By faith I here mean surrender of will, intellect, heart, soul and entire personality in the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. At the core of our faith is this personal event; everything else (dogma, ethics, liturgy) flows from it. Lacking clarity, depth and intensity in this core lends us to confusion, weakness, error, misdirection. The evangelical encounter becomes communal, ethical, liturgical, intellectual.
It is not that our theologians completely lack faith, but that their faith is not solidly Christ-centered, not evangelical, not Trinitarian, not personal, concrete, scriptural, communal, traditional. It is a faith that grasps and appreciates aspects of the Gospel, but not the heart and soul of that Gospel...the very person of Jesus, Son of God. And so we we do not find (what Balthasar called) a "kneeling theology"...reflection flowing out of the encounter with God in personal prayer and corporate liturgy. There is shift of focus: away from loving God with all your thought and all your mind and all your strength; toward subordinate themes such as psychological healing, justice for the poor and oppressed, and others.
By reason I here mean rigorous philosophical reflection grounded in a clear metaphysics of reality, of Being, of the good-true-beautiful. Theology is based in metaphysics. To not do metaphysics is impossible (as it is impossible not to do ethics, politics, religion); to "not do metaphysics" is to do bad metaphysics. So, what occurred immediately after the Council was the widespread turn from philosophy, as the handmaid of theology, to the social sciences, especially psychology and politial science, to Freud and Marx. And so we saw a drift downward into ecclectic, vague, incoherent philosophical ideas drawn from Jung, Whitehead, Chardin, Cambell, and various schools of psychology and politics. We witnessed on a large scale abandonment of the Tradition of "faith and reason."
A case in point: Pope Francis. He certainly has a lively, passionate faith. He loves Christ; he prays; he is fierce and fearless in his devotion to the poor and marginalized. But regarding reason he is severely challenged. He is incapable of deep, coherent, grounded theology. He is a man of emotion, not of thought. He is not merely non-intellectual; he is an anti-intellectual in that he resents dogma, sustained reflection, and the authority of Tradition and Magisterium. He may or may not be a saint; but he is a catastrophe of a theologian, and a weak, weak pope.
Question: were things better in the pre-Council Church. Well...sort of!
We shared a widespread culture of faith, but it was neither evangelical nor deeply intellectual. It was the ethnic, immigrant faith of the unschooled, purified by suffering: immigration-prejudice-poverty, the Depression, and World War II. It was not strongly Christological. But there was reverence, trust, gratitude and obedience toward God; a rich banquet of devotions to Mary, the saints, the sacraments and hierarchy; an acceptance, at least in thought, of the moral law; an openess to the supernatural; a culture that encouraged virtue and family life. Intellectually there was a failure to engage with the broader culture and a formal, manualist theology lacking in depth. But there was a simplicity and coherence to the theology and its relation to the ethnic culture. It was an ethnic religion, solid and coherent, but lacking a firm evangelical core and intellectual depth. This is why after the Council the culture crashed so catastrophically.
In that post-War period, however, there was a Catholic renaissance of true depth. The flourishing of religious orders, parishes and Catholic institutions of all sorts was not only a superficial flourishing of newfound Catholic bourgeois affluence; although it was that. Alongside of such materialism, there were deeper currents flourishing: resourcement theology as return to the sources (scripture and the fathers), engagment with the best in contemporary thought, renewal movements including the liturgical, Cursillo and similar retreat movements, and a wearied post-war enchantment with the supernatural. These currents were not spectacular statistically; but influential and significant.
The Good News: those often small, humble currents of genuine renewal did not disappear. They inspired the Council itself and continued in the renewal movements, in Communio theology, the Great-Dual-Pontificate and in a million quiet currents of prayer and goodness.
Notwithstanding the travails of the current Church, the Great Catholic Tradition experienced a renaissance in the run up to the Council, in that Event itself, and the dual papacy of Faith-and-Reason. We are blessed to live out of that majestic current of grace!
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