Fergus Kerr and the Pluralization of Contemporary Catholic Theology

Fergus Kerr’s introduction to the plurality of twentieth Roman Catholic theology, Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians, is organized around the motif of the rejection of the neothomism that is basic to the most prominent post-Vatican II theologians.  Kerr makes no attempt to disguise his own disdain for neothomism, which comes through in his early discussion of Garrigou-Lagrange. But one is left with a sense that without the governing orientation of the neothomist metaphysics, post-Vatican II theology is more or less adrift. There remains an emphasis on the study of St. Thomas’ works, but Catholic theology has become much more aware of the historically conditioned and contingetn nature of the Thomistic synthesis. Garrigou-Lagrange’s concern that those who turn away from dogmatic to historical theology will find themselves in a sea of relativism seem to have been born out to some degree in the increasing pluralization of methodological starting points one finds in the theologians surveyed in this book.

The strong, centralizing pontificates of JPII and Benedict XVI have inhibited the trend toward pluralization to some degree, but Kerr seems to have misgivings about this.  It’s also true, however, that most of the most celebrated theologians of the post-Vatican II period such as Henri de Lubac, come in for pretty serious critique in this book. In narrating the controversy over Surnaturel, the central thesis of which was that humanity has no purely natural end since the incarnation and that St. Thomas never envisaged such an end for humanity except hypothetically, as thought experiment, one is left with the assertion that ‘while the vision of god enjoyed by the blessed is a free gift, unanticipated, unmerited, never owed to them, yet the desire for it is, naturally and constitutively, in every human soul’ (p. 71). While Kerr seems to appreciate the interlocking set of paradoxes that de Lubac finds at the heart of the Christian mystery, nonetheless he seems apprehensive about what this means for fundamental theology, the relationship between philosophy and theology: ‘in effect, de Lubac undermines neoscholastic dogmatic theology as radically as he destroys standard natural thoelogy, doctrine remains ‘extrinsic’, just a set of abstract propositions…unless connected to, and resonating with, the ‘intrinsic’ desire ofn the part of the given human nature of the one accepting or teaching the doctrine. thus, philosophy, we may say, requires the supplement of theology, yet theology equally requries the foundation of philosophy–which cannot be had. de Lubac’s paradox, as neothomist critics understandably objected, looks more like an irresolvable aporia’ (p. 75).  My question after reading him is what he thinks of all of this. The indirect tone of his argument doesn’t give much away.

Kerr suggests in the final chapters of the book that there has been some consensus around the idea of ‘nuptial mysticism’ derived from Origen among ‘conservative’ theologians like von Balthasar, Wojtyla, and Ratzinger, but this is by no means universal, and he acknowledges that most lay Catholics look with incomprehension at this teaching. I have a minor quibble with Kerr’s terminology here. I’m honestly at a loss for why it is that Kerr continues to use the term ‘conservative’ in his description of these theologians, since it doesn’t actually point to anything about their theology. If the term means something like ‘tradition-oriented’, then it does nothing to differentiate these theologians from one another. If it means non-receptivity to modern philosophical idioms, then it remains unsatisfactory because, as Kerr notes, in his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger ‘certainly avoids any sign of neoscholasticism’ and draws primarily from theologians who would have been controversial just a few decades before: ‘Aquinas is never mentioned in this book, anywhere. We hear do Johann Adam Moehler as the great Tuebingen theologian…and, even more, of the great Munich theologian Franz Baader….Besides Karl Adam, the other theologians to whom Ratzinger refers with obvious respect, in this book, are Roman Guardini, Gottlieb Soehngen, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner. Remarkably, he shows considerable enthusiasm for the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’ (pp. 190, 191-2).

Kerr’s book is really in most respects a wonderful introduction to the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century, and it also reveals that the great task before Catholic theology is either to find another paradigm for the basic organization of Catholic theology or else to embrace something like David Tracy’s ‘polycentricity’ in theology and show how this approach can be correlated with the great tradition.

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The Covenant Sealed

In the field that my dissertation research is in, early modern English religious history, it is a common trope that Puritanism was incapable of providing a rationale for infant baptism that held together the Reformed emphasis on the sovereignty of God with the efficacy of the ritual.  Thus, Puritanism rather naturally and organically gave rise to the Baptists.  This narrative does not quite seem accurate to me, or at least it is not sufficiently nuanced.
Catholics in preceding centuries had distinguished between different kinds of graces, affirming that regenerative grace came through the medium of baptism ex opere operato (‘by the work worked’), but that its efficacy depended upon the reception of the baptized. Provided that no obstacle was placed in the way of the efficacious working of the baptism, it would regenerate the baptized, and since babies could place no such obstacle, original sin was said to be cleansed by the performance of baptism.

Puritans were notoriously wary of all things ‘popish’, and they saw large parts of Catholic ceremony and theology as merely human innovation and therefore as idolatrous. They were also and by consequence ‘primitivists’, finding the paradigms for worship and theology in Scripture alone. However, they were not ‘bibilicists’ in the modern fundamentalist or evangelical sense of that term, in that they affirmed both a ‘salvation history’ model for biblical interpretation as well as a Christological scopus or trajectory for every biblical passage. In other words, they are masterful pre-modern exegetes.

The Puritan justification for infant baptism, then, was ‘biblical’, in the sense that it relied upon biblical typology and exemplarity, and especially the resonances between circumcision and baptism. It was an exegesis that was very much still scholastic and theological but was attempting to prioritize the canon of Scripture in the process of exegesis rather than appealing to tradition in exegeting the Scripture. A great example of this kind of theological exegesis is the work of Thomas Blake, a proto-Presbyterian (before the late seventeenth century, it’s rather difficult to distinguish between Congregationalists and Presbyterians) writing in defense of the parish system and infant baptism in the 1640s and 1650s. Blake’s Vindiciae Foederis (1648) and Covenant Sealed (1655) were two massive defenses of the practice of infant baptism within the confines of the English national church. His most basic contention is that Jewish circumcision is the exemplar and type for Christian baptism. Since it is obvious to Blake (and to the pugilists against whom he was writing, such as John Tombes, the Baptist, and Richard Baxter, whose position is an interesting hybrid of Congregationalism and Presbyterianism with some low church Episcopalianism thrown in for ecumenical purposes – enormously difficult to characterize) that not all Jews were saved, one had to make the distinction between ‘sanctification’ in the sense of being set apart for the work of the Lord, and salvation, which occurred by proper development or ‘improvement’ of the means of this sanctification.

As Blake puts it: ‘a common and a special grace differ only gradually, not specifically; according to that promise of our savior, Matth. 13.13. To him that hath shall be given, which our divines have still understood of graces of the same, and not of a different kind: he that hath common graces and improves them, shall have a larger measure of those graces; and he that hath spiritual graces and improves them, shall have a more large measure of spiritual gifts. And if they be both of one kind, then Christ’s promise holds from the one to the other’ (Covenant Sealed, p. 159).  Since circumcision is the exemplar and the type of baptism for Blake, it’s important for him to emphasize the organic relationship between the visible community that is circumcised and the invisible part of that community which is saved, which is of course an Augustinian move.  Humans are expected to ‘improve’ upon their baptism as Jews were expected to ‘improve’ upon their circumcision, such that the external grace became the conduit over time of the reception of a spiritual grace. For Blake as a good Reformed theologian, this process was gracious and was thus superintended and ordained by divine will, but human agency was not therefore compromised. Baptism and circumcision were thus not meaningless signs for Blake, but rather were material signs that infused the beginnings of a long-term spiritual process. They ‘sealed’ the covenant in the sense that they assured that divine work was beginning in the person.

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Paul Griffiths and the Challenge to Pray without Ceasing

If you’re like me and you grew up evangelical, you were trained to think of the Bible as literally true except where it expressly acknowledged that it was speaking metaphorically. This approach to Scripture was really comforting in drawing lines between our enemies – atheists, liberals, and so on – and us, but the problem is that no one in my church actually read the Bible in this way.  Implicitly we read troubling or demanding passages as tropes – usually hyperboles or metaphors – that expressed a kind of sentiment or pious ethos – rather than a demand. Christ’s perplexing challenge to his disciples in John 6 that we could not have life unless they consumed his flesh needed to be spiritualized – metaphorized – by reading that saying in light of Christ’s words of institution at the Last Supper that we were to eat the meal in memory of him.  The Pauline injunction in 1 Thess. 5:15f that we are ‘Rejoice always, and pray without ceasing’ was another of these passages that we reflexively harmonized with our own prayerlessness. Paul here had to be expressing a mere sentiment, otherwise he would be commanding an impossibility.

In a recent essay, Paul Griffiths points out that in the tradition many have wrestled with this injunction of Paul’s, treating it as imperative rather than optative.  Augustine, quite inspiredly in my estimation, found a close connection in Latin between the prayer and adoration (oratio/orare, adoratio/adorare). Adoration and prayer are both ‘intentional actions that bring us before God’, with desire for God being the shared term between them. (Griffiths, ‘Pray without Ceasing’, Christian Reflection: Prayer, p. 12). Desire for God was so central to Augustine that in his Ennarationes in Psalmos he argued that ‘The apostle Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) is fulfilled when the desire for God persists without interruption. “Your very desire is your prayer; if your desire is continuous, your prayer is continuous'” (Augustine through the Centuries: An Encyclopedia, s.v. ‘Prayer’, p. 673).

Desire for God must be cultivated, and the manner in which this is to be done is to look freshly upon our lives as gift. God owes us nothing, and our very creation is a gift. We have nothing which we have not received from God’s hand, and gratitude is the proper response of one who has received a gift.  The cultivation of gratitude is capable of changing our the desires of our hearts and thereby the lens with which we look upon the world. If we see our whole lives as gift and cultivate gratitude for that gift, we become the kind of people capable of perpetual adoration of God and therefore of perpetual prayer in all things. Here is Griffiths:

Prayer (oratio) exercises desire (desideratum). It is, we might say, a regime of discipline for desire, a diet for love. What does prayer do? It makes us capable of something we would not otherwise be capable of, which is reception of the gift, the gift which the Lord is always actively giving us. Without prayer, our hearts are trammeled in the direction of ungrateful possessiveness: we grasp what we have as if it were ours, and in doing so try to make of it something it is not and cannot be.  The result is that we lose what we think we have, and also ourselves as aspiring owners of it. Recall that we have nothing ungiven, and so the only way to have what we have been given is to receive it as given, as gift. But with prayer…our hearts are opened, increasingly and gradually, to the possibility of receiving the gift, which is, in the end, sanctification….Finally, the cultivation of gratitude attenuates fear and brings peace. The risen Lord, after Easter Sunday, constantly reiterates to his disciples when he appears to them that they should not fear and that he brings them peace. The Church’s liturgy re-enacts this day-by-day and week-by-week. Our desires, sculpted into gratitude’s shape by ceaseless prayer, become attuned to the fact that the happy or blessed life, the beata vita, is in fact being constantly offered to us by the Lord, and that the only thing asked of us is its reception for what it is: prevenient gift. Gratitude of this sort removes deep anxiety. It does not do this immediately, or course, but over time this is the direction in which it tends. If you not only assent to the claim that the Lord wants desperately to give you the blessing of a happy life, but also, by the cultivation of desire-disciplining gratitude, become the kind of person who acts as if that were true–who responds to the world as if its suffering and injustices and agonies, though real, are not the last word–then you will also find fear removed and anxiety assuaged. These are not gifts given all in a moment, but they are delights that become increasingly apparent as the life of prayer deepens and extends itself over the course of a life. (p. 15-16).

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Revisiting Purgatory

There is a huge, hulking scholarly literature on the work of Luther, much of which is devoted to parsing when he experienced his characteristically ‘reformation’ insights, especially on the issues of ‘passive righteousness’ and ‘justification by faith’. There is no consensus to be had on any of these points, but it is probably safe to say that what initially bothered Luther was not, as he wrote in 1545, the torment he felt languishing under Gabriel Biel’s covenantal soteriology, in which one who did what was within one would not be denied grace, but also in which one could never be sure one’s was doing one’s best.  What probably was the initial spur to Luther was his own pastoral impulse to counteract the horrific practices of the indulgence preachers, who were binding and terrorizing the consciences of the laity over which he had a charge. Or at least it is fair to say that these two stimuli went hand in hand. Johann Tetzel was, of course, the inventer of that famous ditty ‘when a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs’, but Tetzel was only the most egregious of the indulgence preachers in the sixteenth century.

John Bossy argues that the image of purgatory as a geographic space, perhaps an ante-chamber to hell, in which the individual would be subjected to torments until properly purged of the ‘penalty’ (though not the ‘guilt’, which canonists were careful to say had been removed by the satisfaction of Christ) for sin, was an image increasingly favored by the church from the fifteenth century on, and it may have been responsible for the kind of ‘calculating’ approach to spiritual discipline one sees in the works of, for instance, Dietrich Koelde.

Dante’s Divine Comedy , which had after 1320 put purgatory indelibly on the map of Western consciousness, was a monument to both its learned and its instinctual sources.  This did not mean that the average person now had a clear view of the kind of place, or rather state, that purgatory was. The idea, not recognised by Dante but favoured by the Church on quasi-Scriptural grounds, that the agent of purgation was fire and purgatory a sort of cave from which, in the end, souls would fly up to heaven does not seem to have impinged much on the general consciousness until the fifteenth century. Thereafter, encouraged by the indulgence preachers, it made a great deal of headway. (Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, p. 30)

Benedict XVI, in a recent encyclical entitled Spe Salvi , has made it clear that this is in fact not what the Catholic Church believes, teaches, and confesses about purgatory. Purgatory, according to Benedict, is an encounter with the holiness of Christ in which that which is impure about us is burned away.  The fire of purgatory is Christ himself, as our Judge and Savior:

The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. (par. 47)

Benedict also makes clear that this reckoning with the person of Christ cannot be measured by the temporal measurements of secular time. Purgation exists and is governed by a different order of time than we presently experience in our everyday lives, such that ‘satisfactory works’ cannot be assigned a temporal measurement as they were by canonists in the medieval period.

After reading this encyclical, I’m reconsidering purgatory. Protestants in the west have become so accustomed to, even bored by, the idea that Christ has brought us into right relationship with God that we have lost a sense of the holiness and otherness, even the Lordship of Christ. Witness Kevin Smith’s movie ‘Dogma’, with its ‘Buddy Christ’ and other cynical projections in contemporary popular culture of what modern people think the church believes. The sad fact is that modern people are mostly right. God has given the world the right to judge the church, and the world has adjudged our faith weightless and worthless. It will be consumed by the fire of history because we have not been adequate witnesses to the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Hebrews tells us that we are to ‘make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord’ (12:14). It may be that a sound teaching on purgatory is what Protestants need to recover a sense of the weight of glory and what it means to come into the holy presence of Christ, where all fault will be burned away.

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All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well

I’m re-reading Douglas Farrow’s Ascension Theology right now, and it’s even more beautiful and hopeful the second time through.  R.R. Reno writes about this book that its ‘theological passion is infectious’. That is understatement in my estimation.

All the theological virtues are at extremely low ebb in our contemporary culture, but perhaps most dangerous for our times has been the loss of hope, as Chuck Matthewes has pointed out.  Christian hope for the political order has been replaced by iterations of utopias, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, all of which hope to bring a final peace to humanity through the use of power and coercion, and therefore fail to be anything other than purely revolutionary. These utopias are merely universal,  not catholic. And when they fail, the pendulum swings toward cynicism and despair. Oddly enough, the utopic and the cynical not only coexist but feed off of each other in our contemporary public culture.

Douglas Farrow helps us to recover the political meaning of the gospel, which is not theocratic but eschatological. When Sam in LotR asked, ‘is everything sad going to come untrue’?, that was not a utopic but an eschatological pronouncement. For Christians believe, teach, and confess, that Christ’s ascension means not that he has shot from earth into outer space like a cannon, as a crude understanding of the ascension would have it, but rather that it means that he has bodily removed to ‘the place from which God’s rule over the world is effected through the angels, the place where God’s presence to and for creation is manifested and known, the place around which all creation is therefore ordered and arranged’ (p. 124). This ‘space’ is ‘heaven’, sacramentally and porously present in creation itself, which Christ has entered to conform it to his image.When Christ completes the transformation of creation into new creation in his return, heaven will be revealed as the true meaning of creation and will in fact elevate creation to itself, and we will tell a story of goodness and glorification without evil which we can scarcely imagine now. And mindfulness to the reality of glory in our present, despite the shadow cast by the persistence and pervasiveness of evil, may help to us to cultivate a political hope that can overcome the utopic impulse.

…it lies beyond any science of ours to describe the dynamism of a body totally responsive to the soul, or to grasp the spiritually modulated physics of a world in which the saviour shall be seen everywhere, ‘according as they who see him shall be worthy’. It lies beyond any art of ours to tell a story with a beginning but no end, a story that is all ascent and no descent….Yet we concede nothing of significance when we concede that all of this is beyond us; that the promises of God, when we try to think them out, prove unthinkable. For there is no direct line of development between the old order, falsely parsed by sin, and the new order yielded by the anaphoric work of Christ. If that is the case for Christ himself in his resurrection, a fortiori it is the case with the new creation….That does not mean, however, that we cannot speak of it at all. It means only that, when we do speak, we must be faithful to the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that we find in the apostles and the fathers. (pp. 132, 133)

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We Need More ‘Detectives’

Kierkegaard, the intrepid anti-Hegelian of the Danish Enlightenment, in his Attack upon Christendom, said of himself that ‘I am not what the age perhaps demands, a reformer–that by no means, nor a profound speculative spirit, a seer, a prophet; no (pardon me for saying it), I am in rare degree an accomplished detective talent’ (p. 33). What Kierkegaard meant was that particular collation of Christendom and Enlightenment triumphalism had produced a religious monstrosity that was at its core neo-Pagan, and Kierkegaard’s divinely bestowed vocation was to disinter and unmask the obscurantism that made this possible. Part of this work involved a critique of post-Reformation Lutheranism, as he writes in his journal:

Luther’s emphasis is a corrective. But, a corrective made into the normative, into the sum total is eo ipso confusing in another generation (when that for which it was a corrective does not exist). And with every generation that goes by in this way, it must become worse, Until the end result is that this corrective, which has independently established itself, produces characteristics exactly the opposite of the original. And this has been the case. Luther’s corrective, when it indepnedently is supposed to be the sum total of Christianity, produces the most refined kind of skepticism and paganism. (‘Luther’s Emphasis‘, in Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, p. 333)

Lord, bring us more detectives in our contemporary apostasy.

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