-christianum, etiam bene dispositum.”

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one chapter De Ecclesiae mysterio.122 In the final Schema Philips, the previous second chapter now has become numbers 8-10 of chapter one.123 Differently from the pre-conciliar chapter two, which only referred to Scripture in the final footnote, already n° 8 quotes Mk 16:16 and Jn 3:5 in defense of its teaching on the necessity of baptism. Philips, however, apparently believed that his proposal would enjoy a better chance to be taken as basis for the dogmatic constitution if he reintroduced the word reapse, even if he also prepared the discussions on collegiality by stating that Christ governs his Church “through Pope and bishops.”124 e final line repeats the warning to Catholic faithful that had been put at the very end of the chapter in the pre-conciliar Schema Tromp.125 e number on relations with non-Catholic Christians also basically repeats the work of the pre-conciliar eological Commission. In the opening line, however, it explicitly indicates that only baptized Christians are addressed and they are said to lack the “complete,” not the “real” faith.126 e dra of Philips also does not explicitly affirm the perfect identification between the mystical body of Christ and the Catholic Church.127 e final number of chapter one gave Philips and his fellow theologians the occasion to compose their own text independently from any existing material. As becomes clear from the title, the opening phrase and the conclusion of the paragraph, attention to adherents of other 122

AS V/1, 95. “Nota explicativa de constructione capitis primi” (F. Philips 595), 1: “[…] Ad quam aliter ac aliter referuntur catholici, christiani separati et non-christiani (n° 8-10).” 124 “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 595), 6: “Reapse et sine restrictione ad Ecclesiae familiam pertinent illi tantum qui integram eius ordinationem omniaque media salutis in ea instituta agnoscunt, et in compagine visibili eiusdem cum Christo eam per Summum Pontificem et Episcopos regente, iunguntur, vinculis baptismi, professionis fidei et ecclesiasticae communionis.” I take the “sine restrictione” to be an implicit reference to the canonical term “obex” in AS I/4, 18. 125 “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 595), 7: “Memores ergo sint omnes Ecclesiae filii condicionem suam eximiam non propriis meritis, sed peculiari gratiae Christi esse adscribendam; cui si cogitatione, verbo et opere non correspondent, nedum salventur sed verius iudicabuntur.” 126 Ibid.: “Cum omnibus illis qui, baptizati, christiano nomine decorantur sed integram fidem vel unitatem communionis sub Romano Pontifice non profitentur […].” 127 Compare “[…] Spiritu Sancto […] qui non solum donis et gratiis intra catholicam agit” with AS I/4, 19: “[…] qui non solum donis et gratiis in ipso mystico Corpore operatur.” 123

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religions is immediately linked to mission. ey have to be led to the Church;128 the Church is “sent to all people” so that our Savior can “call and conduct them to his kingdom”;129 the heart of the Church is opened “to all people and to the whole world, so that through its Lord, the king of the universe, it happily is the light of all people.”130 N° 10 contains three biblical references and the one to Eph 2:11-13 allowed the draers to reflect on the proclamation of the Gospel not only to the Israelites who were “close” to the Lord but also to those who, “far from Him but not abandoned by Him, seek an unknown God.”131 Pursuing the idea of n° 7 that “some elements of sanctification can even be found outside the structure of the Church,”132 n° 10 knows that tradition considers the good elements to be found in other religions as a “preparation of the Gospel.”133 Whereas the Schema Tromp made their chances of salvation dependent upon human efforts, the Schema Philips contains the hopeful message that those “honestly seeking the true Church of God and Christ, may hope for salvation,” while at the same time not hiding that access to salvation will be more easily available aer baptism.134 3. The Revision of the Schema Philips by the Theological Commission When opening the plenary session of the eological Commission from February 21 till March 13, 1963, Cardinal Ottaviani announced the creation of a number of sub-commissions. In the sub-commission on the Church five out of the seven bishops were in favor of a thorough revision 128

“Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 595), 8: “De non-christianis ad Ecclesiam adducentis.” 129 Ibid.: “Ad omnes enim homines missa est, pro quibus Dominus sanguinem suum fudit, ut eos ad Regnum suum vocaret et dirigeret.” 130 Ibid.: “Ita, dilatata caritate, Ecclesia cor suum universis hominibus totique mundo aperit, ut per Dominum suum, Regem universorum, sit feliciter lumen omnium gentium.” 131 Ibid.: “Quapropter Ecclesia ab orando et praedicando quiescere nequit, donec omnes in Ea incorporentur, sive Domino iam prope fuerint (cf. Eph. II, 11-13), tamquam Israëlitae, fratres Ejus secundum carnem, quorum sunt testamenta et promissa (cf. Rom. IX, 4-5), sive longe ab Eo, sed non derelicti, in umbris et imaginibus Deum ignotum quaesierint (cf. Act., XVII, 23).” 132 Ibid., 6: “[…] licet elementa quaedam sanctificationis etiam extra totalem compaginem inveniri possint.” 133 Ibid., 8: “Quidquid enim boni aput illos invenitur, ab Ecclesia tamquam praeparatio evangelica aestimatur.” 134 Ibid.: “Qui sincere veram Dei et Christi Ecclesiam quaerunt, si salutem quidem sperare possunt […]” To be compared to AS I/4, 18: “[…] simile praestant, sive quod sincera voluntate id volunt quod vult ipse Christus.”

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of the pre-conciliar De Ecclesia. At a secret meeting the next day, they decided to take the so-called Schema Philips as basis and they managed to convince the others of this on February 26, aer Bishop Charue of Namur had made the clever proposal that they would also consult the schema prepared by Parente as well as other dras. None of the other dras, however, shared the same interest and respect towards nonChristians.135 e sub-commission reconfirmed the structure of the opening chapter as proposed in the Schema Philips.136 e revised version was printed on March 1 so as to give the members of the eological Commission enough time to study it, even if the last numbers had not yet been discussed in detail.137 In the number dealing with the Catholic faithful the bishops were asked to reflect whether it would not be better to reintroduce the original lines of n° 9 of the pre-conciliar Schema on catechumens and inculpable non-believers.138 While the final version of

135

e dra approved by the episcopal conferences of Germany and Austria only discussed relations with non-Catholics. ere was no agreement, however, about whether or not they could be called imperfect ‘members’ of the Church, hence the presence of alternative formulations in §§ 11-13. Cf. “Adumbratio schematis constitutionis dogmaticae De Ecclesia,” in AS II/1, 608-639, at 616618. See also Schelkens, ed., Carnets, 14: “For the issue of Church membership two versions are proposed, the open position and a neutral via media, more or less in the manner recommended by me” [my translation]. Chapter 11 of the dra prepared by the episcopal conference of Chile focused on the evangelization of the world without mentioning other religions. Cf. “Annotationes genericae in Schema Constitutionis dogmaticae De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 581), 55. 136 Schelkens, ed., Carnets, 19-20 (1.3.1963): “I have conceived the following plan: first the Ecclesia de Trinitate, i.e. facing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. en the personal relations of the Church with Christ, the idea of the mystical body and the other biblical images. Finally the Church on earth and its relation to Catholics, other Christians and all people” [my translation]. 137 “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis Dogmaticae De Ecclesia,” 1.3.1963 (F. Philips 597), note on p. 9: “Numeri 9 & 10 in genere tantum a peritis approbati sunt et non usque ad ultimum apicem critico examini subjecti. Exspectant periti indicationes quas Patres praebere voluerint.” 138 Ibid., 7: “Voto autem ad Ecclesiam ordinantur catechumeni, qui Spiritu Sancto movente, conscio et explicito desiderio ad Ecclesiam adspirant. Quod suo modo ii praestant, qui nescientes Ecclesiam Catholicam esse veram et unicam Christi Ecclesiam, sincere, adiuvante gratia, voluntatem Christi adimplere volunt, vel si Christum ignorant, voluntatem Dei et Creatoris sui, qui vult omnes homines salvos fieri.” With the exception of the implicit reference to 1 Tim 2:4 in the final line the text is almost identical with AS I/4, 18. A note explains: “Doctrina, in hac ultima paragrapho expressa ab omnibus peritis admittitur. Plures tamen eorum aestimant hanc explicationem proprie theologicam (scilicet de modo quo necessitas Ecclesiae cum voluntate salvifica universali cohaereat)

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the Schema Philips had le n° 9 largely untouched, now the final lines were slightly reformulated, with more attention to the action needed from the part of the non-Catholics.139 Two changes were accepted as to n° 10, but it were reassertions from the pre-conciliar De Ecclesia: the possibility was reaffirmed that atheists acknowledge God as creator and in line with the 1949 letter of the Holy Office hope for salvation is only offered to those “invincibly ignorant” (invincibiliter ignorantes).140 Attempts by André Naud, appointed as peritus by Cardinal Léger, and by Daniélou to improve the text towards an even further openness towards adherents of other religions were not followed.141 e discussion of chapter one in the plenary commission started on March 5, aer an unsuccessful attempt by Ottaviani and Tromp to revoke the decision of the sub-commission to take the Schema Philips as basis for their discussions and numbers 8-10 were discussed on March 8 and March 9.142 e title of n° 8 was changed from De catholicis in Ecclesiam to De fidelibus catholicis since the question was raised who else than Catholics would be “in the Church.” At the start of the discussion, Philips explained as relator that in this number two claims are to be reconciled that at first sight seem contradictory: “the salvific will of God and the non esse a Concilio imponendam.” e insertion would be approved by the eological Commission. 139 “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 597), 8: “Ita in cunctis Christi discipulis desiderium actionemque suscitat, ut omnes, modo a Christo stabilito, in uno grege sub uno Pastore pacifice uniantur” [emphasis mine]. 140 Ibid., 9: “[…] sive longe ab Eo, sed non derelicti Deum creatorem agnoscant […] Qui corde sincero veram Dei et Christi Ecclesiam ignorantes quaerunt […]” e differences with F. Philips 595 have been indicated in italic. 141 Cf. Schelkens, ed., Carnets, 16: “M. Nau [=Naud] is a missionary who defends that there is a clear distance between the visible and the invisible Church. Such a theory is unacceptable in this sharp form and risks to endanger our position” [my translation]. Cf. Leo Declerck and Claude Soetens, eds., Carnets conciliaires de l’évêque de Namur A.-M. Charue (Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de la Faculté de théologie, 2000), 92. See for a more critical account of the tensions between “les équipes de Louvain et de Montréal,” Gilles Routhier, “Léger et Suenens: Les relations difficiles de deux princes de l’Église,” in The Belgian Contribution to the Second Vatican Council: International Research Conference at Mechelen, Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve (September 12-16, 2005), ed. Doris Donnelly, Joseph Famerée, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Karim Schelkens, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 216 (Louvain, Paris, and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2008), 325-357, at 345-346.  142 e official report by the secretary Tromp has been preserved in Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 283-291 and II/2, 676-680. A more personal account is given in Declerck and Soetens, eds., Carnets, 104-106.

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necessity of the Church for salvation.”143 Parente insisted to speak about incorporation in order to maintain the idea of membership and he successfully proposed to return to a more traditional rendering of Bellarmine’s conditions of membership in the Church. e term “communio” which Philips had deliberately chosen was maintained as well.144 e title of n° 9 was changed into De nexibus Ecclesiae cum Christianis non catholicis upon the request of Cardinal Browne, who thought ‘unione’ was too strong. A proposal to only treat this topic in the Decree on Ecumenism was dismissed, since the structure of the chapter requires speaking about different degrees of communion with the Church. A more realistic account of their sacramental and liturgical life is given.145 At the end of the number on ecumenism it is mentioned that Catholics need to be “purified and renewed” as well.146 e title of n° 10, De non-christianis ad Ecclesiam adducendis, remained unchanged, but the original opening line was removed.147 Upon the request of Archbishop Dearden, the paragraph still refers to the Church’s “brethren according to the flesh” without however mentioning the Israelites by name.148 143

Konzilstagebuch, II/2, 676: “[…] recordans quomodo in hoc numero reconcilianda sint duo apparenter opposita: voluntas Dei salvifica et necessitas Ecclesiae ad salutem.” e official relatio prepared by Philips would reduce this to: “Imprimis statuitur necessitas Ecclesiae ad salutem, comparatione facta cum baptismate.” Cf. “Commentarius” (F. Philips 668), 4. 144 Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 283: “Dictum est communio et non regiminis, ut sententia latius pateat.” e version sent to the Coordination Commission on March 23, shows the compromise reached: “[…] vinculis nempe professionis fidei, sacramenti et ecclesiastici regiminis ac communionis” (AS V/1, 454). 145 AS V/1, 455: “Amanter enim credunt in Christum, Filium Dei Salvatorem, baptismo indelebili signantur, imo omnia aut saltem quaedam sacramenta agnoscunt et recipiunt, et plures eorum fidem erga Sanctissimam Eucharistiam necnon devotionem erga Deiparam Virginem fovent.” To be compared with the final version of the Schema Philips (F. Philips 595), 7: “[…] quaedam sacramenta agnoscunt et accipiunt, et plures eorum fide et devotione erga Sanctissimam Eucharistiam necnon amore erga Deiparam Virginem eminent.” 146 AS V/1, 455: “Quod ut obtineat Ecclesia precari, sperare et agere non desinit, omnesque ad orandum et cooperandum exhortatur, ut purificati et renovati, signum Christi super faciem Ecclesiae clarius effulgere faciant.” Tromp’s notes on the meeting do not indicate who was responsible for this addition. Cf. Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 289. 147 Compare “Adumbratio Schematis Constitutionis Dogmaticae De Ecclesia” (F. Philips 597), 9: “Ecclesia, ut omnes qui ad fidem christianam nondum pervenerunt, ad regenerationem in Corpore Christi perducat, instanter operatur. Ad omnes enim homines missa est […]” with AS V/1, 455: “Ecclesia ad omnes homines missa est […].” 148 Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 291. Cf. Declerck and Soetens, eds., Carnets, 106: “Congar en est heureux parce que cela pouvait indisposer les musulmans qu’on

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4. Final Preparations for the Debate on the Revised De Ecclesia in Session Two Aer the approval of the first two chapters by the Coordination Commission on March 28-29, the new dra was sent for language revision. On April 22, Tromp received the notes and a brief commentary on the first two chapters by Philips149 and aer making the final corrections on April 30 the schema was sent to the Council fathers.150 For Philips, the chapter can be divided in three sections: the Trinitarian basis of the Church (2-4), the images of the Church (5-6) and the earthly pilgrimage of the Church (7-10). His relatio insists that salvation for non-believers who are invincibly ignorant is possible, but “not without an objective relation to Christ and his Church” and that the Council did not want to close the theological discussion on the meaning and extension of Church membership.151 e Council fathers are informed that n° 9 offers “a theological foundation of ecumenism” which has to consider coram Deo the existence of baptized Christians who are separated but at the same time joined to us.152 e relatio finally makes it clear that the number on nonChristians has been entirely written in support of the mission ad gentes.153 While the Council fathers were preparing their written or oral reactions on the revised De Ecclesia, containing chapters that dealt with (1)  ‘e mystery of the Church’, (2) ‘e hierarchical constitution of the Church and the episcopate in particular’, (3) ‘e people of God and cite nommément les juifs.” Congar was not among the original periti of the subcommission De Ecclesia but was called to Rome to replace Daniélou as of March 2. Cf. Carnets, 96 (2.3.1963) and Congar, Journal, 263 (2.3.1963). 149 “Commentarius” (F. Philips 668), 5 p., identical to AS II/1, 229-231. 150 Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 362. e Schema Constitutionis dogmaticae De Ecclesia. Pars I, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1963 (F. Philips 670) was sent to the Council fathers in the second half of May. Cf. AS II/1, 218-281. 151 “Commentarius” (F. Philips 668), 4: “[…] Etiam alii, Ecclesiam invincibiliter ignorantes, Dei gratia internaque iustitia salvari possunt, non sine obiectiva relatione ad Christum et Ecclesiam. Patet ita proponi quod absolute certum est, et non dirimi quaestiones inter theologos controversas, puta de valore et extensione vocabuli ‘membri’.” 152 Ibid.: “Sic indicatur fundamentum theologicum Oecumenismi, ex eo resultantis, quod christiani illi sub diversis aspectibus a Catholica separati et cum ea coniuncti inveniuntur: utrumque serio coram Domino considerandum est.” 153 Ibid.: “Quia missio Ecclesiae universalis est, etiam de non-christianis ad Christum adducendis curat […] Bona religiosa, ubicumque inveniantur, considerat ut praeparationem evangelicam, quam perficiendam et complendam totis viribus suscipit, missionariis animum addendo. Completur vero expositio, rursus proposita missione universali Ecclesiae ad gentes illuminandas.”

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the laity in particular’ and (4) ‘e call to holiness in the Church’, Cardinal Suenens chose a different way to improve the Dogmatic constitution on the Church. Aer hearing that the new Pope already had convened the Coordinating Commission on July 3 and that he had to pronounce the relatio on the third and fourth chapter of De Ecclesia, Suenens asked the rector of the Belgian college, Albert Prignon, to prepare a dra for his intervention and to focus especially on what the periti really hoped to achieve. Prignon made the proposal to order the materials anew and to write a new chapter on the people of God to be published before the one on the hierarchy.154 In his relatio, Suenens defended this new structure for pastoral and ecumenical reasons.155 His proposal was even approved by Cardinal Browne and by the secretary of the eological Commission, Fr. Tromp, who perhaps somehow considered this a return to the second chapter of the pre-conciliar De Ecclesia.156 With the help of another peritus, Prof. ils, the cardinal was able to prepare an outline of the new chapter, which would be printed together with part two of the written comments of the Council fathers on the new dra on the Church.157 e chapter would start with a general paragraph on the Church as the new people of God in which her sacramental mission to be a sign and instrument of salvation would be reconfirmed.158 It would then contain the teaching on the universal priesthood which was now part of chapter 3.159 A new number on the unity and universality of the people of God would form an excellent introduction to the conciliar

154

Dries Bosschaert, Leo Declerck, and Claude Troisfontaines, “Mgr Albert Prignon, recteur du Pontificio Collegio Belga à Rome, et le Concile Vatican II,” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis, 31-113, at 53-55. 155 AS V/1, 594. 156 AS V/1, 635. 157 “Letter of ils to Philips,” 29.7.1963 (F. Philips 785). Cf. the ‘Nova ordinatio capitum ab E. Card. Suenens proposita’ in Emendationes a Concilii Patribus scripto exhibitae super schema Constitutionis dogmaticae De Ecclesia. Pars II, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1963, 5-9, as included in AS II/1, 324-328. 158 AS II/1, 326: “[…] ut sit pro universis et singulis sacramentum visibile huius salutiferae unitatis.” 159 It was proposed to divide the long § 24 on ‘De sacerdotio universali, necnon de sensu fidei et de charismatibus christifidelium’ (AS II/1, 258-260) in three numbers, the later LG 10-12. Cf. Peter De Mey, “Sharing in the reefold Office of Christ, a Different Manner for Laity and Priests? e Tria Munera in Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Apostolicam Actuositatem, and Ad Gentes,” in The Letter and the Spirit: On the Forgotten Documents of Vatican II, ed. Annemarie C. Mayer, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 297 (Louvain, Paris, Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2018), 155-179.

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teaching on the Catholic faithful and their relation to non-Catholics and non-Christians which now formed the conclusion of chapter 1.160 Since the eological Commission considered this proposal of the Coordination Commission only as an advice it needed to be confirmed with a majority vote during their meeting of October 9.161 at same evening, Congar puts his initial ideas on this chapter on paper.162 In his opinion, the word ‘members’ can in the largest sense even be applied “to Jews or heathens, who potentially belong to the visible unity of the mystical body.”163 In light of the tragedy of Auschwitz and of the fact that racism and antisemitism are still far too much present among Catholics, it seems important to him that “something is said about the place and the role of the Jewish people, the elected people of God, in the history of salvation.”164 Cardinal Ottaviani convened a new meeting of the eological Commission on October 15, since the Pope had expressed his difficulties about the new structure to him during an audience.165 e four moderators felt obliged to send a note to Ottaviani confirming the Pope’s approval of the new structure.166 Philips and other periti explain during the meeting that the Pope maybe had not sufficiently understood that the people of God also included the hierarchy.167 At the end of the meeting, Ottaviani asked Philips to write down his arguments in a note which he could discuss with the Pope. According to Philips, the new structure will 160

AS II/1, 328. Cf. Dries Bosschaert and Leo Declerck, eds., Notes personnelles de Mgr A. Prignon, recteur du Pontificio Collegio Belga, sur les événements de la 2° session et de la 2° intersession du Concile Vatican II, Instrumenta eologica 42 (Louvain: Peeters, 2020), 30 and 41; Bosschaert, Declerck, and Troisfontaines, “Mgr Albert Prignon,” 65. To be compared with Konzilstagebuch, II/1, 512 (24.9.1963) and III/1, 111 (9.10.1963). 162 “Animadversiones P. Congar in caput ‘De Populo Dei’,” 9.10.1963, 2 p. (F. Philips 979). 163 Ibid., 1: “Membra Ecclesiae considerantur secundum maximam amplitudinem, quia, ultra christianos qui pertinent ad compaginem unitatis visibilis Ecclesiae Christi, nominantur et coeteri christiani et etiam Judaei vel Pagani, qui potentialiter tantum pertinent ad unitatem visibilem Corporis mystici.” 164 Ibid.: “Aliquid dicendi de loco et munere Populi israelitici, ut populi electi Dei, in historia salutis.” 165 Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 126 (11.10.1963). 166 Letter of Agagianian to Ottaviani (14.10.1963), AS VI/2, 362. Cf. Bosschaert and Declerck, eds., Notes personnelles, 43-49. 167 Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 155: “Papa (erronee) supponit ante Episcopos agit de populo fidel. tt. E contra reapse agitur de populo includente tam subiectos quam praepositos.” 161

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also provide the “right,” i.e. eschatological perspective why the Council treats Catholics, non-Catholics and all people and even has to develop “a doctrine on ‘missions’.”168 3. The Preparation of LG 16-17 during the Second Session and Intersession On October 23, the eological Commission started the process of revising its Dogmatic constitution on the Church by listening to Philips’ overview of the interventions by the Council fathers submitted thus far.169 Among the ideas to be added or treated in greater detail, he mentions the theme of “the universal mission of the Church or, better, the missionary nature of the entire community.” In his opinion, this could be realized by expanding n° 10.170 is was one of the tasks entrusted to the second sub-commission that should dra a “chapter 1 bis” on the people of God.171 During the first meeting of this sub-commission, on October 30, it was decided that Witte would revise LG 14 (the previous n° 8), the Spanish Dominican Sauras LG 15 (previously n° 9) and Congar and Naud LG 16 (previously n° 10).172 Congar and Naud would even dra two texts,

168

Philips, “De Populo Dei (Caput II): Rationes propter quas Caput ‘De populo Dei’ immediate post Caput I ‘De mysterio Ecclesiae’ ponendum aestimatur” (F. Philips 982), as printed in Bosschaert and Declerck, eds., Notes personnelles, 101-102, at 102: “6. Rectior statuitur perspectiva ad agendum de catholicis, christianis non-catholicis, universis hominibus (cf. n. 8-9-10), et in specie ad evolvendum doctrinam de ‘missionibus’, donec perveniatur ad terminum eschatologicum perfectae consummationis.” See also ibid., 48 for the request of Ottaviani to Philips. 169 Philips, “Conspectus observationum generalium in totum schema De Ecclesia” (F.  Philips 939), 22.10.1963, 3 p., reprinted in Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 1095-1101. 170 Ibid., 1098: “Secunda idea est thema de universali missione Ecclesiae, vel potius de indole missionaria totius communitatis. […] Huic generali desiderio satisfactio praebere posset, amplificando expositionem quae sub n. 10 schematis occurrit.” 171 “De subcommissionibus particularibus pro examinandis emendationibus, circa textum De Ecclesia propositis” (F. Philips 90), 23.10.1964, 1 p., reprinted in Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 1101-1103. Ibid., 1102: “[…] de indole missionaria Ecclesiae (expositio uberius et profundius tractanda).” e members appointed on October 29 were Cardinal Santos as president and the bishops Garrone, Dearden, and Griffiths, as well as the periti Schmaus, Congar, Piolanti, Sauras, Maccarrone, Witte, Reuter, and Kerrigan. Cf. Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 1078. 172 “Relatio de actis subcommissionis IIae 30.10-23.11.1963,” 11 p., reprinted in Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 930-941, at 930. See also Congar, Journal, 408 (30.10.1963).

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the second one dealing with mission.173 During the meeting of November 6, Congar was also made responsible for the opening paragraph of chapter 2 as well as for the later LG 13.174 On November 8, the reactions of the Council fathers on the previous n° 10 were summarized and assessed175 and the sub-commission discussed and approved n° 16 on November 9 and n° 17 on November 20.176 e members and experts of this subcommission returned to Rome from January 30 to February 1, 1964 to finalize their work.177 1. Expanding the Church’s Outreach to Non-Christians e relatio of the sub-commission on n° 16 starts by accepting the critique by Archbishop Félix Scalais from Léopoldville in the name of his

173

Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 931: “Ipsi duo conficient textum, huic numero adjungendum, cujus argumentum nondum satis definitum fuit: De missione Ecclesiae? De Ecclesia missionaria? De missionibus?” is decision will have pleased Congar a lot, since he had already pointed to this lacuna in the previous dra. Cf. Congar, “Observations sur le schéma de constitution De Ecclesia,” 1-2.7.1963 (F. De Smedt 722), 3: “Le chapitre se termine par un paragraphe sur les non-chrétiens. Nous eussions aimé, pour notre part, que la dimension missionnaire de l’Église fût plus marquée dès le début.” 174 Even if the remote origin of LG 16-17 lies in the interest of the preconciliar eological Commission in the relation of the Church with nonCatholics, the limits of this chapter do not allow us to continue paying attention to the redaction history of the later LG 14 and 15, beyond the discussion on the revised Schema Philips during the second session. 175 Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 936-937. e notes taken by Sauras follow the structure of “De Ecclesia. Numerus 16 (olim 10): Animadversiones quae ad generalia pertinent” (F. Congar, YC 864), 6 p. 176 Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 938 and 941. 177 I consulted the final dra of the texts and relationes of the sub-commission in “Caput II: De Populo Dei” (F. Philips 1240), 32 p. e document is dated 18.2.1964. See for a critical observation on the procedure Congar, Journal, 463 (3.12.1963): “De Populo Dei sub-commission. As we worked on the text in detail, it became painfully clear how much both the De Ecclesia, and this chapter De Populo Dei in particular, have suffered from never having been thought through. Bits have been taken from here and there: a friend of Philips, who had the ear of Cardinal Suenens, had inserted here and there the idea which appealed to him […]: that does not produce a text! Philips satisfied all requests currente calamo [with hesitation], with a disconcerting facility, adding ‘something’ on the Eucharist here, ‘something’ on the mission there, ‘something’ on the diversity of cultures somewhere else. I have his index cards, written directly and almost without crossings-out. But it is without vigour, without unity of thought. What is lacking is one idea that controls and arranges the whole.”

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entire episcopal conference that the previous dra focused too much on individual salvation. is would be countered, as the report of the session on November 9 confirms, by commenting on “the different categories of people to be evangelized.”178 Four categories are envisaged. e relatio prepared by the sub-commission knows that the Secretariat for Christian Unity is preparing a declaration on the Jews, but still sees it as their task to indicate “the theological foundation of this question” and not to speak about them “in a merely human or political way.”179 Congar and Naud were thankful to Bishop Elchinger from Strasbourg for reminding them of the rich biblical teaching on the Jews.180 Upon his suggestion, the people of Israel was qualified as “a people according to their election most dear because of their ancestors: for God never goes back on his gis and his calling (see Rm 11, 28-29)” (LG 16). e members of the subcommission also subscribed to the request of the bishops from the region of Paris to pay specific attention to the Muslims “who recognizing Abraham as father also believe in the God of Abraham.”181 ey also wished to address adherents of other religions who believe in God’s providence and retributive justice. Here, as was the case in previous dras, reference is made to the salvific will of Christ as confirmed by 1 Tim 2:4.182 e last group to be addressed were the atheists, who “strive to lead an upright life.”183 178

Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 938. “N. 16 (olim n. 10): relatio” (F. Philips 1240). 180 AS II/1, 657: “Il reste cependant, selon l’élection, chéri à cause des Pères ; car les dons de Dieu sont sans repentance (Rom 11,28-29).” 181 AS II/1, 752: “[…] Abraham patrae agnoscentes in Deum eius credant, vel saltem Deum creatorem agnoscant.” is led to the insertion: “Nec revelationi Patribus factae totaliter extranei sunt ii qui, Abraham patrem agnoscentes, in Deum quoque Abrahae credunt.” See “N. 16 (olim n. 10)” (F. Philips 1240). 182 “N. 16 (olim n. 10)”: “[…] et Salvator velit omnes homines salvos fieri (cf. 1 Tim. 2,4).” 183 “N. 16 (olim n. 10): relatio”: “[…] tractetur: a) de Iudaeis […]; b) de Mahometanis […]; c) de populis qui revelationem iudaeo-christianam nondum cognoscentes, Deum tamen colunt ut providentem et retribuentem; d) tandem de atheis, vel potius de illis qui profitentur se esse sine ulla religione, sed revera absolutam Iustitiam vel Pacem quaerunt.” Also here an idea has been borrowed from the submission by the Parisian bishops. Cf. AS II/1, 752: “[…] rectam tamen vitae assequi nituntur.” Aer the plenary meeting of the eological Commission Philips would add a more theological justification for the Church’s interest in other religions: “Christus universos homines obiective redemit eosque ad Ecclesiam vocat et dirigit. Omnis autem gratia quondam indolem communitariam induit et ad Ecclesiam respicit.” e most important additions at this stage, however, are also in line with the theological views of Congar as 179

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Bishop William Brasseur from the Philippines had asked to remove a few lines from the previous dra which seemed to be too certain about the salvation of non-Christians.184 He also had asked that the Council would not foreclose the theological discussion on how non-Christians can reach salvation.185 e last two phrases were added to make the transition to the new paragraph on mission. First it is mentioned that unbelief is oen the work of the devil,186 but the Church has received the divine mandate to engage in mission “to promote the glory of God and the salvation of all these people.”187

expressed in The Wide World My Parish. Cf. Andrew Meszaros, “Yves Congar and the Salvation of the Non-Christians,” Louvain Studies 37 (2013): 195-223, at 205: “Congar’s approach to the question of the salvation of the non-Christian or non-evangelized is informed by (1) the universal salvific will of God (1 Tim 2:4) and (2) the actual objective redemption of all creatures accomplished by Jesus Christ.” 184 e following lines will be removed: “Quapropter Ecclesia indesinenter impellitur, ut omnes non baptizatos ad Corpus Christi adducat, ut sic via salutis pro eis latius sternatur” (AS II/1, 13). 185 AS II/1, 449: “Etenim si Concilium revera intendit ‘non dirimere quaestiones inter theologos controversas’, sed ‘tantum proponere quod absolute certum est’, ut dicitur in commentario par. 8, pag. 22, tum textus par. 10, linn. 19-23, in pag. 13, mutandus est. Ratio est quod quaestio de modalitatibus salutis non christianorum est quaestio adhuc inter theologos controversa, nec iam satis clarificata ut statui et imponi possit a solemnissimo Concilii magisterio.” 186 Even if a reference to a Council father is lacking in the relatio the phrase “At saepius homines, a Maligno decepti, evanuerunt in cogitationibus suis, et commutaverunt veritatem Dei in mendacium, servientes creaturae magis quam Creatori (cf. Rom. 1, 21 et 25)” seems to have been requested by Archbishop Jean-Julien Weber of Strasbourg. Cf. AS II/1, 745: “Posset-ne addi ad hunc textum sequentia: conantur – immo qui veritates ordinis naturalis propagant et sic aliquo modo operi divino inserviunt (cf. Sap. 13, 1-22; Act. 17, 24-28; Rom. 1, 19-21) quamvis fraus diaboli, per peccatum in mundum introducta, multas religiones errore inquinavit – aeternam salutem sperare.” Congar will certainly not have objected, since he had written the following in The Wide World My Parish, 144: “e Devil has found more effective ways of ‘possessing’ people. […] All this is a very important aspect of missionary work. […] It is a matter of fighting for Christ against domination by evil spirits.” 187 In his capacity of relator generalis, Philips turned the stronger proposal of the sub-commission – “ad gloriam Dei promovendam et salutem istorum omnium tutiorem reddendam” – into “ad gloriam Dei et salutem istorum omnium promovendam” in order to avoid controversies. Cf. the general remark on Philips’ interventions in Congar, Journal, 450 (25.11.1963): “I had had in my hands the corrections suggested by Mgr Philips. He is without the slightest doubt a providential man: he alone could do what he has done, that is to say replace the official text by a new one, without struggle or crisis. He has an

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e plenary discussion of this number took place on March 5, 1963. If the dra which Philips had prepared during the first intersession had almost completely been revised by the sub-commission in light of the many comments by the Council fathers, now the text was only changed on three more places. e members first returned to the newly added statement on the Muslims. Due to the absence of an explicit subject the Jews also seemed to be implied in the phrase, thus Bishop Schröffer correctly observed. e eological Commission also agreed to add the words “children of Ismaël” (filii Ismael).188 Cardinal Browne reopened the discussion on the line dealing with the atheists which he found theologically unprecise. Karl Rahner believed that the text offered hope of salvation “for those who lead a righteous life.”189 Differently from Rahner Tromp insisted on the necessity of faith for salvation. A new formulation was offered by Gagnebet and one also had heard the warning against semi-Pelagianism from the Jesuit Smulders, who insisted that even the preparation of baptism presupposes the gi of grace.190 Finally, the eological Commission expanded the line about evil forces even more, in response to the request by Bishop McGrath who had asked to better elaborate “the necessity of the proclamation of the Gospel.”191

astonishing gi of welcome, that gi of peacefully disarming every adversary. It is marvellous and one can never overstate what he has done. But his thinking is limp, and his texts are flat!” 188 Tromp’s report only mentions interventions by Bishops Schröffer, Doumith and Henriquez. Cf. Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 459. Maybe the suggestion came from Congar, who on March 19 sent a little note to Philips with additional proofs in scholarly articles that the term was already used by the Church fathers. Cf. F. Philips 1156. 189 Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 461: “Rahner observat textu exprimi spes salutis pro iis qui recte vivunt.” 190 “De non-Christianis (n. 16 – olim n. 10)” (F. Philips 1242): “Nec divina Providentia auxilia ad salutem necessaria denegat his qui sine culpa ad expressam agnitionem Dei nondum pervenerunt et rectam vitam non sine divina gratia assequi nituntur.” A new line was added to the relatio of the sub-commission: “Hoc assertum fundatur in Dei voluntate salvifica.” 191 Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 461. e phrase ending with the reference to Rom 1:21 and 25 now continues: “[…] vel sine Deo viventes ac morientes in hoc mundo, extremae desperationi exponuntur.” It was decided not to include references to Eph 2, 12 – “quia eratis illo in tempore sine Christo alienati a conversatione Israhel et hospites testamentorum promissionis spem non habentes et sine Deo in mundo” – and 1 ess 4:12 – “et ut honeste ambuletis ad eos qui foris sunt et nullius aliquid desideretis,” even if they will probably have served as inspiration for this addition. Cf. “De non-Christianis (n. 16 – olim n. 10)” (F. Philips 1242).

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2. Offering a Theological Foundation on Mission When the second sub-commission started draing an additional number offering a “theological foundation of mission” in response to the many requests by Council fathers,192 it had two interventions at its disposal that had offered concrete text material. Congar introduced both texts on November 9. e written addition to the oral intervention by Archbishop Scalais on November 3 presented a harmonious short text on mission, starting from the universal dimension of the salvific work of Christ, which was handed over by Jesus to his apostles. During their mission among the gentiles, the Church encounters many religious people among those not believing in Christ and many of their religious attitudes are to be appreciated as a preparation of the Gospel. Still, it is the task of those whom the Church sends to non-Christians to introduce them into the body of Christ.193 e unanimously approved text by the Commission De Missionibus194 contained interesting though not well-structured elements according to Congar. An interesting element which will make it into n° 17 is that the work of evangelization has started under the impulse of the Holy Spirit. Following the proposal of Scalais, the opening line of n° 17 quotes 1 Cor 9:16 to illustrate that the missionary commandment was essential for Saint Paul as well as for the entire Church. In this task the Church is the cooperator of the Holy Spirit, as the sub-commission insisted upon the suggestion made by the Commission De Missionibus.195 e goal of the missionary task is to make sure that as many people as possible are incorporated into Christ.196 e values found in the diverse rites and 192

“N. 17 (nova paragraphus): relatio” (F. Philips 1240). AS II/2, 56-57 and Konzilstagebuch, III/2, 938. 194 “N° 10: De non-Christianis ad Ecclesiam adducendis (novus textus)” (F. Congar, YC 863), 5.11.1963. On October 30, Congar knows from a conversation with the Oblate Armand Reuter, who was peritus for the Commission on the Missions that “it will be up to us, in agreement with them (if possible), to introduce a text on this subject in our N° 10 (former numbering)” (Congar, Journal, 408). 195 Compare “17 (nova paragraphus)” (F. Philips 1240): “A Spiritu Sancto enim ad cooperandum compellitur […]” with F. Congar, YC 863: “Quae, etsi praedicationem nondum perceperint, tamen a Deo nunquam derelictae, sub impulsu Spiritus Sancti, revelationem Dei etiam inconscie exspectant. Per evangelizationem enim, quae nunquam a praeparatione evangelica, a Spiritu Sancto misericorditer jam incepta […]” 196 Compare “17 (nova paragraphus)” (F. Philips 1240): “[…] Christoque incorporat” to be compared with AS II/2, 56: “[…] et sic ad Corpus Christi, quod est Ecclesiam, adducuntur.” 193

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cultures of these peoples need to be appreciated and will “be elevated and consumed in honor of God.”197 Spreading the faith, thus the subcommission knows, is a duty for all disciples, but one to be accomplished with respect for the different roles within the Church. e chapter ends with a Trinitarian doxology.198 During the discussion of this number by the eological Commission on March 6 the discussion mainly was about the choice of the opening quote from 1 Cor 9:16.199 e final version will expand the opening lines and refer to the mission of Christ by the Father and Jesus’ commandment to the disciples to pursue this mission.200 Aer the approval by the pope on July 3, the revised De Ecclesia, including the relationes on the changes in the different numbers, was sent to the Council fathers.201 4. The Finetuning of LG 16-17 during the Third Session At the start of the third session only chapters 7 and 8 of De Ecclesia were debated upon whereas chapters 1-6 were subjected to a vote. On September 17, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Gabriel-Marie Garrone pronounced 197 “17 (nova paragraphus)” (F. Philips 1240): “[…] sed sanetur, elevetur et consummetur ad gloriam Dei,” to be compared with AS II/2, 56: “[…] ordinatur ad Christum ‘auctorem et consummatorum fidei (Heb. 12, 2) et ab Eo per Ecclesiam assumi et elevari potest et debet” and with F. Congar, YC 863 “Quin destruatur, genuinum patrimonium uniuscuisque populi Deo oblatum, suam adimpletionem et sublimiorem dignitatem in Christo invenit.” 198 “17 (nova paragraphus)” (F. Philips 1240): “Ita autem simul orat et laborat Ecclesia, ut in Populum Dei, Corpus Domini et Templum Spiritus Sancti totius mundi transeat plenitudo, et in Christo, omnium Capite, reddatur universorum Creatori ac Patri omnis honor et gloria.” Partial inspiration has been found in AS II/2, 57: “[…] conferet at plenitudinem Corporis Christi, in quo ‘omnia instauranda sunt’ (Eph. 1, 10), donec ‘tradat regnum Deo et Patri’ (1 Cor. 15, 24).” 199 Konzilstagebuch, III/1, 459. 200 “De indole missionaria Ecclesiae (n. 17 – nova paragraphus)” (F. Philips 1242): “Sicut enim filium missus est a Patre, et Ipse Apostolos misit (cf. Jo. 20,21), dicens: ‘Euntes docete omnes gentes […] Et ecce Ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem Saeculi’ (Mt. 28, 18. 20). Quam missionem annuntiandi veritatem salutarem Ecclesiae ab Apostolis recepit adimplemendam usque ad ultimum terrae (cf. Act. 1, 8). Unde sua facit verba Apostoli: ‘Vae mihi est si non evangelizavero! (1 Cor. 9, 16).” Cf. “Relatio n. 17 (nova paragraphus)”: “Incipit autem expositio cum ‘missioni’ Filii, qui Apostolos ‘misit’, quam ‘missionem’ universalem Ecclesia secundum praeceptum Domini exsequitur” (F. Philips 1252). 201 Schema Constitutionis De Ecclesia, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1964 (F. Philips 1194). See AS III/1, 158-374.

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the official relatio on chapter 2.202 In his opinion, there were six reasons to dra this chapter and two among them are related to LG 16 and 17: it was important – especially since the Council had disagreed so much on the terminology of membership – to find “the right perspective to deal with Catholics, non-Catholic Christians and all people” and also to show that thanks to the missionary work of the Church “the work and life of Christ continues and grows in time in this world.”203 For Garrone, numbers 13-17 constitute the second part of this chapter in which it is explained in which sense the people of God is catholic and apostolic. Whereas n° 13 explains how everyone is at the service of the salvific will of God, in n° 14 the focus is on those “fully enjoying” the means of salvation, in n° 15 on those participating in these means “in a diverse way” and in n° 16 on those who, thanks to “the secret grace of God” are not completely alienated from God’s people. e whole chapter and especially n° 17 makes it clear that nobody can escape from being moved by the Holy Spirit, “of which the missions are both the symbol and medium.”204 Perhaps because the schema De Ecclesia presented to the Council fathers during the second session only spoke about the relation with non-Catholics in n° 10, in his description of the different paragraphs Garrone decided to combine LG 16-17 under the heading, ‘n° 16: on the non-Christians’. For later interpretations of LG 16 it is important to 202

AS III/1, 500-504. See also “Relatio de Populo Dei” (F. Philips 1255) for the version sent to Philips for (minor) correction. 203 AS III/1, 501: “5) Etiam, quod non parvi habendum est in hoc Concilio, rectior statuitur perspectiva ad agendis de catholicis, christianis non catholicis et universis hominibus, dum terminologia de ‘membris’ multas difficultates affert. 6) Tandem melius videtur quomodo in tempore continuetur et crescat opus et vita Christi in mundo, ita ut de Missionibus doctrina evolvatur.” Garrone partially repeated a motivation previously brought forward by Philips himself. Cf. supra, n. 160. 204 Ibid., 502: “Pars altera vocationem apostolicam et vere catholicam considerat. Nihil enim inter valores humanos extra voluntatem salvificam Dei aestimare licet, qualis populo suo a Deo concredita est ut ei inserviat (N. 13). Alii quidem integre omnibus gaudent quae Pater posuit, in misericordia et voluntate sua, ut omnibus pateant ad finem et vitam in populo suo servandas (N. 14). Alii vere quidem sed gradu diverso ad haec partem habent quae Populum Dei constituunt […] (N. 15). Nec omnino licet illos ut pure alienos habere a Populo Dei in quibus quaedam inveniuntur, quaecumque sit eorum confessio vel professio; de his quae populi Dei sunt, vel etiam illos quorum corda a gratia Dei secreto sollicitari credimus (N. 16). Ex his concludendum est, ut ex toto capite profluit, in Ecclesia semper et ubique impetum et aestum a Spiritu moveri, a quo nemo se abstrahere potest, et cuius symbolum simul et medium in Missionibus datur (N. 17).”

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observe that the official relatio draws the intention first to the “general principle” expressed in the opening line: “ose who have not yet accepted the gospel are related to the people of God in various ways.”205 ereaer, four groups are being discussed – “the Jewish people, the Muslims, those believing God and those ignoring God – before “introducing the need to foster the missions.”206 On September 18, a two third majority voted in favor of the chapter as a whole, but with reservations especially concerning the way in which n° 16 had dealt with the Muslims. As a result of the general approval of the chapter, requests to modify the text could only be accepted if they were not in contradiction with the approved schema.207 At first Congar was upset by the fact that the modi would only be assessed by the bishop who had presided the work of each sub-commission, together with Tromp, Philips and Charue, but aer reading the list of accepted changes he is pleased to see that their work had not been in vain.208 e most substantial discussion with regard to n° 16 pertained to the identification of the Muslims as “children of Ismael.” On June 8, Philips had already received a critical note in this regard from Pierre Duprey. e Secretariat for Christian Unity had taken its task seriously to inspect all dras from an ecumenical perspective. ey proposed to rather not state that the Muslims consider Abraham as father, since the biblical account of Abraham had been substantially revised in the revelation transmitted in the Qur’an.209 It is better not to use the title “children of 205 AS III/1, 189: “Ii tandem qui Evangelium nondum acceperunt, ad Populum Dei diversis rationibus ordinantur.” 206 AS III/1, 503: “16. De non-christianis: In initio statuitur principium generale. Deinde accuratius describitur conditio populi iudaici et allusio fit ad islamitas. Evolvitur autem, post mentionem hominum qui in Deum credunt, descriptio conditionis illorum qui Deum ignorant, et in fine inducitur necessitas fovendi missiones.” 207 Cf. the interesting discussion on the criteria for assessing the modi by Congar, Journal, 614 (9.10.1964). 208 See Congar, Journal, 605 (2.10.1964): “[…] Obviously this does save time. But I shudder for this or that text that I care about” and 614 (9.10.1964): “I studied the modi accepted by the small sub-commission for Chapter II, De Populo Dei. Mgr Philips sent them to me. […] e changes accepted are insignificant and almost entirely of a stylistic character. e text remains virtually what it was.” 209 “Remarques sur le Schéma ‘De Ecclesia’, 16, lignes 20 à 25 concernant l’Islam,” s.d. (F. Philips 1254): “Nous craignons qu’en établissant un lien, si ténu soit-il, entre la Révélation concrète, celle qui est faite aux Pères, et l’Islam, on n’engendre une dangereuse confusion, car on ne parle pas de la même révélation concrète de part et d’autre.”

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Ismael” since it was used by the Church fathers in a pejorative sense and is only defended by a minority opinion among Catholic theologians speaking about two ‘parallel ways’ in the history of salvation. e Secretariat also proposed that the phrase about the Muslims in LG 16 would be harmonized to their own solution which only mentioned a few doctrinal points which Christians and Muslims have in common.210 e substantial note prepared on August 12 by the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales de Caire elaborated this further and they also prepared an alternative formulation. is formulation was included in a modus signed by 230 Council fathers, especially those living in the East, and was accepted without changes: “But the plan of salvation also embraces those who acknowledge the Creator, and among these the Moslems are first; they profess to hold the faith of Abraham and along with us they worship the one merciful God who will judge humanity on the last day.”211 Another accepted modus asked for a better delineation of the third group assessed in this number, i.e. those believing in God, but in religions different from Judaism and Islam. e final version of LG 16 also removed the phrase claiming that they all recognize the Creator. In the lines about the atheists, the request to include a reference to the necessity of faith for salvation was not granted212 but neither the one to delete the reference to the devil. Apart from a few small linguistic changes, one substantial request regarding n° 17 got approved. It was signed by 120 Council fathers. e opening line should quote Jn 20:21 in full and refer to it as a “solemn command of Christ.” e quotation of 1  Cor 9:16 should be followed by an encouragement to continue missionary work today as the faithful continuation of the apostolic 210

“Remarques sur le Schéma ‘De Ecclesia’” (F. Philips 1254): “Le schéma pour l’œcuménisme contient une paragraphe sur l’Islam qui est conçu dans une perspective très différente. Il évite toute allusion à la révélation concrète et met en relief les points doctrinaux de l’Islam, particulièrement sur Dieu, qui correspondent substantiellement à la doctrine chrétienne et ont une grande portée doctrinale et morale. Il faudrait au moins que les deux passages où le Concile parlera de l’Islam soient harmonisés.” 211 Institut Dominicain d’études orientales de Caire, “Note concernant la mention des musulmans dans les deux schémas du Concile (pour la 3e session): Declaratio altera de Judaeis et de non-Christianis et Schema constitutionis de Ecclesia,” 12.8.1964 (F. Philips 1183), 5: “Sed propositum salutis et eos amplectictur, qui Creatorem agnoscunt, inter quos imprimis Musulmanos, qui, fidem Abrahae se tenere profitentes, nobiscum Deum adorant unicum, misericordem, homines die novissimo iudicaturum.” 212 AS III/6, 101: “Asserenda est enim necessitas fidei. Resp.: Fides sub voce ‘sub gratiae influxu’ continetur.”

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mission: “erefore it [the Church] makes its own the words of the apostle: ‘Woe […] to me if I do not preach the gospel’ (1 Cor 9:16), and so it continues without ceasing to send out preachers until new churches are fully established and they themselves continue the work of evangelizing.”213 5. Conclusion At the start of this conclusion, I thankfully make use of the excellent five-point summary of the teaching of Vatican II on other religions in Gavin D’Costa’s monograph Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews & Muslims.214 (1) e principle of the necessity of the Church as a means to salvation (LG 14) is qualified by the Council’s teaching on ‘invincible ignorance’. Non-believers, however, “might be saved. ‘How’ they are saved is not addressed by the Council.”215 (2) e Council combines “the necessity of mission to all peoples” with “respect and regard for other religions.”216 (3) e eological Commission deliberately made use of the verb “ordinantur” in both LG 13 and LG 16 to describe the relationship of different groups with the Catholic Church in reference to omas Aquinas. NonChristians therefore only potentially may become part of the people of God.217

D’Costa is also aware of the different terminology used in the relevant numbers: Lumen Gentium 14 indicates that ‘full incorporation’ (plene incorporantur) is attributed to baptized Roman Catholics and catechumens who expressly desire incorporation; Lumen Gentium 15 treats non-Roman Catholic Christians, who are seen to be joined (coniunctam) to the Church in various degrees as ‘Churches or ecclesiastical communities’. Finally, Lumen Gentium 16 then deals with those related (ordinantur) to the Church.218

213 AS III/6, 102: “Patres, numero circiter 120, proponunt sat longam ampliationem, in quo mandatum Christi de praedicando Evangelio solemnius enuntietur, necessitas inculcetur ut Missiones ad constituendas novas Ecclesias complete exstructas perducantur, et denique doceatur etiam has novas Ecclesias ad opus missionale pro aliis conferre habere.” 214 D’Costa, Vatican II, 60-80. 215 Ibid., 60. 216 Ibid. 217 See also the longer exposition in the section ‘Ordinantur and Potential and Actual Belonging to the People of God’, ibid., 88-99. 218 Ibid., 75-76.

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(4) Whatever is “true, good, and holy in other religions can be preparations for the gospel.”219 (5) As to the reference to Satan in LG 16 and elsewhere, according to Vatican II “the effects of original sin and personal sin undergird the necessity of mission.”220

A major part of the agenda of Ralph Martin and Gavin D’Costa, however, is to inform the reader that LG 16 basically repeats the teaching of Mystici Corporis and of the 1949 Letter of the Holy Office and that its approval went so easily that the teaching of the Council on salvation outside the Church can be considered a matter of perfect continuity. Martin sets out to prove this early in his book with a summary of the status quaestionis: ‘e Council historians: LG 16 was relatively noncontroversial’: Was there much debate on these texts during the Council? Were they controversial? ere was little significant debate on LG 16. In fact, the original dra of De ecclesia prepared by the Curia contains the substance of the teaching that LG 16 presents in the final, approved text. Even though De ecclesia went through significant revision and reorganization, on this point there was no substantial change.221

As I have shown in my analysis, it took the pre-conciliar eological Commission 9 months, including 3 dras by Lattanzi and 3 dras by Trump, before the sub-commission was able to send their final dra for approval to the plenary meeting of the eological Commission in September 1961. In the meantime, as I have illustrated with discussing texts by Congar and Philips, individual periti were invited to share their personal views on the difficult question of Church membership. e theological divergence continued during the discussion in the Central Commission. D’Costa makes a similar claim with regard to the lack of novelty of the revised De Ecclesia debated upon during the second session and mentions that “this was the work of Gérard Philips who extensively used Tromp’s text.”222 His claim is correct with regard to the numbers dealing with the Catholic faithful (n° 8) and the relationship of non-Catholics to the Church (n° 9); but the number on non-Christians had to be draed anew since this topic was not yet treated by the pre-conciliar eological

219 220 221 222

D’Costa, Vatican II, 61. Ibid. Martin, Will Many Be Saved?, 11. D’Costa, Vatican II, 144.

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Commission.223 With regard to the third session he notes that “Lumen Gentium 16-17 went through with little discussion.”224 Here D’Costa seems to have forgotten that the number of votes iuxta modum on LG 16 on September 18, 1964, was quite high because many Council fathers disagreed to qualify the Muslims as “filii Ismael.” One wonders whether the contrast between the focus on the individual need of salvation in the pre-conciliar eological Commission and the focus on different groups during the Council does not constitute an important point of discontinuity. Is the almost exclusive emphasis of Martin on the line referring to the work of the Evil One in LG 16 therefore not a return to the pre-conciliar focus on individual salvation? In a book chapter written during the same period he wrote: e reasons for the missionary command – that the eternal destinies of human beings are really at stake and for many people the preaching of the Gospel can make a life or death, heaven or hell, difference – need to be unashamedly stated.”225

I hope to have shown in this chapter that, what is at stake is the entire teaching of LG 16 and 17 which includes the certainty of God’s salvific will, the affirmation of the presence of God’s grace among non-Christians and of the many ties which link them to the Catholic faithful, and finally the call to Catholics to assist the Holy Spirit in pursuing the mission of Christ, but rather not a focus on individual salvation.

223

D’Costa is aware of this: “In 1962, De Ecclesia contained not a single word on Jews and Muslims.” Ibid. 224 Ibid., 77. 225 Cf. Martin, “e Pastoral Strategy of Vatican II: Time for an Adjustment?,” in The Second Vatican Council: Celebrating Its Achievements and the Future, ed. Gavin D’Costa and Emma Jane Harris (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 137-163, at 157.

19 From De Iudaeis to Nostra Aetate The Development of the Text from November 1963 to October 1965 Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck †

Nostra Aetate, the declaration on the Church’s attitude towards nonChristian religions, is the shortest document of the Council. At the same time, it is a document whose genesis and reception have been discussed abundantly.1 People have qualified the document as the first ecclesial one that “speaks of other religions in a fundamentally positive and appreciative way,”2 a milestone, a new thought,3 a form of discontinuity/rupture with the past,4 or even as a betrayal of the past.5 e document found its 1

See, e.g., Philippe J. Roy, Bibliographie du Concile Vatican II, préface de Jean-Dominique Durand, Atti e documenti 34 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012), 350-363, containing the most important literature on this topic. 2 So Roman A. Siebenrock, “eologischer Kommentar zur Erklärung über die Haltung der Kirche zu den nichtchristlichen Religionen Nostra Aetate,” in Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 2005), III, 591-693, 666 [our translation]. 3 Marcel Poorthuis, “e eology of Nostra Aetate on Islam and on Judaism, or: How Converts Introduced a New ought within the Vatican,” in Suavis laborum memoria: Chiesa, Papato e Curia Romana tra storia e teologia. Scritti in onore di Marcel Chappin SJ per il suo 70° compleanno / Church, Papacy, Roman Curia between History and Theology. Essays in Honour of Marcel Chappin SJ on His 70th Birthday, ed. Paul van Geest and Roberto Regoli, Collectanea Archivi Vaticani 88 (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2013), 317-335, here 317-318. 4 See, e.g., Mathijs Lamberigts, “Discontinuity in the Teaching of the Roman Catholic Church: e Case of Nostra Aetate 4,” in Tradition and the Normativity of History, ed. Lieven Boeve and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 263 (Louvain, Paris, Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013), 55-86; Edmund Kee-Fook Chia, “e Church and Other Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II, ed. Richard R. Gaillardetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 303-317, esp. 304-306. 5 See the detailed study of Philippe Roy-Lysencourt, “La résistance des Catholiques traditionalistes à la déclaration Nostra Aetate du concile Vatican II,”

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origin in the question of the relationship between the Catholic and Jewish religion. In the time since, because of John Paul II’s Assisi-project (1986), related interest in dialogue with the other non-Christian religions today has received abundant attention. In this article we will focus on the evolution of this document between November 1963 and October 28, 1965. Following mostly a historical approach,6 we will pay attention to both the critical remarks of the fathers on the text and, aer the vote, the modi. By doing so, we want to do justice to the debates, and to the work of the Secretariatus ad Christianorum Unitatem Fovendam (from now on abbreviated as SCUF), which made great efforts to take into account the concerns of the Council fathers.7 e roles of John XXIII,8 Jules Isaac (1877-1963),9 and Augustin Bea (1881-1968), the first president of the

in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis: Studies on the Second Vatican Council Offered to Mathijs Lamberigts, ed. Dries Bosschaert and Johan Leemans, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 317 (Louvain, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2020), 341-357, esp. 351-355. 6 e number of theological commentaries is impressive as has been made clear by Roy, Bibliographie du Concile Vatican II; see, e.g., The Catholic Church and the World Religions: A Theological and Phenomenological Account, ed. Gavin D’Costa (London: T&T Clark, 2011); Stefan Schreiber and omas Schumacher, eds., Antijudaismen in der Exegese? Eine Diskussion 50 Jahre nach Nostra Aetate (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 2015); Pim Valkenberg and Anthony Cirelli, eds., Nostra Aetate: Celebrating 50 Years of the Catholic Church’s Dialogue with Jews and Muslims (Washington, DC: e Catholic University of America Press, 2016). 7 For a survey of that debate, see Nicla Buonasorte, “‘Iudaei adhuc carissimi?’ La pubblicistica antisemitica al concilio Vaticano II,” Humanitas 57 (2003): 481493; Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck, “Vatican II on the Jews: A Historical Survey,” in Never Revoked: Nostra Aetate as Ongoing Challenge for JewishChristian Dialogue, ed. Marianne Moyaert and Didier Pollefeyt, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 40 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2010), 13-56. 8 For John’s interest in the fate of the Jews, see Alberto Melloni, Fra Istanbul, Atene e la guerra: La missione di A.  G. Roncalli (1935-1944) (Genoa: Marietti, 1992), 258-279; see also Giovanni XXIII-Angelo Roncalli, Lettere ai familiari 1901-1962, ed. Loris Francesco Capovilla (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1968), II, 484. e fact that John XXIII was opposed to derogatory and prejudiced statements concerning pagans, Jews, Muslims etc. is also evident in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 51 (1959): 595. 9 On this remarkable Jewish historian, who had lost his wife and daughter during the Second World War (both were arrested by the Nazis and died in Auschwitz), see now Norman C. Tobias, Jewish Conscience of the Church: Jules Isaac and the Second Vatican Council (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).

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SCUF10 in the beginning of the enterprise, are well described. Jews invited Pope John to intervene when anti-Semitism re-emerged in Germany.11 Institutes such as the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University sent reports to the pope. Its founder, Mgr John Maria Oesterreicher (1904-1993), was an Austrian Jew who had converted to Catholicism. e Seelisberg-conference (Switzerland) in the summer of 1947, bringing together Jews, Protestants, and Catholics,12 ended with an address to the churches. e ten points of Seelisberg found their way into statements of several organizations, investing in an amelioration of the relations between Jews and Christians. Conferences such as those organized by the founder of the Dutch Catholic Council for Israel, Anton Ramselaar (1899-1981), in Apeldoorn in 1958 and 1960,13 brought together internationally renowned promoters of the dialogue between Jews and Christians such as Oesterreicher, Abbot Leo von Rudloff, O.S.B. (1902-1980) of Dormition Abbey, Jerusalem and Paul Démann (1912-2005),14 again a converted Jew, one of the editors of the Cahiers Sioniens, and a participant at the Seelisberg conference.15 Whether the Apeldoorn conferences had an impact on the text on the Jews, is still a matter of debate, but participants in the meeting such as Oesterreicher and Rudloff would become members of the SCUF in 1961 (when the discussion on the Jews in the SCUF started), just like Gregory Baum 10

On this appointment, see Saretta Marotta, Gli anni della pazienza: Bea, l’ecumenismo e il Sant’Uffizio di Pio XII, Istituto per le scienze religiose – Bologna. Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, Testi, ricerche e fonti, nuova serie 63 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2019), 434-483. 11 Cf. Arthur Gilbert, The Vatican Council and the Jews, appendix G (Cleveland, OH: World Publishers, 1968). 12 On this conference, see, e.g., érèse M. Andrevon, Une théologie à la frontière: L’Église et le Peuple juif depuis le Concile Vatican II. Préface du cardinal Kurt Koch (Toulouse: Domuni Press, 2018), II, 36-46. 13 On Ramselaar, see Marcel J.  H.  M. Poorthuis, “e Diplomat and the Pioneer in Jewish-Catholic Relations prior to Nostra Aetate: Jo Willebrands and Toon Ramselaar,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49 (2014): 471-488, esp. 473-475. At that time, Ramselaar was the president of the Minor Seminary of Apeldoorn. 14 On Paul Démann, see the excellent study of Andrevon, Une théologie à la frontière, I, 253-293. 15 See the survey in Poorthuis, “e Diplomat and the Pioneer in JewishCatholic Relations,” 475-476; see also Marcel Poorthuis, “De diplomaat versus de pionier in joods-katholieke betrekkingen voorafgaand aan Nostra Aetate: Jo Willebrands en Toon Ramselaar,” De Nederlandse jaren van Johannes Willebrands (1909-1960), ed. Adelbert Denaux, Willebrands Studies 2 (Bergambacht: 2VM, 2015), 211-241, 218-220.

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(1923-2017), son of a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, who would become a Roman Catholic in 1946.16 Isaac’s request to put the question of the Jews on the agenda of the coming Council,17 was accepted by the pope and the SCUF would become the place where the issue received attention.18 However, the schema prepared by the SCUF did not (yet) reach the Council’s agenda,19 mostly because of political reasons.20 However, both the SCUF21 and Pope John XXIII were of the opinion that a document on the Jews deserved its place on the conciliar agenda.22 Jewish communities such as the one of

16

Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, secrétaire du Secrétariat pour l’Unité des chrétiens. Traduction française annotée par Leo Declerck. With a preface by omas Stransky, Instrumenta eologica 31 (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), 155. Poorthuis, “e Diplomat and the Pioneer in Jewish-Catholic Relations,” 486 observes that Ramselaar, the architect of the Apeldoorn meetings, was not invited to join the SCUF. We suggest that this was probably due to the fact that at the moment that the SCUF would be enlarged, Ramselaar was already a member of the preparatory commission on the lay apostolate since 1960, while the dossier on the Jews would become an issue in 1961. With regard to Oesterreicher and Baum, see also Poorthuis, “e eology of Nostra Aetate on Islam and on Judaism,” 328-330. 17 Cf. in this regard Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, 1964), 14. 18 See Tobias, Jewish Conscience of the Church, 190-191. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust (1930-1965) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 208 suggests that the meeting was organized by John XXIII, but this is not what one will find in Isaac’s report. 19 For the details, see Johannes Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 1-151, at 40ff.; Lamberigts, “Discontinuity in the Teaching of the Roman Catholic Church,” 67-79; Mauro Velati, Dialogo e rinnovamento: Verbali e testi del Segretariato per l’Unità dei Cristiani nella preparazione del concilio Vaticano II (1960-1962) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), passim. at the SCUF had to make great efforts in order to get its place in the conciliar activities, is made clear in Peter De Mey, “e Difficult Cooperation between the Secretariat for Christian Unity and the Oriental Commission in the Preparation of De Oecumenismo (December 1962 – November 1963),” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis, 245-275. 20 Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano  II Apparando 2.2.5, 22-23; see also Stjepan Schmidt, Augustin Bea: Der Kardinal der Einheit (Graz: Styria, 1989), 642-643. 21 See Mauro Velati, Una difficile transizione: Il cattolicesimo tra unionismo ed ecumenismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 380-381. 22 See in this regard, for example, Georges M.-M. Cottier, “L’historique de la déclaration,” in Les relations de l’Église avec les religions non chrétiennes:

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Strasbourg, asking for a text on the Jews, were supported by Catholic theologians, like Congar,23 who insisted with Willebrands that such a text should be presented to the Council.24 Also Germans such as Cardinal Döpfner were in favor of such a text. In fact, people knew of the existence of a text and were of the opinion that one could not abandon the project.25 During the first intersession, the SCUF continued its activities and a quite different (in comparison with the text finished in the preparatory period) but still short text, entitled Decretum pastorale de Judaeis,26 was ready on May 14. It would be slightly changed in the SCUF’s meeting and presented under a new title: De Ecclesiae habitudine ad Iudaeos.27 It was now part of the document on ecumenism (as chapter 4), a proposal that would be approved by the Coordination Commission. In the text, the link with ecumenism was made explicit in the introduction. e text recognized that the beginnings of the Church’s hope and election were already present in the time of the patriarchs and the prophets. e Church is the spiritual continuation of that congregation, with which God started his “ancient covenant” (antiquum foedus). e text also made clear that the Church believes that Christ, our peace, embraced both Jews and Gentiles and wanted both to be one. e text recognized that a “magna pars” of the Jews is far away from Christ, but therefore Israel cannot be qualified as a condemned people for it remains carissimus to God because of the Fathers and the promises made. e text also stated that one cannot accuse the Jewish people of deicide, for Christ suffered and died for the sins of all. e Church loves this people to which Christ, Mary and the Apostles belonged. Christians and Jews Déclaration “Nostra Aetate”. Texte latin et traduction française, ed. A.-M. Henry, Unam Sanctam 61 (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 37-78, at 40. When presenting the text on November 19, 1963, Bea will explicitly refer to this mandate given by John XXIII; see AS II/5, 481. See omas Stransky, “e Genesis of Nostra Aetate: An Insider’s Story,” in Nostra Aetate: Origins, Promulgation, Impact on JewishCatholic Relations, ed. Neville Lamdan and Alberto Melloni, Christianity and History. Series of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna 5 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007), 29-53, here 43. 23 Yves Congar, Mon Journal du Concile. Présenté et annoté par Éric Mahieu. Avant-propos de Dominique Congar. Préface de Bernard Dupuy (Paris: Cerf, 2002), I, 357. 24 Congar did so in a meeting in Bossey, March 19, 1963; see Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, I, 359. 25 AS VI/2, 182-183. 26 For this text, see F. De Smedt 698 (Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven). 27 See the text, dated May 15, 1963, in F. De Smedt 699.

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have a common spiritual patrimony. e text invited readers to theological studies and fraternal colloquia. It condemned all injustices inflicted against people and deplored and condemned all hatred and persecutions against the Jews throughout history up to the current day. In substance, the text did not fundamentally change thereaer.28 In the text distributed to the fathers in November,29 an introduction is added stating that the SCUF is of the opinion that one must discuss the way in which one should dialogue and cooperate with non-Christians, who venerate God, are of good will and aim at preserving the moral law which is sown in their hearts. is introduction explains why the text of November will be entitled: De Catholicorum habitudine ad non Christianos et maxime ad Iudaeos, even although the main attention goes to the Jews. In paragraph 4 of the text it is stipulated that the Church is happy to announce the reconciliation of the whole world in Christ. e text recognizes that the elected people is still far away from Christ, but it is added that “not the whole (Jewish) people, living at the time of Jesus, and even less the people of today are involved in Jesus’ death.” Added was also that “priests should not say anything in their catechesis or predication that could create hatred and contempt against the Jews.” In the last paragraph, mention was made in the new text of the “common patrimony of Church and synagogue.” With regard to the Church’s condemnation of hatred and persecution, it was added in the last part of the sentence that this is done “with a maternal heart.” 1. The Presentation of Chapter 4 of De Oecumenismo in the Second Session e text on the Jews was distributed to the Council fathers on November 8, 196330 and presented by Bea in the general congregation of 19 November,

28 See the introduction of Bea in AS II/4, 481: “Schema ‘de Iudaeis’ nunc examine subiciendum plus duobus annis abhinc parari coeptum est et quoad substantiam mense maio anni elapsi absolutum fuit.” Bea made some small changes aer the meeting of May, 15, that would be discussed in the subcommission on the Jews on May 18; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 21. Willebrands is still working on the text on the Jews on June 16, 1963. 29 For this text, see AS II/5, 431-432. 30 Fathers would complain about the fact that the text was distributed so late; see Cardinal Bueno y Monreal, Archbishop of Sevilla, AS II/5, 536. is delay is a bit surprising. e text on the Jews met with appreciation in the CC, held beginning July. On July 9, 1963, Cicognani confirmed to Bea that the schemata De Iudaeis and De Libertate religiosa were approved and would be sent to the

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1963. Already before November 8, it was known that a text on the Jews existed: because of articles published in the Arabic press, Willebrands visited the embassy of the United Arab Republic in order to inform them.31 In a press release, the SCUF emphasized that the nature of the text on the Jews was religious and not political.32 While the three first chapters of the schema De Oecumenismo had been sent to the fathers on April 22, thus were already read and even somewhat commented upon by them,33 chapters 4 and 5 (on religious liberty) were, in a sense, new.34 In his long presentation of the text,35 Bea made clear that the text did not discuss a national or political question and did not deal with the recognition of the State of Israel by the Holy See, as some suggested at that time. Next, he emphasized the bond between Israel and the Church, considering the Old Testament as a preparation for Christ’s redemption. He condemned any rejection of the people of Israel because of the crucifixion of Christ. He insisted that not all Jews at the time of Jesus’ life nor the Jews thereaer could be held responsible for Christ’s crucifixion. bishops. On July 11, one is waiting for an addition of Cardinal Liénart of Lille. On August 7, 1963, Willebrands speaks about a project of text De Iudaeis he is preparing (Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 39-41). On September 19, there is contact between Fagiolo and Willebrands about the two texts (ibid., 57). On October 5, 1963, Willebrands speaks with Suenens about the “blocage” by the theological commission (ibid., 63). On October 19, 1963, it is decided that the text on religious liberty becomes chapter 5 of De Oecumenismo (which means that chapter 4, on the Jews, is already finished), but there must be a meeting with the theological commission in order to avoid a conflict with the Holy Office (ibid., 67). From then on, most of the problems are related to the text on religious liberty (see ibid., 70-71). e text De Libertate religiosa will be examined by the theological commission first in a sub-commission (November 7, 1963), next in the plenary theological commission (November 11, 1963); see the archive of Philips, which is preserved at the Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, here at nos 1103-1104. Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 47, does not offer reasons for this delay. 31 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 73. 32 Giovanni Caprile, Il Concilio Vaticano II, vol. 3 (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1966), 420-421. 33 See the survey in AS II/5, 442-467. 34 Among the fathers, the idea to have a Conciliar text on the Jews, was already present during the intersession; see Bishop Philip Francis Pocock, coadjutor Archbishop of Toronto, AS II/5, 467. 35 In fact, the presentation was longer than chapter 4 itself. Cf. Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, I, 545: “Elle est trop longue, avec des répétitions, mais elle est très forte et très belle.”

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Moreover, the love of Christ and the apostles should be followed by all Christians. Bea was of the opinion that the Council had to speak about the Jews because of antisemitism, especially Nazism. Bea concluded his speech with an explicit reference to John XXIII’s wish about this text, entrusted to the SCUF.36 e debate that followed focused mostly on the first 3 chapters of the schema. However, on behalf of 110 out of 120 bishops of the USA, Cardinal Meyer of Chicago made clear that for them both chapters 4 and 5 were closely related to the topic of ecumenism, and this both on the theoretical and practical level.37 ey therefore asked to keep them in the schema as presented now.38 Méndez Arceo, Bishop of Cuernavaca (Mexico), who, during the first session, had asked for a condemnation of antisemitism, now defended the idea that the Jews, because of their special and close relation with Christians, should keep their place in this schema and should not be discussed together with the non-Christians in a separate document.39 Cardinal Léger, Archbishop of Montréal, argued that both schemata deserved to be discussed as schemata in their own right.40 Especially bishops from Spain and Italy were of the opinion that both chapter 4 and 5 did not belong to a schema on ecumenism.41 Others suggested to integrate the text on the Jews in the text on the Church42 (either in the section dealing with the salvation history and the relation between Old and New Testament,43 or in the section on the non-Christians),44 or 36

Still, the authority of the SCUF would be questioned; see the intervention of Cardinal Bueno y Monreal, Archbishop of Sevilla, AS II/5, 536. 37 Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to NonChristian Religions,” 47ff. does not mention this overwhelming support. 38 See AS II/5, 597. His position received the support of the Swiss bishops; see AS II/5, 601-602. However, Cardinal Ritter, Archbishop of Saint Louis, very positive about the text, was of the opinion that it could not be part of a text on ecumenism; see AS II/5, 537. 39 AS II/5, 617. 40 See AS II/5, 551-552. 41 Cf. Cardinal Bueno y Monreal, Archbishop of Sevilla; Patriarch Batanian of the Armenians; Cardinal Bacci; Archbishop Morcillo González of Zaragoza; Bishop Hervás y Benet, praelatus nullius of Ciudad Real, Spain; Bishop Carli of Segni; Bishop Gúrpide Beope of Bilbao, AS II/5, 533, 560, 598, 608, 671, 691, 792-793. In opposition to his colleagues of the Near East, in his speech, Batanian did not reject the idea to say something about the Jews somewhere else. However, in his written version, this part is le out. 42 Ukrainian Archbishop Senyshyn of Philadelphia, AS II/5, 817. 43 Archbishop Dalmais of Fort-Lamy, Chad, AS II/6, 783, submitting a text signed by 6 colleagues, active in Chad, Congo, Gabon, and Madagascar. 44 Archbishop Florit of Florence, AS II/5, 666.

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in the schema on the missions or in that on the presence of the Church in the world.45 Jews are not part of the ecumenical movement, but one cannot treat them in the same way as the non-Christian religions because of the many things Christians have in common with the Jews.46 Fathers from the Near East considered a text about the Jews inopportune, and an insult for the separated brethren, treated on the same level as the Jews.47 e political situation, a lack of understanding and opposed factions may cause much damage to the Christians, a religious minority in the Near East.48 In this context, one will understand why Maximos IV Saigh argued that one should say something about the Muslims, for they are with more than 400 million and it is among them that Christians like the Melkites live as a minority.49 A good number of critical interventions asked for more attention to people adhering to other religions.50 It was suggested that they were nearer to the Catholics than the Jews.51 Furthermore, people could no longer speak derogatorily about non-Christians, calling them barbarians or condemning them because of error and superstitious idolatry. erefore, Bishop Lokuang of Tainan (Taiwan) asked that an exhortation be added either in chapter 4 or chapter 5 about the respect and the love people should show with regard to non-Christian people and religions. He was of the opinion that in all non-Christian religions one would find truths that must come from God. In non-Christian moral doctrines, one will find many good precepts, these people oen living a better ethical life than many Catholics, while Catholics should inspire the

45

Morcillo González, AS II/5, 608. He was of the opinion that the ecumenical method had to proceed in a different way for Christians and non-Christians, “etiamsi filii sint Abrahae.” Archbishop Dalmais suggested to speak about the non-Christians (but not the Jews) in this schema, for Jews have a different relationship with Christianity; see AS II/5, 783. For a similar remark, see Mgr Yoshigoro Taguchi of Osaka, AS II/5, 830-831. 46 Cf. Bishop Souto Vizoso of Palencia (Spain), AS II/5, 821. 47 Maximos IV Saigh, AS II/5, 543. 48 See the critical remarks of Cardinal Tappouni, Patriarch of Antioch of the Syrians; Cardinal Ruffini, Archbishop of Palermo; Patriarch Sidarous of Alexandria of the Copts; see AS II/5, 527, 529, 541. 49 Maximos IV Saigh, AS II/5, 544. Cf. also the request of Mgr Jelmini, Apostolic Administrator of Lugano, on behalf of the Swiss bishops, asking to mention all those who believe in God and are victims of persecutions, AS II/5, 601. For the protest of the Near East fathers, see also Antoine Wenger, Vatican II: Chronique de la Deuxième Session (1964) (Paris: Centurion, 1964), 175. 50 Bishop de Castro Mayer of Campos (Brazil), AS II/5, 785. 51 Cardinal Ruffini, AS II/5, 529.

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non-Christians.52 On behalf of four Ukrainian colleagues, Archbishop Hermaniuk complained about the absence of a true and concrete universal ecumenical approach: the text limited itself to the Jews but was silent on Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and other religions that inspire many people today. Moreover, nothing was said about the dialogue with the people of today.53 He thus asked for a new chapter or paragraph that should deal with the Church’s dialogue with these religions.54 Also Bishop coadjutor da Veiga Coutinho of Belgaum in North India suggested thinking in the direction of ecumenism sensu latiore, integrating in this document a theological consideration on the relation of the Christian revelation with other religions. In such a text, something should be said about the religions of very ancient cultures such as Hinduism, for in its sacred books it contains truths which are important for the Church as mother and teacher (Mater et Magistra). e following principles were considered to be important: the unique economy of salvation for humanity, in which all religions must be included; especially the religions with a very ancient culture should be present as a kind of evangelical preparation for the perfect revelation in Christ. Tolerance and active cooperation are of utmost importance in the missionary regions. He proposed avoiding words that could harm other religions, referring to terminology such as tenebrae ignorantiae, paganismus, and idolatria. Da Veiga Coutinho was convinced that offering a broader context would do justice to the major religions in Asia and Africa, where half of humanity resides, and would overcome any attempt to give a political interpretation to the text. He concluded by asking for the creation of a Secretariat for the non-Christian Religions that should collaborate with the SCUF.55 Cardinal Doi of Tokyo, speaking on behalf of the Japanese bishops, was positive about the text on the Jews, but stressed the importance of

52

AS II/5, 799. Here, he referred to the speech of Paul VI, held at the opening of the second session of the Council, on September 29, 1963. 54 AS II/5, 794-795; for a similar request, see the intervention of auxiliary Bishop Wójcik (auxiliary Bishop of Sandomierz), AS II/5, 829. 55 For this important text, see AS II/5, 744-745; cf. also Paul Pulikkan, Indian Church at Vatican II: A Historico-Theological Study of the Indian Participation in the Second Vatican Council, Marymatha Publications 1 (Trichur: Ebenezar Press: 2001), 315-316. Similar suggestions were made by Bishop Pont y Gol of Segorbe (Spain); Bishop Verhoeven of Manado, Indonesia (on behalf 30 Indonesian bishops), AS II/5, 746, 748, 828. e suggestion to create such a secretariat was already made by Paul VI in a letter to Tisserant on September 12, 1963. 53

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non-Christian religions such as Buddhism and Confucianism in Japan.56 e Catholic Church could show its esteem for the germs of truth in these religions, that seem to prepare for Christ. Catholics must respect and love their non-Christian co-citizens and should collaborate wholeheartedly with them for the common good of the fatherland and the whole human society.57 at something had to be said about Islam, was evident, for they also believe in one God58 and belong to the Abrahamic religions. ere is already collaboration on the social and cultural level.59 Furthermore, they were an important group in Africa, Asia, and America.60 Even although there was no real debate about chapter 4, one can conclude that a majority of bishops was positive about the text, several bishops from the Southern hemisphere asking for an extension to other non-Christian religions, while some bishops from Spain and Italy and the bishops of the Near East had problems with the text, either for theological or political reasons. On November 21, 1963, a vote was organized with regard to the first three chapters of the schema De Oecumenismo. General secretary Felici promised that in the next days the same would be done for chapters 4 and 5. However, such vote did not take place,61 even though it was requested by some fathers.62 ere was even a rumor circulating that the pope was unaware of the text on the Jews and even against it, something that was firmly contradicted by Döpfner who held that the pope had

56

Explicitly referring to the intervention of Cardinal Doi, Bishop Chang Tso-Huan of Xinyang, living in exile, asked to mention the Chinese culture, AS II/5, 766. 57 Cardinal Doi, AS II/5, 540; cf. also Cardinal Rugambwa, Bishop of Bukoba (Tanzania), AS II/5, 556. 58 Bishop Pailloux of Fort Rosebery (Zambia), AS II/6, 129. 59 Archbishop iandoum of Dakar (Senegal) on behalf of 25 bishops, active in Africa, AS II/6, 198. 60 And in Europe (Yugoslavia), as was mentioned by Mgr Franić, Bishop of Split-Makarska, AS II/6, 320. 61 According to Bea, who surprisingly got the floor while no debate had taken place on chapter 4, this was only due to lack of time. Moreover, he invited all fathers to study the chapters 4 and 5 and to submit all their proposals and corrections before January 31, 1964. See his intervention on December 2, 1963, AS II/6, 365-366. See also Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 54. 62 See Mgr Helmsing’s intervention of November 29, 1963, AS II/6, 313: “Tale suffragium erit possibile hodie sine interruptione disceptationum huius schematis.”

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spoken in favor of the text on the Jews in a meeting with the moderators.63 It will be clear that the issue was a sensitive one. 2. The Second Intersession From January 4 to 6, Paul VI visited the Holy Land, where he also met the Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I, on January 5. During his travel, the pope also met Jewish, Arabic, and Christian people. He made clear that his visit was that of a religious leader, and that he did not intend to make a political statement. e opinions about chapter 4 of De Oecumenismo were rich and diverse. While 44 fathers, a clear majority, oen speaking on behalf of many, praised the text, 18 vota considered the chapter inopportune and ambiguous. Several bishops questioned its presence in the schema on ecumenism and suggested dealing with the matter in another schema. 23 vota asked for a more extended treatment of the other non-Christian religions, 9 for a text on Islam. ose objecting to this chapter (only 2), claimed that according to Scripture, tradition, and the doctrine of the popes, the Jews as people were guilty of Christ’s death, the reason why they had to undergo terrible punishments in the course of history. Also, their unbelief (in ancient times and today) was mentioned as an argument. People also questioned the competency of the SCUF. e document would also offend other religions, especially Islam, and could be politically misused. ose in favor of the text mentioned the need to take away antisemitism among the faithful, considered it as a moment to ask forgiveness to the Jews, mentioned the common salvation history, the Scriptural patrimony, and the foundation of the Church in the Jewish people through Christ and the apostles. ey opined that the schism between the Church and the Synagogue was the source of all divisions in the people of God. Referring to Romans 11, also the future fate of the Jewish people was mentioned.64 In January 1964, the Coordinating Commission (abbreviated as CC) gave the SCUF the right to decide for itself whether the text should remain in the schema on ecumenism or become an independent

63

Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 80-81. On this rich variety, see the relatio of Gregory Baum, March 4, 1964; F.  Degrijse (dossier SCUF 1964, Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven). 64

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document.65 In the plenary meeting of the SCUF (February 24 – March 7, 1964),66 much attention was paid to the integration (or not) of Islam and the monotheistic religions in the schema De Iudaeis.67 On February 25, it was decided, with an overwhelming majority, to mention Islam. A sub-commission of the SCUF, consisting of Bishops Rabban, Chaldean Archbishop of Kerkük, Mansourati, auxiliary Bishop of Antioch of the Syrians (Lebanon), Abbot von Rudloff, and White Father Cuoq (19171986) (expert in Islam),68 prepared a text on Islam and other religions, a second appendix next to the one on the Jews. In this text, the bond with Abraham was mentioned. Also, the monotheistic character of Islam was emphasized, considered to be the common basis for the promotion of spiritual values in collaboration between them and Christians and for the mutual esteem. e text concluded, stating that the Church invites all human beings of good will, who sincerely venerate God through pious acts, and informs them that the Catholic religion with due respect appreciates what is true, good, and human among them.69 In the text on the Jews (version of March 4), the introduction of the November 1963 text was le out, with the order of it slightly changed (the warning with regard to catechesis and predication was put at the end of the text). On the level of the content of the text, the statement that not all Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, was now omitted.70 On March 6, the texts on the Jews and Islam and on respect for all who venerate God, were integrated within one document. In comparison

65

See the official minutes of the CC of January 15, AS V/2, 120. e CC seemingly was divided. e report of Cardinal Döpfner (AS V/2, 89) suggested to frame the statement on the Jews within a broader declaration on the Jews, the other non-Christian religions and all people of good will, a suggestion also made by some fathers during the discussion. e official minutes (AS V/2, 95) seem to prefer an integration of the text on the Jews into the document on the Church in the Modern World. Bea was thinking of inserting a paragraph on the monotheistic religions in general and Islam in particular into the segment on the Jews; cf. Bea’s letter to Felici, January 14, 1964. Anyway, Bea wanted the text to be an appendix to the schema on ecumenism; cf. AS V/2, 104. 66 Prepared by experts between February 4 and 21, 1964; see Schmidt, Augustin Bea: Der Kardinal der Einheit, 651. 67 AS V/2, 167. 68 See AS V/2, 168. In SCUF, there was no theological expert on Islam present; see the list of participants in F. Degrijse (1964), 86-87. We presume that Cuoq was invited “last minute.” 69 e text as prepared by this sub-commission was extensively discussed in the meetings of March 3, 1964. See F. Degrijse (1964), 120. 70 See F. Degrijse (1964), 134.

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to the text of March 4, in the text on the Jews it was added that God had also revealed himself in the Old Testament. For the rest, the text remained substantially the same. e text on the Jews would be accepted. e text on Islam and the other religions (now nos. 2 and 3 of the text), several times being discussed, would finally be rejected on March 6, 1964.71 Cicognani was informed about this on March 9, 1964.72 On March 10, the CC discussed the letter of Bea in which he informed the commission that De Iudaeis was now an appendix. Given the fact that there was no text available on Islam and other non-Christian religions, it was suggested that, if necessary, Bea should contact Cardinal Marella, the future head of the Secretariat for the non-Christians with regard to the nonChristian religions.73 e SCUF’s text was discussed by the CC on April 16. e text submitted focused exclusively on the Jews,74 and thus the pressure of the Arabic countries and the concern of the Near East patriarchs on the document continued.75 erefore, Cicognani suggested adding a text on the Muslims and a general statement about the pagans in general “per attenuare i contrasti.”76 e CC further agreed to mention the other monotheistic religions in a general way in order not to offend anyone. e text should emphasize the importance of universal fraternity and condemn every form of racial or national oppression. Also it should be recognized that pagans are children of God.77 On April 18, 1964, Cicognani informed Bea about the decisions taken and stipulated that the text should avoid any reference to deicide. e new title should be: Declaratio de hebraeis et de gentibus non christianis.78 It became evident that in light of this option, the Jews now would function within the framework of relations 71

For the two texts as presented on March 6, see F. Degrijse (1964), 164-166; for the rejection, see AS V/2, 152, 169. 72 Letter of Bea to Cicognani, AS V/2, 152. 73 AS V/2, 157. 74 For the text, see AS V/2, 283-284. 75 During the meeting of the CC, Agagianian made clear that he was opposed to the text. At a given moment, it seemed that the whole text might disappear. It was then decided to leave out the sensitive word deicidium. See the report of Arrighi in Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 134. e official report of that meeting remains vague about this issue; see AS V/2, 292-293. 76 See his survey of the situation and suggestions, AS V/2, 286-287. On the rumors about Arabic agitation, see Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 59-60. 77 AS V/2, 292-293. 78 For this letter, see AS V/2, 295; see also Giovanni Miccoli, “Two Sensitive Issues: Religious Freedom and the Jews,” in History of Vatican II. Vol. IV: Church as Communion: Third Period and Intersession. September 1964 – September 1965,

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with the world religions – in particular with Islam – and within the framework of universal fraternity. e CC pushed the SCUF to extend its perspectives. e CC’s recommendations were quickly implemented.79 e text received a new title: Declaratio De habitudine Christianorum ad Iudaeos et ad universam familiam humanam.80 In the text on the Jews, the passage about Christ, suffering and dying for the sins of all men, was le out. A rather long section was added, stating that all people have God as their father. Negation of human fraternity was equated with negation of God. People can only receive forgiveness of sins when they are cordially forgiving the sins of the others. e entire section was filled with Biblical quotes and references. A section was added, explicitly stating that Christians must attentively reflect on the opinions and doctrines of other religions: even although they differ in many aspects from the Catholic ones, “still they reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens every person that is born in this world” (tamen reflectunt radium illius Veritatis quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum) as requested by several Asian bishops. en, a sentence on the Muslims followed, in which it was said that they venerate one, personal and rewarding God and that, on the basis of historical events and cultural communications, they are nearer to Christians than followers of other religions.81 e text ended with a condemnation of every form of discrimination.82 e new text was sent by Bea to Felici on May 2 and handed over to the pope on May 6.83 Globally speaking, the text enjoyed the approval of Paul VI.

ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis; Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 135-165, at 145. 79 e texts, rejected in March, still being inspirational. On the role of Congar, see his Mon Journal du Concile, II, 70-72, 82. 80 is title thus differed from what was suggested by the CC; see AS V/2, 571. 81 Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 70. On April 27, 1964 (cf. p. 74) he states: “Finalement, on penche pour ne pas faire mention spéciale des Musulmans et pour garder intact (sauf le mot ‘déicide’) le texte du secrétariat sur les Juifs. Notre texte est admis par Willebrands.” In a meeting with Duprey, on May 1, the question is asked whether also the Islam could be the responsibility of the SCUF. Both Willebrands and Bea did not like the idea. Bea was of the opinion that a text on the Muslims should be prepared by the Secretariat for the NonChristian Religions; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 114-115. 82 For the text, see AS V/2, 571-572; VI/3, 160-161. 83 For the details see AS V/2, 571. Felici added some comments which do not do justice to the suggestions made by Cicognani in the Coordination Commission of April, but were followed by the SCUF. Among others, he suggested that

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However, he changed the title into Declaratio De Iudaeis et non Christianis. He requested leaving out the passage “sive ante actis sive nostris temporibus,” for it could give rise to endless recriminations drawn from history. e most important change had to do with the hope for a future conversion of Israel, resulting in a reunion of the Jewish people with the Church.84 On the basis of the teaching of Paul, the Church expects “fide inconcussa ac desiderio magno” the return of the Jews to the fullness of the people of God, which Christ has renewed.85 e text was given back to Bea, the pope having finished his reading on May 21, 1964.86 Bea, again, suggested to add a reference to Paul (Rom 11:25) in order to concretize Paul’s teaching and suggested to change the word reditus into accessus, arguing that the Jews did not have to return, for they did not leave the Christian religion, but had not accepted it.87 In a letter of June 16, Felici promised to submit “prossimamente” (the letter of Bea was already sent June 4!) the remarks to the pope.88 ese changes were accepted by the pope, who added a quote from Rom 9:4 about the Jews, “to whom pertain the adoption as children, the glory, the covenant, the giving of the law, the service of God and the promises.” When in a letter of June 23, 1964, Bea suggested an addition to the text, in which neither the Jews of today, nor any Jews at the time of Christ were considered to be responsible for Christ’s death – moreover, that the Jews at the time were not aware of the crime they had committed (with references to Acts 3:15-17; cf. Lk 23:24; Acts 13:27) –, this proposal was not accepted by the pope, for the text in Acts 3:15-17 was quite polemical and thus could cause reasonable discussion among the theologians. e pope suggested the statement about the Muslims had not been requested. is is absent in the letter of Cicognani to Bea, but was a point made by Cicognani in the meeting. For the letter, see AS VI/3, 159. 84 Willebrands worried about this addition, but, as was affirmed by Felici, it came from the pope. Willebrands still hoped that Bea could change the pope’s mind, for such text could give the impression that one was, again, proselytizing; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 125. However, the addition remained in the version sent to the fathers. 85 AS V/2, 572-573; VI/3, 180. e pope closely followed the developments and sought to present the question of the Jews in the best possible light; cf. AS V/2, 548-549. Mgr Felici to Cardinal Bea, dated June 1, 1964; cf. AS V/2, 525-526. 86 is delay made Willebrands nervous, for the text on ecumenism and religious liberty were already sent out, and people would be surprised if there was no text on the Jews; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 118. 87 See the letter of Bea to Felici, June 4, 1964, AS V/2, 534. 88 AS V/2, 547-548.

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that the CC, meeting on June 26-27, 1964, ought to propose a suggestion, making clear that the Jews of today are not responsible for the acts of their ancestors.89 In the meeting of June 26, the CC emphasized that Christ died for us, sinners, and that not all Jews could be made responsible for what the behavior of the Jews and their leaders in Jerusalem had done. e CC accepted this proposal,90 but the pope, at the instigation of Ciappi,91 did not accept it.92 However, a short phrase arguing not to put the blame of the (leaders of the) Jews on all Jews, probably proposed by the pope in an audience with Cicognani on July 3, 1964, would find its way into the text.93 With regard to the ray of truth that enlightens all people, the text discussed in the meeting of June 26 ran as follows: “tamen referunt radium illius Veritatis quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum.” However, Agagianian considered this too much and thus suggested to add aer referunt “in multis.” e proposal was accepted.94 Ciappi, like Cardinal Browne,95 was also of the opinion that Christians did not have a common patrimony with the Jews, but that they had received it from the Jews. In an audience with Felici, the pope also accepted this change.96 During the discussion, Felici complained about the fact that in light of a number of letters received from the United States, it had become clear that elements of the content of the text had been leaked.97 On July 7, 1964, Bea was informed that the declaration

89

See Felici’s report as presented in the Coordination Commission, AS V/2,

579. 90

For the intervention of Lercaro, see AS V/2, 639. See the argumentation of Ciappi, submitted on July 5, in AS V/2, 644. 92 For this proposal, see AS V/2, 639. 93 See AS V/2, 645: “Caveant praeterea ne Iudaeis nostrorum temporum quae in Passione Christi perpetrata sunt imputentur.” According to Felici, Cicognani and the pope met on July 2, AS V/2, 648. 94 See the letter of Felici to Bea, AS V/2, 648. 95 AS V/2, 643-645. 96 AS V/2, 646. In the audience the pope also asked to leave out at the end of no. 1 the following text: “Haec enim omnia voluntati Iesu repugnant, qui uno amore et Iudaeos et Gentes complectitur.” On July 22, 1964, Liénart will protest about this omission, AS V/2, 654-655. 97 On June 11, 1964, an article was published in the New York Times, which (rightly) had stated that the text on the Jews was weakened. e SCUF prepared a press communication on the Jews on June 12, which, aer approval by the pope, was published on June 13; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 131-132. e Cardinals Spellman (June 16 and 17), Ritter (June 22, 1964), and Helmsing (June 15, 1964), worrying about what happened, sent letters to Cicognani, AS V/2, 639. 91

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would be printed and sent to the fathers.98 Bea was well aware of the differences between this text and the text approved in March. He thus informed the members of the SCUF in a confidential letter, dated July 17, 196499 about the fact that the CC “had to a certain extent assumed its responsibility for the content and the redaction of this text.” Bea asked the members whether the SCUF could still take full responsibility for the current text. Bea expected the reactions of the Council fathers before mid-September. Bea also expressed his fear that the text might be known by the press that might offer incorrect presentations and awkward interpretations. He asked the members to avoid any public discussion before the presentation of the text in aula.100 Meanwhile, on May 17, 1964, the pope officially announced the establishment of a new Secretariat for non-Christian Religions, a project that was already underway for some time.101 Cardinal Marella would become its first head.102 In a message to the Council fathers, Marella would make clear that the Secretariat was not part of the Council and that it intended to create a climate of greater cordiality and understanding in sincerity and love. In fact, nothing that is good, true, and noble should be neglected in these religions.103

98

Letters of Felici to Bea, AS V/2, 646-649. For the text, see F. De Smedt 1100. 100 e reply of De Smedt is preserved; see F. De Smedt 1102. He considered the changes not as substantial and unacceptable. e only thing he did not accept was the fact that the text now was speaking of respect for doctrines and opinion, while, according to De Smedt, the SCUF was speaking about respect for persons. 101 See the letter of Secretary of State Cicognani of March 14, 1963, addressed to Mgr Felici, mentioning that Marella had received from the pope the task to carry out the foundation of such Secretariat; cf. AS VI/3, 99. On the task of this Secretariat, see AS VI/3, 181-183. Relations with the Jews continued to fall under the auspices of the SCUF. e subject of the Islam was given to a mixed commission, existing of the Propaganda fide and the congregation for the Eastern Churches. 102 On Marella, see Jan De Volder, “Nostra Aetate’s ‘Slumbering Existence’? An Assessment of the Interfaith Dialogue during the Pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), in Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova: Studies in History of Christianity in Honour of Mathijs Lamberigts. Études d’histoire du christianisme en l’honneur de Mathijs Lamberigts, ed. Jean-Marie Auwers and Dries Vanysacker, Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 107 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 251-264, at 254 (with bibliography). 103 For the text, distributed in Italian, French, English, Spanish, and German, see AS III/1, 30-58. 99

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While the text was sent to the fathers, public opinion was also managed via articles and speeches by Cardinal Bea, for example, or by Archbishop Heenan of Westminster.104 A positive statement of the Arab League at the United Nations, welcoming a text that would deal exclusively with the religious aspect of Judaism, was experienced as a support for the text. On August 6, 1964, Paul VI published his first encyclical, Ecclesiam suam,105 an encyclical in which the pope emphasized the importance of dialogue with other religions, speaking positively about Jews, Muslims and Afro-Asiatic religions (part 3 of the encyclical). Nevertheless, the pope insisted that the Christian religion is the one and only true religion. is should, however, not exclude openness to the spiritual and moral values of the various non-Christian religions for one could collaborate with them on many levels: religious liberty, human brotherhood, education, culture, social welfare, and civic order. On all these levels, the pope pleaded for dialogue in genuine, mutual respect (nos. 107-108).106 In passing, it should be said, that meanwhile people like Cardinal Ritter of Saint Louis, who on March 12, 1964 sent a letter to the pope, were still disappointed about the fact that the text on the Jews and religious liberty was not discussed in the second session.107 When rumors began to spread that the CC had interfered with the text produced by the SCUF, reactions abounded from both Jewish and Catholic quarters. Catholics feared that they would lose the credibility that had been built up with the Jews,108 while the Jews explicitly requested a return to the text of November 1963.109 104 Also antisemitic material was spread among the Council fathers, very much attacking Bea; see L’Azione Giudaico-Massonica nel Concilio, F. De Smedt 1104. 105 Acta Apostolicae Sedis 56 (1964): 609-659. On the relation between the encyclical and Nostra Aetate, see De Volder, “Nostra Aetate’s ‘Slumbering Existence’?,” 252-256. 106 e fact that the encyclical did not always enjoy a positive reception is evident, for example, in Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 121. 107 See AS VI/3, 108; for a whole series of letters and/or observations, going in the same line, see AS Appendix I, 442-446, 448, 450-458, 462, 468-473, 475477, 480, 483-485, 496, 498-499, 502-505. Given the fact that most of the letters coming from the US are dated beginning of 1964, one gets the impression that we have to do here with an organized action. 108 Cf. in this regard the letter of Cardinal Spellman (New York) to Cicognani, dated June 13, 1964, AS V/2, 543-544. 109 See AS VI/3, 199 (letter of von Rudloff, dated May 10, 1964); AS VI/3, 279 (note written by Cicognani concerning the opinion of S. E. Goldberg, member

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Patriarchs of the Near East continued to oppose the text on the Jews. Maximos IV Saigh, Patriarch of the Melkites, on behalf to his bishops, who had gathered in assembly from August 17 to 22, asked to remove the text from the Conciliar agenda. e document was inopportune and unnecessary: enough had been said about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments in De Ecclesia, and a statement on the question of racial hatred could be better placed in the schema on the Church in the modern world.110 Having already arrived in Rome, the Coptic Patriarch Sidarouss wrote a letter in which he pointed out that the text had already been abused for political and religious reasons. Moreover, the text was a disaster for the relations with other Christians (namely the Greek Orthodox) and with Islam. He concluded by noting that his own small community was already being confronted with considerable problems.111 As became clear in a document, dated September 16, 1964,112 collecting the observations of 14 members of the SCUF, answering to Bea’s request of July, different opinions existed about the text to be discussed in the third session. Most of the bishops gave the text a placet iuxta modum. Only Archbishop Rabban opted for a non placet because he was of the opinion that the text was not sufficiently moderate. He opted for the text as approved in March, but with the omission of deicide. Others, like Heenan, Hermaniuk, Shehan, Nierman, Hart, and Holland suggested to maintain deicidium as mentioned in the previous text. Several bishops complained about the fact that the text was weakened (Shehan), le out essential aspects as the fact that Christ voluntarily died for the sins of all (Lorscheider, Hermaniuk, Hart), or suggested that the Jews in history once were guilty (Nierman, Gran, Primeau, Lorscheider). Bishops of the US Supreme Court, who would appear to have spoken in the name of the major Jewish organizations and centers, dated August 28, 1964). Cf. also Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 119-120. For a good description of the tensions among the Jews, see Stransky, “e Genesis of Nostra Aetate,” 45-47. 110 AS VI/3, 400 (letter from Maximos to Paul VI, dated September 3, 1964). 111 AS VI/3, 401 (letter from Sidarouss to Paul VI, dated September 22, 1964); for other reactions see AS VI/3, 437, 460-461, 470-471, 475. e reactions in question stem from Roman diplomats, including those in Cairo, Jordan, and Lebanon. In the latter instance, the reaction is clearly coming from Islamic people. On the pro’s and contra’s, see also Cf. Joseph Famerée, “Bishops and Dioceses and the Communications Media (November 5-25, 1963),” in History of Vatican II. Vol. III: The Mature Council: Second Period and Intersession (September 1963 – September 1964), ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis; Louvain: Peeters, 2000), 117-188, at 164. 112 See F. De Smedt 1315.

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were displeased about the fact that this text suggested that the Jews had to convert (Hermaniuk). With regard to no. 33, several bishops and the Superior General of the Scheutist fathers asked for a more extensive treatment of Islam (Jaeger, Rabban, Degrijse, Gran). e introduction of this paragraph was considered to be a sermon, rather than a conciliar decree (Hart). De Smedt was of the opinion that in the lines 17-19 the respect for the person should be stressed, not for the idea. With regard to no. 34, Degrijse was of the opinion that it should be transferred to schema 13. In the meeting of the sub-commission on September 17 – present were von Rudloff, Oesterreicher, Vodopivec,113 Hussar,114 Persich,115 Ahern,116 and Baum117 – it was also observed that the text missed the ardor of love, which had been present in the previous text. As requested by the bishops, the periti of the SCUF agreed that the text on deicide as it stood should be restored. Furthermore, any kind of proselytism should be avoided. More care should be taken of the Scriptural texts for the section on the non-Christians, in order to take into account the remarks of De Smedt and to invite experts on Islam.118 3. Third Session e text on the Jews, now an appendix to the schema on ecumenism,119 was qualified as a Declaration,120 and was discussed in the general assemblies

113 Vodopivec (1917-1993) was a Slovenian priest, professor of ecclesiology at the Urbaniana, and consultor of the SCUF. 114 André Hussar O.P. (1913-1996), converted Jew, was the founder of the Saint Isaiah House in Jerusalem (1959), a center for the study of Judaism. He was sent to Rome for the third session in order to follow the Jewish case. 115 Nicolaus Persich (1922-2005) was a Vincentian who had studied in Rome and was at the time of the Council seminary regent in Denver, CO. 116 Ahern (1915-1995), an American Passionist and biblical scholar, was advisor to Cardinal Meyer and peritus at the Council. e SCUF regularly made use of his exegetical expertise; cf. Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 24. 117 e enlargement of the sub-commission for the Jews thus happened already before the start of the debate on the Jews, not thereaer as suggested by Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 96. 118 For the report, see F. De Smedt 1316. 119 us taking into account both the privileged place of the Jews in the salvation history on the one hand and the specific uniqueness of ecumenism as such (dealing with Christian denominations); see AS III/2, 334. 120 Some speakers were still of the opinion that the text sensu lato belonged to a text on ecumenism; see Liénart, AS II/3, 785.

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of September 28, 29, and 30.121 It would be the only debate on the text. e text,122 now starting with the Jews, was significantly longer than the text of 1963.123 e text was presented by Cardinal Bea on September 25.124 e new text was considered as weaker125 and as not doing justice to the intentions of the SCUF.126 During the debate,127 many fathers – the number of fathers who will speak in favor of the text, clearly exceeds

121 With regard to the opposition to the text, see L’Action Judéo-Maçonnique dans le Concile: Lecture exclusivement réservée à Leurs Révérendissimes Pères Conciliaires, F. Prignon 986 (Centre Lumen Gentium, UCL). e text attacked converts such as Oesterreicher and Baum, but also Cardinal Bea himself was not spared. With regard to the interventions in aula or in written form, see AS III/2, 581-607; III/3, 11-55, 155-178. Given that most of the commentaries sent to the SCUF before the opening of the third session, are repeated during the debate, we leave them out (also because of lack of space). 122 See AS III/2, 327-329. 123 Because of the many remarks submitted during the second session and intersession, the SCUF had already revised the text; see Relatio circa rationem qua schema elaboratum est, in AS III/2, 331. 124 AS III/2, 558-564. Bea did not forget to emphasize the fact that a positive attitude towards the Jews was also part of the aggiornamento intended by John XXIII; cf. AS III/2, 564. For the details, see Miccoli, “Two Sensitive Issues,” 135, 152ff. 125 Meyer considered the previous text on the Jews as better and more ecumenical, AS III/2, 596; cf. also Bishop Forst of Dodge City (USA), AS III/3, 166. Many fathers asked to reintroduce the word deicidium into the text; see, e.g., Liénart, Frings, Léger, Pocock (Archbishop coadjutor of Toronto), Archbishop Shehan of Baltimore, Méndez Arceo, auxiliary Bishop Leven of San Antonio (on behalf of most of the American bishops), Bishop Podestà of Avellaneda (Argentina) on behalf of many colleagues, a group of more than 40 bishops from Brazil, AS III/2, 581, 583, 591, 602, 880; III/3, 18, 31, 51, 177-178 respectively. Shehan would repeat this in his intervention of September 29, 1964; see AS III/3, 46-47. As member of the sub-commission on the Jews, Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 65 considers this critique as justified. For other aspects of the text such as the mention of the persecutions of the Jews in recent history, fathers asked to go back to the previous text; see König: AS III/2, 595. See also the severe critique of Heenan, member of the SCUF, AS III/3, 37-38. 126 In his report, Bea emphasized that the CC had intervened after the plenary session of the SCUF and that it had not been possible to organize a new meeting aer the decisions taken by the CC, in a sense putting the blame on the CC; see AS III/2, 561-562. 127 See the Summarium systematicum interventuum, quos Patres conciliares in Aula circa Declarationem in genere et numerum 32 in specie fecerunt, dated October 6, 1964, and prepared by Baum and Hussar; F. De Smedt 1317.

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the number of the critics128 – continued to focus on the section on the Jews and most oen in a positive way, only asking to change details or to explicitly condemn any form of proselytism and antisemitism.129 When the group of supporters of the text formulated critiques, this is because they were of the opinion that the former text (chapter 4) was better than the current text: they really wanted to show their willingness to support and promote the Jewish case.130 Some also complained about the fact that the spirit of love had been weakened in this text.131 Many asked to refute explicitly the accusation of deicide.132 It was also asked to state explicitly that in a sense all human beings are guilty of Christ’s death and all owe his redemption.133 But critiques remained.134 Fathers from the Near East still considered it inopportune.135 Bishops from Italy, Spain, and Latin America argued that the text was against the Church’s magisterium.136 Like in the second session, it was asked to put the text in the schema on the Church.137 e 128 With regard to the unconditional support of the Germans, see Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 67-68. 129 See the impressive list of interventions in AS III/2, 579-581, 585-586, 587590, 593-594, 599-600, 604-607, 791, 793, 809; III/3, 26-27, 31, 32, 33-35, 40, 155-156, 158, 166-167, 169, 170-171. e number of people who maintained that the Jews must convert to Christ is very small; the Summarium only mentioned two names: Grotti and Ruffini; see F. De Smedt 1317. 130 e Summarium here refers to Meyer, Ritter, Elchinger, Leven, Heenan, Mendez and Forst; F. De Smedt 1317. 131 e Summarium mentions Ritter, Cushing, König, Nierman, and Heenan; F. De Smedt 1317. 132 See the impressive list in the Summarium; F. De Smedt 1317. 133 Klonowski, AS III/3, 170-171. 134 As is made clear in the Summarium, the number of non placets is rather minimal (8); cf. F. De Smedt 1317. 135 Tappouni on behalf of the Eastern Patriarchs Sidarouss, Maximos IV Saigh, Cheikho, and Batanian, AS III/2, 582. He received support from the Canadian Bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe, Douville; see AS III/3, 164. For other (written) observations in the same direction, see AS III/2, 784, 800, 803. e Greek Melkite titular Archbishop Tawil referred to the expulsion of the many Arabs from their land and to the difficult relation with the Islam, when asking to vote for a non placet, AS III/3, 52-53. 136 A complaint made by bishops from Italy, Spain, and Latin America; see Stransky, “e Genesis of Nostra Aetate,” 49. 137 Rabban, AS III/2, 802-803. is suggestion had already been made by 14 bishops from Central Africa. ey had suggested to put the dogmatic part on the Jews in the schema on the Church, and the moral and practical aspects on the Jews and the other religions in the text on the Church in the world, AS

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opponents, either coming from the Near East or belonging to the Coetus internationalis patrum, demanded not to obscure the judgements about the Jews in Scripture (cf. the idea of the reprobation),138 or asked to explain why the Church in its tradition did speak De perfidis Iudaeis and about the Jewish guilt of deicide.139 Some were of the opinion that Jews should not be discussed in a text on the dialogue with non-Catholics on the one hand, and that too much attention was paid to the Jews, thus neglecting other religions on the other.140 Given the complexity of the dossier (it was discriminating, Christ was killed by Jews, and Islam had persecuted Christians), it was even suggested to reduce the whole declaration to a general statement about the great love the Church had for non-Christians, this being the reason why she invited them to dialogue and mutual respect.141 e importance of dialogue and cooperation between Christians and non-Christians was considered to be important on all levels and for the whole of one’s life.142 During the debate, people focused on Islam, Eastern non-Christian religions, and to a lesser extent, African religions. e explicit mentioning of Islam met with approval,143 for both on the level of faith and the living together in society there are many elements that are binding the two religions.144 Based on personal experiences, bishops argued that the Muslims respected the Catholic education, caritative and social works and the like145 and that they peacefully and respectfully lived

III/2, 875. e remark of Bishop Fady of Lilongwe, Malawi, was going in the same direction, AS III/3, 165-166. 138 See, e.g., the remarks of the Maronite Bishop Abed of Tripoli del Libano, de Castro Mayer, Doumith, AS III/3, 157, 161, 163. In this regard the hardness of their heart, the loss of the election, the rejection of the New Testament, their real guiltiness and the like were mentioned. 139 AS III/3, 171. 140 Colombo, Hoffmann of Djibouti (written observations submitted already before May 21, 1964), AS III/2, 789, 796. 141 See the intervention of Bishop Quaremba of Gallipoli, Italy, AS III/3, 173. 142 Bishop Satoshi Nagae on behalf of the Japanese bishops, AS III/3, 21. Cf. also König and Meyer, AS III/2, 594, 598. 143 Frings, König, Nierman (Groningen, on behalf of the Dutch episcopal conference), AS III/2, 582, 594, 603. Hoffmann argued that Muslims would never understand why the Jews would receive a special treatment, AS III/2, 798. 144 Archbishop Tchidimbo of Conakry (Guinea), AS III/3, 173-174. 145 Plumey, AS III/3, 16, Hoffmann, AS III/2, 798. Gavazzi, AS III/2, 793. is abbot had lived as a monk for several years in Toumliline in Morocco, where the community also had installed an infirmary for the local population, which changed the attitude of the Muslims towards Christianity.

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together with Christians.146 People also requested that the part on Islam should be more elaborated. Jaeger of Paderborn asked to mention explicitly that the Muslims belong to the Abrahamic family, even although the text should also mention that they do not believe in the Trinity and that God is the father of Jesus.147 Other fathers observed that Islam esteems Jesus as a prophet148 and gives a special place to Mary,149 something which was considered as remarkable because “in general they despise women.”150 Negative observations stated that one could not consider polygamy in Islam as “obedience to God.”151 People also warned for the fanatism of Islam152 and insisted on the fact that it did not possess the authentic faith.153 People also wondered why nothing was said about the persecutions of Christians.154 But bishops from the East also insisted on the importance of nonChristian religions, not mentioned in this text.155 Satoshi Nagae insisted that the Christian attitude should be a positive one, embracing the sincere attempts of non-Christians, searching for truth and thus showing respect. e traces of Truth, present in these people should be considered as a kind of preparation for the Gospel.156 In this regard, especially Hindus and Buddhists were mentioned, who neither in number nor in importance are inferior to the Muslims and likewise have ancient roots.157 ey are neither more remote nor further separated from the Christian 146

See the intervention of Bishop Anoveros Ataún (bishop of Cádiz y Cueta, Spain), AS III/3, 37. 147 AS III/2, 602. Plumey (AS III/3, 16) would quote from the letter of Gregory VII to king Anazir, a text Nostra Aetate 3 will refer to in its final version. 148 See also Archbishop Descuffi (Smyrna, Turkey), AS III/3, 54. 149 See the speeches of Plumey, Sfair, and Descuffi, AS III/3, 16, 41-42, 54. See also Liénart, the Maronite Archbishop Sfair, titular Archbishop of Nisibis, Bishop van Melckebeke of Yinchuan (China), AS III/2, 785, 806, 808. 150 Gavazzi, AS III/2, 793. 151 Archbishop coadjutor Bonfigioli of Syracusa, Italy, de Castro Mayer, AS III/3, 159, 162. 152 De Castro Mayer, AS III/3, 162. 153 e Maronite Bishop Doumith of Sarba, AS III/3, 164. 154 Douville, AS III/3, 164. 155 See Mathijs Lamberigts, “Vatican II on Hinduism and Buddhism: A Historical Survey,” in The Living Legacy of Vatican II: Studies from an Indian Perspective, ed. Paul Pulikkan (Bengaluru: ATC Publishers, 2017), 159-185, 169-177. 156 See the written observations of the Bishop of Tainan, AS III/2, 799. 157 In a written observation, Fernandes, Archbishop coadjutor of Delhi, observed that people in his country would not understand why their religions were not mentioned, AS III/2, 879.

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religion than the Muslims.158 e books of Hindus like the Upanishads were longing for God as director and redeemer and were searching for the Christ whom they do not know. In other words, Christ is not completely unknown to them.159 On behalf of many Indian bishops, the Archbishop of Verapoly, Attipetty, observed that a good number of Hindus adore a personal God and are also motivated by a sincere religious sense.160 e Church should recognize and assume the evident goods, present in these religions and cultures, just as she did with other cultures (acceptance of Greek philosophy, human laws from Babylon, administrative organization of the Romans).161 Christians should study more profoundly these religions whose culture and philosophy are ancient and original.162 In any case, if all recognize the invisible activity of the Holy Spirit, one also must recognize that there is some unity among all who venerate God in the Spirit and truth.163 Moreover, the Eastern religions had a positive impact on humanity which the Church should not neglect in view of missionary activities or societal cooperation.164 e Vietnamese Bishop Nguyen Van Hien put it bluntly: either you mention them or you do not speak of Islam.165 Some fathers, without denying that nonChristian religions certainly possess a ray of truth, asked to add that this is still imperfect and mixed with many human errors.166 Some fathers argued that many of the African and Asian religions were nearer to the Catholic Church than Islam (and Judaism).167 e bishops of Madagascar asked to say something about the supernatural values of religious acts by non-Christians.168 In any case, the text deserved

158

Ruffini, AS III/2, 586. Archbishop Parecattil, AS III/3, 44. Parecattil invited to dialogue; for this speech, see Pulikkan, “Nostra Aetate on Hinduism and Buddhism,” 206-207. 160 See AS III/3, 47-48; see also Pulikkan, “Nostra Aetate on Hinduism and Buddhism,” 206. 161 Parecattil, AS III/3, 44. 162 Ibid., 45. 163 Ibid. 164 Colombo, AS III/2, 790. 165 AS III/3, 24; see also Archbishop Alvim Pereira of Lourenço Marques, AS III/3, 158. 166 See Frings, AS III/2, 583; for De Castro Mayer, there was no excuse for non-Christians not to join the Church, AS III/3, 162. 167 Bishop Gahamanyi, speaking on behalf of more than 70 colleagues, AS III/3, 141-142. See also the intervention of the Bishop of Butare on behalf of 80 colleagues, AS III/2, 142. For an explanation of this intervention and the list of its signatories see Miccoli, “Two Sensitive Issues,” 163-164. 168 AS III/3, 178. 159

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to be extended169 with a mention of those ancient Asian and African religions which tended towards monotheism.170 A last argument used for the extension of the text was that putting the Jews in the broader framework of the non-Christian religions could take away every suspicion with regard to an eventually political agenda.171 While, all in all, the comments were rather positive, surprises were underway.172 On October 7, in a meeting of the Council of Presidents, the Coordination Commission and the moderators, it was, aer a dense discussion, decided to integrate the text in the schema on the Church (Chapter 2, no. 16). e vehement debate showed that apart from political concerns, anti-Jewish motives still played an important role. Cardinals were of the opinion that one should simply tell the truth on the Jews: they refused to accept the Gospel (Tisserant). Others insisted on the fact that the Church has ties with the Jews and partly shares the same revelation (Liénart). Also, the antisemitism and this to the current day should lead to a condemnation of violence (Caggiano). A fundamental problem was how to integrate a text in another text that is already voted. Giving up the declaration would cause a scandal (Meyer). At the end, Felici suggested to hand over the case to a mixed commission, consisting of members of the doctrinal commission – responsible for the text on the Church – and the SCUF.173 Felici informed Bea and Ottaviani of this decision on October 8.174 e SCUF was shocked.175 Bea expressed his opposition to the establishment of a mixed commission.176 On October 13, he informed 169 is was asked by several bishops; see, e.g. Lokuang, the Chaldean Archbishop Rabban of Kerkuk (Iraq), Satoshi Nagae, AS III/2, 799, 802; III/3, 21. 170 König, AS III/2, 594. 171 De Provenchères, AS III/2, 792. 172 e October crisis also had to do with the text on religious liberty; see Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 81-86. 173 See AS V/2, 754-757. 174 See AS V/2, 763-765. However, one cannot avoid the impression that the debate in the meeting was more confused and less clear than what is found in the letter of Felici. 175 See Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands,138-139; see also Vincenzo Carbone, Il “Diario” Conciliare di Monsignor Pericle Felici, ed. Agostino Marchetto, Storia e attualità 20 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), 424425. e letters of Felici were very badly received by the SCUF in its meeting of October 9, 1964. Seemingly, they were leaked and published “con commenti tendenziosi,” Felici added. 176 Cf. AS V/2, 779. For a discussion of the plans to give the text on the Jews a place in the schema on the Church, see, for example, Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 190, 195, 212-213. Cf. also AS V/2, 63, 66-67, 754ff. (discussion in the

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the SCUF that it remained the only competent office with regard to the text on the Jews and on religious liberty.177 e SCUF continued to work on the text.178 On October 14, a subcommission consisting of Holland, Baum, Benoit, Hussar, Ahern finished the work on the Jews.179 A new introduction was written, stating that the Council remembered the bond through which the people of the New Testament were bound to the descendants of Abraham. e text offered pastoral exhortations to the faithful in order to serve always Christ’s precept. In a second paragraph it was added that the Church received from the people (of Israel) the revelation of the Old Testament and has been nourished from the root of the good olive tree, onto which the branches of the wild olive tree of the gentiles have been graed. For the Church believes that Christ, our peace, reconciled Jews and gentiles and made them both one (Eph 2:14). In paragraph 3 was added “those of his own race” (de cognatis eius). To the quote of Rom 4:5 was added: “to them belong the patriarchs, and, according to the flesh Christ is of their race” (quorum patres et ex quibus est Christus secundum carnem). Added was also “son of the virgin Mary” (filius Mariae Virginis). In a last sentence, it was stipulated that next to the apostles also “were many of those first disciples who proclaimed the gospel of Christ to the world” (plurimos illos primos discipulos, qui Evangelium Christi mundo annuntiaverunt). A completely new paragraph 4 stated that although a good deal of the Jews had not accepted the Gospel, this would not mean, as Paul had proved, that the Jews do not remain “very dear” (carissimi) because of the fathers. e text continued that together with the prophets and Paul the Church is waiting for the day, only known to God, the day on which all people with one voice will invoke the Lord and “will serve him with one arm.” In paragraph 5, it was said that “the spiritual patrimony” (patrimonium spirituale) is “common” (communis) to Jews and Christians. With regard to the mutual knowledge and esteem it was said that the dialogue should be promoted “especially through biblical and CC); see also Miccoli, “Two Sensitive Issues,” 166-193, which offers a detailed survey of events surrounding our text and that on religious freedom. For other details on the whole affair, see Siebenrock, “eologischer Kommentar zur Erklärung über die Haltung der Kirche zu den nichtchristlichen Religionen Nostra Aetate,” 641-642. 177 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 140: “Soulagement.” 178 Ibid., 142. At least until October 21, 1964, the periti involved in the preparation of the text on the non-Christians were not yet aware of such decision; see Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 217. 179 For the composition and the text, see F. De Smedt 1320.

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theological studies” (praesertim studiis biblicis et theologicis). It was also said that the Council deplored and damned hatred and “persecutions” perpetrated against the Jews, “whether long ago or in our times” (sive olim sive nostris temporibus). In paragraph 6, the second part of the first sentence was changed and now it said nothing should be taught what might generate hatred or contempt against the Jews. Added was that the Jewish people never was considered as “rejected by God or accursed” (a Deo reprobati neque ut maledicti), guilty of deicide. It was explicitly stated that what had happened in Christ’s passion “could not be imputed to all the Jews living at the time nor to the Jews of today” (nec omnibus indistincte Iudaeis tunc viventibus, nec Iudaeis hodiernis imputari possunt). is paragraph was concluded with a completely new pair of sentences: “e Church has always maintained and maintains, moreover, that Christ willingly and with immense love went to his passion and death because of the sins of all people. It is the duty of the preaching Church, then, to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s universal love and the source of all grace” (Ceterum semper tenuit et tenet Ecclesia, Christum voluntarie propter omnium hominum peccata passionem suam et mortem immensa caritate obiisse. Ecclesiae praedicantis ergo est annuntiare crucem Christi tamquam signum universalis Dei amoris et fontem omnis gratiae). e sub-commission on the Islam, consisting of Rabban, Anawati, Cuoq, Caspar, Corbon, and Long, finished its work on October 16.180 e text first enlarged the paragraph on love for the brothers, stating that although “their opinions and doctrines differ in many aspects from our faith” (quamvis ab iis quae nos fide tenemus in multis discrepant), in it is a ray of the truth that illuminates all human beings. Added was that the moral and socio-cultural values present in them must be considered with due reverence, taking into account the “purity of our faith” (salva fidei integritate). In a next paragraph, it was stated that the Musulmani (the term used at this stage) seek to submit themselves to God’s hidden decrees with their whole heart and that they submit them to God like Abraham, to whom the Musulmana faith readily relates itself.181 Although they deny Christ’s divinity, they still venerate him as a prophet and

180 For the composition of the sub-commission and the text, see F. De Smedt 1321. Not being familiar with Islam or other religions, the SCUF started to invite experts not belonging to the SCUF; see Stransky, “e Genesis of Nostra Aetate,” 50. 181 Poorthuis, “e eology of Nostra Aetate on Islam and on Judaism,” 323-325.

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honor his virginal mother and sometimes devoutly call upon her. ey expect the day of judgement, when God will remunerate all risen human beings. Hence they worship God in prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. ey also try to live a moral life both individually as well as in the context of the family and the society in obedience to God. In a third paragraph, the dissensions and enmities between the Musulmani and the Christians were mentioned. e Synod exhorted people to forget the past and to search for a sincere mutual comprehension and to maintain and promote together social justice and moral values as well as peace and freedom for all people. e text on Hinduism was prepared by Josef Neuner, an Austrian Jesuit, working at the Jesuit Institute in Pune,182 the one on Buddhism by Paul Pfister, a German Jesuit, teaching at the theological faculty of Sophia University, theological adviser of Cardinal Doi and expert of the Council since the second session.183 During a meeting on October 21, 1964, Stransky, Neuner, Pfister, Moeller, and Congar discussed the order to be followed in the section on the non-Christian religions (those on the Jews and the Islam being ready). It was decided to write a short introduction. Next, the unity of humanity would be emphasized. In this context, a statement should be made on the great religions insofar as they are looking for answers to the great questions of humanity and desire for dialogue. A reduced no. 33 would be preserved, followed by the texts on the Islam and the Jews. Allusions to missionary activities were avoided, the members being very well aware that this text could not become a kind of appendix to chapter 2 of the schema De Ecclesia, for this document was dealing with the missions.184 e text had to remain an independent text, a text of the SCUF, even in case it might be integrated in

182 Josef Neuner, Der indische Joseph: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Feldkirch: Die Quelle, 2005), 70. See also Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 223. Neuner suggested that Congar was needed because of his link with the theological commission that had to approve the theology behind the text. On the role of Neuner, see now Paul Pulikkan, “Nostra Aetate on Hinduism and Buddhism: e Role of Joseph Neuner, S.J., and the Indian Bishops,” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis, 201-224. 183 Cf. Henri de Lubac, Carnets du Concile, introduit et annoté par Loïc Figoureux, avant-propos de François-Xavier Dumortier, S.J. et Jacques de Larosière, préface de Jacques Prévotat (Paris: Cerf, 2007), II, 279, reports that Pfister showed him on November 7, 1964 the new text on the non-Christians, asking de Lubac’s judgement about the text on Buddhism. De Lubac had published two books on Buddhism: Aspects du bouddhisme (Paris: Seuil, 1951); La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l’Occident (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1952). 184 For the details, see Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 215-217.

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chapter 2 on the Church, a question that had to be answered by the theological commission.185 In the meeting of October 25, it was decided to bring together the texts of Neuner and Pfister in one section, thus making a “mélange” of it.186 In the introduction, it was said that all nations are one community and have one origin, God, who wanted the whole human race to live all over the world. God is humanity’s final end. His providence and plans for salvation are directed to all until the elect be gathered in the Holy City. All faithful expect in the various religions a solution for their questions about human existence, which intimately move the hearts of people then and now: what is the meaning and purpose of life, what is good and what is sin, how to attain true happiness, what do death, judgement, and reward of death mean, what is finally the ultimate and ineffable mystery that embraces our existence, from which we receive our beginning and towards which we are tending?187 Number 2 underlined that human beings were always seeking for God. e statement was clearly intended to express respect and appreciation for the ‘primitive religions’. Next, religions were praised that were associated with the development of civilization and thus were answering the above-mentioned questions with more refined ideas, as more highly developed language was used. In this context, Hinduism and Buddhism were mentioned. In Hinduism, people explore the divine mystery and express it with an inexhaustible wealth of mythology and with sharp philosophical attempts. Liberation is sought from the anxieties of our life through forms of ascetic life, profound meditation, and by taking refuge in God with love and confidence. In Buddhism, the radical inadequacy of this changeable world is acknowledged, and a way is taught through which human beings, with a devout and trustful heart, are able to be liberated from transitory things and reach a state of permanent rest, by self-denial and purification. In the same way, also in other religions, present all over the world, in various ways proposals are made to solve the problems of human existence. To the previous text stating that the Church considered with great attention opinions and doctrines, different from her own position, but in many aspects referring to the ray of that truth, which illuminates every man

185

Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, 221. See ibid., 223. 187 is text would remain the same up to the final approval. Only the following section would be added to it: “In suo munere unitatem et caritatem inter homines, immo et inter gentes, fovendi ea imprimis hic considerat quae hominibus sunt communia et ad mutuum consortium ducunt.” 186

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coming in the world (no. 33), the text was now enlarged and deepened: the Church does not reject anything in the other religions that is true and holy. e text stated that the Church announces without ceasing Christ, the way, the truth, and life (Jn 14:6), in whom God has reconciled all things (2 Cor 5:19). e statement that the Church, moved by love, considers with great attention the ways of acting and living, the opinions and doctrines, that refer to that ray of truth that illuminates all people, even although they in many things differ from the faith the Church holds, was now moved to no. 2. In the last paragraph, in fact for the most part borrowed from the introductory part on the Muslims as prepared by the sub-commission on October 16, 1964, it was said that the Church admonishes her children to serve and promote through dialogue and collaboration with the members of other religions those spiritual and moral goods and the socio-cultural values which are present in them. e difference with that text of October 16 is that now the dialogue and collaboration are mentioned. In no. 3, the rest of the text on the Musulmani was taken over. Added in the first sentence was that the Church looks with love to them, and that also in their religion God has spoken to human beings (revelation). For no. 4, the text of 14 October was taken over, except for the second half of the first sentence in the first paragraph. is part in which was said that the Church offers to the faithful pastoral exhortations in order to always serve the mandate of Christ, was le out. In the concluding no. 5, it was said in the first paragraph that we are not able to truly call upon God, if we refuse to behave fraternally with some people, created in the image of God. e attitudes toward God and other human beings are so interwoven that every negation of brotherhood is a negation of God, with whom there is no acceptance of persons.188 For this first commandment goes hand in hand with the other: we cannot receive remission of sins if we do not forgive wholeheartedly those who sinned against us. is truth was already hidden in the Old Law (follows  a quote from Mal 2:10), and clearly expressed in the New Law (follows a quote from 1 Jn 4:20-21). en paragraph 1 and 2 of no. 34 of the text presented in September followed. In that first paragraph, it was said that the basis is taken away from any theory or practice which draws distinctions between people, nations, with reference to human dignity and the rights flowing therefrom.189 All faithful with a good heart and especially Christians must abstain from any discrimination of men and harassment because of race, color, class or religion. On the contrary, 188 189

e text here referred to Rom 2:11; Eph 6:9; Col 3:25; 1 Pet 1:17. is text will remain the same from the beginning to the end.

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the Council “following in the steps of Peter and Paul” (this part was added to the previous no. 34), earnestly begs that they maintain a good conduct among the gentiles (1 Pet 2:12), if possible in order that they are truly children of the Father who is in heaven and raises the sun on all people (Mt 5:44-45). From the previous text, the sentence stating that the faithful should not only love their neighbors but also their enemies, if needed, was le out. e text, finalized by a sub-commission, consisting of Willebrands, Congar, Moeller, Pfister, Neuner, and Stransky, was ready on October 28, 1964.190 e text now had received the order which would be maintained until the final approval: Introduction, non-Christian religions, Muslims, Jews, and a concluding paragraph. e new text was discussed in a plenary session, held on October 30, 1964.191 Only a few changes were made. In no. 1, paragraph 2 was added: God whose providence and “testimony of goodness” (bonitatis testimonium) extend to all. In the first sentence of paragraph 3, the previous text was changed as following: “Human beings expect” (homines expectant) from the different religions “an answer to the obscure riddles of the human condition” (de reconditis condicionis humanae aenigmatibus). In no. 2, paragraph 1, mythology was replaced by myths. e last sentence of this paragraph was completely changed: “In like manner, too, other religions which are to be found throughout the entire world strive in various ways to relieve the anxiety of the human heart by suggesting ‘ways’, that is teachings and rules of life as well as sacred rites.” In paragraph 3, a reference to Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV.28.2 was added: Taught by various dispositions of salvation. Added was also that the Church considered with “sincere” observance the ways of acting and living, the “precepts” and doctrines. e rather denigrating “opinions” was thus replaced by praecepta. In no. 3, paragraph 1, the introduction of the first sentence was changed from “the Church looks with love” into “with esteem” (cum aestimatione).192 No other changes were made, neither in no. 3, nor in no. 4.193 In no. 5, paragraph 1, the whole section from “that every negation” up to 1 Jn 4:20-21, was le out and replaced by a reference to 1 Jn 4:8; 190

For this text, see F. De Smedt 1322. See F. De Smedt 1324. 192 With regard to the Islam, see Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck, “Nostra Aetate 3-4: Vaticanum II, de Islam en de Joden,” in 50 jaar Vaticanum II: Herinnering en Belofte, ed. Karim Schelkens, Nikè-reeks 60 (Louvain and Den Haag: Acco, 2013), 157-184, at 163-164. 193 For no. 4 at this stage, see Lamberigts and Declerck, “Vatican II on the Jews: A Historical Survey,” 36-37. 191

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2,9-11; Lk 10:25-37: the one who does not love, does not know God. In the third paragraph, the part “raises the sun on all people” was le out. e corrections were finished on November 4, 1964.194 In one month time,195 most of Nostra Aetate was written after the debate of September and this text would be approved without debate on November 20. While the Secretary of State, Cicognani, still had problems with the text on the Jews and Ottaviani seemingly claimed that the text on religious freedom should be examined by the theological commission,196 the SCUF simply had continued its work as if the decision of October 7 did not exist. During a meeting between Cardinals Ottaviani, Bea, and Cicognani on 11 November, 1964, the decision was made not to include the declaration of the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions in the schema on the Church but to publish it later as an appendix thereto,197 something which was already rejected during a meeting of the theological commission on November 12.198 In that meeting, the theological commission was of the opinion, that the text was theologically in order199 and thus could be printed. e result of all this work, entitled Declaratio De Ecclesiae habitudine ad religiones non-christianas,200 was distributed in aula on November 18, 1964. Only in no. 1, line 12 it was said that “the elect” will be united in the Holy City.201 e vote on a substantially enlarged text was foreseen for November 20, 1964.202 e report about the corrections203 made clear how much the SCUF had taken into account the (many) remarks of the fathers. e text,

194

Cf. F. De Smedt 1324. e drawing of the text as such took less time than oen suggested; see Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” 98. 196 Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 240. 197 Cf. AS V/3, 62-63, 66-67. 198 See Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 261. 199 See ibid., 261-262 (with an interesting review of the various antitheses within the theological commission on the said topic). 200 See AS III/8, 637-643. 201 ere was also one grammatical change: ‘fundamentum’ was replaced by ‘fundamenta’ in no. 4, l. 10; see AS III/8, 640. 202 According to Stransky, “e Genesis of Nostra Aetate,” 50, the new text had impressed both the coordinating authorities and the pope and thus it was decided only to present the text (by Bea) and to vote. 203 See AS III/8, 643-648. is report was ready on November 4, 1964; see F. De Smedt 1323. 195

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offering practical and pastoral norms,204 was extended, showing that it had no political motives. No. 1 explained why this declaration was needed in a period that the world becomes more and more one. More important was that God embraces all of humanity and leads people to their destination. Finally, the dialogue between human beings was emphasized. With regard to no. 2, the report made clear the fundamental principle of respect for other religions and the recognition of their ethical and religious value. Fundamental to the Catholic attitude is Christ’s mystery, Christ being the total and universal revelation of the Father, but in such a way that he assumes and reconciles humanity with God. e Church is not blind to what is false in these religions but also recognizes the truth present in them, for truth finds its origin in God, the ray of eternal life illuminating all human beings. No. 2 concluded with an appeal to collaborate with the adherents of other religions, to promote social-cultural values, interconnected with the different religions, but without giving up the integrity of faith. e text on Islam had taken into account the many remarks and suggestions made by the fathers. e report warned not to confuse Islamic understanding of concepts with Christian self-understanding, thus explaining why the text was rather sober. At the request of some fathers the attitude and offices of Christians towards Muslims were explicitly mentioned in order to promote peaceful and cooperative relations with them that correspond with our common religious patrimony and are required in our age. For no. 4, the SCUF had returned partly to the text of 1963 and this at the request of several fathers. e report stressed the positive aspects of the text. No. 5 consisted of an urgent exhortation to universal fraternity and exclusion of discrimination, because God is our common Father, as was attested with Biblical texts. In his relatio,205 Cardinal Bea stressed the unique character of the declaration, the first conciliar statement about the relation towards the nonChristian religions. Bea explicitly mentioned the travel of Paul VI to Bombay, something which very much fitted into the text as presented now.206 e votes on the texts were generally speaking very good. More than 90% of the fathers gave a placet to nos. 1-3.

204 According to Bea’s relatio, this was one of the reasons why the text was not included in the dogmatic constitution on the Church; see AS III/8, 649. 205 For the text as presented in aula, see AS III/8, 649-651. 206 Neuner had hoped that the text would be approved before the end of the third session, because of the pope’s participation in the Eucharistic Congress in

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e ballot on numbers 4 and 5 – both were taken together – was a success: 1969 fathers took part, 1770 voted in favor of the text, 185 against and 14 votes were invalid. During the vote on the document as a whole, 1651 votes (out of 1996) were positive, 242 fathers gave a placet iuxta modum, 99 fathers voted against. In other words, the text as a whole was broadly approved by the Council participants (more than 82%). Aer the vote, the fathers were asked to send their modi to the SCUF. 4. Third Intersession Even although the results were comforting to the SCUF, they caused a degree of disapproval, especially from the Arabic nations.207 At the request of Secretary of State, Cicognani, worrying about the political consequences of such a declaration,208 Bea was to write an article on November 30 in L’Osservatore Romano in which he insisted once again that the text had purely religious motives and that every political interpretation thereof was to be rejected. e text was intended in the first instance to contribute to the promotion of peace.209 Not everybody shared Bea’s enthusiasm about the positive vote. Felici informed Macchi, the personal secretary to Paul VI, that he had prepared a note on the article of Bea. He insisted on the fact that the iter of the schema was not yet finished, for the modi had to be submitted (before January 31, 1965) and only then a vote of the entire text could happen. Felici added that the Expensio modorum may result in changes in the text before the final vote. Such changes could give the text greater perfection, in order to avoid erroneous interpretations in its purpose.210 Felici was still hoping that a mixed commission, consisting of members of the doctrinal commission and the SCUF could be of help in this matter.211 us, he had prepared a note, adding: “Al momento opportuno lo faccia vedere al

Bombay, beginning December 1964; see Neuner, Der indische Joseph: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, 71. 207 Schmidt, Augustin Bea: Der Kardinal der Einheit, 659 entitles this period as “Im Sturm.” 208 See Lamberigts and Declerck, “Vatican II on the Jews,” 39-40. 209 For the details, see Cottier, “L’historique de la déclaration,” 65-67. 210 AS VI/3, 572-573. 211 See his letter to Cicognani of December 16, 1964, AS VI/3, 603-604; Lamberigts and Declerck, “Vatican II on the Jews,” 39-40.

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Santo Padre.”212 Mgr Carli, member of the Coetus, published, on February 15, 1965, an article in which he argued that on the basis of the New Testament, the tradition, and the magisterium, no one could deny the guilt of the Jews for the death of Jesus, for the Jews had rejected Jesus and his message. e accusation of deicide was theologically correct and in line with the Catholic Tradition.213 In the Near East, the critique of the Orthodox Churches was vehement.214 e reaction in the Arab world was outspoken.215 One should keep in mind that Jews were occupying the properties of Palestinians, including Christian Palestinians. Still in February 1965, Maximos IV Saigh was of the opinion that the best solution was the cancellation of the declaration. If this would not be possible, he suggested that the pope decide.216 It was in such a context that the SCUF had to examine the modi submitted. In a document, dated February 18, 1965,217 the modi were collected. e relatio for the nos. 1 and 2 was prepared by Neuner on February 23,218 while the report on no. 5 was finished on February 24.219 e 212

Letter of Felici to Macchi, December 1, 1964, AS VI/3, 572. On January 28, in a meeting with the pope, Felici discussed the place of the declaration on the Jews (sic!). e pope worried about the text and told Felici that the text be changed; see Carbone, Il “Diario” Conciliare di Monsignor Pericle Felici, 455. In a meeting with the ambassador of Egypt (February 12, 1965), Felici assured him that the decree would be revised in order to make clearer its religious and charitable purpose. He added that it would be an act of the Council once it would be approved by both the pope and the bishops, not before; ibid., 458. 213 Luigi Maria Carli, “La questione giudaica davanti al Concilio Vaticano II,” Palestra del Clero: Rivista quindicinale di cultura e pratica ecclesiastica 45 (1965): 185-203. A second article was published in May 1965: “È possibile discutere serenamente della questione giudaica?”, Palestra del Clero: Rivista quindicinale di cultura e pratica ecclesiastica 45 (1965): 465-476. Still in November, Bea felt the need to react against this article; see “Il popolo ebraico nel piano divino della salvezza,” La Civiltà Cattolica 2769 (6 November 1965): 209-229. 214 For the details, see Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 85 (2009): 341-384, at 342-344. 215 See Pietro Doria, “La dichiarazione conciliare sugli Ebrei e le reazioni dei paesi Arabi,” Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Notes et documents, January 2012, 84-94, which offers an impressive wealth of details. 216 AS VI/4, 118. Concerning this eventful period and the Arabic reactions to it, see Oesterreicher, “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to NonChristian Religions,” 101-105. 217 For the document, see F. De Smedt 1463. We will limit ourselves to those modi that would impact the content. 218 See F. Degrijse (1965), 45-50. 219 F. Degrijse (1965), 134.

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report on no. 4 was offered on February 25, 1965.220 It will be no surprise that some fathers asked to say more about non-Christian religions. Some were thinking of the Chinese religions with their reverence and piety for the ancestors.221 Some fathers had problems with the idolatrous character of the religions in no. 2, and this in line of Scripture with the Church’s continuous condemnation of it. Being silent on this issue while being positive on pagan religions would be dangerous.222 Some people considered the text as such,223 or the one on the Islam and the Jews as too irenic and indulgent and suggested to temper no. 4, because it was both biblically and historically not correct.224 Several bishops asked to pay more attention to the unification of the Jews and the Christians.225 Furthermore, the point should be that one should bring Islam to the truth.226 Concerning the text on Hinduism and Buddhism, people were of the opinion that this text was too short, did not justice to these religions and might offend them.227 erefore it was suggested not to mention any religion, thus leaving out also the numbers 3 and 4.228 e objections of the bishops from the Near East remained the same: the declaration caused unrest,229 and hindered the ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox.230 Furthermore, Israel as people is “reprobata, maledicta, rea deicidii.”231 Denying this is against Scripture,232 the common opinion of the Church in the twentieth century and the historical

220

See F. De Smedt 1464. Bishop Schoiswohl of Seckau; F. De Smedt 1463. 222 Remark of the auxiliary Bishop of Montevideo, Corso; F. De Smedt 1463. 223 See the comments of Paro, president of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy; F. De Smedt 1463. 224 Remarks of Archbishop Maccari of Mondovi, Italy; F. De Smedt 1463. 225 Cf. F. De Smedt 1463. 226 Bishop Paro of Pesaro; F. De Smedt 1463. 227 Remarks of Archbishop Maccari of Mondovi, Italy; F. De Smedt 1463. 228 Cf. Bishop Paro, president of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy; F. De Smedt 1463. 229 So auxiliary Bishop Gelat of Jerusalem; F. De Smedt 1463. 230 Patriarch Batanian; F. De Smedt 1463. Deicide will indeed disappear in the last dra. 231 Bayan; see also Bishop De Chiara of Mileto, Italy, Bishop Paro; F. De Smedt 1463. Bishop Petralia considered the rejection of the Gospel by the Jews as a moral guilt and as an explanation for the destruction of the Holy Land and the Jewish nation aer Jesus’ death. But other bishops, such as Köstner disagreed, without denying the responsibilities of the Jewish leaders. 232 See the modi of Mason, Gelat, Paro (referring to Acts 3,15); F. De Smedt 1463. 221

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conscience.233 Denying it would even support the Islam, claiming that Christ was not really crucified.234 Bishops argued that violence against all people be condemned, not only against the Jews,235 suggesting that this statement should find its place in no. 5.236 Bishops asked that only well-prepared Catholics should dialogue and collaborate with non-Christians.237 Some asked for additions that made clear that dialogue with non-Christians should result in their illumination through faith.238 As from February 24, 1965, the text on the non-Christians was discussed. Periti present were von Rudloff, Baum, Oesterreicher, Moeller, Cuoq, and Caspar, the last two experts on Islam.239 On February 27, 1965, a corrected version of the text on the Church’s attitude towards the nonChristians was ready.240 In no. 1, in the first paragraph, a text was added in which it was said that the Church, “in its task of promoting unity and charity among people, indeed also among nations, it now turns its attention to what human beings have in common and what things tend to bring them together.”241 In paragraph 3, a small sentence was added: “What origin and purpose do sufferings have?” (quem ortum habeant dolores et quem finem).242 In no. 2, paragraph 1, it was added that people “until modern time” have a perception about God. It was further said that “this perception and acknowledgement permeates their lives with a deep religious sense.” In line with the request of Cardinal Doi of Tokyo, who explicitly stated that this proposal was made by the specialists in Oriental religions of the Sophia University, in the text on Buddhism the diversity of its forms was added according to which Buddhists “with a devout and trustful spirit may be able to reach either a state of perfect freedom or, relying on their own efforts or on help from a higher source, the highest illumination.”243 e cardinal made clear that one cannot 233 Cf. Mason, who ended his modus quite dramatically: “Praesens declaratio, uti sonat, nimis aperte contradicit toti sensui historiae!!!”; F. De Smedt 1463. 234 Auxiliary Bishop Gelat; F. De Smedt 1463. 235 Patriarch Batanian; F. De Smedt 1463. 236 e Armenian Bishop of Iskanderiya (Alexandria, Egypt), Bayan. 237 So Bishop Köstner of Gurk; F. De Smedt 1463. 238 So Bishop Petralia of Agrigento; F. De Smedt 1463. 239 See Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 155-156. 240 See F. De Smedt 1465; F. Degrijse (1965), 101. 241 It is the text that in an unchanged form will be approved on October 28, 1965. 242 is modus had been proposed by Bishop Petralia of Agrigento; F. De Smedt 1463. 243 e Latin text in Nostra Aetate is exactly the same as what one can find in the modus of Cardinal Doi; see F. De Smedt 1463.

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equalize the Buddhism of India, Ceylon, or Indochina with that of China, Korea, or Japan. In the sentence about the way in which other religions all over “occurrunt proponendo […] sacros,” the “occurrunt” was mitigated to “strive” (nituntur) to relieve.244 In paragraph 2, it was more explicitly said that “people find the fullness of religious life in Christ.” Added was that the Church attentively considers “those” ways and precepts which “oen” (haud raro)245 refer to the ray of truth. In the last paragraph, exhorting the faithful to dialogue and cooperate with the followers of other religions, it was added that this should be done “with prudence” and charity.246 Instead of “salva integritate fidei catholicae,” the new text reads as following: “bearing witness to the Christian faith and way of life” (fidem et vitam christianam testantes), while it was also said that they should “recognize” (agnoscant)247 the spiritual and moral goods, and their socio-cultural values. In no. 3, paragraph 1, dealing with the Muslims’ veneration248 of God, the adjective “merciful” was added to God. In no. 4, paragraph 1, it was added that we are “spiritually” united with the descendants of Abraham. At the end of the paragraph, it was said that Christ made Jews and gentiles one “in himself” (in semetipso).249 In paragraph 4, the text was made more Biblical: “As Holy Scripture witnesses, Jerusalem did not know the time of its visitation” (Teste Sacra Scriptura, Ierusalem tempus visitationis suae non cognovit). A footnote refers to Lk 19:44. Respecting the Scriptural truth, it was also said that many Jews were opposed to the dissemination of the Gospel.250 In paragraph 6, starting with the discussion of Jews in catechesis, it was added that nothing should be taught that does not correspond to the evangelical truth and the spirit of Christ.251 e text, more severe to the role of Jews in the death of Christ, now stated that “the Jewish authorities with their

244 Proposal of Archbishop Maccari of Mondovi; F. De Smedt 1463. A similar observation was made by Bishop Köstner of Gurk (Austria). 245 is modus had been proposed by Archbishop Maccari of Mondovi, for this did more justice to the fact that other religions and the Church content wise hold different positions; F. De Smedt 1463. 246 e word order as suggested on February 27 (“cum caritate et prudentia”), would be changed in the meeting with the bishops. See F. De Smedt 1465. 247 In the text, one will find “agnoscunt,” but this is clearly a typing error. 248 “Musulmanos” was replaced by “Muslimos” (twice), and “fides Musulmana” by “fides islamica,” as was asked in the modi. 249 See also the argumentation of Baum; F. De Smedt 1466. 250 Cf. also the Expensio modorum, 2; F. De Smedt 1466. 251 Baum, Expensio modorum, 3 motivated this addition referring to historical facts. Because of the Christian predication this warning was not superfluous.

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followers pressed for the death of Christ.”252 Inversing the two next sections, the paragraph concluded that neither the reprobation, nor malediction or guilt for deicide could be derived from Scripture. us, Jews are not rejected “as if that follows from Holy Scriptures” (quasi hoc ex Sacris Litteris sequatur). “Damnat” was le out. However, in what was added, the strong word “condemns” (reprobat) was used with regard to all persecutions. e noun “antisemitism” was added. In the last paragraph it was more explicitly said that Christ died in order that all people may obtain salvation. In no. 5, paragraph 3 (dealing with discrimination), a sentence was added that the Church condemns everything that is foreign to the mind of Christ. During the meeting of the SCUF from March 1 to 6, 1965, the texts on the general introduction and the modi, prepared by Neuner, were read by Long. For the nos. 1-2, everything was unanimously accepted on March 3, 1965.253 e next day, in the plenary morning session, number 3 was discussed in the presence of Cuoq. Relators were Mansourati and Rabban. e text would only be changed substantially with regard to the praise of the moral life of the Muslims. Here, the part on family and social life would be le out,254 as was requested by the Vicar Apostolic of El Obeid, Mason, for this statement is not true: polygamy, divorce, sodomy, concubines prove the opposite.255 In the aernoon of March 3, 1965, no. 4 was discussed. No. 4 remained a point of discussion. In view of the plenary session, Baum had prepared an Expensio modorum256 in which he first argued that the text on the Jews has its place in the declaration on the non-Christians, referring to both Lumen Gentium 2,16 and Ecclesiam Suam. Baum insisted on the fact that this declaration focuses on the relation between the Jews and the Church, not about the “full truth concerning the Jews and their 252 Here, the text followed a suggestion of Auxiliary Bishop Gelat. Although opposed to the declaration, he searched for a phrasing that would do justice to both the Scriptural texts and to the fact that not all Jews could be accused of being murderers of Christ; F. De Smedt 1463. See also the very elaborated argumentation of Baum in his Expensio modorum; F. De Smedt 1466. 253 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 157. 254 In the meeting of the experts, this text had been untouched; see F. De Smedt 1465. 255 See his remarks and those of Köstner, Paro, Bishop Borromeo of Pesaro in F. De Smedt 1463. See also the Expensio modorum, ad 3, AS IV/4, 704. According to Patriarch Meouchi, their moral life “est plutôt animale et un scandale”; see Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 346. 256 F. De Smedt 1466; F. Degrijse (1965), 129.

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religion” (plena veritate circa Iudaeos et eorum religionem). e declaration was not intended to offer a complete presentation of the other religions, but only pastoral and practical norms, based on revelation, in order to promote dialogue with non-Christian religions. Relators during the meeting of March 3 were Bea, von Rudloff and Hermaniuk.257 In paragraph 2 it was said that Christians receive the revelation of the Old Testament “through that people” (per populum illum), thus underlining more that the revelation comes through the mediation of the Jews.258 e plenary meeting resulted in a nuanced speaking about the responsibility of the Jewish people which “cannot be ascribed indiscriminately to all the Jews living at the time nor to the Jews of today” (nec omnibus indistinctim Iudaeis tunc viventibus, nec Iudaeis hodiernis imputari possunt). e new phrasing thus accepted that members of the Jewish people were guilty of Jesus’ death (asked by several bishops), without blaming all Jews living at that time or today. en, the text on the catechesis followed and it was said not to preach “what is not in keeping with the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ” (quod cum veritate evangelica et spiritu Christi non congruat). It was also proposed to transfer the section in paragraph 5, stating that because of genuine evangelical charity, the Church deplored and condemned all hatred and persecutions against the Jews, to no. 5. At this stage, that text was running as following: “Praeterea, dum iniurias hominibus ubicumque inflictas severe reprobate, secundam genuinam caritatem evangelicam, Sancta Synodus, memor quoque huius patrimonii communis, odia et persecutiones omnium temporum contra Iudaeos, praesertim si a Christianis perpetrata sint, deplorat et damnat.” e suggestion as made in the modi – condemning all forms of hatred and persecution, thus not focusing only on the Jews – thus was taken into account. A new proposal was made: “Moreover, the Church, mindful of its common inheritance with the Jews and motivated not by political considerations but by the religious charity of the gospel, rejects and condemns feelings of hatred, persecutions, and demonstrations of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at whatever time and by whomsoever” (Praeterea communis cum Iudaeis patrimonii Ecclesia non rationibus politicis sed religiosa caritate evangelica impulsa, odia et persecutiones, antisemitismi manifestationes quovis tempore et a quibusvis in Iudaeos habita, reprobat et damnat). is text would become, with some small changes, the same text that would be approved 257

Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 157. In his Expensio modorum, 2, Baum had rejected this proposal because it was too ambiguous; see F. De Smedt 1466. 258

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in the final vote in October, but the text would be put back in no. 4, where it logically belonged to. e vote on the mention of deicide made clear that this topic still divided Near Eastern and American bishops.259 erefore, definite decisions on the text were postponed till May.260 In no. 5, the plenary session added that discrimination and vexation must be condemned because they are against Christ’s mind.261 We want to emphasize that from this moment onwards the main problems with the text are mostly on the psychological and political level, not on the level of content. Furthermore, the opposition to this text mostly comes from the small group of bishops of the Near East: these bishops protest because of the context they are living in, less because of the content of the text, even although objections based on Scripture and tradition remain. is explains why in the next phase of Nostra Aetate’s journey, diplomacy will take the lead, for an ecumenical Council searches for as much unanimity as possible, thus also taking into account the concerns of the minority. Travels to the Near East were undertaken by Willebrands and Duprey in order to calm down people,262 seemingly without much result. In fact, the nervousness increased. Willebrands even suggested to withdraw the text from the Council.263 In a personal meeting with Bea on May 8, the latter explicitly told Willebrands and Duprey to present that proposal

259

On the vote, see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 158. e attitude of the bishops in the Near East was still a matter of concern for Cicognani; see his dossier sent to Bea on March 3, 1965; AAV, CVII, 1418. For the details, see F. De Smedt 1465; Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 344; Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.SS.R. (1960-1965), trans. Jaroslav Z. Skira, annotated by Karim Schelkens, Eastern Christian Studies 15 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012), 231. 260 Letter of Willebrands to De Smedt; F. De Smedt 1430. 261 F. De Smedt 1465. 262 On these travels (in March and April) of which at least the first one was “controlled” by the Secretariat of State, see Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck, “Msgr. Willebrands and Nostra Aetate 4: Diplomacy and Pragmatism,” The Ecumenical Legacy of Johannes Cardinal Willebrands (1909-2006), ed. Adelbert Denaux and Peter De Mey in collaboration with Maria ter Steeg and Lorelei Fuchs, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 253 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012), 245-259, especially 251-258. See also Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 161-163. e reports of the nuncios of Beirut and Damascus caused dismay in the Secretariat for they were considered as a sign of distrust in Willebrands’ work; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 171. 263 See AS V/3, 320.

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as his personal opinion.264 Willebrands seemingly also had informed the pope (or Felici) about this proposal.265 In the meeting of the SCUF (May 12 to 15), this option, like others, such as the alternative of Bea,266 was rejected.267 Although the sphere was tense, the SCUF still searched for a solution that could satisfy the pope, the bishops in the Near East, and respect the votes of September 1964. e SCUF worried about the situation but persevered. Alternatives were rejected. e modi of the pope, who was very much concerned about the situation in the Near East, were discussed.268 But most of the text remained the same, as became clear in the text of May 13, 1965.269 Some small stylistic changes in no. 3 were made. In no. 4, the section on Semitism was put again. In comparison to the text of March, the most important change was the replacement of “rejects and condemns” (reprobat et damnat) by the weaker “deplores” (deplorat). Furthermore, in a vote, it was decided (17 pro, 6 contra) to leave out “deicide” (deicidium).270 e changes were made in order to meet the will of the minority. However, the fate of the text on the Jews was still uncertain.271 Because of the tensions about this part of the declaration, all that had been approved unanimously for nos. 1-3, was also under threat.272 Aer a meeting with the pope, kept informed about the meeting of the SCUF,273 it was decided to organize a third trip to the 264

Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 178. Carbone, Il “Diario” Conciliare di Monsignor Pericle Felici, 472. Felici does not offer details about the pope’s view on this proposal of Willebrands. 266 For the text of Bea, see AAV, CVII, 1458; F. De Smedt 1470. Hermaniuk suggested that the text came from the pope; The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, 238. is is contradicted by Moeller; see Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 353. Also De Smedt proposed a text to the SCUF, in case the promulgation of the document could not take place, but the text was not taken into consideration. For the text, see F. De Smedt 1468; Archivio Apostolico Vaticano [AAV], Archivio del Concilio Vaticano II [CVII], 1458. 267 Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 345-349; iid., “Msgr. Willebrands and Nostra Aetate 4. Diplomacy and Pragmatism,” 256. 268 For these modi, see AS V/3, 212-213. 269 For the text, see F. De Smedt 1467; F. Degrijse (1965), 140. 270 AAV, CVII, 1458. 271 On May 14, in the evening, it was decided by Bea to stop the discussion on the Jews; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 182. 272 Still on May 21, 1965, Long, Stransky and Willebrands were reworking the text according to the changes as made in the SCUF; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 184. 273 AAV, CVII, 1458; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 186. 265

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Near East.274 e difficult but effective travel of De Smedt, Willebrands, and Duprey would change the attitude of most of the patriarchs in the Near East,275 except for Gori, the Italian Patriarch of the Latin Church in Jerusalem, who remained opposed to the text.276 e fact that they could convince Maximos IV Saigh was probably the turning point for the Near East: one of the most outspoken opponents to the declaration had changed his mind! As a result of this visit, it was decided to create an information service for the Arabic world and this with the explicit approval of the pope.277 On September 2, 1965, Willebrands informed Felici about his travel to the Near East, the remarks of especially Maximos IV Saigh, and about the situation with regard to the text on the non-Christians. Willebrands was quite confident that that text, approved by the pope, could be presented for vote to the Council.278 Felici asked Dell’Acqua to inform the pope about this note.279 5. Fourth Session In view of the meeting of September 15, Lanne and Baum worked on the Expensio modorum as from September 10, 1965.280 e Expensio

274

Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 201. Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 357-367; see also Les Agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 212. 276 See AAV, CVII, 1447; AS VI/4, 405-407. Gori insisted on the fact that the Eastern Christian and Islamic world considered the declaration as a support for Zionism and as a purely political matter. He also mentioned the decline in esteem for the pope since his last visit to the Holy Land and the many incidents. He criticized the obstinacy with which people wanted the declaration to be approved. 277 See the letter of Willebrands to Felici, July 28, 1965 (with in annex the approval by the pope). Willebrands suggested to appoint the Paulist Father Habib Bacha as responsible; see AS VI/4, 383-384. For Felici’s reply, see 399. Objections came from O’Connor, head of the Press Committee, who remarked that there was already a responsible for this, but this was insufficient for Willebrands and Joseph Khoury, the Maronite Archbishop of Tyr; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 223-224. at a person like Habib Bacha was needed, also had to do with the fact that within the Secretariat for the NonChristian Religions, not much space was given to experts like Cuoq; see Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 225. 278 For this note, see AS V/3, 338-339. 279 AS V/3, 339. 280 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 221-222. 275

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modorum was ready on September 14, 1965,281 but the modi of Maximos were neither mentioned nor explained in this report.282 is would happen in the meeting of September 15. is explains why theologians like Moeller were not pleased. ey had not been informed about the travel of Willebrands and De Smedt to the Near East and about the proposals of Maximos. e modi were only presented in the meeting itself and could, according to them, not be subject to serious examination.283 However, the request of Maximos to mention that the Church is opposed to agitation “to all people” (sicut in quosvis alios homines), would be added.284 e sentence “cannot be ascribed indiscriminately to all the Jews living at the time nor to the Jews of today” (nec omnibus indistinctim Iudaeis tunc viventibus, nec Iudaeis hodiernis imputari possunt) was literally taken from the letter of Maximos of July 26, 1965.285 e same was the case for the sentence “Although the Church is the new people of God” (Licet autem Ecclesia sit novus populus Dei), added on September 15.286 Given the importance of Maximos’ support, the members of the SCUF were confronted with a fait accompli.287 e text as a whole would be approved, even although it met with resistance from American members 281

For this text, see F. De Smedt 1690. De Smedt added these proposals in his own text and these handwritten corrections will also be present in the printed final text of October 1965; F. De Smedt 1469, 1475. See also the differences between the Expensio modorum of September 14 and the Expensio modorum as sent to the fathers on September 30. 283 Leo Declerck and André Haquin, eds., Mgr Albert Prignon, Recteur du Pontificio Collegio Belga, Journal conciliaire de la 4e Session, préface de Mgr Aloys Jousten, introduction par Claude Troisfontaines, Cahiers de la Revue théologique de Louvain 35 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de la Faculté de éologie, 2003), 33-34. Paul VI also offered modi but he did not want them to be mentioned in the Expensio modorum; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 229. 284 Compare F. De Smedt 14 and AS IV/4, 711. 285 See the letter of Maximos IV of July 26, 1965; F. De Smedt 1475. Compare also F. De Smedt 1690, 15 with AS IV/4, 715. 286 Compare the text as offered in the Expensio modorum of September 14, with the final text as presented in the Expensio modorum, sent to the fathers; F. De Smedt 1690, 16 and AS IV/4, 716. See also 714, where the two sentences of Maximos were mentioned and as argument was given that they made clear that the Church is the true Israel and that rhetorical style was avoided. is part is, again, missing in the Expensio modorum of September 14. e idea came in fact from Mgr Edelby; see Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 362. 287 Mgr Albert Prignon, Recteur du Pontificio Collegio Belga, Journal conciliaire de la 4e Session, 34. On behalf of Bea, Duprey had sent a letter to Maximos on August 23, 1965, telling him that his suggestions would be submitted to the 282

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of the SCUF, who explicitly wanted to mention the deicidium.288 For that reason, in the second Expensio, it was explained that the new text “Etsi auctoritates […]sequitur” did more justice to the historical truth, that the word deicide “sounds offensive” (odiose sonat) and thus should be forbidden in Christian vocabulary. Moreover, the use of the word could lead to false interpretations, which had already caused problems in pastoral work and in ecumenical dialogue.289 e Expensio modorum took some time and was only accepted on September 20, 1965.290 Willebrands did his utmost best to inform the Arab diplomatic corps in Rome291 and the orthodox observers.292 Now, things went smoothly, the new text and the Expensio modorum being distributed to the fathers on September 30, 1965.293 All changes as made in comparison to the text of 1964 were explained and motivated in a very detailed way. In reaction to the critique that the text was too optimistic, it was said that the declaration did not offer a complete treatise on religions but a fundament for dialogue and cooperation, paying attention to what brings religions together, admonishing Catholics to act with prudence in their relations with others and to give testimony of their own faith and life.294 While a good number of the modi were not accepted, this was well motivated. In this regard, it was explained that under no. 2 animism was not mentioned because this could not be qualified as one religion, “but rather as a common characteristic of several religions that are found among various peoples” (sed potius typus communis plurium religionum, quae in variis gentibus inveniuntur).295 Modi which might offend other religions, like the one suggesting that Catholics only have esteem for the fact that SCUF; cf. AAV, CVII, 1447; Lamberigts and Declerck, “Mgr. E. J. De Smedt et le texte conciliaire sur la religion juive (Nostra Aetate, n° 4),” 362, n. 121. 288 On the discussion, see F. De Smedt 1475; Les Agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 225, dealing with the discussion on deicidium; cf. also The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.SS.R. (1960-1965), 247, 249. 289 AS IV/4, 715-716. 290 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 230. 291 Willebrands visited the embassies of Lebanon, UAR, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria; Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 234. 292 Mauro Velati, “Willebrands at the Council: A Historical Approach,” in The Ecumenical Legacy of Johannes Cardinal Willebrands (1909-2006), 96-116, at 112. 293 For this text and the Expensio modorum as distributed on that day, see AS IV/4, 690-696 and 698-717. 294 F. De Smedt 1690, 1; AS IV/4, 698. 295 F. De Smedt 1690, 3; AS IV/4, 700.

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Muslims venerate one God, were not accepted, partly because Nostra Aetate 3 took over the ideas as expressed in Lumen Gentium 16,296 partly also because a declaration could not offer a complete historical survey.297 e request to delete no. 4 was not accepted because the Council had already approved the text and because of what was said in Lumen Gentium. Most of the requests for a more detailed presentation of the negative aspects on the Jews as present in Scripture (as a whole) were not accepted, because the declaration wanted to present what has to do with pastoral and practical norms, based on revelation, contributing to dialogue and cooperation.298 e same could be said for the modi that were accepted, like those on Hinduism and Buddhism. Here, the advice of the experts in the domain was taken into account.299 A careful comparison of the text as presented to the fathers with the one already finished in March 1965 makes clear that for nos. 1, 2, and 3, the text had remained the same. e same could be said for no. 4, paragraphs 1-5. In paragraph 6, leaving out deicide, the proposals of Maximos IV had been accepted. In paragraph 7 it was explicitly stated that the Church condemns persecution against any people and that it deplored (no longer “reprobat et damnat”) agitations against the Jews. Only under no. 4, paragraph 6-7, the changes were substantial and sensitive.300 Accepting the requests of Maximos IV, much agitation was taken away. e text on the non-Christians was translated in Arabic and handed over to the observers, coming from the Arabic countries, who were invited to come to the SCUF.301 e fathers received the relatio of Bea on October 11. In this relatio, Bea explained why deicidium was le out: pastoral prudence and evangelical charity were mentioned as reasons. e Coetus, striving to slow down activities302 continued its counterattacks through very intensive propaganda.303 Still on October 11, the

296 e addition misericordem in Nostra Aetate 3 was inspired by Lumen Gentium 16; see F. De Smedt 1690, 6; AS IV/4, 703-704. 297 See F. De Smedt 1690, 7; AS IV/4, 704. 298 See the elaborated replies in F. De Smedt 1690, 7-8; AS IV/4, 705-706. 299 F. De Smedt 1690, 3-4; AS IV/4, 701. 300 is also explains why the overwhelming majority of the responses in the two Expensiones modorum corresponds to the answers as given by Baum on March 1, 1965; compare AS IV/4, 705-717 with F. De Smedt 1466. 301 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 236. 302 See the letter of Lefebvre, c.s., of October 8, 1965 to Felici, AS VI/4, 540. 303 The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.SS.R. (1960-1965), 260-261.

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Coetus distributed a text in which it pleaded for the rejection of the text via a non placet,304 because they were of the opinion that the SCUF had not objectively taken into account their remarks. e Coetus was opposed to what it considered as a “leveling” of all religions,305 thus being more opposed to the numbers 1-3 than to number 4. e Coetus asked to reject these numbers, considering them to be opposed to the proclamation of the “truth of Christ,” the true mission of the Church. e Coetus, accusing the document of superficiality,306 was scandalized that the Council dared to speak about “commune” between the notion of the Trinity and the Hindu myths. Furthermore, liberation has another meaning among Hindus than Christians.307 Especially the moral standards of Islam and the conflicts between Islam and Christianity were mentioned as an argument for rejecting no. 3.308 For the Coetus, minimizing the differences between Christianity and other religions was a threat to the missionary activities of the Church. e critique on the text on the Jews was not only coming from the Coetus.309 In fact, a good number of antisemitic pamphlets were distributed, one of them signed by 21 traditionalistic organizations.310 Marella received a message threatening to blow up the aula if the text would be approved. On the other hand, some were disappointed about the removal

304

For this text, see now Philippe Roy-Lysencourt, Recueil de documents du Coetus Internationalis Patrum pour servir à l’histoire du concile Vatican II (Strasbourg: Institut d’Étude du Christianisme, 2019), 1048-1054. 305 See also the letter of Lefebvre, Sigaud, and Carli, the leaders of de Coetus on July 25, 1965, AS VI/4, 373-374, which makes clear that they did not accept the results of the votes of 1964. 306 Roy-Lysencourt, Recueil de documents du Coetus Internationalis Patrum, 1051. 307 Ibid., 1053. 308 AS IV/4, 704. 309 See Mauro Velati, “Completing the Conciliar Agenda,” in History of Vatican II. Vol. V: The Council and the Transition: The Fourth Period and the End of the Council (September 1965 – December 1965), ed. Guiseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis; Louvain: Peeters, 2006), 185-273, 214-215. e critique of the Coetus with regard to the Jews was rather nuanced; see Roy-Lysencourt, Recueil de documents du Coetus Internationalis Patrum, 1053. 310 Some of the journals mentioned on the list probably were put on it without the consultation of their editorial boards; see the letter of De Castro Mayer, member of the Coetus to Felici, October 16, 1965, making clear that the journal of his diocese, Catolicismo, present on the list, in no way was involved in this action, AS VI/4, 562.

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of deicidium and damnat in number 4.311 But Bea was no longer willing to accept changes for it could be an attack on the pope’s authority, 312 which had risen aer the pope’s visit to the UNO. e support of the Near East bishops and the many diplomatic initiatives, among others of the SCUF, were decisive. During the last but one vote on the schema, on October 14, 1965, still 184 bishops voted against paragraph 2, thus more or less the same number as those voting against paragraph 3 (on the Islam; 189 contra) and a bit less than the section in paragraph 4 where it was said that the Jews are not damned nor cursed by God (245 contra). In other words, the openness to other religions as such was still experienced as problematic by some bishops. In the vote on the schema as a whole, October 15, 1965, still 250 Council fathers voted against this schema (more than 10%) and 10 voted invalid, a high number when one takes into account that a council is always longing for a maximum of unanimity. is quite high number is the result of opposition of both sides. Part of the non placet contingent of voters probably wanted to return to the previous text where, with regard to the Jews, the word deicide was explicitly used and where the persecutions of the Jews, not only were deplored but also condemned (“deplorat et damnat”).313 e adagium “the winner takes all” does not function in a Conciliar context: Nostra Aetate was a matter of give and take, for the concerns of most players in the debate had to be taken into account in a Council that also with regard to interreligious dialogue aimed at an aggiornamento. In all, the votes were a success. On October 16, 1965, Bea sent a letter to the pope, adding two favorable telegrams of both Visser ‘t Hoo and the Jewish Committee, asking to proclaim the text on the non-Christians in the public congregation.314 Gori, still opposed to the text, would write a letter to the pope on October 20, 1965, still contesting the way in which Rom 11:28 was quoted. e letter was sent by the pope to Bea, who would only respond to Gori on October 30, 1965, thus aer the approval of the declaration, even although the SCUF was informed of this letter already on October 27.315 On that day the pope asked Felici to contact Bea with 311 Both Shehan and Journet (on behalf of Maritain) were critical towards the omission of damnat and sent a letter on this issue to Cicognani. A copy of these letters was sent to Bea on October 14, 1965; see AS V/3, 424-427, 470. 312 Les Agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 243. 313 See Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, II, 438. 314 AS V/3, 438-440; the pope agreed, AS V/3, 437-438. 315 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 250. Felici suggests that Willebrands and Paul VI had decided to quote the sentence in full, something

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regard to this request. In a telephone call, Bea answered that it was better not to change anything. One gets the impression that Bea did not want to take into account any objection to the text that might cause a delay.316 On October 28, 1965, Nostra Aetate was solemnly proclaimed, a moment of great joy for the SCUF and its president, Bea.317 In less than two years, a document on the Catholic Church’s attitude towards non-Christian religions was finalized and would result in an intensification of the interreligious dialogue and of theological debates up to the current day.318

that clearly did not happen; see Nostra Aetate 4; there is a reference to Rom 11:18-19, but not a full quote; see also Carbone, Il “Diario” Conciliare di Monsignor Pericle Felici, 494. 316 On this exchange of letters, see AS V/3, 473-474, 512-514. 317 Les agendas conciliaires de Mgr J. Willebrands, 251. 318 See Terrence Merrigan, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Breaking the Impasse in Contemporary Catholic eology of Interreligious Dialogue,” and Didier Pollefeyt, “Unrevoked Covenant – Revoked Consensus – Indestructible Love? e Reception of Nostra Aetate 4 in Jewish-Catholic Relations,” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis, 469-482 and 483-498.

20 “The True Light That Enlightens Everyone” A Critical Examination of J. Dupuis’ Application of Jn 1:9, 14 in His Trinitarian Christology and Theology of Religious Pluralism Nguyen Thi Tuong Oanh, Sr. Maria, ZvMI

In contemporary Catholic theology of religions,1 among those advocating an inclusivist approach,2 divergent answers have been proposed to the question of whether non-Christians are saved despite or through their religions. is question came to the fore in the major work of the Catholic theologian Jacques Dupuis,3 in which he developed a Christian theology of religious pluralism de iure (as willed by God), and through which he became one of the most discussed and disputed theologians.4 His work has met with a mixed response; he has supporters as well as opponents both within and outside the Catholic Church.5 Nevertheless, 1 See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to the eology of Religions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003). Cf. Joseph Famerée, “Pluralité des religions et unicité du salut en Jésus-Christ,” Revue théologique de Louvain 35 (2004): 510-517. 2 For the differentiation of the three ‘categories’ or typologies in theology of religions in terms of ‘exclusivism’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’, we rely on the short and concise definition of Terrence Merrigan, “Jacques Dupuis and the Redefinition of Inclusivism,” in In Many and Diverse Ways: In Honor of Jacques Dupuis, ed. Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 60-71, esp. 60. 3 Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997). See also Gerald O’Collins, “Jacques Dupuis: His Person and Work,” in In Many and Diverse Ways, 18-29. 4 See, Gerald O’Collins, “Jacques Dupuis: e Ongoing Debate,” Theological Studies 73 (2013): 632-654. 5 For the supporters of his trend, see S. Mark Heim, e Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian eology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001); Franz Cardinal König, “Let the Spirit Breath,” in In Many and Diverse Ways, 14-17; Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Religious Pluralism (London: Routledge, 2004). Cf. Ryan P. McLaughlin, “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Revelatio?: God’s

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despite the substantial amount of critiques of Dupuis’ theology of religions, a critical examination of his interpretation of biblical texts, according to our knowledge, is rarely found.6 We, therefore, have attempted to take up this task as subject of our doctoral dissertation in which we provided, next to a theological, an exegetical examination of Dupuis’ interpretation of the Johannine Prologue and Heb 1:1-2 as well as the way he applies this to his Trinitarian Christology and his theology of religions.7 Within the limitations of this article, however, we can only roughly present and examine Dupuis’ reading and application of the Johannine Prologue, upon which he founded his Logos- and Trinitarian Christology and theology of religious pluralism de iure, through a (con-) textual and theological exegesis of Jn 1:9, 14.8 With this small contribution we hope to let the “true Light” of the Gospel, Jesus Christ, the Word Self-Disclosure to Non-Christian Religions in Contemporary Catholic Religion,” Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion & Education, published online on July 1, 2015: https://doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2015.1053600 [accessed July 24, 2020]. For the critical direction: International eological Commission, Christianity and the World Religions (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1997); the Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), “Dominus Iesus” on the Unicity and Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church (2000), followed by a Notification on Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (2001); Gavin D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); R. W. Nutt, “An Office in Search of Its Ontology: Mediation and Trinitarian Christology in Jacques Dupuis’ eology of Religious Pluralism,” Louvain Studies 32 (2007): 383-407. Cf. K. E. Johnson, A “Trinitarian” Theology of Religions? An Augustinian Assessment on Several Recent Proposals, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2007), available in: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/190/ D_Johnson_Keith_a_052007.pdf?sequence=1 [accessed March 23, 2020]. See also the list of critical secondary literature on Dupuis’ work in Matthew W. I. Dunn, The Use of the Bible in Jacques Dupuis’ Theology of Religious Pluralism: An Examination according to Chapter III of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s ‘The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church’, (University of Toronto, Toronto: 2013), 14, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/43417 [accessed July 13, 2020]. 6 e only exception seems to be the mentioned dissertation of Matthew W.  I. Dunn, which only examines his biblical usage from a guideline of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and not from the biblical texts themselves. 7 T. T. Oanh Nguyen, A Biblical-Exegetical Examination of the Appeal to the Trinity in the Contemporary Catholic Theology of Religions: The Case Jacques Dupuis and Gavin D’Costa, unpublished doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Terrence Merrigan (promoter) and Prof. Dr. Gilbert Van Belle (co-promoter) (Louvain: KU Leuven, 2014). 8 Although we follow, among others, the historical-critical method, in the limits of this article, however, we will mainly focus on the meaning of the text.

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Incarnate enlighten and guide us in the reflection on contemporary theology of religions and interreligious dialogue. However, preceding this part, a short sketch of the theological problems in Dupuis’ Logos- and Trinitarian Christology will be necessary in order to have a clear insight into the theological and biblical problems of Dupuis’ Trinitarian model and his call for a religious pluralism de iure. is will clarify the way how he interprets and applies biblical texts in his theology of religion. 1. Dupuis’ Theological Problems In his attempt to legitimate religious pluralism de iure, Jacques Dupuis developed a Trinitarian Christology by departing from the immanent Trinity, i.e., the mystery of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in God’s internal or intra-trinitarian divine relationship. God the Father, who is the source and goal of all beings and of human history, acts salvifically through his Son, the Word (the Logos) and the Spirit as his two Hands from the beginning in creation and throughout human history. However, what makes Dupuis’ presentation of this classical notion of God’s Trinitarian activity problematic is his tendency to consider the three persons of the Trinity in isolation from one another and, indeed, to place them over against one another. is is particularly obvious in his ambiguous description of the hypostatic relation between the Father and the Son: e Father has to be affirmed as the source and goal of history and salvation, such that eocentrism or “God-centeredness” must be stressed above Christocentrism. He argues as follows: “[O]n the side of God, it will have to be shown clearly that Jesus Christ must never be thought to substitute for the Father.”9 Jesus was, according to him, aer all, entirely God-centered. Although the Johannine statement on Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6) is to be maintained, Dupuis asserts that Jesus is “never the goal or the end” of human existence and of history. Moreover, the author points to the distinctness and the “unbridgeable distance” between Jesus and the Father,10 since only God is considered the absolute mystery, the source and center of all reality. God stands

References to exegetical issues will only be provided when it is semantically relevant for the theological meaning of the text. 9 Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 205. 10 “e unique closeness that exists between God and Jesus by virtue of the mystery of the incarnation may never be forgotten, but neither can the unbridgeable distance that remains between the Father and Jesus in his human existence.” Ibid., 205-206.

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therefore beyond Jesus, even while it is true that Jesus is the Son.11 Furthermore, even while it is true that Jesus is confessed as being at the center of the Christian mystery, it is nevertheless “not to be understood in an absolute sense but in the order of the economy of God’s freely entertained dealings with humankind in history.”12 is means that, according to this description, the centrality of Christ is to be situated on the level of his salvific function and not of his ontological being and is therewith, in the final analysis of Dupuis’ presentation, relative. For, while Christ might be claimed as absolute for Christians, this need not be the case for other religious traditions, since he makes a distinction between the salvific efficacy of Jesus Christ as the Son and that of God. is is most clearly expressed in the following statement: e historical particularity of Jesus imposes upon the Christ-event irremediable limitations […] While the human existence of the man Jesus is truly that of the Son of God, it necessarily shares with all humanity the limitations of historical human existence. ere follows that the human consciousness of Jesus as Son could not, by nature, exhaust the mystery of God, and, therefore, le his revelation of God incomplete. ere likewise follows that the Christ-event itself does not and cannot exhaust God’s saving power. God remains beyond the man Jesus as the ultimate source of both revelation and salvation. Jesus’ revelation of God is a human transposition of God’s mystery […] e personal identity of Jesus as the Son of God notwithstanding, a distance continues to exist between God (the Father), the ultimate source, and he who is God’s human icon. Jesus is no substitute for God.13

Furthermore, in this claim Dupuis moves from speaking about Jesus’ limitations to speaking about the Christ-event which is, according to him, by consequence also limited and “does not and cannot exhaust God’s saving power.”14 He equates herewith, the person of Jesus the Christ with the whole Christ-event, which is evidently not the same. ough there is an inseparable bond between the person of Jesus the Christ and the Christ-event – since the latter presumes the former – the notion of the latter provides much more scope for conceiving of the existential dimension of salvation. In the Christ-event the human response to the offer of salvation by means of faith is an integral part of the realization of salvation. In other words, while the person of Jesus the Christ points more directly to the offer of salvation by God’s self-revelation in and 11 12 13 14

Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 206. Ibid. Ibid., 298; Dupuis, “Trinitarian Christology,” 91. Ibid.

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through his only Son, the Word Incarnate, the Christ-event refers to the realization or fulfilment of it, when it is freely and existentially accepted by humankind by means of faith. However, from a Christian point of view and especially from the Johannine perspective, faith can finally be considered as grace, i.e., a gi of God, without any reduction of human freedom and responsibility (cf. Jn 15:15-16).15 Moreover, according to the Christian faith claim, the Christ-event is considered as “the fulfilment of God’s saving work in salvation-history (Heb 1:1; see Ex 3:14).”16 erefore, by drawing the conclusion and repeatedly affirming that, due to Jesus’ humanity, the Christ-event is also limited and consequently not able to reveal fully God’s saving power, Dupuis has willingly or unwillingly reduced God’s ultimate self-revelation in the Incarnation of the Son, Jesus the Christ, and in the whole Christ-event to an incomplete, limited and human occurrence. is militates, precisely, against the classical faith claim regarding the unicity and universality of Christ as constitutive for, and the Christ-event as the “fulfilment of, God’s saving work in salvation-history,”17 albeit Dupuis always insists on the truth of this claim.18 In short, by overemphasizing eocentrism above Christocentrism in his Trinitarian Christology Dupuis risks falling into subordinationism in the divine qualification of the Son, since he considers Jesus Christ and the Christ-event as limited by space and time. Christ can therefore not be substituted for God, but also cannot be identical with the Logos asarkos, since he does not have the same salvific efficacy as the latter.19

15

See Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 (London: SCM Press, 1970), 76-77: “In making its decision, faith understands itself as a gi. e disciples did not choose Jesus; he chose them ([Jn]15:16).” As a complement to Bultmann, see also Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: e Seabury Press, 1978). 16 Josef Finkenzeller, “e Christ-event,” in Handbook of Catholic Theology, ed. Wolfgang Beinert and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Herder and Herder, 2000), 70-71. 17 Dupuis, “Trinitarian Christology,” 71. 18 Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 248-249. 19 is tendency has been recently developed by many pluralists, especially by Asian theologians. See hereby also the critical discussion and comments of Terrence Merrigan, “Saving the Particular: Incarnation and the Mediation of Salvation in the eology of Religions,” in Orthodoxy, Process and Product, ed. Mathijs Lamberigts, Lieven Boeve, and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 227 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 299-322.

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In this sense, Dupuis has ascribed an ontological distinction to, not only the hypostatic relation between the Father and the Son, but also to the integrity of the Son as second hypostasis of the Trinity. With this distinction, Dupuis suggests (either willingly or unwillingly) a subordinationalist description of the second hypostasis, which contrasts with the original Christian confession and the traditional theology of the Trinity, where the hypostatic union of Christ and the consubstantiality (homoousios) of the Son with the Father is confessed and affirmed: e Son of God is and remains before and aer the Incarnation the second hypostasis of the Trinity. Moreover, the Christian faith claims that the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity share in the same divine nature in union and intercommunion without any hierarchical distinctions.20 Furthermore, Dupuis’ emphasis on eocentrism above Christocentrism, or his subordinationistic tendency, goes together with his choice for a high Christology, which is based on a Logos-Christology. He departs from ‘above’, i.e., from the Logos asarkos or the “Word-to-be-made-flesh” instead of from ‘below’, i.e., the Logos ensarkos, the “Word-made-flesh.” In Dupuis’ reasoning, a high Christology on the basis of a Logos-Christology

20

According to the Church’s teaching on the doctrine of the Trinity, initiated and clarified by the Cappadocian Fathers and confirmed by the Council of Nicaea (325), “the Son is not an intermediary entity between an (in principle wholly) unreachable God and the world; instead, he is mediator as Son. Moreover, he does not have lower status in divinity than the Father, even though he receives his sonship from the Father. Hence, God (the Father) – and this is the really decisive aspect of this conception – is no longer seen [in the history of development of the doctrine of the Trinity] in terms of an absolutely autarchical being that lives only for God. Instead, God is characterized in and through God’s movement toward the Son. e Son is characterized by being shown to be the one who has received himself wholly from the Father. e oneness of the Father and Son is the Holy Spirit.” See W. Breuning, “Trinitarian Heresies,” “Trinitarian Personhood,” “Trinity,” and “Trinity: Doctrine of the,” in Handbook of Catholic Theology, ed. Wolfgang Beinert and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 717-726, for this quotation see 724; cf. 358-366. e hypostases of the Trinity share not only in the same divine nature, but are also one in their relational distinctiveness. If this were not the case, we would have a tritheism instead of a Triune God. For, in the same and one life the Father is the Father, the giver, and the Son, the receiver, and the Spirit the one who proceeds. Only in the relations of the three hypostases the particular distinctness of each person of the Trinity can be characterized. In this sense, one cannot describe the Trinitarian relationship in hierarchical order as Dupuis does, although certain traces of subordinationism can also be found in the synoptic gospels. Nevertheless, they do not outnumber the claims on Jesus’ uniqueness and divinity in the New Testament (cf. Jn 5:19-21, 23; 10:30, 36-38; 12:44-45).

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allows, aer all, for an emphasis on the divinity of Christ and his universal, salvific presence in the world as the Logos asarkos, above his historical presence in the world as the Logos ensarkos, which is limited in space and time. According to Dupuis, the Logos asarkos was salvifically and universally active in the world from the beginning before, and endures aer, the incarnation, while the Logos ensarkos was only punctually active (even though as a culminating point) in history.21 Consequently, all people from all times, as well as all religious traditions and philosophical wisdom in all its varieties, can be inspired and “‘enlightened’ by the Logos, who is the one ‘source of divine light’.”22 erefore, Dupuis concludes, the “elements of truth and grace” in other religious traditions that are recognized by the Church (Ad Gentes 9) can be ascribed to the Logos asarkos, who has sown and is still sowing his seeds of truth and grace in them.23 at this view implies a far-reaching separation between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos with regard to its salvific efficacy, shall be clear in his arbitrary reading and application of the Johannine Prologue to his Trinitarian Christology. 2. Dupuis’ Problematic Reading and Application of the Johannine Prologue in his Logos-Christology In order to found his Logos-Christology and theology of religions biblically, Dupuis predominantly relies, next to Heb 1:1-2 and other passages, especially on the Johannine Prologue (Jn 1:1-18), which he reads and applies arbitrarily in function of his aim in supporting a religious pluralism de iure. is is particularly clear in his programmatic introduction: According to the [Johannine] Prologue, all salvation history, beginning with creation, is wrought by God through the Logos. is history, from the beginning (Jn 1:1), is ordered to the incarnation of the Word in humanity (Jn 1:14). But long before the incarnation, the Word was present in the world as the source of life (1:4), as “the true light that enlightens every human being by coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him” (Jn 1:9). Here we are surely dealing with the active presence of the divine Logos, not yet incarnate, throughout the whole of human history […] Neither is there any doubt that the Logos-Wisdom theology of John, which embodies the universal selfmanifestation of God throughout history, offers the widest New Testament perspective on God’s universal involvement with humankind. It is

21 22 23

See Dupuis, “Trinitarian Christology,” 91. Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 320. Dupuis, “Trinitarian Christology,” 94.

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this universal and continuous involvement of God in human history that allows for a positive approach to the religions of the world.24

From this statement follows that in his appeal to and even in his interpretation of the Johannine Prologue, Dupuis considers the universal presence and activity of the Logos only with regard to its state ‘before’ the Incarnation (Logos asarkos), as is apparent in the following statement: e universal active presence of the divine Logos before the Christ-event is clearly affirmed by the Prologue of the Gospel according to Saint John: he was ‘the true light that enlightens every human being by coming into the world’.25

Further polarizing interpretation and application can be found in the following statements: is goes to show that, before God’s self-manifestation culminated in the incarnation of his Word (Jn 1:14), God had already ‘spoken’ to humankind in the Word-to-become-incarnate […] e universal significance of the incarnation of God’s Word notwithstanding, room must be le for his anticipated action in history as well as his enduring influence under other symbols.26

From these two statements just quoted above, we can determine that Dupuis reads, interprets and applies the Johannine Prologue historically in terms of the time ‘before’ and ‘aer’ the Incarnation and respecting the Christ-event. is distinction is based on the fact that Dupuis ascribes a universal significance for the world only to the Logos before the Incarnation (Logos asarkos), while the Incarnation is according to him constrained by a limitation in space and time. Furthermore, it is also obvious that, textually, Dupuis refers to Jn 1:9 for the universal significance of the Logos asarkos, and oen opposes this to v. 14 regarding the Incarnation.27 Hence, it is clear that Dupuis’ interpretation and application of the biblical text goes hand in hand with his theological distinction of an almost separation between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos. However, biblically and theologically, there raises the question whether such a reading, interpretation and application of the biblical text do justice to the biblical message and revelation of the Christian faith. ough from the Christian faith perspective it might be clear that the Johannine Prologue speaks of the one and the same eternal Logos becoming incarnated,

24 25 26 27

Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 50-51. Ibid., 221. See ibid., 243, cf. 294, 298, 319, 328. Ibid., 50-51, 221, 242-243.

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the arbitrary reading and application of this text, shows the need for an exegetical and theological clarification of the text. Since an exegetical and theological interpretation of the whole Prologue would go beyond the limit of this paper, we will focus our exegetical examination to the two core verses 9 and 14 in their textual and intertextual context. 3. A Critical Examination of Dupuis’ Application of Jn 1:9, 14 From the short sketch of Dupuis’ theological and biblical problems presented above, we can formulate the key issues in the following two questions: (1) Does the Johannine Prologue really make the distinction between the Logos ‘before’ the Incarnation and the Logos Incarnate, and ascribe a greater salvific significance to the former in terms of universality, while the latter is constrained by limitations? (2) Or, applied to v. 9 itself, is the coming of the Logos in terms of the true Light (τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινόν) to the world (ἐρχόμενον εἰς τὸν κόσμον, v. 9c) different from the becoming flesh of the Logos (καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο) in v. 14? What, in fact, does the Prologue mean with vv. 9 and 14 in their textual and intertextual context? In order to answer these questions, we will have to show that (1) the Johannine Prologue forms textually qua form and content a unity by means of a determination of its bipartite structure and function, and (2) the Logos in Jn 1:9 is the same as in Jn 1:14 with the same universal significance by means of the semantic determination of the verses 9 and 14 in the context of the Prologue and of the whole Gospel. 1. The Structure of the Johannine Prologue (1:1-18) and Its Bipartite Function In contrast to the epic style and form of the remainder of the Gospel, the Prologue is almost completely written in a poetic form with a lyric rhythm and contains all the characteristics of a poem with rhymes.28 In this regard some also speak of a hymn.29 Significantly, in its poetic

28

See Rudof Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St John, vol. 1 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 224-225; cf. Raymond Brown, The Gospel according to John I–XII (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 19-22. 29 See Brown, John I–XII, cxxxviii. For an overview of the text-genesis, see Michael eobald, Fleischwerdung des Logos: Studien zum Verhältnis des Johannesprologs zum Corpus des Evangeliums und zu 1 Joh, Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen 20 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1988), 67-78.

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form it resembles the prologues of 1 John and of the Letter to the Hebrews.30 e Prologue shows two great parts (I and II), marked by a change in the narrative perspective from the third person singular to the firstperson plural.31 As a whole the internal structure of the Prologue may be represented as in the following figure: I) A (1:1-2) B (1:3-5) / C (1:6-8) / B’ (1:9-13) q r II) D (1:14) / C’ (1:15) / D’ (1:16-17) A’ (1:18) Each part consists of two sandwich-structures (B/C/B’ – D/C’/D’), and both are kept together by an inclusion (A – A’) through the Logos being present with the Father from eternity (vv. 1-2 and 18).32 e sections A, B, D, A’, B’ and D’ are poetic, while C and C’ which are about the witness of St. John the Baptist are epic. Despite the different styles, the global and poetic unity of the Prologue as a whole remains untroubled and undisturbed by the intervention of the references to the Baptist’s witness in vv. 6-8, 13, 15, 17-18, since they are not opposed to, but attuned to, each other through the connecting term μαρτυρέω (to witness) in v. 7ab (C), which reoccurs in v. 15 (C’) so that one can speak of a middle speech.33 However, although the bipartite structure of the Prologue offers a clear overview of the dynamic construction of the topics in the Prologue, its semantic interpretation and function is more difficult to determine than a first reading suggests. e main difficulty in this regard may be

30

See also Brown, John I–XII, 18. Qua content it also draws nearer to the Prologue of Mark 1:1. 31 See also Klaus Wengst, Das Johannesevangelium, eologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 4, Neuausgabe in einem Band (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2019), 34. 32 See Michael eobald, Im Anfang war das Wort: Textlinguistische Studien zum Johannesprolog (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1983), 13-26. eobald is right in stating that the bipartite structure offers a “strukturelles Gleichgewicht” or “structural equilibrium.” See eobald, Fleischwerdung, 197-200. is structure is concisely reproduced in Jan G. van der Watt, “e Composition of the Prologue of John’s Gospel: e Historical Jesus Introducing Divine Grace,” Westminster Theological Journal 57 (1995): 311-332, esp. 316-317. 33 Cf. eobald, Im Anfang, 26-27.

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formulated in the following questions: To what extent does the Prologue speak about the pre-existent Logos, and where precisely (i.e. from which part or strophe) does it begin to reflect on the Logos in history, that is, Jesus, as Dupuis suggests in his interpretation and application?34 is interpretative problem is caused by the fact that the “becoming flesh” of the Logos, is explicitly mentioned only in the second part (v. 14), while the coming of the Logos to the world is already mentioned in the first part (vv. 9-11). e many attempts to resolve this problem, either theological-historically, or in terms of a “Geschichtserzählung”35 (a historical narrative) according to literary criticism,36 do not offer a sufficient convincing answer to the textual problem concerning the meaning of this bipartite structure, since a historical reading of the Prologue can easily cause a polarizing view on the Logos. is is the case with Dupuis, who offers an agenda-serving reading of the Biblical text in favor of religious pluralism de iure, when contrasting these two theological categories (L.  asarkos and L. ensarkos) by applying a different salvific efficacy to them as if there were two different (or even separated) Logoi. However, such a reading does not expose the real meaning of the Johannine Prologue according to its textual basis and theological aim, which can be determined from a textual analysis. Concerning the function of the Prologue’s bipartite structure we agree with eobald in his syntactical and textual analysis that the Prologue does not reflect a revelation history of the Logos, but is a programmatic 34 is question was posed by Rudolf Bultmann, “Der religionsgeschichtliche Hintergrund des Prologs,” in ΕΥΧΑΡΙΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ: Studien zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments. Hermann Gunkel zum 60. Geburtstag, vol. 2, ed. H. Schmidt, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 19/2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1923), 1, and is recalled by eobald, Im Anfang, 35: “Die Einsicht in die Zweiteiligkeit des Prologs kann in einer von den Exegeten zumeist als crux empfundenen Schwierigkeit weiterhelfen: ‘Wie weit ist von dem präexistenten Logos die Rede, von wo ab von dem in der Geschichte auretenden, d.h. von Jesus?’” 35 See Walther Eltester, “Der Logos und sein Prophet: Fragen zur heutigen Erklärung des johanneischen Prologs,” in Apophoreta. FS Ernst Haenchen, ed. Walther Eltester, Beihee zur Zeitschri für die neutestamentliche Wissenscha  30 (Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1964), 109-134, here 119, who compares the Prologue with Jesus’ childhood narrative in the Synoptic Gospels. Cf. eobald, Im Anfang, 35. 36 Schnackenburg, John I, 223-228, considers the first part of the Prologue as pre-Johannine pointing to the pre-existence of the Logos, while the second part mostly as Johannine treating the incarnation of the Logos, whereby the evangelist has already connected vv. 5, 9-10 to the incarnation. Ibid., 227. Cf. eobald, Im Anfang, 35, n. 3.

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theological text,37 consisting of two parallel parts with a sandwich structure. Part I (1:1-13) is proclamatory of nature and reflects the universal salvific significance of the Logos for the cosmos (vv. 3, 4, 9b, 10), while part II has a confessional character and reflects the believer’s experience of the Logos.38 is observation is furthermore confirmed by the stylistic change of perspective from the proclamatory style (proklamatorisch) in the first part (vv. 1-13) to the confessional style (bekenntnishaft) (vv. 14-18) in the second part. is means that only the subject of the speech in the Prologue undergoes a change from ‘He’ to ‘we’ while the object remains the same.39 Yet, the semantic unity between both parts and vis-à-vis the whole of the Prologue is qua form and content expressed in the frame verses 1 (A) and 18 (A’) and through the witness of John the Baptist (C and C’) in both parts. Formally the object of the Prologue remains the same, since it speaks of the same Logos with God from eternity as well as incarnate by vv. 1 and 18 (A and A’), and the witness of John the Baptist in C and C’ affirms the same content. is would mean qua content and in theological terms, that part I, with its internal sandwich form B/C/B’, reflects the origin (A: vv. 1-2) and the divinity of the Logos which is described in terms of being pre-existent with and as God from the beginning,40 who is the creator and source of life and light of all beings, although they do not recognize Him (B: vv. 3-5). However, John the Baptist testifies precisely to this divine Logos (C: vv. 6-8), that He as “the true Light” has universal salvific significance 37 According to eobald, the Prologue is not only a programmatic theological exposition in itself, but also for the rest of the Fourth Gospel and should be predominantly theologically read and interpreted, since it corresponds to the bipartite macrostructure of the rest of the gospel. e first part comprises the revelation of the Son to the world (1:19–12:50), while the second part describes Jesus’ revelation to those of his own (13:1–20:29). is correspondence, or better, anticipation of the bipartite prologue with the bipartite macrostructure of the gospel, is particularly visible in the parallel similarity between the verses 1:5, 10, 11 and the first main part of the gospel (1:19–12:50). In John 1:5, 10, 11 the drama of the Logos is described as being neither received nor accepted in and by the world, while in John 1:19–12:50 Jesus has to face the rejection of the world by their unbelief. e same parallel can also be found in the second part of the Prologue (1:14-18), where the believers’ experience of the Logos is condensed summarized and which is further explored in the Farewell Discourse (13:1–20:29) by Jesus’ self-revelation to his disciples. See eobald, Im Anfang, 37. 38 Ibid., 30, 35-39. 39 Ibid., 36-37. 40 Cf. Gen 1:1. Beginning here does not mean with the ‘creation’, but even before creation, i.e., before time exists, that is eternity.

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for the whole creation and humankind by means of His coming to His own people in the world to enable those who believe in Him to becoming children of God, even though they do neither recognize nor accept Him (B’: vv. 9-13). It is obvious that the tragic character of the coming of the Logos through the negative disposition of His own is already clearly expressed in poetic terms in this part, which obviously refers to the historical Christ event as background.41 Part II on its turn, with its internal sandwich structure D/C’/D’, describes from the perspective of those who have beheld and recognized the Logos in his full δόξαν […] πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας, as the only Begotten of the Father (μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός, D: v. 14). e second witness of John the Baptist confirms the unity between part I and II when he in fact identifies this μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός 42 with the Logos from God in the beginning (cf. vv. 1-2) by characterizing the one who comes aer Him (ὁ ὀπίσω μου ἐρχόμενος) as the one who was before Him (C’: v. 15). e reason for such a recognition of, and identification between the Word Incarnate and the eternal Word as God, as one and the same person, God’s only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, is given through the common confession of John and the believers in section D’ (vv. 16-17): “From his fullness we have all received namely grace upon grace” with the insight that, in contrast to the law which came through Moses, “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” is fullness of grace and truth is finally clarified in the last frame that “No one has ever seen God,” only Jesus Christ, the μονογενὴς θεός (the only Begotten, who is God) coming from the Father, has made Him known (A’: v. 18). With this clear result, the first question about the identity and unity of the Logos raised above can be considered as positively answered, since the bipartite structure of the Prologue speaks about one and the same subject: the Logos is the μονογενὴς θεός, who became incarnate to dwell among the people so that those who believe in Him are enabled to become children of God. Despite the two different states of the Logos’ being (pre-existent and incarnate), the Logos remains ontologically and existentially identified as the same: Jesus is the μονογενὴς θεός, the only Begotten of the Father, the eternal Word being with God and is God from the beginning who makes God known through His incarnation. In 41 See C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St John (London: SPCK, 1978), 11-15. Cf. Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John (Marshall, MI: Morgan & Scott, 1971), 50-51. 42 e demonstrative pronoun οὗτος in v. 15c refers back to μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός in v. 14d.

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other words, the bipartite structure of the Prologue does not water down the hypostatic unity of the μονογενὴς θεός, as eternal Logos and Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ, as Dupuis might suggest in his reading and application. is is not only formally expressed through the inclusio in vv. 1 and 18, but also through the witness of St. John the Baptist in both parts C and C’ (vv. 6-8, 15).43 It has also to be noted that the double witness of John the Baptist can be considered to be the structural hermeneutic key to the formal and theological unity of the Prologue, since it has a cohesive function and, theologically, it provides clarificatory hints for a correct understanding of the Prologue. With this structural key, one cannot read the Prologue in either a purely spiritualizing or a merely historical (not to mention ‘polemical’) way,44 since one then risks separating the identity of the Logos, and dividing God, by splitting the only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, into two personalities. is precisely is the case with Dupuis, when he asserts, by referring to v. 9, that the Logos asarkos is active in the world and in all religions, whereas the activity of the Logos ensarkos in Jesus Christ is limited to the Church, since – according to him – Jesus in His incarnated state is limited to space and time.45 However, are the salvific works and efficacy of the Logos non-incarnate and the Logos Incarnate different or the same? Or, to put it the other way round, does the Fourth evangelist mean something totally different with Jn 1:9 and 1:14, or, do these verses express the same content in different perspectives? e following section is an attempt to give a semantic explanation of these verses in their textual context, in order to provide an as suitable as possible answer to Dupuis and those who call for a recognition of other religions as having salvific value de iure. 2. The Semantics of Jn 1:9, 14 and Its Meaning for the Theology of Religions In our structural analysis above, we have already shown that the bipartite Prologue has a proclamatory and a confessional function, since it forms qua style and content a unity. is clarifies also why there is a change of

43 Cf. eobald, Im Anfang, 30-32. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1950), 3. 44 For an historical and polarized reading, see Walter Bauer, Das Johannesevangelium, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1933), 22-23. 45 See Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 298.

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perspective in the narrative line. Jn 1:9 belongs to the first proclamatory part I (vv. 1-13), which comprises a contemplation of the Logos in His pre- and immanent existence and relationship with God (vv. 1-2), His universally salvific significance for the whole creation and humanity by being their source of life and light (vv. 3-5) and by coming into the world with a tragic outcome of being rather denied than accepted (vv. 9-11). Noticeably, the description of the universally salvific significance of the Logos follows immediately that of His divine identity (vv. 1-3), with the statement “the light shines in the darkness,46 and the darkness has not received / overcome it” (v. 5.), which is in fact synonymous with the action of the “coming of the true light into the world” in v. 9. In other words, already here the Prologue speaks about the presence and salvific action of the Logos in history in poetic terms of ‘shining’ and ‘enlightening’ every human being in order to see and recognize Him as “the way, truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6) and as the “only Son of God” who is “one with God” (cf. Jn 1:1-3, 18; 10:30).47 All those who are willing to receive Him by having faith in Him, are enabled to become children of God and live in the trinitarian relationship, i.e. dealing with Jesus Christ in his relation with the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit (Jn 1:9-12; cf. 14:12-17, 26; 15:4, 9, 26-27; 16:13). However, the Prologue is also quite clear about the fact that not everyone is willing to accept and believe in Him, since neither the “world” (v. 10) nor His own people, i.e. the Jews (v. 11) are about to recognize and to receive Him, even though He is their source of life and existence. is contrasts to Dupuis’ reading of v. 9, who only sees in the coming of the Logos in the world an evidence for His presence in other religions. However, Dupuis does not take into account the freedom of humankind to willingly accepting or recognizing the Logos among them or as their source of being. is explains also why there are and there will be de facto always those who reject the Logos, or the Gospel. With this fact, v. 9 corresponds qua content exactly with the incarnational statement of “the Word made flesh and dwelt among us” in v. 14. However, while the latter describes the positive witness of the 46 Noticeably, the ‘heavenly’ or ‘divine’ state of the Logos as God in eternity (vv. 1-4) is described in the past tense, while His actions “φαίνει/ shines” and “φωτίζει/ enlightens” in vv. 5, 9a are in the present tense, in order to express the enduring work of the Logos by ‘shining’ and ‘enlightening’ humankind so that they might recognize and receive Him. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, “e Prologue of the Gospel of John: John 1:1-18,” Review and Expositor 62 (1965): 429-439, at 432. 47 Cf. ibid., 435.

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incarnation of those who have received the Logos, the former describes the tragic outcome of the “coming” of the Logos into the world through the denial of His own people by unbelief. Even though the Logos’ destiny in v. 9 is described in poetic and symbolic terms of the “true Light,” which is a biblical image for God’s eschatological salvation for Israel foretold by the prophets (cf. Is 9:1-6; 60:1-3), it refers in fact implicitly to the concretely historical fulfilment of God’s promise in the Christ-event testified in all four gospels.48 e tragic aspect of the Christ-event, aer all, comprises also the betrayal and denial by his own people, and by all those who do not belief in Him, with the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a result. Precisely, through this event Christ has brought universally salvific significance to humankind, since he has overcome the darkness,49 which comprises, amongst other things, finally the death, through His resurrection. It is, therefore, obvious that all salvific actions of the Logos are described in a climactically disclosive way, starting from a general metaphor of “the light shines in the darkness” (vv. 5, 9), zooming the focus on “the true light which enlightens every human being” (v. 9) and finally moving to the climax in the concrete fact of the Incarnation by the act of “becoming flesh with humankind to dwell among them” (σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, v. 14a-b). Only by His incarnation, humans can receive and see Jesus Christ in His glory (δόξαν), full of grace and truth “as of the Father’s only Son” (ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός), as it is testified by John the Baptist and the author, representing all those who do accept and belief in Him, and by their faith they are given the power to become children of God (vv. 6-8, 14c-16; cf. 1 Jn 1:14). Following this personal testimony, the Prologue concludes with a firm general confession about the exceeding character of God’s self-revelation through the Son, Jesus Christ, who surpasses the law that has been given through Moses (vv. 17-18). is latter refers here clearly to the first covenant God has made with His people Israel (cf. Ex 34:1-35). With this thought the Prologue subscribes obviously to the same confessional statement of Heb 1:1-2 that “[i]n many and various ways God 48 See Frans Neirynck, with the collaboration of Joël Delobel, ierry Snoy, Gilbert Van Belle and Frans Van Segbroeck, Jean et les Synoptiques: Examen critique de l’exégèse de M.-É. Boismard, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 49 (Louvain: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 1979). 49 Darkness (σκοτία) can be understood as everything that opposes God, who is connoted with light, life, and goodness. e author of the fourth Gospel uses this biblical term in a preferential way to make this clear: cf. 1:5(2×); 6:17; 8:12; 12:35(2×), 46; 20:1; 1 Jn 1:5; 2:8, 9, 11(3×), in comparison to the rest of the New Testament (Mt 4:16; 10:27; Lk 12:3).

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spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days He has spoken to us by a Son[…],” with the stress on the latter sentence, in contrast to Dupuis, who reversed this verse to emphasize the former in favor of his proposed religious pluralism de iure.50 However, both texts, Jn 1:118 and Heb 1:1-2, as well as the whole New Testament, stress the surpassing character of God’s full self-revelation in Jesus Christ above all other revelations God has ever made before in history.51 Dupuis’ reading of these texts sounds, therefore, here somehow ironically, since it tries in vain to reverse a very firm confession of the New Testament about the universally salvific significance of Jesus Christ as the unique savior and mediator (cf. Jn 14:6; Acts 4:12; Rom 5:14-15; 1 Cor 1:18-25; 1 Tim 2:3-6; Heb 8; 9:11-15; 12:24). With this confession, the New Testament does not aim to judge or devaluate other religions as such – as some theologians, like Dupuis, who give such an impression by attempting to relativize it when proposing a religious pluralism de iure. What the New Testament witnesses do is proclaiming Jesus Christ as the unique and universal savior and mediator between God and humankind, since He is recognized and professed as God’s only Son and as God. In other words, according to the Christian faith claim, as it is witnessed in the New Testament and obviously in Jn 1:1-18 and Heb 1:1-2, the universally salvific significance of Jesus Christ consists precisely in His divine identity as Son of God and as God (cf. Jn 1:1-2, 18), which is constitutive for the salvation of humankind and not merely in what He does. is recognition is reflected and proclaimed from different perspectives in the Johannine Prologue through the bipartite structure, which reflects two approaches of the same Christ-event: Jn 1:1-13 can be considered as Christology from above, while Jn 1:14-18 as Christology from below. 4. Conclusion What does the result above mean for the call for religious pluralism de iure in contemporary theology of religions, as is represented by the work 50 Cf. Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 294. See also the list of other biblical passages that are arbitrarily used by Dupuis in, Nguyen, A BiblicalExegetical Examination, 105-106. 51 In contrast to Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology, 226, who ascribes an enduring value to the cosmic Noachide covenant, the surpassing character of Jesus Christ as God’s full self-revelation does not mean an abolishment of his earlier revelation throughout history through prophets and forefathers of old, but a fulfilment of what God has foretold through them (cf. Is 9:1-6; cf. 60:1-3, 19-20).

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of J. Dupuis? From the Johannine hermeneutics as well as from the New Testament, we can acknowledge that all creation, including all what is good and true in other religions,52 have their source of being in the Triune God. As part of the creation other religions are also directed to and, called to receive the fullness of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ as their fulfilment (cf. Jn 1:1-3, 5, 9-10).53 It is only in that sense that we can talk about God’s will in creation and in other religions and Dupuis is right to search for such a confirmation. However, if we talk about nonChristian religions as systems with totally different content, objects of worship and aims, which can even contrast the revelation in Jesus Christ, as it is usually meant in current theology of religions, then we must say, from a biblical and dogmatic point of view, that a proposal of religious pluralism de iure in that sense is incompatible with the Christian faith claim in the Triune God with the Son, Jesus Christ, as the unique and universal Savior and Mediator. In other words, with the incarnation of the Logos as second hypostasis of the Trinity, we have a new and true hermeneutic key in Jesus Christ (cf. Rev 5:1-14), to discern God’s presence in the world54 and to interpret history, not merely in the chronological terms of ‘before’ and ‘aer’ the Christ-event, but predominantly in the ‘kairological’ terms of that event. is means, in the context of theology of religions, everything, the whole creation, including the nonChristian religions, have to be considered from the Kairos, i.e. the decisively eschatological time of God’s salvific offer in Jesus Christ for humankind. In that sense, would not a recognition of religious pluralism de facto suffice to do justice to both requirements: the Christian faith claim and a correctly positive recognition or disposition towards other religions in interreligious dialogue? In this regard, there seems to be a misunderstanding among some theologians about the function of the two disciplines, namely ‘theology of religions’ and ‘interreligious dialogue’. e latter is, according to our understanding, more situated on a practical or pastoral level, which as subject has the function to give concrete advices that can contain a positive 52

See Nostra Aetate 2. See Gaudium et Spes 29. e Church fathers considered other religions as praeparatio evangelica. See Mikka Ruokanen, The Catholic Doctrine of NonChristian Religions according to the Second Vatican Council, Studies in Christian Mission 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 20-34. 54 See also the ‘normative Christology’ in Gavin D’Costa, “Christ, the Trinity, and Religious Plurality,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Gavin D’Costa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 16-26, at 18-19. 53

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disposition toward others in order to get into dialogue,55 while the former is situated on the reflective level as theology, understood as ‘selfseeking understanding’, and has the function of clarifying the Christian faith claims as the basic ground for dialogue and discernment of the Spirit in the world. Both disciplines, according to our understanding, do not contrast but presuppose each other since interreligious dialogue is originated in the missionary task of the Church to proclaim the Gospel to the world and requires, therefore, a firm understanding of one’s own faith as a treasure one would like to share with others. In this regard, a correct reading and interpretation of biblical testimonies is of great importance, as we have tried to show in this chapter, since God’s Word can enlighten and guide us in our reflections and protect us from misconceptions if we are willing to receive it as it is and, not as what we want to see in it.

55 See Leonard Swidler, “e Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious Dialogue,” Journal for Ecumenical Studies 20 (1983): 1-4.

21 Graced Religions Ecumenical Perspectives on Revelation and Grace in the Theology of Interreligious Dialogue Wouter Biesbrouck

is article argues that all God’s revelation is soteriological because revelation means that God reveals himself as his loving self with the purpose of inviting creation into fellowship with him. e distinction between general and special revelation, perhaps helpful for heuristic purposes, tends to lead to an unhealthy bifurcation between God as Creator and God as Redeemer. is is especially relevant for a Christian theology of interreligious dialogue where the question of the particularity of God’s ultimate revelation in Christ and his universal salvific will comes strongly to the fore. We argue that there are good biblical and theological arguments to be made that God does indeed provide the necessary revelation and means of grace to everyone, in such a way that their particular contexts, including the religious, can provide the holy ground where one can encounter God. Drawing on sources from different Protestant families and from Roman Catholic contributions we try to argue our case such that it is plausible for the particular theologies of both traditions. We specifically combine the Neo-Calvinist concept of ‘common grace’ with a participatory ontology and a dispositional soteriology. In this way we hope to demonstrate the cross-fertilization of an ecumenical and traditionspecific approach to theology of interreligious dialogue. 1. Revelation as Divine Invitation: On the Fundamental Continuity Between General and Special Revelation 1. Definition of Revelation According to the Pocket Dictionary of eological Terms, revelation refers both to the process by which God discloses the divine nature and the mystery of the divine will and purpose to human beings, and to the corpus of truth disclosed. Some theologians maintain that revelation

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consists of both God’s activity in salvation history through word and deed, culminating in Jesus (who mediates and fulfills God’s selfrevelation) and the ongoing activity of God to move people to yield to, accept and personally appropriate that reality.1

Revelation, then, concerns God’s self-communication referring to the process and the deposit. It is truly dialogical since it includes the human reception of God’s self-revelation. We can unproblematically assume that the disclosure of his nature will point out that God is love (1 Jn 4:8)2 and that the divine will and purpose include his desire for “everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).3 It is easily seen that revelation and salvation history are so intertwined that we must posit that revelation has in and of itself salvific purposes. As the definition states, God’s self-revelation culminates in, and is mediated by, Jesus Christ. is raises the question whether knowledge of and encounter with Jesus Christ is necessary for revelation to attain the fruit of salvation. For this purpose, theologians have traditionally made a distinction between ‘general’ (or ‘universal’) and ‘special’ revelation or between ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ revelation.4 General (or ‘universal’)

1

Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee Nordling, Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 102. For comparison, Avery Dulles exposits revelation as following: “In an active or dynamic sense, revelation is the process of God’s self-disclosure – a gradual process that extends, as we shall see, over long periods of history. In an objective sense, revelation denotes the fund or ‘deposit’ of knowledge, insights, and wisdom resulting from the process just referred to.” Avery Dulles, “Faith and Revelation,” in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011), 81-128, at 81. 2 “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Logos electronic ed. (Nashville, TN: omas Nelson Publishers, 1989). 3 “[God our Savior] desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). 4 Sometimes, a distinction is made between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ revelation. But this confuses the matter. Such a distinction concerns not ‘revelation’ but ‘knowledge’, i.e., ‘natural knowledge’ which is, according to Dulles, “an achievement of human reason, which assents necessarily to demonstrative arguments.” He rightly points out that ‘natural revelation’ as “the self-manifestation of God through the regular order of nature” is also ‘supernatural’. It is important that “the meaning of natural as opposed to historical should not be confused with the meaning of natural as opposed to supernatural.” In Dulles, “Faith and Revelation,” 81-82.

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revelation refers to that knowledge of God that is universally available, be it through the observation of the created order or through an innate sense of God. John Calvin, for example, attested to knowledge of God outside revelation through Scripture. He first recognizes a sensus divinitatis: “at there exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute […].”5 is sense of Deity leads to the acknowledgment of the existence of God.6 e sensus divinitatis is then a kind of innate revelation. According to Calvin, it is complemented by a knowledge of God’s character accessible through observing the works of creation.7 Avery Dulles points out that the Second Vatican Council confirmed a similar understanding for Roman Catholicism in Dei Verbum 3: “God, who through the Word creates all things (see John 1:3) and keeps them in existence, gives men an enduring witness to himself in created realities (see Rom. 1:19-20).”8 In distinction with this universally available revelation, ‘special revelation’ is “evidenced in salvation history and culminating in the incarnation as understood through Scripture.”9 It is immediately clear that if salvation is limited to the beneficiaries of special revelation, the adherents of other religions seem to be without hope of salvation. 2. Bifurcation of Special versus General Revelation For many theologians this distinction between general and special revelation is not merely a heuristic tool but represents a clear division in God’s dealing with the world.

5 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 43 (I.3). 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 51 (I.5). 8 Second Vatican Council, “Dei Verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” (1965), accessed December 27, 2020, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_deiverbum_en.html. 9 Grenz, Guretzki, and Nordling, Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, 109. From a Roman Catholic perspective, the ‘understanding through Scripture’ is qualified as follows by Dulles: “e fruits of the process [of revelation], ‘objectively’ contained in Scripture and tradition, are transmitted to believers by education in the church, the living community of faith.” Dulles, “Faith and Revelation,” 81.

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According to Calvin, the sensus divinitatis condemns humankind through his own conscience when God is not worshiped or followed.10 God speaks so clearly that no one can claim ignorance. In his uncompromising style, Calvin writes “on each of [God’s] works his glory is engravened in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse.”11 Wayne Grudem likewise claims that there is a kind of natural knowledge of God, yet it functions only negatively: “Scripture nowhere indicates that people can know the gospel, or know the way of salvation, through such general revelation. ey may know that God exists, that he is their Creator, that they owe him obedience, and that they have sinned against him.”12 It is well-known that Karl Barth denied true knowledge of God apart from Christian revelation.13 Reformed theologian John Frame confirms the opinion that general revelation delivers true knowledge of God, but it “doesn’t tell us how to be saved. It gives us law, not gospel.”14 According to Lutheran theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, for Luther, “it is only through God’s Word that we can know God and come to saving faith.”15 Matthew Becker maintains the Lutheran position when he

10

Calvin, Institutes, 43 (I.3). Ibid., 51 (I.5). 12 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Leicester: IVP; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 123. 13 Barth’s rejection is aimed primarily at the natural ‘knowledge’ of God (as understood, e.g. by the First Vatican Council) and natural theology, more than at ‘general revelation’ per se. In the preface to the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, he (in)famously writes “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and I believe that because of it it is impossible ever to become a Roman Catholic, all other reasons for not doing so being to my mind shortsighted and trivial” – Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, I/1, Logos ed. (London and New York: T&T Clark), xiii. Gerald R. McDermott helpfully notes that “Barth was never able […] to separate analogia entis from general revelation in any clear way” – Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 203. is understanding seems to be confirmed by Olivier Boulnois who writes that Barth rejected the analogia entis because it implies “knowledge of God outside revelation.” According to Boulnois, this understanding of analogia entis “is true of Neoscholasticism but not of Scholasticism” – “Analogy,” in Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27-30, at 29. 14 John M. Frame, Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 51-53. 15 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to the Theology of Religions: Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 73. 11

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states that “[t]rue answers about the Holy, however, cannot be discovered through human action or thinking; they are known only in the selfrevelation of the Holy One in Jesus Christ.”16 General revelation, though real, is not salvific, for it only “reveals the inability of human beings to listen to God and their creative ability to devise their own convenient ways of reaching the divine.”17 Older and recent Evangelical theologians have confirmed this position, even if some of them would certainly stress the reality of general revelation as attested by Scripture’s witness. Louis Berkhof, e.g., challenges Karl Barth’s denial of natural revelation, but reacts equally against liberal theology’s tendency to privilege general revelation. For Berkhof, the insufficiency or inadequacy of general revelation must now be stressed. e primary theological reason for this is that general revelation “does not acquaint man with the only way of salvation. […] Since general revelation knows nothing about grace and forgiveness, it is entirely insufficient for sinners.”18 More recently Michael Bird bluntly states that “natural revelation is not salvific. […] Natural revelation does not have a saving effect because the knowledge given in natural revelation is inevitably rejected by humanity.”19 is array of theologians from the Reformation should not blind us to the fact that a similar approach is common in Roman Catholic tradition. Reaching back to the Middle Ages, Roger Olson proffers that neither Anselm nor omas believed that general revelation and unaided reason are capable of yielding redemptive knowledge of God; both believed in divine special revelation as the remedy for the ignorance of God brought about by sin. However, like most other rational theologians who emphasize natural theology, they viewed it as a kind of vestibule through which one could gradually introduce open-minded inquirers to the higher revelation of God in Christ and Scripture.20

Louis Berkhof claims that “[a]t the time of the Reformation both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants regarded general revelation as 16 Matthew L. Becker, Fundamental Theology: A Protestant Perspective (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 180. 17 Ibid., 213. 18 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology with a New Preface by Richard A. Muller, Combined Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), loc. 2976. 19 Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction, EPub ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), loc 373.9 of 2034. 20 Roger E. Olson, The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity & Diversity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press; Leicester: Apollos, 2002), 82.

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insufficient.”21 Although the Roman magisterium at the first Vatican Council affirms the competence of reason to know God,22 it is equally clear on “the limitations of reason in the process leading up to and following the act of faith demanded of the Christian.”23 3. Distinction but Not Separation e distinction between general and special revelation is heuristically helpful but as with many of these kinds of distinctions and nuances they tend to live a life of their own and the consequences can be far-reaching. In safeguarding the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, it seems that with this understanding of special revelation God has been silenced for the majority of the world. Many theologians, both from the Reformation and from Roman Catholicism, acknowledge continuity between general and special revelation and point out that the basic unity between the two should not be downplayed in favor of an unhealthy separation. Dutch theologian C. Berkouwer wrestled with this issue. He introduces article 2 of the Belgic Confession (1561)24 as a decisive argument for general revelation, although he maintains the reformation conviction that general revelation is not salvific and only lets humanity stand without excuse before the Creator God. Yet he nevertheless states that the “distinction between general and special revelation does not posit a rupture in the unity of God’s revelation but points out rather the revealing acts of

21

Berkhof, Systematic Theology, loc. 2976. e First Vatican Council taught in Dei Filius, the dogmatic constitution on revelation, that “God’s existence, together with certain divine attributes, could be known with certainty by the natural light of reason” as quoted in Gabriel Daly, “Revelation in the eology of the Roman Catholic Church,” in Divine Revelation, ed. Paul Avis (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1997), 23-44, at 30. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Philip Schaff, ed., The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations, 3 vols., Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis: e Creeds of Christendom 3 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1919), 384: “We know God by two means: First by creation, preservation and government of the universe, which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God, even his everlasting power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says (Rom. 1:20). All which things are sufficient to convince men and leave them without excuse.” 22

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God in history in the way of creation, fall and redemption.”25 According to Berkouwer, the distinction between general and special revelation is part of the ‘not yet’, and will be eschatologically dissolved.26 Steven Duby is able to see a positive role in (what he calls) natural knowledge of God because the “ultimate origin or efficient cause” of that knowledge “is God the Creator himself who purposefully makes himself known by the created order to the human race as a whole.”27 is natural revelation is then a praeambula fidei, or, otherwise termed a “preparation for the school of grace.”28 Duby maintains that “nature and natural theology are organically connected to grace and supernatural theology.”29 e discussion of Hendrikus Berkhof on general and special revelation is illuminating in the context of our discussion. For him, “the contrast general-special, suggesting a kind of break between biblical revelation and what passes for revelation outside of it, is also insufficiently able to show the common background of both.”30 at is because special 25 G. C. Berkouwer, “General and Special Divine Revelation,” in Revelation and the Bible: Contemporary Evangelical Thought, ed. Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1958), 11-24, at 23. 26 Ibid., 22. 27 Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (London: Apollos, 2020), 126. 28 For a discussion of praeambule fidei in Schillebeeckx, see Frederiek Depoortere, “Taking Atheism Seriously: A Challenge for eology in the 21st Century,” in Edward Schillebeeckx and Contemporary Theology, ed. Lieven Boeve, Frederiek Depoortere, and Stephan van Erp (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 36-48, at 45-47. 29 Duby, God in Himself, 129, n. 220. We are not convinced that Duby’s choice for the term ‘natural revelation’ which he uses interchangeably with ‘natural knowledge of God’ and with ‘natural theology’ in distinction to supernatural theology is helpful. He prefers ‘natural’ revelation over ‘general’ revelation because it brings the how of God’s communication (through nature) more clearly to the fore. ‘General’ revelation highlights the for whom of God’s communication. Another reason to prefer it is the continuity with reformed orthodoxy’s use of the distinction between natural and supernatural theology (ibid., 59, n. 1). On both accounts we would make the other choice. We do not want to limit a priori God’s means of communication to nature, nor do we want to confuse matters by linking the terminology to the different – even if related – topic of true knowledge of God unaided by his self-revelation. See also footnote 4 on p. 464. 30 Hendrikus Berkhof, Christelijk geloof: Een inleiding tot de geloofsleer, 4th ed. (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1979), 79. e English translation is from Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith, trans. Sierd Woudstra, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986; repr., 1990), 82.

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revelation is rooted in historical events that are connected to the wider context of what happens in the world. God’s dealings with the nations and with Israel are intertwined and this interrelation is not expressed in the crude distinction between special and general revelation.31 is interrelatedness of general and special revelation is highlighted by N.  T. Wright in his 2018 Gifford Lectures. He remarks the paradox that on the one hand, the historical method has been applied to the study of the Bible. On the other hand, because the Bible is labeled as special revelation, it is not included in the discussion of general revelation or taken into account as a possible resource for natural theology. Wright points out that it is surprising to exclude “the Bible from ‘nature’. e Bible was, aer all, written and edited within the world of space and time, by a large number of individuals situated in ‘natural’ communities and environments.”32 Since special revelation also describes historical events, “not least the public career of Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew who lived and died within the ‘natural’ course of world history,”33 they should at least be considered in constructing a natural theology: “Jesus and the New Testament ought by rights to be included as possible sources for the task of ‘natural theology’.”34 e problem of distinctions evolving into divisions rather than maintaining continuity is not a problem limited to the question of revelation. Jürgen Moltmann points out that there is a tendency in pneumatology to overlook the Spirit’s agency in creation and solely affirm the redemptive Spirit, thereby de facto putting redemption in direct opposition to creation. For Moltmann, then, “‘the Spirit of Christ’ has no longer anything to do with Yahweh’s ruach.”35 e relevance for the continuity between general and special revelation is clear. It is the same Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, who is the Spirit of Christ, i.e., the Holy Spirit who is operative in general revelation as in special revelation.36 Moltmann rightly 31

Berkhof, Christelijk geloof, 79. N. T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), loc. 135. 33 Ibid., loc. 144. 34 Ibid., loc. 175. “Jesus is part of ‘general revelation’ and admissible to any open enquiry into the relationship between God and the cosmos.” E. J. David Kramer, “Review of History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology by N. T. Wright,” European Journal of Theology 29, no. 2 (2020). 35 Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl, Paperback ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 8-9. 36 For Moltmann, this is an implication of the filioque clause. Although Western theology is perhaps more prone to this kind of division, it is not a necessary consequence of the filioque. 32

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points out that this problem is not confined to pneumatology but fundamentally regards “the unity of God’s work in creation, redemption and the sanctification of all things.”37 We are of the opinion that a bifurcation of general and special revelation precisely disrupts this fundamental unity of God’s economy. As I have elsewhere written, when we stress the continuity between general and special revelation we do not “diminish the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Christ. On the contrary! We maintain that Christ is the goal and purpose to which all revelation points as he himself points to the Father. For, in Christ, ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’” (Col 1:19).38 Similarly Col  2:3 states that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Nevertheless, the fear to abrogate God’s ultimate self-revelation in the incarnation is an important factor why many theologians and believers in general are wary of emphasizing continuity. We are, however, convinced that exactly the opposite is at stake. Kärkkäinen perceptively remarks that Karl Barth deduced the wrong conclusion from his conviction that all genuine knowledge of God is linked to Christ. is does not mean that there is no true revelation of God in creation, but rather that since Christ is both the agent of creation and the one who holds creation together, knowledge of God may be found everywhere.39 ese two aspects of Christ’s person and work are testified to in Col  1:16-17,40 and the latter aspect in Eph  1:1041 and Heb 1:3.42 Similarly, all truth (‘wisdom and knowledge’) in creation may be linked to Christ, as Col 2:343 makes clear.

37

Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 9. Wouter Biesbrouck, Wrestling with Angels: Catholic and Evangelical Tradition-Specific Approaches to Theology of Religions, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Louvain: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2013), 296. 39 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Revelation: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 118. 40 16  “ [F]or in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. 17  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:16-17). 41 “[…] to gather up all things in him [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10). 42 “He [Christ] is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3). 43 “[Christ] in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3). 38

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4. Revelation as Divine Invitation Distinctions in concepts are helpful, and we cannot do without them. at belongs to the essentials of systematic theology (or any science, for that matter). If, as Hendrikus Berkhof maintains, revelation is an event of encounter, then all revelation is extremely special and the term general revelation becomes a contradictio in terminis.44 Gerald O’Collins concurs that “too much insistence on the distinction between ‘general’ (better called ‘universal’) and ‘special’ revelation” has been made.45 We agree with Berkhof that in the case of the distinction between general and special revelation, it is probably not realistic to assume that we will be able to find alternative terminology that will receive general acceptance. e best we can do then, is “a persevering struggle for their purification.”46 is contribution is an exercise in that direction in which we start from the premise that all revelation results from acts of God to self-communicate. His purpose in this communication is not in the first place to share or impart knowledge about God-self but rather to invite humanity (and by extension also the whole of creation) in a loving relationship with God-self. is invitational aspect is noticeable in the definition of revelation that Michael Bird proffers: Bird defines revelation as “the self-presentation of the Triune God, who through the Holy Spirit communicates saving truth about himself and draws humankind into a community in fellowship with his Son, so that they might know him, experience his mercy, and enjoy him forever.”47 Avery Dulles similarly states that revelation is “a call to personal union with God.”48 Stephen Davis states that revelation “exists for the essential purpose of establishing a personal and loving relationship between God and human beings.”49 Earlier we pointed out 44

Berkhof, Christelijk geloof, 79. Gerald O’Collins, S.J., Revelation: Towards a Christian Interpretation of God’s Self-Revelation in Jesus Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ix. 46 Berkhof, Christelijk geloof, 81. He is referring to the discussion of general revelation in Hendrik Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press; repr., James Clarke and Co Ltd, 2002), chapter 20. Before his pragmatic solution of ‘purging’ the term, Kraemer (ibid., 342) states bluntly that general revelation “is one of the most misleading and confusing terms possible and ought to be abolished.” 47 Bird, Evangelical Theology, loc. 360.5 of 2034. 48 Dulles, Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, 84. 49 Stephen T. Davis, “Revelation and Inspiration,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. omas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 30-51, at 32. 45

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that for Hendrikus Berkhof revelation is an event of encounter.50 is is, arguably, also the position of the Second Vatican Council, which in Dei Verbum 2 speaks of revelation as God’s invitation to humanity for fellowship with Himself.51 O’Collins speaks of the word of God which “brings about a saving communion between God and human beings.”52 Commenting on the idea of God’s presence, Richard Bauckham helpfully points out that God’s omnipresence should not be understood as the geographical stretching of a divine attribute or that it refers to a static presence. He points out that “God’s presence is personal and active. He wills and acts to be present to every creature and at every moment.”53 Because it is ‘personal and active’ it is never dispassionate or disinterested, a “presence that makes no difference.”54 Revelation, then, is not only dialogical, but also soteriological. Several authors pointed out that in Dei Verbum the terms revelation and salvation are used as near synonyms. Terrence Merrigan remarks that Dei Verbum continuously moves between the language of salvation and the language of revelation.55 O’Collins goes so far as to claim that for the Council, “the history of revelation is the history of salvation and vice versa.”56 Werner Jeanrond also notes this shi in the understanding of revelation since Vatican II, towards a “personal and soteriological understanding of divine revelation which emphasizes the invitation to all men

50

Berkhof, Christelijk geloof, 59. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 2. 52 Gerald O’Collins, S.J., Rethinking Fundamental Theology: Toward a New Fundamental Theology, paperback ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71. 53 Richard Bauckham, Who Is God? Key Moments of Biblical Revelation, Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 12. 54 Ibid., 11. 55 Terrence Merrigan, Geloof en Openbaring: Ongepubliceerde cursusnota’s (Louvain: Faculteit eologie en Religiewetenschappen, KU Leuven, 2006), 53. Merrigan refers to Dei Verbum 3, 4, 6, 7, 14-15, 17, 21, but also to Ad Gentes 9 and 12 and Gaudium et Spes 45. Similarly, O’Collins (Rethinking Fundamental Theology: Toward a New Fundamental Theology, 71) notes “‘revelation’ and ‘salvation’ merge so closely that the Second Vatican Council employed the terms almost interchangeably in Dei Verbum.” 56 O’Collins, Rethinking Fundamental Theology: Toward a New Fundamental Theology, 82. Also O’Collins, Revelation: Towards a Christian Interpretation of God’s Self-Revelation in Jesus Christ, 37. In the same work (p. 30) he refers to Bultmann’s concept of Heilsoffenbarung which “nicely suggests both salvation that is revealing and revelation that is intrinsically salvific.” 51

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and women to participate in the divine nature.”57 roughout his work, Evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock has developed and stressed the soteriological aspect of revelation and the resulting basic continuity of general and special revelation. In his Scripture Principle (1984), he claims that if revelation is truly revealing God, it reveals him as the “God of the gospel” and therefore cannot “be other than saving in its basic significance.”58 In his pneumatology (Flame of Love, 1996), he states that general revelation is always also a revelation of God’s grace. For all humanity, this functions as a genuine invitation to respond to the Spirit’s outreach.59 Pinnock underlines the unity of God’s economy. Creation itself is a gratuitous gi, an act of God’s grace. Grace, therefore, “did not begin as result of the fall into sin.”60 Special revelation, God’s gracious self-communication culminating in Jesus Christ, is then continuous with general revelation. Newman scholar and Dominican theologian Jan Hendrik Walgrave puts it almost identically: “e relationship between Christ’s revelation and universal revelation, working in religious mankind, is thus first and foremost a relationship of dynamic continuity.”61 2. The Means of Revelation and the Means of Grace If we then agree that there is a basic continuity between general and special revelation, and that all revelation is soteriological, we must look at how such revelation takes shape in the concrete lives of people. We will look at some biblical texts that may hint at the concrete forms before trying to systematize them theologically. In order to do so, we will consider the neo-Calvinist understanding of ‘common grace’, the typological reading of reality within a sacramental understanding of reality and a dispositional soteriology. We will find that particular religious inscriptions – the particular cultural linguistic settings of people, play an important role in the way God communicates his loving self to invite 57 Werner Jeanrond, “Revelation and the Trinitarian Concept of God: Are ey Key Concepts for eological ought?,” in God, Experience and Mystery, ed. Werner Jeanrond and Christoph eobald, Concilium (London: SCM Press, 2001), 120-130, at 121. 58 Clark H. Pinnock, The Scripture Principle (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984; repr., Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2002), 7. 59 Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 187. 60 Ibid., 274, n. 3. 61 J.  H. Walgrave, Heil, geloof en openbaring (Kasterlee: De Vroente, 1968), 207 (my translation).

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people into communion with him and create within them a disposition towards him. is anonymous revelation and anonymous grace links people ontologically if not epistemologically to the Father in Christ through the Spirit. 1. Biblical Arguments We have established that God’s omnipresence is a personal and active presence, ever reaching out to communicate himself in a soteriological invitation to divine-human communion. God reaches out through his Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ through whom all creation came into being and through whom all of creation continues to be upheld. e Christological presence pervades all of creation and the Spirit acts in order for humanity (and all of creation) to be able to say ‘Abba Father’.62 is unrestricted availability of God’s invitation seems to be in tension with a traditional understanding that locates such ‘special’ revelation only within the borders of the covenant – either the Abrahamic covenant or the new covenant. However, there are some biblical examples of the Spirit’s activity outside those borders. In Gen 14:17-24, Abraham is blessed by Melchizedek, king of Salem, and reportedly “priest of God Most High” (v. 18). Jean Daniélou discusses Melchizedek as one of the pagan saints of the Old Testament. Melchizedek does not know God by his name ‘Yahweh’ but has come to know God through his cosmic work, i.e., the creator God who can be known through his working in the world.63 Clark Pinnock uses the case of Melchizedek as exemplar for all those who do not possess the full revelation of God, but who, on the basis of the limited revelation available to them, react in a proper way and are thereby accepted by God.64 e Bible is unclear what kind of religious practices Melchizedek performed, and on the basis of what ‘revelation’ he acted. We do know that his practices were in line with what was generally known in his time and region: offerings, blessings, and acceptance of tithes for the priestly order. Something similar is observed in the story of Job, whom O’Collins calls “the holy ‘outsider’ par excellence” as he is not an Israelite and no

62

See Rom 8:15 and Gal 4:6. Jean Daniélou, Heidense heiligen uit het Oude Testament, trans. A. Angevaare (Roosendaal: De Koepel), 84. 64 Clark H. Pinnock, “Revelation,” in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and James I. Packer (Leicester: IVP, 1988; reprint, electronic ed., Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 585-587, at 586. 63

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allusion is made of the Abrahamic or Mosaic covenant.65 We notice that Job makes sacrifices to God for possible sins of his children (Job 1:5). In the discussion with his friends, a distinguished theology can be gleaned, and above all, God reveals himself as one who can be known through creation as one who is wholly transcendent but at the same time also intimately close and caring. For O’Collins it is clear that “God reveals himself to ‘predecessors’ and ‘outsiders’: there is revelation before and outside the people of God (‘revelatio ante et extra populum Dei’).66 In the New Testament, the most striking example is undoubtedly that of the Magi (Mt 2:1-12). In an ironic reversal, Matthew pictures pagan astrologers, acting upon the revelation they presumed on the basis of their local wisdom (a mixture of religion, science and superstition) finding the Messiah of the Jews, whilst the wardens of divine (special) revelation are not at all looking for the Messiah, and not acting upon the knowledge. e true worshipers are those whom special revelation brands as idolaters. e precious gis they bring for the Messiah are as firstfruits of what representatives of all nations will bring to the new Jerusalem in the eschaton. e vision of John the Seer states that the city is enlightened by God himself and “e nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. […] People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations” (Rev 21:24, 26). Cornelius is the Roman Centurion to whom the apostle Peter is sent aer both received a vision. Acts 10:2-467 says that Cornelius is devout and fears God68 and is known for his generosity towards the poor and

65

O’Collins, Revelation: Towards a Christian Interpretation of God’s SelfRevelation in Jesus Christ, 192. 66 Ibid. Gerald R. McDermott and Harold A. Netland agree that Job “seems to have had no contact with Israel” and deserves the title ‘holy pagan’ (A Trinitarian Theology of Religions: An Evangelical Proposal [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 105, n. 40). See also Daniélou, Heidense heiligen uit het Oude Testament, 70-82. 67 2  “ He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God. 3 One aernoon at about three o’clock he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, ‘Cornelius’. 4 He stared at him in terror and said, ‘What is it, Lord?’ He answered, ‘Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God’” (Acts 10:2-4). 68 e term for “one who fears God” (φοβούμενος τὸν θεόν) could be a technical term that refers to “a class of people who believed, and to some extent followed, the Jewish religion without being full converts to Judaism” – Conrad Gempf, “Acts,” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al. (Leicester and Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1081-1082.

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his unrelenting prayer.69 In the vision, the angel tells Cornelius that his disposition and religious behavior is noticed by God and that his religious practices function as a ‘memorial sacrifice’ pleasing to God.70 I. Howard Marshall comments that “[t]he description of Cornelius as one who fears God, gives alms, and prays reflects the ideal of piety typified in Tob. 1:3; 12:8 and elsewhere.”71 On the basis of this event, Peter reports in Acts 10:34-35: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Christian Dionne remarks that such a one already participates in salvation even if that salvation is not fully consummated.72 He points out that God’s favor on someone is not the end point of one’s relation with God and Luke’s account makes clear that the proclamation of what God has done in Christ is accepted by Cornelius. Nevertheless “the C. K. Barrett [A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. Vol. I: Preliminary Introduction and Commentary on Acts I–XIV, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 500], however, comments that “in and around the first century Jews, proselytes, and occasionally Gentiles might be described as fearing, or reverencing, God; that is, the expressions σεβόμενοι, or φοβούμενοι, τὸν θεόν, were not necessarily technical terms but could be simply descriptive of the pious.” 69 For ‘constant prayer’ in Act 10:2, the Lexham Bible adds a translator note: “Literally ‘through everything’.” See The Lexham English Bible, ed. W. Hall Harris, III et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press). 70 Craig Keener [The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1993), Acts 10:4-8] understands the reference to ‘memorial offering’ to be to the sacrifice instituted in the Levitical code in Lev 2:2 and sees a link between the hour of the vision (‘the ninth hour’) and the two times a day when the daily sacrifices in the temple were taking place (third and ninth hour). Marshall, however, thinks that “a direct reference to Leviticus is unlikely here; the use of ‘memorial’ in relation to God is found more broadly, and it is more likely that a common understanding of other religious acts functioning like sacrifice is present (cf. Sir. 50:15; Tob. 12:12; 1 En. 99:3)” – I. Howard Marshall, “Acts,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic; Nottingham: Apollos, 2007), 577. 71 Marshall, in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 577. Tob 1:3 “I, Tobit, walked in the ways of truth and righteousness all the days of my life. I performed many acts of charity for my kindred […].” Tob 12:8: “Prayer with fasting is good, but better than both is almsgiving with righteousness.” 72 “Il faut alors admettre que tout être humain qui ‘pratique la justice et craint Dieu’, et qui, en retour, est considéré favorablement par Dieu, participe déjà, d’une manière, à la réalité du Salut.” Christian Dionne, “La rencontre de l’‘Autre’: Quelques remarques sur Actes 10, Actes 14 et Actes 17,” in Le dialogue interreligieux: Interpellations théologiques contemporaines, ed. Fabrice Blée and Achiel Peelman (Montréal: Novalis, 2013), 164.

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important thing here seems to be the acknowledgement that salvation already exists and is in the process of being realised for all those who, regardless of their origin, race, culture, belief or religion, are positively situated before God.”73 Cornelius exemplifies positively what Heb 11:674 indicates as requirements to please God: approach him in the belief that he exists and rewards those who seek him. e author of Hebrews would ascribe faith to Cornelius because he pleased God. It is noteworthy that the passage in Hebrews concerns the pre-Abrahamitic heroes of the faith, who operated in a context with limited ‘special revelation’. In that sense, they are comparable to those outside the covenant community who have no (or limited) access to special revelation in Israel and Christ. C. K. Barrett comments: What Luke means is that God judges men fairly in accordance with their opportunities. Cornelius is not to be condemned for not believing a Gospel he had never heard; he is rather to be rewarded for having lived up to the opportunities he had had by being allowed to learn more and to believe more. God looks with favour upon those who so far as they know him fear him, and so far as they know what righteousness is practise it.75

It is remarkable that the disposition, behavior, and religious practices of Cornelius are described in terms resembling the ideal of piety in Second Temple Judaism. We must not fail to notice that in Acts, the events surrounding Cornelius function as a key moment in the early Church’s understanding of the extent of salvation.76 It is true that these four examples, two from the Hebrew Bible and two from the New Testament, are ambiguous. Our interpretation here runs counter traditional Evangelical and some Roman Catholic interpretation. It harmonizes, however, with several of the major emphases in biblical revelation concerning God’s immanence and his economy. 73 “L’important ici semble d’admettre que ce Salut existe déjà, et qu’il est en cours de réalisation pour tous ceux qui, peu importent leur origine, leur race, leur culture, leurs croyances ou leur religion, se situent positivement devant Dieu.” Dionne, “La rencontre de l’‘Autre’,” 165. 74 “And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11:6).. 75 Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 498. Elsewhere, he writes rather provocatively: “God is about to take action on behalf of Cornelius by bringing him within reach of the Gospel. He does this, one might say, because Cornelius has shown by his devotion and his charity that he deserves it. is theme runs through the narrative; it is reasonable to ask whether it is consistent with, for example, Pauline theology.” Ibid., 503. 76 See also ibid., 493, 95.

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2. Systematic Theological Considerations a) Common Grace ere are different ways in which theology has expressed God’s immanence to the world apart from the categories of general and special revelation. Neo-Calvinist theologians developed the concept of ‘common grace’. A developed theology of common grace was introduced by the Dutch theologians Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.77 ey were in need of a theological concept that confirmed the goodness of creation aer the fall. ere is much that is true, good, and beautiful, not merely in nature, but also in human culture in general and specifically in individuals, families, organizations, societies, economic relations, arts, sciences, and also religions. Ernest Conradie states that common grace, for Kuyper, “helps to affirm the goodness that is still present, despite the impact of sin, outside the Christian sphere of influence – in terms of a widespread sense of moral conscience and in terms of religious practices that help to preserve identity and community.”78 For Kuyper and Bavinck, nature and grace are not opposites. Kuyper expresses lyrically how nature and grace belong together: “you cannot see the richness of grace if you do not see how its roots penetrate everywhere into the joints and cracks of the life of nature.”79 Bavinck conveys the continuity between nature and grace by pointing out that it is “the 77 Herman Bavinck, De algemeene genade: Rede bij de overdracht van het rectoraat aan de Theologische School te Kampen op 6 December 1894 (Kampen: G.Ph. Zalsman, 1894); Abraham Kuyper, De gemeene gratie. Vol. I: Het geschiedkundige gedeelte (Leiden: D. Donner, 1902); Abraham Kuyper, De gemeene gratie. Vol. II: Het leerstellige gedeelte (Leiden: D. Donner, 1903); Abraham Kuyper, De gemeene gratie. Vol. III: Het practische gedeelte (Leiden: D. Donner, 1904). For an English translation, see Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” trans. Raymond Van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal 24, no. 1 (1989). Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World. Vol. I: The Historical Section, ed. Jordan J. Ballor and Stephen J. Grabill, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman, Ed M. Van der Maas, and with an Introduction by Richard J. Mouw, Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, WA: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and Lexham Press, 2016). 78 Ernst Conradie, “Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for Contemporary Ecotheology: Some Reflections from within the South African Context,” in Creation and Salvation: Dialogue on Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for Contemporary Ecotheology, ed. Ernst M. Conradie, Studies in Reformed eology 20 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2011), 95-135, at 107. 79 “Dat ge de genade niet in haar rijkdom kunt doorzien, als ge niet speurt, hoe haar wortelvezelen overal in de voegen en scheuren van het leven der natuur

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same God who speaks to us in nature and grace, in creation and recreation, in the Logos and in Christ, in God’s Spirit and in the Spirit of Christ,” for, says Bavinck, “nature and grace are no contradictions, we have one God from whom, through whom and for whom both are.”80 is understanding of common grace allowed both Bavinck and Kuyper to express themselves much more positive towards other religions than Calvinist theology of religion is commonly portrayed. Bavinck states: ere is thus a rich revelation of God even among the heathens – not only in nature but also in their heart and conscience, in their life and history, among their statesmen and artists, their philosophers and reformers. ere exists no reason at all to denigrate or diminish this divine revelation. Nor is it to be limited to a so-called natural revelation.81

Bavinck renounces the description of the founders of other religions as “impostors, enemies of God, accomplices of the devil”82 and he explicitly mentions Mohammed. For Bavinck, common grace is clearly at work in the religions. is is the work of the Holy Spirit.83 e positive appreciation of other religions is recognized in their fulfilling religious needs of people and in offering consolation in times of suffering.84 is implies that the function of common grace in God’s economy is not merely in restraining evil and sin. It has a positive contribution to make. Richard Mouw observes that Kuyper’s understanding of common grace is not exhausted by its restraining power. It is not limited to making human life (in Calvinist theology pertaining to ‘both the elect and non-elect’) bearable by curtailing the effects of the fall. It also comprises an internal aspect “in the heart and lives of the non-elect.”85 In a way similar to indringen.” Abraham Kuyper, De gemeene gratie, Vierde onveranderde druk, 3 vols. (Kampen: Kok, [1939]), I, 228 (my translation). 80 “Het is dezelfde God, die in natuur en in genade, in schepping en herschepping, in den Logos en in Christus, in den Geest Gods en in den Geest van Christus tot ons spreekt. Natuur en genade zijn geen tegenstelling; wij hebben éénen God, uit wien en door wien en tot wien zij beide zijn.” Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde dogmatiek, 4 vols. (Kampen: J. H. Bos, 1897), II, 47 (my translation). 81 Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 41. 82 Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde dogmatiek. Vol. 1: Inleiding – Principia (Kampen: J. H. Bos, 1895), 238 (my translation). 83 Bavinck connects this with Calvin’s concepts of ‘semen religionis’ and ‘sensus divinitatis’. Ibid., 239. 84 Ibid., 240. 85 Richard J. Mouw, “Discerning the Spirit in World Religions: A Neocalvinist Approach,” in The Spirit Is Moving: New Pathways in Pneumatology. Studies Presented to Professor Cornelius van der Kooi on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed. Gijsbert van den Brink, Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman, and Maarten Wisse (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 200-214, at 204.

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Bavinck, this allows Kuyper to positively evaluate the religious contribution of Mohammed. What actually was this magic wand with which Muhammad won this unprecedented loyalty and brought about this unique turn in the history of the world? It cannot possibly be attributed to conscious deceit. A deceiver lives on the basis of his lies and can produce no more than pseudo events that can only control restricted circles and are short-lived. Undoubtedly Muhammad had ecstatic visionary instincts, but such instincts are both quickly enflamed and equally quickly extinguished. Such a person is not likely to possess sustaining power through the centuries. A spiritual power of the first order must have dwelt in Muhammad that, regardless of other factors of lower rank, supplied the essential driving force from which his creativity emerged and that retains its vitality till this day. That driving force undoubtedly was his inspired and resilient call for Monotheism.86

It seems that the concept of common grace indeed allows theologians from the Reformation to hold a more positive evaluation of God’s active and life-giving presence in the world outside the sphere of influence of the Church. It also directs away from an exclusively negative and condemnatory understanding of other religions. Yet in the end, for these Reformed theologians, even common grace is neither salvific nor does it enable those outside the purview of special revelation and particular grace to participate in the fruits of Christ’s salvific work. Mouw recognizes this tension and tries to overcome it allowing that “much of what we now think of as common grace may in the end time be revealed to be saving grace.”87 is implies that the means of salvation

86 Abraham Kuyper, The Mystery of Islam, with a Preface by Translator-Editor Jan H. Boer (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2010), 11. e original Dutch has “Wat nu was de tooverstaf, waardoor Mohammed deze ongeëvenaarde bekoring van zich deed uitgaan, en dezen ongekenden keer in de historie der wereld tot stand bracht? Aan opzettelijk bedrog valt niet te denken. De bedrieger lee uit de leugen, en kan daarom niet dan een schijn-actie, en die schijn-actie slechts voor een korte wijle en in kleinen kring van zich doen uitgaan. Ongetwijfeld was Mohammed van ecstatisch-visionairen aanleg, maar ook uit den snel opvlammenden, maar daarom juist even snel gebluschten glans van het visionaire, komt geen macht op, die de eeuwen beheerscht. Er moet in Mohammeds geest een geestelijke macht van eerste orde hebben gehuisd, die, hoe ook gesteund door factoren van lagere orde, de wezenlijke drijracht was, waaruit zijn schepping opkwam en die haar tot nu toe in stand hield, en die drijracht was ongetwijfeld zijn bezield en veerkrachtig roepen voor het Monotheïsme.” Abraham Kuyper, Om de oude wereldzee, 2de onveranderde ed., 2 vols. (Amsterdam Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1908), II, 3. 87 Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace: The 2000 Stob Lectures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 100.

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and revelation remain hidden in mystery for us. eologians must not, however, too easily play ‘mystery’ as a trump card. e appeal to mystery can be a way of evading the hard work of theology. eologians have an obligation to try and give a reasonable explanation of the faith (cf. 1 Pet 3:15). David Stubbs tries to introduce a third category of grace to maintain the distinction between God’s work in creation and his work in recreation but at the same time to resist the temptation to make nature and grace opposites. He argues that “perhaps the common grace tradition needs to question the binary opposition between common and special grace, and create their own three-legged stool: creational grace, reconciling grace, and new-creational grace.”88 We doubt that a further distinction will overcome the problematic tensions. We find ourselves to be much more in agreement with Kees van der Kooi in questioning altogether the bifurcation of grace. Earlier we argued for plotting general and special revelation on a continuum. We must understand grace in a similar way. It is worth quoting van der Kooi more extensively here: God, in his turning to the world and in his sending of Jesus Christ, is offering his nearness, his life-giving involvement and commitment. And this involvement takes something up that was already present in the work of the Spirit in creation. God’s blessing of this life, the preservation and sustaining of the world, stems from the same God, from the same source as the coming and sending of Jesus Christ. e claim that there is only one kind of grace, God’s life-giving grace, and not different kinds of grace, will take away the duality in Kuyper’s thought.89

We base such an understanding on the same argument as our understanding of the unity of revelation: God’s essence as love, he is the one who invites creation to participate in his overflowing love. One systematic theological concept that brings God’s abundance into focus is ‘sacramental ontology’. b) Sacramental Ontology A sacramental ontology understands creation to be rich in pointers to God. Yet it is not merely that creation contains traces of transcendence or that it describes “an objective ontology of divine symbolism that is written into the very fabric of creation” as Scott Hahn describes the 88

David L. Stubbs, “Kuyper’s Common Grace and Kelsey: Polishing a Reformed Gem,” Journal of Reformed Theology 10 (2016): 314-339, at 330. 89 Kees van der Kooi, “‘Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit’,” in Creation and Salvation, 213-221, at 220.

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sacramental worldview of omas Aquinas.90 A sacramental ontology is a participatory ontology. Hans Boersma maintains that a “sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and ‘point of reference’, but that it also subsists or participates in God.”91 A case can be built on the biblical texts referring to Christ holding creation together92 and on Justin Martyr’s notion of logos spermatikos. Regarding the latter, omas Guarino claims that logos spermatikos indeed has participatory ramifications.93 Regarding the former, we note that Ephraem the Syrian worked with a sacramental ontological understanding. Ephraem refers to the headship of Christ in creation in order to find in nature, writes Sidney Griffith, “types and symbols […] by means of which the invisible God reveals himself to the eyes and minds of persons of good faith […].”94 If we can indeed speak of a sacramental ontology, then creation is replete with opportunities to discover the true God. ese opportunities are not merely formal invitations to take part in his loving nature, but ipso facto offer the means to do so. However, all religious experience remains ambivalent.95 e means of grace do not escape such hermeneutical ambivalence. is drives us to

90

Scott Hahn, Scripture Matters: Essays on Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church, Logos digital ed. (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2003), 57. 91 Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 24. 92 See our discussion above of Col 1:16-17, Eph 1:10, Heb 1:3, and Col 2:3. 93 “A proper correlation between Christianity and secular wisdom is allowable for Justin on the grounds that creation itself bestows a certain participation in the personified wisdom of God, Jesus of Nazareth.” omas G. Guarino, Foundations of Systematic Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 271. 94 Sidney H. Griffith, “A Spiritual Father for the Whole Church: e Universal Appeal of St. Ephraem the Syrian,” Hugoye; Journal of Syria Studies 1, no. 2 (2010 [1998]) originally published as Sidney H. Griffith, “A Spiritual Father for the Whole Church: Saint Ephraem the Syrian,” Sobornost 20, no. 2 (1998): 60-70. Griffith (211-212) quotes the full stanza XX.12 of Ephraem’s Hymn on Virginity: “In every place, if you look, his symbol is there, / and wherever you read, you will find his types. // For in him all creatures were created / and he traced his symbols on his property. // When he was creating the world, / he looked to adorn it with icons of himself. // e springs of his symbols were opened up to run down and / pour forth his symbols into his members.” For a the discussion of the typological approach of Ephraem in the wider context of the revelation of God in all of reality, see McDermott, Everyday Glory, 7-8. 95 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict Series (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).

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make a link between the concept of common grace and a sacramental ontology. e means of common grace are not unequivocal, but the ‘revelation’ of God which they contain can lead people to God but can also lead them to judgment. e same goes for the ‘normal’ means of grace like the eucharist if we note how Paul can say that some ‘eat towards their judgment’.96 As with the ‘ordinary’ sacraments, the efficacy of the means of grace depends on their reception in faith. If the proper disposition is necessary for the sacrament to bear fruit, the same applies for the ‘sacramentals’ with which creation is replete. We think that a fruitful crossfertilization can take place when we extend the concept of common grace even as we stretch the Roman Catholic understanding of ‘sacramentals’. e Catechism of the Catholic Church says of sacramentals that “they do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it.”97 Sacrosanctum Concilium makes the case that all of the created order, indeed, even all ‘material things’ could function as a sacramental implying that it potentially contributes to sanctification and God’s glory.98 One of the benefits of this argumentation is its trinitarian structure. A sacramental ontology links all reality with God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. e logos spermatikos makes the explicit connection with the Son. And the conferring of grace and right disposition is clearly pneumatological in order. A second benefit, not in the least for Roman Catholic theology, is the indissoluble link between sacramentals and the Church. Sacrosanctum Concilium states that the benefits of sacramentals “are obtained through the Church’s intercession.”99 Such an ecclesiological dimension is important as it ask for the active participation of the faithful in realizing the benefits of a sacramental ontology for those outside the Church. is ecclesiological understanding points to a huge ecclesial responsibility. e Church must activate, so to say, the sacramentals available for non-Christians in its prayers. For Protestants not working within the 96 “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Cor 11:29).  97 Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), 373, §1670. 98 Second Vatican Council, “Sacrosanctum Concilium: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” (1963): §61, accessed February 11, 2021, https://www.vatican.va/ archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_ sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html. 99 Sacrosanctum Concilium 60.

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framework of sacramentals, we proffer that participation in interreligious dialogue and interreligious rituals could be a way to open the doors of God’s grace in their own understanding and of sharing that grace with adherents of other religions. c) Pneumatology and a Dispositional Soteriology e foregoing discussion hints to the importance of the right disposition of the individual. In this context, we notice a commonality in some Catholic and Protestant approaches. Nathaniel Sutanto has shown that neo-Calvinists like Bavinck and Kuyper understood general revelation not in the first place as accessed epistemologically. at is, they did not consider general revelation to be reducible “to propositional beliefs about God” but considered it more as “precognitive and primordial in character.”100 General revelation is not accessed through one’s rational analysis, but it is a “precognitive attunement (though suppressed), by virtue of God’s dynamic acting in the world […].”101 Sutanto shows that according to Bavinck one can know God unconsciously – with the soul rather than with the mind.102 Common grace, for Bavinck, is capable to “account for the real presence of true beliefs in unregenerate creatures.”103 Henk van den Belt concurs that Bavinck sees this effect also in the religions which are the result of a subjective response to the semen religionis. ere is an internal principle to revelation that makes one receptive to revelation. Van den Belt claims that for Bavinck “religion is a form of revelation; namely, the internal counterpart of God’s general revelation in nature and history.”104 We find a similar exposition of a precognitive general revelation in Walgrave’s discussion of anonymous grace.105 Anonymous grace is also

100

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, “Neo-Calvinism on General Revelation: A Dogmatic Sketch,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20 (2018): 495-516, at 497. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 503. 103 Ibid., 511. 104 Henk van den Belt, “Religion as Revelation? e Development of Herman Bavinck’s View from a Reformed Orthodox to a Neo-Calvinist Approach,” The Bavinck Review 4 (2013): 9-31, at 30. 105 Walgrave mentions that the terminology for ‘anonymous grace’ comes from Cardinal Dechamps, who played an important role in the First Vatican Council. Unfortunately, Walgrave does not mention where in Dechamps he found this term. Although we have searched for it in several of Dechamps’

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grace granted by Christ, but the recipient is not aware that Christ is the benefactor. According to Walgrave, there is a certain ‘knowledge’ of God in the person who receives grace, but it is a knowledge through sympathy by which we are inwardly attuned to God and drawn towards him.106 We can know something without our being aware of it. “is is an inner knowledge, an intimate apprehension of God, but we do not possess this apprehending knowing in such a way that by our own reflection we can convey its contents in clarity of conscious knowledge. By itself it gives us no more than a slumbering knowledge which we cannot of our own accord awaken from sleep.”107 at is why, for Walgrave, the one exposed to anonymous grace has an unconscious longing, a desire, to know its benefactor and this implies an orientation or disposition towards God.108 is is God’s inner drawing that animates human life even when a person is unaware of its divine origin.109 is ‘inner tendency’ or the ‘inner existential tendency’110 is, however, oriented towards a conscious act of recognition and acceptance of the full revelation of God in Christ. e anonymity of grace is only temporary and will be resolved, if not in this life through the proclamation of the Church, then at least eschatologically. John Wesley held equally to a dispositional soteriology. According to the founder of Methodism, “the merciful God regards the lives and tempers of men more than their ideas. I believe He respects the goodness of the heart rather than the clearness of the head.”111 Methodist theologian omas Oden says that the goodness of the heart is made possible through ‘actual grace’ which makes one “fit to act in a way accountable to God.”112 is is not in the first place an epistemological awareness, but an existential, not so much “our understanding of truth, but more so our extensive writings, we were not able to find the precise terminology. See Walgrave, Heil, geloof en openbaring, 83. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 83-84 (my translation). 108 Ibid., 83. 109 Ibid., 84. 110 “‘Innerlijke tendentie’ en ‘innerlijke wezenstendentie’,” ibid., 84, 85. 111 John Wesley, Sermons 87-141, ed. omas Jackson, 3rd complete and unabridged ed., e Complete Works of John Wesley 7 (1872; repr., e Ages Digital Library Collections, Albany, OR, 1996, 1997), Sermon CXXV.15, as quoted in Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to the Theology of Religions: Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives, 88 Kärkkäinen, however, mistakenly writes “idols” rather than “ideas.” 112 omas Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 57 as quoted in Kyle Faircloth, “Natural Law and the Nature

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disposition to embody the truth.”113 It is a dispositional enabling that is activated on the basis of actual grace mediated through general revelation directed towards salvation.114 is precognitive and dispositional element is taking concrete form in the cultural and social particularities of people, including in what Marianne Moyaert calls the “particular religious inscriptions” of people.115 e semen religionis cannot be but particular to the context of those involved. We noted with Walgrave the existence of a drive, a longing, to give expression to this primordial or precognitive knowing. For those outside the reach of Christianity, it necessarily takes shape within the religious cultural-linguistic framework that is available. We need concrete forms, tangible signs, to express our religiosity, and to connect with the divine. e tangible and the particular are inevitable for human beings. For some Evangelicals, it may be difficult to acknowledge that the sensus divinitatis is positively expressed in religious rituals, liturgical practices, and holy places. e tendency lingers to oppose religion to true belief (“we don’t have a religion, we have a relation [with God]”). Richard Bauckham, in his recent study on who God is, reflects on a similar tendency in some biblical theology to denigrate the Temple (a static dwelling place) compared to the mobile Tabernacle, saying that such a view ‘is probably influenced by a Protestant suspicion of holy places and sacerdotal rituals.”116 Bauckham remarks that God communicates his merciful availability with palpable symbols, precisely “because God’s presence in this world is most oen not evident” and therefore “his people need such assurances.”117 For Israel “[t]he temple was a tangible sign of God’s gracious accessibility.”118 It would be surprising if the Holy Spirit did not reach out in similar ways to others outside God’s special revelation. In the absence of Scriptural revelation, one would actually expect more rather than less of these signs and symbols that communicate God’s accessibility. Here Evangelicals can learn from Neo-Calvinists as Bavinck

of Grace: A Reformation Approach to the Question of the Unevangelized,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20 (2018): 472-494, at 487. 113 Oden, Transforming, 43 as quoted in Faircloth, “Natural Law,” 488. 114 Ibid., 489. 115 Marianne Moyaert, “Postliberalism, Religious Diversity, and Interreligious Dialogue: A Critical Analysis of George Lindbeck’s Fiduciary Interests,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 47 (2012): 64-87, at 85. 116 Bauckham, Who Is God?, 16. 117 Ibid., 17. 118 Ibid.

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and Kuyper and their much more positive evaluation both of religion in general and other religions in particular. 3. Conclusion Common grace and a sacramental ontology show us a God who is inviting people everywhere into communion with himself by the revelatory pressure119 and constant pull of grace of all of reality. is includes the religio-cultural inscriptions of non-Christian religionists. e implication is that those who have no access to God’s special revelation, especially his self-disclosure in Jesus Christ, will have access to other revelation through which the Spirit communicates the benefits of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Even if this is ‘anonymous grace’ for the persons involved, it is the Spirit who knows what to pray even if humanity’s words are totally lacking. For this Spirit who is working, is the same Spirit who says ‘Abba Father’.120 is indicates that the Spirit is working through the structures, institutions and religions of other cultures, however marred they may be when Christologically evaluated.121

119

For this term, see Sutanto, “Neo-Calvinism on General Revelation,” 504. Rom 8:15, 26-27. 121 is paper is an homage to my Doktorvater Terrence Merrigan. In this paper I have broached upon several topics that are central to his thinking. His own PhD supervisor was Walgrave, which makes it fitting to give this Dominican theologian a renewed audience. For many years Terry taught the courses ‘Faith and Revelation’ and ‘eology of Interreligious Dialogue’. Studying under him has le its indelible mark on me. But working with Terry is being touched as much by his holy heart as by his clear head. See Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991). 120

22 “Tread Softly! All the Earth Is Holy Ground” A Comparativist Responds Constructively to Terrence Merrigan’s Sacramental Theology of Religions Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

1. Merrigan’s Invitation [A]n understanding of interreligious dialogue which takes its lead from the doctrine of the incarnation would allow Christian participants in dialogue to do (more) justice to the particularities of their own and other traditions, while enabling a more convincing account of developments in Christian theology in response to the contemporary experience of religious pluralism.1

roughout his career and amid many other theological projects and teaching and administrative obligations, Terrence Merrigan has been patiently developing a theology of religions that is deeply Christian, grounded in a deep appreciation for the Incarnation, the sacramental nature of the faith, and the particularity-in-Christ at the heart of a Christian sense of the world – and that enables rather than blocks a deeper Catholic engagement with the many religions of the world. As is well known, Merrigan is a leading expert in the writings and thought of John Henry Newman. ough Newman was on his own terms no leader in interreligious learning (as distinct from ecumenical affairs), Merrigan finds in his writings wisdom that fosters an understanding of religions resonant with Christian tradition and yet promising greater attentiveness and receptiveness to other traditions. As Merrigan states in a 2011 essay, God is inextricably and from the start involved in our lives, present within us even if in the mediations of our material and verbal realities God’s reality is both obscured and constricted: 1 Terrence Merrigan, “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17-27, at 17.

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e insistence on the mediated character of the divine presence is, of course, the application of the sacramental principle that was so dear to Newman. If God “is still actively present” in history, Newman claimed, then He must be “acting through, with, and beneath those physical, social, and moral laws, of which our experience informs us.” He must be implicated in “that system which meets the eye,” that is to say, the world as we know it. Indeed, according to Newman, “the one great rule on which the Divine Dispensations with mankind have been and are conducted, [is] that the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible [– the veil, yet still partially the symbol and index: so that all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and yet suggests, and above all subserves, a system of persons, facts, and events beyond itself.]”2

God is mysteriously manifest in the world, material and historical, yet in obscure ways; the veil is ever drawn, though ever ready to be pulled back ever so slightly. e Church too is implicated in the mystery of God present in this way: “To suggest, therefore, that Christ is always ‘implicated’ in the salvation of all men and women, but that the Church is only implicated in the salvation of Christians, would be to violate the sacramental (or incarnational) principle on which the Church is founded and to which John Henry Newman was so committed.”3 Merrigan ventures further by inviting Catholic thinkers to stand firmly on this sacramental foundation, not to hide out in Catholic preserves, but in order to pay more attention to religions, in a concrete, vivid, sacramental manner: [T]his same ‘sacramentalism’ obliges Catholic thinkers to account, in a coherent fashion, for the manifest signs of the divine presence (what Vatican II called the ‘bona moralia et spiritualia’) among non-Christian men and women who look to their concrete religious traditions for spiritual sustenance. It is in light of this challenge that Newman’s insistence that God’s presence to the world is always a mediated presence acquires contemporary significance. As far as the non-Christian religions are concerned, this means that they have a claim on us, a claim to be taken seriously as potential channels of the divine presence that was fully realized in Christ. Whether this is the case (i.e., whether they are such channels) can only be determined in and through dialogue, through intense engagement with the life and thought and practice of non-Christians.4

2 Terrence Merrigan, “Newman and Religions,” Louvain Studies 55 (2011): 336-349, at 339-340. 3 Ibid., 348. 4 Ibid. My experience suggests that ‘dialogue’, as verbal exchange, too oen does not generate this ‘intense engagement’, which arises rather by the kind of study I call ‘comparative theology’ and others call ‘interreligious learning’, etc.

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God’s presence is mediated to us in part through those other religious ways of veiling/unveiling the divine: to understand this requires interreligious learning that is particular and concrete, rather than generalities about ‘the religions’. Otherwise, the vivid concreteness of the Christian faith and lived reality will find itself merely next to pale, vague notions of ‘the religions’ that have more to do with how Christians think and feel than how believers in other faiths live out their religious lives now and over millennia. If Christians wish to assess how religions channel divine presence, the way forward is by learning pursued in practice. Merrigan points to dialogue, but this may at first appear as an exchange of ideas, courtesies from a bit of a distance. Fortunately, he qualifies that dialogue as “intense engagement with the life and thought and practice of non-Christians.” In 2017 Merrigan again draws on Newman in taking up the question of other religions. e immediate context is another Newman distinction, this time between ‘doctrines’ (articulations of the truth of the faith in one or another context) and ‘principles’ (“the essential or fundamental premises on which a doctrinal system takes shape”).5 Here too Newman is enlisted to speak to how the visible world mediates yet veils the divine: For Newman, the doctrine of the incarnation highlighted especially (but not exclusively), the “sacramental principle,” that is, the notion that God’s dealings with humankind are always mediated, that “the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible.” e incarnation is the supreme instance of such mediation, “the announcement of a divine gi conveyed in a material and visible medium.” For Newman the sacramental principle was “characteristic” of incarnationally based Christianity.6

Such grounding in Christ is the basis for engaging traditions more holistically: An incarnationally grounded, and sacramentally oriented theology of religions cannot but pause and reflect upon the abundance of spiritual and moral goods manifest in non-Christian religious traditions. Such a theology is, so to speak, predicated on the conviction that “lived religion” is the only valid testimony to the divine presence, and that where such testimony is given, one must tread carefully for one may be standing on “holy ground.”7

5 Merrigan, “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” 18. 6 Ibid., 18-19. 7 Ibid., 27. See also Terrence Merrigan, “Introduction: Rethinking eologies of Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, 1-16, at 5. ‘Lived religion’ is, as I take it, ‘living religion’,

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Holy ground: some readers may think immediately of Christina Rossetti’s “Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets,” a long and prayerful meditation on Christ in the world, of which this is just a very small portion: Tread soly! all the earth is holy ground. It may be, could we look with seeing eyes, is spot we stand on is a Paradise Where dead have come to life and lost been found…8

Along with Rossetti, Merrigan is surely pointing us back to Exodus 3: When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” en he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex 3:4-5, NRSV).

ere are holy places; they can be visited, but it is only the humble, unshod, who know enough to tread gently there. Just as Moses neither owned the holy space, nor predicted where he would meet God next, Merrigan is suggesting that in the other religions we will be able to meet God too, if we proceed vulnerably and with humility, one step at a time. Here too Merrigan hearkens to Newman’s notion of the visible world as instrument and veil: Such a theology, rooted in the Church’s own experience of the “Word made flesh,” unashamedly posits its own criteria for the determination of what is good and true and worthy of worship. It does so, however, in the awareness that other expressions of the encounter with the Holy are possible, and that, in our day, they demand – and deserve – to be taken seriously, in their very materiality, as questions to us and perhaps even as responses to the God for whom, in Newman’s words, “the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible.”9

e mystery of the Incarnation is the measure of what is good, true, and holy, and this enables us to engage other traditions in a manner commensurate with how we understand the Christian faith. Both at home and abroad, so to speak, the veiling makes the mystery of God and the world near and accessible, because and not despite the fact of sacramental mediation. One cannot look to the Christian mystery nor at that such as does not exclude the great traditions of scripture and tradition, practice and experience, that long precede the present moment. 8 is long poem can be found in Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti’s Poems, With Memoir and Notes by William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), 73-82; the cited lines are on 76. 9 Merrigan, “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” 27, citing John Henry Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (London: B. M Pickering, 1873), 192.

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of other traditions with a demand for utter clarity and complete certainty, but rather only with a respect for holiness that relies on a careful discernment of where God is. e historical-incarnational dynamic of the imagination helps us to distinguish between mere ideas about religion that have no relationship, for instance, to any particular religion, and those that enter seriously into the detail of the histories of religions, where the prehending and realizing imaginative powers are able to turn to concrete cases. e religious imagination, if its power is to be effective, must be observed in action: In short, the imaginary with any claim to move us or to inspire (or convert) us must – quite literally – become history and continue to ‘make’ history. is is the only proof of its vitality and of its relevance […] Concretely, this means that the defenders of ‘great ideas’ and all those who appeal to the power of the ‘imaginary’ cannot neglect the study of history, and that any and all truth claims must, so to speak, be ‘enfleshed’ or ‘incarnated’ in history if they are to be at all credible.10

is concrete ‘making of history’ need not, I suggest, be restricted to particular social or political forms. Indeed, recognizing how traditions have estimated and engaged the world around them, and how religious teachers and poets see their work at the service of the world, are historymaking events of importance. Such events too have future to them, as they make possible further real-time encounters across religious borders among those imaginative enough to grasp the opportunities. It is now time to ask more concretely what it means to say that the incarnate Word enables the Church to learn, even while positing “its own criteria for the determination of what is good and true and worthy of worship.” How does theological reflection, guided by Christian doctrine and its generous principle of sacramentality, encounter the abundance of spiritual and moral goods in other traditions, without reducing those other traditions to raw materials? How does one “tread carefully” on a ground that is holy – and not to be strip-mined or dug up and carried off – because one is a Christian who adheres to the truth of Christ incarnate?11 10 Terrence Merrigan, “e Imagination in the Life and ought of John Henry Newman,” Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens 70, no. 70 (2009): 187-217, at 215. 11 In a footnote (27, n. 45) Merrigan suggests that perhaps this work is being done in comparative theology, though the field’s significance needs to be determined over time: “is desideratum is being fulfilled, to some degree, by the emergence of the discipline of comparative theology. e full significance of its investigations, for theology of interreligious dialogue, remains to be determined.”

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2. Accepting the Invitation: A Complicated Affair Comparative theology is a new field with a long history. It may be (loosely) defined as ‘faith seeking understanding across religious borders’, a mode of study that brings dispositions and practices familiar to Christian theologians to bear in engaging, in faith and with intellect, other religious traditions. It is no surprise that I, a comparative theologian, appreciate Merrigan’s sense of a fresh beginning here, articulated from deep within Christian theology. His sense of the Incarnation, particularity and sacramentality invites engagement with the world’s religions by a concrete mode of study that I consider to be good comparative work. His appreciation of the work of the imagination suggests a concrete way of venturing out into the wide spaces of other traditions as a Christian with eyes wide open. ere are moral and spiritual goods; the ground can indeed be holy; the particularity of Christ and of the Church in Christ enables rather than undercuts a respectful and attentive engagement with other traditions; the Catholic sense of the particular and the sacramental, with a certain humility in the face of God ‘veiled’ in the world, works as a sensitivity to the religious other. ese are dispositions closely akin to the kind of Catholic inclusivism modeled in the work of Jacques Dupuis, and such as inspire too my own comparative work which I describe as inclusive. For I aim at an including theology, in which learning from other traditions is allowed to have its own effect, such as can become evident only over time: the holy recognizing the holy, in thought, word, and deed. e practice of an ‘including theology’ can be profitably grounded in Merrigan’s sacramental disposition in understanding the role of Christ in the world. But how actually to proceed? e learning involved is more easily commended than carried out. We need to be sober-minded at this point. ere are factors that make quick learning difficult, and fruitful learning makes considerable demands on both the author and the reader. Learning can come only slowly and by stages, since the challenge is not merely the importing of information extracted from other traditions into Christian theology, so that Christian theologians might then selectively make use of what they find as they choose. But theologians ought not hope to receive samples of the non-Christian that they then can interpret. e ‘non-Christian’ is not inertly available for the taking; the traditions of the world are sophisticated, and preserved in millennia of faith, interpretation, and enactment, such as makes them more like the Christian, and therefore expecting commensurate interpretation. Nor are there grounds

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for thinking that Western and Christian thinking is on the whole subtler than the thinking that has taken place in other cultures and religions. e complexities are real. But understanding the complexities of the religious other is a matter of patiently acquired expertise. Even sophisticated theologians (Christian or other) usually have only limited knowledge of other religions, so there have to be proper avenues of learning and exchange. e notion of neutral deliverers of knowledge about the other is neither ideal nor realistic. Scholars of Islam, Hinduism, Chinese religions, etc., and historians of religions are specialists who are unlikely to write in terms easily accessible to theologians, and they will write in accord with their own disciplinary terms – which either by professional focus or for other reasons eschew theological language. We do not expect that non-theologians will present and explain theological ideas in the way theologians do, but nor should we rely on non-theologians and then be disappointed to discover a lack of theological sophistication in other religions. Comparative theologians – learned enough twice over to dwell in two worlds at once, knowing two theologies and holding them in proximity – are needed. To speak personally: for many years now, I have tried to communicate something of the history and substance of Hindu views, experiences, and practices, presented in a manner that recognizes the complexity and autonomy of Hindu thinkers. To fashion a necessary accommodation that is theologically responsible and theologically fruitful, I have tried as far as possible to be reasonably well informed about my Catholic faith, its theology, spirituality, practice, and similarly expert and attentive regarding what is true and good and holy – held up as such by millennia of believers – in other traditions as well. Most of the time, in writing not intended for an Indological audience, I have gone out of my way to make my work accessible to non-specialists. is is so even if books like Hindu God, Christian God and Divine Mother, Blessed Mother go relatively deeply into Hindu materials and inevitably involved issues new to Catholic theology. Even Beyond Compare, which heavily invests in the Treatise on the Love of God of Francis de Sales, has proved challenging for most Western readers, since it too involved serious parallel engagement with Hindu theology and spirituality; and, ironically, also because de Sales’ Treatise itself is hardly much noticed in theology today.12 12 Francis X. Clooney, Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); id., Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary

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In the next part of this essay I try again. I sketch the contours of an example that fits rather closely Merrigan’s case for a Christian attitude to other religions. I have in mind a medieval Hindu poet/saint who composes with a strong sense of the incarnational and sacramental, reliant on the imagination, and acutely aware of what is at stake in treading reverently upon the holy ground. 3. In Practice: Gently Approaching a Hindu Tradition’s Holy Ground I have studied the Śrīvaiṣṇava Hindu tradition of Tamil South India for many years, and in particular the poet saint Śaṭakōpan (familiarly called Nammālvār, ‘our ālvār’).13 Śrīvaiṣṇavism is a tradition that differences notwithstanding resonates very well with a Catholic emphasis on the particular and sacramental, fostering and enjoying a sense of God’s presence such as is both mediated and obscured by material reality and our (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); id., Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Śrī Vedānta Deśika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008). On occasion I have resisted the tendency to pre-digest Hindu learning so as to make the learning fit too easily into Christian categories. I have tried to make known an ‘other’ who thinks, categorizes, writes differently, and who will not be any more accessible to a Christian theologian than a medieval scholastic would be to most Catholics today. My essay in Merrigan and Friday’s 2017 volume [Francis X. Clooney, “Discerning Comparison: Between the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons and Catholic eology,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, 164-183] took up a case of Indian religious thinking that is difficult simply because the ideas and reasoning are very, very refined: a medieval introduction to and synthesis of ritual thinking – Madhava’s Jaiminīyanyāyamālā (Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons) – read along with small portions of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Peter Canisius’ Catechism, and the Law Code of Gratian. is kind of ‘hard example’ does not speak directly to the questions arising in Christology and the theology of religions. In a sense, it asks other questions. It takes a good while even to think properly about what is at stake, because first we must understand what the religious other means by what it says; not, what answers do they have to our questions, but what are the questions they are asking? For another difficult example, see Francis X. Clooney, “Comparative eology’s Difficult, Near Other: Reading Ritual in the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons (III.5),” in How to Do Comparative Theology: European and American Perspectives in Dialogue, ed. Francis X. Clooney, S.J. and Klaus von Stosch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 13 See for instance, Francis X. Clooney, Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of South India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); id., His Hiding Place is Darkness: An Exercise in HinduCatholic Theopoetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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embodied ways of knowing. I deal also with the work of a poet who struggles to imagine an ascent to God beyond this world that is energized by his enduring embodiment in the flesh, its experiences and words. Śrīvaiṣṇava Hinduism is a double tradition that has roots in the Sanskrit tradition of the Vedas and Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā (as far back as 1200 ) and in Tamil secular and religious traditions of love, landscape, and emotion (at least as far back as 200 ). Its commentarial and textual history goes back well over 1000 years, most notably to Rāmānuja, the famed theistic Vedānta theologian. Śrīvaiṣṇavism flourishes today in Tamil Nadu and now in many parts of the wider world, though it remains a relatively small community. It is in some ways an elite brahminical tradition with a heavy emphasis on traditional learning, yet at the same time a tradition that refuses to invest caste with an essential religious meaning, and insists on the universal availability of divine grace. e faith of Śrīvaiṣṇavas focuses on a personal, loving God who is clearly the sole and supreme Lord of the universe which is entirely dependent on him; he is most importantly named as Nārāyaṇa, though he famously descends into the world as Kṛṣṇa and Rāma; he is accompanied from eternity by the Goddess Śrī Lakṣmī. e twelve poet saints known as the ālvārs – usually taken to mean those who are ‘immersed’ in the reality of God – of the sixth to ninth centuries praise this God and Goddess in a body of nearly 4000 Tamil verses with strong philosophical, devotional and mystical themes. Śaṭakōpan is the greatest of these ālvārs, the most devoutly remembered, his works (about 1300 verses) the most revered and commented on. His four works, Tiruviruttam (Verses on the Holy Drama or, Holy Verses in the Vṛtta Meter, 100 verses), Tiruvācirīyam (Holy Verses in the Ācirīya Meter, 7 verses), Periyatiruvantāti (The Great Set of Holy Linked Verses, 87 verses) and Tiruvāymoli (The Holy Word of Mouth, 1102 verses) are found placed in this order, as charting his spiritual journey.14 ey have 14 All translations from the ālvār’s works in the following pages are my own. e best published translations are those by Venkatesan of Tiruviruttam and Tiruvāymoli. ough I will not in this context enter heavily into the commentaries, the verses I quote I have studied in light of the normative medieval commentary of Periyavāccanpiḷḷai, and consequent modern commentaries such as those of Uttamur Viraraghachariar, PB Annangarachariar, and Krsnasami Ayyangar. For a start, I recommend to readers who know Tamil the commentaries by Uttamur Viraraghavachariar on all four works. Śaṭakōpan, Tiruvāymoli, Tamil Text and Tamil Commentary by Uttamur Viraraghavachariar, 3 vols. (The Visishtadvaita Pracharini Sabha, 1975); Śaṭakōpan, Tiruviruttam, Tiruvācirīyam, Periyatiruvantāti, Tamil Text and Tamil Commentary by

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for centuries been read as giving voice to the saint’s spiritual journey, from the anguish of separation (Tiruviruttam) through a formative process of visualizing God as an act of sustenance and consolation (Tiruvācirīyam) and outside himself too in an unstable but dynamic relation to God (Periyatiruvantāti), who ends up desiring the saint and keeping him in the body, showing his divine self to the saint in various temples, until a final consummation of their union (Tiruvāymoli). Here I introduce four examples from across Śaṭakōpan’s four works. 1. Is the Body a Barrier to Seeing God? (Verses from the Tiruviruttam) e journey begins in the saint’s Tiruviruttam, which from the start portrays the saint as alienated from this world and distanced from God. is beginning is a risk, since it may suggest too easily the notion that Hindus want to flee this world and the prison of the body that is marred by illusion, sin, and physical decay: False knowing, bad behavior, a body mired in filth – May we not abide among such things! You were born in many births to protect life, O Lord of the gods whose eyes never close, So abide in a body once more, hear this your servant’s prayer (Tiruviruttam 1).

Yet there is no harsh rejection of body in Śrīvaiṣṇava Hinduism, which is a tradition that is richly material, just as it is spiritual. Yet still, there is ambivalence: the world is a barrier, thwarting our desire to see God; in the body we yearn for God by our five senses. Yet his instinct is to rectify the situation by having the Lord take on a body, coming to stand before him, so that the divine person can be seen, touched, tasted. e saint sees, with increasing clarity as his verses follow upon one another, that the five senses – particularly seeing and tasting – reveal God indirectly, in the intense process of approach to the impossible state of seeing God in the flesh. Yet the visible world offers imaginative glimpses that by analogy signal aspects of a Lord (Māl, Nārāyaṇa) who cannot be seen: Mt. Meru is like in form to holy Māl, the dazzling sun on Meru like the discus in holy Māl’s holy hand. It is as if I see all this and signs too of holy Māl and his form. Uttamur Viraraghavachariar (e Visishtadvaita Pracharini Sabha, 1971); Śaṭakōpan (Nammālvār), A Hundred Measures of Time. (Tiruviruttam), trans. Archana Venkatesan (Penguin Books India, 2014); Śaṭakōpan (Nammālvār), Endless Song. (Tiruvāymoli), trans. Archana Venkatesan (Penguin Books India, 2020).

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I cry out in praise, my holy desire climaxes – How can evil deeds come anywhere near me? (Tiruviruttam 88).

As the commentators note, a verse like this – in the saint’s own voice, not the young woman in his drama of God present and absent – both points to a likeness yet admits that it is really not so: what is not God excites the desire for God. is seems to be what Merrigan is referring to in citing Newman on the instrumental yet veiling power of material reality. By the end of Tiruviruttam we have the sense that turning to see the Lord is the way forward, even if most of the time material reality bars the way to God. In some way God can be seen, but people will not open their eyes: People are born and suffer birth again and again as countless ages pass, Although they see this happen again and again. Meanwhile, without grief the host of gods who never close their eyes Circle round and worship our ancient Lord, eyes full of him: How can people who love him ever close their eyes? (Tiruviruttam 97).

He thus chastises people caught over and over in this world, born again and again; the chastisement indicates that humans might choose to be like the gods, eyes ever open. But neither is there any sure optimism, since the drama is still under way, nowhere near its resolution. 2. The Religious Imagination at Work (Verses from the Tiruvācirīyam) e Tiruviruttam ends in a kind of stalemate, the saint recognizing that vision of God is always almost impossible, a receding horizon. e Tiruvācirīyam, counted to be the next work, is only 71 lines long. Here the saint’s spiritual imagination comes immediately into play. It begins with a remarkable vision of a natural phenomenon – a massive emerald mountain – and then of the Lord:15 Wearing a great radiant cloud, crowned with a circle of lights, e most radiant sun, the lovely radiant moon, the many stars, A mouth of radiant coral: a bright emerald mountain.

e saint conjures a fabulous scene of a mountain of splendor and beauty, as if to prepare his imagination for seeing God. is vision of a splendid mountain is fictive, but it is also a hold on the material world, 15 e Tiruvācirīyam does not offer a clear division into verses. In referring to ‘verse one’, etc., I am following the commentators. e break-up of verse one into lines, and the division into three parts, are mine.

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since what is visible intensely imagined sets the scene for a further imagining of a familiar mythic scene, the Lord on the Milk Ocean, the near-transcendent abode that lies between heaven and earth: Seeming to sleep on the waves of the ocean lord, Wearing a golden cloth, a crown, sparkling fine jewels, Mouth and eyes radiant, bright – But besting all of that is his fresh green body. ere he is, resting in his knowledge-sleep, For his couch that snake with branching poisonous hoods, there on the wavy sea. From the navel of this incomparable great Lord arises the lotus upon which Śiva, Brahmā, Indra, and all the rest abide, And there the crowd of the gods, palms pressed in prayer, fall down in worship.

e unseen Lord is splendid, as the mountain, composed of images from nature, was splendid. is second part of the verse marks a shi from a work of imagination to a contemplation of the Lord, calm, resting, but fully awake on his couch in the Milk Ocean. He resides there in glory, surrounded by all other deities, who worship him for time without end. e commentators note that the final line of the verse turns to direct address: O Lord, your lustrous feet rule the three worlds! (Tiruvācirīyam 1).

ough still deprived of the sought-aer direct vision, the saint is able to peer through the obscuring veil, so as to address the Lord directly. Imagining a natural scene and imagining a mythic scene make a more immediate encounter possible. Later verses indicate that this is no private journey. e saint’s predicament, neither face to face with God nor entirely blind before the divine, reflects the human condition. By his words he illumines the situation and the way out of it, and gives those who take his words to heart the wherewithal to tread the path to God. e Tiruvācirīyam’s third verse shows this dynamic. It begins with a further contemplation of the Lord in his transcendent glory: Your fame shines forth, all three worlds altogether are intent on worshipping you in the right way. Your commands are always obeyed. You are the first among the three gods, your chest gleams bright.

e saint then evokes the ancient myth of the churning of the ocean to release its treasures. is myth is famous in a number of deities’ mythologies, but here it is interpreted as the work of the Lord:

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e cool ocean resounded with waves so towering that even the mountains trembled, But you twined the body of the many hooded snake around that steadfast mountain And with it you churned the ocean.

e final lines of this third verse, as far as we can go here, suggest that in his own way, the saint is echoing the eternal divine praises, and churning this world by his words, to make the Lord available to devotees: How sweet it is for us age upon age and never ceasing To serve the devotees of so great, incomparable a deity! (Tiruvācirīyam 3).

e saint’s poetry is beautiful, and it is for the sake of the world. 3. Coming to Terms with the God Who is (Not) Visible (Verses from the Periyatiruvantāti) Periyatiruvantāti is placed third among Śaṭakōpan’s compositions. In its 87 verses, the saint continues to work through the dialectic of not-seeing and seeing, facing up to the fact that access to God is barred by the barrier of flesh, even as enfleshed desire does, over and again, cross the barrier from here to God. e poem begins with a plea to unite his own heart, his words, his love: O my heart, you ever strive to rise up, you are ever ahead of me, But may you now join me in singing! We are filled with praise of the lord in color a lovely red kāyā flower, Our words woven on a tongue that pours forth love (Periyatiruvantāti 1).

e saint cannot forget that he has not had the direct vision he so desires, but by his inner eye he sees vividly: I have not seen with my eyes his dark form and how he holds his discus, But even so By the inner eye of my heart, I see him, I meditate upon him (Periyatiruvantāti 28).

e theology of the tradition does not allow direct vision of the divine essence, and the commentators take this to be the point in mentioning the Lord’s dark form, and his holding the discus: this is the Lord ad extra, able to be seen in a certain way distinguished by color and material form. In the Periyatiruvantāti the saint reaches a kind of equilibrium, the polarity of seeing and not-seeing as the preferred way of human life, an unending dance of desire, and its satisfaction, but then too a further lapse in the face of new absence. us,

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He rests on his jeweled snake on the echoing sea, And he is hard to approach, but even so I see him in my mind all at once and all the time, And so his coming here banishes my mind’s cares (Periyatiruvantāti 55).

But a new insight is evolving. e saint realizes that what he knows of the vast Lord who is greater than the universe is balanced by what he knows of his own experience of that same Lord inside himself: e earth, the wide sky are inside you, And you have entered inside me by way of my listening ear, Now you are within me all the time. So who is the greater, you or me? Who knows? ink about that, O you who hold the flesh-slicing discus! (Periyatiruvantāti 75).

He himself is the temple in which the unattainable Lord dwells; he is greater than the God who is greater than himself. 4. God Near and Far (Verses from the Tiruvāymoli) e largest and by all accounts most important of the works, Tiruvāymoli, collects all the preceding themes in a set of one hundred eleven-verse hymns. e problem of not-seeing God while in the body, and in the body suffering a more and more intense yearning for God, continues to dominate. is verse early on reinforces the theme of yearning to see Nārāyaṇa, Tirumāl: Your servant knows so little – e Lord is the one whom even the wise find it difficult to know, e incomparable Kṛṣṇa who wears a garland of fragrant, lovely cool basil, Tirumāl who frees devotees from their wretched bodies – Yet I am the one who cries out, “Let this servant see you!” Is there any foolishness greater than this? (Tiruvāymoli 1.5.7).

What Tiruvāymoli notably adds to the dynamic is close attention to actual temples. Temples figure hardly at all in the three preceding works, while at least thirty of the songs in Tiruvāymoli are associated with specific temples. To see God in the temple is a truly sacramental moment, given the real presence of the divinity in the consecrated temple form. For example, once the young woman – who is the persona of the saint lamenting in separation – sees the Lord in the Tiru Kuruṅkuṭi temple, she cannot help but see him everywhere else too: Women, don’t be angry, see things by way of my heart. Aer I saw our master who lives among the cool and lovely groves of the Tiru Kuruṅkuṭi temple,

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His splendid thread, his earrings, the emblem on his chest, his unfading jewels, his four arms – ey’re everywhere I go (Tiruvāymoli 5.5.2). Women, you are angry, you complain, “She just stands there, confused, pining away!” But aer I saw our master who lives among the mountainous towers of the Tiru Kuruṅkuṭi town, His victorious bow, his staff, his sword, his discus, his conch, He’s never stopped being right here in my eyes, right here in my heart (Tiruvāymoli 5.5.3).

And yet, on and off thereaer, the acute inability to see the Lord torments her again. For the saint, the priority of inner vision is not lost sight of, even as his attachment to temple presence grows: at Lord who once came down to destroy the walled city of southern Laṅkā amid the sea Came to reside in the Tiru Pērai temple, And once my heart’s gone there, I’ll never see it again. My friend, I have no one here, no one who can summon back my heart. So what’s le to do here, with whose help? What my heart has seen, I have seen (Tiruvāymoli 7.3.7).

e saint is both rent in two. e Lord of the mythic Rāmāyaṇa, the destroyer of Laṅkā, now dwells in the Tiru Pērai temple, and the saint’s heart has le him to go there. I cannot go there, and I cannot call back my heart. And yet: what his heart sees, he himself sees. In both 5.5 and 7.3, the commentators insist, “seeing the Lord in the temple” is not literal, since God cannot be seen by human eyes. And yet, the visible form of the Lord in the temple image (mūrti, idol) mediates an intense external visualization of the Lord. Again, that is, we have instances of the sacramental, the indirectness of God’s presence in the natural, which Merrigan hearkened to in citing Newman, as we saw earlier.16 Many other verses could be cited here, but to see where things (nearly) end, I turn finally to 10.8, where we see the saint at the Tiru Pēr temple. Delight spills over in all directions, as he sees the Lord in a way that is indelible, never to be forgotten: Aer eating and enjoying all this, who needs heaven? I exult in ever greater service, I’ve already uttered worship’s last word.17

16 17

you.

See above, p. 490, note 2. e last word of the Tirumantra (Holy Mantra), namaḥ, “I bow down” to

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I see, I enjoy the Lord of the Tiru Pēr temple surrounded by sweet sugar cane where bees delight. He abides within me, he never leaves my eyes (Tiruvāymoli 10.8.7).

e next verse only accentuates how the Lord is beyond the mind’s reach, but firmly and intimately here, in the temple, in the heart: He never leaves my eyes though he is greater than my thoughts, e most precious goal beyond all reckoning, the essence of all seven musical notes: e Lord of the Tiru Pēr temple surrounded by fine sparkling jeweled houses Has surely now entered my heart (Tiruvāymoli 10.8.8).

e tension of body and soul, flesh as obstacle and vehicle of the Lord’s presence, is here mostly resolved: the flesh is the impossible but real place were God can be experienced, because God chooses there to dwell. By tradition, in the last verses of Tiruvāymoli the saint is taken up into heaven body and soul in a kind of rapture, even as he finishes composing his last verses by making the point that however great the Lord may be, however unreachable, in the end, all of created is subsumed into the greatest mystery, the unlimited desire for God and God’s own self: Primal unique seed for all three worlds and everything else, Primal unique Lord – when will I be united with you? Primal unique source for all that lives here and yonder, Primal unique source pervading the deep and the high – ere’s no end to you (Tiruvāymoli 10.10.9). Primal, unique, pervading, you are the deep, you are the high, there’s no end to you, but Encompassing that, and greater still, the full blossoming light, and Encompassing that, and greater still, the radiant joy of knowledge, and Encompassing that, and greater still, my desire for you, but even that you finish off, Encompassing me myself (Tiruvāymoli 10.10.10).

In the ritual celebrations of Tiruvāymoli, with these last words the saint is taken up into heaven for all eternity. He departs, leaving only his songs behind. e saint’s poetry is an act of service to the community, for to learn these songs is to travel through them, from impenetrable distance to God seen and experienced intimately, here and within the heart. 4. Venturing Theology on Holy Ground us my example, verses from the four poetic compositions of one south Indian Hindu mystic. e poetry is over a thousand years old, but it

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remains alive in the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition that holds it closely and passes it down. I have charted a course through the saint’s works in hopes of establishing a sense of one portion of Hindu holy ground – in the heart, in word, in the temple – that is not entirely inaccessible to readers. My hope is that this way of proceeding resonates with key nuances in Merrigan’s incarnational, embodied, and sacramental instinct for the heart of the Christian tradition. I hope to have shown what it can look like to go deep into another tradition, in order to recognize and begin to see and understand spiritually, on the holy ground of a living religious tradition, in an encounter true to Catholic tradition but not so regulated by doctrine that learning becomes impossible. With the deeper sacramental grounding Merrigan proposes, Catholics become able to recognize the holiness of the other. e holy ground where these great realms of the particular, sacramental, and holy stand near to one another is also uncharted ground. Full certainty, a clarity that would allow one finally to be done with religions and move on to other matters, will not be possible. In his 2017 essay, Merrigan summarizes as follows what is happening in properly grounded attempts to account for the “bona moralia et spiritualia” of other traditions: ese attempts are perhaps best seen as, so to speak, mining expeditions into the untapped depths of the theological tradition that take their lead from a new appreciation of non-Christian religious traditions. ese expeditions are prompted by the need to find fresh raw materials out of which to develop meaningful responses to ever-changing contexts and the novel questions and experiences that such contexts make possible. At the same time, these expeditions must always be guided by a determination to do justice to the paradigmatic status of the event of incarnation. It is, therefore, neither surprising nor reprehensible that those who see their role as protecting Christianity’s “natural resources” insist on the Christological provenance of whatever is proffered as a response to the need of the contextual moment.18

Merrigan evokes the language of mining here, indicating, it seems, that “fresh raw materials” found in other traditions – on their holy ground? – will help Christian theologians to mine more deeply the depths of the Christian mystery. e “Christological provenance” helps the theologian to protect Christian “natural resources” even while digging deeper due to interreligious learning. It is the Christian that is being newly

18 Merrigan, “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” 23.

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excavated; there is no question of carrying away the treasures of other religions, merely to adorn our Christian theologies. at my examples have all been from Hindu poetry (or song), makes definitive conclusions less likely, since poetry, even poetry with layers of commentary, rarely concludes in fixed and final insights. Merrigan recognizes this when he observes that we must, with Newman, be honest about the limitations of any doctrinal claims we might make: No revelation can be complete and systematic, from the weakness of the human intellect. When nothing is revealed, nothing is known, and there is nothing to contemplate or marvel at; but when something is revealed, and only something for all cannot be, there are forthwith difficulties and perplexities. A Revelation is religious doctrine viewed on its illuminated  side; a Mystery is the selfsame doctrine viewed on the side unilluminated.19

When words are always in peril, expressive in the failure to express, we must recognize a poetic turn: Newman had pondered Christianity’s ‘poetic’ and therefore ‘immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, [and] mysterious’ character. Poetry, Newman wrote, “does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, and love.” Elsewhere, Newman observed that “Revealed Religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.”20

Newman says nothing to indicate what he might think of Hindu traditions or Tamil poetry (which were only beginning to be studied at Oxford before and during his lifetime), but his insight into the limit of doctrinal formulation and the power of poetry returns us to the poetic and richly affective world of Śrīvaiṣṇavism and Śaṭakōpan’s poetry. If so, we need to have the same patience with Hinduism’s holy ambiguity that Newman expects for his own faith’s “Religious Truth”: us Religious Truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines, and isolated masses. Revelation, in this way of considering it, is not a revealed ‘system’, but consists of a number of detached and incomplete truths belonging to a vast system unrevealed, of doctrines and injunctions mysteriously 19 “e Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion,” in Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London: B. M Pickering, 1873), 30-101, at 41. 20 Terrence Merrigan, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47-72, at 61-62.

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connected together; that is, connected by unknown media, and bearing upon unknown portions of the system.21

Here too Merrigan extends Newman’s thinking and moves us in the right direction. us, in his 2003 article on Jacques Dupuis, S.J., and the future of inclusivism, he commends an Asian Catholic approach to the goods of other religions: One instance of this approach is the development of what is called interfaith or multifaith hermeneutics in the reading of the Bible and the sacred texts of the dialogue partners. Rather than taking the Bible “as a yardstick to judge the sacred texts of other religions,” the Bible is read “in light of other sacred texts and vice versa, for mutual cross-fertilization.” As Peter Phan observes, “the purpose of such reading is not to prove that the Christian Bible and the sacred scriptures of other religions are mutually compatible, [or] to find linguistic and theological parallels between them for some missiological intent, but to enlarge our understanding of both [our emphasis], to promote cross-cultural and cross-religious dialogue, to achieve a ‘wider intertextuality.’” Here, the aim is not, in the first place, to situate the other against the horizon of the Trinity, but to achieve a deeper appreciation of the other in their “otherness.” is does not mean that Christians must abandon their particular faith perspective, but it does mean that they open themselves to be enriched by the distinctiveness of the other.22

is enrichment occurs by an unpredictable pilgrimage onto the holy ground of another tradition, such as I have introduced with my reading of Śaṭakōpan’s theologically rich poetry. is seems to indicate an enduring state of learning, since we never fully own our own holy ground, much less theirs. We are only at the beginning of a new kind of Catholic interreligious encounter. So too, we must be honest that this ought not to be entirely our project. We do not set the calendar on our own; we must give the Śrīvaiṣṇava community time to decide whether and how to engage in this new dialogue. And then we must find ways to invite them onto the holy terrain of incarnate Catholic faith, and then wait to hear what they say in return. e comparative theologian does not own or administer the holy. Her job is to clear obstacles, open pathways, and to discourage easy detours that would relieve readers of the chance to share in such rich experiences.

21 “e Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion,” 41-42. 22 Terrence Merrigan, “Jacques Dupuis and the Redefinition of Inclusivism,” in Many and Diverse Ways: In Honor of Jacques Dupuis, ed. Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 60-71, at 67.

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e comparative theologian can try to rule out the temptation to abstractions and generalizations, and to accompany readers to the concrete and sacramental richness of other traditions, at least near to their holy ground. at such work may be exactly what Catholic theology needs today owes much to the richly sensitive and sensible approach to Christian theology that Terrence Merrigan has cultivated thus far in his splendid career.

23 Is There a Judeo-Christian Approach to Religious Others? The Case Study of Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Buddhism Elizabeth J. Harris

In February 2014, I gave a paper at a conference organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies of the University of Antwerp and the University Centre Saint Ignatius, also in Antwerp. e conference examined whether it was possible or advisable to speak of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition. I presented on Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Buddhism within a section on “e Judeo-Christian Tradition and Other Religious Traditions.” It was not my finest paper! Aerwards, I was pointed kindly towards a debate that I had missed, namely whether Judaism had been a missionary religion, within the world of classical Greece and Rome. Louis Feldman’s research, I was told, provided strong evidence that it had been and I had not referred to it, preferring an interpretation of Judaism as a non-missionary religion, unwilling to accept converts into its fold, in line with the research into Jewish law of scholars such as Broyde.1 If Feldman was right, historical contingencies rather than doctrinal orthodoxy had changed this global face of Judaism and the theology that underpinned it, not least the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 , which weighted the scales against Judaism, as Christianity gradually became the Empire’s official religion. e Jewish academics who listened to me, therefore, invited me to recognize that proselytism could belong to the common ground between the two traditions, within the field of relationships with religious others. In my teaching and writing, I have usually avoided using the term ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’, because of its Christian supersessionist connotations. It has been such a loaded concept that I have preferred to honor 1

See Michael J. Broyde, “Proselytism and Jewish Law: Inreach, Outreach, and the Jewish Tradition,” in Sharing the Book: Religious Perspectives on the Rights and Wrongs of Proselytism, ed. John Witte and Richard C. Martin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 45-61.

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the integrity of the two religious traditions by separating their development, aer the ending of the Second Temple period in 70 . By doing so, however, as the Antwerp conference taught me, I had downplayed the intertwining of their histories within the turbulent religious politics of the Common Era. In this chapter, therefore, I revisit the unpublished paper I gave in Antwerp and the assumptions it contained about the possibility of a Judeo-Christian tradition of relationships with religious others, in the light of my deeper sensitivity to the multiple ways in which Jewish and Christian traditions, since their separation during the first century of the Common Era, have mirrored, reacted to and responded to each other, whether under the sword of Christian antisemitism, during periods where Jewish-Christian boundaries were negotiated, sometimes with mutually beneficial transactions between the two,2 and in times of Jewish-Christian rapprochement. My revised argument is that, although historical contingencies separated Jewish and Christian responses to religious others aer the fourth century , the two traditions possess much in common within this field, through the holy texts they share, their roots in the classical world of Greece and Rome, and their response to contemporary issues within interreligious relations. Whether this merits the judgement that there is a ‘Judeo-Christian’ approach to religious others is a question I will leave to my concluding thoughts. I examine this commonality through two case studies that focus primarily on Christian and Jewish attitudes to Buddhism. ey stand at two ends of a spectrum of responses to religious others within both traditions. e first compares the Christian theology of religions that arose within the British Evangelical Revival at the end of the eighteenth century, as expressed in missionary activity in nineteenth century Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, with the theological impetus behind Jewish missionary activity within the Hellenistic and Roman world between the second century , and the fourth century . rough this, I demonstrate that both religious traditions used the Bible to support proselytization among non-Christian and non-Jewish communities respectively, albeit within different landscapes of power. In concentrating on Sri Lanka, I draw on

2

See for instance Maria Diemling, “About Bakers, Butchers, Geese and Pigs: Food and the Negotiating of Boundaries between Jews and Christians in Johann Jacob Schudt’s ‘Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten’,” Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge/ Frankfurt Jewish Studies Bulletin 40 (2015): 115-138.

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over twenty years of research3 and would ask readers to be tolerant if I repeat some of this material, albeit for a new purpose. e second examines the more positive encounters with Buddhism that Jews and Christians experienced in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on those who sought to combine Buddhist practices with their Jewish or Christian spiritualities, within a hybrid or dual identity. I ask whether the changing theologies of religions within the two traditions contributed to this phenomenon, whilst recognizing that the encounters themselves were conditioned by divergent existential and empirical experience. First, however, I turn briefly to what we know about early Jewish and Christian encounter with Buddhism. Jewish encounter with Buddhism could date back to before the Common Era. Katz, for instance, points to a common mythical narrative found both in “the judgement tale of King Solomon” (1 Kgs 3:16-28) and the Mahosadha Jātaka to speculate about early narrative exchange between the two religious traditions.4 In addition, trade brought Jews to India and probably China. From at least the ninth century , a Jewish community existed in India.5 As for Christianity, similarities between the traditional biographies of the Buddha and Jesus prompted similar speculations to those of Katz.6 One of the earliest documented evidence of Christian awareness of Buddhism, however, is found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, although this might not have indicated direct encounter.7 Centuries later, in the sixth century , members of the Church of the East, probably from Syria, arrived in China, remaining

3

See Elizabeth J. Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); ead., “Memory, Experience and the Clash of Cosmologies: e Encounter between British Protestant Missionaries and Buddhism in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka,” Social Sciences and Missions 25 (2012): 265-303; ead., Religion, Space and Conflict in Sri Lanka: Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 25-95. 4 Nathan Katz, “Buddhist-Jewish Relations,” in Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel (St. Ottilien: Editions of St. Ottilien, 2008), 269-293, at 269-270. 5 Ibid., 271-273. 6 E.g., Ray C. Amore, Two Masters, One Message: The Lives and Teachings of Gautama and Jesus (Kuala Lumpur: Buddhist Missionary Society, 1978), 26-27, which points, for instance, to the narratives of Simeon (Christian) and Asita (Buddhist) – two elderly men who visit the baby Gautama and the baby Jesus respectively and predict that they will be great spiritual leaders. 7 See David Scott, “Christian Responses to Buddhism in Pre-Medieval Times,” Numen 32 (1985): 88-100.

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several centuries, followed by Jesuits in the latter part of the sixteenth century.8 In these early encounters, exchange happened not only at the level of narrative and myth. Palmer argues that the Church of the East in China sought to communicate Christian ideas through Daoist and Buddhist thought forms to the extent that a synthesis occurred with reciprocal learning.9 Katz suggests that the “Jewish mystical concepts of reincarnation (gilgul) and angelology” possibly bear an Indian stamp and that the thirteenth century kabbalist, Abraham Abulafia (1240-1291) brought Indian ideas into his system.10 1. Judaism and Christianity as Missionary Religions 1. Judaism within the Hellenistic and Roman World e gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament recounts the narrative of a Roman military officer who seeks healing from Jesus for his servant. He sends some respected Jews to Jesus with this request and they are reported as stating, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us” (Lk 7:45). Jesus goes towards the officer’s house but is met by a further group who deter him from proceeding, saying that the officer had faith that Jesus could heal from a distance, simply by saying ‘the word’, to which Jesus replied, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Lk  7:9).11 In the light of Louis Feldman’s work on Jewish missionary activity in the Roman world, it is highly likely that this Roman officer was perhaps a convert to Judaism or at least a sympathizer. Within the Roman Empire, both existed.12

8

See Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Religion of Taoist Christianity (London: Piatkus, 2001) for an analysis of the Church of the East in China. For an examination of the Jesuits in China see: Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China 1578-1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 9 Palmer, The Jesus Sutras. 10 Katz, “Buddhist-Jewish Relations,” 273. 11 For quotes from the New Testament I use the New Revised Standard Version. For quotes from the Hebrew Bible, I use Adele Berlin and Mark Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 12 Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 357.

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In presenting Judaism as a missionary religion, I am heavily dependent on Feldman’s research, which argues that “the cumulative evidence – both demographic and literary” for Jewish missionary activity in the Hellenistic and Roman periods is “considerable.”13 His work, however, has been contested. Brian McGing argues convincingly, with a statistician’s mind, that Feldman’s demographic evidence is faulty and that it is impossible to assess exactly “how many Jews there were in the ancient world.”14 And Broyde’s position is that from the earliest times, the “Jewish legal tradition desires not to participate in proselytizing and conversion, either as proselytizer or proselytizee.”15 However, Feldman has gained enough support for me to use his data with cautionary affirmation.16 Feldman cites precedents in Jewish text and tradition to prove that Jews were not a religious community determined by ethnicity. He points out, for instance, that, in the book of Esther, a Jewish military victory prompted many non-Jews to profess Judaism, perhaps out of fear (Esth 8:17)17 and that the historians Josephus and Ptolemy suggest that the Idumaeans, in the south of Palestine, were allowed to remain on their land in the second century  “only so long as they converted properly to Judaism.”18 e context of Jewish missionary work in the Hellenistic and Roman period, according to Feldman, was their relative strength throughout the Mediterranean area. Feldman’s assessment that Jews possibly formed ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire, during the time of Augustus Caesar, which ended in 14 ,19 cannot be trusted but that they were a wealthy and powerful minority can. ey negotiated their presence by balancing positive vertical relationships with those in power and resistance to assimilation into Rome’s deity cults, whilst, at the same time, seeking to spread the message of Jewish monotheism. Feldman’s 13

Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 293. Brian McGing, “Population ad Proselytism: How Many Jews Were ere in the Ancient World?,” in Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 88-106. 15 Broyde, “Proselytism and Jewish Law,” 45. 16 James Carleton Paget, for instance, critically assesses Feldman and authors who have come to similar conclusions such as Salo W. Baron and agrees that there was “a missionary consciousness among some Jews” in the Hellenistic and Roman world: “Jewish Proselytism at the Time of Christian Origins: Chimera or Reality,” Journal of the Study of the New Testament 18, no. 62 (1996): 65-103, at 85. 17 Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 289. 18 Ibid., 124-125. 19 Ibid., 92. 14

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assertion that any Gentile could “become a Jew through conversion, as many Romans actually did” is also trustworthy.20 Sometimes, again according to Feldman, Jewish proselytizing methods could be aggressive or, at the very least, persuasive. Philo, Josephus, and rabbinic writers all refer to the considerable extent of this Jewish missionary activity.21 In 139 , 19  and perhaps again several decades later Jews were reportedly expelled from Rome for brief periods because of their expansionist methods, in spite of the toleration they usually received because of their relative power and wealth.22 e theology behind Jewish missionary activity at this time was heavily informed by Jewish monotheism and the condemnation of idolatry found in the Torah, which states: “you shall have no other gods besides Me” and shall not bow down before or serve “any sculptured image” (Ex 20:3-4). In line with this, Judaism developed strict minimal requirements for conversion.23 Converts to Judaism had to reject all other gods, and images of these gods, and, in addition, identify with the “national aspirations of the Jews.”24 In effect, they had to join Judaism’s “social and political community.”25 at some were willing to do this is proved by Tacitus’s lament that converts were forced to ‘despise’ the gods and ‘disown’ their country.26 ese strictures represented an exclusivism that was intolerant of any form of hybrid religious practice, particularly if it violated Judaism’s monotheism. However, the very fact that Jews were willing to bring ‘Gentiles’ into their community and, by extension, into a covenantal relationship with God represented an inclusivism that was in line with an important strand within the Hebrew Bible, namely that the ‘nations’, those outside the Jewish community, were already accountable to God and in a relationship with God. As Katz points out, in the Babylonian Talmud, this was expressed in a conviction that this strand contributed to the nonproselytizing stance of Judaism. Why attempt to convert people to Judaism if they were already in a relationship with God! Yet, he, nevertheless, 20

Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 102. Ibid., 290, citing Bernard J. Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 1939). See also Louis H. Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, eds., Jewish Life and Thought among Greeks and Romans (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 123-135. 22 Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 93-94, 302, 304. 23 See Broyde, “Proselytism and Jewish Law,” 52-53. 24 Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 288. 25 Broyde, “Proselytism and Jewish Law,” 53. 26 Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 300, 302. 21

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stresses that the “Noahide law” governing non-Jews included the prohibition of “idol worship.”27 In the Hellenistic and Roman world, worship of images was endemic. It is not surprising, therefore, that this invited a Jewish response that was missionary. However, this inclusivist strand within Jewish thought, I would suggest, discouraged Jews from demonizing Roman religious practices. A possible example would be Paul’s sermon in Athens, recorded in the New Testament (Acts 17:22-31). A follower of the Jesus movement, Paul was, nevertheless, steeped in Jewish ethical practice and could have been following Jewish methods when he recognized that the Athenians were ‘extremely religious’ and quoted a Greek poet to establish common ground, only then arguing that Greek altars to ‘an unknown God’ in fact pointed to the one Creator God of the universe. With methods such as these, it is not surprising that the spirituality of the Jews was attractive. Varro, for instance, praised Jewish condemnation of sculptured images of deities.28 Others were attracted to Jewish virtues, which were similar to their own, and also to Jewish piety and heroic leaders such as Moses.29 2. Evangelical Christianity within Colonial Sri Lanka e interreligious exchange of ideas and narratives that characterized very early Buddhist-Christian encounters and the inclusivism in Paul’s sermons were anathema to the evangelical Christian missionaries who travelled to Sri Lanka at the beginning of the nineteenth century.30 As Jews had done in the Hellenistic and Roman world, however, they began with rejection of ‘idolatry’. Buddhism, with its abundance of Buddha rūpas (images) and its ritualistic culture, appeared to them to be the epitome of idolatry and, therefore, the greatest offence against God, the penalty for which was death. In the words of Wesleyan Methodist missionary, Robert Spence Hardy (1803-1868),31 it was, “a robbery of 27

Broyde, “Proselytism and Jewish Law,” 46. Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 108. 29 Ibid., 201-287; Feldman and Reinhold, eds., Jewish Life and Thought, 105-120. 30 Five members from the London Missionary Society arrived in 1805, followed by Baptists in 1812, Wesleyan Methodists in 1814, American Presbyterians in 1816 and Anglicans from the Church Missionary Society in 1818. 31 Spence Hardy arrived in Sri Lanka in 1825. In 1839, aer a visit to the former Kandyan Kingdom, he wrote a treatise entitled, The British Government and the Idolatry of Ceylon, arguing for an end of British support for Buddhist institutions in Kandy. He wrote a number of influential books on Buddhism. 28

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heaven” and a “universal slander upon the character of the Deity.”32 Prostrating before a Buddha rūpa was idolatry. Placing flowers in front of an image was idolatry. Even more culpable was the devāle system in Sri Lanka, which involved worship of the gods and exorcism, within a cosmology that placed the Buddha at the apex and the gods beneath. ‘Kappoism’, the missionaries called it, a distortion of the name of the officiating priests, kapurālas. So, Spence Hardy could write with lyrical but devastating effect: Could we be transported, like our blessed Master, to some mount of universal vision, how should we be confounded at the numberless pollutions and puerilities of idol worship. A thousand temples would be seen, consecrated to impurity and lust; and the shouts of myriads would be heard, ascending before the shapes of blasphemy and horror, whose very invention must have been infernal.33

Coupled with condemnation of idolatry were the theologies connected with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Two theological strands underpinned the late eighteenth century Evangelical Revival, Arminianism and reformed Calvinism.34 Shared by both, however, was a substitutionary theology of the cross that conditioned attitudes to religious others. It went like this. All humans are steeped in sin and alienated from God, thus coming under the judgement of God. Jesus, through his death and resurrection, turned the wrath of God away from human sin, by himself receiving the punishment due to humanity. Only those who are Christian believers can benefit from this. e sin of unbelievers remains unpardoned, the justice of God calling for an eternity in hell.35 In 2012, I continued: See Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter, 62-75; Elizabeth J. Harris, “Two Western Indologists in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka: Daniel John Gogerly and Robert Spence Hardy,” in Methodism in Sri Lanka: Visions and Realities 1814-2014, ed. G. P. V. Somaratne (Colombo: Wesley Press, 2014), 81-97. 32 Robert Spence Hardy, “Idolatry,” The Friend I, no. III (September 1837): 45-46, at 45, quoted in Harris, “Memory, Experience and the Clash of Cosmologies,” 280. 33 Robert Spence Hardy, “Idolatry,” The Friend IV, no. XII (March 1841): 171172, at 171, quoted in Harris, Religion, Space and Conflict, 29. 34 Arminianism, named aer the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), affirmed that salvation was not pre-ordained. Reformed Calvinism moved away from a closed view of predestination to justify inviting non-Christians to accept the gospel. 35 For formal statements of faith from nonconformist churches at this time, see David Bebbington with Kenneth Dix and Alan Ruston, eds., Protestant

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For Harvard [1790-1857, one of the first Wesleyan Methodist missionaries in Sri Lanka], 36 this meant, “that to be unsaved by the gospel is to be eternally lost”37 and, for Robert Spence Hardy […] that, in Sri Lanka, “not a breath is heaved or a word spoken, during the momentary existence of which the doom of some soul is not sealed for ever.”38 For Harvard, Spence Hardy and their compatriots, each individual Sri Lankan was a ‘deathless soul’ condemned to hell for eternity unless they turned to God through Jesus Christ. And there was only one lifetime for this ‘turning’.39

In the light of this, each missionary was utterly convinced that their condemnation of Buddhist belief and practice was motivated by compassion, pity and love for ‘eternal souls’ that would otherwise be lost for eternity. To re-quote my 2012 article, “To leave ‘idolaters’ alone was sin and, to use an anachronistic term, racist, since it risked denying the humanity of those subject to British rule.”40 e shadow side of this theology was anger and horror at the devotion shown to the Buddha. And this horror was read by Buddhists as contempt.41 e missionary representation of Buddhism was inextricably linked with this theology. Buddhism was condemned as nihilistic, atheistic, morally impotent, irrational, and under demonic influence through its practice of ‘kappoism’. Some missionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century were able to praise Buddhist ethics, whilst criticizing its doctrine42 but, by the middle of the century, words of praise were rare. Very few Sri Lankan Buddhists were persuaded either by the arguments for Christianity that the missionaries brought forward or the missionary insistence that all Buddhist practices had to be rejected in the event of conversion. Such exclusivist, non-negotiable distinctions between Nonconformist Texts. Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 33-58. 36 Harvard chronicled the first years of Wesleyan Methodist activity in Sri Lanka: William M. Harvard, A Narrative of the Establishment and Progress of the Mission to Ceylon and India Founded by the Late Rev Thomas Coke under the Direction of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference (London: W. M. Harvard, 1823). 37 William Harvard, ed., Memoirs of Mrs Elizabeth Harvard, Late of the Wesleyan Mission to Ceylon and India with Extracts from Her Diary and Correspondence to Her Husband, 2nd ed. (London: printed for the author, 1833), 23. 38 Robert Spence Hardy, “Our Times,” The Friend VII, no. XV (September 1844): 281-291, at 281. 39 Harris, “Memory, Experience and the Clash of Cosmologies,” 279-280. 40 Ibid., 280. 41 Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter, 189. 42 Ibid., 31.

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religions were not traditionally part of Buddhist cosmology. A model that I have called ‘inclusivist subordination’ was closer to Sri Lankan practice, namely a tendency to “include, respect and tolerate the Other at a subordinate level within a Buddhist cosmological framework.”43 To cut a long story short, the contempt that Buddhists saw in the missionary response to their religious practice turned them towards defensive action against what they saw as a threat to the existence of the Dhamma in Sri Lanka, namely a Buddhist revivalism that threw at Christianity exactly the same accusations as Christians had thrown at Buddhism – that it was nihilistic, pessimistic, morally impotent, and irrational. A reciprocal demonization occurred. e Buddhist revivalist, the Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864-1933), for instance, cited the Christian conviction that hell was eternal for non-Christians as proof that Christianity was not suited for a civilized community such as the Buddhists of Sri Lanka.44 If a lesson for inter-faith relations can be drawn from the Christian side of this case study, it is that demonization of another religion rarely leads to the promotion of the religion doing the demonizing. In the context of this paper, that this kind of theology could exist as the handmaid of imperialism divided it from Jewish approaches, in spite of common ground concerning idolatry. Indeed, it was used as a sword against Judaism. e toxic mixture of imperialism and an evangelical, missionary theology that drew non-negotiable and demonizing distinctions between Christian identity and religious others was a product of a particular moment in western expansionism. Its precedent, however, was antisemitism – the demonization of Jews and Judaism that arose through a combination of supersessionism and the accusation of deicide.45

43 See Harris, Religion, Space and Conflict, 4 and Elizabeth J. Harris, “Syncretism or Inclusivist Subordination? An Exploration into the Dynamics of Inter-Religious Cooperation,” in Theological and Philosophical Responses to Syncretism: Beyond the Mirage of Pure Religion, ed. Patrik Fridlund and Mika Vähäkangas (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), 209-225. 44 Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter, 204, quoting from an article Dharmapāla published in the Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society in May 1915, re-printed in Ananda Guruge, ed., Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala (Colombo: Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Information, 1991), 400. 45 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010) links racism, Empire, and antisemitism. See also Dan Cohn Sherbok, Anti-Semitism: A History (Stroud: Sutton, 2002).

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By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a new Christian theology of religions was emerging – fulfilment theology, a form of inclusivism that grew from positive missionary experience of religious others.46 Possibly, however, its precedent was the previously mentioned, ‘Jewish’ sermon of Paul in Athens, which offered monotheism as the fulfilment of Athenian religion. Fulfilment theology did not demonize religious others. For instance, John Nicol Farquhar, Scottish missionary in India, in The Crown of Hinduism, affirmed much within Indian belief and practice but argued that it was not, in itself, salvific. It needed Christian truth as crown.47 With reference to Buddhism, Kenneth Saunders (1883-1937) was perhaps closest to Farquhar. His 1922 biography of the Buddha praised much within the life of the Buddha and his teachings but, towards the end, Buddhism was represented as unable to reconcile free-will with predetermination and as lacking the fullness of ‘love or Benevolence’ that was present in Christianity.48 In stereotypical fulfilment mode, Saunders wrote: Short of the solution of Jesus that there is a divine grace yearning to help us overcome the tremendous forces of heredity and environment which are too oen ranged against us – that the Righteous Ruler of the Universe has a Father’s heart, and that He who sets man his problem is anxious to help him to solve it – short of this, there is no solution offered to mankind.49

2. The Twentieth Century Jewish and Christian Encounter with Buddhism: Conversion, Dual Identity and Hybridity To move to my second case study, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buddhism entered the European imagination not only through the negative representations of missionaries such as Spence Hardy and theologians such as Saunders, but also through popular pieces of literature such as Edwin Arnold’s romantic and evocative poem about

46

See Kenneth Cracknell, Justice, Courtesy and Love: Theologians and Missionaries Encountering World Religions 1846-1914 (London: Epworth, 1995). Cracknell told me personally that he was unable to find missionaries in Sri Lanka with a sympathetic attitude to Buddhism. His examples came mainly from India, China, and Japan. 47 John Nicol Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913). 48 Kenneth J. Saunders, Gotama Buddha: A Biography (YMCA [India] and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 109. 49 Ibid.

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the Buddha, The Light of Asia,50 translations of Buddhist texts by western orientalists,51 New Religious Movements such as the eosophical Society52 and associations such as the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland, founded in preparation for a Buddhist mission to the West, from Myanmar, led by the British-born Buddhist monk, Ananda Metteyya, in 1908.53 Many of the first western converts to Buddhism were influenced by at least one of these, although recent research has also uncovered a group of working class European seafarers and travelers who converted through direct encounter with Asian Buddhism, for instance U. Dhammaloka.54 Later in the twentieth century, European converts were joined by increasing numbers of Asian Buddhists, who responded to work opportunities in Europe or sought to escape violence in Asia. Jewish and Christian theologies of religions responded to this new context and the more general growth of religious plurality in Europe in a postcolonial era. To illustrate this, I will take two examples of Christians and Jews drawing from each other, as illustration of the continued historical intertwining of the two traditions. Alan Race, Anglican priest in Britain and avowed pluralist, began his book, Making Sense of Religious Pluralism, with a quote from the Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972): “In this aeon, diversity of religions is the will of God.” Heschel made this affirmation in 1966 and Race claimed that he was “ahead of his time – for Jews as well as Christians.”55 Heschel, in fact, voiced exactly the kind of thinking that Race sought to encourage. Race

50

Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia or the Great Renunciation (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1897). 51 Important were the translations of the Pali Text Society, founded in England in 1881 by T.  W. Rhys Davids and the Sacred Books of the East Series, edited by Max Müller and published by Oxford University Press from the late 1870s into the twentieth century. 52 e eosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Colonel Olcott (18321907) and Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), at first for the renewal of spiritualism. It eventually turned to the Indian subcontinent and the wisdom of Buddhism and Hinduism. 53 See Elizabeth J. Harris, Ananda Metteyya: The First British Emissary of Buddhism (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1998) and John L. Crow and Elizabeth J. Harris, The Life of Allan Bennett, Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya (Sheffield and Bristol: Equinox, 2022 forthcoming). 54 See Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking, The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 55 Alan Race, Making Sense of Religious Pluralism: Shaping Theology of Religions for Our Times (London: SPCK, 2013), vii.

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would have had no personal difficulty in citing a Muslim, a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian if their words supported his argument. e fact that he chose Heschel, however, was significant. He knew the reader-response would be different. A Jewish voice would be seen as closer to the Christian tradition than, for instance, a Muslim voice. And Christians would, therefore, be more ready to learn from it. My second example comes from The Dignity of Difference, by Jonathan Sacks, then Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. e book addressed globalization and religion, most particularly the potential of religions to be a source of hope rather than conflict should they embrace an ethic of interreligious respect. It was the product not only of his scholarly understanding of the Jewish tradition but also of the support he had received from Christians. At the beginning, he acknowledged a debt to Gordon Brown, a Christian, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury amongst others56 and crystallized part of his thinking in these words: We encounter God in the face of the stranger. at, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet God.57

Towards the end, he stated, “It is that the one God, creator of diversity, commands us to honour his creation by respecting diversity.”58 Respect for and a willingness to engage with religious difference and diversity came to characterize both Jewish and Christian theologies of religions in the twentieth century. Some Christian theologians took a theologically inclusivist stance. Kenneth Cracknell, for instance, interpreted the Johannine representation of the Logos (Jn 1:1-9) as indicative of the presence of the ‘Word’ in religions beyond Christianity.59 Jacques Dupuis took what he called an inclusive pluralist position, which recognized a reciprocal complementarity between religions, whilst retaining for Jesus, the fullness of divine revelation.60 Perry Schmidt-Leukel, on the

56 Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), vii-viii. 57 Ibid., 59. 58 Ibid., 200. 59 E.g. Kenneth Cracknell, In Good and Generous Faith: Christian Responses to Religious Pluralism (Peterborough: Epworth, 2005). 60 Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997) and Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002).

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other hand, was just one of those who took a pluralist position, affirming that different religions could offer equally valid paths to salvation or liberation.61 On the Jewish side, I have already mentioned Heschel and Sacks. Dan Cohn Sherbok in 1994 called for “a multi-dimensional, crosscultural, interreligious approach in which all religions are conceived as interdependently significant”62 and, in his reader on interfaith theology, included an extract from Jewish scholar, Ze’ev Falk, who claimed that alongside the exceptionalist strand in the Hebrew Bible was “a universalist interpretation of religious diversity,” as expressed in Mal 1:10-12.63 ese scholars and thinkers used similar texts from the Hebrew Bible and created a theological atmosphere that gave permission for Jews and Christians to encounter religious others. In the twentieth century, Jews were prominent among converts to Buddhism. I have known a number of these personally through their link with Sri Lanka, where I lived for eight years between 1986 and 1993. Sigmund Feninger (1901-1994), a German Jew, became a Buddhist monk in the Sri Lankan eravāda tradition in 1936-1937 with the name, Ven Nyanaponika. Interned in Dehra Dun during World War II, he returned to Sri Lanka aerwards to spend the rest of his life there, apart from travels to Myanmar and Europe. Founder of the Kandy-based Buddhist Publication Society in 1958, he had a profound influence on many.64 When I met him, he was in his eighties, a gentle but penetrating fatherfigure. Venerable Ayya Khema (1923-1997), another German of Jewish background, became a leading teacher of Buddhist meditation in both Sri Lanka and Germany, and a champion of higher ordination for eravāda Buddhist women, co-organizing in 1987 a pioneering conference in Buddha Gaya on Buddhist nuns, which gave birth to the international Buddhist women’s association, Sakyadhītā (Daughters of the Buddha).65 Jeffrey Block, an American of Jewish background, was 61 Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Gott ohne Grenzen: Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen (Gütershloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 2004), translated into English by Ulrich Guthrie et al. as God Beyond Boundaries: A Christian and Pluralist Theology of Religions (Münster and New York: Waxmann, 2017) 62 Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Judaism and Other Faiths (London: Macmillan, 1994) quoted in Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Interfaith Theology: A Reader (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), 62. 63 Cohn-Sherbok, Interfaith Theology, 83. 64 See Bhikkhu Bodhi, ed., Nyanaponika: A Farewell Tribute (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1995). 65 See Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Sakyadhītā: Daughters of the Buddha (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1988).

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ordained as Bhikkhu Bodhi and lived with Nyanaponika in Sri Lanka, as his pupil. Now based in the United States, he is a world-renowned translator of Pāli texts66 and founder of a Buddhist humanitarian charity, Buddhist Global Relief. Each of these Jewish converts had their Christian parallel. Venerable Santikaro, an American Christian, for instance, converted to Buddhism through encountering Buddhist meditation whilst he was a Peace Corps volunteer in ailand. Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo, born into a strict Baptist family in the United States, is now a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition and an academic writer on Buddhism and women. She was a co-organizer of the 1987 Buddha Gaya conference.67 Not one of these converts, however, was included in a collection published in 2003, Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians and the Way of the Buddha.68 is featured seven Jews and seven Christians who had attempted to hold together, in different ways, the religion of their birth with Buddhism. e Jewish side included the already-quoted Nathan Katz and Alan Lew. Katz told the compiler, Kamenetz that he had been brought back to Judaism through Buddhism.69 Lew was a Buddhist in the Zen tradition for ten years before realizing that a substratum of his meditation experience had always been Jewish. He then became a rabbi, whilst not renouncing his Zen practice.70 Yet another was Sandra Lubarsky. She did not become a Buddhist but was deeply changed through engaging with Buddhism, writing in a similar vein to Jonathan Sacks: What kinds of Judaism will grow through listening to other traditions cannot be predicted. My hope is that Judaism will continue to be a tradition that teaches its followers how to be alive to the great goodness and 66 Bhikkhu Bodhi has translated, for instance the Saṃyutta Nikāya (2000) and the Aṅguttara Nikāya (2012) of the Pāli Canon for Wisdom Publications. 67 See Elizabeth J. Harris, “e Word of the Buddha and Jesus, the Word: Conversions from Christianity to Buddhism and from Buddhism to Christianity,” in Finding and Losing Faith: Studies in Conversion, ed. Christopher Partridge and Helen Reid (Milton Keynes and Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2006): 39-55. 68 Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan, eds., Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003). 69 Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 269. 70 Alan Lew, “Becoming Who You Always Were: e Story of a Zen Rabbi,” in Beside Still Waters, 45-60. Similar perspectives can be found in Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus, 139 where Isaac Bentwich claimed he was more Jewish than before, aer he started practicing Buddhism.

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beauty in the world and deeply connected to it. I am convinced that Jewish renewal is tied to the creative transformation that follows from encounter with other traditions.71

On the Christian side was the Roman Catholic nun, writer and Zen teacher, Sister Elaine MacInnes, who spent many years in Britain as a prison chaplain,72 and the self-defined Buddhist Christian, Maria Reis Habito, a Catholic who became a pupil of the Taiwanese Buddhist master, Hsin Tao.73 Rodger Kamenetz heard the self-definition ‘Jubu’ (Jewish Buddhist) from an American ophthalmologist and used it in his later book.74 Some of those I have mentioned do not warrant the name, particularly the converts. Ven Nyanaponika, for instance, rejected belief in God completely as a Buddhist monk.75 Nevertheless, he was willing to engage in dialogue with monotheists. In the early 1980s, he was drawn into a dialogue with Christianity, through the Director of the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue in Colombo, Rev. Dr Lynn de Silva (1919-1982). Offering a short, “positive” approach to Christianity, he differed from another western Buddhist drawn into the conversation, Maurice O’Connell Walshe, who had claimed that, although the “twin questions” of God and the soul in Buddhism and Christianity could not “be entirely reconciled,” the difference between them could “to a certain extent be legitimately ‘relativised’.”76 Nyanaponika wrote: e present writer believes that a “positive approach” between the religions themselves (that is, apart from a few individual followers) will be successful only if the futile attempts to “reconcile the irreconcilable” are given up; if differences are recognized and respected, and are no longer seen as causes of hostility.77 71 Sandra B. Lubarsky, “Enriching Awareness: A Jewish Encounter with Buddhism,” in Beside Still Waters, 61-70, at 70. 72 Sister Elaine MacInnes O.L.M., “e Light of Buddhist Wisdom and the ree Births,” in Beside Still Waters, 171-184. She wrote several books for Christians on Zen, including Zen Contemplation for Christians: A Bridge of Living Water (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 73 Maria Reis Habito, “On Becoming a Buddhist Christian,” in Beside Still Waters, 201-213. 74 Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus, 7. 75 See Nyanaponika era, ed., Buddhism and the God-Idea (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1981) 76 M. O’C. Walshe, “Buddhism and Christianity: A Positive Approach,” Dialogue New Series IX, nos. 1-3 (January-December 1982): 3-39, at 32. 77 Nyanaponika Mahathera, “Christianity: Another Positive Approach,” Dialogue New Series IX, nos. 1-3 (January-December 1982): 40-42, at 40.

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He continued, however, to itemize five propositions that could form common ground between the two religions, including “Death is not the end” and the importance of “universal love and compassion.”78 Venerable Ayya Khema could perhaps be called a ‘Jubu’. Although she did not advertise her Jewish roots when I knew her in Sri Lanka, Nathan Katz elicited from her in private conversation that she still felt Jewish.79 And towards the end of her life, when directing a Buddhist center in Germany, she certainly revisited her theistic roots, writing positively about the Sermon on the Mount80 and suggesting in a lecture to the Eckhart Society that Godhead and nibbāna were the same, because both were reached through the dying of the ‘self’.81 On the Christian side, several of those who wrote for Beside Still Waters later participated in Rose Drew’s research into dual Buddhist-Christian belonging, for instance Sallie King, a Quaker and a socially engaged Buddhist, and Maria Reis Habito.82 is case study demonstrates that some Jews and Christians in the twentieth century entered into such a profound encounter with Buddhism that they found that their primary identity as either Jew or Christian was no longer enough. ey found a second identity, and the exact relationship between the two differed for each person. Among both Jews and Christians, there were dual belongers, namely those who identified as 100% Buddhist and a 100% Jewish or Christian. Among both Jews and Christians were those whose identity was asymmetrical, Judaism or Christianity forming their primary identity and Buddhism, their secondary identity.83 Likewise, there were those who struggled to reconcile differences between the two religions, for instance the demands of nonattachment and the demands of love, which prompted Sallie King to 78

Nyanponika, “Christianity,” 41. Katz, “Buddhist-Jewish Relations,” 279. 80 E.g. Ayya Khema, Jesus Meets the Buddha: Reflections on the Buddhas Loving Kindness Discourse and Its Similarity to the Sermon on the Mount (Uttenbül: Jhana Verlag, 1995). 81 See Elizabeth J. Harris, “Buddhism and the Religious Other,” in Understanding Interreligious Relations, ed. David Cheetham, Douglas Pratt, and David omas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88-117, at 110, quoting from Ayya Khema, “Mysticism is No Mystery,” Eckhart Review V, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 44-57, at 45 and 57. 82 Rose Drew, Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration in Dual Belonging (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 83 See Stella Durand, Expanded Identity: Moving beyond Interreligious Dialogue towards a New Convergence, doctoral dissertation (Dublin: Milltown Institute of eology and Philosophy, 2011). 79

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write, “I cannot sit in comfort with either tradition. And yet I need both.”84 All, however, found wisdom within the ‘other’ and were able to draw it into themselves, able to either reconcile difference or struggle/ dialogue with it, in ways that enriched rather than led to disintegration. Drew found that the dual belongers she interviewed were convinced that ultimate reality was one, whilst nevertheless asserting the distinctiveness of each tradition.85 She found, however, that not all her interviewees were happy with a ‘pluralist’ label and sought a more nuanced approach. ey did not deny that Buddhism and Christianity are equally efficacious but did not feel “they had sufficient evidence to positively affirm it.”86 She, therefore, drew a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘so’ pluralisms, the latter being “the negative epistemic claim that it is not possible to know whether hard pluralism is true or false.”87 e ‘so’ pluralism of her interviewees, therefore, spoke of the possibility that two or more religions may embody equal soteriological potential. Was there something within Jewish and Christian traditions that empowered not only empathy towards another religious tradition but also a path of hybridity or dual belonging? e latter, of course, was not the preserve of Jews and Christians at this time. Yet, I would suggest that the strands within twentieth century Jewish and Christian theologies of religions mentioned above, not least the conviction that religious diversity had divine sanction, facilitated both. Nevertheless, I would also argue for differences between Jewish and Christian encounters with Buddhism. Empirical and psychological contingencies that did not apply to Christians, for instance, were present for Jews. Buddhism was not implicated in the discrimination and violence suffered by Jewish communities in the West, expressed not only in the Shoah but in centuries of Christian antisemitism. Buddhism also offered a philosophy that actually engaged with that history, through its emphasis on suffering and liberation from suffering. As Lubarsky stated, “Buddhism’s teachings on suffering have been especially attractive to Jews of my generation,”88 namely the post-Shoah generation. is is not to say that Buddhism’s message about suffering did not resonate with Christians. It

84

Sallie King, “e Mommy and the Yogi,” in Beside Still Waters, 157-170, at 170. 85 Drew, Buddhist and Christian, 206-219. 86 Ibid., 132. 87 Ibid., 133. 88 Lubarsky, “Enriching Awareness,” 67. Similar examples are also found in Kamanetz, The Jew in the Lotus, 91-146, particularly 142-146.

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did. Yet, the existential conditions for Jews in the West made it particularly potent. Additionally, Buddhist perceptions of Jews and Christians differed. Suspicion of Christians is still present in majority Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Cambodia, which were governed by European powers and subjected to Christian missionary activity. Jews were not directly implicated in this, in spite of the negative appraisals of the Hebrew Bible in the writings of revivalists such as Anagārika Dharmapāla. Admittedly, Katz cites a mid-twentieth century pamphlet by the King of ailand that represented Jews as “a parasitic commercial class, self-satisfied and disloyal.”89 Yet, he refers to Tibetan Buddhists seeing Jews as a symbol of resistance to the kind of oppression that Tibetans had also faced. Jews, for some Buddhists, symbolize survival in diaspora through remaining true to religion and family in the face of discrimination, violence and exile.90 Kamenetz, on the other hand, described a 1990 dialogue between the 14th Dalai Lama and a group of Jewish delegates, in which both partners recognized that, “an analogous experience of destruction” united them and enabled mutual learning.91 3. Concluding Thoughts In this chapter, I have investigated whether Jewish and Christian responses to religious others during the last two millennia merit the judgement that there is a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition in this field. To do this, I have used two case studies from opposite ends of the spectrum of possible attitudes to religious others, namely proselytism and dual religious belonging, with particular reference to the encounter with Buddhism. Two questions arise from them: (1) Do they demonstrate that the convergences between Jewish and Christian approaches to religious others are greater than the divergences?; (2) Do they suggest that we can speak of a Judeo-Christian tradition of interreligious relationships or a Judeo-Christian theology of religions? Many more case studies would be needed before definitive answers could be given to these questions. However, I would like to argue tentatively for an affirmative answer to both. 89

Katz, “Buddhist-Jewish Relations,” 276. Ibid., 276-277. Kamanetz also found that Tibetan Buddhists in India were respectful of the resilience of the Jews: Kamanetz, The Jew in the Lotus, 91-100, 184-188, 277-278. 91 Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus, e.g. 185-188, 277. 90

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Both Judaism and Christianity developed proselytizing strategies, with Jews possibly pioneering methods that did not demonize religious others, because of their conviction that holiness was present in all peoples. e contexts and power relationships within which these arose and through which they were enacted differed. Nothing, for instance, within Jewish activities in the Hellenistic and Roman world quite matched evangelical Christian mission under the expansionist imperial power of Britain. Yet, opposition to idolatry and anything that smacked of polytheism defined relationships with religious others for both traditions in the early centuries of the Common Era and informed the theology of religions that sent evangelical missionaries across the globe in the nineteenth century. Antisemitism in Europe ripped apart this common ground, making it sensitive and controversial, more so when this very antisemitism, backed by imperial power, forced Jews to cease being a missionary community. In the twentieth century, both Jewish and Christian theologians revisited and re-worked their theologies of religions. Some of the religious texts from the Hebrew Bible that inspired this were shared and interpreted in similar ways. New possibilities, therefore, arose for reciprocal learning and support between the two traditions, as both turned outwards towards the greater religious plurality of their societies. With this came an opportunity for a re-visioning of the term ‘Judeo-Christian’, as both Jews and Christians developed theologies of religions that rejoiced in religious diversity as the will of the divine, some encountering religious others at such depth that forms of dual belonging emerged. In the twenty first century, there is potential for even greater convergence and reciprocal learning so that a truly Judeo-Christian approach to religious others is developed. For this to happen, however, Christian antisemitism and its fruit in the Shoah must be faced and the Christian exclusivism that characterized my first case study must be revisited, particularly its negative impact on Jews. rough this, it may be possible for the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ to be released from its supersessionist prison to imply not the superiority of Christianity but mutuality, reciprocity, common commitments and respectful interreligious learning between two ever-changing religious traditions.

24 Can Christians Follow More Than One Religious Tradition? On Buddhist-Christian Dual Practice Alexander Löffler, S.J.

ere are Christians who practice more than one religion. In a representative survey conducted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany in 2013, almost a third (29%) of all practicing religious believers in Western Germany agreed with the statement: “I draw for myself on teachings from different religious traditions.”1 If one looks at the programs offered by Catholic and other Christian spiritual centers, one can sense that this statement is most probably true, because these centers offer diverse spiritualties, most of them originating in the East. Many of these Christians, who are practicing more than one religious tradition, are neither from the margins of the Church nor do they adhere to a kind of patchwork religiosity, but are women and men forming the very heart of the Church.2 But how is this phenomenon of double religious practice or double religious affiliation3 to be assessed theologically? Is such a practice 1 Detlef Pollack and Olaf Müller, Religionsmonitor: Verstehen was verbindet: Religiosität und Zusammenhalt in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2013), 13. 2 Michael Seitlinger and Jutta Höcht-Stöhr, eds., Wie Zen mein Christsein verändert: Erfahrungen von Zen-Lehrern (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 2004). Cf. also Annette Meuthrath, Wenn ChristInnen meditieren: Eine empirische Untersuchung über ihre Glaubensvorstellungen und Glaubenspraxis (Berlin and Münster: LIT, 2014), 212. 3 I prefer expressions like “double religious practice” or “double religious affiliation” to the common term “double religious belonging” since they do not insinuate that a Zen practicing Christian really belongs (as an official member) to another religious tradition, in this case Zen-Buddhism. e question of whether it is possible to belong (in the strict sense of the word) to two religious traditions or communities at the same time (by fulfilling the official criteria of full membership in both traditions) is a highly complex and controversially discussed issue. See, for example, Catherine Cornille, ed., Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002);

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at all beneficial for Christians and for their faith? Shouldn’t they be rather warned against it because it leads to distortion or even dilution of the Christian faith? In this essay, these questions will be addressed as follows: Firstly, some spiritual reasons will be analyzed that make the exploration of other spiritualties attractive to Christians. Secondly, an attempt will be made to theologically legitimize the phenomenon of Buddhist-Christian double practice from a Catholic point of view. In a third and final step, insights drawn from the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue shall help to substantiate the previous findings. By making this contribution to the Festschrift in honor of my esteemed academic teacher and moderator of my doctoral thesis, professor Terrence Merrigan, I dare to follow in the footsteps of this great and wonderful Catholic theologian and try to develop one of his insights, which he has expressed as follows: An incarnationally grounded, and sacramentally oriented theology of religions cannot but pause and reflect upon the abundance of spiritual and moral goods manifest in non-Christian religious traditions. […] It does so […] in the awareness that other expressions of the encounter with the Holy are possible, and that, in our day, they demand – and deserve – to be taken seriously, in their very materiality, as questions to us.4

1. Spiritual Reasons for the Practice of Another Religious Tradition ere are undoubtedly many reasons why Christians turn to other spiritual traditions. In many cases, however, this happens neither out of curiosity nor out of an anti-church attitude, but it is simply motivated by an unfulfilled spiritual longing. In this line Zensho Kopp, director of a Zen center in Germany, writes: Many genuine spiritual seekers have turned away from the Christian church in our time. ey did not find there the food they needed for their spiritual growth. One of the main reasons for this is that nowadays mysticism has only an antiquated value in the church, and that most pastors completely lack what is an essential requirement for the awakening of

Rose Drew, Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging (London: Routledge, 2011); Gavin D’Costa and Ross ompson, eds., Buddhist-Christian Dual Belonging: Affirmations, Objections, Explorations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). 4 Terrence Merrigan, “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17-27, at 27.

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a genuine enthusiasm for the Eternal. is precondition, however, is nothing else than ‘enthusiasm for God’ gained from mystical life and experience.5

An official Catholic document attests that Kopp is not completely wrong. Already in 1999, the so-called “Domus Aurea Paper about the Presence of Buddhism in Europe,” co-published by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Council of Episcopal Conferences of Europe, states self-critically that Zen practicing European Christians are driven by the search “for an alternative to what they frequently experience as a sterile dogmatism. ey oen feel the Church to be overly institutionalized, relying upon outdated and incomprehensible language. Many complain of missing an adequate initiation into personal prayer, meditation and the experience of integral salvation.”6 is search for an inner experience of integral salvation is aptly summed up by Gundula Meyer, a German Zen teacher and retired Protestant pastor, when she writes: “It is a search for the central, for meaning, for a vision, a new way of life. […] Many people no longer want to be taught, preached, fed, but want to experience and realize the One Reality that is at stake. And that is the great thing about the Zen way.”7 Accordingly, people in the West turn to Buddhism, because they associate with it a greater competence in leading people to religious experience than Christianity. Christianity, instead, is experienced and considered as a religious system rather than a vivid spiritual path.8 Even Christians deeply rooted in the Church are therefore more confident in Buddhism than in Christianity, because of the lack of experience that is so important for a vivid faith. Equipped with a dual religious practice of being a Jesuit and a Zen teacher, Stefan Bauberger confirms this in the following way: “As with many serious practitioners, my approach [to Zen] was not simply light-hearted, but arose from an inner need, an oen-desperate search.” He adds strikingly: “Mysticism exists only on

5 Zensho Kopp, Zen und die Wiedergeburt der christlichen Mystik: Ein Wegführer zum wahren Selbst, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Schirner, 2011), 135. 6 Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and Council of Episcopal Conferences of Europe, “e Domus Aurea Paper about the Presence of Buddhism in Europe,” Pro Dialogo Bulletin 34, no. 3 (1999): 343-345, at 344. 7 Gundula Meyer, “Orient und Okzident sind nicht mehr zu trennen,” Meditation 25, no. 1 (1999): 35-38, at 37. 8 See Werner Höbsch, Hereingekommen auf den Markt: Katholische Kirche und Buddhismus in Deutschland (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2013), 280.

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the periphery, and not in the center of an institutionalized and bourgeois Christianity.”9 erefore, in a first step one has to realize and admit, that the Zen practice among Christians does not seem so much to be a cause, but instead seems to be a symptom of a crisis. It expresses a deeply felt need for which the churches themselves are responsible in the first place. Obviously, there are Christians who are not able to sufficiently meet their longing for a sustainable spiritual life with the instruments provided by their own Christian traditions and therefore look for alternatives outside the church and outside Christianity.10 e concrete trigger for a search for spiritual alternatives outside Christianity does not always have to be only on the side of the Church and a deficit that has been identified there, but can also be connected with the basic spiritual disposition of a person. In the first chapter of his book Zen und Erleuchtung (2005) AMA Samy (actually: Arul Maria Arokiasamy), an Indian Jesuit and a Zen teacher, describes in a moving way how he struggled for many years with the discursive prayer method of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, as prescribed by his order, without ever having found that deep inner peace which he so much longed for. e turning point came with a meeting with the Buddhist Zen master Yamada Koun in Kamakura (Japan), whose disciple AMA Samy subsequently became. With the objectless, non-discursive meditation method of Zen, including Koan training, AMA Samy suddenly found himself on a spiritual path that was in total harmony with his inner spiritual disposition and finally allowed him to realize the longdesired wholeness and non-dual interconnectedness with all reality.11 Doris Zölls, a Zen teacher and a former Protestant pastor, reports a very similar experience. Zölls, who grew up in a Protestant family in Bavaria, had deep experiences of unity already as a child but neither she nor anyone else in her family or in her wider religious environment knew what to do with them. It was only when she herself, as an experienced Protestant pastor, encountered Zen that she was able to understand her experiences and to classify them correctly. Moreover, Zen helped her to li her Christian life of prayer and faith to another level. rough Zen

9 Stefan Bauberger, “Zen und Christentum,” in Spiritualität der Zukunft: Suchbewegungen in einer multireligiösen Welt, ed. Martin Rötting and Christian Hackbarth-Johnson (Sankt Ottilien: EOS, 2019), 157-164, at 157. 10 is is confirmed by empirical studies. See, for example, Meuthrath, Wenn ChristInnen meditieren, 208. 11 Cf. AMA Samy, Zen und Erleuchtung: Zehn Meditationen eines ZenMeisters (Berlin: eseus, 2005), 26-28.

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she became aware that her previous “religious life was always a wish that the world as it is, may be different,” for even if she prayed in the Lord’s Prayer ‘Your will be done’, her own wishes immediately followed in the intercessions.12 Zen instead enabled her to see and accept reality as it is and to find firm ground in all the impermanence of existence. rough sitting in silence, she also realized that prayer is not so much talking but silence and, above all, listening. But Zen took Zölls even one step further: “I experienced that if I am completely this listening, then there is no listening at all anymore, nor I that listens, and there is also nothing that can be listened to anymore. Subject and object become one.” For her, as a result, the words of Jesus ‘I and the Father are one’ became true. “ey were not only intellectually comprehensible; they could be experienced.”13 Another important reason why Christians start to practice more than one religious tradition is that they are spiritually attracted to other religious traditions in a completely unexpected way. is was impressively the case with Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle, S.J. (1898-1990) and Henri Le Saux O.S.B. (1910-1973), two Catholic pioneers of dual religious practice. Filled with missionary zeal, they originally set out for alien religious cultures in Japan and India in order to proclaim Christ, but were unexpectedly strongly affected by the spiritual power of Zen and Advaita Vedanta respectively to such an extent that they could live their Christian vocation profitably only by referring to the respective newly discovered spiritual tradition. When Enomiya-Lassalle completed his first sesshin under the guidance of a Buddhist Zen master, he did so with the intention of better understanding the Japanese culture from within and thus being able to preach the Christian faith more effectively. However, he soon discovered for himself that the non-discursive Zazen with its emphasis on non-attachment was a much more effective means of liberating the human mind from its attachments and orienting the soul towards mystical union with God than the discursive prayer of the Ignatian tradition.14 us, over the course of time the Catholic missionary of Christ in Eastern Asia became a popular proponent of Zen in the Christian West.15

12

Doris Zölls, “Zen, ein Weg auch für Christen,” in Als Christ Buddhist? Auf der Suche nach der eigenen Spiritualität, ed. Heike Radeck (Hofgeismar: Evang. Akad., 2005), 63-71, at 66. 13 Ibid., 67. 14 Cf. Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen – Weg zur Erleuchtung: Einführung und Anleitung (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1987), 95. 15 See for more detail Ursula Baatz, Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle: Ein Leben zwischen den Welten: Biographie (Zürich and Düsseldorf: Benziger, 1998).

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With Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) the situation was similar. When the 38-year-old Benedictine monk le his monastery in Brittany for India in 1948, he did so with the idea in mind to convert not only individual Hindus but “Hinduism as a whole.”16 Le Saux, however, had not yet been on the Indian subcontinent for half a year, when this plan turned completely upside down. In the aermath of a meeting with Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), the ‘great seer’ (maharshi) of the holy mountain Arunācha-la, Le Saux was overwhelmed by such a powerful Advaita experience that he decided to dedicate the rest of his life to the realization of full awakening. To do so, he chose the path of complete renunciation (sannyasa) and eventually, aer the initiation by a guru, became a Christian-Hindu sannyasi. Since Le Saux increasingly loved, practiced and correspondingly lived in both the religious worlds, and neither of them could he completely cast off, he gradually accepted his spiritual double loyalty and considered himself a kind of interreligious bridge-being.17 e Benedictine monk, who originally wanted to lead all Hindus to Christ, was himself converted to the Indian Advaita, and thus became the spiritual model for many Christians in the context of the Christian Ashram movement in India. 2. Dual Religious Practice from a Theological Point of View In the preceding examples and testimonies, it has become clear that there are quite different, but comprehensible reasons or circumstances why Christians rooted in the Church nevertheless start to develop a dual religious affiliation or dual religious practice. But how is this fact to be assessed theologically? Would it not be better to completely refrain from it since any kind of dual loyalty must inevitably lead to conflicts with the Christian faith? Or could it also be understood positively, maybe even justified on theological grounds? Le Saux made no secret of the fact that his religious dual practice, which in his case even took the form of a genuine dual belonging, was escorted by painful internal tensions, even agony, as he expresses in his Spiritual Diary on April 12, 1957: “I oen dream of dying, for it seems there is no way out for me in this life. I cannot be at the same time Hindu and Christian, 16 Christian Hackbarth-Johnson, “Henri Le Saux/Swami Abhishiktananda,” in Multiple religiöse Identität: Aus verschiedenen religiösen Traditionen schöpfen, ed. Reinhold Bernhardt and Perry Schmidt-Leukel (Zürich: TVZ, 2008), 35-58, at 42. 17 Ibid., 49-50.

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and I cannot either be simply Hindu or simply Christian. So what is the point of living?”18 On the other hand, especially with regard to Le Saux and EnomiyaLassalle, one has to ask oneself whether behind the great spiritual attraction, that non-Christian Eastern traditions can exert on Christians, maybe an underlying action of the Holy Spirit could be discovered. If it is indeed the will of God to save all people (cf. 1 Tim 2:4), then these people must be given the possibility to relate to God in some way. Would it not be reasonable to assume that, right from the beginning, God also made available to every people and every culture the appropriate means and methods for establishing contact with him? e Second Vatican Council clearly presumes a supernatural, divine origin of non-Christian forms of prayer and meditation, when in the decree Ad Gentes (AG) on the Missionary Activity of the Church the missionary religious institutes are explicitly called upon to “carefully consider how traditions of asceticism and contemplation, the seeds of which have been sown by God in certain ancient cultures before the preaching of the Gospel, might be incorporated into the Christian life” (AG 18; emphasis added). EnomiyaLassalle was firmly convinced that Buddhist Zen meditation must be considered as a result of “a special providence of God”19 and thus be counted among “the riches which a generous God has distributed among the nations” (AG 11). During the last years, more and more Catholic theologians have shown a positive attitude toward dual religious practice among Christians. Some of the main ideas of three of the leading Catholic theologians on this practice will be presented briefly. ey all are representatives of an inclusivist theology of religions.20 A first well-known Catholic theologian, who not only appreciates religious dual practice among Christians but even openly advocates its active

18 Abhishiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary (1948-1973) of Swami Abhishiktananda (Dom H. Le Saux). A Selection, edited with introduction and notes, by Raimon Panikkar. English translation by D.  Fleming and J. Stuart (Delhi: ISPCK, 1998), 203. As already indicated, Le Saux will increasingly find the meaning and vocation of his life in connecting different religious worlds in his own person. 19 Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen, 88. 20 One of the leading Catholic theologians who advocates such practice is Paul Knitter; however, he adheres to the pluralist theology of religions. For more details see Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009).

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promotion is Peter Phan.21 Phan takes his starting point in the optimistic theology of religions of the Second Vatican Council. If it is indeed true that non-Christian religious traditions contain elements of the good, true and holy (Nostra Aetate [NA] 2; Lumen Gentium [LG] 16) then, according to him, “multiple religious belonging is not only possible but also desirable,” because the Church must be interested in taking up these God given elements and in integrating them into her own religious practice, provided, that these elements, i.e. the values, teachings, and practices of another religion, are not in direct opposition to Christian ones (such as, for example, the Indian caste system).22 According to Phan, religious dual belonging is nothing fundamentally new to the Church, since it has had its place in the Church right from the beginning in the guise of JudeoChristians and has been lived openly (cf. Acts 2:46).23 In a similar way, even today, although in other forms, for him dual religious belonging still embodies a legitimate and fruitful way of being authentically Christian, especially when it applies to Christians, who are both deeply rooted in the Church and loyal to another religious tradition (and thus are not models of the so-called postmodern supermarket-spirituality or “believing without belonging”24).25 According to Phan, the most effective means of promoting such a kind of dual religious practice among Christians consists in making and maintaining interreligious friendships. For more than Christian duty to love (even up to the love of enemies) – by which the true disciples of Jesus should always distinguish themselves – through a genuine interreligious friendship, it is possible to win the human heart for the ‘stranger’ and ‘otherness’, in a way that gradually transforms a person in the core of his or her being.26 Phan writes: 21 See Peter C. Phan, “Multiple Religious Belonging: Opportunities and Challenges for eology and Church,” Theological Studies 64 (2003): 495-519. is essay is reprinted (as Chapter 4) in Peter C. Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 60-81. e following presentation refers to the book. Although, due to some ambiguous statements, the book was investigated by the CDF, Peter Phan clearly holds to the orthodox Catholic faith. See for more details and an apologia sua: Peter C. Phan, The Joy of Religious Pluralism: A Personal Journey (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017). 22 Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously, 67; also 77. 23 See ibid., 68. 24 Cf. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). 25 See Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously, 62; also 70-71. 26 Phan refers to James Fredericks, Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 173-177.

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By accepting the stranger as friend, we allow his or her ‘otherness’ to confront us radically, challenging us with stories we have never heard, questions we have never raised, beliefs we have never entertained, and practices we have never imagined. By welcoming and learning to appreciate these new religious realities, we gradually adopt them as our own because our friends have them and share them with us, and thus we begin to acquire, perhaps without being aware of it, multiple religious belonging or double religious identity.27

Phan is aware that the formation of a religious double loyalty is not easy, but if it is given to a Christian, it should be gratefully accepted and gracefully lived out: Multiple religious belonging is not for the fainthearted or the dilettante. As the life of Abhishiktananda has shown, it is a demanding vocation, a special call to holiness, which up till now God has granted only to a few. It is not unlike martyrdom. Ultimately it is not something one looks for or demands at will. It is a gi to be received in fear and trembling and in gratitude and joy.28

A second Catholic thinker with a similar optimistic view of double religious practice is the Australian theologian Gideon Goosen. In his book Hyphenated Christians he writes: “Dual belonging is about spiritual enrichment, not erratic religious behaviour. […] It is a gi from God, not a threat. It should be appreciated, not feared.”29 With regard to NA  2, Goosen – like Phan – assumes that there is truth and grace in other religious traditions, but in such a way that these extra-Christian truths are not only precursors or reflections of the Christian truths, but can also illuminate, deepen, supplement or even correct the latter.30 For Goosen, under the conditions of history, truth is not absolute but relative, or rather relational, so that the revelation of Jesus Christ, despite its unique and definitive character, must not be misunderstood as the absolute or as the only divine self-manifestation in the world, but must always be seen in relation to those truths that God has revealed elsewhere. For Goosen there is no doubt – and the Zen practice among Christians seems to support his view – that other religious traditions too have been endowed by God with spiritual insights and practical elements that do not exist in Christianity, and which are experienced by Christians as enriching for their own Christian practice. is corresponds to Goosen’s view that “the world’s religions are a gi from God” and “have an 27

Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously, 81. Ibid. 29 Gideon Goosen, Hyphenated Christians: Towards a Better Understanding of Dual Religious Belonging (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 162. 30 See ibid., 125. 28

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autonomous role in the history of salvation.”31 us, according to him, dual practicing Christians should not be regarded as heterodox syncretists but as gied spiritual people who in a special way discover the truths inspired by God in other religions and make them their own.32 For him dual religious practice is fundamentally possible because God is the originator of all these truths, so that in the end there can be no final contradiction between them: “Since God is the author of all these truths, there can be no possibility of them being in opposition, even if we do not always see the relationship immediately.”33 e fact that these truths, in the diversity of their human, contingent expressions, take on an apparently contradictory or paradoxical character does not speak against their authenticity but rather for it. As Goosen reminds us, even common Church-going Christians must live with paradoxical truths, such as, for example, the divine-human nature of Jesus Christ. In this regard, for Goosen who also did some empirical research in the field of Buddhist-Christian dual practice,34 genuine dual religious affiliation does not imply the creation of a new, syncretistic tertium quid, but the deepening and enrichment of an already existing religious identity, that nevertheless demands a critical distinction of spirits. “If New Age is seen as an uncritical openness to all religious traditions, […] because, at its worst, it implies individual autonomy and a rejection of all truthclaims that do not have a basis in personal experience,” Goosen writes, “I would say that dual religious belonging is a critical openness to other faiths.”35 Above all, authentic dual religious practice attempts to give full respect to both otherness and integrity of the traditions involved. According to Goosen, however, there can ultimately only be asymmetrical, not symmetrical forms of dual religious practice, so that the term “dual religious belonging” has to be considered an analogous (not univocal) term. us, he defines “dual religious belonging” the following way: “when a person has a first major religion and draws on a second to a greater or lesser degree, according to the three criteria of doctrine, practices and actions.”36

31 Goosen, Hyphenated Christians, 129 and 125. Goosen adheres to the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ (see ibid., 123, 126, 134). 32 See ibid., 131. 33 Ibid., 133. 34 Cf. Gideon Goosen, “An Empirical Study of Dual Religious Belonging,” Journal of Empirical Theology 20 (2007): 159-178. 35 Ibid., 15 (original emphasis). 36 Goosen, Hyphenated Christians, 19 (emphasis deleted); also 27, 159.

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A third prominent Catholic theologian, who considers double religious practice possible from a Christian point of view is Claude Geffré O.P., the former head of the École biblique et archéologique française in Jerusalem.37 Compared to Phan and Goosen, Geffré epitomizes a special case in that he looks at the phenomenon of dual religious affiliation from the opposite perspective. In his reflections on dual religious practice, Geffré does not have Western Christians in mind, who want to enrich their faith by making use of non-Christian forms of Eastern meditation. He rather has the former followers of non-Christian traditions in mind, among others Buddhists and Hindus, who, as a result of a genuine inculturation of the Gospel in a formerly non-Christian context, converted to Christianity, and he now asks himself whether and to what extent such converts are still be allowed to hold on to central elements and values of their non-Christian original traditions and thus in a certain way to live a dual religious affiliation. Geffré distinguishes between “multiple belonging” and “double belonging.” While by the term “multiple belonging,” he understands the phenomenon of eclectic supermarket spirituality, which is dominant in the West (and which, in his view, should be critically assessed). In this spirituality everything revolves around the individual well-being of one’s own self and the enhancement of one’s potentials, so that people use different religious traditions without really belonging to one of these traditions. However, he considers “double belonging” as the “logical outcome of real inculturation” of the Gospel into a non-Christian context and thus a possible and legitimate way of being an authentic Christian.38 Geffré doubts whether someone can actually belong to two religions at the same time at the institutional level. However, this seems to him to be far less unrealistic at the experiential level, as he writes: It would be absurd to affirm that one can be both Christian and Hindu or Buddhist from the perspective of these traditions as religious systems. But if religion is understood as an interior experience and as the total surrender of oneself to a transcendent and Absolute reality, it would be possible to affirm a continuity between my Christian experience and my previous spiritual experience. It would be the same experience of the 37

See Claude Geffré, “Double Belonging and the Originality of Christianity as a Religion,” in Many Mansions?, 93-105. 38 Geffré, Double Belonging, 93. Geffré is not critical of every form of religious patchwork or supermarket spirituality. For him the crucial question is whether a specific (individual) form of spirituality or religiosity is an expression of a genuine search for God or whether it only serves to nurture one’s own self and its wellbeing (see ibid., 95).

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Absolute that is mediated by different symbolic conceptual and ritual ways of objectifying the experience.39

3. Insights from the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) A look at the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) shows that in the field of double religious practice more is officially permitted and possible than widely held and known. For nuns and monks engaged in the MID – a movement established at the request of the (then) Pontifical Secretariat for Non-Christians in the 1970s and entrusted to the communities of the Benedictine family, especially the Benedictines and Trappists – have been practicing genuine Zen in the heart of the Church for decades with the permission of the Vatican.40 An important official document of the MID throws a very positive light on non-Christian Eastern forms of meditation when it states: [T]he forms of meditation, prayer or contemplation elaborated apart from Christian tradition are not a priori a threat to Christian faith. e history of Christian prayer attests to this fact. If these influences have at times disturbed certain Christian communities, in other cases, where they have been received with the necessary spiritual discernment, they have been positive and have even fostered the realization of the Gospel. Consequently, we can say that contemplation is not more Christian to the extent it is less influenced from without. Rather, what makes it Christian is the way in which the contemplative succeeds in entering into the spirit of Christ in order to make all things flow together towards the coming of the Kingdom.41

e same document encourages Christians to practice Zen in an authentic Buddhist way and to consider this a kind of interreligious hospitality.42 39

Geffré, “Double Belonging,” 99f. See Simon Tonini, “Intermonastic Dialogue: Beginnings and Development,” Pro Dialogo Bulletin 23 (1988): 9-17, esp. 13-14. See also Pierre-François de Béthune, “Monastic Inter-Religious Dialogue,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 34-50. 41 International Commission of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue: References and Perspectives Drawn from the Experiences of Monastics,” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 49, no. 1 (1994): 12-19, at 13-14. e original document is published in French: Commission internationale pour le dialogue interreligieux monastique, “Contemplation et dialogue interreligieux: Repères et perspectives puisés dans l’expérience des moines,” Pro Dialogo Bulletin 28 (1993): 250-170, at 254. 42 See International Commission of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 13. See for more detail Pierre40

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By way of adopting a non-Christian form of Eastern meditation it is intended to give the guest tradition – and with it also God – a place in one’s own heart. is requires courage and above all humility, because the guest now dwells in one’s own heart with all of its strangeness, and the host has to take oneself out of the center. At the same time, however, the adoption of a non-Christian form of Eastern meditation enables Christian practitioners to enrich and deepen their own faith. For, as the Zen practicing Benedictine monk and former secretary general of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, Pierre-François de Béthune, rightly points out, Eastern methods like Zen can “help us to discover other ways of experiencing the numinous.”43 What makes such a form of Christian Zen practice that fully respects otherness possible is the fact that both the Christian and the Zen path, despite the great differences on the level of doctrine, share the same kenotic dynamic on the spiritual level.44 For at the heart of Zazen, the silent sitting meditation, there is the realization of the ‘great death’, i.e. the dying of one’s own egoistic self, which is associated with the awakening (or resurrection) to the true self, manifesting concretely in the realization of a new, selfless way of living. e realization of this true ‘selfless self’ is now also the central characteristic of Christian discipleship, as Jesus himself understands when he says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple, deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake will save it” (Lk 9:23-24). e Pauline understanding of Christian discipleship seems to be characterized by the same dynamic of self-emptying, when Paul reminds the Christians in Philippi to imitate the kenotic, self-giving attitude of their Lord at all times of life, in order to win authentic life, a life raised above and eternal (cf. Phil 2:5-11). Consequently, not only in Buddhism but also in Christianity it is essential to gain true life (or self)

François de Béthune, Interreligious Hospitality: The Fulfillment of Dialogue (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010); Pierre-François de Béthune, Welcoming Other Religions: A New Dimension of the Christian Faith (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016). 43 Pierre-François de Béthune, “Christian-Buddhist Dialogue as Spiritual Experience,” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 52, no. 1 (1995): 16-24, at 17. 44 See Franco Sottocornola and Maria De Giorgi, “A Christian-Catholic Appraisal of Buddhism,” in Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Comprehensive Study, ed. Karl Josef Becker and Ilaria Morali (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 443-458, at 456.

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through a life of selflessness, so that both traditions come very close in their practical and spiritual setting.45 erefore, when Zen is about training oneself into losing oneself or detaching oneself methodically in order to clear one’s own center to make room for something greater, the true self, then for the Christians rooted in Christ, it is not about dissolution of the self into a nameless Absolute, as feared sometimes by traditional Christians. Rather it is about the self’s actual and deepest realization as it is aptly expressed in the aforementioned document of MID in the following way: “Whoever knows the Christ […] knows that in ‘losing oneself’ in contemplation, under any of its forms, one allows themself ‘to be grasped’ by the Lord.”46 According to the Jesuit theologian and Catholic expert in Zen Buddhism, Hans Waldenfels, even for Christians “the figure of Jesus is not primarily an object of contemplation” because such an object “remains something fixed and external.” However, “Christ does not wish so much to be an ob-jectum [Gegenüber] for us as to take form within our very selves.” As Paul writes to the Galatians: “[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). As a consequence, this means: “When no distinction any longer remains between Christ and the one who believes in him […] only then […] does the full actualization of what it means to be a Christian take place.”47 No doubt, any form of Christian Zen practice that respects alterity poses a challenge for Christians and requires careful spiritual guidance and discernment of spirits. However, it also offers the Church the possibility to discover new and yet unimagined facets of the divine mystery and thus grow even deeper into the promised fullness of truth (cf. Jn 16:13) and Catholicity. Moreover, the Christian practice of Zen could be understood as a concrete example of how the admonition (and not only

45

is view is also shared by Hans Waldenfels when he writes: “Our God, the God with a human face, is a selfless, divesting God of love and a Christian is only the one who lets himself to be lured by him into the discipleship of selfemptying love and wins himself while losing himself. e great opening depicted by the great death in Buddhism applies also in Christianity: ‘If the grain of wheat does not fall into the earth and dies, it will remain alone: if it dies, it will bring rich fruit’ (Jn 12:24). In the end, the law of practice is the same in both major world religions”; Hans Waldenfels, Faszination des Buddhismus: Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1982), 55. 46 International Commission of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 15. 47 Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 161.

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recommendation or request) expressed by the Council fathers in NA 2 that Christians should acknowledge, preserve and even promote the spiritual goods and values of the other religions, could be exemplarily met, especially with regard to Buddhism. As a matter of fact, Christian Zen teachers do not hesitate to understand their ‘ministry’ – the training of Christians in Zen – as an explicit implementation of this Magisterium’s precept.48 Is it possible to consider Buddhist-Christian dual practice not only a form of Christian life accepted and promoted by the Magisterium, but even a God-given form of vocation that is prompted and sustained by the Holy Spirit? Without doubt it would be a “specific vocation for the few,”49 but nevertheless a vocation that is closely interwoven with the basic vocation of the Church being “a sign and instrument” of a worldwide reconciled humanity (LG 1).50 In accordance with the main concern of MID to understand dialogue as ‘mission’, Zen practicing Christians could give a face of reconciled brotherhood and sisterhood to humanity already mysteriously united in its divine origin and goal (see NA 1). At the same time, by virtue of their concrete interreligious existence and competence, they would be valuable co-workers in the global ministry of reconciliation for humanity, entrusted in a special way to the Church that is called to build up the Kingdom of God in today’s world. e declaration Nostra Aetate leaves no doubt that Buddhists and Christians already serve the same power, when NA 2 explicitly acknowledges in non-theistic religious traditions (like Buddhism) – on the basis of the doctrine of the logoi spermatikoi – “a certain awareness [perceptio] of a hidden power,” which Christians call “father,” and in their “teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites” a “ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” that has been revealed in all its fullness in Jesus Christ. us, Zen practicing Christians would be best understood as “interreligious bridge-pilgrims” that connect two religious worlds. For it is precisely from this, being bridges and bringing different religious worlds into relation and communion, that they gain their true identity, knowing that neither of the two sides or worlds between which they move is or will be their true or ultimate home. eir true home lies in the depths of both worlds, in that ultimate source that transcends all religious worlds and yet carries, unites and holds them together in their origin and final destiny (cf. NA 1). 48

See, for example, Robert E. Kennedy, Zen Gifts to Christians (New York: Continuum, 2000), 5. 49 De Béthune, “Christian-Buddhist Dialogue,” 23. 50 See also Goosen, Hyphenated Christians, 158.

25 At the Intersection of Racial and Religious Othering Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue as a Performance of White Christian Innocence? Judith Gruber

1. White Discourses of Supremacy-disguised-as-Innocence ere is a peculiar topos that informs much theological work currently done on interreligious dialogue: a rhetoric of religious difference as a new discovery seems to be at work in many approaches in this field, in which it is a well-established custom to start publications with the observation that religious difference poses now, to a hitherto unknown extent, both a theological challenge and chance.1 e accelerating processes of globalization, such introductions frequently hold, entail an increasing pluralization in the religious field that more than ever calls on theology to reflect on religious difference. Such framing of religious alterity as a new discovery oen goes hand in hand with a call to an ethics of hospitality and tolerance that advocates for interfaith engagement as a profitable enterprise, inviting scholars to venture out of their familiar tradition onto unknown territory, in which the encounter with the religious other can become an enriching experience for their home community.2

1 Jeannine Hill Fletcher points out that this rhetoric of novelty already dominated the perception of the first World Parliament of Religion: Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “Marginal Notes: Women and Other ‘Others’ in the eology of Religions,” in The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 145-163, at 149. 2 For an exemplary critical voice that complicates the prevailing discourse of novelty, cf. Albertina Nugteren, “Restricted Access Entitled to Understand: A Critical Look at Comparative eology,” in Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe: Between Texts and People, ed. David A. Cheetham, Ulrich Winkler, Oddbjørn Leirvik, and Judith Gruber, Currents of Encounter 40 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 149-160.

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An emerging body of literature that investigates how the category of religion intersects with race, however, complicates this narrative.3 It surfaces other genealogies4 in which the co-production of racial and religious otherness appears as a defining feature of colonial modernity and a core instrument of modern colonialism.5 From this work, a new view of colonial modernity emerges as a religio-racial project of empire/ nation-building that pursued the co-production of religious and racial difference to implement White Christian Supremacy as a pervasive system for distributing both, access to resources and vulnerability to death, unevenly along religio-racialized lines. White European theologians have been deeply implicated in this violent religio-racializing project of colonial modernity, offering “arguments on race and religion that established the connection between White Supremacy and Christian superiority.”6 By doing the work of constructing whiteness, in turn, theology has itself been racialized.7 What transpires from this research, then, is the challenge to see “White Supremacy as the backdrop against which modern Christian theologies of pluralism have emerged.”8 Hence, when we bring race to bear on a theology of religious difference, the rhetoric of novelty might be less innocent than it first appears. “e most dangerous weapon of White Supremacy has always been its ability to erase the history of its violence and of its victims,”9 Williams argues, challenging us to consider how current theologies of religious difference continue to sponsor White Christian domination by turning a blind eye on the racialized histories in the midst of which they take place. Reflecting on her own work in this field, Brecht speaks candidly about such an erasure of race that allows its whiteness to pass unproblematized: 3

Cf. for a review of the state of the art, the recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: “Roundtable: ‘Religio-Racial Identity’ as Challenge and Critique,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 2 (2020). 4 Cf. Dienke Hondius, Blackness in Western Europe: Racial Patterns of Paternalism and Exclusion (New York: Routledge, 2017), 113. 5 ere are also scholars that argue for older, medieval origins of the race/ religion constellation (the term is Anya Topolski’s), cf. e.g. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 6 Hill Fletcher, “Marginal Notes: Women and Other ‘Others’ in the eology of Religions,” 146. 7 Kameron J. Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. 8 Hill Fletcher, “Marginal Notes: Women and Other ‘Others’ in the eology of Religions,” 154. 9 Shannen D. Williams, “e Color of Christ’s Brides,” American Catholic Studies 127, no. 3 (2016): 14-21, at 14.

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I presumed a significant disconnect between race and religion. […] I articulated my inclusivistic perspective without thinking about how my race functioned […] under the surface: It did not occur to me to consider how my experience as a White Christian influenced my theological expectations for salvation […]. By holding race at a distance from religion and related theological convictions, I never forced myself […] to consider how religion and theology are themselves racialized.10

Scholars of critical whiteness studies highlight that such assumed colorblindness is a crucial feature of whiteness. Whiteness, as the ‘normal(ized)’ way of being in the world, provides white people with the privilege to not have to reckon with the ways in which our particular racialized position shapes the ways in which we navigate the world. Our whiteness, hence, affords us with an ignorance that protects us from accounting for the ways in which it violently sustains racialized social inequity. White ignorance allows white people to maintain a sense of ourselves as ‘good people’.11 Wekker speaks of “White Innocence” to trace these connections between “privilege, entitlement, and violence that are deeply disavowed”12 and buttress a white claim to moral superiority. Writing in the Netherlands, but indicating that her argument is applicable to other Western European nations as well,13 she shows that it is central to “dominant white Dutch self-representation”14 to understand the nation as “colorblind and [thus] antiracist, a place of extraordinary hospitality and tolerance,”15 and argues that this sense of collective self is achieved through an aggressive denial of race as a constitutive part of Dutch history and presence. e claim to racial/racist innocence as an essential part of white self-understanding thus rests on “an ignorance militant, […] that refuses to go quietly – not at all confined to the illiterate […] but […] presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge.”16 It is a “smug ignorance: (aggressively) rejecting the possibility to know”17 that affords the collective White self the feeling to be “inherently on the moral […]

10

Mara Brecht, “Why We Have to Talk about Race When We Talk about Religion,” Religious Education 113 (2018): 358-361, at 360. 11 Cf. Maureen O’Connell, If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 101-113. 12 Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 18. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 18. 17 Ibid.

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high ground,”18 which comes with a sense of mission to be “a guiding light to other […] nations.”19 White innocence sponsors white saviorism in an aggressive disavowal of a history of race, and hence, racism. Amplified by Wekker’s concept of White Innocence, Brecht’s selfdiagnosis, then, offers a lens to revisit the topos of novelty in current theologies of interreligious dialogue. Together, they call for an interrogation of the claims to innocence that silently underwrite the framing of religious difference as a novel opportunity for theology. How, we can ask with Wekker, is this “innocence accomplished and maintained”?20 In which ways is this discourse of novelty achieved through an erasure of the long history of the co-production of religious and racial difference, and thus, a performance of White Christian supremacy-disguised-asinnocence? In which ways does it, then, continue to uphold White Christian supremacy through theological practices? And what could be alternative theologies of religious difference that problematize their participation in the maintenance of White Christian supremacy? I aim to address these questions by examining the controversy that surrounded Achille Mbembe’s invitation to the 2020 Ruhrtriennale in Bochum, Germany. Aer Germany’s ‘Commissioner for the Fight against Antisemitism’ accused Mbembe of antisemitic writings, heated debates arose about international holocaust commemoration and colonial amnesia in Germany. At first glance, we might not recognize this controversy as an apt resource for a theology of interreligious encounter, which we typically locate in comparative exchanges about religious practices between representatives of religious traditions. Nonetheless, I argue, this debate can contribute important insights to a theology of interreligious encounter: Using Wekker’s concept of White Innocence as a lens, I show that it can serve as a springboard to excavate a longer history of religious difference and its entanglement into racial othering that decenters theologies of interreligious encounter, excavates their contributions to White Supremacy and problematizes their dominant discourse of color-blind novelty. It will, though, also offer resources for re-framing a theology of religious difference in ways that can account for their entanglement into race. e theological challenge that arises from this interrogation is a re-conceptualization of innocence in ways that do not conceal histories of violence.

18 19 20

Wekker, White Innocence, 2. Ibid. Ibid., 18.

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2. Genealogies of Religious-Racial Othering – The History of White Christian Innocence21 Mbembe’s work is internationally acclaimed and has also received widespread recognition in Germany. His most recent invitation to Germany to give the opening lecture of the Ruhrtriennale 2020 in Bochum, however was met with growing resistance and a public call to disinvite him, based on the accusation that his publications contain antisemitic passages. e storm of critique was initiated by Lorenz Deutsch, an FDP politician from North Rhine-Westphalia, and amplified by Felix Klein, Germany’s ‘Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and for the Fight against Antisemitism’. Based on short passages in selected writings, in which Mbembe compares South African apartheid with the Holocaust, as well as with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, they argued that such comparisons follow antisemitic patterns of argumentation, such as a relativization of the Holocaust and a demonization of Israel. A heated public debate ensued, in which the accusations against Mbembe were widely amplified, while some countered them with accusations of racism against Klein and others. Very quickly, this controversy was deadlocked between these mutual accusations. In my analysis, I will not reiterate the two sets of arguments that have circulated to either substantiate or refute the accusations. Given how quickly the debate stalled, it is more productive to discern the presuppositions that informed this debate – silently and largely unquestioned. Rothberg’s commentary offers a first segway into such an analysis. e accusations against Mbembe, he argues, emerge from a distinctly German memory discourse that is “premised on taking responsibility for the Nazi genocide of European Jews.”22 In this discourse, the Holocaust occupies a “quasi-sacred place as a unique event in the nation’s memorial landscape.” Such insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust follows the pattern of “competitive memory” that nourishes “the fear that bringing the memory of the Holocaust into contact with other memories of violence […] will lead to the diminution […] and even denial of the Holocaust.” Mbembe’s work, in contrast, is part of a tradition that has “for the past seventy years, reflected on the relationship between the Holocaust 21

A slightly different version of this section has been published in Judith Gruber, “White Innocence/White Supremacy: Exploring the eo-political Intersections of Race and Salvation,” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 7 (2021). 22 Michael Rothberg, “e Spectres of Comparison,” https://www.goethe.de/ prj/lat/en/dis/21864662.html (all quotations in this paragraph taken from this article).

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and the racist violence [against] African and African diaspora peoples by Europeans” and investigates how “memory cultures develop dialogically through […] echoing of other […] traditions of memory.” In German public discourse, however, competitive memory remains the dominant framework of collective self-understanding. Impinging on this dominant discourse, the comparisons that Mbembe suggests are ultimately an affront to official German self-understanding that cannot go unsanctioned. By asking “[w]hat does this affair teach us about the current status of German public culture?,” Rothberg thus situates the controversy within a larger debate about collective German self-understanding where an emergent discourse of “multidirectional memory” begins to question the self-evidence of a dominant German identity discourse that centers on the uniqueness of its Holocaust memorialization. Michaels’ commentary offers an even thicker description of dominant German self-understanding, that has made anti-antisemitism23 a defining marker of post-war German identity. As he points out, Mbembe and other proponents of multidirectional memory did speak in this debate – yet entirely on the terms of the dominant German self-understanding. His observation calls to a closer scrutiny of the unmarked epistemic privilege that came to the fore in the critique of Mbembe’s work. In German public memory, Michaels argues, the nation’s rigorous remembrance of its responsibility for the Holocaust is coveted as a hard fought-for “national achievement.”24 Framed entirely by this memory discourse, the critique of Mbembe reveals that this memory discourse grants the nation with an assurance of its morally unambiguous position, and underpins its claims for interpretative sovereignty in the discourse of public memory. Based on its “achievement” of holocaust remembrance, Germany acts as the “arbiter of antisemitism”25 while seeing itself beyond reproach in matters of racism. Messerschmidt’s analysis of “postcolonial memory processes in [Germany’s] post-national socialist society”26 further explicates how the 23

Cf. Gil Anidjar, “Antisemitism and Its Critics,” in Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story?, ed. James Renton and Ben Gidley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 187-214. 24 Ralf Michaels, “Deutschstunde für alle Welt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 9, 2020, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/mbembe-debattedeutschstunde-fuer-alle-welt-16804545.html (all quotations in this paragraph taken from this article, translation JG). 25 Rothberg, “e Spectres of Comparison.” 26 Astrid Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha: Vom Umgang mit Rassismus und Antisemitismus,” Peripherie 28, nos. 109-110 (2008): 42-60 (translations JG).

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hegemonic discourse of anti-antisemitism and (a denial of) racism intersect in the construction of dominant German self-understanding as morally unambiguous. She argues that the “fiction of having successfully worked through the past,”27 relegates German antisemitism to the past in ways that sponsor amnesia about the nation’s colonial history, and affords it with ignorance about the prevalence of racism in contemporary Germany. Restricting the concept of racism solely to the national-socialist persecution of Jews, it fosters the narrative that ‘aer’ the Holocaust, racism has been overcome.28 Simultaneously, the narrative of successful Vergangenheitsbewältigung makes the discourse of anti-antisemitism an exclusivist tool of nation-building. An aggressive embrace of anti-antisemitism as the defining marker of contemporary German identity allows to project “antisemitisms that still exist in German society” onto minorities such that “the divisions between ‘us’ (native Germans) and ‘you’ (migrants), that shape contemporary Germany as an immigration society, are used as a buffer against critical self-reflection: it is the others who are racist and antisemitic, and not us who have so intensely and successfully worked to come to terms with our history.”29 (Silently) framing the “Muslim immigrant” as the antitype of anti-antisemitism,30 this memory discourse has a racist underbelly in which the “racist division in society serves as an instrument of exoneration [for ‘German’ identity]”31 und supports its self-understanding as non-racist. Messerschmidt’s critique thus reveals intimate ties between a vocal discourse of anti-antisemitism and a subtler one of Islamophobia that serve as a racist tool of demarcating dominant German identity. Her analysis can be further unfolded by recent research that investigates how constellations of (anti-)antisemitism, Islamophobia and (colonial) racism have served as instruments in empire- and nation-building in Europe and beyond.32 Renton and Gidley for instance argue that the “Jewish question” and the “Muslim question” have been constitutive to the formation of European nation states and thus surface the “paradoxical 27

Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha,” 44. 28 Cf. ibid. 29 Ibid., 52. 30 Cf. Anidjar, “Antisemitism and Its Critics.” 31 Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha,” 53. 32 For a discussion of the conceptual and political complexities of the issues at stake, cf., e.g. Nasar Meer, ed., Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia, Ethnic and Racial Studies (London: Routledge, 2014).

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centrality to, and exclusion from, Europe of Muslims and Jews [as] central to how European imagination has figured them.”33 ey take a diachronic approach that allows them to trace conceptual ties between “notions of the Jew and the Muslim as racialised religious subjects”34 while being nuanced enough to register how “both racisms change [in] shiing configurations of statehood.”35 is offers a framework to build a historical narrative from the crusades to the post-9/11 era, in which varying constellations of a shared “Judeo-Muslim epistemology”36 serve as a foil to define Europe as normatively Christian. In a number of case studies, their collective volume demonstrates that Europe’s “Jewish [and] Muslim Questions are products of a Christian Question.”37 While the “contexts, significance and coding of [premodern] Christendom’s Muslim and Jewish Questions”38 were transformed through the era of empire and enlightenment, “the idea of Europe has never fully broken free from Christendom,”39 and an implicit normative Christianity has robustly remained in place to define the position of Jews and Muslims even in “the avowed secularism of contemporary Europe.”40 Pursuing a diachronic analysis of such “boundary-making work”41 on terms of and in service to Christian Europe, Renton and Gidley’s volume shows that constellations of a shared “Judeo-Muslim epistemology” has, for a large part, been a history of “coupling”42 antisemitism and Islamophobia to each other. Further, they advocate for a “cosmopolitan understanding of racism”43 that investigates “how colonial histories have shaped antisemitism within Europe, while the racialisation of Jews in the continental metropoles has shaped the management of Muslim [and other religio-racial] difference in empires abroad.”44 eir argument is supported by research that studies these global entangled histories of religio-racialized othering, by means of which (modern) Western Europe constituted itself as Christian in an interplay of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim,

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Renton and Gidley, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 11. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 14. Ibid.

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and colonial racism. Locating the origins of modern Europe in the violent renegotiations of Christendom’s boundaries during the Reconquista, Dussel has done ground-breaking work in this field.45 Europe, he argues, redefined itself in purging Al-Andalus of religious difference. e Reconquista, in turn, with its massacres, evictions, and redistribution of appropriated land, became the blueprint for Spanish and Portuguese colonial projects in the Americas, and thus the model for modern Western European empire-building.46 As Catherine Keller summarizes Dussel’s argument: e Reconquest was not a crusade, but a new state-building deployment of Christian resentment against the Moors and the tiny, if influential minority of Jews. Almost simultaneously with these expulsions and massacres, the same aggression was applied to those new infidels without [… T]he natives were branded in each case as ‘oriental’, as ‘Indians’.47

e violence of the modern European re/conquista is thus “definitive of modern statehood and nonetheless religious.”48 Hence, modern Europe continued to rely on Christendom’s theological management of its hegemonic power. It maintained its dominance through a grammar of religious difference that figured Jews and Muslims as inferior, and therefore conquerable, because they practiced the “wrong religion.”49 At the same time, in its export to the colonies, Christian hegemony went through a profound change. e indictment of Jews and Muslims as practicing the “wrong religion” became a question whether these new ‘Orientals’, had religion at all. In the colonies, thus, the grammar of religious difference was refigurated into a controversial anthropological question: “Religion is universal among humans, but the alleged lack of it among natives is not initially taken to indicate the falseness of this statement, but rather the opposite, that there exist subjects in the world who are not fully human.”50 An answer to this question had, in 45

Enrique D. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995). 46 Marius van Hoogstraten, Theopoetics and Religious Difference: The Unruliness of the Interreligious. A Dialogue with Richard Kearney, John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 189. 47 Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 247. 48 Ibid. 49 Ramón Grosfoguel, “e Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/ Sexism and the Four Genocides/ Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of SelfKnowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 73-90, at 79. 50 Ibid., 81.

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intersecting ways, a major impact on the positioning of colonial subjects within both, the Christian economy of salvation, and the emerging modern-colonial economy of capitalism: to find that the indigenous practiced religion, even if it is the wrong one, meant that they had a soul, and hence were salvageable, and therefore to be Christianized. If, however, it is determined that they had no religion, and therefore lack a soul, they fall outside God’s plan of salvation. eologically unsalvageable, they are economically enslaveable. In this theological dispute about the salvific possibilities of colonial subjects, Grosfoguel locates the origins of racism as a system of domination: Even though the word ‘race’ was not used at the time, the debate about having a soul […] was already a racist debate in the sense used by scientific racism in the 19th century […] about having the human biological constitution […] Both were debates about the humanity […] of others [and] became the organizing principle of the international division of labor and capitalist accumulation at a world-scale.51

e colonial racialization of religious difference circled back to the metropolis and transformed “the old islamophobic und judeophobic medieval religious discriminatory discourses against Jews and Muslims […] into racist discrimination.”52 As Europe’s religious others were racialized, its Christian hegemony was refigured as White Supremacy. rough the theological operations that transformed religious inferiority into racial inferiority, whiteness was produced “as a structural-aesthetic order and as a sociopolitical arrangement.”53 At the intersection of religious and racial othering, through a global circulation of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and colonial racism, White Christian supremacy has thus been accomplished as definitive of modern statehood. e postcolonial era, Renton and Gidley posit, has brought shis to this constellation without completely dissolving it. A process that began “with the alliance between Zionism and the British empire from 1917”54 and was intensified through Holocaust remembrance, introduced a divergence of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racism and resulted in a “splintering of Christendom’s Jew and Muslim.”55 In this process, “Islam becomes a largely political subject and European Jews cease to be

51 52 53 54 55

Grosfoguel, “e Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities,” 83. Ibid., 84. Carter, Race, 89. Renton and Gidley, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 12. Ibid., 13.

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Oriental.”56 In the post-9/11 era, in particular, Renton and Gidley argue, it is the “figures of the persecuted Jew and the political Muslim” that are central to Western (European) nation-building so that today, “[a]ntisemitism and so-called Islamism – not Islamophobia – are twin and, in the Western official mind, connected enemies of the West.”57 Tracing how both racisms change with shiing configurations of nationhood, Renton and Gidley thus corroborate Messerschmidt’s argument that an interrelated discourse of anti-antisemitism and Islamophobia is foundational to current constructions of nationhood in Western Europe. At the same time, their diachronic approach situates this current constellation within a longer history of religio-racial othering such that we can argue that the recent embrace of anti-antisemitism perpetuates a discourse that relies on an interrelated framing of Jews and Muslims as constitutive of Western European nationhood. Considered as an instance of shiing constellations of a racialized Judeo-Muslim epistemology at the heart of Western European nation-building, the discourse of anti-antisemitism in the wake of the Holocaust has not fundamentally changed the politics of religio-racialized othering through which White Christian Supremacy is accomplished as definitive of nation-building in Western Europe. It has merely shied the religio-racialized boundaries in the positioning of Jews and Muslims as Europe’s constitutive others. With this result, we can return to the Mbembe Debate. Situating it within this variegated history, in which shiing constellations of (anti-) antisemitism, Islamophobia, and colonial racism have served to maintain White Christian supremacy, we see that the German defense of antiantisemitism might be less innocent than it appears at first sight. It rests on a selective remembering of German antisemitism as an event of the past which entails, in turn, that “occurrences of antisemitic statements or practices [can] be relegated to the outside of German society.”58 Germany’s anti-antisemitism, hence, is achieved through a diachronic and synchronic erasure of antisemitism from dominant German self-representation. is erasure allows to turn a blind eye on its persistent presence in the aermath of the Holocaust, it affords a militant ignorance about colonial history and contemporary racism in Germany, and it sponsors an exclusionary discourse of nation-building based on Islamophobia. As the Mbembe controversy brought to the fore, this erasure 56

Renton and Gidley, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 12. Ibid., 4. 58 Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha,” 49. 57

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assures dominant German self-understanding of its moral standing and buttresses its claim to sovereignty of interpretation over histories of violence. e aggressive defense of anti-antisemitism as a benchmark of German identity in the Mbembe-Debate, then, is indeed not unambiguously innocent. Rather, sponsoring a claim to moral superiority through an aggressive disavowal of its complicity in an on-going history of religio-racialized violence, it can be understood as a performance of White Innocence: a defense of white saviorism through an erasure of a history of religio-racialized violence that continues to maintain White Christian Supremacy. 3. Theopolitical Constructions of White Christian Innocence Wekker suggests that the dominant self-representation of white Western Europeans as innocent is patterned along central concepts of the Christian tradition. eological thinking practices were instrumental in transforming Christian hegemony into White Supremacy at the dawn of modernity, and they continue to provide the imaginaries that sustain the technologies of power for the maintenance of White Supremacydisguised-as-innocence in today’s purportedly post-Christian nation state constellations. e Mbembe Debate is a case in point. At first glance, it hardly appears as a theological dispute, yet the discourse of anti-antisemitism that has dominated the controversy has theological underpinnings that serve to sustain White Christian innocence. Messerschmidt gestures towards these reticent theological patterns when she argues that the self-representation of German identity as anti-racist rests on an erasure of a history of racialized violence that is fed by “an imagination of salvation in which the acknowledgement of historical responsibility results in purification.”59 A scholar of education, Messerschmidt does not further interrogate this soteriology, yet, her argument can be unfolded by the work of ‘post-Shoah’ theologians, who critically engage the theological heritage in the wake of the Holocaust and show how it has been complicit in seeking to satisfy the desire for exculpation. For the period right aer WWII, Kellenbach demonstrates how a theology of forgiveness was employed to effect the protection of perpetrators from persecution. Analyzing confessions of guilt promulgated by Protestant and Catholic churches, she argues that “in 1945, the Christian paradigm of confession and reconciliation became a public ritual of 59 Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha,” 49.

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self-incrimination and apology.”60 ese acts of contrition, however, were not geared towards “provid[ing] moral support for the […] persecution of Nazi crimes through the allied forces.”61 Rather, speaking of solidarity in sin and the universality of guilt, they employed theological imaginations to obscure the responsibility of individual perpetrators. Drawing on soteriology in a politically effective way, they suggested that “Christian forgiveness in faith in Christ’s atoning death should be possible without repentance, atonement or symbolic acts of reparation.”62 us privileging forgiveness and reconciliation over accountability and justice, these statements offered theological legitimization to “the growing ecclesial critique of the persecution practices of the occupying forces”63 and “met the interest of perpetrators to forget their past and be absolved from their responsibility.”64 By “silently solidarizing, and even identifying itself with the concerns of perpetrators,”65 it accomplished innocence by concealing a history of violence and its victims. Second generation proponents of a Theologie nach Auschwitz proffered sharp critique of (post-)war theological discourses that sponsored the interests of perpetrators. Instead, they sought to develop a theology that resists the temptation to achieve exculpation through an erasure of a history of violence. By way of reparation for the complicities of theology in the Holocaust, they called for a theology that is in solidarity with victims. To make amends for the Christian roots of antisemitism in theological anti-Judaism, they worked for a retrieval of Christianity’s origins in the Jewish tradition. Yet, as third-generation post-Shoah theologians argue, such identification with the victims/survivors is not immune to problematic productions of innocence, either. It, too, is prone to satisfying the desire for exculpation by suppressing collective and individual responsibility in the perpetration of violence. As Krondorfer shows, theologians nach Auschwitz continued to fail in accounting for their own (family’s) entanglement into a history of guilt and instead frame suffering as a locus theologicus in a way that does not sufficiently differentiate 60

Katharina von Kellenbach, “eologische Rede von Schuld und Vergebung als Täterschutz,” in Von Gott reden im Land der Täter: Theologische Stimmen der dritten Generation seit der Shoah, ed. Katharina von Kellenbach, Norbert Reck, and Björn Krondorfer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaliche Buchgesellscha, 2001), 46-67, at 46 (all translations JG). 61 Ibid., 50. 62 Ibid., 46. 63 Ibid., 50. 64 Ibid., 47. 65 Ibid., 51.

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between the agency of perpetrators and victims.66 Centering on the victims, the Theologie nach Auschwitz also fell short in forging a sustainable language to account for responsibility of perpetrators in an ongoing history of violence; instead, it sought to “achieve exoneration [through] the ambivalent desire to take the side of the victims.”67 Such disowning of complicity in historical violence informed the method of the Theologie nach Auschwitz and became the point of construction for its dominant imaginaries of salvation. As Pinnock argues, it complemented the critical exposure of theological complicities with Nazism with constructive proposals that sought “to vindicate the tradition”68 by “retriev[ing] a ‘moral core’ [and/or historical variant] of Christianity that is innocent of such abuses”69 and identifying “an ‘authentic’ Christian faith based in the distant past that is untainted by exclusionary prejudice.” 70 This “appeal to historical and moral authenticity”71 purifies Christianity from complicity by implementing a linear historiography of retrospective decline from and a proscriptive call for a return to an original innocence of the Christian tradition. is teleological framing of history is mirrored in a theological imagination of salvation history which models salvation as an arch of redemption from an innocent origin through a fall to the restoration of original innocence. e methodological appeal to authenticity thus sponsors an understanding of salvation that is not constitutively affected by the suffering of victims and the violence that gives rise to it. Instead, it holds on to a Christian continuum that can integrate historical violence “perhaps all too smoothly, into a ‘hopeful, healing and redemptive message of Christianity’.”72 is linear narrative of redemption leaves no room for tainted histories that can speak to the ambivalences of the Christian 66 Sabine Jarosch, “Postkoloniale eologie nach der Shoah? Eine Analyse von Täter- und Opfer-Vorstellungen als Beitrag zu einer postkolonialen eologie in Deutschland,” in Postkoloniale Theologien. II: Perspektiven aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. Andreas Nehring and Simon Wiesgickl (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2018), 73-91, at 82. 67 Ibid., 73. 68 Sarah Pinnock, “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (2007): 499-523, at 502, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfm038. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 506. 72 Björn Krondorfer, “Abschied von (familien-)biographischer Unschuld im Land der Täter: Zur Positionierung theologischer Diskurse nach der Shoah,” in Von Gott reden im Land der Täter, 11-28, at 14.

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tradition and its complicities in the perpetration of violence. Engaging in theological practices that outsource Christian complicity, this soteriology produces an innocence that absolves from the need to confront issues of theological accountability. Investigating the interferences between theological discourses and public Holocaust remembrance, Pinnock argues that such a redemptive narrative is not only an effective tool for the self-exoneration of the Christian tradition, but also serves a powerful model to construct innocence in contemporary national identity narratives in the wake of the Holocaust. While post-Shoah theologians have begun to see the theological tradition in terms of its irreducible ambiguity, a linear narrative of redemption still dominates popular representations of the Holocaust. Analyzing the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as an example, Pinnock shows that it “contextualizes the vicarious experience of Holocaust horrors with a redemptive resolution, symbolized by U.S. forces.” 73 e museum thus bolsters American identification with Holocaust rescuers in ways that promote complacency, rather than eliciting critical selfawareness of by-standing complicity of Americans during the Second World War and the persistence of antisemitism and racism in contemporary USA.74 It thus promotes “an innocent ‘us’ (American) versus ‘them’ (Nazi) mentality”75 that remains quiet on American perpetrators. e “redemptive tendencies”76 in popular US Holocaust remembrance, Pinnock thus shows, give rise to a “victorious Americanized narrative”77 that “takes on a distinctive national character.”78 Representing “Holocaust atrocities [as] the antithesis of American values,”79 the exhibition forges a memory of the Holocaust which ties it closely into “the mainstream U.S. narrative of progress that justifies American moral supremacy”80 – itself a narrative that embodies a national theology steeped in Christian soteriological imaginaries. National innocence in the wake of the Holocaust is, for historical reasons, certainly achieved in different ways in Germany than in the US. However, in both contexts, a teleological narrative of redemption offers a powerful model for a national historiography of exculpation. For 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Pinnock, “Atrocity and Ambiguity,” 500. Cf. ibid., 517. Ibid. Ibid., 516. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 500. Ibid., 503.

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a nation that seeks exoneration by embracing responsibility for a violent past, the soteriological arch of redemption provides a rich imaginary for the production of innocence by offering a frame for history in the wake of the Holocaust as the restauration of original innocence through repentance aer the fall. It is by way of such an arch of redemption that dominant German self-understanding can reconcile confessions to an antisemitic past with the claim to be the sovereign arbiter in the current defense of anti-antisemitism, as came to the fore in the Mbembe Debate. In both contexts, the redemptive tendencies of a linear soteriology allows to disown continuing complicities in ongoing histories of violence in contemporary constructions of national identity. Such theopolitical productions of innocence are neither religiously nor racially neutral, but have a bias towards conceiving of innocence as Christian and as White. Pinnock, for example, finds the USHMM’s framing of Holocaust memory as a “national self-congratulatory spectacle”81 particularly “deficient in avoiding presentation of Christian moral failings institutionally and individually.”82 Framed as a narrative of redemption, the national self-representation of the US in the wake of the Holocaust glosses over the shares of American Christians in the perpetration of violence and instead represents them as saviors. eological patterns of interpretation are thus at work in forging a narrative of national exoneration; in these dominant narratives, in turn, Christians are given a privileged position as particularly innocent. e redemptive narrative forecloses a “reflection on connections among Christian identity, U.S. [and other] nationalism[s] and violence,”83 and instead gives rise to Christian innocence as a constituent of nation-building. 4. Theologies of Religio-racialized Difference: Novelty or Reparation? We have started with the observation that contemporary theologies of interreligious dialogue oen highlight the novelty of their engagement with religious difference. A critical reading of the Mbembe Debate through the lens of White Christian Innocence, however, has surfaced a different history of religious plurality that complicates the dominant discourse of novelty and unearths its entanglement into a history of racialization. We have also noted that theological thinking practices are instrumental to accomplishing White Christian domination. Soteriological 81 82 83

Pinnock, “Atrocity and Ambiguity,” 519. Ibid., 516. Ibid., 517.

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imaginaries provide a powerful model for the erasure of a history of violence and allow White Christian supremacy to present itself as innocent, thus buttressing its claim to superiority. e Mbembe debate might thus not be an obvious case of interreligious encounter, but by allowing us to trace these powerful theopolitical genealogies, it raises profound questions concerning the methodological choices, conceptual frameworks and theological trajectories that are operational in the field of interreligious theology. Subscribing to a discourse of novelty, does it contribute to the erasure of the violent history of religio-racialization? Dealing in religious difference, how can it account for its entanglement into racialization? In response to these probing questions, is there perhaps a need to re-orient the methods and concepts that dominate the field? Based on the insight that theological practices are crucial to the accomplishment of White supremacy-disguised-as-innocence, I will conclude with a search for building blocks toward an alternative soteriological imaginary that can address the entanglement of religious difference into the forging of White Supremacy. In positing that it might be possible to find an alternative soteriology that is critical of (rather than critical to) White Christian supremacy, I do not seek to vindicate the Christian tradition or search for an authentic variant that is innocent of complicity. Rather, this search is motivated by the desire to reckon with the irresolvable entanglement of theological practices into the politics of religio-racialization, and therefore seeks to respond to the theo-pragmatic urgency to devise alternatives to theologies of White innocence/supremacy. Precisely because Christian traditions are irretrievably implicated in the history of race, theological work has to engage both critically and constructively with this heritage. Reckoning with irresolvable theological complicities in the politics of race, it is also challenged to develop theological tools that allow for transformative practices of religio-racialization. As an entry point for this search, we can revisit the theological topos of innocence. Within a linear narrative of redemption, the imaginary of innocence sponsors the erasure of a history of violence as “the most dangerous weapon of White Supremacy.”84 Engaging with seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, Elizabeth Dodd however shows that innocence can capture a more complex imaginary of salvation that is not so easily subjected to a teleological arch of redemption. In the theopoetics of Donne, Traherne, Milton and others, she uncovers layers of ambiguity in the topos of innocence that result from its privative denotation. Its

84

Williams, “e Color of Christ’s Brides,” 14.

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negative semantics point to a constitutive “void of limit, lack and absence within the celebration of the good” and write a “strange dualism of hope and lament,”85 of “affirmation and negation,”86 of “absence and presence,”87 of “innocence and guilt”88 into the language of innocence. Innocence, Dodd thus shows, gains its meaning through an interplay of opposites that give it a paradoxical structure. It “is denied in the very act of being affirmed”89 and “known only in its loss [and] through the knowledge of evil”90 such that it appears as “never purely lost or purely possessed, but […] ever present in its absence and absent in its presence.”91 e semantic ambiguities of innocence have rich theological potential. Seventeenth-century metaphysical poets used them to renegotiate the tension between Augustinian orthodoxy on the doctrine of original sin and the emerging anthropological optimism of humanism, condensing it into a christological-soteriological position by interpreting the “Cross […] through 2 Corinthians 5:21 as a model of innocent sacrifice: ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him’.”92 rough her reading of these poems, Dodd shows that “the paradox of the innocent suffering for the [salvation of] the guilty”93 does not offer an “easy resolution”94 for the ambiguous oscillation of innocence between presence and absence. On the contrary, this soteriology highlights the irresolvable interplay of affirmation and negation on which innocence depends: “In the kenotic act of Christ’s crucifixion, a void of negation is opened up which is wide enough to encompass the abyss of sin.”95 Dodd does posit that the “paradoxes of innocence are […] ultimately resolved in the Cross.”96 e thrust of her argument, however, does not point to a simple (dis)solution of the ambiguities of innocence through Christ, but rather speaks to their embrace in his atoning death. Christ, “who as both God and man on the Cross is 85 Elizabeth Dodd, “Affirmation and Negation: e Semantic Paradox at the Heart of Innocence,” in Innocence Uncovered: Literary and Theological Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Dodd (New York: Routledge, 2020), 21-40, at 25. 86 Ibid., 29. 87 Ibid., 27. 88 Ibid., 25 (my italics). 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 27. 92 Ibid., 35. 93 Ibid., 36. 94 Ibid., 35. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid.

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both innocent and guilty,”97 embodies the “dualism of innocence and sin, the endless circulation between past remembrance and present lament, the interplay between lack and desire.”98 Figured as the “innocent malefactor”99 he is the epitome of the “pervasive paradox of the absent presence of innocence.”100 Engaging with this “long Christian tradition, […] in which the primary model of innocence was not Adam, but Christ,”101 we can develop theological resources for contesting the erasure of violent histories. Depriving innocence of connotations of pristine purity, it resists an all too easy integration of the topos of innocence to a linear arch of redemption that pivots around the restauration of pristine innocence and thus offers a theological imaginary that sponsors the disavowal of violent histories. Rather than buttressing a teleological narrative of redemption, it calls for more complex histories of salvation that can account for the irresolvable simultaneity of innocence and guilt. Such soteriological reconfigurations will also go hand in hand with a reorientation of theological methods: a linear imaginary of redemption, we have seen, correlates with a methodological search for original authenticity of the Christian tradition that is purportedly free from complicities in violence and, consequently, lacks the conceptual tools to critically address perpetrator perspectives. Embracing the ambiguities of innocence, we find incentives to develop different frameworks for understanding salvation and theorizing theological method. In search for resources for such reorientations, we can – finally – turn to Mbembe’s own work in political theory, which addresses themes that are central to Christian soteriology, such as violence and forgiveness, guilt and redemption, in ways that resist unambivalent binarizations. It can therefore offer trajectories for a reconfiguration of the theopolitical imaginaries that inform White Christian innocence. His Critique of Black Reason102 offers a rich starting point. Here, Mbembe gives a searing account of the lethal history of racialized capitalism as the driving rationale of modernity, arguing that the invention of blackness is the unacknowledged core of modernity that has sponsored the modern

97

Dodd, “Affirmation and Negation,” 36. Ibid., 37. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 98

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autofiction of European superiority and funded the concomitant emergence of global capitalism. Both are rooted in the rationalization of the black as a thing that uses the signifier Black to transform people of African origin into “a kind of life that can be wasted and spent without limit.”103 Mbembe draws painful attention to the pervasiveness of such ‘black reasoning’ that shapes the material and symbolic constitution of the modern world. And yet, in the midst of it, he also finds resources for transformative forms of black reasoning by tracing black responses to the abjection of being human that can be reconstructed from the knowledges and survival practices of the enslaved. For Mbembe, the “question of […] captivity” and “of the longing for redemption”104 are thus inseparably at the heart of the modern history of racialization – it is simultaneously a “history of waste”105 and one of “permanent generation, re-creation and resignification of life flows in the face of the forces of capture and desiccation.”106 Tracing how black life ekes out an existence in the midst of racializing violence, it is Mbembe’s crucial argument that practices of black desire for redemption do not overcome racialization, but are at work within it. Against a tradition of Black emancipative writing that grasps the longing for emancipation through concepts of fugitivity, he posits that such linear logics of escape are inadequate to grasp the ambiguities of living in a history of violence. Practicing the longing for redemption is “not a matter of running away to form some separate space of seclusion,” but concerns “matters of repair.”107 Utterly dispossessed of resources that sustain life, black life – nevertheless, spitefully – engages in “work for life”108 through a “reparation”109 that follows the “logic of composition”110 and continuously rebuilds life out of “debris,”111 out of discarded (body) parts. Such life is not a straightforward triumph over death, but

103

Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 34. Achille Mbembe and David T. Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason: Achille Mbembe and David eo Goldberg in Conversation about Critique of Black Reason,” https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/interviews-achillembembe-david-theo-goldberg-critique-black-reason. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Achille Mbembe, “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 1-26, at 16. 109 Mbembe and Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason.” 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 104

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complicates the notion that there is an unambivalent difference between hope and lament: “Liv[ing] with all kinds of prostheses, [… it] skirts with death, but […] is not dead; or even when [it] is actually dead, [it] retains a kind of agency that is far from posthumous, so embedded it is in the actuality of life itself.”112 Mbembe’s conception of living-on in the wake of violence reverberates strongly with New Testament accounts of cross and resurrection, especially when we read them through the lens of trauma studies. Here, too, resurrection is not a self-evident defeat of death, but becomes graspable only through a hermeneutics of wounds and tears: omas has to touch wounds to see and believe. It is through the mist of her tears that Mary recognizes her Rabbuni. Resurrection is irresolvably tied to the recognition of a history of violence. Conceptualizing redemption as reparation, Mbembe embeds it in the midst of violent histories. Framed as precarious survival wrestled from death “under the conditions of necropower [where] the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred,”113 this concept of redemption does not rely on an erasure of histories of violence, but speaks to new life becoming possible through the re-creative work of reparation from the ruins of history. In these ways, it too speaks to the paradoxical tensions between presence and absence, guilt and innocence that, as Dodd argued, can be conceived as a core feature of Christian soteriology. As a performance of these tensions, Mbembe indicates, redemptive reparation is not a once-and-for-all accomplishment, but “unending labor”114 that is both sign and instrument of life: “To repair is to be alive […] and to take care of something that matters because that thing is a very condition of my survival with others,”115 Surfaced from the ongoing survival “practices of the everyday,”116 Mbembe’s theopolitical concept of reparation also offers resources for the reorientation of theological imaginaries of atonement. It does not subject debt, reparation and (new) life to a linear narrative, but interweaves debt and reparation such that they become the condition of individual and collective life: “In the project of repair, there is the admission of a kind of debt that is not expropriatory; a debt that is in fact necessary for the

112 113

Mbembe and Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason.” Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40,

at 40. 114 115 116

Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 181. Mbembe and Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason.” Ibid.

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very constitution of […] the community.”117 rough reparation – “this double labor of transformation and regeneration”118 “whose function [is] to consolidate the relationships between humans and the other living being with which [we] share […] the world”119 – debt and full life are no longer conceived as mutually exclusive, but, again paradoxically, become each other’s constitutive condition: “Sharing the world with other beings [is] the ultimate debt. And it [is], above all, the key to the survival of both humans and nonhumans.”120 Redemptive reparation is here no longer conceived as a singular event of atonement already achieved, but as ongoing work that becomes the condition for all creaturely life in its precarious suspension between lost innocence and promised grace. For Mbembe, this theopolitical imaginary of redemption translates into a method for historical reflection that does not limit itself to mere description, but includes a normative thrust for transformation (and is thus, arguably, adaptable for theological methodology). He sees his scholarly work participating in the recreative labor of reparation. His history of black reason is “neither a history of ideas nor an exercise in sociological history”121 but “a sort of reminiscence”122 that does not “dwell in the trauma”123 but becomes transformative because it stands up against productions of innocence through the erasure of histories of violence. As a method for historical-description-as-ethical-reflection-forpolitical-transformation, reparation provides tools for resisting the temptations of innocence by offering modes for writing history that refrain from understanding Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as a fait accompli and instead embrace the “endless labor” of remembrance. For those who have been erased from history through the powerful discourses of innocence that accomplish White Supremacy, this requires a particular voice which is able to supplement the “incomplete” archives of Black reasoning by engaging reparation that “create[s], not out of nothing but out of the debris of information, on the very site of the ruins, the remains and traces le behind by those who passed away.”124 But reparation goes beyond a recovery of the suffering and agency of victims of historical violence. At stake is practice of remembering that engages in such 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Mbembe and Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason.” Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 181. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Mbembe and Goldberg, “e Reason of Unreason.” Ibid.

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recovery in ways that do not conveniently make us blind to perpetrator perspectives and the continuing reverberations of violent histories. is requires a “dual approach. On the one hand, we must escape the status of victimhood. On the other, we must make a break with ‘good conscience’ and the denial of responsibility.”125 Reparation, then is also a method of writing that requires, against the temptations of innocence, an “attitude of […] ‘self-mistrust’ [Selbstmisstrauen],”126 as AustrianBelgian Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry reminded post-Holocaust Germans in the 1960s. Envisaging possible transformations from the ruins of histories, reparation resists the powerful desire for exculpation and reminds us instead that, in the search for new relations, we “confront something not so much unique as soiled.”127 Writing against productions of innocence that seek to erase histories of violence, reparation is ongoing “memory work [that] asks what cannot be integrated and can therefore not be put behind us.”128 Mbembe thus allows us to develop reparation as a soteriological imaginary and methodological framework that can re-orient theological reflections on the racialized histories of religious difference. It provides an alternative to the soteriological imaginaries that have contributed to the productions of White-supremacy-disguised-as innocence through a theopolitical erasure of violent histories. Translating into a method that surfaces the violent histories of racialization, it complicates discourses of novelty and instead allows us to trace long-standing theological complicities in these histories. Uncovering the ongoing histories of religioracialized differentiation that accomplish White Supremacy, it may help us to lose our innocence.

125

Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 178. Quoted in Rothberg, “e Spectres of Comparison.” 127 Meer, Racialization and Religion. 128 Messerschmidt, “Postkoloniale Erinnerungsprozesse in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gesellscha,” 57. 126

Part IV

The Significance of Secularization for the Contemporary Church

26 Recalibrating Tradition Renewal and Retrieval in Contemporary Catholic Theology Stephan van Erp

“Catholicity is an overture, a prelude, a symphony, or even a symphonic poem which opens up the richness of revelation in ever newer forms.”1

1. Contemporary Catholic Theology: A Story with a Plot Twist In recent years, a significant number of publications present new interpretations of the development of Catholic theology since the First Vatican Council. Previously, this development was oen described as follows. Existential phenomenology had liberated Catholic theology from the systematic rigor of neo-omist thought. In particular the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and in its wake Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricœur, had confronted theologians with a hermeneutic awareness. From the 1940s onwards, it was not the thought of omas Aquinas, but the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that was regarded by many as offering the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.2 Aer the Second Vatican Council, according to this view, a theology emerged that was oriented towards the world with more attention to politics and emancipation, influenced by critical theory. is eventually led to postmodern theology, with more attention for the plurality of religious traditions, and a growing, critical sensitivity for grand narratives, especially behind power hegemonies. is has brought us where we are now, in a situation dominated by political and contextual theologies.

1 Balász M. Mezei, Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 309. 2 Ted M. Schoof, Aggiornamento: De doorbraak van een nieuwe katholieke theologie (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1968); English translation: A Survey of Catholic Theology, 1800-1970 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008).

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is version of the development of Catholic theology is obviously indebted to where I was educated and by whom, but the narrative elements in other historical accounts of this period are usually roughly the same.3 Although the evaluation of it can differ greatly, the development of Catholic theology in the nineteenth and twentieth century has been described by many as the passage from a neo-omist approach of metaphysics and systematic theology to a focus on modern ethics and anthropology based on existentialist and personalist principles, resulting in postmodernity: a movement from metaphysics to liberation and deconstruction, and from doctrine to life and critique – a story of a development with seemingly clean caesuras, albeit perhaps with grey areas in between the transitions. e end of the story, however, indicates that it was more complicated than we thought. e abovementioned account of the development of Catholic theology, which is sometimes also characterized as a movement from a ‘theology from above’ to a ‘theology from below’, has been considerably adjusted in recent decades. First of all, new studies on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury neo-omism have been published, which have shown that, despite the a-historical idea of being a philosophia perennis4 defended by some neo-omists, there was more historical variety within the modern reception of omism than some neo-omists themselves were willing to admit.5 In the latter days of neo-omism, there were thinkers, among whom Jacques Maritain, who wrote about the culture and politics of their own time in a neo-omistic framework, also long before there were debates among the neo-omists about the place of history and the present in neoscholastic thought.6 3

For a different account of the development of Catholic theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see for example Aidan Nichols, O.P., From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990); see also Tracey Rowland, Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), who is expressing a strong aversion against postmodern theology. 4 Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggeman, Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), xiv. 5 Fergus Kerr, O.P., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Romanus Cessario, O.P. and Cajetan Cuddy, O.P., Thomas and the Thomists: The Achievement of Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017); Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), esp. Part IV: Modern Receptions, 293-374 and Part V: Early Twentieth Century Receptions, 375-482. 6 Cf. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). See also Jacques

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Furthermore, a remarkable amount of literature has been published in the last twenty years showing a new interest in the ressourcement theologians.7 e new literature shows that none of the theologians of this interwar generation can be easily placed on the development line that runs from omism via existentialism to postmodernity.8 In addition to broadening the range of historical sources for the narrative of the development of modern Catholic theology, this renewed interest in the ressourcement tradition also provided an important corrective to the growing polarization between conservative and progressive theologians.9 Even though thinkers such as Henri Bouillard, S.J., Henri de Lubac, S.J., Jean Daniélou, S.J., Yves Congar, O.P., and Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., were claimed by different factions in the Church, their theological and ecclesial positions proved to be more complex and their influence much broader than a one-sided classification into a certain camp would suggest. A similar correction is also present in the recent literature on the Second Vatican Council.10 As Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., once claimed, the council was much more than a catch-up with the Enlightenment and the theological developments that followed.11 It was also more than a confirmation of the prevalent views of the time before the council, for example those of the ressourcement theologians. e council documents themselves became an important new source for post-conciliar theology, and offered a new conceptual framework that redirected the development of modern Catholic theology.12 At the same time, the council proved unable to put a halt to the secularization in the West and did certainly Maritain and Christopher Dawson, The Persistence of Order. Vol. 1: Essay on Religion and Culture (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019). 7 Most notably the handbook of Gabriel Flynn and Paul Murray, Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Patricia Kelly, Ressourcement Theology: A Source Book (London: T&T Clark, 2020). 8 A good illustration of this corrective can be found in Étienne Fouilloux, Yves Congar, 1905-1995: Biographie (Paris: Salvator, 2015). 9 Cf. Hans Boersma, Nouvelle théologie: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10 Richard R. Gaillardetz, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Vatican II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 11 See Stephan van Erp, “‘Sign and Precursor of God’s Grace for All’: Schillebeeckx’s Ecclesiology during the Second Vatican Council,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Edward Schillebeeckx, ed. Stephan van Erp and Daniel Minch (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 122-134. 12 Ormond Rush, The Vision of Vatican II: Its Fundamental Principles (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019).

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not become the instrument for liberalizing theology for the whole Church that some had hoped for. is hope was not even realized if one looks at the general development of Catholic theology aer the council. Although progressive theologians – most notably Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx – seemed to be more influential immediately aer the council, the tide turned in the 1990s. Since then, the growing influence of the three theologians who founded Communio – Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar – is particularly noteworthy, not least because of the prominent place they occupy in the Radical Orthodoxy movement – although less popular among Catholic thinkers13 – and because of the leading role they currently play at prominent Catholic theological institutions, among which for example Notre Dame University. Also noteworthy is the continuing interest in the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, who initially operated in the shadow of his teacher Karl Rahner, S.J., but whose ‘new political theology’ and its focus on the history of suffering now forms a critical conversation partner of the influential political theology of Carl Schmitt and his Augustinianism. at Catholic conversation has been the starting point of contemporary political theology, which has become a vast field of studies and is not limited to the project of one theologian and his disciples anymore. In Catholic theology, political theology was the domain of liberation theologians for quite a while, but in recent times, instead of focusing on poverty and suffering, Catholic political theology turned its attention to synodality, democracy, and unity. e theological legacy of the twentieth century thus provided some familiar figures, events and issues, which on the surface seem to fit well with the common narrative of the development of modern Catholic theology. But the story ends with more different names and trends than one would have expected at the end of that century, and the ressourcement theologians and their ideas on catholicity are playing an important role in twisting the plot. In what follows, I will present a brief overview of recent publications on these developments.

13

John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). For the catholic reception of Radical Orthodoxy, see Laurence Paul Hemming, ed., Radical Orthodoxy: A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

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2. A Plethora of Sources: The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology e once common picture of the development of Catholic theology, which was said to have moved away from a traditionalist omism towards a liberal existentialism, with the Second Vatican Council as its high point or turning point, has not only been qualified and adjusted by recent studies, but has been rejected as a historical reduction, if not sheer misconception. is had already become evident in the Blackwell Companion to Catholicism published in 2007,14 but the recently published Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology shows the historical and present diversity of modern Catholic theology even better.15 Moreover, it addresses the decline of existentialism and moralism that characterized twentieth-century theology at both ends of the ecclesiastical spectrum. In what follows, I will present the content of this new handbook at length, as it will illustrate how the developments in Catholic theology have been reconstructed by its editors and authors. e new handbook consists of two parts: I: Catholic ought, divided into four sections: An Introduction into Catholic eology, Dogmatics, Sacramental Life, and Moral eology; and II: Modern Catholic eology, divided into two sections: e Sources of Catholic theology up to the First Vatican Council, and Catholic theology since 1870. In the introductory essay ‘What Is Catholic eology?’, editor Lewis Ayres describes what he sees as three major tensions in twentieth-century Catholic theology: (1) the debate about unity and diversity in the Church and in theology; (2) the tension between the interpretation of Scripture and Catholic dogma; and (3) the relationship between history and tradition on the one hand and the contemporary relevance and significance of theology on the other. Ayres thus seems to indicate that the Second Vatican Council is indeed the focal point of contemporary Catholic thought, since these tensions were all central concerns of the council fathers, and even led to some notorious controversies during the council sessions. Remarkably, as Gerald O’Collins, S.J., noted in a rather critical review in The Tablet,16 fundamental theology is not treated as a separate discipline in this handbook, but is nevertheless included in several chapters. Fundamental theology is a theological discipline that could indeed be 14 James Buckley, Frederick Bauerschmidt, and Trent Pomplun, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2007). 15 Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 16 Gerald O’Collins, “A Comprehensive Compendium,” The Tablet (November 7, 2019), 21.

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regarded as particularly catholic. It has the specific tasks of clarifying the relationship between philosophy and theology, and giving a rational, methodological account of the principles and criteria of the study of the Catholic faith. e discipline does feature in the contributions of Francesca Aran Murphy and Serge-omas Bonino, O.P., who both wrote a chapter on the modern history of omism, and in the chapter by Declan Marmion, S.M., who wrote on transcendental omism. Peter Joseph Fritz discusses Heidegger’s impact on Catholic theology, but his approach is historical rather than systematic. Not surprising, the Rahnerian Fritz is quite mild about the current significance of the nowadays controversial Heidegger in contemporary theology. He suggests that we need his thought, not as a philosophical foundation, but for historical reasons. Heidegger helps us at least to better understand the origins of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s focus on the glory of God, or the resurgence of Ignatian spirituality in academic theology through the revival of the work of Erich Przywara, S.J. e philosophical foundations of Catholic thought are an amalgamation of several sources, as Balázs Mezei demonstrates in his chapter on the relationship between faith and reason. Apart from being a mixture of historical influences from Augustine and omas, but also from Luther, Kant and Schleiermacher, it should furthermore include the subjective-affective and mystical traditions, according to Mezei. William Desmond discusses in his contribution more systematically the growing importance of analogy in Catholic theology and shows that Catholic reason, besides providing a strong focus on the realism of faith, is also motivated by aesthetics and by what he calls ‘plurivocity’, a term that qualifies catholicity in a new way, by pointing at the richness of the actual, beyond the dichotomy of identity and difference. e chapters on dogmatic theology, sacramental life and Catholic moral theology in the first part of the handbook offer solid introductions to the individual treatises of Catholic doctrine. e editors have succeeded in finding authors who together constitute a fairly good reflection of various generations of theologians. is however is not the case when it comes to the representation of Catholic theology worldwide: with a few exceptions, the authors come from the United States and the United Kingdom, or they teach in Rome, which perhaps saves the catholicity of the handbook, if your definition of catholicity depends on a unity represented by Rome. In contrast to the 2007 Companion, this new handbook devotes far less attention to global theology, with the exception of the two chapters on Asia and Africa. is is perhaps its most important shortcoming, for the theological developments in recent decades show quite

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a different trend. Whereas the field of religious studies is mainly developed in Western academic institutions, and constitutive of organizations such as the American Academy of Religion, the innovations in Catholic theology mainly take place in both ecclesiastical and academic institutions in the southern hemisphere. For a handbook of Catholic theology for our time, this is a serious omission. Ayres and Volpe’s new handbook is particularly interesting because of its second part on modern Catholic theology. Not least because of the surprising choice to first present sources up to the First Vatican Council, where much attention is paid to the patristic (in a chapter written by Ayres himself), monastic (in a contribution by William Harness, S.J.) and mystical traditions (masterly presented by Rik Van Nieuwenhove). ere are also contributions by Trent Pomplun on early modernity, by Ulrich Lehner on the Catholic Enlightenment, by Christian Washburn on Trent and the First Vatican Council, and by Grant Kaplan and Holly Taylor Coolman on the Tübinger Schule and John Henry Newman. Despite the three chapters on the history of omism, this overview thus shows that the sources should not be limited to the omistic ones, but should also include Patristic and Platonic influences. Such a diversity of sources is somewhat less evident in the section on Catholic theology since 1870, where, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar is the only individual theologian to receive an entire chapter. e diversity of influences on the documents of the Second Vatican Council is also underexposed in the chapter on the Council by Gavin D’Costa, although that contribution is worthwhile because of its description of the pluralistic reception of the Council. Political theology receives relatively little attention in the handbook, except in the chapters on liberation theology (Roberto Segundo Goizeta) and feminist theology (Danielle Nussberger), but this can probably be explained by the fact that the publication was ten years in the making and its contents were already more or less fixed before the emergence of contemporary political theology had even begun. e last three chapters are devoted to theology and dialogue, in contributions on ecumenism (Paul Murray), Eastern Orthodoxy (Jaroslav Skira) and other religions (Michael Barnes, S.J.). Interestingly, only Newman and von Balthasar are treated in an individual chapter dedicated to their work and reception. It might indicate that these are regarded the most significant theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth century respectively. It shows at least that the development of Catholic theology is very rarely motivated by individual thinkers. What the handbook also makes clear is that spiritual, sacramental, and

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mystical approaches have come to play a greater role in the self-definition of Catholic theology, thereby adding to the plethora of influences that constitute its development in modernity. If we add to this the emergence of aesthetics and popular culture as theological sources – to which, incidentally, the editors of the handbook pay scant attention – we might have to conclude, at least cautiously, that despite their internal diversity, both Enlightenment rationalism and neo-omism are passed stages in the development of Catholic theology, and that very few seem to regret this. 3. After Blondel: The Catholic Turn in Modern Philosophy Despite Enlightenment rationalism and neo-omism having had their time of day, they still form the cradle of contemporary Catholic theology. Aer the First Vatican Council, when neo-omism was confirmed as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church,17 there was criticism among neo-omists of the idea that there is a universal Catholic philosophy, which is valid always and everywhere.18 At the same time, there were attempts to develop a Catholic philosophy that did not follow the neoscholastic method, of which the philosophy of Maurice Blondel, is a well-known example. Currently, there is a renewed interest in Blondel’s work, not least because of the publication of a comprehensive biography in 2010.19 Blondel has, however, been a continuous, though not always dominant and sometimes underappreciated influence on contemporary Catholic thought. is is especially because of his work L’Action (1893) that contains a philosophy of action in which he explicitly opposed the neo-omism of his time. Even though Blondel became embroiled in the modernist crisis, he was never convicted and was personally protected by Pius X from further charges. Nevertheless, his works on apologetics and the development of dogma were cited by anti-modernists as examples of works they thought should be on the Index.

17 For the history of that decision see Gregory B. Sadler, ed., Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 10-46. 18 Henry Donneaud, Histoire et théologie: Thomistes en dialogue, XIXeXXe siècles (Nancy: Arbre Blue Éditions, 2021). 19 Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life, Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic ought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). Cf. Inigo Bocken, “Mystiek, filosofie en theologie bij Maurice Blondel,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 59 (2019): 257-280.

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A recently published monograph on Blondel by Robert Koerpel addresses the historical and philosophical background of this debate.20 Koerpel discusses Blondel’s concept of tradition in his work Histoire et Dogme (1896) in line with the nineteenth-century ideas on the development of dogma, especially in the work of Johann Adam Möhler and John Henry Newman. ey emphasized the dynamic relation between the historical, visible and changing reality of the Church and the continuity of tradition. Koerpel discusses at length the correspondence on this subject between Blondel and Alfred Loisy, the priest and theologian who was condemned by Pius X at the beginning of the twentieth century at the peak of the modernist crisis. For the further course of twentiethcentury Catholic theology, it is especially interesting to see to what extent Loisy and Blondel differed about the nature of metaphysics. For Loisy, metaphysics was a fixed system, especially as it was envisioned by the neo-omists, a prison for thought from which one had to free oneself. For Blondel, metaphysics was not a static system at all, but a search for truth that depended on human action, and for this reason he believed that metaphysics was constantly changing. According to him, instead of being the expression of an eternal truth, metaphysics could only be based on a common practice and should not be abstracted from that practice either. is dynamic definition of metaphysics had consequences for Blondel’s concept of tradition. According to him, tradition is the means of finding and representing God’s permanent presence in history, especially through religious and liturgical acts. Sacramental representation is for him the place where we can understand the dynamic interrelation of dogma and history. is makes his work relevant again for our time, in which liturgy is once more accentuated as a, if not the primary finding place for faith and theology.21 According to Blondel, philosophy plays a crucial role in discerning the historical relationship between Creator and creature. at is why he is so much more than the proto-existentialist that he is believed to be.

20

Robert Koerpel, Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition, resholds in Philosophy and eology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). 21 For example, in the work of David Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? (Mundelein, IL: Liturgy Training Publications, 2003) or of Joris Geldhof, Liturgical Theology as a Research Program, Brill Research Perspectives in eology (Leiden and New York: Brill, 2020).

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Blondel’s plea for a Catholic philosophy is especially important for the development of theology.22 e task of Catholic philosophy, he claims, is to think through this continuous, but historically changing relationship between God and man, instead of repeating the same ontological principles, whereby history would be no more than a succession of variations on the same theme. Despite the fierce debates that followed Blondel’s plea for a Catholic philosophy,23 Catholicism had a substantial share in the birth of phenomenology, as Edward Baring shows in his recent book, Converts to the Real.24 Phenomenology was difficult to reconcile with neo-omism and this problem alone made it attractive for atheist philosophers. Catholics in turn made the effort to study these new developments in philosophy, by generating a critical mass that brought phenomenology to the attention of well-known thinkers in Catholic education. Philosophers interested in phenomenology could not avoid this Catholic reception. Until this day, phenomenology continues to arouse a Catholic interest, especially in Latin America, at renowned Catholic universities in the United States such as Boston College and the University of Notre Dame, and at the Institut Catholique de Paris. Baring shows in his book that the relationship between Catholicism and phenomenology is not accidental, and that it has helped Catholic theology to enter into conversation with secular thought. Phenomenology emerged at a time when neo-omists were searching for an apologetic strategy for their debates with secular philosophers. erefore, phenomenology fascinated them, because there were examples of people who converted to Catholicism because of it, while it made others turn away from Catholicism. e fascination and frustration with these conversions in two directions led to an intense Catholic study of phenomenology which is still present in continental philosophy today, and has had an impact on the following self-identification of Catholic philosophy: a critique of Cartesian philosophy, a rejection of naturalism and other totalizing forms of rationality, an interest in limit concepts and in the porous boundaries between the immanent or the existential, and the transcendent or the so-called ‘Other’. According to Baring, there is therefore not so much a theological turn in contemporary continental 22 Maurice Blondel, “Y-a-t’il une philosophie chrétienne?,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 38 (1931): 599-606. 23 Sadler, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation, 67-78, 81-96. 24 Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

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philosophy as there is a Catholic turn in phenomenology, which continues to this day, for example in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque.25 4. Ressourcement: Catholic Method Shaped by Politics While existentialist phenomenology emerged, and had its impact on Catholic theology, the Jesuits and Dominicans in France and Belgium developed what came to be known as ressourcement theology. In Jon Kirwan’s recent book, the developments from Blondel to phenomenology are extended to ressourcement theology, or nouvelle théologie.26 e author uses the latter term in full, even though it was once a negative term, first used by the editors of the Osservatore Romano in 1942 and later becoming widely known through the title of a very critical article by the neo-omist Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.: “La nouvelle théologie où va-t-elle?”27 Kirwan wants to clarify the project of nouvelle théologie by placing it in its time. e historian Étienne Fouilloux already published several studies on the history of the ressourcement movement, concentrating for example on the problems that Catholic intellectuals encountered with the Magisterium, but he never devoted a complete study to the ressourcement theologians in their cultural and political context.28 Kirwan concentrates mainly on the theologians in the Jesuit study house at Fourvière near Lyon, among whom were de Lubac, Daniélou, and Bouillard, and that of the Dominicans in Belgium near the French border at Tournai, Le Saulchoir, where Chenu and Congar taught, but he does not only limit himself to the better-known names, which makes this book an important source of historical information. In previous research, Kirwan claims that the modernist roots of the ressourcement theologians is lacking, as is the influence on their thought of the political developments in France during the interwar period. In his study, he uses the generational method, and instead of the usual 25

Martin Koci and Jason Alvis, eds., Transforming the Theological Turn: Phenomenology with Emmanuel Falque (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). 26 Jon Kirwan, An Avant-garde Theological Generation: The Nouvelle théologie and the French Crisis of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 27 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., “La nouvelle théologie où va-t-elle?,” Angelicum 23 (1946): 126-145. 28 Étienne Fouilloux, Une église en quête de liberté: La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II, 1914-1962 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998); id., “L’affaire Chenu, 1937-1943,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 98 (2014): 261-352.

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periodization in the study of ressourcement, he starts much earlier with the Dreyfus generation, from 1890 to 1914, which saw the establishment of the right-wing political Action française, an intensification of laïcité, the rise of French nationalism, and an increasing cultural influence of le-wing intellectuals.29 At the same time, the modernist generation came into being, to which, besides Loisy and Blondel, also George Tyrell and Édouard Le Roy belonged, whose ideas were condemned by Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). It is particularly Blondel’s philosophy that would later be continued by the Jesuits of Fourvière, especially by de Lubac who, according to Kirwan, tried to show that Blondel’s ecclesiology was indeed more authentic than the neo-omistic one, even though it was based on a Kantian epistemology, thereby offering an unexpected philosophical foundation for Catholic ecclesiology. Before Kirwan draws a direct line from modernism to nouvelle théologie, he discusses the work of Dominicans and Jesuits around the turn of the century, who he believes should be considered predecessors of the ressourcement theologians. He describes how during that period, one of Blondel’s pupils, Auguste Valensin, visited fellow Jesuit and metaphysician Joseph Maréchal, who formulated points of contact between the philosophy of Aquinas and Kant. Aer his visit, Valensin cried out that “Hegel, Kant, Blondel and Saint omas were all mixed together […] is is astounding!”30 is method of what Kirwan calls the first ressourcement generation has had a direct influence on those that came later to be known as the ressourcement theologians. Around the turn of the century, their predecessors were motivated by the desire to heal the sacred and the secular in French society, which led to the then contested mix of omism and modern philosophy. e development of Catholic theology in the interwar period is driven both by Blondel’s reformulation of metaphysics and tradition, and by the response to laicité in France. e famous, second ressourcement generation of the 1930s was also influenced by the shock of the First World War, which shaped their ideas about the cultural crisis, such as de Lubac’s opposition to atheistic humanism. So, it was not so much the theology of that generation that was radically ‘new’, but the combination of a theological renewal that had already begun in the nineteenth century with a cultural and social critique prompted by the situation.

29 Corinne Bonnet and Danny Praet, Science, Religion and Politics during the Modernist Crisis (Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut, 2018). 30 Cit. in Kirwan, An Avant-garde Theological Generation, 78.

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5. Recalibrating Universality: The Challenges for Post-secular Catholicism e historical continuity of French modernism was disrupted during and aer the Second Vatican Council, when theologians who had previously allowed themselves to be grouped together under the same denominator became diametrically opposed to one another. Kirwan has shown how the history of modernism and the developments in the Church and in the wider culture were closely connected during the interwar period. is led to a theological renewal movement with members of rather diverse backgrounds. is diversity might have played a role in the sometimes radically different directions they followed in their assessment of the results of the council a few decades later. e ambivalent outcome of the council prompted Michele Dillon to re-examine the importance of modernity for Catholic thought.31 In her recent book on post-secular Catholicism, she describes how Catholic thought in the twentieth century repeatedly adapted itself to the questions and challenges of the modern age. Time and again it turned out that these adaptations needed to be revised as well, and modern Catholicism, she claims, is characterized by a critical flexibility that leads to self-criticism and adjustment on the one hand and to discernment and cultural criticism on the other. Following Jürgen Habermas, she calls this ‘contrite modernity’. In the present era, as in the time of the council, she sees a need for a recalibration of theology. She describes the present juncture with the term ‘post-secular’, by which she signifies the critical attitude of religion towards the failures of modernity, without denying the secularity of contemporary culture. For Catholicism, this does not mean that the Church should develop a post-secular mentality, but that it can use this period as an opportunity for dialogue and action, precisely because the current relationship between Church and culture is tense. It is important to note that Dillon formulates her agenda for a public theology as an alternative to the culture wars in the United States on the basis of both the papacy of Benedict XVI and that of Francis. Remarkably, she makes their critique of modernity fit seamlessly with that of Habermas. She illustrates this by discussing themes such as economic inequality, climate change, sex and gender, and the controversies during the Synod on Marriage and the Family, with particular attention to the debates among North American theologians and their bishops. Whether 31 Michele Dillon, Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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her three interlocutors, the two popes and a famous German atheistic sociologist of religion are agreeing on all these issues, as Dillon seems to claim, is very much open to question. Her post-secular agenda is not directed against secular culture, but she does think that faith is the best vehicle for modern self-criticism, both for the Church and for the secular world. In doing so, she goes a step further than Habermas, who assigned this role to the egalitarian quality of rationality rather than to the critical properties of religion. Dillon’s position is more interesting than that of a public theology, which oen hides its critical potential behind an apologetics of adaptation, in which religion is not much more than an instrument for dialogue, provided that it adheres to the rules of the culture that surrounds it.32 She argues for a post-secular Catholicism, whose method is based on the Catholic practice of penitence. For that, Catholic thought needs to continue to explore its precarious balance between faith and reason, and between authority and interpretation, in Dillon’s view the best instruments for criticizing and tackling the excesses of modernity. e Freiburg professor of fundamental theology, Karlheinz Ruhstorfer, follows the opposite path, but with the same result. 33 For him, too, Catholicism is the instrument par excellence to criticize modernity, without turning away from it. Unlike Dillon, however, he is not so much concerned with a specific religious community that has to distinguish itself critically from a secularizing modern culture, but rather with the ‘opening’ of every private identity to a universal form of catholicity. His aim is to herald the end of postmodernity and to point the way to a global identity (globale Identität). His basic thesis is that Scripture has a universal significance for the history of ideas in Europe. It is not his intention to defend once again the primacy of revelation and theology for everything and everyone. Rather, on the basis of a dynamic understanding of tradition, not dissimilar to that of Blondel, he seeks to establish that the unfamiliar elements of this history of ideas – unfamiliar because they are alien to Christianity – are also part of the universal history of revelation. To this purpose, Ruhstorfer distinguishes five phases in the history of European ideas: (1) the pre-Christian phase; (2) the incarnational phase; (3) the metaphysical phase of modernity; (4) the current bio32

See, for example, Stephan van Erp, “e Sacrament of the World: inking God’s Presence beyond Public eology,” ET-Studies 6 (2015): 119-136. 33 Karlheinz Ruhstorfer, Befreiung des “Katholische”: An der Schwelle zu globaler Identität (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2019).

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anthropological phase; and (5) the Catholic phase that he announces and wishes to defend. In making his case for the concept of catholicity, he draws on omas Aquinas, whose theology he describes as the search for a synthesis of revelatory knowledge and natural reason. e Summa Theologiae placed Jesus Christ at the center of this synthesis, but in postomas omism, Christ became the condition of possibility for a confessional Catholicism, thereby making its own claim to universality impossible. As a result, as long as Catholic thought continues to rely on omas in this way, it will remain fundamentally anti-modern, according to Ruhstorfer. As long as Catholicism remains confessional and private, it denies itself the universal value of salvation that could still be imagined in the original omistic synthesis. e ‘liberation of catholicity’ mentioned in the title of Ruhstorfer’s book is only possible if, according to him, the theology of the Church critically processes contemporary thinking and learns to distinguish its own universal Catholic principle in it. is way, he distinguishes himself from the neo-omistic project that derived its universality from a generally valid epistemology and an Aristotelian logic of truth. He also distinguishes himself from the binary and all too historicizing frameworks of modernity. Several times in his book, he emphasizes that he is not concerned with entering into dialogue with others who think and believe differently, and he criticizes the postmodern sensitivity to the otherness of the other. Rather, he seeks to open the content of Catholic theology to global perspectives in such a way that, like omas Aquinas, it can once again articulate the universality of its message, by finding that universality elsewhere, according to the logic of its own principle. Here, we might catch a glimpse of the persistence of omism in modern Catholic thought. Perhaps it still deserves the designation of ‘eternal philosophy’, if only because of its paradoxical life aer death in secular thought. 6. Conclusion What the future of Catholic theology will bring is not clear, despite Ayres’ promise, in his introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, that “we have every reason to hope whenever anything seems dark, from darkness, light is drawn.”34 Based on my discussion of recent literature on the self-understanding of modern Catholic theology, that hope could be based on several of its qualities. First, there is the dynamic 34 Lewis Ayres, “What Is Catholic eology?,” in Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, 4-51, at 38.

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interplay of sources that continue to provide the material for the development of the content of the Catholic faith. Second, the history of modern Catholic theology shows it is capable of self-criticism and adaptation without losing sight of the varied continuities within the tradition. ird, this way it continues to redefine its catholicity, not only by recalibrating the balance between unity and diversity, or between universality and particularity, but also by opening itself towards the newness of revelation, which provides the desire and equity that enables one to see the truth, also in other perspectives, a catholicity that is becoming manifest in the mystery of its unfolding unity.

27 Problematic Predictions Religion in the Secular Age Hans Joas*

Some time ago I was a guest on the popular German TV show Scobel on the 3sat channel. e topic of the evening was conveyed by a phrase more hackneyed than humorous, “the emptiness of the churches,” which played on the fact that in German this sounds exactly like the more familiar expression for “the churches’ teachings.”1 is trite beginning signaled the slant of the clips shown during the broadcast: our churches and other places of worship are mostly empty and thus largely dispensable; no one today is interested in the messages of the Christian faith, while esotericism and Asian forms of spirituality are flourishing in the West. A biologist, who also claimed to be a religious studies scholar, asserted that for two thousand years Christianity had been no more than an extension of the state – since before the crucifixion of Christ, then, strictly speaking! e broadcast began by showing the demolition of the so-called Immerath ‘cathedral’, a church that fell victim to open-cast mining in the northern Rhenish brown coal field – though this was not mentioned, with the church’s destruction merely serving to illustrate the superfluousness of large-scale church buildings in the present age. We might characterize the historical picture implied by all this as follows. Although Christianity, given its proximity to the state, bears a significant degree of responsibility for every form of political oppression and social inequality in the parts of the world it has influenced, almost everyone in Germany adhered to it until well into the post-war period and the days of the economic miracle. Subsequently, however, an unparalleled and continually self-reinforcing collapse occurred, which is now resulting in the complete marginalization of Christianity and casts doubt on – or

* is article has been translated from German into English by Alex Skinner. 1 ‘Die kirchliche Leere’ instead of ‘Die kirchliche Lehre’.

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renders absurd – any notion of Germany or Europe as a culture profoundly shaped by Christianity. I am of course well aware of the signs of declining Christianity and advancing secularization in Germany and in a number of other countries. Since 2000, around five hundred Catholic churches have been redesignated in Germany and 140 of these have indeed been torn down. But if we really want to understand the precise nature and causes of this weakening of Christianity, we have to engage far more deeply with the subject. In spatial terms, we must be willing to look beyond Germany and central or Western Europe, while in temporal terms we must think beyond the present era. If we do so, it soon becomes apparent that – from a global perspective – the weakening of religion in these European countries is clearly the exception. It is true that this phenomenon pertains in some, though by no means all, ex-communist countries in Europe, most strikingly the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany, and Estonia. It is also to be found in an array of western European countries (the UK, Sweden, France, the Netherlands), though it is always worth scrutinizing the relationship between the majority and the minority of seriously ‘practising’ Christians in each country. Particularly in the case of Sweden, the term ‘vicarious religion’ has been put forward2 to convey the benign attitude of those who do not attend church on Sunday towards those who do so, as it were, on everyone’s behalf. is benevolence is for the most part not bestowed upon churchgoers in Eastern Germany, so the term would be a quite inappropriate means of describing the situation there. Only in a very small number of non-European societies shaped by European settlers are there similarly strong trends towards secularization (New Zealand and Uruguay are the most frequently mentioned). Comprehensive communist repression of religion now exists chiefly in North Korea; China, by contrast, despite the antagonism of the state, which has intensified again recently, is undergoing a multifaceted revival of both indigenous religious traditions (such as Buddhism and Daoism) and (mostly Protestant) Christianity. Developments in South Korea have been dramatic. ere, one of the most rapid economic and scientific-technological processes of modernization in the history of the world has gone handin-hand with a revitalization of older religious traditions and a vigorous process of Christianization. Christianity is growing rapidly in many African countries, despite the fact that even some of the most astute observers, such as the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, once 2 Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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assumed that the end of colonial rule would cause Christianity in Africa to wither, as a European implant. is growth is largely though not entirely due to demographic factors. According to reliable estimates, the number of Christians in Africa is currently growing by 23,000 people a day.3 In the shape of so-called Pentecostalism, today Christianity continues to spread in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, and, in the face of immense resistance, even some parts of India.4 In light of these developments, the so-called secularization thesis has now lost its plausibility for most researchers in the field, though not all. Here I have to sound a warning about a common misunderstanding. is thesis has never simply stated that secularization exists. It is thus neither confirmed by indisputable cases of the weakening of religion nor refuted by the resurgence of religion. Instead this thesis or theory claimed to explain the weakening of religion. It asserted a close causal connection between modernization and secularization: the more modern a society (in terms of economic and scientific-technological development), the weaker religion is within it, or the more it is limited to the private sphere. But this very assumption has increasingly proved to be a false generalization of phenomena found in European history. It has always been clear that it does not apply to the United States – an indisputably modern society but also one that is religiously vigorous and even productive of religion. By ‘productive of religion’ I mean a society that gives rise to new religious movements that are capable of surviving and even of spreading, as in the case of the United States, which saw the emergence of Mormonism in the nineteenth century and the aforementioned Pentecostalism in the twentieth century. e thesis of secularization also fails to explain the major differences within Europe, which can by no means be described as a uniformly secular continent, given that the regional differences are substantial and cannot simply be put down to differing levels of modernization. It is now becoming clear that almost nowhere outside Europe do the facts corroborate this thesis. Even its few remaining proponents concede that the stronger population growth in religiously vital societies is making the world increasingly religious.5 According to them, the

3

According to Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 56, with reference to the World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4 Sarbeswar Sahoo, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India, with a preface by Hans Joas (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 5 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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tendency is for the population of modern – and thus, as they assume, highly secularized – societies to die out due to the low number of births or to be radically changed through the impact of migrants and the religiosity they bring with them. But the loss of credibility suffered by the secularization thesis has manifold consequences. I will discuss three of them here. (1) If modernization as such is not the explanation for secularization, but instances of the weakening of religion are undeniably real, we clearly need a different explanation for this religious decline. By no means are most critics of the secularization thesis postmodern opponents of all grand historical narratives or comprehensive theoretical attempts at explanation. ey consider just one specific theory and one particular grand narrative, namely the theory of secularization, to have failed. (2) If modernization and secularization are no indissoluble dyad, then the common interpretation of the prehistory of modern secularization also begins to look shaky, namely the narrative, going back to Max Weber, of a millennia-long process of disenchantment. We must, however, make a clear distinction between the critique of the conception of disenchantment and criticisms of the theory of secularization. (3) If we think through seriously the erroneousness of the predictions arising from the thesis of secularization and the narrative of disenchantment, we find ourselves confronted by truly fundamental issues entailed in such assertions of historical trends in general. ese oen have a prophetic air. But there are genuine and false prophets. What we say about the future always forms part of contemporary struggles over this future. is state of affairs also demands consideration and explains the title of the present text. 1. Secularization: Not a Necessary Corollary of Modernization At the beginning of this article I indicated that I believe the notion of the taken-for-granted Christianness of Germany or Europe as a whole until the era of the post-war economic miracle to be wrong. By the early eighteenth century the first commentators had already begun to predict the disappearance of Christianity from Europe. To my knowledge, such views had not in fact been expressed for more than a millennium, since the era when Saint Augustine “considered a mass return to heathenism quite conceivable” (Jörg Lauster) aer Alaric I’s sack of Rome in 410. Now, though, a growing number of people began to express such views. Prussian king Frederick the Great, for example, articulated such thoughts in his correspondence with Voltaire, while the French Revolution saw violent practical efforts to speed along this alleged process. We should

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keep in mind that Friedrich Schleiermacher, the greatest Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, could address his brilliant speeches on religion of 1799 to “the educated among its despisers” only because these despisers existed in large numbers – both educated and uneducated. In the Vormärz (the period of German history prior to the revolution of March 1848 in the states of the German Confederation) and in the revolution of 1848 itself, the Protestant (state) church’s loyalty to the Prussian dynasty, the king, government, and army alienated much of the liberal bourgeoisie and the nascent labor movement in Prussia from Christianity – with lasting consequences. By the late nineteenth century Berlin was already one of the most secularized cities in the world, in significant part because Protestant Christianity had become bourgeoisified and the lower classes felt repelled or excluded by this bourgeoisie and the pastors’ nationalist views. e period aer the First World War and the Nazi movement strengthened the cultish and anti-Semitic efforts to draw on a form of supposed Germanic religiosity predating Christianity, with its Jewish roots, or to strip Christianity of all Jewish elements. Jesus Christ, it was claimed, did not bring salvation; instead, we must be saved from Jesus Christ – this was the dominant view in the circle around Mathilde Ludendorff. In order to achieve the ‘dejudaization’ of Christianity, a theological “Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” was even founded in Eisenach in 1939. Had the Second World War ended differently, these incipient efforts to establish a new (Christian or anti-Christian) racist anti-universalism would probably have made a major impact; the Christian dimension, in the sense of a universalism of love, was also essentially absent from the “German Christians” organization. ese outline remarks are an attempt to demonstrate that we undoubtedly require an alternative to explanations of secularization focused on modernization. is alternative is readily available. I call it the ‘political sociology of religion’ and regard British sociologist David Martin as its pioneer.6 is approach foregrounds churches’ and religious communities’ stance on the major political questions of a given era: the ‘social question’ for example, as it was called in the nineteenth century, the national question (which was so crucial to the loyalty of the Poles, Irish, 6 His magnum opus is David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). On his oeuvre as a whole, see the discussion volume: Hans Joas, ed., David Martin and the Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge, 2018). See also Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), esp. 37-49.

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Croats, and Bavarians to their Catholic church), the democratic question, the rights of the individual, the emancipation of women, and the issue of religious pluralism. e patchwork religious map of Europe, where highly religious regions sometimes border on highly secular ones, can be understood only from such a historically nuanced perspective. is also allows us to see how far from inevitable certain processes of secularization were and are. What matters is the character of the institutional relationship between state and church or state and religious communities. Excessive proximity to the state and a power-backed religious monopoly were always a danger to the churches if political and economic dissatisfaction spread among the general population. is is the rational core of the biologist’s statement as cited at the start of this article. But how wrong it is to generalize from this is evident in her consummate ignorance of the history of tensions between church and state, as well as the tremendous significance of the dualism of state and church in European history. My favorite example from recent German history involves a Catholic school in the Eichsfeld region of uringia, where I once gave a talk. It was forced to close in the context of Bismarck’s Cultural Struggle (Kulturkampf) – aer which it was reopened. Later the Nazis closed it – it was subsequently reopened. e next to close it were the communists – aer which it was reopened once again. ree political regimes in Germany came and went, and this Christian school survived them all. e notion of the churches’ and the whole of Christianity’s steadfast closeness to the state must sound strange indeed in the Eichsfeld region, which – rather like Asterix’s Gaulish village holding out against the might of the Roman empire – has remained an island of the Catholic faith as the various political regimes have arisen and fallen away. Tensions of this kind are not solely part of the past. ey may also take new and unexpected forms. is applies, for example, to immigration policy in Germany, with the churches putting forward moral arguments in support of mass immigration and backing government policy, potentially alienating disadvantaged social milieus.7 New challenges always arise when it comes to questions of war and peace as well. e increased need for individualistic forms of spirituality also seems significant to me. While this need may very well be satisfied within the major religious communities and traditions, it may also be a threat to them. Again, this is the rational core of the claim that esotericism and new forms of 7 Hans Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur? (Munich: Kösel, 2016). See also the recent discussion volume: Jochen Sautermeister, ed., Kirche – nur eine Moralagentur? Eine Selbstverortung (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2019).

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spirituality are on the increase. But it is empirically incorrect to extrapolate from religious or quasi-religious quest-centered movements, which oen lead merely to short-lived membership or practice and are mostly not passed on to the children of those involved, to the impending dissolution of all religious institutions. I would like to make two additional remarks on this complex to avoid misunderstandings. An emphasis on political questions does not mean that the political dimension is all that matters and that there is no religious sphere as such or that, as Marxism suggests, religious forms are merely the displaced expression of material interests. But the turn to and away from particular religions and even secular worldviews and value systems mostly occurs not on the basis of individual doctrinal statements, but via holistic forms of identification. Hence, religious biographies are determined in part by key political inflection points. And finally: it may be some time before the consequences of such pivotal political forks-in-the-road kick in. We know from the United Kingdom that for a long time men’s distance from the church did not prompt them to leave it because their mothers, wives and lovers oen acted as a countervailing force. But if women too lose their ties to the church, thus ‘feminizing’ unbelief, the result may be an avalanche of departures. And if due to historical circumstance the parental generation fails to keep their children in the religious community, then galloping secularization, occurring aer some delay, is likely. is sounds gloomier than I mean it to be. One may also read the three-hundred-year history of the weakening of Christianity in Europe, as I have outlined it here, as the history of repeated instances of partially successful rejuvenation, as a reason not to underestimate the vitality of Christianity even in the secularized parts of Europe and to contemplate the undeniable relevance of its message, liturgical practice and welfare and social activities. 2. Disenchantment: Not an Unilinear World-historical Process Only since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has Europe seen the emergence of an intellectually developed and aggressively espoused new alternative to the Christian faith in the shape of what the great Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his monumental 2007 work A Secular Age, called the rise of the ‘secular option’.8 Prior to its appearance there was certainly religious indifference, hatred towards some or all clergy or the 8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

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church, for example in light of its role as exploitative landowner, but – apart from Judaism and the views of some intellectuals – no self-confident alternative to Christianity in Europe. How did this new worldview manage to emerge and spread? e key question here is whether the explanation for modern European secularization lies in the conditions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves or whether this epoch-making shi has a lengthy prehistory. Just as the theory of secularization claims to explain the development of the last two centuries, the narrative of disenchantment claims to explain the long-term historical background to this secularization. ‘Disenchantment’ is not ‘secularization’, though the two are constantly confused. For Max Weber, the main source of this narrative, ‘disenchantment’ in fact meant a history extending across two and a half millennia, beginning with the Hebrew prophets (and certain parallel phenomena in other cultures such as Buddha). Weber drew a line that led from these prophets and the philosophy of the Greeks, aer setbacks in the middle ages, to the new prophetic awakening in the Reformation and the early modern scientific revolution, from there to the establishment of a causal-mechanistic worldview and the Enlightenment, but subsequently also to the profound crisis of meaning in the European Fin de Siècle around 1900 and on the eve of the First World War. is narrative proved tremendously suggestive. Much as Nietzsche ascribed to Christianity a constitutive role in a historical process that inevitably led to the overcoming of Christianity – because the ethos of truthfulness also led to historical Bible criticism – Weber, however great his distance from Nietzsche in the detail, also constructed a narrative that leaves no room for an intellectually responsible and vital religiosity in our era. To try to put forward a detailed critical discussion of this narrative would be to push the present text far beyond its limits. In my book The Power of the Sacred I tried to show, in hundreds of pages, what is wrong with this narrative and what an alternative to it might look like.9 Above all, the narrative of disenchantment suffers from the ambiguity of its core concept, namely that of ‘disenchantment’. is term refers to the prophets’ struggle against magic (‘demagification’), a loss of meaning with respect to everyday action and life (‘desacralization’) and the weakening of notions of radical transcendence as expressed in Jesus’ statement to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (‘immanentization’ or ‘detranscendentalization’). Because Weber fails to distinguish between these 9 Hans Joas, The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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three meanings, he turns these different processes into successive phases of one single world-historical process of disenchantment, which is then supposed to have facilitated both modernization and secularization. To make my core criticism understandable I use the distinction between three conceptual pairs, which constantly flow into one another in relevant debates.10 I am referring to the pairings sacred/profane, transcendent/immanent (or mundane) and religious/secular. e terms ‘sacred’, ‘transcendent’ and ‘religious’ are not synonyms. e concept of the ‘sacred’ (or ‘holy’) is an attempt to convey a universal anthropological phenomenon, one that arises from human experiences of self-transcendence. e concept of the ‘transcendent’ refers to ideas of a division between the realm of the divine and the earthly, as well as the locating of the true and the good in the realm of the divine. ese ideas by no means represent a universal anthropological phenomenon, but instead emerged historically in identifiable places and at particular points in time. Finally, the concept of the religious only makes sense if it contrasts with something; this has only fully been the case since the rise of the ‘secular option’ in the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.11 If this distinction between three contrasting pairs, which I have mentioned here only very briefly,12 makes sense, then it follows that there must be three different processes of shi from one side to the other: this means there are processes of sacralization and profanization (or desacralization); there are processes of transcendentalization and immanentization

10

I can claim to have been championing this distinction for a number of years. See Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 56-57, on the secular/religious pairing versus profane/sacred. On the pairing transcendent/immanent, see my studies on the Axial Age, such as Hans Joas, Was ist die Achsenzeit? (Basel: Schwabe, 2015). is distinction is expressed with particular clarity in José Casanova, “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s eory of Religious Evolution,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 191221. It also forms the basis of the theory of religion in Reinhard Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam (Basel: Schwabe 2015), 109ff. 11 On the genesis of the term ‘religion’ as a phenomenon opposed to the ‘secular’, see the remarks in chapter 1 of Joas, The Power of the Sacred; on the emergence of notions of transcendence, see chapter 5 of the same book. 12 For a more in-depth treatment of the concept of the sacred, see chapter 2 of The Power of the Sacred; Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 51ff.; Hans Joas, “Säkulare Heiligkeit: Wie aktuell ist Rudolf Otto?,” in Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917) (Munich: Beck, 2014), 255-281.

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(or detranscendentalization); and there are processes of religious revitalization and secularization. It is in no way imperative to conceptualize these different processes as naturally succeeding one another. ings may proceed in either direction. I would like to illustrate this with reference to a single example. In Max Weber’s account, the Reformer Calvin plays a key role: Weber asserts that his thinking embodies the ‘completion’ or apogee of religious disenchantment through radical hostility to magic. Weber certainly exaggerates when, without citing evidence,13 he writes that “the strict Puritan had the corpses of his loved ones dug under without any formality in order to assure the complete elimination of superstition. at meant, in this context, cutting off all trust in magical manipulations” – for Calvin certainly approved of funerary rites.14 Fundamentally, however, it is true that Calvin insisted on the “negation of any grounds for a mundane separation of sacred and profane – in other words of any basis for distinguishing certain places, times, numbers, objects, actions, and so on, as holy.”15 Yet in Calvin’s thinking, of course, the point of this battle against all “idolatry of created things” (Kreaturvergötterung) is not total desacralization, let alone secularization, but rather the intensified, indeed exclusive sacralization of God, that is, his radical transcendentalization.16 By citing this example I aim to at least begin to lend plausibility to the argument that when it comes to ascetic Protestantism we must understand demagification as transcendentalization. Much the same may be said about what Weber called the “prophetic age.”17 Again, we have to understand the prophetic struggle against magic not as the precursor of later secularization, but merely as a step towards a demagified religion. Aer all, as Weber himself wrote,18 in the first instance demagification opens up the potential for a form of religious faith that

13

Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: e Free Press, 1951), 226. See Hartmann Tyrell, “Potenz und Depotenzierung der Religion: Religion und Rationalisierung bei Max Weber,” Saeculum 44 (1993): 300-347, at 306, n. 20. 15 Ibid., 323. 16 Ibid., 311. 17 See Joas, Was ist die Achsenzeit?, 26-35. 18 Max Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” The Sociological Quarterly 22 (1981): 151-180, at 155. e English translation uses ‘ethical’ for Weber’s ‘gesinnungsha’ which does not really convey the meaning of Weber’s statement. See Max Weber, “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie,” in id., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1973), 427-474, at 433. 14

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places greater emphasis on morality and conscience or one of a more mystical hue. Hence, we can at least tentatively tease apart what Weber folds into the single concept of disenchantment. is is bound to prompt us to ask whether demagification, desacralization, detranscendentalization, and secularization are not in fact completely different processes. On this premise it is not obvious that we ought to declare that any one of these processes lays the ground or sets the pace for the others. Instead, this perspective points to a plethora of different challenges that religious traditions must cope with or that may be their ruin. While in Weber’s work itself the process of disenchantment stood center stage as a phenomenon in the history of religion, in the broader public debate it is the connection between the history of science and disenchantment that plays the greater role. is latter connection also crops up in Weber’s work, where its relationship with the history of religion is quite unclear. e idea that it is the progress of science itself that robbed religion of its credibility cannot in fact be plausibly argued in light of our present-day state of knowledge. No one today, for instance, would seriously portray all the key figures in the early modern history of science as motivated by a desire for secularization. Generally speaking, scholars have recognized that it was oen religious motives that prompted the great natural scientists to study nature, for example, as the book of God.19 For the same reason it cannot be satisfactory to put the emergence of a worldview of immanence down to the empirical advances of the sciences. To gain an appropriate view of such matters we are faced with at least three key tasks, which I can mention only briefly here. First, in addition to the causal-mechanistic worldview, to which the sciences, supposedly, inevitably gave rise, we must take account of all those intellectual approaches that emerged in response to this worldview and that limit or overcome it without detaching themselves from the modern sciences. Kant’s philosophy, with its focus on the conditions of possibility  for human knowledge and moral freedom, the historicist and 19

Of the vast and of course also controversial literature, here I will mention just an excellent overview: Rivka Feldhay, “Religion,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 727-755. It distinguishes three main narratives on the relationship between religion and science as it has developed over the course of history (eternal conflict; peaceful coexistence; affinities and interactions), affirms the relative validity of each narrative and, above all, emphasizes how the religious upheavals of the early modern period and the development of modern science led to changes whose complexity is not well conveyed by any of the three narratives.

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hermeneutic tradition of Herder, Humboldt and Schleiermacher with its emphasis on human expression, and the complex attempts to synthesize these new philosophies in the work of Hegel do not tally with the notion of the triumphant march of the causal-mechanistic worldview. Second, we must ask how the ideas about transcendence found in religious traditions, such as Judaism or Christianity, change if the spatial metaphors for the localization of transcendence (in ‘heaven’) are no longer available. e simplistic notion that the astronomy of the early modern era simply did away with these ideas of transcendence because they were associated with these spatial metaphors is by no means an accurate summation of the history of religious discourse on cosmology. ird, when it comes to the newly emerging worldview of immanence, we have to distinguish between those versions that aim, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, to retain the moral universalism of the transcendence-focused religions, perhaps in a secularized form, and those for which science and the pathos of immanence are a means of eliminating this moral universalism, for example through a supposedly scientific racial doctrine and a population policy based upon it. e terms ‘disenchantment’ or ‘enchantment’ certainly do not equip us to perform these tasks. If one wishes to narrow the meaning of the term ‘disenchantment’ so that it is limited to ‘demagification’, then the empirical question must be how attempts to combat magic or superstition in the modern age actually played themselves out and what role religious or other motives played in this.20 We might also examine the role played by references to science in the different processes of demagification, detranscendentalization, desacralization and secularization; in none of these cases should we work on the assumption of an automatic, one-sided effect. Articulations of religious faith are shaped in a range of ways by these debates within and with the sciences, but the outcome is always open rather than being

20 e standard text by Keith omas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), is highly compatible with Weber’s narrative of disenchantment. For the debate on this book, see the introduction by the editors in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-45. On the history of the ‘miracle’, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 2001). For a critique, see Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 692-716, esp. 703-705. Saler writes: “In this respect, enchantment waxed rather than waned by the time of the Enlightenment, countering more linear narratives of progressive disenchantment” (703).

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determined by the sciences. My brief survey of these issues here is chiefly intended to lend plausibility to the conceptual distinction I have proposed. e history of demagification since the Reformation is not the same as that of detranscendentalization, and neither can be equated with desacralization in the sense of the loss of a motivating relationship with the world. To uncover possible effects of one process on the others and to evaluate the role played by each of them in relation to secularization (in the sense of a weakening of all religion), we have to get past the concept of disenchantment. 3. Historical Inevitability and Political Struggle So, while secularization theory and the narrative of disenchantment, however positive or melancholy they may be, present a specific view of the future as quite certain, if my thinking is correct the future is in fact indeterminate and thus more open than many scholars are willing to countenance. at is, the future, including that of the churches and religion, depends in significant part on conscious human action. is does not mean that this future can be planned and molded at will. But just as Christians and their churches or communities are entangled in the past history of secularization and are to some extent responsible for it – secularization is not akin to a ‘tsunami’ that descended upon western cultures unpredictably and from ‘outside’, destroying everything in its path, contrary to the views articulated in 2012 by one American cardinal (Donald Wuerl) – they are also enmeshed in its future history. But many commentators talk about the future in the idiom of false certainties and on the basis of problematic predictions. ere are several reasons for this. For one thing, there is a general tendency to exaggerate the sciences’ capacity for prediction. It is true that unexpected events have a sobering effect here. e prestige of economics, for example, suffered following the financial crisis of 2008 in much the same way as that of the social sciences aer the unforeseen collapse of communism in Europe in 1989 and aer. But the tendency to overestimate the sciences’ ability to make predictions oen reappears before long. Secularization theory, which responded with surprise to the growth of Pentecostalism and the increased public presence of religion in many modern societies, and the narrative of disenchantment, with its implications for the future, are of course more than just failed or poor forecasts. In fact, they represent a concealed philosophy of history that fails to own up to its status as such. Many schools of thought of this kind exist. e implausibility of such a philosophy of history, though in this case an openly espoused one, suddenly became

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clear to me decades ago, when I was confronted in East Germany with the belief that socialism was unquestionably ‘a whole era ahead’. Since its advocates thought they knew where history was headed, a socialist society simply had to be further ahead historically, even if its aged blocks of flats were crumbling, its urban infrastructure was in a state of decay and its industry could not compete within the global economy. But such seemingly secure knowledge about the future is not only taken for granted in Marxism. Statements presupposing a historical tendency towards political centralization or towards larger states can be found in contexts ranging from discussions of educational federalism in Germany to the debate on the prospects for an ‘ever closer’ European Union, with opponents of such developments being vilified as backward, nostalgic or dangerous. No thinker has analyzed the militantly ideological character of such assertions of historical tendencies as astutely as the great German historian Reinhart Koselleck who died in 2006. In his book Critique and Crisis21 he showed just how much the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century worked with assertions of historical inevitability. Far from value-free hypotheses about empirically observed tendencies, these were tools in the battle of ideas. Time and again, prominent thinkers, instead of openly fighting against the absolutist state on the political level, argued – within the frame of a particular philosophy of history – that it was outmoded. e assertion of its inevitable disappearance thus became a weapon, but one whose wielders did not acknowledge its true nature. Precisely the same may oen be said of Enlightenment predictions – and later forecasts that built upon them – of the disappearance of Christianity or of religion as a whole. Rather than rejecting religious faith, or as a means of supporting its rejection, many thinkers argued that it was outmoded or backward or no longer in keeping with the times. It is remarkable and almost odd that Koselleck’s sensitivity to such rhetorical strategies, particularly in the case of the thesis of secularization itself, seems to have let him down, when he himself referred, for example, to a ‘post-Christian’ or ‘post-theological age’.22

21 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1959) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 22 Hans Joas, “e Contingency of Secularization: Reflections on the Problem of Secularization in the Work of Reinhart Koselleck,” in The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science. Festschrift for Björn Wittrock on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Hans Joas

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But this is irrelevant to our discussion. My only goal in this article has been to consider the facts of present-day secularization in this part of the world without illusion, while placing them within a historical and global framework and thus freeing us from the self-imposed browbeating inherent in prophecies of decline, whether openly stated or camouflaged.

and Barbro Klein, International Comparative Social Studies 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 87-104. e expression ‘our post-theological age’ appears in Koselleck’s foreword to Critique and Crisis, 3.

28 Re-Imagining God in a Secular Age Religion, Philosophy, Science James J. Kelly

A new theological perspective on our image of God is urgently required. Historically, God has been seen as the one absolute, transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable Being, the Creator and source of all. With its own principle of existence, the Divine is eternal, self-sufficient, independent, and completely separate from the finite, changing, temporal world of becoming which is derivative and dependent. Such asymmetrical dualism underlies the essentialist, static notion of God. In fact, Christianity has oen accentuated the separation between the transcendent, immutable God and an immanent world of change and process so much that it has at times become an opposition. is needs to be redressed. In today’s secular culture, the previous asymmetrical theological thinking is scientifically and philosophically implausible and theologically untenable. e advancements in modern science and philosophy, especially since the twentieth century, present us with a new cosmology and metaphysics of process and organism which question many of our preconceptions and invite a reappraisal of the traditional image of God. Process is now viewed as the primary constituent of all existence. Rather than opposing being and becoming, contemporary science and philosophy regard these as aspects of one dynamic continuum. Indeed, becoming is the more concrete of the two. So, the immediate focus needs to be on becoming, change, and process. is necessitates a reframing of our traditional presuppositions. It means the reversal of the basic scientific, philosophical, and theological assumptions held in the West almost since the inception of these disciplines. It also demands a reframing of the relationship between God and world from within a new perspective of process and immanence. e traditional Western emphasis on the centrality of the transcendence of the Divine in religion coincides with the origins of Israel in the Ancient Near East. Until then, the Gods of the surrounding cosmological

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societies were regarded as immanent in the world. Israel’s break with a cyclical cosmological form of existence and their advance to historical form,1 occasioned by the Exodus, changed matters. History became the locus and medium of Israel’s founding event. eir conception of existence was no longer cyclical but linear, with a before and aer the central intervention of the ‘outside’ God. As a historical religion, Christianity too looks to its past founding event and directs itself toward the future, the eschaton.2 Its founding event is the Incarnation: God in human form in time and space and so subject to human conditionality. e Early Church Fathers and Church Councils from Nicaea (325 ) to Chalcedon (451 ) formulated the Incarnational event doctrinally through the medium of Greek philosophy. No matter the difficulties, they never wavered in their belief that Jesus Christ was one in Divinity and in humanity, truly God and truly man; of one substance, homoousios, with the Godhead according to Divinity and with humans according to humanity. Both Divinity and humanity were acknowledged as directly present in this one person. Furthermore, their Trinitarian doctrine also recognized Divine immanence in the world in the form of the Spirit.3 However, a strong residue of Platonic dualism permeated early Christian theology, accentuating a chasm between God and world. To bridge this gulf Plato introduced a subordinate divinity, the Demiurge, as a world generating function of the eternal God. In the late Middle Ages, scholastic theology further underscored transcendence as the distinctive trait of divinity but its separation of natural and supernatural and ascetical spirituality did not help matters. Mysticism attempted to bridge the gap but, whenever it was felt to infringe on the institutional Church’s emphasis on transcendence, it was quickly condemned and suppressed. Nevertheless, its cyclical emergence and suppression is indicative of the underlying problem. In keeping with its essentialist Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, Church authorities opted to preserve the ‘eternal truths’ of the early period in their pristine form, shielding them from the usual changes and developments. For fear of diluting any aspect of Divinity, those early doctrinal formulations remained unaltered and so solidified into icons. 1 Eric Voegelin, Order and History. Vol. 1: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). 2 e gulf between the eschatological belief of primitive Christianity and our current future oriented view is a question for another time. 3 e modern revival in Spirit-Christology was initiated by Paul Tillich.

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However, like everything else, doctrine cannot remain static: it must face the transportations of history. Continuous reinterpretation in light of the development of human understanding is required. Nevertheless, throughout history the Roman Church has continually attempted to guard this ‘deposit of truth’ against any semblance of change. Until recently Christian theology has accentuated the radical transcendence of God along with the infinite qualitative distance between God and world. is was reinforced philosophically by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and theologically by Karl Barth (1886-1968).4 During the early twentieth century any talk of immanence within Roman Catholicism was likely to be labelled immanentism and condemned as part of modernism’s ‘synthesis of all heresies’.5 Feeling under threat, the Church focused on itself as an institution and its dogmatic teachings to the detriment of interiority. In so doing, it abdicated its spiritual role, leaving that to the privacy of the individual. In failing to prioritise its mystical dimension, its raison d’être, it further enabled the process of secularisation along with its own more imminent decline. e objectification and dogmatisation by the institutional Church of much of the older symbolisms has rendered these opaque. Hence, a new symbolic language which would be more meaningful for people today needs to be developed. Cognisant of the new insights in evolution6 and the rapid growth in scientific discoveries one seeks, in vain, for any comparable developments within the institutional Church’s teachings and language. It is not surprising then that the decline in belief has accelerated rapidly. Unless and until the Church retrieves its spiritual dimension, recovers its mystical sources and opens a positive dialogue with modernity, this decline will continue. In an effort to contribute to this debate we propose that any renewed image of God be expressed in terms of immanent-process.

4 Barth later took a more balanced position in Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (London: Collins, 1961). 5 Initially by a decree of the Inquisition, Lamentabili Sane Exitu (July, 1907), thereaer in an encyclical of Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (September, 1907), followed on September 1, 1910 by a Motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum with the anti-modernist oath. ereaer a climate of repression and fear pervaded Roman Catholicism, stultifying theological developments. 6 Darwin’s theory of evolution, its modern synthesis and further developments are presupposed throughout this article.

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1. An Age of Speculation 1. Early Greece Questions regarding the natural world, human existence, God and their relatedness have always preoccupied humanity. In the West, speculation really began when early Greek mythology developed through Hesiod’s Theogony into the rational penetration of nature with the pre-Socratics.7 Unknowingly, this was the dawn of what we now commonly call science. e story of this momentous event begins in the sixth century  with three Ionian cosmologists of Miletus: ales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. As philosophers of nature, they posed the eternal question as to the original stuff of everything. eir answer was framed in terms of a single substance or physical element. ales (630-545), the founder of the school, viewed water or moisture as the Urstoff of everything. He and his successors conceived nature as ‘ensouled’, a living organism, undergoing spontaneous change. ey were called hylozoists: those who think matter is alive, that it has a soul or a power which moves or informs it. Following this, ales held that “Everything is full of gods.”8 All these notions were commonly accepted presuppositions in early Greece. A more rational and natural account of origins arose with ales’ successor, Anaximander, regarded as the ‘Father of Cosmology’. He described earth’s original ‘stuff’ as neither water nor any other element, but rather as something limitless or boundless from which everything arose and into which it destructs.9 As an undifferentiated mix of antagonistic elements or opposites it is a mean between coming-to-be and passing-away in this world. It is infinite, indestructible, eternal, and the source of everlasting motion. Anaximander termed it ‘the apeiron’, meaning: ‘without

7 at the history of philosophy is divided into pre- and post-Socrates resulted from the loss of confidence in the philosophy of nature at the time, compelling Socrates to turn to human interiority for the order and purpose of life. However, if intelligibility, order and purpose could be discovered in nature, as contemporary science is discovering, this opens up another approach which needs to be pursued. 8 Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 21, and Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 127-128. 9 Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 129-130.

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boundaries’.10 Encompassing and governing everything, he identifies this Boundless with the arche. e final Ionian of note, Anaximenes identifies the original substance as air or vapor. is cosmic vapor occasions eternal motion within itself and its rotary movement separates and distinguishes things, thus occasioning change. Differences between substances are ascribed to condensation and rarefaction. Anaximenes conceives the primitive substance as divine, identifying it both with the world’s creative process, hence immanent, but also with the outside envelope which enfolds and binds it together, so also transcendent.11 But Anaximenes also posed another question. He asked why, if everything is made of the same stuff, do things behave differently. Unfortunately, he never capitalized on his insight into rotary movement as occasioning opposites. Nevertheless, he prepared the way for Pythagoras for whom difference is not dependent on ‘what’ something is made of, but rather on its structural form. is shi from a philosophy of matter to one of form was a game changer. 2. Pythagoras With Pythagoras (ca. 572-497) and his followers the perspective shis from matter to form. ey viewed the universe as a cosmos12 embodying geometrical forms with proportional mathematical relations. Instead of focusing on matter, the more mystically minded Pythagoreans pondered about the patterns and relations between things. While materially and quantitatively things may look alike, they may embody qualitative differences which distinguish them from one another. Differences are formal rather than substantial or material, linked to geometrical structure or form. ey describe relational patterns. So, unity and harmony are based on nature’s changing patterns of relatedness rather than on inert material substance. As mathematicians, the Pythagoreans had already uncovered harmonic forms of mathematical ratios underlying the musical scale. From the field of acoustics, they demonstrated that qualitative differences between musical notes are not based on what material the strings are made of but on the rate of their vibrations. So, while each note retains its

10 William K.  C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 27. 11 For my treatment throughout this and subsequent sections I am indebted to Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (1945) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 12 Pythagoras is reputed to have been the first to call the world kosmos.

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individuality, all are proportionally linked together, indeed interdependent parts of the larger whole, forming a harmonious pattern. Similarly, they viewed nature as a harmonious organism, a unity in which the parts function as an integrated whole. And if difference is about patterns of relatedness and musically can be described mathematically, why not the cosmos also. In this manner they accounted for both similarities and differences. Succinctly put: differences do not inhere in things but describe their patterns of relatedness. is culminated in a completely different approach to the nature of reality. 2. An Age of Analysis 1. Renaissance Science From the Greeks until the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology ruled supreme. As almost all the inaugurators of this subsequent scientific revolution were Christians, they regarded themselves as neither revolutionaries nor scientists, but rather as initiating a new philosophy of nature or cosmology. Intended or not, their scientific revolution had the most significant repercussions on all future religious and cultural sensibilities. Unfortunately, the Renaissance philosophy of nature departed radically from that of the Pythagoreans. It harked back to Democritus and the Atomists and their essentialist philosophy of substances.13 In contrast to the earlier notion of nature as a living organism undergoing spontaneous change, it asserted that the world contains a succession of separate, instantaneous configurations of matter. It pictured the world as a vast machine. In contrast to the early Greeks’ question of ‘what’ and ‘why’, the question now shis to ‘how’. is would lead to the reductionist, materialist, mechanistic theory of nature which became the orthodox creed of this new science. Historically the materialist, mechanistic view of nature was launched by Copernicus (1473-1543) in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). is became a turning point in the history of science. It changed not only our perception of the world as the centre of the universe,14 but destroyed any notion of its organic nature by reducing differences to 13 Democritus (ca. 460 – ca. 370) and the Atomists viewed an atom as separate, unchangeable, indestructible: the ultimate physical unit at the basis of everything. 14 According to Collingwood, the true significance of this discovery “consisted not so much in displacing the world’s centre from the earth to the sun, as

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purely quantitative arrangements. en in 1600 William Gilbert’s (15441603) De Magnete (1600) proposed that the earth was a giant magnet whose poles exercised a mutual attraction on the various bodies. Gilbert’s electromagnetics proposal was further developed by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), best known for his laws of planetary motion.15 Kepler also suggested that in physics the word anima (a vital principle), should be replaced by the word vis (force, power). Robin G. Collingwood interprets this as a change from the old conception of ‘vital’ energy producing qualitative changes to a material force producing physical, quantitative change, a further step towards a mechanistic model of the world.16 Kepler was succeeded by Galileo Galilei (1561-1642) who concluded that as quantitative nature can be measured mathematically, the language of the universe is mathematical. Qualitative distinctions like colours and sounds are simply modifications introduced by the senses, but devoid of objectivity. Nothing can be scientifically knowable except what is quantitatively measurable. is narrow focus greatly facilitated scientific advancements to the benefit of humanity, but led to the demise of any organic, ecological conception of nature. Nature was debased into inert matter, wedged between the creator God, its cause, and the human mind, the origin of its qualitative aspects. Change and movement were now regarded as directed by efficient causality following the workings of a machine. Consequently, the principle of finality (teleology), focusing on end and purpose rather than beginnings, as proposed in their own ways by both Plato and Aristotle, was relegated into the background.17 2. The Enlightenment: Rationalism, Empiricism, Deism is reductionist, quantitative, mechanistic theory of nature found its modern philosophic expression in René Descartes (1596-1650). It soon pervaded the seventeenth century, becoming a basic assumption which has endured for almost three centuries. Descartes’ philosophical success was due, in no small measure, to the fact that his ideas would dovetail well with the upcoming Newtonian physics. Impressed with the absolute certainty of mathematics, Descartes extended the mathematical method

in implicitly denying that the world has a centre at all.” Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, 97. 15 Kepler attributed these laws to the ingenuity of the Divine Mathematician. 16 Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, 101-102. 17 Teleology is being recovered by contemporary science as a more openended, future oriented process.

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across the whole field of knowledge. By pursuing a rigorous methodology of doubting everything, he arrived at his infamous cogito ergo sum. is, he assumed, was a sure and solid basis on which to construct an epistemology. It also furnished him with a test for truth, namely clear and distinct ideas. Instead of starting from the concrete whole, the personin-the-world-with-others, he reduced this to ‘the thinking subject’. Alongside, but apart from the cogito, are the res extensa, material bodies. For Descartes both mind (consciousness) and matter are separate, independent substances. We arrive here at an extreme abstract dualism of isolated thinking substances and separate material substances, the latter alone available for scientific exploration. In his Principia philosophiae (1644), Descartes relates that, when we conceive of a substance, we conceive of something that exists in itself, needing nothing else for its existence. e only such being is God. Consequently, both mind and matter are only substances in a derivative sense. God is their unifying principle and sustaining source. As a rationalist, Descartes believed that the idea of God is innate. But as finite, imperfect creatures we cannot be the origin of this idea. Such an idea can only originate from an infinite, perfect being. Furthermore, existence must necessarily be predicated of this being, since it is a perfection without which that being would be lacking something. erefore, the supremely perfect being, God, exists.18 Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was born on Christmas Day, 1642. It could be said that up until the seventeenth century our vision of the universe was Aristotelian and thereaer Newtonian. Even today our common sense view of the world is Newtonian. Newton’s Principia (1687) launched the modern scientific version of Descartes’ philosophical vision on its triumphant journey. It completed the mechanistic view of nature that formed the foundation for the sciences right into the twentieth century. Within Newton’s mechanistic universe separate, individual material objects move within an empty receptacle of absolute space and time. ey follow the fixed laws of mechanics just like a machine, with cause and effect at the basis of all movement. Consequently, to understand something one simply had to reduce it to its component parts and analyse the various external connections, namely their linear causal influences and effects. is furnishes our common sense picture of the world. e success of the model seemed to confirm its credentials, so it quickly became the new orthodoxy. 18 is seems simply a reiteration of Anselm’s ontological argument. But, as Kant reminds us, existence is not a predicate.

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However, while the mechanistic model is highly successful in a wide range of areas and is justified to the extent that living organisms have many parts which operate like machines, the danger arises when living organisms are reduced to nothing more than mere machines. From a Newtonian perspective, the universe runs like a gigantic machine. Initially God created solid material particles, setting them in motion through the force of gravity and perpetuating them by the laws of motion. Should any irregularities occur, God can always be called upon to correct them. As the logic goes: since God created nature then one should be able to reason back from nature to God. e English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) gave philosophical expression to this new cosmological outlook which resulted theologically in Deism. As the philosopher of common sense, Locke, in his Essay on Human Understanding (1690), proposed that all knowledge begins with sense data. Since God is not an object of sensations, Locke’s epistemology ruled out any direct experience of God. Consequently, our knowledge of God must be mediated through the world. God’s existence is established by reason from the order of nature, but this creator-god is separate from the world. As distinct, the world runs its course without any further divine interference. is fundamental principle of a non-interventionist God existing alongside the world is shared by both the rationalists and the supernaturalists, except that the latter allow for God’s miraculous intervention in the natural processes on exceptional occasions. In a later book entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke portrays Christianity as a reasonable religion of common sense. As a Christian, Locke accepts that God’s existence can be proved by reason from the order of the world. But although revealed truth rises above reason, it can only be accepted in so far as it is reasonable. In the event of conflict, Christian doctrine must submit to rational critique. us, reason becomes the ultimate criterion of revelation. Future Deists would further apply these principles, seeking God’s revelation in the laws of nature and subjecting revelation and the Bible to rational and historical critique. Christianity is thus fashioned into a natural religion of reason, devoid of mystery, to which all religion must conform. Locke epitomises the eighteenth century: since we are shaped by the nature that God had created it is possible for people, by the use of their natural faculties, to bring their ideas, their conduct and institutions into harmony with the natural universal order and so in conformity with God. God is simply the chief architect who, aer creating the world and humanity, le them to themselves, reserving to Himself the rewarding of good and punishing of evil in an aerlife. So, Deism focuses on the

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present world as the true task for humanity and reduces the hereaer to a beneficent reward for an orderly and good existence here on earth. It only remained for William Paley (1743-1805) to provide us with his famous watchmaker argument from the design and order of the universe to its supreme designer, God. But before Paley even completed his argument, Hume had shown that the only kind of God this reached was an arch-mechanic or master designer. It should be noted that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the continuous advance of this mechanistic, reductionist, scientific methodology attempting to explain everything in terms of the fixed laws of classical physics. Physicists took little or no interest in the philosophical implications of their theories and philosophers visa versa. en, an even more insidious tendency emerged when this scientific methodology began to infiltrate the human and historical fields. is led to nineteenthcentury positivism and historicism which subordinated theoretical relevance to method, thereby perverting the meaning of the social and historical sciences.19 3. An Age of Transition 1. Modern Science As we saw, Newtonian physics is based on the separate, isolated individuality of each bit of matter occupying a particular place in space and time and operating according to the fixed laws of mechanics – the classical scientific paradigm. Gradually however, many concepts of Newtonian physics have had to be abandoned.20 John Dalton’s (1766-1844) atomic theory showed that, contrary to Newton, the ultimate particles of matter were not static, solidified blocks, and that even the atom is not dependent for its chemical quality on the quantity of electrons but on the dynamic, constantly changing rhythmical patterns produced by these electrons. Further advancements were made with Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clark Maxwell’s (1831-1879) research into the field of electromagnetics. is meant abandoning Newton’s notion of force for magnetic 19

Methods are simply means. Different objects require different methods. e idea of making the social, historical and human studies ‘scientific’ by employing the methods of the physical sciences is utterly fallacious. 20 In what follows I am indebted to: Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925; Glasgow: Collins, 1975) and Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; London: Penguin Classic, 2000).

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fields and overturning his strictly mechanical view of the world. e subsequent publication of Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) articles on special relativity (1905) and his general theory of relativity (1915) further revealed the limitation of Newtonian mechanics. Instead of presenting a separation between absolute space and absolute time, they highlighted their connection. Both are linked, forming the four-dimensional continuum ‘space-time’. Any lingering doubts about the limitations of Newton’s model were squashed with the advent of quantum physics in the nineteen twenties where the laws of classical Newtonian mechanics no longer applied. Depending on one’s viewpoint, sub-atomic particles appear sometimes as particles and sometimes as waves.21 e quantum wave then is a wave of probability. It represents all possible places where a particle might be before observations. In its original state the quantum particle is in a superposed (overlapping) state with no one distinct location, nor measurable properties. When observed, however, we witness the collapse of the wave function into the classical Newtonian particle state, with unique location capable of measurement. e observer therefore plays an integral part in the process of what is observed.22 But no laws of physics can predict which of the possible states the particle may occupy. Hence everything seems uncertain, random and indeterminate.23 is demands a reformulation of the classical concepts of space, time, matter, cause and effect and certainty. Whereas classical physics is analytic with the various parts constituting and determining the whole, in quantum mechanics everything is interconnected with the whole also influencing the behaviour of the parts. 2. Modern Philosophy Like Newtonian science, the foundations of classical philosophy were also being shaken. Here we can only briefly treat three of the distinguished innovators in the recovery of this organic process movement, namely: Henri Bergson (1859-1941), William James (1842-1910), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).

21 22

It is similar with light. Process philosophy throws light on the epistemology of this paradoxical

issue. 23 Cf. Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation, 1926, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 1927 and Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, 1928.

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In his masterful work Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889),24 Henri Bergson championed the organic, process notion of reality. His work is a protest against abstract, dualistic Cartesianism and the simplified Newtonian version of reality. According to Bergson, any notion of separate, self-contained substances is a pure construct masking the dynamic, organic notion of immediate reality. e basic distinction pervading Bergson’s work is between our inner, lived-experience and our natural inclination in practical life to externalise or spatialise this. In treating time Bergson describes experiential-time as duration (durée): the interconnected, qualitative flow of our inner experience. is may be likened to the notes in a musical composition merging to create a melodious, harmonic whole. Experientially time flows in a movement of qualitative change: like a river always in flux, constantly renewing and incapable of being split up, except by abstract thought. Conceptualisation disrupts the continuity of this rhythmic unity with practical life’s demands for objectification. So, duration is spaced externally into quantitative clock time. en common sense naively assumes that simple location is the way things exist concretely in space and time. is is the disconnected, objectivist version of reality: a world full of objects with fixed properties in space and time, that Bergson rightly rejects. He sees it as a distortion of reality under the guise of abstract logic. His anti-intellectualism has its roots here. Although correct in his critique, Bergson’s absolutist opposition to conceptualization is too extreme. Conceptualizations can elucidate and clarify our lived-experience. e problem occurs when concepts attempt to replace experiential reality. Conceptualizations are secondary, abstractions, having no reality apart from the experience they emerge from and to which they refer. In a similar vein, William James (1842-1910) published a seminal article entitled “Does Consciousness Exist?”25 Here James delivered a decisive blow to both the mechanistic model of nature and Cartesian dualism. As the title indicates, James begins by posing the question: “Does Consciousness Exist?” and concludes in the negative. He denies that the word ‘consciousness’ stands for an entity, but suggests that it stands for a function: that of knowing. As such, it is simply functional, involving a particular kind of relatedness within the flow of experience. Taken in 24 English translation: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.  L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). 25 William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1, no. 18 (September, 1904): 1-14.

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one context of relatedness, experience plays the role of the knower or the subject; while simultaneously, the same totality of experience viewed in another context plays the part of the object, the known. It all boils down to particular contextual relatedness within the same holistic experience. Like Bergson, James’ holism debunks the basis of Descartes’ philosophy, built as it is on the dualism of independent ‘thinking subjects’ separated from ‘extended bodies’. us, the search for some illusive material objective entity at the basis of experience is futile. Reality is immediately given. It is the experiential process. Everything else, like subject and object, is secondary. Experience is a collective term for the organic wholeness of mind, matter and their multiplicity of dynamic interrelatedness. It is a flowing stream, an organic whole, not a duality. Consciousness does not exist as a separate entity. It is only invoked to explain a function, a specific quality of relations within experience from which both thoughts and matter are sourced.26 We now turn briefly to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead brings to his work the combination of a brilliant mathematical, scientific mind along with some superb philosophic acumen. Acknowledging the epoch-shaping achievements of his predecessors, Bergson and James, Whitehead forges his own unique path as a process philosopher. While criticising the abstract nature of much of modern philosophy Whitehead, unlike Bergson and James, is not adverse to the process of conceptualisation per se. Conceptualisation is necessary for the clear expression, communication and wide dissemination of the more diffuse lived-experience. While prone to abstraction,27 the intellect need not necessarily fall into this trap. He joins both Bergson and James in their critique of the objectivist, material mechanism of Newtonian physics and the subjectivity of the Cartesian cogito and concurs with their notion of an organic, process notion of experience. According to him, no matter how abstract the science or how materialistic its language, its presuppositions are always rooted in an organic theory of reality. As far as physics goes, the basic substances are what Whitehead calls “actual entities” i.e.,

26 James J. Kelly, “Remembrance and Imagination,” Louvain Studies 42 (2019): 397-415, at 406-407. 27 Whitehead calls this “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” i.e., the error of mistaking our abstractions for concrete realities. Whitehead, Science in the Modern World, 68.

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complex, interdependent occasions of experience.28 ese are wholly concerned with interacting or relating to each other and have no reality outside this function. Any search for some illusory substrata or objective reality behind the functioning particles is futile. Like Bergson and James, Whitehead criticises the basic inadequacies of the theoretical scheme developed by seventeenth-century science to which philosophy has also succumbed. As he writes: e seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians. e great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions […] e enormous success of the scientific abstraction […] has foisted on to philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact. ereby modern philosophy has been ruined […].29

Philosophy needs to be rehabilitated and Whitehead proceeds to do this in his magnum opus: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.30 We cannot here detail Whitehead’s philosophy nor his notion of the relatedness of God and World. Suffice it to say that, as he writes: “e theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.”31 4. An Age of Complexity 1. Towards a Different Paradigm Developments in General Systems eory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 19011972), Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964), and Systems Philosophy (Ervin Laszlo, b. 1932) emerged in the wake of organic, process philosophy. General Systems eory32 views everything in life as systemic, evolving through interconnected, mutually related recursive interactions of stability and change within a larger holon. A system’s dynamic

28 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929, 1967), 28. 29 Whitehead, Science in the Modern World, 73. 30 Cf. n. 28 above. 31 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 529-530. 32 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968, 1969). Cf. also Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (London: Collins, 1983), 285-332.

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stability cannot be reduced to a conglomerate of isolated constituents. Unlike closed systems (machines) which follow linear chains of cause and effect, organisms are open systems evolving through complex flows of feedback loops. e open systems approach views living organisms as dynamic processes of organised complexity. is raises the notion of dynamic stability (homeostasis).33 ese notions were further developed by Gregory Bateson (1904-1980).34 For Bateson, the basic unit of evolutionary survival is not the individual or sub-species but “a flexible organism-in-itsenvironment.”35 Individuals, societies, and nature are self-correcting organisational systems inextricably intertwined with mind. However, the “individual mind is only a sub-system” of a larger Mind which Bateson sees as comparable with God and as “immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”36 As a participant in this larger cosmic Mind, physical death for the individual nexus of the ‘I’, according to Bateson, does not mean the complete end, as our more enduring contributions live on. We now turn to the notion of ‘selforganisation’ initially in the works of Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) and thereaer Erich Jantsch (1929-1980). 2. Self-Organization An important impetus was injected into this debate by the chemist Ilya Prigogine,37 his team and especially by the synthesising work of his colleague, Erich Jantsch. Prigogine was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1977 for his work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, specifically on dissipative structures which arise from feedback processes in fluctuating open systems. Prigogine’s work challenges the Newtonian model by demonstrating that its universal laws apply to closed systems and linear relationships on which it is predominantly focused. Open 33 A term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon (1871-1945), though the concept originated with Claude Bernard (1813-1878). 34 We can only briefly touch on some of Bateson’s interesting thought here. 35 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, Random House, 1972, 1985), 451. Cf. especially Part V, “Form, Substance, and Difference,” 448-466. Cf. also Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979). 36 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 461. 37 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). Our brief presentation has been facilitated also by Alvin Toffler’s excellent Foreword, xi-xxvi.

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systems, however, exist in dynamic stability (homeostasis). ey evolve and change through constant interactions (feedback loops) with their environment. Open systems tend towards dynamic stability by means of negative feedback loops. Positive feedback, however, can occasion internal disruption. At times even a single fluctuation may add critical momentum to the pre-existing organization, rendering it unstable and so generating unpredictability. At this ‘singular moment’ or ‘bifurcation point’ a tipping point is reached and unpredictable change occurs spontaneously. e system may disintegrate into disorder and chaos or leap to a new, higher, more differentiated level of order or ‘dissipative structure’.38 Indeed, the stability and order of living systems is always dynamic and can emerge spontaneously out of disorder and chaos through a process of ‘self-organization’. is is akin to having “a will of its own”39 with all the uncertainty and unpredictability that entails. It also reveals an internal learning process and creativity. One might say that there is an innate directional autonomy in self-organizing systems. With Prigogine the focus is on the organism-in-its-environment (disequilibrium in process): each mutually affecting the other through continual interaction. But there is more, namely: “the creative development of new structures and functions without any environmental pressure.”40 Here the potential for novelty, indeed self-transcendence is present within living organisms themselves. All this differs from classical Darwinism where organisms adapt in relation to their environments. To explore further this central concept of spontaneous ‘self-organization’ we now turn to Erich Jantsch who proposes ‘self-organization’ as the new paradigm in evolutionary theory. Jantsch dedicated his book The Self-Organizing Universe41 to Prigogine as the catalyst for his work. He proposes Prigogine’s principle of ‘selforganization’ as a new paradigm which sheds unexpected light on the allembracing phenomena of evolution. On this basis he presents a scientific 38 Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos, Foreword, xv. According to Prigogine: “At all levels […] non-equilibrium is the source of order. Non-equilibrium brings ‘order out of chaos’.” 286-287. 39 Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (London: Heinemann, 1987), 87. Davies sums up the matter succinctly: “spontaneous self-organization tends to occur in far-from-equilibrium open non-linear systems with a high degree of feedback.” Ibid., 142. 40 Capra, The Turning Point, 296. 41 Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford and New York: Pergamon, 1980).

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foundation for a new Weltanschauung focusing on process, change, and evolution as a comprehensive framework for a deeper understanding of many modern developments. Jantsch views “evolution as a complex, but holistic dynamic phenomenon of a universal unfolding of order”42 from the simplest to the more complex organisational levels of consciousness. Indeed, the evolution of mind/consciousness is present on all levels as a self-organizing, selfevolving, and self-transcending dynamic. is offers the prospect of a more integrated, holistic view of life as a process of self-realisation. Regarding an ultimate aim or goal: Jantsch rules out the possibility of any transcendent outside entity or personal deity. Any Aristotelian ‘unmoved mover’ is rejected in favour of his self-organizational principle which allows new patterns of order to evolve out of chaos. For Jantsch, divinity may be seen as ‘pure potential’, an unfolded ‘totality of undifferentiated qualities’ in becoming, embedded within “the total evolutionary dynamics of a multilevel reality.”43 God is not viewed as the creator, but rather “the mind of the universe”44 in whose evolution each of us share as “in the divine principle, in meaning.”45 Instead of speaking of God, Jantsch suggests that we substitute meaning. Meaning becomes the impulse for self-transcendence, the reaching beyond not only our human limitations but all limited horizons.46 So, for Jantsch meaning emerges from within our sense of connectedness and participation in the unfolding dynamic of the larger whole. is gives meaning to even the simplest of lives. e connectedness of each individual’s life-processes with the dynamics of the all-embracing evolution of the universe may be regarded as a real movement of selftranscendence. It is a movement towards the not yet unfolded and unbounded whole, each action adding to or detracting from the continually evolving whole. Our inter-actions not only shape the universal now, but also the hereaer and self-reflexively ourselves as participators in the process. Jantsch suggests that meaning simply emerges when we embrace our role within this universal creative process. Feeling part of a universal, enduring, evolving dynamic offers hope to one and all. As Jantsch writes: “is connectedness of our own life processes with the dynamics

42 Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, 307. In what follows I rely especially on Jantsch’s Epilogue, ibid., 307-311. 43 Ibid., 308. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 309.

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of an all-embracing universe has so far been accessible only to mystic experience. In the synthesis, it becomes part of science which in this way comes closer to life.”47 And he continues further on: “e fascination held by the evolution of mankind pales in comparison with the fascination held by a universal evolution whose integral aspect we are.”48 Jantsch’s synthesis proffers meaning in the here and now while being open-ended, arising as it does from our sense of connectedness to and active participation in the creative process of an unfolding future. Could not such evolution of mind and meaning afford some promise in a secular world craving for connectedness and meaning? Confronted with existential choices: is choosing a more creative, participative life in a worldwith-others not in itself more meaningful, more life-enhancing? Future uncertainty and unpredictability are not abolished, but unveil a welcome horizon of possibilities. We now proceed to a brief discussion of some similar issues in the thought of the Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Teilhard’s classic book is The Phenomenon of Man.49 Two central themes run throughout the work: the need for an evolutionary rather than a static viewpoint and the essential interconnectedness and interdependence of everything in the cosmos. He himself summarizes his position under three inter-related headings. His first central principle is “e Cosmic Law of Complexity-Consciousness.”50 Teilhard sees evolution as involving a process of organic involution, i.e., the unfolding of matter already enfolded within itself “(from the extremely simple to the extremely complex) […] bound up with a correlative increase in interiorisation […] in the psyche or consciousness.”51 On the individual level the breakthrough to “e Individual reshold of Reflection,”52 constitutes a second phase. e higher evolved mind of self-consciousness in humans confers an undisputable functional superiority to them. Furthermore, human development furnishes a localised example of a wider, more universal trend in the growth of consciousness present throughout 47

Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, 309-310. Ibid., 310. 49 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (1959) (London: Collins, 2008). Completed in Peking, June 1938 – June 1940. Typed in 1947 but, because of prohibition by church authorities, only published aer Teilhard’s death in 1955. 50 Ibid., 300. Teilhard’s Postscript, 300-310, inserted some years later, offers a good summary. 51 Ibid., 301. 52 Ibid., 302. 48

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nature. is growth is the specific effect of organised complexity.53 Complexification includes the genesis of increasingly elaborate organisation during cosmogenesis from subatomic units to our more civilised society. On this level it has a twofold complementary outcome. While humans become more individuated, their interdependence and increased cooperation also grows. From this threshold of reflective consciousness, humans develop into a new form of biological existence. is third stage entails “e Ascent towards a Collective reshold of Reflection.”54 As humanity becomes more self-reflective, the initial slow evolutionary climb speeds up attaining the global evolution of the entire group. With this socialization, human interactions grow in complexity. Better organized social networks contribute further to an overall increase in consciousness. Here the evolving organised complexity-consciousness culminates in personalised community relationships.55 ese leaps in the refinement of consciousness propel us towards new forms of existence where all human potentiality will eventually be realised and humans discover that they are “nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.”56 Here humanity reaches its highest stage of complexification-consciousness, attaining an intense unification and a final hyper-personal state of cosmic consciousness characterised by a sense of oneness and envelopment within the All.57 is is Teilhard’s Omega Point.58 Evidence of this sense may be found in art, poetry, and mysticism. For Teilhard then, while evolution may not entail a precisely detailed pre-existing plan, “the impetus which guides and sustains its advance […] implies essentially the consciousness of being in actual relationship with a spiritual and transcendent pole of universal convergence.”59 is suggests an open, future-oriented process or teleology. In conclusion, Teilhard briefly touches on the question of pantheism. He suggests that those who question the orthodoxy of his work fail to understand that his notion of the ‘converging universe’, which is essential 53

is is exactly what we saw earlier regarding open systems. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 304. 55 As Teilhard writes: “e only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalising’ universe.” Ibid., 290. 56 Ibid., 221. 57 Ibid., Chapter 2, “Beyond the Collective: e Hyper-Personal,” 254-255. ough dismissed by scientists at the time, Teilhard’s notions of radial energy and noosphere demand further exploration. 58 Ibid. For a fuller exposition cf. 257-264; 268-272. Alpha, the initial state of elementary particles and energy is the other pole to Point Omega. 59 Ibid., 298. 54

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to fulfil a collective unification and stabilising function within the process, “must be conceived as pre-existing and transcendent.”60 Here Teilhard contends: “the reflective centres of the world are effectively ‘one with God’, this state is obtained not by identification (God becoming all) but by the differentiating and communicating action of love (God all in everyone). And that is essentially orthodox and Christian.”61 5. A Secular Age: God and World: Conclusion Cosmology, metaphysics, epistemology, and humanity’s image of God are always intertwined. As we saw, in the Judeo-Christian tradition God enters the world from ‘outside’, demonstrating a clear division between the two. is chasm was perpetuated in the West by Platonism and NeoPlatonism. e teachings of the Early Church Fathers, however, offered a unique opportunity to bridge this gap and develop a metaphysics based on immanence, mutuality and wholeness, rather than a duality. Prescinding from all doctrinal positions, the intuition and instinct behind their doctrinal statements opened up fruitful avenues for further metaphysical exploration. Regretfully, these possibilities were not pursued and an opportunity to explore holistically the relationship between God and world from within the perspective of our this-worldly experience was forfeited. Subsequently, institutional Church teaching along with traditional Christian theology continued to focus on the duality between an infinite, eternally static God and a finite, changing world. is envisioned the human soul as created directly by God in the divine image and likeness, as distinct from the rest of creation which was merely God’s handiwork. e soul was not of this world, nor at home in it, but destined to return to God. With the ‘soul’ removed from the natural world, nature was le inanimate. Robbed of her organic and spiritual attributes nature was ripe for human domination and exploitation.62 Renaissance science, Newtonian physics along with Descartes’ disastrous epistemological dualism perpetuated this mechanistic picture of nature as inanimate and mindless. Humanity was le in a thoroughly schizoid state. Gregory Bateson summarises the situation:

60

Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 310. Ibid. 62 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (New York: Dell, A Delta Book, 1968), 71. 61

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If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. e environment will seem to be yours to exploit.63

Aer a number of detours, we are once again recovering an organicsystemic, holistic, indeed spiritual perspective on life. As we saw with Whitehead, no matter how physical or mechanistic the science or abstract the philosophy, their presuppositions are always based on some notion of process, organism or wholeness. So, unless and until we relinquish all forms of atomism and dualism and embrace a systemic, ecological, cosmic holism, both the planet’s and humanity’s future survival face imminent danger. As part of our journey we have focused on some contemporary developments in science, philosophy, and systems theory which could form part of a multidisciplinary approach to re-imagining a different theological perspective for articulating transcendence from within an immanent framework of process. Becoming, not being, is the more direct constituent of existence and is foundational in contemporary cosmology.64 e choices we make here influence and frame our subsequent metaphysics and consequently our symbolization of God, humanity, world, and their cosmic correlations. Re-imagining God in terms of the cosmology, metaphysics, and language of this-world means our interpretations be expressed in terms of immanent-process. So, any emerging symbolizations would express the interrelatedness, inseparability, and mutuality of the temporality, change, and multiplicity of this cosmogenic existence with the creativity of the trans-durationality, permanency, and unity of trans-immanence. In the wholeness of this experiential process and its engendering symbolic expressions one may catch a glimpse of the poets’ or mystics’ consciousness of the oneness, harmony, and beauty of all. Here, where speculation gives way to the illumination of the mystics’ originating experiences and their evocative symbolisations, we recall the words of T.S. Eliot: Except for the point, the still point, ere would be no dance, and there is only the dance.65

63 64 65

Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 462. All our theories presuppose, at least implicitly, some cosmology. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1944) (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 15-16.

29 “Which Wolf Will You Feed?” Good Narratives as the Basis for Dialogue and Building a Common Life Lieven Boeve

How does one work toward a new consensus which makes living together in difference possible? In a society marked by ever increasing conflict and lack of understanding, polarization, and exclusion, this question is even more pressing. Moreover, how can one work toward this supposed consensus within a context wherein there are hardly any traditions which bind people together, and many people who balk at being identified with a tradition altogether? In what follows, I shall first address this last group, oen referred to as the ‘nones’, and identify the challenge they present to theology in general and also to our particular question: how can we nurture the necessary basic beliefs, values, and attitudes needed to appreciate dialogue and difference in reaching a new consensus? is is a salient question as democratic society cannot survive without this. In order to cra an answer to this question, I suggest that we need to focus on convincing narratives that serve to bring people, regardless of their differences, to connection and solidarity. In order to do this, I engage concepts from the works of Rutger Bregman and Richard Rorty. In this essay, I will weave together insights gathered from my theological work, and from the discussions I am involved in as director-general of the Office for Catholic Education in Flanders. As a starting point for my contribution to this collection of essays commemorating Terrence Merrigan’s retirement, I focus on the ‘nones’, a topic of particular interest to our new emeritus professor. 1. The Challenge of the ‘Nones’ e term ‘nones’ appears in sociological literature on religion and secularization and refers, primarily, to the group of people who do not identify themselves with a particular religious tradition. Sometimes – though not always – this lack of identification is accompanied by an assertion

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that they also do not believe in (a) God. e ‘nones’ is a group which has grown considerably over the years. Linda Woodhead, for example, notes that in Britain a tipping point was reached in 2013 when 50.6% of the population identified themselves as ‘nones’ rather than Christian.1 Moreover, the fact that there are more ‘nones’ among the younger population than among the older population indicates the impressive growth margin for this category. Woodhead further notes that the number of people indicating belonging to a non-Christian religion does not compensate the loss in the share of Christians. Furthermore, her research shows that the growth of the ‘nones’ cannot be attributed to adults who abandon their faith so much as to children simply not following in the footsteps and traditions of their parents and families. Faith traditions are simply no longer passed down from generation to generation. To put it another way, detraditionalization and individualization go hand in hand.2 So who are the ‘nones’ and what are the implications of them forming a new cultural majority? Woodhead is adamant in noting that nones are not straightforwardly secular. Certainly, nones reject religious labels – but they reject secular ones as well. If we take “secular” in a strong sense to mean hostile to public religion (e.g. faith schools) and religious beliefs, surprisingly few nones are sympathetic.3

e Belgian results of the latest European Values Study also indicate that the number of people identifying themselves as ‘atheist’ has shown little growth while those not identifying with a particular tradition has grown exponentially. In 2009, nearly a third of the Belgian population (32.6%) indicated belonging to a group identified as ‘others who do not belong to a particular religious tradition’ – a description which corresponds to that of the ‘nones’.4 While it is possible that more than a few atheists belong to this group, the fact that they did not indicate they belong to the officially recognized atheist movement suggests that their atheism is more pragmatic than a matter of principle. is would serve as an analog to Woodhead’s research which shows that the ‘nones’ are against all forms 1

Linda Woodhead, “e Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain: e Emergence of a New Cultural Majority,” Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016): 245-261. 2 For these terms, see Lieven Boeve, Theology on the Crossroads of University, Church and Society: Dialogue, Difference and Catholic Identity (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 43-45. 3 Woodhead, “e Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain,” 249-250. 4 Cf. Karel Dobbelaere, Jaak Billiet, and Liliane Voyé, “Religie en kerkbetrokkenheid: Naar een sociaal gemarginaliseerde kerk?,” in Nieuwe tijden, nieuwe mensen: Belgen over arbeid, gezin, ethiek, religie en politiek, ed. Koen Abts, Karel Dobbelaere, and Liliane Voyé (Tielt: Lannoo, 2011), 143-172, at 145.

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of identifying with a specific tradition – be it religious, or secular. Furthermore, and in line with Woodhead, the fact that 10 years have elapsed since this study would imply that also in Belgium the ‘nones’ have grown quite rapidly since then. To summarize, the ‘nones’ are a group of individuals who do not identify with any religious (or secular) tradition. When asked about their convictions, these individuals consciously reject belonging to an established tradition, thus choosing to belong to ‘nothing’. As a result thereof, they conveniently are assigned by sociologists to a new, neat category: the ‘nones’. Within this group one can identify two subgroups. e first consists of people who also do not believe in (a) God. e second, on the contrary, corresponds to individuals who possess a religious sensitivity and sometimes even go so far as to say that they believe in ‘something more’ – without understanding this ‘more’ with a recourse to a classic religious tradition. Whoever the ‘nones’ may be, this group – which thus may be less coherent and like-minded than its designation suggests – offers an interesting phenomenon for theological reflection. In that regard, it is especially interesting to consider the question whether the group of ‘nones’ is analyzed as being the byproduct of the progress of secularization itself (1), or whether it points to a new kind of positioning oneself in a context of religious plurality (2). When it comes to identifying the best theological response to this phenomenon, this distinction makes a world of difference. (1) Are the ‘nones’ the end-result of Modernity’s effect upon religion, the endpoint to which all religion is directed through secularization? Or (2) are the ‘nones’ a new, identifiable collection of various positions in our pluralistic context, which might challenge other positions to mutual understanding through dialogue? If we follow the first line of analysis the ‘nones’ become the ‘new normal’, a kind of soft-secular social consensus constituting the horizon in which all construction of meaning and identity take shape. Within this line of analysis, religion and (for the West) Christianity have evolved to a marginal phenomenon, a relic from the past. In line with the way the challenge of Modernity has been approached by theology since at least the 1950’s, theological responses move in between two extremes: either fully adapting to this evolution as the future of Christianity, or rejecting it while firmly reaffirming the supposedly unchanging truth of Christianity. eologians then have two options. Either they proceed in continuity with the presumed so-secularist claims of the ‘nones’, and let go of overly ‘outdated’ Christian elements, developing a more generalized religious sensitivity. Or they do the opposite, and react to the ‘nones’ by

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accentuating Christianity’s discontinuity with the contemporary context: upholding its countercultural truth claims while classifying the ‘nones’ as relativists and nihilists.5 Although in our pragmatic day-to-day dealings, this first so-secularist analysis of the ‘nones’ seems to be mainstream, both theological answers are unsatisfactory. Moreover, this so-secularist portrayal of the ‘nones’ might be usurped all too easily by more secularist tendencies, not to mention the ideologies of the market and consumerism. e second line of analysis to the ‘nones’, considering this group as a kind of new positioning within the context of religious plurality, allows for a different evaluation and theological approach. In this line of analysis, the fact that traditions are no longer simply passed on (detraditionalization), and thus that identity construction requires an effort on the part of individuals and communities (individualization), is combined with the pluralization of the context (and thus of the sources available to individual and social identity construction). With regard to theology, this second line of analysis to the ‘nones’ urges us to identify the challenges presented by the ‘nones’ to the Christian faith in the same way as other philosophical and religious positions do.6 In the dialogue with other positions, we learn much about the other but even more so about ourselves. If we consider the ‘nones’ as a variegated collection of positionings in a highly plural context, the question arises as to how the mutual dialogue between ‘nones’ and Christians challenges everyone to selfclarification, mutual learning, and unity through difference. Indeed, if the dialogical process is mutual, we are able to not only learn about our differences, but also to discover, within the process of dialogue, new common ground allowing us to live together while respecting our differences. In the remainder of my contribution, I will focus on this last point: how are we to come to a new social consensus when traditions no longer hold, identities are to be constructed, and the context is marked by difference and conflict?

5 For these options, see Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval (New York and London: Continuum, 2007), chapter 2. 6 Cf. ibid., chapter 7. is theological approach has led me to develop a theology of interruption, combining both continuity and discontinuity in theology’s approach to the contemporary context.

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2. The Issue of Social Consensus e way in which the mutual dialogue with the other urges both respect for the other and self-clarification in the individual and social construction of identity has been the basis for the project of the “Catholic dialogue school,” developed in the Flemish Catholic education network. Dialogue not only leads one gaining more knowledge about and appreciation for the other; rather, first and foremost, it enables one to discover and then articulate one’s own horizon of meaning and significance.7 Nevertheless, we are le with a question concerning those who are either unwilling or unable to identify with a particular tradition or community. How should we engage such individuals in dialogue, and how would this dialogue enable both parties’ access to more layers of identity and meaning? Stronger still, in such a case how are both parties enabled to come to a common social consensus through their differences? It is this last element which has occupied much of my attention lately. How can we, in fact, in the midst of the process of dialogue, arrive at a common set of values which enable our society to thrive? e vision statement of the Catholic dialogue school itself points to the importance of this element: [e Catholic dialogue school] enables students to learn how to engage with similarities and differences, and what unites and divides, in a critical-creative manner. rough this, students are enabled and equipped to construct an open, meaningful, and sustainable society which includes everyone.8

In considering this issue, I have been intrigued by J.-B. Metz’s omentioned consideration of the Böckenförde paradox.9 According to the German philosopher of law Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, modern democracy is sustained by assumptions and values which are neither created nor guaranteed by it.10 By making essentially everything subject to the will of the majority, a democratic society can even end up willing

7

Cf. Lieven Boeve, “Catholic Dialogue Schools under Construction: From eory to Practice,” in The Catholic School and the Intercultural and Interreligious Challenges: CEEC Acts of the International Symposium, Brussels, March 14-15, 2019, 142-155. 8 Cf. http://pro.katholiekeonderwijs.vlaanderen/katholieke-dialoogschool/ visietekst. 9 Cf. Johann-Baptist Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie (19671997) (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1997), 180-181, 188. 10 Cf. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), 60.

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its own self-destruction – which is exactly what happened in Germany during the 1930s. Of itself, democracy does not simply and naturally lead to more democracy. Instead, in order to sustain its basic values and assumptions, democracy makes an appeal to resources available in the fundamental beliefs and values of the individuals and social groups participating in it. For Metz, the latter opens a space where religious traditions, particularly their dangerous memories and histories of suffering, could be retrieved as necessary sources of meaning for people living in post-traditional democratic societies. How, then, do we arrive at a social consensus, at common beliefs, values, and attitudes which enable us to live together, despite our mutual differences? Or must we simply consign ourselves to the breakdown of society through continued polarization and radicalization? Needless to say, it seems that we are headed in that direction. What is our common narrative against fake news, incendiary language and rhetoric on social media, and the disappearance of true conversation, nuance, and understanding? Is that narrative shared by enough people so that it can provide the basic beliefs and attitudes needed to ensure democracy’s survival? Until recently our society had traditions which were strong and widespread enough to contribute to a true social consensus. Due to the processes of detraditionalization and pluralization – also within these traditions themselves – this no longer seems to be the case. e only way to offer a solution to this lack of established consensus, is if the various traditions and positions in our society enter into dialogue and, thereby, reach a kind of new consensus, not despite their differences, but through engaging these differences productively. In line with this position, I am convinced that the Catholic dialogue school can be of use to our society in its search for a new consensus. Our goal is to introduce everyone, regardless of their personal convictions, to the traditions and narratives – old and new – which are present in our society. rough dialogue we teach our students to think about, deepen, question, and enrich their own identities, and then be able to communicate this to others. ereby, we enable the values and attitudes necessary to uphold our democratic society to become anchored in the individual’s unique sources of meaning, whatever they are.11

But how are we to approach dialogue with the ‘nones’, a culturally determined group which primarily distinguishes itself by not wanting to belong anywhere? How do we appeal to those not wanting to be a part 11 Lieven Boeve, Het evangelie volgens Lieven Boeve: Mijn ambitie voor onderwijs (Louvain: Lannoo Campus, 2019), 55.

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of anything, that they actually are positioned in our society and that, through dialogue, they are called upon to think further about that position? How can we develop a narrative that includes them in coming to a new social consensus which enables a common life with all of its differences and points of convergence? In coming to formulate an answer to my question, I make recourse to a recent book by Rutger Bregman, which makes a remarkable appeal to rethink our quasi-self-evident anthropological assumptions. All too oen we assume that, le to themselves, human beings would leave civilization behind – that they are, in other words, easily capable of relapsing into the state of beasts. Bregman’s book is a long argument to show the error of this assumption. At the end of the day, most people are good. We just have to remind them of this fact. 3. Most People Are Good Bregman’s basic hypothesis has three components. First and most importantly, he wants to show that, when it comes down to it, most people choose for the good. Perhaps they are not good by nature but when placed in emergency situations, they prefer the good. But he maintains secondly that we are constantly barraged with the opposite message. Everyone, he maintains, wants to make us believe that the only thing we really care about is our self, and that our society is merely a thin veneer covering over this basic fact. Finally, Bregman argues that in the long run we actually start believing that and act accordingly – or at least expect that others will do so. Similar to the placebo effect, he calls this the nocebo effect: the more we maintain that human beings are essentially self-centered, the more will we be inclined to act that way (‘what we believe, is what we become’).12 We oen think erroneously that a negative view of human nature is likely to be correct, but Bregman argues that it is precisely the other way around. According to him, there are many indications which serve to confirm this: it is, in short, not at all naïve to maintain that most people are good. ose in power in the world, however, tend to posit this negative image because it serves to solidify their positions. Aer all, it is best to keep selfish animals on a leash. Bregman’s considerations about the so-called ‘real-story’ of the Lord of the Flies are quite illustrative here. It is not widely known that William 12 Rutger Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen: Een nieuwe geschiedenis van de mens (Amsterdam: De Correspondent, 2019), 30-31.

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Golding’s story about a group of boys who end up stranded on an island and eventually run off the rails actually happened – though with a completely different, strikingly positive ending. To be true, Golding’s novel is much better known, speaks better to our imaginations, went through many editions, and gave its author the Nobel Prize for Literature. Destruction sells better. Nevertheless, reality teaches us something different from fiction. Here is what really happened: In 1965, six boys from Tonga were stranded on the Pacific island of Ata aer their fishing boat sank. Aer being stranded there for a year, they were saved by an Australian sailor and brought back to their homeland. During their time on the island, they ensured their survival by working well together, maintaining a vegetable garden, collecting rainwater, and so forth. ey even had devised a smart way to handle conflicts: whoever started an argument was sent away, and, aer cooling off for a couple of hours, was brought back into the community so that the disagreement could be talked through. Bregman concludes, the real Lord of the Flies is a story of friendship and fidelity, a story that demonstrates how much we are capable of if we build each other up. Of course, it is only a story. Yet, if we insist that millions of teenagers read Lord of the Flies we should also tell them about the time when a few kids really were washed up on an island.13

Moreover, a look across the scientific disciplines confirms the basic hypothesis that most people are good. ese insights are many and diverse: the domestication of wild animals which led to animals becoming more friendly toward human beings; soldiers who generally do not shoot the enemy when they encounter them ‘in real life’ (or at least do not aim to kill them); the real circumstances surrounding the decline of Easter Island which came primarily from outside sources; the real story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment and behind Stanley Milgram’s experiment with the electric shock machine (which leads to completely different conclusions than the common assumption that people will do all sorts of terrible things to each other when the opportunity presents itself); the nuanced reversal of the ‘bystander perspective’ (bystanders actually want to help!); how empathy actually blinds people and brings them, under the pretext of the good, actually to end up doing evil (empathy imprisons us within our relationships and ensures – opposite from sympathy – that we no longer take the position of the other). Again and again Bregman shows that, in reality, people are inclined to do good. e problem is that we are not inclined to believe this. Ultimately, we end up 13

Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen, 62.

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supposing the opposite to be true and sensation-addicted journalists and scientists use this to their advantage. Power-addicted leaders do this as well, for power corrupts – even leaders who start out with the best of intentions.14 Bregman places before us a choice between following omas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If we follow Hobbes, human society resembles a dog-eat-dog world with civilization depicted as the corrective to this bestial state. Conversely, if we follow Rousseau, civilization is depicted as that which corrupts human beings who are good by nature. Bregman ultimately aligns himself with Rousseau and proceeds to lay out the whole history of humankind from that perspective. e prehistoric hunter-gatherers worked together in groups and also were familiar with relatively egalitarian partnerships characterized by achievement based inequality. Power and inequality only came to become more prominent with the establishment of the first settlements and the concept of private ownership. Bregman also notes that this was the mistake of the Enlightenment insofar as it too easily claimed that human beings were selfish and that only reason could serve as a remedy to this. Everything in our modern economy is built up around the concept of being rationally committed to one’s own self-interest. Modern democracy itself is also based on this concept with its systems of checks and balances which serve to preserve various self-interests. Bregman should not be misunderstood: he is not claiming that the Enlightenment and Modernity are bad; on the contrary, they are success-stories. However, success-stories with serious shadow sides (and many victims) which serve as a lesson and a warning: whoever founds his or her narrative on egoism ultimately comes to pay a heavy price. For Bregman, this serves as a good illustration of the nocebo-principle: When modern economists assumed that we are, at our deepest, selfish, they began to advocate for policies which brought this selfishness to the forefront. When politicians became convinced that politics was merely a cynical game, politics became in fact, a cynical game.15

However, hate is not the only thing that is contagious: so is trust. Whoever sees the best in a person, also brings forward what is best in him or her. In this case as well, Bregman highlights several examples: managers who trust their employees, teachers who enable students to take ownership of their learning process, and politicians who treat their constituents as creative and engaged citizens. He also points to prisons which are not 14 15

Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen, 280-281. Ibid., 303.

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based on repression and where prisoners and staff together build a small community. He tells a story about how sailing together at sea, is the best remedy against racism. In the same vein, he narrates the history of reconciliation in South Africa and especially the role of Nelson Mandela. He concludes that the human being in essence is a cooperative being, a homo cooperans. People are challenged to live into this reality precisely when things appear to be going in the opposite direction and humans are seen as being fundamentally selfish. Ultimately, people who encounter each other, come to know each other, enter into dialogue, come to trust each other, and serve to change the course of history. Nevertheless, also the opposite is true: people who do not encounter each other, live isolated from each other and are separated by walls, much more easily develop caricatures and mechanisms of exclusion. Having little or no contact with foreigners, then, runs a great risk of developing feelings of xenophobia. In the final analysis, both trust and xenophobia can be learned and conditioned. is ultimately brings Bregman to articulating ten precepts: (1) when in doubt, assume the good (and avoid the pitfall of thinking negatively about what is going on); (2) think in terms of win-win scenarios (because in the best deals, everyone wins); (3) make the world a better place by asking questions (and do not assume the answer you already think is correct); (4) temper your empathy and train your compassion (because empathy is exhausting while compassion enables you to act); (5) try to understand the other, even if he or she does the wrong things; (6) love your neighbor in the same way as others do (because also far-off foreigners love their families); (7) avoid the news (because that only serves to reinforce the misguided view of human nature); (8) extend an olive branch to your greatest enemy; (9) come out into the open and do not be ashamed of the good (because also the good can be contagious); and (10) be realistic (and assume that most people are pursuing the right thing). 4. Telling Stories Which Highlight the Good Bregman writes: Modern psychology has discovered that oentimes people make up selfish reasons for their actions when they have actually done something out of the kindness of their heart. […] is is quite logical: if you assume that most people are selfish, then the good is, by nature, suspect.16

16

Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen, 469.

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is fact itself serves to strengthen the nocebo-affect. We certainly should not always brandish the fact that we are good, but “whoever pretends to be an egoist serves to confirm people in their incorrect view of human nature.”17 Whereas the goodness of one, in fact serves to inspire goodness in others. We certainly do not have to agree with everything in Bregman’s book. What he says about religion, for example, is best to be le aside, and the broad brushstrokes with which he paints the history of humankind is probably lacking in nuance. Nevertheless, his general plea for a relational and positive view of human nature is quite salient, as is his cautioning against the nocebo-effect of those who assume that human society is fundamentally characterized by selfishness and cynicism. If we want a society where the good has a chance to thrive, then it behooves us to announce this message boldly: most people are good! His book serves to promulgate this message quite well. It is a well written and very readable witness to the fact that people, particularly in a crisis, seek goodness and cooperation and thrive best in situations of trust. is book does what it claims: it confirms us in this belief and also challenges the more pessimistic views of human nature prevalent in the news, media, and politics. And it seems to work. Bregman’s book has been printed in many editions already and it also has been translated into English.18 Do such books help to build up a context wherein a new consensus can begin to grow? Dialogue already assumes a positive view of human nature and assumes that difference and conflict do not necessarily have to lead to exclusion and polarization. Dialogue trustfully presupposes that by taking people seriously in their differences, by listening and speaking to them, we can be united with them – regardless of their differences. When we assume a positive and relational view of human nature, we propagate and ultimately come to trust in the good – or at least hope that it appeals to something within people which results in them doing good. Nevertheless, the priority of the good is not simply a given, nor is it universally accepted as something certain and irrefutable. Richard Rorty (1931-2007), for his part, notes that you should neither want nor expect this. More to the point, he notes that someone who too easily assumes that his or her beliefs are fixed and certain – in reason, reality, or 17

Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen, 469. Cf. Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 18

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Revelation – deceives him- or herself and misunderstands the contingency of what provides meaning and motivation.19 Someone who wishes to promote solidarity, cannot do so through calling upon grand theories about solidarity; to the contrary, it is by far better to tell stories about it, stories that unite the past, present, and future. For Rorty, the only thing that can unite us as human beings is our resistance to cruelty, for all of us know what pain and humiliation feel like. Solidarity includes being concerned with the other who is the victim of cruelty. It thus demands that we enter into the language (vocabulary) of the other so that we can understand why he or she feels mistreated or in pain. Solidarity, then, arises from a feeling of familiarity, from a local ‘we’, open to the possibility that one can enter into the vocabulary of the other. Various coincidental similarities will enable us to more easily admit certain (groups of) people into our ‘we’, others will make this more difficult.20 Which of these two are the case, ultimately depends on the (contingent) vocabulary that we use. For Rorty it comes down to attempting to expand our ‘we’ as much as possible, making room in our vocabularies, in our narratives. In the end, Rorty hopes to include every human being in that ‘we’, not because he claims to have access to the ultimate essence of human nature, but because for him solidarity has the power to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of “us.”21

Insofar as Rorty considers pain to be non-linguistic, he does not articulate something like the ‘language’ of the oppressed, suffering, or persecuted. When one is in pain, all speaking stops. e language of victims appears to be no longer adequate in coming to articulate words which capture their suffering. However, others are able to witness to their pain, 19

Cf. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 20 Cf. ibid., 189-191: Rorty is here referring to the differences between the way the Belgians and the Danes helped their Jewish neighbors during the Second World War. For the Danes, there were more historical-contingent reasons to consider the Jews as a neighbor whom you should help rather than ‘just a Jew’. For the Belgians, on the other hand, the fact that someone was Jewish was seen as having more weight than the fact that she was also a mother with children. Bregman also notes in his telling of positive stories the Danish resistance to Nazi-Germany’s persecution of Jews. 21 Ibid., 192.

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and Rorty understands this as the duty of novelists, journalists, poets, filmmakers, and documentary producers. ese media enable us to become conscious of the suffering of others. ey help us to feel what the suffering is the other is going through, and this causes our horizons to widen. is, ultimately, brings us to being in true solidarity with the victims of suffering. is solidarity is expressed in plain sight insofar as we then know how to do the right thing for those included in our ‘we’; a ‘we’, as we have noted, which is the contingent result of a series of historical circumstances. For Rorty, then, solidarity is not something we merely recognize. It is a process that we have to keep engaging in, always making more room for the marginalized other, the one whom we used to refer to as them rather than us. In short, insofar as Rorty does not posit solidarity as an unchangeable concept outside of the contingency of history, he advocates for the creation of a common language which can be shared by all people – their differences notwithstanding – as they resist all forms of cruelty and degradation. Society, then, is held together by a created shared vocabulary around particular common goals. ese goals are understood as the avoidance of all cruelty which leads to an increase in solidarity and eventually the expansion of our empathy so that our ‘we’ comes to become more inclusive. Liberal democracy is the best means we have of reaching this goal – though perhaps the future will bring us something better suited. Aer all, democracy provides us with a forum where various vocabularies encounter each other. It provides us with a space where we can dialogue about our common priorities, where we can debate the meaning of freedom and justice, and where we can search for a common vocabulary. Ultimately, even when we do not arrive at a common consensus on particular issues, democracy ensures that we can all agree on one ultimate criterion: avoid cruelty as much as possible. Similar to Bregman, we certainly do not have to follow Rorty in all of his ideas and conclusions. Nevertheless, we can certainly learn from him to appreciate the power of language and narrative in order to arrive at a more inclusive social consensus. Such a consensus can sustain a pluralistic society, particularly when neither theory nor tradition can effortlessly supply it. 5. Conclusion: “The Wolf You Choose to Feed” I have argued elsewhere that a positive and relational view of human nature lies at the heart of the Christian faith. We are, in short, already in

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dialogue with each other, and this is founded in the relationship which God seeks to have with us in Revelation.22 is makes the project of the “Catholic Dialogue School” a thoroughly Christian project inspired by the dialogical dynamic of God’s Revelation – even though it is addressed to everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike. In this contribution I took a step back and asked the following question: how can we, in our pluralized context marked by many people who do not subscribe to any classical (religious) tradition (the ‘nones’), appeal to this people to subscribe to the beliefs and practices necessary to sustain a dialogical society? More so, how can this be done at a time when we cannot simply rely on an already-agreed upon consensus and instead must together work toward a new one? e way forward, I suggest, is forged by telling the good stories, that is: the stories which highlight the good (Bregman), and through literature and documentaries rather than relying upon theories (Rorty). In the dialogue, which is enabled by these, the Christian voice can come in with something positive to offer. Christians, for their part, could tell stories about how following Jesus Christ can incline people towards the good, sometimes in ways that are quite challenging and interruptive. In this way, they can inspire perhaps both Christians and non-Christians alike to act in accordance with the good.23 I would like to conclude by way of a popular parable which, according to Bregman, is a perfect illustration of what is at stake in our work towards a new social consensus. Once there was a grandfather who said to his grandson: “there is a battle raging within me, a competition between two wolves. One of the wolves is evil, angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant and lazy. e other wolf is good – he is peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. ese wolves are also waging battle within you and within every other person.” e boy thought for a moment and then asked: “which wolf is going to win?” e old man smiled and said, “the wolf you choose to feed.”24

22 Cf. Lieven Boeve, Theology at the Crossroads of University, Church and Society: Dialogue, Difference and Catholic Identity (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), chapter 1. 23 Cf. Lieven Boeve, “Faith in Dialogue: e Christian Voice in the Catholic Dialogue School,” International Studies in Catholic Education 11 (2019): 37-50. 24 Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen, 31-32.

30 Secularization and Theological Ethics Joseph A. Selling

Professor Terrence Merrigan has dedicated a good deal of time and effort investigating the relationship between secularization and religion in general. Besides his own research and teaching, he also directs graduate level research in the field and is involved in a major project on Catholic identity that is also confronted with the challenges of secularization. I could not pretend even to come close to the scope of his accomplishments on the topic but will limit myself to the relationship between secularization and theological ethics. I should begin with the classic distinction between secularization and secularism. I understand secularism to be an ideology that claims or insists that there should be nothing in public life that resembles religion or some kind of appeal to universal or sacred things or ideas that transcend the power of the state. Secularization, on the other hand, I understand to be a process whereby some religious ideas and symbols are replaced, or perhaps are provided, with nonreligious alternatives. Since time immemorial, religion has functioned to ‘explain’ things for which most people had little understanding. Sickness, for instance, was once explained as a punishment for sin or the result of some evil curse. It was ‘god’1 alone who decides the time of death of every individual. e growth of science, and in these cases especially medicine, usually provides a more cogent explanation for sickness and death. at does and should not stop us from praying for the sick or the injured, but it does have an impact upon our understanding of what religion is about. Secularism can certainly make it difficult for religion or religious activities to thrive. Some suggest that this could make religion more purified and robust. But the absolute separation between the secular

1

I use small case letters for this designation because its object insinuates some kind of being or force that manipulates and determines the outcome of human activity. at, I believe, is not a proper characterization of what Catholic Christians worship as God.

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(state) and the religious (institutions) could also drive religion in the direction of becoming a cult and subsequently losing contact with the real world that is, at least from a Catholic point of view, inhabited by God’s children. Secularization, on the one hand, can be hostile toward religion, but it can also prove to be a valuable dialogue partner. If both secular and religious leaders maintain mutual respect, much can be learned from each other. Religion can instill positive attitudes and virtues that are not necessarily part of the secular world, things like humility, forgiveness, collaboration, and detachment. e secular can be the source for new ideas, scientific advances, pragmatic solutions, and broader social interaction. Although it has been common among some religious thinkers to suppose that worldly or secular things are hostile to the spiritual well-being of religious persons, the word itself does not carry that negative connotation. e ‘secular clergy’, for instance, refers to those ordained ministers who are not attached to religious orders. ey work ‘in the world’, mediating the natural and supernatural for the faithful through teaching, worship, prayer, and the sacraments. Up until the second half of the last century, the Catholic Church was still very much closed in on itself for several reasons, ranging from the belief that it was superior to other spiritual movements to protecting itself from discrimination.2 is made it very difficult to broach the subject of secularization from a theological perspective. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), its ‘doors and windows’ have been opened and there has been more engagement with the secular world. 1. Dealing with the ‘Secular’ World How is it that the Catholic Church accommodates both a ‘religious’3 clergy and a ‘secular’ clergy? is is a complex question that dates to the origins of the ancient church. In early times, the primary spiritual leader 2

One thinks of persecution in communist countries during the ‘cold war’. And it was only in the second half of the century that a Catholic could even think about running for president in the United States. 3 ‘Religious’ is a term used to describe persons who have committed to a ‘religious life’, usually including vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. ey live in community, sometimes separated from, sometimes on the periphery of ‘life in the world’. ey can be male or female, priests, brothers, sisters, and so forth. e contrast I am making in the text is between the secular or diocesan clergy and the male, ordained members of religious orders who live in some form of community together.

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was the bishop who ruled over a diocese that could be spread out over a large area. Individual communities had elders or ‘presbyters’ who functioned between the bishops and the deacons whose chief function was to carry out the tasks designated by the bishop, such as charitable works. e title presbyter is the etymological origin of the word priest who carried out sacramental rites in the name of the bishop. Toward the end of the third and beginning of the fourth century, some men began to live their lives as hermits, dedicated to spiritual exercises. ey were anchorites or ‘the ones who withdraw’ from the world. But there were also cenobites, monks who lived a ‘common life’ in community. Many of them believed to be following the examples chronicled in the Acts of the Apostles 4:32 where early Christians are said to have lived a ‘communal life’. ese communities lived according to a ‘rule’, the bestknown examples of which are the Rule of Augustine and the Rule of Benedict. Other bishops and priests took their cue from Jesus’ speech aer the resurrection according to Mt 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” e best example of heeding this message was St. Paul whose journeys around the Eastern Mediterranean are described in Acts as well as in many of the Epistles. Christianity is a ‘missionary religion’.4 It seeks to bring its message5 to those who have not yet heard it. A tremendous amount of good has been done through Catholic missionary activity, but we should not forget that much like the work of St. Paul, the encounter with other cultures also included a certain amount of ‘give and take’. For instance, reading the epistolary accounts of Paul’s work incorporates ideas, including lists of vices and virtues, that are not found (at least explicitly) in the Hebrew or 4 Many sources also list Islam and Buddhism as missionary religions, although I would suggest that the way in which each of these three religions go about functioning in a missionary way is different. I would also remind the reader that the way in which the Catholic Church carried out missionary activity over the ages had been considerably divergent. I expect the same of the other two religions, although I have not done the research to substantiate that opinion. 5 One could justifiably ask about the nature of the message that has been delivered in the name of Christianity. One would like to say it is the message of the Gospel, the announcement of the ‘Kingdom of God’. Seen from the perspective of theological ethics, however, it is difficult to dispute that ‘missionary activity’ also conveyed a significant amount of European cultural values.

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later scriptures.6 Faith, hope, and charity (1 Cor 13:13), which later came to be known as the ‘theological virtues’ do not originate in the Gospels, but are later developed by Paul in his efforts to evangelize the people he encountered. en, a number of social questions, such as the issue of slavery, that was considered ‘normal’ in the Hebrew scriptures and never questioned in the gospels, are treated at least tangentially by Paul as well (Eph 6:5-9). Apparently, Paul took this attitude a step further and pressured the early church to come to terms with its roots in Palestinian Judaism.7 Aer the encounter with the so-called ‘Judaizers’ who were insisting that to become a follower of Jesus one first had to become a Jew and be circumcised, Paul urged the brethren to take a stand on the explicit stipulation that they were attempting to impose upon those followers. e results of their deliberations were the following. en it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. ey sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brethren, with the following letter: e brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting. Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, it has seemed good to us in assembly to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from un-chastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell (Acts 15:22-29).

Taking this distance from Torah definitively put the early Christians on a path different from the context and culture within which they became a community. is opened the way to encountering the various cultures in the Mediterranean basin. From early times, therefore, the church

6 See, for instance, Raymond F. Collins, Christian Morality: Biblical Foundations (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1986). 7 ere has been an academic, exegetical debate about whether Acts 15 can rightly be referred to as a ‘Council of Jerusalem’. Be that as it may, the inclusion of the pericope in the canonical books of the Bible demonstrates its importance to the early Christian community.

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began to deal with the so-called ‘secular world’.8 One could characterize this in a positive way and say that secularization had more to do with taking one’s missionary audience seriously than with ‘giving up control’ of some of the narratives of the Judeo-Christian community itself. Let me take the example of marriage as a cultural given that the church eventually felt obliged to incorporate into its discipline. e Hebrew people had a standard marriage ceremony including many of the things that might surround the event. But clearly the Christians did not follow that precedent. Non-Palestinian converts would have known nothing about the Jewish ceremonies or marital expectations. Outside of the Jewish milieu, the ancient world would have had a variety of marital customs and practices that covered a rather wide scale. For nearly a thousand years, the church did not get officially involved in how marriages came into being and were lived out. ere were Christians who married and sought some sort of blessing or recognition of their new status and responsibilities in their religious community. But no real, standard ceremony or even legislation determined how that should take place, until the famous canonist, Gratian (d. 1158), tried to standardize canon law. e result of his efforts revealed that there were two, somewhat different notions present in twelh-century Europe about how a marriage comes into being. e Southern European approach was that marriage consisted in an act of consent on the part of the spouses whereby they pledged their willingness to create a union to which they would remain faithful. is became a legal bond which was lawful, ratum. e Northern European approach placed an emphasis upon a situation of cohabitation in which an actual partnership, possibly complete with the procreation of a child, became established. is was recognized as an accomplished fact, the relationship having been consummated, consumatum. To take cognizance of both approaches, Gratian declared that a canonical marriage needed to be both ratum et consumatum,9 thus bringing together traditions that pre-existed specifically Christian notions of the married state.

8

At this point in European history, the concept of the ‘secular’ is not yet relevant. What I mean with the word here is that the early church went outside of its original religious setting. 9 Unfortunately, by the time canon law became a significant part of the institutional church, the concept of consumatum became synonymous with performing a single act of sexual intercourse, leaving behind the original, ‘secular’ meaning of the tradition in Northern Europe.

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2. Ambiguous Attitudes toward the Secular It is relatively easy to look back to the ancient church and recognize its dealing with things secular as a part of becoming established in the European context. Doing so, however, should not blind us to the fact that creating its own ‘space’ in the first millennium was accomplished without compromise. e Roman Church10 was not averse to aligning itself with powers (royal, political, economic) that were beneficial to the success of the church’s spiritual mission. Frequently, these were mutually beneficial, which is one way to portray the relationship between Charlemagne and the Catholic Church in the Carolingian Renaissance. Monasteries prospered, scholarship flourished, and the empire enjoyed a linguistic and clerical infrastructure that smoothed the process of becoming a substantial, albeit short lived power on the Continent. When the middle ages dawned in the second half of the first millennium, the institution had already been established and performed the role of giving advice, but also support, to the secular powers on which it was dependent. at relationship resulted in many things that were beneficial for both parties. However, it also resulted in things such as the crusades, the feudal system of social and economic exploitation, the divine right of kings, not to mention the church’s own corruption and spiritual failures that ultimately led to the Reformation. In other words, asking whether we should engage with the secular world is really a moot question. Up until 1870, the Pope was the absolute ruler of the Papal States. Almost every historical account of that period mentions the backwardness of the territory because the Pope refused to allow ‘modern’ innovations, such as building a railroad, to take place. One might ask whether this was a tactic to avoid any infiltration of the secular into the lives of those who were unfortunate to live there. Aer the Papal States were lost, Pius IX’s successor, Leo XIII, faced a different world. Although he isolated himself as a ‘prisoner of the Vatican’ and did not engage with the new Italian regime, he did make an attempt to offer advice on topics such as marriage (Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae, 1880) and the relation between capital and labor (Rerum Novarum, 1891).

10 I refer to the Roman Church in order to designate the Catholic Church in the West, in distinction from the Catholic Church in the East which was adjusting to an entirely different political and social context. West and East, unfortunately, did not always get along with each other, so much so that they parted ways in 1054.

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However, between these two documents he also promulgated an encyclical on the “Christian Constitution of States” (Immortale Dei, 1885). In a sense, this was an assessment of the challenges facing the church in this new political situation. He describes this in the following way.11 23. But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. 24. Amongst these principles the main one lays down that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men. In a society grounded upon such maxims all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. It does choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name.

is is clearly a reflection of the view of the world presented by Pius IX. Leo even refers to his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864) which was accompanied by the “Syllabus of Errors.” It is a challenge for us to read these words today, knowing what we know about democratic government. At the same time, the contrast here illustrates the difficulty of defining what we mean by the ‘secular’. For several democratically governed countries have managed to solve the problem of church-state relations through tolerance and dialogue. More pertinent than the contrasting views is the way that Leo explained the ‘truth’ of the claims that he was making. 30. Now, natural reason itself proves convincingly that such concepts of the government of a State are wholly at variance with the truth. Nature itself bears witness that all power, of every kind, has its origin from God, who is its chief and most august source. 11 is text is cut/pasted from the Vatican website. Only one change has been introduced, namely in nr. 23 correcting the spelling error of unheavals to upheavals.

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e reasoning of the Pope’s argument here points squarely to what he understood to be the natural law. In his mind, this way of thinking virtually stood in an equal relationship with revelation itself as a source for moral norms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was never questioned. e Second Vatican Council appeared to move past the idea of natural law, not even referring to it in two of the documents most closely related to theological ethics, e Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes,12 and the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, both promulgated on the last working day of the Council, December 7, 1965.13 e post-conciliar pontificates continued to look ‘through’ these documents with the presumption that nothing had changed at the council. When Paul VI issued his encyclical on the regulation of fertility, Humanae Vitae (1968), he built his argument on the natural law. John Paul II was even more narrow in his vision about the council, reinforcing not only his predecessor’s views but also following the script of the moral manuals more closely. Benedict XVI, although more theologically astute than his predecessors, became so deeply involved in his own theological discourse that he could not deal with the situation the church was in and felt that he had to resign the papacy in 2013. His successor, Pope Francis, has taken a much more pastoral approach in his leadership position. Like Jesus, Francis’ concept of missionary work is not to demand that everyone strictly follow rules (rational deductions from the natural law) but to exercise leadership by giving persuasive examples. e missionary demonstrates through both word and activity the meaning and purpose of the Christian way of life. Simultaneously, the missionary knows that the surrounding culture and social structure – if you will, the secular context to which they bring their message – will not itself necessarily change. e aim is to convert persons, not systems and structures. Systems and structures come into being and are maintained because they reflect the character of the people 12

‘Natural law’ is, in fact mentioned in Gaudium et Spes, but only in the last two chapters of Part II which are addressed to world leaders who would not necessarily even be aware of the Catholic Christian faith. 13 In place of using the natural law as a source of objectivity in determining what is good and evil, the council fathers suggested that a more appropriate criterion for this task would be the concept of the ‘human person integrally and adequately considered’. See the famous ‘footnote 14’ attached to GS, 51, paying special attention to the official commentary on that text in the Expensio modorum, which one can find on my website: https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/christian-ethics/theory/origin.html [accessed March 14, 2021].

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who build them. To change them, you need to change the character of the people who in turn will modify the systems and structures to reflect their (altered) beliefs and convictions. In the meantime, there will be parts of the system and structures that the missionary believes are incompatible with his or her faith. Some of the individual members of the faithful may find themselves in a position where they must deal with those incompatibilities. Legislators, for instance, may face new laws that they do not agree with while the majority of the people they represent clearly want them passed. Governors, mayors, and police may have to enforce laws with which they do not agree, but which most people believe to be entirely justified. We also need to remember that not everyone in the Catholic Church agrees with one hundred percent of the moral teachings of the hierarchy. e most glaring example of that is the lack of acceptance of the teaching on contraception. Although some people – mistakenly – make that teaching a kind of litmus test for Catholic identity, it is reasonable for persons to conclude that they cannot in conscience accept that teaching in their lives. Aer all, it was based upon an outdated and virtually untenable concept of natural law. 3. Secularization and the Sciences e institutional church has frequently had a difficult time with the sciences. If scientists said nothing that might differ from the traditional interpretations of Scripture, there was little problem. However, when someone like Galileo comes along and insists that there is visual proof that the planets, including the earth, orbit the sun, things can become, shall we say, uneasy. When Darwin suggested that all life on earth is a product of evolution, he was understood to have contradicted the story of creation. And when Freud suggested that we are really ruled by our unconscious mind, this was interpreted as destroying any notion of moral responsibility. Using good science can be of great benefit for humankind, as well as a good calling card for the missionary tendencies of the church. Catholic health care and education were ahead of their time and continue to benefit millions of people. Keeping up with science is crucial to those endeavors, although it would not be inaccurate to observe that this has not always been the case. One could ask whether consulting or using the data of scientific research is already a form of secularization. At first glance, looking at the paragraph immediately above would seem to indicate that the Catholic

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church has already passed that point. Looking more closely, however, it is not hard to detect that the usage has been rather selective. Take, for instance, the church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality. I already pointed out that the way that Gratian described a valid marriage – which is still used in canon law today – was a combination of different cultural phenomena. Since the twelh century, and especially in the last 150 years, we have certainly learned much more about human psychology and human relationships. Has any of this been applied to the church’s teaching on marriage? Much more can be said about our understanding of human sexuality. Up until the nineteenth century sex was simply considered to be the physiological14 process of a male person inseminating a female person. e most outstanding clarification that the church added to this observation was that the male and female persons should be married with each other. Because it was believed at the time that the male semen contained everything that was necessary to bring a human person into existence, the church deduced that any voluntary ejaculation of that seed that was not deposited in the body of the male person’s spouse was more or less equivalent to destroying a (potential) human life and hence a major moral offense against God’s will. When scientific data revealed that semen on its own was not in fact capable of producing human life, the church did not revise its teaching. When more data explained how and why female fertility was only periodic, it took twenty years for church teaching to decide whether it was morally acceptable for a couple intentionally to restrict their sexual relations to the infertile period in order to avoid conception. When it became possible to temporarily suppress ovulation by using artificial hormones, church teaching rejected this method of regulating fertility. When the logical question was posed about the difference between restricting intercourse to the infertile period and extending the infertile period using hormones, it was never answered. Pope Paul VI finally attempted to respond to the issue of artificial contraception in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, stating that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (HV, 11), begging the question about that “intrinsic relationship” to procreation for the vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse that are – naturally – not fecund. He attempted to 14 One cannot call this a ‘biological’ process because there was no understanding of the biological phenomena taking place in the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth.

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provide a justification for his statement by writing that it “is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act” (HV, 12). is last statement is unprecedented in church teaching.15 No explanation was given to the notion of unitive or procreative ‘significance’. Nor was any reference provided in the text because there is nothing in the tradition to substantiate the idea. Even more surprising is the encyclical’s appeal to a consequentialist argument, prohibiting the use of contraception because it would “open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” and because “a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman” (HV, 17). Apparently, the author of the encyclical did not have much faith in the integrity of the married, Catholic laity. 4. The Vatican’s Rejection of ‘Gender’ (Studies) Going much beyond the biological data brought to light by scientific research are the human and social ‘meanings’ of sexuality that have been the result of scientific investigation since the early part of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud began to uncover the impact that early life experiences could have on adult persons. He focused a great deal of his work on sex, giving the impression that sexuality was responsible for just about every aspect of personality formation. It was easy to ignore his work because of what seemed like exaggerations, but he did create an entirely new approach to understanding human behavior. e bad news was that this strongly ‘medicalized’ the studies of human sexuality. But the good news was that someone was looking at sexuality seriously. In the United States, a good deal of work was done on sex and sexuality by Alfred C. Kinsey, resulting in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) that presented 15

Later research, aer the death of Pope John Paul II when many of his works originally available only in Polish were translated, revealed that as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla he organized a commission to study the issue of artificial contraception before the encyclical was written. He subsequently relayed the results of that commission, known as the Krakow Memorandum, to Paul VI. His own early moral theological work also drew attention to the ideas expressed in Humanae Vitae. See, Michael J. Barberi and Joseph A. Selling, “e Origin of Humanae Vitae and the Impasse in Fundamental eological Ethics,” Louvain Studies 37 (2013): 364-389. e full text is available on my website, www. christian-ethics.be, on the sources page.

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actual data on how Americans lived out their sexuality. In 1966, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson published Human Sexual Response based upon laboratory tests with a representative cross section of the population. As a result, for the first time, there was detailed, measurable, scientific data that helped to explain exactly how the physiological processes of sexual excitement and climax take place, what effect this has on the body as a whole, and how persons ‘recover’ from the experience.16 To borrow a phrase from a somewhat later phenomenon, ‘sex had finally come out of the closet’ and the accumulated data was offered to anyone who cared to consult it. Research into human sexuality did not stop with the physiological and biological. For social and (inter-)personal relationships are also affected by sexuality. How an ‘average male person’ might relate to an ‘average female person’, and vice versa, is not something embedded in nature. Nor does it remain the same throughout history. Nor is it exercised the same way all over the world. One cannot go from one cultural context to another, different cultural context, and treat a person of the ‘opposite sex’ in the same way without risking the possibility of offending or insulting that person. Just because that person has the same primary (physiological) sexual characteristics as your own mother (father), sister (brother), or girl (boy) friend does not make it appropriate to treat that person in the same way. One of the results of this reflection was that ‘sexuality’ stands for something much more complex than sex. To distinguish this very different category of understanding human persons, the word ‘gender’ began to be used in place of ‘sexuality’ and stood for sexual identity, experience, and expression: what does it mean to be a man or woman in the world with others? While all this was happening, the official church teaching had locked itself into a rather narrow view of human sexuality. It was determined by two ‘principles’. e first was introduced by Paul VI who used the argument that every sexual act had to include a connection between a unitive and a procreative ‘meaning’. is was referred to as the ‘inseparability principle’. e second, which won favor from John Paul II, was that the only legitimate sexual act was one that united a man and a woman in such a way that they complemented each other and hence produced 16

In 1970 they published Human Sexual Inadequacy and subsequently worked on a therapeutic program to help persons with sexual dysfunctions overcome their difficulties without having to go through months or even years of psychological and psychoanalytic therapies.

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a single, two-sided event. is was referred to as the ‘complementarity’ principle. While the rest of the (Western) world was becoming familiar with the complexity of sexual identity, experience, and expression – the contours of which are usually highly influenced by social, cultural, political, and religious parameters – the Vatican concentrated exclusively on these two ‘principles’. When the word ‘gender’ was used, the hierarchy thought ‘sex’. When someone uses the word ‘gender’ in a way that does not (immediately) involve potentially procreative sexual relations between a married man and woman, the hierarchy detects a conspiracy which it refers to as ‘gender ideology’. Unless and until one can address the reasons why this is the case, I believe that no progress will be made in attempting to dialogue about ‘gender’ with the Roman Catholic (hierarchy of the) Church. 5. Gender and Amoris Laetitia When Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, he appeared to take a different tack in regard to many things, including the way he spoke about ethical issues. He was very much aware that many issues concerning marriage and the family, and by extension issues in sexual ethics in general, remained unresolved in the minds of many. He therefore called for convening two Synods of Bishops: an ‘extraordinary synod’ to better define the question(s) surrounding marriage and the family in 2014, and an ‘ordinary synod’ that would subsequently discuss the issues that were raised in 2015. In anticipation of those synods, the bishops of the world were encouraged to consult a broad spectrum of the faithful. While this did not become a consistent, global phenomenon, many of the laity were in fact ‘consulted’ on these matters, something that raised expectations about what the two synods might accomplish. When the two synods came to a close, the bishops drew up a ‘final report’ (Relatio finalis) that they delivered to Pope Francis for his consideration in composing his response to the work of the synods. He frequently referred to this report in his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (2016). However, although he quotes passages of the report literally, it is clear that he does not always stand in complete agreement with what we find in the synod document. For instance, in the second chapter, on “e Experiences and Challenges of Families,” in relation to the second theme he writes, 56. Yet another challenge [to families] is posed by the various forms of an ideology of gender that “denies the difference and reciprocity in the

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nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family. is ideology leads to educational programs and legislative enactments that promote a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female. Consequently, human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time” (Relatio finalis, 2015, 8).

is rather long quotation of the Synod document contains two ideas that have a bearing on the understanding of gender. e first refers to an ‘ideology of gender’ (a phrase that is not included within the text of the Relatio) that “envisions a society without sexual differences.” e second challenge is that this will lead to a situation in which identity and intimacy, having been “radically separated from the biological difference between male and female” becomes nothing more than a “choice of the individual […] which can change.” e entire paragraph 56 includes three quotations from the Relatio, the second of which also refers to gender: “biological sex and the sociocultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated” (Relatio finalis, 2015, 58). Although this third proposition identifies the meaning of gender with “the socio-cultural role of sex,” it simultaneously limits the idea to “biological sex,” clearly indicating the physiological characteristics of male and female. In summary, the principle ideas present in this text are: gender implies a society without sexual differentiation identity and emotional intimacy are merely a matter of individual choice the socio-cultural role of sex is defined by physiological differentiation.

We do not find the word gender anywhere else in Amoris Laetitia. However, Francis does use the term masculinity three times (55, 117, 286) and the word femininity only once, where it is related to the concept of masculinity (286). e context here is that of sex education, and the message is closely related to what many people today mean when they use the word gender. Nor can we ignore the fact that the configuration of our own mode of being, whether as male or female, is not simply the result of biological or genetic factors, but of multiple elements having to do with temperament, family history, culture, experience, education, the influence of friends, family members and respected persons, as well as other formative situations. It is true that we cannot separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation, which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological elements exist which are impossible to ignore. But it is also true that masculinity and femininity are not rigid categories. It is possible, for example, that a husband’s way of being masculine can

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be flexibly adapted to the wife’s work schedule. Taking on domestic chores or some aspects of raising children does not make him any less masculine or imply failure, irresponsibility, or cause for shame. Children must be helped to accept as normal such healthy “exchanges” which do not diminish the dignity of the father figure. A rigid approach turns into an over-accentuation of the masculine or feminine and does not help children and young people to appreciate the genuine reciprocity incarnate in the real conditions of matrimony. Such rigidity, in turn, can hinder the development of an individual’s abilities, to the point of leading him or her to think, for example, that it is not really masculine to cultivate art or dance, or not very feminine to exercise leadership. is, thank God, has changed, but in some places deficient notions still condition the legitimate freedom and hamper the authentic development of children’s specific identity and potential (AL, 286, italics added).

It seems quite clear that Pope Francis has a different notion of what it means to be a man or a woman than the bishops who wrote the final report. Without using the word gender, he attempts to describe some flexibility in the concepts of masculinity and femininity. In drawing attention to those things that “configure our mode of being” which include “multiple elements,” Francis’ approach in many ways resembles the discourse of those who describe the origin and meaning of gender. Socio-cultural and family influences shape roles adopted by or assigned to individual persons. is also needs to be seen in geographical, chronological, and political perspectives. is, I believe, is very much what gender is about. ose who oppose these ideas frequently refer to them as ‘secular propaganda aimed at destroying the family’. Unless I am mistaken, Pope Francis might be open to discussing this further with someone who would be in a – trusted – position to enter that dialogue without the baggage of ‘traditional thinking’ on the subject. I write ‘trusted’ in the sense that one could make a case for gender studies that avoids contentious issues of, for instance, abortion, which is so frequently – but unnecessarily – associated with gender discourse. However, I do not expect a ‘breakthrough’ to occur any time soon on this for several reasons. On the one hand, Francis comes from a culture which is rather different from what is frequently referred to as the ‘Western world’ in which at least the idea of genuine equality of the sexes is no longer seen as ‘radical’. On the other hand, he is also in a position that must consider a global community spanning all the cultures of the world. While it is relatively easy to openly discuss ‘gender equality’ in ‘the West’, and even to investigate how our faith contributes to real aspirations to achieve that goal, there are other social, cultural, and political environments in which that discussion has little chance of acceptance.

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In a certain sense, then, I believe that one could say that Francis does not yet have the words to formulate something directly resembling what we refer to as ‘gender’. Yet I believe that he, if not the institutional church, is struggling with the concept of gender while recognizing that he must simultaneously address a wide range of social, cultural, and political contexts. at is not an easy task, and I, for one, certainly do not have a solution for it. 6. Secularization and Theological Ethics If one understands that theological ethics is primarily a discipline concerning laws and rules, whether they be biblical commandments or rational deductions from some natural law, it will be inevitable that this will clash with secular cultures in various kinds of ways. Sometimes it will result in direct confrontation, as in the form of the ‘culture wars’ that are currently taking place in the United States and in which the Catholic Church there is heavily involved. At other times, the confrontation will be more indirect, as when a conservative Catholic population or its representative political leadership blocks calls for reform or any kind of change in the status quo. e recently elected government of Poland has announced that it plans to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty drawn up by the Council of Europe in 2011 aimed at eliminating violence against women and domestic violence.17 ere are 45 signatories to the convention, 34 of which have ratified the treaty and brought it into force. Poland signed it in 2012 and ratified it in 2015. Euronews reported that the Polish government “argues the Istanbul Convention does not respect religion and promotes controversial ideologies about gender.” Having seen the document, I suspect that the target of the government’s objection has to do with the definition of the term ‘gender’ which is presented in Chapter 1, Article 3, C, “‘gender’ shall mean the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men.” e government considers that this

17 For more information, see: Euronews: https://www.euronews. com/2020/07/27/istanbul-convention-poland-s-plan-to-quit-domestic-violencetreaty-causes-concern; e New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 07/27/world/europe/poland-domestic-violence-treaty.html; e text of the convention can be found at: https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/ conventions/rms/090000168008482e [accessed March 14, 2021].

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approach aims to validate what it understands to be a ‘gender ideology’ which goes contrary to the customs and laws of the country. It is one thing for the church to make known and defend its beliefs and practices. It is quite another for any church to enter a political confrontation over a single issue that is generally accepted by the population of a state. Claiming that every use of the word ‘gender’ immediately involves some sort of ideology says more about the claimant than about the one being criticized. It virtually terminates any further discussion and can create a serious obstacle to any further missionary activity. In fact, when local church leaders support such a position this may very well lead to alienating many of the faithful. If, on the other hand, one understands theological ethics as responding to the announcement of the Kingdom of God and engaging in a life-long attempt to find out what that means, one will have to be attentive to everything around them as our lives progress; as opportunities arise and disappear; and as the cultural, social, economic, climactic, and political forces change for the better or worse. With a longer life expectancy than has ever been the case, our lives will be more exposed to change, both in ourselves and in our environment. e only meaningful way of dealing with this is to be attentive to whatever the world – the secular – has to offer so that we can judge the most appropriate way to live our lives striving for the Kingdom. is kind of theological ethics is not tied to a single set of rules and moral laws. Currently in my mid 70s, I have memories about how social life was organized when I was young. I remember the fear and isolation the church practiced not only in relation to non-Catholics, but even within the Catholic community itself. Growing up in a highly ethnically diverse community in the United States, there were clear, if unspoken, expectations and restrictions with respect to Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, German Catholics, Negro Catholics […] did they exist then? As a young, white, Catholic in a Slovak-influenced church, school, and social environment, I did not have the slightest idea. How things can change, one might say. Perhaps better would be ‘how things will change’! How can we be loyal both to the emerging Kingdom of God and our missionary calling to be a witness to that message if we are not in touch with the world around us? It is no longer, as I was once taught, a competition between the sacred and the profane (secular). As twenty-first century Catholics, we need to be engaging the world, challenging it, but also being challenged by it. If our calling, our vocation, is to be a witness to the Kingdom of God, how, then, should we confront injustice, corruption, exploitation, and

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any of the connected sins that one might name? Is it by imposing laws and rules that will scream ‘condemnation’ to our fellow human beings? Or is it not more productive to offer examples of justice, transparency, solidarity, and an offer of redemption? Even, or especially, as Catholics, we are in the world, with the world, and to use an expression of Francis, even smelling like the world. I believe, I think in line with Francis, that in judging the world, and especially in judging others, we set ourselves up as mini-gods: judging, condemning, and in the process, alienating others from the Word that should bring joy, peace, and community. When encountering other human persons who seem genuinely attempting to live loving, sincere, and just lives, even though the way in which they do that is rather different than my own, I would also echo his words, “Who am I to judge?”

31 Common Discernment in Theology Jacques Haers, S.J.

e best of theological thought emerges amongst challenging friends in creative conversations involving vulnerable personal convictions. Friendship provides a safe space to explore daring theological ideas, to touch deep concerns, and to probe the entanglement of life and ideas. We need friends to ask the difficult but important questions: How is ‘who we are’ involved in our theological arguments? What kinds of prejudice inhabit us? What are the real and tangible consequences of our theological choices? Friends add perspectives beyond our imagination and enjoy with us the feeling of good theology. We need this daring empathy, like that of the impromptu companion on the road to Emmaus. Such a journey is a prime example of common discernment. Terrence Merrigan – Terry – is such a dear friend. Although we are different in many ways and do not always agree, we share a journey that I want to honor here by offering some thoughts on a concern dear to both of us: How to practice theology in a discerning mode? My contribution is meant to be ‘programmatic’, scouting avenues that I intend to explore more deeply in the space of Terry’s friendship. eology is the intellectual articulation of the foundational relationship with God: conversations about a God who is present in our lives in the same way a friend would be. It requires friends on a journey of shared discernment to touch the intimate relationship between God and creation. In the wanderings of faith communities, ‘we’ explore God’s presence to the world in ongoing conversations about experiences that allow God’s intimate and strange involvement in the affairs of our world to self-reveal. When the trust of friendship unravels, terrible things happen. In a challenging book, Anne Applebaum analyses the authoritarian predisposition of people “who cannot tolerate complexity.”1 When such a frame 1 Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (London: Allen Lane, 2020). See p. 16 and the reference to Karen Stenner.

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of mind dominates, friendship and common discernment become impossible. Desolation is the fate of communities where the indifference,2 the capacity to open and discerning communication, has been wrecked. is is true in politics; it is also true in the Church and in theology. Not surprisingly, William A. Barry writes: “ere is, perhaps, no greater challenge to religion today than to foster the conditions that make such communal discernment possible.”3 In this contribution, I highlight the delicate character of theology as discerning conversation amongst friends on a journey, ongoing common discernment entangled in the histories and narratives of communities. It clarifies the joy and consolation, or the pain and desolation, theology may offer us, our communities, and the world we inhabit. Discerning theology is of all ages. Origen’s fine-tuned heuristics provide a wonderful early example. I plead for a renewed fundamental theology based on ecclesiogenetic common discernment. A short primer in the idea of discernment may be helpful. I draw on my Ignatian spiritual background. Discernment concerns the effort (a) to descry God’s presence and work in our interconnected world as creation, inviting us (b) to commit in line with God’s activity in the world and to choose to engage towards its future shared destiny. I will use a broad understanding of discernment as a dynamic at work in all created reality, revealing its relatedness to its source of being. Discernment as a decision-making effort concerns important lifechallenges that do not have a ‘uniquely correct’ answer: discernment is not needed when there is only one good and correct answer. Our choices concern a real, as yet open future. Discernment will prove itself in the future it opens up. erefore, discernment engenders history and requires narratives. Discernment requires training in a rationality governed by a logic of consolation and desolation at individual and communal level. When do we experience joy in our lives and communities growing in commitment to the wellbeing of all, in trust, in hope, in loving, empathetic attitudes towards one another and nature? Here lies consolation. When we experience division, anger, hopelessness, distrust and fears, disruption, division, violence, and competitive exploitation in our lives together, then we must probe whether such desolations do not indicate a loss of deep bearings. 2

In the Ignatian sense of the word. William A. Barry, “Toward a eology of Discernment,” The Way Supplement 64 (1989): 129-140, at 138. 3

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Discernment is always common, requires clarifying conversation. God’s Spirit is at work in an interconnected world, taking into account the contribution of all. e discernment proposed here is lived out in common. It is based on the conviction that the Holy Spirit speaks to the group as such, through each of its members. Hence the importance of listening and unconditional respect for the other. is presupposes that the word is given to everyone, even to those who seem to occupy a less important place in the group. A “group dynamic” is involved in this approach, with psychological and spiritual aspects.4

What is claimed here for human groups is also true for the world as creation. Common discernment informs concrete decisions we take individually or as a group, and also reflects a profound individual and communal attitude in our relationship with God’s Spirit at work in creation’s thrust towards full encounter as a whole world with and in God. We develop a fine-tuned sensibility for God’s Spirit in our communities of discernment considering God’s presence in each of its members, urging the community to live towards the Kingdom. Sometimes, the ‘common’ of discernment is insufficiently paid attention to. Discernment is then understood as private, concerning individual life decisions. Without doubt, discernment is profoundly ‘personal’ – it constitutes the human person in its spiritual and existential depth – and, therefore, also crucial at an individual level. But discernment is never merely individual, precisely because it is ‘personal’, i.e. inescapably interwoven in relational networks that constitute the individual. All discernment is profoundly common: it concerns the community as a whole and affects it. It is situated in a common and shared history that sustains the individual who cannot be disentangled from the interconnectedness of reality. Of course, communal discernment always involves individual discernment in view of choices that are made in communities that value God’s contribution in each one of the members of the group. One cannot 4

Michel Bacq, Jean Charlier, and ESDAC, Pratique du discernement en commun: Manuel des accompagnateurs (Namur and Paris: Fidélité, 2006), 14: “Le discernement proposé ici est vécu en commun. Il est fondé sur la conviction que l’Esprit Saint parle au groupe comme tel, à travers chacun de ses membres. D’où l’importance de l’écoute et du respect inconditionnel de l’autre. Ceci suppose que la parole soit donnée à chacun, même à ceux qui semblent occuper une place moins importante dans le groupe. Une ‘dynamique de groupe’ est impliquée dans cette démarche, avec des aspects psychologiques et spirituels.” e translations in the body of the text, unless otherwise indicated, have been made by the author with the help of DEEPL.

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separate individual and common and one should look at processes of discernment from the perspective of both the individuals and the group. John English emphasizes: “ere is no individual discernment outside a communal setting and no communal discernment without individual discernment. Each individual profits from the communal activity of discernment and the community profits from each individual’s discernment.”5 Shared discernment, therefore, also strengthens and deepens the community: it is ecclesiogenetic. In what follows, I will first explore how common discernment is embedded in the relational quality of theological themes such as God, creation, and Church. In a second step, I will offer some thoughts towards ecclesiogenetic common discernment as a fundamental theology. 1. Common Discernment as Structural Feature of Relational Reality eological ideas require the epistemological crucible of ecclesial common discernment as will be discussed in my second part. But there is more: in many areas of theology, common discernment constitutes an insufficiently reflected dynamic feature of the relational quality of the theological core ideas themselves. An ontological perspective surfaces: all reality being profoundly relational and historical, dynamics of discernment structure all reality. I will focus on theology proper – how we speak about a self-revealing God; on protology – how we speak about our world as creation; and on ecclesiology – how we speak about church communities. 1. Theo-logy: Narratives of a Self-Revealing God eology embodies our willingness to explore the meaning of the word ‘God’. Although, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out in his Christology notes, the ‘logy’ refers first to God’s Word addressed to us, theology remains inevitably a human word about God. Even when pointing to God’s own Word, words as ‘logos’ and ‘God’ are still ours, caught up in our experiences and the stories of our relationship with God. We cannot speak about God outside of our relationships with God. We inevitably enter a narrative mood and articulate the stories of our experiences. eology is a human endeavor exploring conversational spaces with God, in

5 John English, S.J., Spiritual Intimacy and Community: An Ignatian View of the Small Faith Community (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 26.

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which God, through our open-ended human exploration, self-reveals in the horizon of conversations that constitute the universe. Our language about God, therefore, is odd self-subversive language. We speak about a God always narratively entangled in our lives. Even when we speak about God as beyond our reality, this is still our language about our experiences in our reality. is also means that one may claim that ‘God is patient’ and ‘adapts to our realities’. Our religious and theological language constitutes an invitation to conversation. Critical ‘common’ discernment is needed, as others will, out of their personal narratives, criticize our use of language, allowing a space for the real Other to emerge. In his anthropological approach to theology, Karl Rahner6 speaks about the ‘transcendental experience’: “We shall call transcendental experience the subjective, unthematic, necessary and unfailing consciousness of the knowing subject that is co-present in every spiritual act of knowledge, and the subject’s openness to the unlimited expanse of all possible reality.”7 Human beings, in their most distinctive experiences, are necessarily open to the unlimited space of all possible reality to which they belong. In this horizon it becomes possible to speak about transcendence and God as a necessary ground. is transcendental experience at the core-margins of every human act of love, of knowledge, and of hope, is ours, even if we are not consciously aware of it. Human beings touch transcendentally what they call God in the deepest open depths of all their experiences, even if they are not always aware of it. is deepest open depth is a condition for human experience itself. An effort of reflection and discernment is needed to deepen our awareness and understanding of the transcendental experience. Human beings are on a neverending risky, satisfying, and fulfilling adventure of discernment. e 6 In this contribution, I rely heavily on Karl Rahner’s theological and mystical anthropology. Unfortunately, I cannot pursue here some important critical issues regarding his thought: does Karl Rahner pay sufficient attention (1) to the universe’s creational covenantedness in destiny; (2) to the suffering caused by his interreligious views on ‘anonymous Christianity’; and (3) to the political and societal implications of theology? 7 Karl Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1977), 31: “Das subjekthae, unthematische und in jedwedem geistigen Erkenntnisakt mitgegebene, notwendige und unaufgebbare Mitbewusstsein des erkennenden Subjekts und seine Entschränktheit auf die unbegrenzte Weite aller möglichen Wirklichkeit nennen wir die transzendentale Erfahrung.” e translation above has been borrowed from Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978).

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possibility of the encounter with God is inscribed in our being: we are fundamentally relational beings, unsatisfied in ourselves alone. e transcendental experience and common discernment are inextricably entangled in the reflection on human deepest open depths and in the openness to all of reality. Karl Rahner’s approach points to what could be called the mystical or spiritual structure of human beings, their original openness to otherness and to the Other. We use here a broad understanding of the word mysticism as structurally connecting every human being with the unexpected, real, and overwhelming experience that the mystics describe in their encounters with God. e following description of the mystical experience is provided by Paul Mommaers: How then, as generally and comprehensively as possible, can we characterise the mystic? It is someone who overwhelmingly experiences the presence of something that transcends himself and is far more real than anything that is usually thought of as real. e entire human system – the world in which we live and which seems so self-evident and solid – becomes a transparent backdrop for the mystic, because another, ultimate reality presents itself. And this perception of an incomparable presence is accompanied by a complementary psychological phenomenon: the mystic feels his normal self disappear. His personality – that is, the particular, personal way in which he leads his existence – loses its contours. e seclusion of man who “is himself” is broken in him, his loneliness is lied.8

In this quote we touch the crucial relational structure of human beings as over against their ‘I’ness or personality, the self-centeredness entrapping them and the world in themselves. Mystics are psychologically aware of God’s self-revelation in the depth of their person. All human beings and – one could argue – all created reality have a mystical

8

Paul Mommaers, Wat is mystiek?, Spiritualiteit 12 (Nijmegen: B. Gottmer; Brugge: Emmaüs, 1977), 25: “Hoe kunnen we dan, zo algemeen en omvattend mogelijk, de mysticus karakteriseren? Het is iemand die op overweldigende wijze de tegenwoordigheid ervaart van iets wat hemzelf overstijgt en veel werkelijker is dan al hetgeen men doorgaans voor werkelijk aanziet. Heel het menselijke bestel – de wereld waarin wij leven en die zo vanzelfsprekend en solied lijkt – wordt voor de mysticus een doorzichtig decor, omdat een andere, uiteindelijke werkelijkheid zich aandient. En deze waarneming van een onvergelijkbare tegenwoordigheid gaat gepaard met een complementair psychologisch fenomeen: de mysticus voelt zijn normale ikheid verdwijnen. Zijn persoonlijkheid – dat is de bepaalde, eigen manier waarop men zijn bestaan leidt – verliest haar contouren. De beslotenheid van de mens die ‘zichzelf is’ wordt bij hem doorbroken, zijn eenzaamheid wordt opgeheven.”

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structure, an openness to God’s self-revelation, even if this self-revelation is not experienced overwhelmingly as such, but only recognized reflectively as lying at the fringes and in the depths of every human and created experience. In his letter of Ignatius to a Jesuit today, Karl Rahner emphasizes the mystical encounter: “I was convinced that I had encountered God directly, first initially in my illness at Loyola and then decisively in my time as a hermit in Manresa, and that I should impart such experience to others as best I could.”9 God reveals Godself, even if we choose to ignore it. ere is, here, a triple ‘learning’ process: we come to know God, ourselves, and the universe in a process that we cannot split up. I call this ‘first’ relationship a personal encounter: it touches our core, our being a person: it calls us to be(come) a person. In this encounter, we discover what it means to be a person: relational in our core being, connected to the source of reality and in that source to the whole of reality. e selfimprisonment in ourselves, our personality, is broken open towards our fundamental interconnectedness in shared destiny. Karl Rahner’s theology articulates an anthropology of the spiritual dimension of human beings: it situates them and their experiences in their transcendental openness and embeds them in the whole of the cosmos. We also intuit, as did G. M. Hopkins in his famous poem “God’s Grandeur,” that this deep relationship with God, the fountain of life, is present in all created being: “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Chapter 8 in Paul’s letter to the Romans deepens that intuition. Karl Rahner’s thought testifies that human beings can reflect upon and narrate this transcendental experience and the ‘awareness’ of a deep connection to the source of life that opens them up to the horizon of the full universe. A nagging question arises: How do we know that such ultimate conversation is not abused to our own advantage in our power-games with ourselves, with fellow human beings, and with the world as a whole? Indeed, the name of God can be abused: the abuse victims shout it to our faces. Such abuse brings about desolation also in our broken societies. We need to continuously question our theologies: they are vulnerable to abuse precisely in our claims about the encounter with God – when we

9 Karl Rahner, “Rede des Ignatius von Loyola an einen Jesuiten von heute,” in Ignatius von Loyola (Freiburg i.Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1978), 9-38, at 10: “Ich war überzeugt, dass ich zunächst anfängerha in meiner Krankheit in Loyola und dann entscheidend in meiner Einsiedlerzeit in Manresa unmittelbar Gott begegnet bin und solche Erfahrung andern, so gut es geht, vermitteln sollte.”

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use the word ‘God’ to pursue our own interests or dominance over others. us, discernment is needed. No one was more aware of this than Dietrich Bonhoeffer who in a wonderful text “Aer Ten Years”10 – in which he reflects about 10 years of resistance to Hitler’s Nazi regime and ideology – shows how deep religious feelings and realities can be turned and abused. He denounces “the abysmal wickedness of evil”: evil spirits taking on the appearance of healthy moral or religious attitudes. In George Orwell’s fine review of Mein Kampf the attractiveness of Hitler is discovered precisely in the abuse of the deeply religious pattern of a martyr full of grievance and resentment against the universe.11 At this level of abuse, when we attempt to bend religious experience at the service of our own fears or hunger for power, fine-tuned discernment is necessary in conversation with the abuse victims. Deep self-analysis and open critical conversations with others – especially the wounded others – and with institutionally embedded traditions are required, as well as the awareness of the impact of our claims and actions. How does how we speak about God affect the lives of our fellow human beings and the dignity of the world that gives us life support? is is an urgent and difficult question for each of the faithful, for each theologian, and also for the Church as a whole. In these relentless self-searching and critical conversations, we refer to people’s and communities’ narratives about their experience of the relationship with God. What narratives of God’s self-revelation in human history are available? An important task of theology is to provide such reliable narratives and to build up spaces in which new reliable narratives can be generated. Our experiences of encounter with God are presented in narratives, stories, but also liturgies, and theology or history books, and so much more. Narratives constitute a heuristic device involving their readers and requiring conversations to discern, in one move, both their content and existential impact on readers. Christianity works with powerful narratives – as found in the bible, but also in the lives of the saints and in the sacraments. e core structure of the Christian faith are the narratives centered in Jesus Christ connecting us narratively to the narratives about Jesus’ life. Jesus invites us, through generations of narratives generated by prior narratives, into 10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke 8 (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1998), 19-39, at 20: “die abgründige Bosheit des Bösen.” 11 George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf, https://bookmarks.reviews/ george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/ [accessed on February 20, 2021].

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exploration of the personal encounter with God, as an encounter in Christ and in the history generated by people in the line of the personal encounters with God in Christ. God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ is embedded and enabled for us in narratives that require cautious common discernment in which God’s Spirit inspires us to understand both Christ and who we are. But is the spirit that inspires us really God’s Spirit or are we moved, e.g., by a mindset through which we want to secure our own (spiritual) dominion or our own interests? Here, again, we hear the call for careful common discernment. Christology highlights some important features of common discernment. e understanding of scripture requires discernment, as texts are always interpreted, and interpretations require critical evaluation based on their veracity in readers’ lives. Scripture texts are narratives inviting their readers to self-reflection and commitment. A heuristic process is needed in line with Jesus’ own heuristic process. Luke Timothy Johnson explains how this discernment is common: Above all, the theologian helps the church to form and understand its response as a group, helps it pull together the many individual interpretations of God’s Word into a communal discernment which prepares for decision. e theologian may be preacher or teacher, may be ordained or not, may be now one person, now another. But the theologian’s interpretation of how God is calling us as a group will be alive and pertinent only if the same process of interpretation is going on in the lives of individual believers within the community. e case is the same as that with worship and work: Without the implicit process, the explicit gesture is meaningless.12

Jesus is a heuristic person himself, involved in processes of discernment to discover God’s presence in the world and to interpret the narratives about God handed over to him. He tries to understand (out of the Spirit who moves him) who he is through listening to how God challenges him in fellow human beings. e narratives, such as his encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, show a person with a keen eye for God’s challenging presence and action in the world and in human beings. erefore, the Second Testament is not primarily a theoretical book, but rather a story, that entices readers to enter the narrative so as to write their own renewed narrative. Here, the process of discernment is to follow Jesus.

12 Luke Timothy Johnson, Scripture and Discernment: Decision Making in the Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 27.

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e community is key to understanding Jesus Christ: he assembled a group of followers toward the vision of the universal Kingdom. is group of followers becomes the Church, the narrative and discerning community reading the bible and constituting itself in the traces of the community that Jesus built up around himself. Discernment in the community happens in light of the vision of the Kingdom and in creative narrative faithfulness to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, transmitted over ages and in various contexts by his followers. e Christian narratives refer to God as Trinity – in Christ God reveals God-self as Father, Son and Spirit. is divine dynamism is important not only to understand our own lives molded on the dynamics of the trinity (as is illustrated in Egied Van Broeckhoven’s diaries13), but also to constantly correct our understandings of God, of the Spirit and of the Son, Christ. For Christians, a crucial question is the following: How does the narrative of Jesus change our own lives and narratives and how does it bring us to action that changes our world? How does it bring consolation and desolation? is implies the willingness to entrust oneself and one’s communities to the way of life of Jesus. is choice to follow Jesus needs confirmation in the conversations that build up the Jesus-communities. 2. Our World as Creation: Shared Destiny Karl Rahner’s existential theology emphasizes the relational root structure of Christian anthropology: to understand what it means to be a human being, one has to discern the transcendental experience and the relationship with God as the intimate core of our own open being entangled in the world as a whole. As in the relationship of human beings with God we discover God and ourselves, and as this relationship constitutes ‘who we are’, we speak about a ‘personal’ relationship. Such an intimate relationship is not the prerogative of human beings alone; it is present also in all non-human beings as the fountain of existence, even if these beings do not possess the reflective and conscious awareness proper to human beings. is invites us to speak about creation as the intimacy with God in all that exists. eologies of creation are crucial today: environmental abuse illustrates that the world is not respected as creation and that human beings have lost the sense of belonging to the world as creation. Pope Francis’ 13 Egied Van Broeckhoven, Dagboek van de vriendschap (Brugge: Uitgeverij Emmaüs and Desclée de Brouwer, 1971).

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encyclical Laudato Si’ invites us to see the abuse, to judge by our faith convictions, and to act in the perspective of God’s commitment to the world: a complex discernment process. Creation faith translates into ethical commitment: Do we respect our created interdependent togetherness in the one world, or do we follow the competitive urge that isolates us as separate others? e idea of creation articulates in human persons a mystical core of personal relationships that dismantles individual self-obsession. Using the word ‘creation’ is an act of faith: we entrust ourselves to the constitutive relation to God as the origin of our existence and of the world. Not surprisingly, omas Aquinas considered creation to be a ‘relatio quaedam’,14 a very special kind of relationship, substantial and not accidental. e relationship at our origins originates in God. When writing a thesis on Aquinas’ idea of creation, I understood this ‘relatio quaedam’ foremost as referring to the depth of human individual existence. At the thesis examination my promoter Bela Weissmahr, S.J., pointed out that I had forgotten to consider an essential feature of this relation: its cosmological scope. Creation is not only about the intimacy of individual human existence; it also concerns our belonging to one another and to the universe. We and reality as a whole, are inescapably covenanted in a shared destiny. e spiritual reality that sustains us individually is ‘common’: when touching our spiritual depth in the relationship to God, we also touch our belonging to the cosmos and we discover the entanglement of our relationship with God and our relationship to the world as a whole, to creation. is suggests an original covenant: we share, as one cosmos, a common destiny. An evolutionary perspective may help us to better grasp the ongoing shared discernment taking place in a covenanted world. Contemporary sciences hint at such universal connectedness, even if we nearly always limit our research topologies to our immediate environments… until the unexpected explodes into our views and understandings, and forces us to breach the borderlines of our topologies. Set theory in mathematics and ideas as entanglement or particle-wave-duality in quantum physics provide some helpful metaphors to better understand reality as an interdependent whole. e tension between individuality and original relationality is not easy to grasp. Individuality, identity, subjectivity display a fluid character, 14 omas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 45, a. 3. See also: AntoninDalmace Sertillanges, L’idée de création et ses retentissements en philosophie (Paris: Aubier, 1949).

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challenging our engrained ideas of the ‘stable’ subject. Although we claim to be the same subject perduring over time, we are the ongoing outcome of constitutive and sometimes unexpected change in the networks of relations that build us. Early theologians such as Origen emphasized the tension between image and likeness of God: our future is in us as our origin, and in the now we work towards the future. In nature, there is a permanent (re-)construction of subjects at various levels – human beings are an example of such subjects, as are atoms, molecules, stones, plants, animals, … –, allowing new relational and conversational possibilities and configurations. Relations are at the core of reality, and out of the sometimes-chaotic network of relations subjects arise as combinations or configurations of relations that in turn allow for new relations and subjects to emerge at a higher level. ‘Relation’ and ‘subject’ are, in that sense, two complementary, inseparable, ways to look at reality, as particles and waves in quantum physics. Nature can be understood as ever more complex processes of common discernment at various levels. Human discernment is an exceedingly complex example. At various points, many possible futures and bifurcations (as in chaotic behavior) are possible. Human beings are special because of their (self-)conscious reflectiveness: they discern in a way that molecules, or plants, or animals cannot and can recognize ‘precursors’ to their discernment in molecules, plants, or animals. Human discernment processes allow for reflection and even self-reflection. Moral responsibility arises and increases. In this sense, a cautious, moderate anthropocentrism may be in place. In human beings, cosmos and nature come to a level of self-awareness not attained before. One should be careful, however, lest in such anthropocentrism human beings lose their sense of covenantal creational belonging. Although subjects, especially human subjects, constitute a nexus in a discernment process, they never are this nexus just on their own, independently of the rest of the world, but always in common and involved in the discernment process of the whole, which is a much looser process without necessarily involving awareness, consciousness, or selfconsciousness at all its levels. e whole always is taken into account as it is integrated in every even individual decision-making process. is invites us to use biological metaphors when thinking about creation. We belong to a whole and consolation or desolation are also conditioned by how we fit in the whole and how the whole gains from our actions and thoughts. To understand creation, or the world as universe in its relationship to God, we need to consider many different perspectives in a spirit of

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transdisciplinarity so as to articulate the complex processes involved in relational structures, as these relations at different levels unfold in different ways and according to different laws and rules. One can say that the laws of physics and biology and chemistry represent a level of discernment inherent in nature. A sense of complexity is needed to respond to and articulate the complexity of reality itself. is is characteristic of processes of common discernment: many perspectives and points of view have to be brought together, allowing us to understand better and allowing for an open future. is is not easy for an authoritarian mindset that resists uncontrollable complexity and diversity and aspires at imposing inadequate order and structure. Complex ontologies require complex epistemologies. Common discernment or decision-making in evolving situations is a core ‘mechanism’ or ‘law’ of a destiny-connected universe unfolding and exploring its constitutive creative powers. ere is nothing predetermined about this; a theologian will consider it an exploration in the relationship with God and, so, into God self, who self-reveals in the creative structures and dynamics of the world. 3. Ecclesial Connectedness Two characteristic attitudes of Jesus are oen highlighted: his calling God ‘Abba’ and his call to community building towards the vision of the Kingdom. Here, salvation is understood not only individually but crucially also as ‘communal’: an individual is deeply constituted by diverse relational networks, interconnected to the whole of creation, sharing its destiny. God-created covenantedness in destiny is the foundation of the Church. In European languages the Greek words ‘kuriakos’ and ‘ekklesia’ determine the meaning of the idea church: being called forward into the community around the Lord. Two challenges arise to be discerned: Who lords over our communities? What is the ‘missionary’ dynamic of contrast church communities that live by the promise of the Kingdom? e core relation to the Lord feeds discerning conversations that build up the Church. Pope Francis structures this ecclesiogenetic perspective as a synodal, discerning process.15 e Church is a long-haul history of common discernment, God’s people on its journey in the world towards the 15 Jacques Haers, “A Synodal Process on Synodality: Synodal Missionary Journeying and Common Apostolic Discernment,” Louvain Studies 43 (2020): 215-238.

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Kingdom, the visionary attractor for the development of its narratives. e Church is a space for common discernment.16 To better understand such approach, reference can be made to Kenneth Gergen’s17 and René Bouwen’s18 relational constructionism: addressing common issues, we build the community to address these issues. Community building is a crucial part of processes of common discernment. Inevitably, there is also a political dimension, in the sense of building the ‘polis’, the city, the environment or neighborhood where we gather around the Lord and explore the Lord’s invitation into the Kingdom. What will be the concrete decisions made to respond to the vision of the Kingdom allowing this vision to be explored, discerned, and made actionable? From this visionary perspective, church communities become contrast and prophetic communities in the larger human societies, agonistic actors in Chantal Mouffe’s understanding,19 participating in political discernment processes, targeting the common good. Political theology is a kind of practical ecclesiology. e question of who belongs to the Church is important: with whom are we willing to enter into conversation? e challenge for the Church is to expand into ever more universal conversations. Ultimately, the Church is open to the whole of creation. ere are no final borders to the Church, separating it from the rest of the world, but ever-changing challenging frontiers, where people meet face to face in ever new encounters and conversations. e Church is a heuristic space that is being re-built continuously. is is a challenge also to its hierarchical structures and institutions, critical of all clerical arrogance, also in theology. In processes of common discernment, God challenges us into choices through and with others, particularly those suffering prejudice and exclusion. In that sense, the Church is God’s ultimately, not ours. We are tempted to limit the Church to chosen people within a borderline,

16 Jacques Haers, “Kerk: Plaats van ontmoetingen, veld van spanningen en ruimte voor onderscheiding,” in Een werkzame dialoog: Oecumenische bijdragen over de kerk 30 jaar na Vaticanum II, ed. Robrecht Michiels and Jacques Haers, Niké-reeks 38 (Louvain and Amersfoort: Acco, 1997), 187-227. 17 Cf. Kenneth J. Gergen, Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 18 René Bouwen, “‘Relational Practices’ for Generative Communal Organizing: Travelling between Geel and Ecuador”, in Relational Practices, Participative Organizing, ed. Chris Steyaert and Bart Van Looy, Advanced Series in Management 7 (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing LTD, 2010), 21-39. 19 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005).

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whereas God has a taste of ‘more’, inviting all to the community and especially the excluded, creating new frontier-spaces for discernment. God self-reveals in unexpected others, victims of our prejudice and exclusion and calls the Church to open up in processes of reconciliation that are processes of radical common ecclesiogenetic discernment. ere is, of course, an institutional dimension to the Church and it impacts on its discernment processes. Our own inner experience needs the discernment with others and, therefore, institutions that protect us, confront us, engage us, challenge us, and inspire us. ese institutions are in permanent movement and become actors in ecclesiogenetic discernment. However, institutions can also become prison walls, reassuring to some as they seem to provide stability and security; institutions can become an impediment to common discernment. e self-constitution and self-discovery of the Church in its common discernment processes initiates a history of narratives describing its discernment journey in answer to the signs of the times, important events in which God self-reveals. Church narratives include texts, stories, and theologies, but also ecclesial praxes, sacraments, liturgies, rituals, common bible reading, … In all of them discernment praxes are enshrined. We participate in these narratives that connect generations and transmit experience and knowledge in participatory ways. ey offer traditions that are key to common discernment. Creative faithfulness to traditions structures them as an adventure and so we enter into life-giving conversations with generations to come. However, traditions are also vulnerable institutional features: they may fall prey to clerical power-games in which theologians unfortunately sometimes play a dangerous role. In the ecclesial space of common discernment care must be taken of the quality of conversations. Fruitful conversations that increase connectedness, mutual respect, and openness are a sign of consolation. A lack of ‘indifference’, when we isolate ourselves from those who differ from us and cannot abandon our own prejudiced positions, brings desolation. It is not enough to think of our conversations in terms of ‘exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism’, because the point of departure of these attitudes is always the individual on its own, not the underlying covenantedness in destiny. Differences are valued positively in common discernment as the space to explore our encounters with God who selfreveals in diversity. Differences exist and are important. ey may continue to exist, even when a commonly supported decision is taken and evaluated. In our differences we belong together. So, Church originates in that ontological reality of co-belonging: Church ultimately is how covenanted creation unfolds towards the Kingdom. e scope and the vision

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of the Church is universal, not in submitting all, but in admitting all to discover itself. is also calls for us to distance ourselves from our own spontaneous crude anthropocentrism, that considers nature as subservient to human beings, viewed as the perfection of creation. e Church, therefore, embodies our endeavor to unfold creation. How do we shape the interconnected destiny that links us to one another, to all of us and to the whole of creation? Church is common discernment from and towards the Kingdom. We recognize its histories of consolation: the capacity to recognize God’s work in the interactions between human beings; resistance against clerical power-games; the option for the vulnerable and the poor; the inclusion of those excluded; its processes of forgiveness and reconciliation; the creativity of sharing destiny; … Desolation is at work when communities are split in violent destructive conflicts that undo dynamics of hope and love; when they suffer clerical power-games; when fundamental ecclesial openness is not recognized towards other religions and towards nature; … e actors involved in discernment are multiple and diverse. Today, in times of ecological crisis, we encounter ‘strange actors’ such as future generations and non-human actors in nature. Who will voice for such strange actors? e French philosopher Michel Serres emphasizes the role of scientists.20 I would like to suggest that also the Church is called to be an advocate and convenor, inviting to the discernment table or into the discernment space the diversity needed to build the Kingdom, so as to create optimal heterogeneity to engage the challenges at hand. 2. Common Ecclesiogenetic Discernment Heuristics Common discernment plays an important structural role in core theological ideas. Godself is inner-trinitarian discerning conversation. e self-revelation of God, narratively explored in the life of Jesus and through the narratives of his followers, invites us to commit to a broken world in the destiny of which we are inescapably entangled. We discern our universe as creation, a deeply relational world caught up in diverse processes of continual discernment. e Church is built up in its discerning endeavors. eology highlights the relational characteristics of reality and, as a consequence, also its narrative and historical structure,

20

Michel Serres, Temps des crises (Paris: Le Pommier, 2009).

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intimately connected to deep processes of discernment that reflect reality’s destiny-covenantedness. We cannot unfold the relational wealth of theology but relationally. erefore, theology requires ‘relational’ and conversational work: common ecclesiogenetic discernment as a theological method. We trust that a theological viewpoint emphasizing the relationship of reality with God, the fundamental openness of all being, and the interconnectedness of all in the one world, contributes, as a partner rationality amongst others such as physics, mathematics, sociology, or psychology, towards a more profound understanding of reality. e theological perspective seems to offer a challenging intellectual thrust based on the decision to see the world as creation. Wrestling with the western secular mind that oen remains blind to a theological perspective and tends to confine theology to the private realm, we explore theological rationality as ecclesiogenetic common discernment and stress its contribution to a broader common discernment in the exploration of reality. eology is a human endeavor next to others, each with its proper rationality of discernment. It enjoys a plural and transdisciplinary environment. Moreover, the rationality of discernment proper to theology sheds light on other rationalities and reveals how in them too discernment has its place. eology’s ecclesiogenetic component, highlighting the creative diversity of approaches and views while offering its own perspective, invites to a critical transdisciplinary viewpoint on all endeavors that tend to imprison reality. Not surprisingly, theologians will become convenors of transdisciplinary working groups and journeys. eological issues require discernment communities of involved and diverse actors and institutions to enter into open conversations about the choices to be made and how to make them. Pope Francis’ understanding of synodality suggests such a journey. Discernment, both regarding the role of theology in the overall transdisciplinary exploration of reality, as well as concerning the interpretative choices made within theology itself, requires criteria to evaluate its veracity. e balance between consolation and desolation is the most important relational criterion. It articulates the effects of the theological decisions – theology is about decision-making – in the heart of individuals as well as in the communities involved. Discerning theologians, therefore, also ask questions that move beyond the mere technical theological issues and influence these in new ways. Examples of such questions illustrating the balance ‘consolation – desolation’ concern the encouraging effects in the hearts of people, the construction of open entangled communities, and their liberating effect on our world.

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Does theological research provoke joy, hope, faith, and love in people’s hearts? Does it provide a better understanding of one’s belonging to reality? Does it strengthen the sense of responsibility for nature and for the future? Does it shed light on our relations with God, with ourselves, with our fellow human beings, with nature and the universe? Do we come to recognize our errors and the interests that guide our mind as prejudices? How do theologies improve ecclesial ‘quality’, the joyful cohesion of communities? Do our theologies invite more mature conversations, or do they lead to separation and polarization, to desolation? Are our thoughts open to criticism and to the discovery that God’s challenging presence can also be gleaned in those whose opinions we do not share? Are we capable of collaborating with others in truly transdisciplinary ways? How do we deal with conflicts, frequent in the history of theology? Are our communities open or closed to the larger world? Do our theologies lend a voice to the voiceless and do they reach out to an optimal heterogeneity, where many viewpoints meet, especially those that shatter our comfort zones? Do our communities become more inclusive and more sensitive to the needs of excluded people? Is there a thrust towards an ever-more universal community at peace with its interconnected destiny? What possible future is enabled? Do theological ideas and theories invite people and communities to be moved by a spirit of empathy and compassion? What are the effects of our theologies? Does theological research lead to stronger commitment in the service of God’s people, particularly the poor and the forgotten? Do we recognize the abuses theology may suffer or cause? Can a challenging and subversive theological idea such as the vision of the Kingdom of God, the implications of which we discover on the go, provide imagination, inspiration, and commitment? Do we contribute creatively to other broader decision-making processes? Is the Church capable of using its unique position to convene people and institutions at the service of the common good? In these questions, discerning theologies aim, through the unfolding of creative hope-filled theological ideas, at the consolation of open church communities enabling processes of common discernment towards the common good; the unfolding of creative, hope-prone theological ideas. Discerning theologies concern life challenges that are undecided: they have no pre-set solutions. ey require choosing between various possible good alternatives; various choices can be made. eological choices, therefore, remain open to further discernment, in ever new circumstances.

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eology is a history of choices that are narratively communicated constituting communities that pursue the critical reappropriation of theological issues in ever new circumstances and contexts. In a community not everyone will agree on the choices made, but the road to a decision becomes common history in shared consolation, even when disagreements continue to exist. Shared consolation does not require unanimity of opinion. e need arises, as in common discernment not all agree, for institutionalized decision-making mechanisms. Superiors in religious communities are an example as well as hierarchical Church structures. Of course, such decision mechanisms also require discernment and evaluation. Discernment processes are historical and narrated so as to include the future generations in the dynamics of theological decision-making. Chantal Mouffe emphasizes the importance of agonistic pluralism as a prime characteristic of politics. is is true also for theology and in church communities. eological discernment is not in the first place a specialized ‘technique’ (as procedures or algorithms) for decision-making in specific circumstances, although such techniques, of course, prove helpful. It is also a spiritual contribution informing our human and intellectual quest in the emphasis on reality’s interconnectedness in its relation to God. It reaches out to community in the deep conversation with others who with us question the motives, reasons, interests, feelings… that determine our ways of deciding, also in theology. Such discernment is always common also as it moves us into the complex web of destiny in which we are entangled and out of which arise new relationships that allow us to deepen our capacity to discern. eology requires the contact with the community of destiny, in which the poor occupy a privileged place as responsible subjects. is ever-expanding community of co-belonging has a history expressed in traditions that determine us. Discernment requires the art of consoling encounter and communication. eologies that do not sufficiently communicate and do not expose themselves to possible criticism are desolate, lost in themselves. ey lack the indifference that allows one to go to the core of the issues by entering relations that allow for unexpected or unsettling complexities to surface. eology, therefore, is a heuristic, rather than a hermeneutic process: it is a journey on which we encounter a rich tradition of narratives to be explored by entangling them with our own experiences into an open, rich, and future prone adventure in the midst of the world.21

21

Jacques Haers, Het avontuur van de traditie (Averbode: Altiora, 1999).

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Discernment, indeed, produces history and invites narrativity. Discerning theology constitutes an adventure of individual theologians and of the Church as a whole. We emphasize, therefore, the importance of the history of theology and of ecclesial narratives. ey provide support or challenge for theological imagination: choices have been made and are being made that shape communities. ey constitute traditions, that become interlocutors in future histories of common discernment. A last remark is in place for discerning theology: as a process of common discernment, it calls for reconciliation. Indeed, theology as discernment remains a risky adventure: we share novel ideas or insights, that must be explored critically. ere will be mistakes, sometimes with profound and dire consequences. eologies may lead to injustice towards others; they may sharpen prejudices. Some of us may have been carried away by unwarranted enthusiasm, by fears, by the profound desire to impress on others our own ideas, by pride, by clericalism, … Many dark interests and motives may infect theological debate and cause harm. Can we learn from mistakes made and pains suffered? So, discernment in common is also the effort at reconciliation amongst one another, with the world as creation, and ultimately with God. Hopefully, in view of the Kingdom vision, reconciliation may offer a fertile ground. Discernment in common is a reconciling endeavor, as reconciliation is a form of common discernment. Praxes of restorative justice may prove insightful to sustain ecclesial reconciliation processes. 3. Conclusions In the perspective proposed in this contribution, theology grows as processes of common discernment in the Church where the faithful, theologians, institutions, and traditions interact in creative, critical, constructive ways, articulating the foundational relationship of creation with God. ose processes build up and shape the Church. eological conversations do not only concern relational faith content and technical theological matters, but also the motives and concerns that inhabit theologians and church communities: they build history as narratives in which future generations become critically and creatively entangled. Discernment is a delicate and risky endeavor, as our conversations about God and our Spirit-inspired lives remain dependent upon our human contexts, languages, experiences, and relations. ey are always tainted by our prejudices, fears, and angers, … Learning about God is always a confrontation with ourselves, our inner beauty and ugliness, our frailties and vulnerabilities, our weaknesses and sinfulness. To enter this

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confrontation with and amongst ourselves, we need the ‘safe’ space of friendship where we encounter the other with whom we explore our theological ideas in real and engaging conversations. Such discerning journeys amongst friends are crucial to the practice of theology. e quality of the bonds created in and creating the community and the consoling creativity of theological ideas are intimately linked and constitute the driving challenge for this essay in which I outlined the importance of common ecclesiogenetic discernment as a core theological method. I invite my readers to engage in a research program to investigate the entanglement between the practice of theology and common ecclesiogenetic discernment. Support for these views can be found in Pope Francis’ ideas on synodality, but also in the crucial deep relational structure of reality and of core theological ideas. For common ecclesiogenetic discernment as a method also sustains the building of the Church towards the Kingdom. I hope to pursue these ideas in the company of Terry.

32 Kenotic Solidarity in a Splinterizing World A Balthasarian Response to the Polarization of Contemporary Society Robert Aaron Wessman

How do theologians resist the temptation to remain in the comfort of the ersatz ‘ivory tower’ of the academy, pontificating to the world from their Christian presuppositions, even though it might quite surely be the case that the ‘world’ is not likely to be listening?1 Towards the end of Terrence Merrigan’s professorial career, as he oen told me, this was a question that haunted him more frequently.2 In addition to being unable to ‘exorcise’ the ghosts of this haunting, Merrigan’s love for the Christian tradition and a desire to articulate critically this tradition to others, motivated this systematic theologian to focus his research more on the subject of faith and culture in general, and the study of secularization in particular.3 As the Western context of this celebrated Newman scholar became increasingly ‘secular’,4 he desired to understand these changes, not only 1

See Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 285-294. 2 I had the privilege to work with Professor Merrigan on my graduate research. I am indebted to him for his guidance, expertise, and support. 3 Terrence Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject: A Newmanian Perspective on Religion in Contemporary Society,” in A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, ed. Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers (Washington, DC: e Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015), 179-208. 4 Taylor defines ‘secular’, when referring to a ‘secular age’, as a change in the ‘conditions of belief’, brought about, in part, by the particular background or culture (what Taylor calls a ‘social imaginary’) which exist in a particular society, such that people can make a choice to believe or not to believe in God, where belief in God is contested and no longer axiomatic. is changing social imaginary can affect people such that the result is oen a decline in belief in God, and the practices associated with this belief. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), especially 1-22.

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in order to teach them and discuss them with his students, but also more importantly, it seems, for his own theological pursuits and personal spiritual journey. e present essay is an attempt to follow Merrigan on his journey to understand the changing Western world. e first section of this essay explores what I call the ‘splinterization’ of Western culture, and how this splinterization tends to affect human beings as individuals and society in general. I will elaborate on what I mean by ‘splinterization’ throughout this essay. For introductory purposes, suffice it to say that ‘splinterizing’ involves the rapid intensification of multiform (i.e., pluralized) polarization in the Western context. As will be shown, this notion of splinterization mirrors and expands upon aspects of Merrigan’s own work, especially in his exploration of what he calls the ‘exile’ of the ‘religious subject’ in a ‘secular age’.5 While the first part of this essay is an homage to Professor Merrigan’s interest in the theme of secularization, the second part addresses another reality that colors this Leuven professor’s life: the study of the theology concerning Jesus Christ and its implications for human beings.6 Rather than risk the fate of some theologians to the ‘red pen’ of Merrigan’s sharpened theological insights (a fate, when I was his student, that was oen my own), this section will seek to appropriate his advice. I will attempt to avoid ‘pruning the particularity’ of Christ, and will suggest that it is actually ‘saving’ this particularity, that is, focusing on the uniqueness of Jesus, especially the kenotic movement of his incarnation, which can provide insights into how to approach some of the challenges posed by the splinterization of culture.7 In order to briefly explore some of these christological insights, I will use the work of Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), whose research I had the privilege to study under the careful guidance of Professor Merrigan. As will become more apparent, von Balthasar’s theology is apt for this conversa-

5

See Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 212-219. See, for instance, Terrence Merrigan, ‘“For Us and for Our Salvation’: e Notion of Salvation History in the Contemporary eology of Religions,” Irish Theological Quarterly 64 (1999): 339-348; id., “Saving the Particular: Incarnation and the Mediation of Salvation in the eology of Religions,” in Orthodoxy, Process and Product, ed. Mathijs Lamberigts, Lieven Boeve, and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 227 (Louvain, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 299-322; also id., “Religious Pluralism and Dominus Iesus,” Sacred Heart University Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 63-79. 7 On ‘pruning the particularity’ of Christ, see Merrigan, “Saving the Particular,” especially 303-321. 6

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tion, as he was a christocentric theologian and well aware of the challenges posed by ‘secularization’.8 1. The Self in a Splinterizing World In Merrigan’s own study of secularization, he follows the research of Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow, among others, looking specifically at the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘selood’ in a ‘secular age’. As Merrigan notes, using Taylor’s work, “our age is characterized by the quest for ‘selfhood’, understood as an expression of ‘the moral ideal of being true to oneself, in a specifically modern understanding of that term’.”9 is quest, for those who choose to embark upon it, is undertaken by being “faithful to the impulses of one’s inner life” and by engaging the “accumulated wisdom (oen identified as ‘tradition’) of those who have undertaken a similar quest in other times and contexts” with the ultimate goal of ‘authenticity’.10 In other words, the ‘quest’ for ‘selood’ combines interior ‘searching’ and ‘negotiating’ of experiences, and exterior engagement with other individuals, groups or traditions, which can provide insights into how to navigate such ‘quests’, so as to assist the individual in achieving some kind of ‘integration’. Merrigan seems somewhat skeptical as to whether this quest, undertaken in a ‘secular age’, will easily result in the sought aer authenticity or integration, which are the prized trophies of individuals in search of ‘selood’.11 He states that, in some cases, the ‘self’ on the quest has become somewhat “‘problematic’, because it has been unmoored from its anchoring in tradition” and thus is “by no means a stable entity.”12 Furthermore, Merrigan wonders how, as life experiences multiply 8 See Carolyn Chau, Solidarity with the World: Charles Taylor and Hans Urs von Balthasar on Faith, Modernity, and Catholic Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016); David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996); Robert Aaron Wessman, “What Are the Options for Authentic Identity-Discernment in a Secular Age?,” Church Life Journal, December 5, 2017, http://churchlife.nd.edu/2017/12/05/what-are-the-options-for-discerningidentity-in-asecular-age/ [accessed July 15, 2020]. 9 See Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 193-194. Merrigan is quoting Charles Taylor. See The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 15. 10 Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject,” 194. Merrigan is using the research of Taylor. See The Ethics of Authenticity, 26. 11 Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject,” 195. 12 Ibid.

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exponentially, “the tension between an identifiable self and self that is ‘as scattered’ as the varieties of religious experience [or any other experience for that matter], is to be resolved.”13 Merrigan defers to Wuthnow’s research, which suggests that an ‘affinity’ can be achieved between external experiences and the internal, identifiable self-in-quest.14 However, Merrigan’s project, as he repurposes the thought of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), is to suggest, through Newman’s nineteenth-century insights, that the prospect of integration will not be easy to achieve for people in the contemporary period. e experience of the self in a secular age might rather be accurately described as a kind of ‘exile’.15 It is my contention that Merrigan’s intuition is justified and that the very nature of the ‘splinterized’ world in which Western human beings find themselves can leave individuals somewhat wounded and vulnerable, struggling to know the identifiable self, and struggling to integrate the various experiences of life. To support this claim, it is necessary to describe the two interrelated ways in which I refer to the concept ‘self’, so as to suggest how ‘splinterizing’ culture affects the ‘self’, and how, as I will explore, the ‘wounded’ self in turn can contribute to ‘splinterization’.16 One way of understanding the concept ‘self’ is that it has to do with one’s knowledge of one’s identity.17 It is what one comes to recognize and understand, through the myriad experiences of one’s life, as the values and principles to which one consciously or unconsciously adheres; the memories one has and what they mean; the history one has lived and sought to integrate; and the insights of who one is at the most fundamental level – i.e., flowing from one’s nature. e notion of one’s self is oen formed by, among other things, one’s family, country of origin, friends, religion and education, and the overall ‘social imaginary’ in which a person lives.18 e

13

Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject,” 196. See ibid. See also Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 167. 15 See Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 214-219. 16 In this way, culture affects human beings, just as those effects, working in a human being, can influence her in supporting the very structures she is living in. 17 See, for instance, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. I: Prolegomena, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988), 481-648, especially 481-487; Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). 18 On the subject of ‘social imaginary’, see Taylor, A Secular Age, 171. 14

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identity of the self is what is referred to in answering the enduring philosophical question “who am I?”19 e concept ‘self’ also refers, in an interrelated way, to what philosopher E. F. Schumacher calls the center of freedom or agency in a person from which she engages the world.20 When a person says ‘I’ love or ‘I’ believe, it is this ‘I’ – that is, this center – from which one approaches life, that can rightly be referred to as the ‘self’. It is this ‘self’ that, as Schumacher argues, requires at least a modicum of integration in order for human beings to actualize free agency, and respond to the world around them.21 Ideally, growth in one’s identity is a lifelong process, allowing one gradually to secure a center of freedom so as to become a singular subject acting in and dealing with the world. Schumacher calls this a process of ‘integration’, which is “the creation of a center of unity, a center of strength and freedom, so that the being ceases to be a mere object, acted upon by outside forces, and becomes a subject, acting from its own ‘inner space’ into the space outside itself.”22 It is both knowledge and integration of the self that splinterizing culture tends to impede. In this way the self becomes itself splinterized, pulled in many directions by the various, somewhat disconnected experiences of life, seeking almost exclusively on its own to integrate the experiences of life, while being somewhat unsupported by stable structures that provide for a more secure identity. ese impediments are the result of a long historical process. Outlining this process casts at least some light on the culture of the Western world. Over the past 500 years, 23 Western human beings have grown in understanding themselves as free, ‘autonomous’ individuals.24 In the 19

See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 481-490. See Ernst F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 26-38. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Ibid., 31. 23 It might seem academically lazy to trace cultural changes in the Western world over a 500-year period in the context of two paragraphs. However, a significant body of research exists offering greater detail to this story than can be presented here. See, for instance, Taylor, A Secular Age; Fukuyama, Identity; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin Books, 2015); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). 24 See Siedentop, Inventing the Individual. 20

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practice of this freedom, human beings operated within a kind of ‘sacred canopy’, which included a shared religious system. ey operated within various forms of community and within a particular understanding of nature, all of which set forth certain ‘limits’ or ‘parameters’ for practicing one’s freedom, and thus promoted somewhat more stable identities within individuals.25 is newfound freedom, however, practiced within a multiplicity of other cultural changes that took place,26 allowed human beings to ‘detach’ or ‘buffer’ themselves from sources of identity, including, in some cases, at least from Christian presuppositions, the very source of all freedom and identity, God.27 Coupled with the disembedding of the individual from these structures was the simultaneous weakening of identity-forming structures through a complicated and complex series of events all falling under what Taylor describes as the ‘Reform Master Narrative’ or by what, similarly, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman refers to as a kind of ‘liquidation’ of identity-forming structures.28 Emboldened by a newfound freedom, secured through ‘disembedding’, Western humanity – sometimes intentionally and sometimes not – sought to reform, and, in some cases, began ‘tearing down’ identity-reinforcing structures.29 At least three consequences of this historical development shaped contours of the present ‘splinterized’ culture of the West.30 First, while in the past family, tribe, land, the economy, nature, culture, technology, and religion were generally identity-reinforcing structures (even though sometimes rightly or wrongly considered debilitating),

25

On this point see, for instance, Fukuyama, Identity, 35, 50-58, 63-68; Taylor, A Secular Age, 25-37. 26 ough it goes beyond the confines of this essay, other important themes to cover are the ‘pluralization’ of cultural forms within society, the overall ‘disenchantment’ of the world, or the effects of the Protestant Reformation on secular culture. 27 On the ‘buffered self’, see Taylor, A Secular Age, 37-41. On the ability to ‘detach’ or ‘buffer’ oneself from over-reliance on God, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, trans. D.  C. Schindler (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2004), especially 31-50; id., Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. II: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1990), 335-429. 28 See Bauman, Liquid Modernity, especially at viii. See Taylor, A Secular Age, 90-158, 773-776. 29 On this point, see Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (London: Harper Perennial, 2005). 30 On ‘imbedding’ and ‘disembedding’ see Taylor, A Secular Age, 146-158.

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today these structures do not serve the same function they once did. ese previously stable structures have been weakened and, in some cases, no longer provide the grounds for formation and integration of one’s identity. Sometimes they even serve to inhibit the pursuit of one’s identity.31 Second, just as these structures were ‘liquidated’, a multitudinous retinue of cultural options took their place. e singular ‘sacred canopy’, for instance, was replaced by a plethora of religious options. Political systems multiplied. Opportunities for making a living increased and oen required mobility in order for them to be secured. Life experiences in general multiplied exponentially, facilitated by new technologies and an increasingly globalized world.32 Finally, although in many cases those who intentionally sought to ‘reform’ or ‘liquidate’ cultural structures desired to ensure greater freedom and autonomy, what actually seems to have resulted, especially for the poor and underclasses of society, is a kind of quasi-Edenic experience of expulsion and exile: contemporary human beings are somewhat le on their own, exposed and fragile, forced to ‘discover’ or ‘invent’ who they are, separated from the very things that are the reason for their existence and give meaning and dignity to their lives.33 Of course, it is possible for individuals to form an identity and acquire a sense of ‘self’ from the multifarious experiences and choices available in their lives. As

31

One example of this ‘weakening’ relates to the nuclear family. See Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2013). See also Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015). For more on ‘political’ realities, see Bauman, Liquid Modernity, vii-viii. For more on the economy, see Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 53-90. For more on the theme of ‘technology’, see Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers are Changing Us (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014). 32 Taylor refers to the rapid growth of cultural ‘options’ as ‘fragilization’. For more on Taylor’s description of fragilization and pluralization, see Ruth Abbey, “eorizing Secularity 3: Authenticity, Ontology, Fragilization,” in Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, ed. Carlos D. Colorado and Justin D. Klassen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 98-124. See also Taylor, A Secular Age, 304; Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 42-44. 33 On this point, see R. R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society (Washington, DC: Regnery Faith, 2016), 9-20; also Bauman, Liquid Modernity, xvii, 20-22.

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research suggests, many individuals are capable of this.34 However, this process of ‘individualization’, as Bauman calls it (that is, the process of piecing together one’s identity without the support of structures, institutions, or even other human beings), is a strikingly difficult task – and, for some, an insurmountable one – oentimes leaving the most vulnerable in society struggling to make sense of their existence.35 Commenting on this cultural shi, political scientist Francis Fukuyama states: “the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice [in the contemporary, Western context]. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is.”36 If the previous analysis sufficiently captures some of the cultural markers of Western society, then it seems that Merrigan’s intuition is correct that for a growing number of people in the Western world, contemporary culture – what I call ‘splinterized culture’ – seems to impede growth and knowledge of one’s identity. If this is the case, the necessary integration of the self, which Schumacher deems essential for growth as a free subject, is also impeded. What is more (and this will be the theme of the next section), the struggle to secure one’s identity – and the oentimes existent vulnerability this situation can create – is causing, in some cases, resentment in people as well as increasing polarization in society.37 2. Splinterizing Communities in Contemporary Society In Merrigan’s research on culture and secularization, he notes that those seeking for ‘selood’ in the midst of the changing, contemporary Western world will likely require community and communitarian traditions to support their quest. As he states: “the future, for the religious subject le to himself, is rather bleak, and the need for community makes itself felt.”38 is section will suggest that Merrigan’s insight regarding the need for community is well founded for those who desire ‘selood’ today. Going beyond offering further support of Merrigan’s research, this

34

Merrigan highlights this point in his own research. See “e Exile of the Religious,” 196-200. See also Wuthnow, After Heaven; Wuthnow, After the Baby, especially 13-14. 35 See Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 7-8, 32. 36 See Fukuyama, Identity, 56. 37 Ibid., especially ix-xvii. 38 See Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 215.

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section will explore how the communities that people want to shape or join, are themselves affected by and contributing to the splinterization of culture. As will be shown, this splinterization manifests itself in reference to the sometimes strained interaction between various communities with different meta-narratives, and through the organization of these communities within society. As mentioned above, the Western world has undergone the process of ‘reform’ and ‘liquidation’ over the past 500 years, which has resulted in the weakening or disappearance of many identity-forming and sustaining structures.39 e disappearance of identity-forming structures and the somewhat endless quest for identity oen leave individuals exposed and vulnerable.40 For many people, their experience of vulnerability or insecurity motivates them to join pre-existing groups or communities in the process of forming their identity, or to form new groups or social units in order to secure their identity and stability in life. As Fukuyama states, for some people “[t]he crisis of identity leads […] to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon.”41 As more people unite to form communities or groups to secure their identity, the result is the emergence of a multiplicity of different communal identities within society.42 is result is different from previous historical periods, when competing groups in society were fewer in number and homogeneity, rather than increased diversity, was the norm.43 is social phenomenon (i.e., the emergence of a plethora of communal identities) poses certain challenges in contemporary society, and these define aspects of splinterizing culture. To begin with, there is the challenge related to the specific selfidentification of the various groups within society and how others, who 39

See Fukuyama, Identity, 63-65. For more on the issue of ‘vulnerability’ as it relates to identity, see Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Avery, 2015). 41 Fukuyama, Identity, 56. 42 Ibid., 105-123. Fukuyama lists many different communities that emerged, especially since the 1960s, which were organized around a particular identity, such as the ‘feminist movement’, Native Americans, immigrants, gays, lesbians, Blacks, transgender people, etc. It is not that these people did not exist in different historical moments. e point is that, at least according to Fukuyama, the contemporary need for communal support, and public recognition (which will be explored below), did not exist as strongly in previous historical periods in the West. 43 See Taylor, A Secular Age, 1-41. 40

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are not part of that community, relate to the group. As can be expected, each of these communal identities is formed around a particular, though fluid, narrative or meta-narrative. ese narratives incorporate a specific self-understanding, including the commonalities that bond the group, and expectations of how others should respond to or respect, the community’s existence.44 ese narratives also contain ways of thinking, i.e., versions of enquiry, which include principles, ways of arguing, assumptions about truth or the demonstration of truth, and community-specific ‘language games’, somewhat inaccessible or deemed inaccessible to the outsider, who has no first-hand experience of being part of the group.45 ese narratives oen emerge somewhat independently of the narratives of other groups with, in many cases minimal overlap. ere is nothing inherently problematic in forming communities with people for whom commonalities exist, or in defining a particular ‘identity’ for a group of people. As Fukuyama states, the formation of these communal identities is a logical response to contemporary Western culture.46 Moreover, the narratives, which form communal identities, will necessarily contain diversity and reflect people’s personal experience.47 Historically, this kind of diversity has been understood as one of the hallmarks of Western culture.48 What is different about the present moment, however, is that these emerging narratives are becoming what some would call untranslatable or incommensurable.49 In other words, it is not only a challenge to find common ground, it is even difficult to find similar vocabulary or agreed upon ways of conversing in order to start

44 Fukuyama outlines the various ways in which communal groups seek to define themselves. He notes that it is oen the case that groups define themselves in contrast to society’s norms, or the general way in which society might perceive the group. In other words, it is important for people, who form communal identities, to be responsible for shaping and determining their own identity, rather than having this identity determined by ‘outsiders’. See Identity, 107-116. 45 See, for instance, Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition: Being Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). For an introduction to the concept of ‘language games’, see Anthony C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 78-89. See also Fukuyama, Identity, 108-111. 46 See Fukuyama, Identity, 114-115. 47 See ibid., 115. 48 See, for instance, Reno, Resurrecting the Idea, 9-37. 49 See MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 1-8.

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exploring common ground.50 Moreover, an increasing intensity accompanies the emerging intransigence in which human beings take their positions or defend their identity, on account of the fragility they experience and on account of the homogeneity of the groups of which they are a part.51 is rigidity oen manifests itself in a kind of inhospitable approach towards the other, or worse, a hatred or resentment towards the other.52 Resentment grows when a community feels ostracized, forgotten, or abused by other communities, particularly by those in power.53 Certainly, not all forms of community will approach the ‘other’ in a defensive or hostile way. Many communal identities are formed around virtues or quasi-virtuous principles and goals that enshrine a posture of hospitality towards the other, and which seek to support the dignity of a particular group of people that oentimes has been neglected by others.54 However, there is no guarantee that the so-called ‘other’ will extend the same kind of good will or desire for understanding, which many groups seek to enshrine in society. Sometimes the very assumption of the possibility of understanding is denied. 55 What can result are countless encounters of rejection that sometimes leave even the most gracious dialogue partner exhausted by the effort, wounded in the attempt to approach the other in vulnerability, and desiring to ensure these exchanges are not repeated.56 is latter point leads to another challenge: splinterized geographical and meta-geographical organization of communities. One of the ways human beings try to ensure the ‘safety’ of their communities, or to bolster their own communal identity, is by geographical

50

On this point, see Murray, Coming Apart, 293-294. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston, MA and New York: Mariner Books, 2009), 58-77. See also Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012); Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020). 52 See Fukuyama, Identity, 7. 53 See ibid., 122. One of the main themes of Fukuyama’s research is the ‘politics of resentment’. It is beyond the scope of this essay to investigate this theme thoroughly. See Identity, 7. See also Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018). 54 On this point, see Fukuyama, Identity, 115. 55 Ibid., 108-112. 56 For a helpful discourse on the ‘psychology of the tribe’, see Bishop, The Big Sort, 58-77. 51

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or meta-geographical organization.57 Simply put, many people, in the Western world in general, and in the United States in particular, increasingly choose to organize their lives almost exclusively around likeminded people, oen from similar social, economic, or moral classes, such that these arrangements offer little opportunity or motivation for interaction between various communities with diverging principles, values, or narratives.58 Reflecting on the situation in the United States, journalist Bill Bishop notes that over the last three decades “Americans were forming tribes, not only in their neighborhoods but also in churches and volunteer groups. at’s not the way people would describe what they were doing, but in every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations.”59 For instance, these enclaves are sometimes physically barricaded through gated communities or gentrified areas – existentially barricaded, on account of a growing sense of resentment towards the other; or virtually barricaded, through the ‘friends’ people follow on social media.60 From the research above, Merrigan seems justified in suggesting that people seeking ‘selood’ in the contemporary period will not only seek out groups or communities for support, they will likely require the assistance offered by these communities. What seems to be the case, however, is that splinterization not only affects individuals, but also the very groups they seek out. e splinterization of society seems to intensify as groups organize around somewhat inaccessible ‘identities’ or even more inaccessible enclaves. e tension between groups struggling to interact with each other in any meaningful way colors the splinterized canvas of many Western contexts. Given these challenges, an obvious question emerges for theologians: What, if anything, does the Church in general, or theology in particular, have to offer, that might shed light on some of the struggles in contemporary society? is question is taken up in the following section.

57

On this phenomenon, occurring in the United States, see Bishop, The Big Sort. For research on this occurrence in European countries, see Tiit Tammaru et al., Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities: East Meets West (New York: Routledge, 2016). 58 See Bishop, The Big Sort, 5. See also Murray, Coming Apart, 105. 59 See Bishop, The Big Sort, 6. 60 On polarization in relationship to electronic media, see ibid., 74-75.

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3. The Church in a Splinterizing World In Merrigan’s research on secularization, he briefly addresses the role that the Church can play in contemporary society. For those people who pursue ‘selood’ and who have an interest in seeking the guidance of traditional forms of community, the Church, Merrigan notes, should “endeavour to tap into, and engage with, their [i.e., those on a quest for ‘selood’] spiritual aspirations and to allow itself to be challenged by them.”61 Merrigan is aware that the Church, like other groups in contemporary society, oen struggles to remain open to the outsider, and that the Church sometimes even finds itself in a kind of ‘self-imposed’ “exile from the people it is called to serve.”62 In this regard, Merrigan’s insights are supported by research suggesting that Christians themselves are affected by, and contribute to, the challenges present in secular culture, including the splinterization of culture described above.63 e final section of this essay will expand upon Merrigan’s insights into the need for the Church in general, and theologians in particular, to engage with others struggling to form their identity in a secular age. Drawing upon aspects of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s christological analysis, two themes will be presented. First, it will be proposed that the question of ‘identity’ has a fundamental christological component. is christological component provides insight into the quest for identity that many people are pursuing in the present era. Second, it will be suggested that Christ’s kenotic solidarity in the world can serve as a guiding principle in the Church’s practice of engaging a splinterizing milieu. 1. The Self in Christ: A Christological Proposal to the Question of Identity Writing throughout much of the twentieth century, von Balthasar was keenly aware that the question of identity was a concern of contemporary human beings.64 In his research, he approaches the ‘question of the self’

61

Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 219. Ibid. 63 On the challenges facing the Church in splinterizing culture, see Benjamin T. Peters and Nicholas Rademacher, ed., American Catholicism in the 21st Century: Crossroads, Crisis, or Renewal? (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017). See also Mary Ellen Konieczny et al., eds., Polarization in the US Catholic Church: Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016). 64 e following section reflects previous research of mine. See Wessman, “What Are the Options?” 62

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by surveying Western thought, and suggests that this question is not only a present concern, but also one that was taken up, in different ways, by the ancient Greeks and the Church fathers, and continues to be researched by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers.65 Von Balthasar applauds all of these responses and highlights their important contributions.66 For his part, he discerns two challenges that need to be addressed. On the one hand, there is the problem of contingency. Human beings can comprehend their identity (in many of the ways already discussed in this essay) through their family, birthplace, education, philosophical and religious pursuits, or through their friendships with others.67 Yet, according to von Balthasar, these are all at some level contingent and only partially determinative of one’s identity. Even if one were to multiply as many of these experiences as possible, which is not uncommon for certain spiritual ‘quests’ in the contemporary period, one would still wonder if having just one more experience, or knowing just one more person, might not lead to a richer, more robust understanding of one’s identity.68 As von Balthasar states: “is individual, under different conditions, could have become quite a different subject.”69 On the other hand, there is the predicament of perspective.70 If a person, desiring to know her identity, begins to investigate her ‘interior’ self, a conundrum exists. According to the Swiss theologian, the self realizes that it cannot gain a full perspective on itself because it is the very ‘self’ that does the investigation, and it does not have the ability to stand ‘outside’ of itself to gain an exhaustive all-encompassing perspective.71 In encountering this enigma, human beings oen look for a more humandialogical method in order to gain a richer perspective.72 But even the discovery of who an individual is to another person, as insightful and meaningful as this can be, is still contingent and incomplete in von 65

See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 487-589. Ibid., 645. 67 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. III: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992), 204-205. 68 See Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 195-199. See also Robert Aaron Wessman, “e Church’s Witness in a Secular Age: A Hauerwasian Response to Privatized Religion,” Missiology 45 (2017): 56-66. 69 Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III, 205. On this point, see also Robert Aaron Wessman, ‘“Who am I?’ – Westworld, Identity, and the Church’s Engagement with the ‘Real’ World,” March, 2017, https://theo.kuleuven.be/en/research/goa/ goa-blog-page#Wessman [accessed July 15, 2020]. 70 Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 481-491. 71 Ibid., 484. 72 Ibid., 626-643. See also Theo-Drama III, 205-208. 66

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Balthasar’s estimation. e perspective of another human being does not fully define who one actually is, and this perspective itself is limited and subject to change.73 erefore, one’s identity, whether discerned through a kind of introspection or through a human-dialogical process, is still not fully secure. Is there a way to arrive at a more secure identity in one’s life, or will every quest disappoint? Certainly, the process of discerning one’s identity is lifelong and in many ways affected by the vicissitudes of life. According to von Balthasar, however, the question regarding one’s identity can be more fully uncovered through theological insights.74 Plumbing the depths of christological thought, von Balthasar explains that Jesus identified himself completely with his relationship to the Father and, in this case, in the sense of mission. Jesus’ unique identity as the Son of God who ‘comes’ from the Father is one with his mission or purpose to be sent into the world. As von Balthasar states: “Jesus experiences his human consciousness [i.e., the awareness of his identity] entirely in terms of mission. e Father has commissioned him, in the Holy Spirit, to reveal God’s nature and his disposition toward man.”75 In other words, as Balthasarian scholar Karen Kilby aptly writes: “Jesus does not just have a mission – he is the mission.”76 In an analogous sense, von Balthasar argues that for human beings the most intimate and fundamental aspect of who we are – the most intimate part of our identity – can only be understood in and come from God. As he writes: It is when God addresses a conscious subject, tells him who he is and what he means to the eternal God of truth and shows him the purpose of his existence – that is, imparts a distinctive and divinely authorized mission – that we can say of a conscious subject that he is a ‘person’. is is what happened, archetypically, in the case of Jesus Christ, when he was given his eternal ‘definition’ – ‘You are my beloved Son’.77 73

Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III, 205. For an extensive overview of this theme, see von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 626-648; Theo-Drama III, 149-282. 75 See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III, 224. 76 Karen Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 96 (emphasis original). One could say that everything that Jesus does is indicative of his identity, such that his identity can be interpreted through what he does. is is different for human beings, who only gradually receive (become aware of) their mission throughout life. erefore, they must grow in their identity a posteriori. See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III, 207-208. 77 See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III, 207. By using the term ‘person’, von Balthasar’s analysis echoes that of Schumacher’s above. Von Balthasar is not saying that people who have not appropriated a mission in Christ are not 74

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In other words, one’s quest for ‘selood’ relies significantly on a revealed gi from God in the form of a divinely inspired mission. If von Balthasar’s analysis is correct, his thought supports Merrigan’s plea for the Church to engage with and learn from the multitude of people struggling to secure their identity in a secular, splinterized world. On the one hand, it seems that the Church’s task is to find ways to assist Christians themselves who, as research suggests, are struggling to secure their identity-in-Christ in the midst of splinterized cultural forces.78 On the other hand, the Church finds itself in a privileged, yet humble position. If it is the case, as described above, that splinterized culture severely impedes the search for identity, oen leaving people feeling vulnerable and uncertain, Christians should be the first to recognize how serious this vulnerability actually is. For it is not only the struggle to piece one’s identity together in the midst of splinterized culture that presents challenges for people, it is that many people ultimately are unaware that their search for identity can only find its fulfillment in Christ. is realization by the Church is by no means triumphalistic, but seems to invite a deepened intensity by which the Church should seek ways to share the gi of identity-in-Christ with others.79 For those who, at least inchoately, have ‘found’ their identity in Christ, this means that they have been given and appropriated, however indeterminately, a mission to be lived in and for the world. How Christians might consider approaching the world through their mission is the subject of the final section of this essay. 2. Kenotic Solidarity in a Splinterizing World roughout von Balthasar’s theological career, he was concerned with recasting the vision the Church maintained in reference to the ‘world’.80

‘persons’. Oentimes, he uses the distinction ‘theological-persons’ to refer to those who have appropriated a mission in Jesus. 78 See, for instance, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Christian Smith et al., Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults in, Out of, and Gone from the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 79 For more on this point, see Wessman, “What Are the Options?” 80 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “e Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio 24 (Summer 1997): 347-396; Razing the Bastions: On the Church in

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Reflecting on ecclesial history, he discerned that the Church was still operating out of an antiquated view of the Church as a fortress.81 Under this ecclesial vision, the Church oen fell into the trap, not unlike what Merrigan hints at in his own research, of choosing a self-imposed separation (exile) from the world behind stalwart, somewhat impregnable bastions.82 It is not that the Church did not understand that it had a missionary calling. According to von Balthasar, however, Christians in many parts of the West did not perceive the need to reach out to unbelievers because they (the Christians) were content remaining in the safe confines of the fortress.83 Or, if Christians did appropriate their missionary calling, mission was understood as defensively extending the walls of the fortress to bring the world under the confines of the Church.84 Clearly, the missionary history of the Church is filled with nuance and complexity.85 For von Balthasar this ‘fortress mentality’ emerges as a vestige of the past, with which the Church, even in the contemporary period, cannot seem to part, and which impedes the Church from sufficiently living out its missionary calling.86 Von Balthasar, in attempting to recast the missionary vision of the Church, focuses his theological reflection on the uniqueness of Christ’s kenotic movement of solidarity in the world.87 It is in this kenotic movement that, according to von Balthasar, the Church can find the ‘form’ of all mission in the world. One of the central themes of von Balthasar’s missiological vision of solidarity, garnered by reflection on Christ’s kenosis, is what might be called ‘crossing the threshold of dissimilarity’. As the Swiss theologian writes concerning the incarnation: God steps into this so very worldly world, so dissimilar to God, and claims it for himself, precisely in this worldliness and dissimilarity. e very feature that makes the world the world, its naturalness with all that this means – reasoning, logical thinking, free will, sympathetic feeling, the vitality and animality of man’s physicality, his emotions, pains and

This Age, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1993); id., Engagement with God: The Drama of Christian Discipleship, trans. R. John Halliburton (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2008). 81 Von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 47-70. 82 Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious,” 219. 83 Von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 31, 68-70. 84 See ibid., 47-48. 85 See, for instance, Stephan B. Bevans, and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). 86 Von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 48. 87 See ibid., 58-74.

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desires, in short the whole great bazaar of everyday life on earth – has been sought out by God as the place for his incarnation.88

Jesus’ mission is manifested in his willingness to cross the threshold of dissimilarity and to embrace it, in order to bring salvation within this dissimilarity. Christ’s kenotic solidarity is witnessed not only in the initial moment of his incarnation, where the Creator appropriates creation, but also throughout his entire ministry, where he embraces outcasts, dines with tax collectors and sinners, and moves into close contact with every aspect of the world.89 For von Balthasar, the apogee of Christ’s solidarity with the world is the cross. Here the dissimilarity of sin and strife is laid upon Jesus, when, breathing his last breath, he crosses the ultimate threshold and stands in solidarity with the dead. In this final moment, for the salvation of the world, the eternal God experiences the most profound dissimilarity, the sting of death.90 For von Balthasar, Christian mission involves living one’s unique, divinely gied mission-in-Christ, while imitating in an analogous way the kenotic movement of Jesus to cross the thresholds of dissimilarity and stand in solidarity with the world.91 Von Balthasar is well aware that this ‘movement’ of the Church will require Christians to cross over into the realm of uncertainty and vulnerability, as it intimately connects with dissimilarity.92 He also speaks of the potential danger that might exist for Christians who could possibly ‘lose’ their identity in Christ as they enter into the dissimilarities of the world.93 Nevertheless, for von Balthasar, the threat of losing one’s identity in Christ is just as real for the person who decides not to enter into solidarity with the world, thereby shirking her mission in life and not living in accordance with the identity Christ has gied her. For von Balthasar, Christian mission, modeled on Jesus and lived through kenotic solidarity, should usher in “an ever deeper and more serious incarnation”94 for the salvation of the world. It is only possible to conjecture how von Balthasar would have responded to the various challenges facing the Church today, over thirty

88 See von Balthasar, “e Fathers, the Scholastics and Ourselves,” 388 (emphasis original). 89 See von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 62-69. 90 See ibid., 66. 91 Ibid., 63. 92 Ibid., 79-82. 93 Ibid., 89-90. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, trans. Richard Beckley (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1994), 127-130. 94 Von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 71.

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years aer his death. However, it seems that von Balthasar’s notion of kenotic solidarity, if lived out in the world, might assist the Church to avoid what Merrigan refers to as its oentimes ‘self-imposed’ exile or separation from the world. In the face of an increasing number of splinterized communities in the Western world, von Balthasar would likely suggest that Christians are called to imitate Christ in crossing the thresholds of dissimilarity by entering into contact with these groups, whose communal identities may seem dissimilar or even difficult to understand. Furthermore, even as the dissimilarity that might be experienced by engaging with the other might seem threatening or that the ‘resentment’ encountered might be intimidating, von Balthasar would likely suggest that this is exactly where Christians are called to be. Christ took the risk to be vulnerable and enter into the world in order to embrace it: fully, completely, and totally, in view of bringing the world to a deeper experience of salvation. While more groups in society continue to be tempted to erect more-robust bastions to secure their identity, the Christian response, based on the kenotic solidarity that von Balthasar has suggested, can be potentially different. Christians can recognize that their identity is not to hide behind bastions, but rather to raze those bastions, crossing to the other side, in order to stand in kenotic solidarity with the world. 4. Conclusion is essay engaged Terrence Merrigan’s research on faith and culture. As a starting point, Merrigan’s insights into the challenge of secularization were analyzed and deepened by appealing to the cultural phenomenon of ‘splinterization’. One of the central claims of Merrigan’s research on secularization is that the Church ought to consider how to engage with many of the challenges people face in navigating the contours of secular society. With the help of the thought of von Balthasar, the potential nature of this engagement was explored. By focusing on the particularity of Christ, that is, on the unique manifestation of Jesus’ kenotic solidarity in the world, it was argued that the Church is not only in a unique position to offer christological insights to those seeking their identity, the Church is called to do this by entering into kenotic solidarity with the world, crossing the thresholds of dissimilarity, in order to offer to the world identity-in-Christ, i.e., a foretaste of salvation.

List of Contributors Wouter Biesbrouck, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is educational policy advisor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. Lieven Boeve is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. As of 2014 he is also Director-General of Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen, the Flemish Office for Catholic Education. Christopher Cimorelli, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is director of the National Institute for Newman Studies (Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America) and associate editor of the Newman Studies Journal. Francis Xavier Clooney S.J. is Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States of America. Raymond F. Collins is emeritus professor of New Testament, Catholic University of America. Till 1993 he was professor of New Testament at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He is a priest of the Diocese of Providence, RI, United States of America. Viorel Coman is senior postdoctoral researcher of the Research FoundationFlanders (FWO) at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. Leo Declerck † is the former vicar general of the Diocese of Bruges and free scientific collaborator of the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. Peter De Mey is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. Emmanuel Durand O.P., a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is adjunct professor of systematic theology at the Dominian University College of Ottawa (Carlton University) and lecturer at Fribourg University.

700

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Stephan van Erp is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. Jerry T. Farmer is the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Endowed Professor in eology at Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA, United States of America. Gabriel Flynn is associate professor of theology at the School of eology, Philosophy, and Music, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland. Joris Geldhof, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Pastoral and Empirical eology. Jeffrey C. K. Goh, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, together with his wife Angie runs a theological formation program for the laity in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Judith Gruber is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. Jacques Haers S.J. is emeritus professor of the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions – and parish priest of the University Parish, KU Leuven. Elizabeth J. Harris is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion, University of Birmingham, UK, and former president of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies. Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Honorary Professor, Faculty of eology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. James J. Kelly is emeritus professor, School of Religions and eology, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. Mathijs Lamberigts is emeritus professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of History of Church and eology. Dermot A. Lane is a priest of the Archdiocese of Dublin and the former president of the Mater Dei Institute of Education, Dublin City University, Ireland.

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701

Alexander Löffler S.J., a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is professor of fundamental theology at the Philosophisch-eologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt a. M., Germany. Declan Marmion S.M., a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is professor of systematic theology, St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland. Annemarie C. Mayer was till October 2021 professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. She was the main editor of Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs. Currently she is professor of systematic theology at the eologische Fakultät, Universität Trier, Germany. Andrew Meszaros, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is lecturer of systematic theology, St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland. Peter Nockles is an Honorary Research Fellow of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures: Religions & eology, e University of Manchester, UK. Nguyen i Tuong Oanh, Sr. Maria ZvMI, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan and a sister of the Zusters van Maria Ingelmunster, teaches at the Catholic Institute of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Gerald O’Collins S.J., is professor emeritus of the Gregorian University (Rome), writer in residence at the Jesuit eological College, Parkville, Australia, and adjunct professor of the Australian Catholic University. Herwi Rikhof is emeritus professor of systematic theology, Tilburg School of Catholic eology, Tilburg University. He is a priest of the Diocese of ’s Hertogenbosch, e Netherlands. Joseph A. Selling is emeritus professor of the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of eological and Comparative Ethics. Kristof Struys, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is professor at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven – Research Unit of Systematic eology and the Study of Religions. He is a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels.

702

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Beáta Tóth, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is professor of systematic theology, Sapientia College of Theology, Budapest, Hungary. Robert Aaron Wessman, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, is 1st Vice-President and Director of Education of Glenmary Home Missioners, Cincinnatti, OH, United States of America. Geertjan Zuijdwegt, a former doctoral student of professor Merrigan, has a part-time teaching position at the Faculty of eology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He also works at the Centre for Religion, Ethics, and Detention, housed at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC).