Benedict XVI and SOme Current Theology

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BENEDICT XVI AND SOME CURRENT THEOLOGY
Edward T. Oakes, SJ
In 1968 Joseph Ratzinger, then a professor at Regensburg, wrote a modestly sized treatise on the Apostles’ Creed called Introduction to Christianity. What made the book so remarkable was not just its deft use of the Apostles’ Creed to explain Christianity to the lay reader, or its acute analysis of unbelief and the secular mind. An even greater virtue of the book was the future Pope’s keen analysis of why the promising spirit of Vatican II failed to bring about a reunited Christianity and a re-Christianized Europe. According to his analysis, post-Enlightenment Christianity in Europe had been conned into adopting an evangelical strategy too superficial in its approach and too intimidated by Enlightened objections to Christian doctrine.

After Vatican II, we changed the language of the liturgy from Latin to the vernacular, called on nuns to modernize their habits, introduced guitars and folk music in the Church’s worship, addressed the modern world in tones of respect and hope, praised modernity for its achievements: the core of our message still seems absurd to the secular mind.

Anyone who has followed the path taken by Protestant theology in the past two centuries and by Catholic theology in the past four decades already knows that not all the changes in the world will matter if the messenger has squandered his treasure by altering his message to suit the convenience of the audience. For Ratzinger, creeds matter only if what they proclaim is true, and if Christians deep down don’t really think so, then all the translation strategies in the world will mean nothing:

The worried Christian of today is often bothered by questions like these: has our theology in the last few years not taken in many ways a similar path? Has it not gradually watered down the demands of faith, which had been found all too demanding, always only so little that nothing important seemed to be lost, yet always so much that it was soon possible to venture on to the next step?

In Europe and in many English-speaking countries overseas, we now have plummeting church attendance, and a secular culture grown aggressively anti-Christian. Little surprise there, for the Church now trumpets its gospel with a most uncertain tocsin. As the renowned historian of dogma Jaroslav Pelikan brutally observes in Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (the fifth volume of his five-volume history of The Christian Tradition), “the modern period in the history of Christian doctrine may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated for most of Christian history were themselves called into question: the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very transcendence of God.” Add to this mix doubts about the existence of hell and the need for the atoning death of Christ on the cross, then no wonder more and more struggling and confused believers say to themselves “why bother?” No wonder secular culture regards with such contempt the pathetic attempts of self-styled liberal believers to play catch-up ball with modern advances.

But perhaps the greatest harm done by this step-by-step sell-out is the damage Christians inflict on themselves by continuing to go to church while calling into question, secretly or openly, such central doctrines as the divinity of Christ and his atoning death. For when that happens, professions of faith become hollow and words are used without meaning them. In other words, Christians turn themselves into liars by showing up for church while hedging their bets even as they profess their faith. In one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, fittingly called “Unreal Words,” Newman gets at this point directly when he says:

To make professions is to play with edged tools, unless we attend to what we are saying. Words have a meaning, whether we mean that meaning or not; and they are imputed to us in their real meaning, when our not meaning it, is our own fault.

But what is true of individuals is even truer of the Church, for when ambivalence and equivocation take hold of the faithful in the very act of reciting the Creed, the Church will be choked off from the very graces it was founded to give to the world - again as Cardinal Newman, in that same sermon, foresaw:

And though we trust that the Church is nowhere thus utterly deserted by the Spirit of truth, at least according to God’s ordinary providence, yet may we not say that in proportion as it approaches to this state of deadness, the grace of its ordinances, though not forfeited, at least flows in but a scanty or uncertain stream?

A scanty, uncertain stream indeed! How else can we explain the dearth of vocations in the industrialized West, the empty churches in Europe, the abysmal ignorance of the faith among nominal Christians, the closing of Catholic schools in the United States and Canada, the notorious violation of their vows by some priests, even the very fact that the internal precincts of the Church have become one of the battlefields in the Culture Wars?

To my mind there really is no solution to this problem except one: the initial focus of evangelization must now be, for the foreseeable future, on Christians, at least in the West, which is becoming increasingly post-Christian and aggressively secular.

In the face of this dilemma, preaching must nowadays constantly stress precisely those elements of the gospel that best counteract the implied presuppositions of watered-down liberal Christianity. Above all, Christians must say forthrightly (to the world, to be sure, but above all to themselves) that when God sent his Son as the expression of his love for the world (John 3:16), he did so not to change the world, but to redeem it, something very different. In many monographs, the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus, is interpreted, both by biblical scholars (for example, John Dominic Crossan) and by theologians (most especially liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez), as a call to “transform the world,” “change sinful social structures,” “engage in social action,” and so forth. When read on their own terms, I admit these views can sound quite plausible; and I would never want to gainsay the contribution that Christians have made to the abolition of slavery, the banning of child labour, the amelioration of the harshness of industrial life, and other important fruits of the Social Gospel movement. Nor do I wish to call into question the social teachings of the Catholic Church from Leo XIII to John Paul II. But all these teachings and efforts belong, it is important to remember, to what Martin Luther called “the order of preservation” (that is, to the order of creation-after-the-Fall) and not, strictly speaking, to what he called the “order of redemption.”

While I have no intention of trying to get the reader to subscribe to every jot and tittle of Luther’s theology of the Two Kingdoms, the distinction he draws with this terminology is none the less an important one. Above all, Luther’s distinction helps us to avoid a huge theological blunder, one that the Austrian-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin pointed to, admittedly with a certain clumsiness of terminology, when he deplored the human longing that tries to ameliorate social evils by attempting to abolish the constraints of the human condition. The late nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth century can be usefully interpreted as the laboratory in which that programme was tried, and it failed disastrously. Both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw this looming disaster in its earliest stages of gestation, and both warned against the monumental folly of those who did not see it coming.

Nietzsche is especially instructive here, because he cannot be accused of any revanchist Christian bias in his diatribes against liberal democracies. His most prominent English biographer, R. J. Holingdale, makes a striking point when he observes: “Nineteenth-century rationalism was characterized by insight into the difficulty in accepting revealed religion, and obtuseness regarding the consequences of rejecting it.” Above all, I would argue, Nietzsche warned against that peculiar obtuseness of secularized Europe that had managed to persuade itself that ethical striving alone could bring about an eschatological kingdom on earth. That to me is Nietzsche’s great lesson for Christians.

Dostoevsky too stands guard before the portals of this ever-receding future Eden. Like Nietzsche he saw how frustration with the human condition soon leads to resentment, which quickly congeals into rage, and then finally devolves into a raw and hate-filled nihilism.

For that reason I maintain that the most important truth of the gospel for our times is simply this: that God saved the world, not by abolishing or transforming the human condition but by taking it on. This is why the only successful apologetics for our times will prove to be the one traced out for us by Blaise Pascal, who always began by portraying the human condition in its full bleakness and then showed how Christianity, and Christianity alone (he was no politically correct apologist), gives the answer to that bleakness. For Pascal, God has made himself accessible to us only in and through Christ. And because Christ redeemed us not by plucking us out of our condition but by assuming it, only Christ can tell us everything we need to know about the human condition.

In other words, redemption cannot mean rescue from the human condition, at least here on earth, as if it were God’s role to invite us to jump out of our own skins. For part (but only part) of what it means for God to redeem the world by sending his Son to die on the cross is that God confirms the inherent wretchedness of the world - and thus of the human condition - precisely by taking it on and subsuming it into the Godhead. By saying this, I do not wish to imply that the human condition is itself salvific or sacramental, for if it were, then the need for redemption would be pointless, whereas in fact everything about the human condition cries out its need for rescue, however much humans misunderstand how that rescue has been effected. In the Christian dispensation, that rescue only takes place by transforming the human condition into heaven, not on earth, for only there, in heaven, can we find the true locus of our hope. This is the essence of the gospel, and any attempt to reinterpret it solely to make it more useful for social justice will only invert and thus pervert its real import.

Signs of the Spirit animating Christians to place their hope in heaven alone are really not that hard to discern, and St. Paul sets them out in several passages where he lists the Christian virtues (charity, magnanimity, forbearance, courage to withstand persecution, and so forth). But in the modern context I try to look for one sign of the Spirit above all: is heaven more real for Christians than the very earth on which they dwell? In other words, do they cultivate friendship with the saints with the same assiduous zeal for companionship that they show to their friends on earth? Does their prayer seek to assault the very gates of heaven so that their activity on earth really may reflect what they pray for in the Our Father (“…on earth as it is in heaven”): in other words, do Christians pray the Our Father and mean it? For heaven truly is more real than earth, and that is what faith, and faith alone, sees. This is why Christians maintain, is itself the escape from earth, for it gives access to heaven itself, which is why faith really does justify, for it alone clothes us for the Messianic banquet in heaven. For that same reason, faith must be constantly cultivated through daily prayer, which for St. Paul is precisely that activity of Christians in which they focus on heaven, not earth: they “pray always” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). For Christians have a duty to wage war against the flesh if they are truly to seek the things that are above, for which prayer is the most suitable of all their weapons. This war against the flesh, however, does not mean, as is so commonly charged, hostility to life, or to sex, or to raising a family, as if St. Paul thinks Christians must hate the body in the manner of the Gnostics. Rather, he is trying to impress upon his congregations that faith is the only portal to heaven, the only locus of our hope, and therefore the only avenue to justification, which the flesh does everything to prevent us from seeing and realizing.

How many Christians now live by this gospel? How many preachers preach this evangel? How many theologians are theologians in the literal sense: speakers of God’s Logos, rather than coiners of their own words about God? How many of them first start with the recognition that the root of the term “theology” comes from Theou Logos, “the Word of God”? That is, how many theologians begin not with their own words but with that first Word, who sits at God’s right hand and governs the universe, most especially by means of the faith of Christians in him?

The primary cause of all that ails the Church, in modern times, stems from this prior capitulation to the Enlightened agenda, so well adumbrated by the future Benedict XVI in his epochal book. Sometimes this capitulation is openly admitted, even celebrated, as in the slogan that was so popular in the sixties and seventies: “The world sets the agenda for the Church.” Many trends in theology are also quite open about this capitulation. St. Paul says, “We destroy arguments, demolishing every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). In total contrast to such Pauline courage would be the pusillanimity of those theologians who take the opposite tack by capitulating to every Enlightened thought to make the gospel captive to it. Take, for example, the Jesuit Roger Haight, whose recent book Jesus: Symbol of God perfectly illustrates Catholic theology’s recent declension from gold to whetstone. What follows are a few citations from the book - a catena plumbi, as it were - to show what I mean:

My understanding of the resurrection does not support the necessity of an empty tomb in principle. Resurrection faith today is not belief in an external miracle, an empirical historical event testified to by disciples, which we take as a fact on the basis of their word [!]. Although that may describe in fact the belief of many Christians, it is no ideal. A reflective faith-hope today will affirm Jesus risen on the basis of a conviction that Jesus’ message is true; because God is the way Jesus revealed God to be, Jesus is alive. … Because it was Jesus whom people experienced as risen, and not someone else, one must assume that Jesus had a forceful religious impact on people [his identity as Son of God apparently being irrelevant to the issue]. … In the view proposed here, the external event that helped mediate a consciousness of Jesus risen was Jesus himself during his ministry. Or, to be more exact, after his death, the disciples’ memory of Jesus filled this role [all emphases added].

What Fr. Haight has given us, in effect, is a Christology equally suitable to the followers of the slain Beatle, John Lennon, whose fans gather each year at Strawberry Fields in New York’s Central Park (their Golgotha) on the anniversary of his assassination (their Good Friday), fondly recall his memory, proudly affirm that his message is true, and recognize him for the forceful impact he had on people (as he once blurted out to a reporter when he was on tour in South Africa, and to immense controversy, “the Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ”).

But at least say this for the ageing hippies: they are not ashamed of their enthusiasm and do not try to doctor Lennon’s message. Haight, however, comes close to denying the canonicity of the gospels’ resurrection narratives in this telling sentence: “Once the imagination is allowed a place in depicting the resurrection in empirical terms or spatio-temporal categories, one also creates problems that are as impossible to solve as they are irrelevant to the point of the resurrection itself.”

It takes considerable hermeneutical skill to create, not a Philosopher’s Stone that can change lead into gold, but a Theologian’s Stone that transmutes gold into lead. But to transpose the New Testament kerygma into terms that even John Lennon could incorporate into his song “Imagine” - that is truly the most awesome feat of interpretive legerdemain in the history of Christian thought. Nor can Fr. Haight’s views be dismissed as the preposterous ruminations of an isolated theologian, for he once was President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), the main professional organization of Catholic theologians. Incestuous organization that the CTSA is, another past president of the same organization gave the book a rapturous review in the Jesuit weekly America, whose book-review editor at the time had a blurb adorning its cover, as in fact did the reviewer herself, whose first book was called, tellingly, Consider Jesus. (Consider him what: nice? an anti-establishmentarian? subverter of patriarchy? The answer is: all three.)

But let us now ignore that one book as merely symptomatic and turn to all those sermons on Easter Sunday that inform the congregation that “Jesus died as a man and rose as a community” or that the risen Jesus is “not a he, but a we.” Or as one campus minister said in my hearing at a Mass, “Let us now worship that sense of Ultimacy we sometimes call God.” An editor of a “homily helper” newsletter told a reporter than an “allegiance to a Jewish male affronts the modern commitment to ethnic and gender diversity.”

The situation is especially grim among professional theologians. In the first volume of Jaroslav Pelikan’s Christian Tradition, whose fifth volume was already cited above, the author mentions in passing that in the first several centuries of the Church most theologians were bishops, while in the Middle Ages most were monks, but in the modern period most theologians have been professors. This seemingly irrelevant factoid from the sociology of history actually reveals something important - and dangerous. Liberalism in religion first drew its strength from the Wars of Religion in the wake of the Reformation and then gained strength in the multicultural global setting of vastly different religions and cultures. In order to avoid a repeat of the Thirty Years War, but now on a much worse global scale, governments must regard each religion as equally valid and worthy of rights before the law. But validity before the law is by no means the same thing as validity before the bar of the truth, and when the liberal ethos enters an intentional, believing community constituted by a particular revelation, havoc is bound to follow. Especially in the United States, the values of tolerance and non-discrimination have become more than a mere litmus test for citizenship and are now enshrined in the laws that govern how universities may operate. More and more theology professors owe their allegiance to norms of academic “respectability” rather than to the politically incorrect gospel of St. Paul.

In 1990, the Vatican made half-hearted attempts to address this problem with the directive known as Ex corde ecclesiae; but the recent sex-abuse crisis seems to have taken the wind out of the bishops’ sails when the time came to enforce the prescriptions in that document. However worthy the document, or half-hearted its implementation, the problems attendant upon the professionalisation of theology actually go much deeper than anything that the Vatican could address with a mere document. For the corruption of contemporary theology is located not so much in this or that professor but in the institution of the professorate as such, as Nietzsche seems to have been the first to see. As we might expect, he drove home his point with his usual fierce and bitter rhetoric, especially in his book Untimely Meditations, a set of four essays on the woes of liberal education. Given his attacks on Christianity, one might expect Nietzsche to have greeted the advent of the historical criticism of the New Testament with undisguised glee, but his essay on David Strauss (one of its earliest practitioners) shows this not to be so. More crucially, he extends his indictment of Strauss all the way to the footnote-mongering pettifoggery of historical scholarship as a whole, at which point he condemns the guild of “tenured radicals” in his day for becoming a citadel of dishonesty, phoniness, and self-regard.

To see how much the members of the CTSA embody this indictment, one need only glance at its annual Proceedings, where one can eavesdrop on conversations in which revelation is described, not as God’s initiative to impart divine life to us, but as the gradual, quasi-Hegelian awakening of human understanding into divine things already in our possession on the basis of something called a “supernatural existential.” Or one can read accusations that the Catholic Church is not truly “catholic enough,” as in this line: “The fullness of truth is not present and realized in the Roman Catholic Church, both because the Church is sinful and because it is not yet truly Catholic.” The collective resolutions passed by this professional body are, one and all, predictable echoes of the politics of the secular academic left.

In my reading of their works, liberal Christians want to make the Christian message easy to believe, and to do so they must first make the New Testament hard to understand - which explains why there must be such a huge superstructure of biblical commentaries and hermeneutical throat-clearing whenever a preacher sets out to preach, and why the end result proves to be so easy on the intellect once the sermon is over. For example, no one could possibly doubt that the disciples “remembered” the ministry of Jesus after his death; and if, by definition, that is all that the resurrection means, who could deny that Jesus “rose” in the mind of the disciples? But to explain how the New Testament could seem to give an impression so at odds with this easygoing view, one must subject the Scriptures to an astonishingly elaborate historical-critical analysis and then try to get the believer to accept the end result as an even remotely plausible reflection of what the New Testament says. No wonder courses in hermeneutics are so popular in élite divinity schools.

In fact, the situation of New Testament interpretation is the exact opposite: I maintain that the Christian dispensation is much more difficult to believe than it is to understand, for its message can be boiled down to a five-word sentence of remarkable simplicity but one that represents a radical challenge to the intellect: We die before we live. Or again, another five-word kerygma: We meet Christ in death. In each case, five simple, easy-to-understand words, but ones that nearly everything about the way the modern world is structured conspires against making easy to believe.

Far be it from me to deny the difficulties involved in true belief, but whatever the challenges facing preachers of the true gospel, we at least have before us the lesson of two centuries of cultural Protestantism and four decades of liberal Catholicism to warn us against the alternative. Both these versions of “Christianity” teach us that a little bit of the gospel is more damaging than would be forthright rejection of the whole package. Watered-down Christianity has only given us absurd hopes, the vision of a non-existent future, lukewarm zeal, a narcissistic ethic, incantatory theology, invented grievances (like the pseudo-allergy to so-called gender-biased language), and a preaching in which, in Dante’s harsh words, “sheep leave church, having been fed on wind.” No wonder T. S. Eliot tartly observed: “We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.”

Little wonder, too, that Europe is so rapidly abandoning its ancient faith, that a secular morality (called “autonomous”) of convenience and self-indulgence prevails and becomes enshrined in law, that Christian morality (called “heteronomous”) is seen as an affront and a threat, that world Christianity finds itself flummoxed by a resurgent Islam, that faith is interpreted not as the justifying access to heaven but as a vague feeling of self-esteem, that love is praised as a sentiment rather than as a behaviour, that vows are discarded at the first sign of difficulty in living them out (the abandonment of which is chalked up as a “learning experience”), that equality and tolerance become buzzwords used to trump proclamation and evangelization, and that the pure gospel preached by St. Paul is dismissed by liberal Christians like John Shelby Spong as the rantings of a self-hating homosexual who was, to boot, a sexist, patriarchal rabbi. And yet the gospel is the gospel, which not even an angel can change or alter (Galatians 1:8); and no matter how much St. Paul grates on modern or postmodern ears, the gospel will have its effect. Benedict XVI’s election is, therefore, a blessing for the Catholic Church.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. is Chester & Margaret Paluch Professor of Theology
at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois,
the seminary for the Archdiocese of Chicago; and coeditor, with David Moss,
of The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar.