What is shaping my theology?
McDonnell, Monika K Hellwig, George MacRae, Robert McAfee Brown, Michael Novak, Charles E Curran, Ro
'What is shaping my theology' In the years since Vatican II, theological thought has been marked by a wide, some might even say a dizzying, variety of concerns and approaches. These, in turn, have...
...They are each necessary parts of a complex dialectical process in history that ultimately enlarges the religious self-understanding of the entire faith community...
...I grew up in liberal Judaism...
...That's an indictment and I have no explanation...
...The question of "whether" was not included in the mandate, nor did it occur to me then or since that it should have been...
...The correlation between Biblical prophetic criticism and messianic hope, on the one hand, and the contemporary experiences of social sin, on the other, has become the ongoing nexus of my theological reflection...
...I grant that theology written by soft white monastic hands can only deal antiseptically with what Puebla calls ' 'a preferential option for the poor...
...to see safety in the Black community and danger in nightriding whites or white officers of the law...
...THEOLOGY FROM BELOW Kilian McDonnell Professor of theology in the graduate school of St...
...Most of what I have subsequently learned about the church in the past and today has confirmed that impression...
...John's University, Father Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B., is the president of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minnesota...
...Catholic theology, it seemed to me, could live with the historical relativity of the Bible, despite the resistance of the church in the anti-Modernist period, because of its prevailing confidence in the authority of tradition...
...When, after much debate and discussion, Humanae Vitae was finally issued in July 1968, I acted as spokesperson for the American theologians who recognized that one could be a loyal Catholic and still disagree in theory and in practice with the conclusion of the encyclical that artificial contraception is always morally wrong...
...Partly from guilt, which I usually handle very well, I say "yes" to Jesus's preference for the poor, but sometimes I wonder about the universality of reconciliation in liberation theology, let's say the salvation of the well-scrubbed, deodorized middle class...
...The question of this second-decade teacher is how do you love students through ideas...
...He is the author of The Wisdom Community (Paulist Press), an exploration of way&to renew communication within the church...
...But as I had sat in that chair not yet one month, I was there as onlis-tener, content that my predecessor, who had planned the affair, had it all in hand...
...by what steps and in response to which new situations and questions was the systematic explanation developed in the course of history...
...Well, I admire you because I never could make any sense whatever of that stuff...
...He was a rugged man, very unassuming, of childlike simplicity and, to judge from his history, a man of quite extraordinary courage and generosity...
...Relief turns to surprise...
...Slowly I began to think that not just the praxis but the idea of socialism is flawed...
...the experience of watching the effects in Indochina of opposition to American involvement...
...The Humanae Vitae controversy also pointed up the need for moral theology to reconsider some basic methodological questions...
...I believe it was because I was teaching the course, Theology of Freedom, that the two staff members knocked on my door rather than anyone else's, though they may possibly have known that I had worked for the Better World Movement in Rome during the Council years as part of a team engaged in retreats for priests and bishops as well as mixed retreats for people of all states in life...
...Because I love God too much to confuse human words and regulations and institutions with the mandate of the living God to God's Covenant people...
...I have spent a good part of the past decade and probably will spend a good part of the coming decade teaching theology...
...This question is at least double-edged...
...I began to look and realize how much almost all the men in these workshops, almost all the missionaries to whom I had lectured, almost all the priests at the Better World Retreats, almost all the clergy I had ever known, had had to draw their effective theology from sources other than what has been taught them as theology in the strict sense...
...Of what use are words at such a time...
...what is the meaning of the stories, images, and symbols in which answers were first given in scripture and tradition...
...the experience of the presidential campaigns of 1972 and 1976...
...related ways that bishops, parish priests, religious, church and secular university scholars, the people in the pews, and die men and women on the street confront the world as a whole and come to terms with its ambiguity...
...We Christians respect our elders...
...THE single event since Vatican II that has most affected my theological work was the publication of the encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI in July 1968...
...I had been trained in modern, i.e., post-Divino Afflante Spiritu, biblical criticism, and the turbulent history of the Council's "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation," from the first session of the Council until the last, was a matter of deep personal concern to me...
...It is hard to say why this shocked me...
...To BE ABLE to name a single event or idea which has energized and will continue to energize my theological thinking presumes a more integrated person than the one pecking out these reflections...
...Kung, Schillebeeckx, and others proposed a study of Christ from below, how Jesus's contemporaries experienced him on earth, rather than from above with philosophical disquisitions on the meaning of divine and human natures joined in the person of Christ...
...With this went a much more positive assessment of the Enlightenment...
...Gutierrez jolted me when he said that one cannot do theology in the U .S...
...It is the first flush language of story, image, or confession which flows from a religious encounter...
...I expect to spend the rest of my productive years continuing the effort...
...Actually, the experiential was not new to my theological upbringing...
...Again and again, we see freedom become demonic as its old, apparently obvious limits no longer hold...
...The initial questions of mastery of the material and pedagogical method have unraveled into the deeper predicament of all knowledge-merchants...
...I was determined not to yield my destiny into the hands of one political faith...
...Bad theology comes when we say in ancient words what ancients told, but cannot say it as something we relearned ourselves (at their cue...
...Ignoring, then, the obvious sight of goats milling among sheep on both sides of the faith-fence, we concluded that God offers reconciliation only through Jesus-things: creed, sacraments, priests, and the like: If we gave as much reverence to what we have seen with our own eyes as to what the earlier disciples saw with theirs, we would perceive more wholly that Jesus-faith offers us a vision...
...It is not the best of the conciliar documents from any point of view, but it seemed to me then, and in the intervening years it has increasingly seemed to be the case, that this document was the most important statement of the Council for the future of theology...
...The theological name for this is ' 'social sin...
...I learned that death has its own hour, plans are futile, one must do what one must - and, in a way, quite as coldly as reality itself is cold...
...Knowledge is used like weighted gloves, keeping people on the ropes, rabbit-punching in the clinches...
...It is not just a matter of being able to pursue exegesis with a clear conscience and a measure of intellectual integrity, although that is not unimportant...
...We remain silent...
...What has moved me the most in recent years - the Holocaust and the State of Israel having long since become part of me - is a widespread cultural shift rather than a single event or idea...
...Bernard's motto might well have been "I experience in order to believe...
...In college, I used to read a big novel of Dostoevsky's during every Passion Week...
...But two permanent themes have arisen from the twin settings in which I do most of my puzzling...
...Episcopal Conference and Rome, To discard history and experience as mere sin and source of error is gratuitous, Human Sexuality rightly contended, but it failed to demonstrate how undiscerned experience, which is to some degree sinful, can be normative for the Christian life...
...may draw very different ones...
...That is what it means to be human, even before God...
...When we relate our own self-interest to Ultimate Reality, we fabricate divine support for human folly...
...The contemporary stress on reflection and action (and vice versa) will only find a grass-roots audience when it is integrally related to encounter and expression...
...into feminism, into concerns with Latin America and with socialism...
...Looking backward, I see that the Humanae Vitae crisis affected my theology primarily by setting up the agenda for moral theology...
...Perhaps it should be called "grace," since it doesn't seem readily explainable in terms of the immanent forces of my social background...
...On the practical level, the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome demonstrates the importance of this question and the growing gulf existing within the church...
...I reflect: if Golgotha revealed the scene of God-forsakenness of one Jew, Birkenau multiplies that anguish at least three and a half million times...
...These experiences of social sin in the church and society correlated, for me, with research into the historical roots of the messianic idea in Christian origins...
...There is also bad theology when one construes the "signs of the times" without the interpreting wisdom which only the tradition can give...
...He makes that most infinitely beautiful of all human gestures, an upraised thumb, which means "okay...
...CLASSROOM & PARISH John Shea Author of Stories of God and, most recently, Stories of Faith (Thomas More Press), Father John Shea is a Chicago priest, author, and member of the faculty of St...
...More centrally, however, it seemed to express the insights and yearnings of the existentialist movement...
...what phases of loss and recovery of meaning must be acknowledged in this history...
...Some young river pirates, boys only, assaulted him as he pushed his bicycle from a ferry, plunged a knife in his chest, hoped that the body would be lost among the thousands killed in the Moslem-Hindu riots of that time...
...Thus, I affirm the reality of a God who is known as persons are known, and with whom the people of Israel stands in intimate relationship, the Covenant...
...One of the most significant influences upon my theological thinking since Vatican II has been my own mobility...
...Then-watching North Vietnam more closely, and Great Britain, and New York City-I began thinking that socialism (and, more mildly, statism) doesn't work very well, but no other idea is available...
...I replied that I would like to teach a course in soteriology attempting to evaluate the current perceptions of freedom in terms of the Christian understanding of redemption...
...The first edge is the teacher-student relationship...
...IN the past ten years my theological work has been in the following principal settings: parish ministry in the Archdiocese of Chicago, doctoral studies at Louvain, visiting professor in theology at Harvard Divinity School and Notre Dame University, the Cleveland and Washington Chanceries where I serve as personal theologian to Archbishop James A. Hickey...
...The document that finally won virtually unanimous acceptance, Dei Verbum, is scarcely a model of theological clarity, for it bears the scars of many a compromise...
...My mental universe was socialist...
...IN THE ORNERY FASHION of a stubborn Protestant, I must redefine the question...
...Theirs is a solicitude that cannot account for what it does to the martyrs and the ancient orders of promise-keepers...
...Here, for the first time, I learned to look at America from the Black side...
...Losing this polar star, I was at last free to examine my hostilities against the other...
...I owe much to that moment, and to reflections on it later...
...But it came at an auspicious moment and it came at the intersection of two currents of concern...
...It reveals how sacred is the seemingly secular, it discloses the eternal significance of the daily services by which we are called to work out our salvation...
...For the rest of my life, this crematorium will represent the most powerful case against God, the spot where one could - with justice - denounce, deny, or (worst of all) ignore God, the God who was silent...
...They do not face the dilemma they cause: how can we celebrate fidelity to Jesus while shrugging off our faith towards others...
...I never had to break from Jewish Orthodoxy to enter it or to leave assimilation, near-Christianity, humanism,.or the like to become part of it...
...Congar, Bouyer, Schweizer have all just published books on the Holy Spirit, none of which I have yet read...
...Surprise turns to fear...
...There will always be some tensions in this area, but the present situation contains unhealthy elements for the life of the church...
...Unless we understand and hold in check this drive, knowledge goes off on its own and love is not served...
...At that moment two important currents joined irrevocably in my mind and in my life...
...The moving viewpoint of my different responsibilities has awakened in me the desire to build bridges of meaning across sometimes hostile waters...
...Anyone who traffics in ideas must know the sins of the mind-rationalization, self-deception, prestige reinforcement, mental bullying, ridicule...
...From that moment I knew that anything in theology that does not authentically serve the pastoral needs of ordinary priests and ordinary believers is as trivial and dishonest as the money changers in the temple...
...Consider the two polar concepts in the intellectual life of our time, "socialism" and "capitalism...
...Nor am I suggesting that the exclusive dedication to the ministry of "pastors," "scholars," or "administrators" are without merit...
...This current, so widely seen in our world, can be observed moving with special force in the Jewish community...
...Now it was more revelation through the experience of God touching lives and acting in history, that revelatory experience is interpreted and my experience also has a role in the interpretation...
...Daring but less successful was the appeal to experience (read social sciences) as a source of normative behavior in the Catholic Theological Society's Human Sexuality, and for its pains the Society had its fingers rapped, really hammered, by the U.S...
...For one thing, it means that the discipline of biblical interpretation is no longer marginal, or preparatory, or "auxiliary" to theology but is an integral part of it, sharing with theology not only its findings but its methods...
...In my own theology I have tried to recognize the importance not only of methodological questions but also of important social and political issues: There is a danger both for the life of the church and for the discipline of moral theology when exclusive or too much attention is paid to sexual or medical ethics...
...Why I have instinctively moved in a different direction through various experiences of social contradiction is something I can't explain...
...ENGAGEMENT BUT NO SECURITY Michael Novak Theologian and syndicated columnist, Michael Novak is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C...
...I refer to our civilization, perhaps our age's, tidal move to the right, politically and religiously...
...This is the meaning of Jesus's crucifixion...
...The unity of the church should not ultimately be found on such specific issues...
...Because of having stood at Birkenau with them, it is now possible for me to affirm God in ways I never did before...
...We have decided not to put them in the checked luggage since it may be opened without our knowledge...
...All of this was part of my youthful monastic training...
...I remember one of my first "shock" experiences when I was about eighteen in the medieval history class...
...The dangers of first-order expression-enthusiasm, naivete, privatism-are paraded before the reader so the importance of the rest of the book (which is inevitably second-order critique) will not be diminished...
...I set myself to work out a model that would offer a pastorally effective theology out of the traditional resources, determined to do what would serve the ordinary believer whether or not any of it was ever reviewed in learned journals, whether or not any of it got me tenure or promotion in my academic position...
...My own personal involvement in the issue as a moral theologian was heightened by the fact that in the spring of 1967, my contract at Catholic University was not renewed apparently because of my position on that issue...
...The relationship between the hierarchical teaching office and the theological teaching office in the church is a complex one...
...Like many Americans it took place in the early and mid-sixties with involvement in the civil rights and peace struggles...
...Contented, that is, until Harry McSorley from Toronto was explaining' 'The Salvation of the Unbeliever according to Karl Rahner...
...The ideas/ events (plural) shaping my theological future are (a) Latin American liberation concerns, and (b) the impact of the Holocaust...
...I have subsequently moved into a number of other areas...
...In my view there is a proper sense in which the theological teaching function is dependent upon the hierarchical teaching office, but the relationship cannot be understood in terms of juridical and jurisdictional subordination...
...not a deterministic "self-sacrifice" for individual "sins," but a political assassination on the cross of collective apostasy by the political and religious institutions that claim authority over our lives...
...An important "peak" experience for me was the summer I spent working for civil rights in Mississippi in 1966...
...It is also important to me that the stance of prophetic criticism is not one of attack on other people's religion or society, but a faithful judgment on one's own religious and social community...
...The two complexes of event and idea that I have described are not major moments either of the culture's life or of my own...
...Rather I would prefer to speak of an expanding mode of perception, continually fed by certain types of experiences...
...Among liberals I have been a traditionalist, fighting with others against the mindless rationalism of some decades back which had no use for ritual, Zionism, Hebraism, ethnicity, and a God who was more than an "idea" - the God-idea frequently being the cover many alleged rationalists used for their agnosticism...
...He is the author of a "theology of demo-, cratic capitalism," to be published by Simon & Schuster in the Fall of 1981...
...THE TESTS OF LOVE James T. Burtchaell Professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, Father James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C., is the author of Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration from 1810 to the Present (Cambridge University Press...
...I therefore do not expect the problem soon to disappear...
...Although these two approaches can be complementary, they usually pass in the night...
...The American university protections of academic freedom provide an adequate means to safeguard both theology and the episcopal and papal teaching office...
...The letters we are taking to Costa Rica for friends who did not dare put them in the mail are safe in a large brown envelope deep within the suitcase I am carrying...
...The hierarchical church has found it most difficult to live with dissent...
...The challenge to formulate the basis and content of faith cannot take refuge in clinging to ancient formulas but must continually reformulate in conscious awareness of the limits of its own formulations...
...It was a test of whether it would be possible to continue to pursue a vocation of biblical interpretation in the service of the church, making full use of the tools of criticism, the value of which was imposed on the discipline by the sheer weight of modernity...
...The professor mentioned casually that the church did not oppose slavery or serfdom...
...For them it encompassed some convictions about democracy, civil rights, human dignity, and equality...
...A South American airport departure lounge...
...Whatever theology I write or talk about in the future will have this concern at its heart...
...The Board of Trustees at Catholic University mandated an inquiry according to academic norms to determine if the dissenting theologians had violated our manifold responsibilities...
...my whole seminary experience was one long misery...
...The judgment of God may come for me, as for my brother, suddenly...
...Unbelievers are rescued the way believers are: by emerging from their native selfishness into love, something we do by generous service of neighbors in need, and something for which our limp spirits are unready and need the quickening of God's breath, not to mention much human hoisting...
...negativity experiences that force me to rethink the nature of the world I live in and the institutions, ecclesiastical and political, in which I participate...
...My first setting is the classroom...
...Without much effort the classroom becomes a hermetically sealed world and the one who gives grades, Ming the Merciless...
...Please God, give him an editor with sharp shears, a long blue pencil, and courage...
...Personal involvement in very different contexts of religious meaning over a relatively short period of time has underscored my long-standing awareness that very different theological questions are asked in the parish rectory, the gathering of religious women, the graduate faculty of theology, the Chancery Office, at the kitchen table of a housewife, the university student union, or the bishops' conference...
...both shared "a turn to the subject," to historical consciousness, to meaning as experience...
...JERUSALEM, city of peace and violence, where I taught for six months, forced me to rethink the role of experience in contemporary theology...
...I rejoin my wife, whose pounding heart during this brief, interminable episode, has been reverberating throughout the entire airport complex...
...And integrating the concept and practice of personal autonomy into an understanding of the Covenant between God and humankind in general and the people of Israel in particular, is the focus of my theological'work...
...When I met him he had to flee for his life from several Latin American countries and from successive regimes in them...
...In the long run the larger societal events shape the course of theological reflection...
...Those who labor in the Chancery and become so overwhelmed by the daily demands of "maintenance" may have little time to advance beyond the categories of early theological training...
...The Christian faith is not an obvious truth, and we all bring diverse levels of intellectual sophistication and spiritual maturity to our differing interpretations of the meaning and truth of the existence of God, the witness of Christ, the credibility of the church, the practical implications of the universal drive toward moral authenticity, and the general need for an intellectually coherent world view...
...I became aware that the root of the idea of Christ is not that of personal and otherworldly salvation, but of social and historical salvation from the massive contradictions of collective human apostasy...
...At the place where the name of God could be agonizingly denied, the name of God is agonizingly affirmed - by those with most reason to deny...
...There were many other vivid experiences too rich to mention in so short a space...
...In the past, too often the unity of the church was sought in the wrong place - on specific moral or even canonical issues such as Sunday eucharistic celebrations, no contraception, and no divorce...
...I share in the tension between my impulse to deny and their decision to affirm...
...Sound training in scripture and a busy ministry among quizzical students have fostered it, as I am pressed to do justice to the tradition by testing and saying it sensibly, and to do justice to the present by seeing through its fashions with the eyes of Jesus crucified...
...LIMITS OF FORMULATIONS George MacRae A noted Biblical scholar and New Testament specialist, Father George MacRae, S. J., is the Charles Chaun-cey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School...
...Human silence today seems the only appropriate response to divine silence yesterday...
...Contemporary theology recognizes the importance of the experience of Christian people...
...In the late sixties "freedom" was the rallying cry...
...The poor who are waiting for the good news are those who do not hear it because humanly inflicted suffering and deprivation seem to cancel it, but also those who do not hear it because it is wrapped up in alien vocabulary and esoteric modes of thought and expression...
...Perhaps what I later described as'The Experience cf Nothingness grew from reflections not so much on the event but on the sort of real world in which such events are common...
...The attempt to do so in the past century has sometimes been at great cost, leaving some notable bodies on the field of battle...
...The second edge is the way theological thinking arises from and returns to personal and social life...
...I have maintained there will be a greater pluralism in Catholic life and in moral theology in the future...
...But we think that we too have the Spirit, and that we never learn what the tradition has to teach us until we can see and say it sensibly shown in our own experience...
...Those who claim to speak for justice and peace recognize no moral opposition...
...His instincts were rare, his work promising...
...I got this, oddly enough, by reading history...
...There continues to be much discussion about the whole approach of the church to sexuality, but these are not the only or the most important issues...
...To get some idea of the many directions theology is taking today, and of why theologians find these various concerns and approaches so compelling, Commonweal addressed the following questions to a range of distinguished theological scholars: What single event or idea-whether cultural, political, or ecclesiastical...
...In the face of recent history, I maintain the necessity of building our relationship to God on the basis of personal autonomy...
...Around us, fanaticism and zealotry commend themselves as respectable reactions to an age which has lost a genuine conscience - or less dramatically put, orthodoxies now seem the only safe response to the errors of a permissiveness become destructive...
...Innuendo, shunning, ridicule, and hostility are fired at one's reputation to keep one from straying...
...Thus,' what has most influenced my theological thinking, and doubtless that of many others, in the post-conciliar years is not a single event but a gradual realization of the implications of the church's acceptance of historical-critical interpretation...
...Many soldiers throughout the airport, guns on the ready...
...Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein...
...He had been looking for dope...
...Both practically and theoretically this question of dissent has continued to be a problem within Catholicism...
...Some bad theology comes from the opposite proclivity: listening only to the evidence of the present...
...In mis way we will build bridges between the different but...
...As a result the "defense of doctrine" can become ideological paralysis, symbols and mysteries can give way to superstition and magic, and the clarity of scholarship become a tyranny of words...
...The experience of a "total community" on the left at Old Westbury...
...The roof of the crematorium of Birkenau, the deathcamp of Auschwitz...
...There is a great danger that we of the white, north half of the world will fail to recognize the important social, political, and economic problems that our life and theory must face...
...At the same time, "freedom" was a key idea for liberal intellectuals of the older generation...
...Perhaps what especially struck me is that Dick was studying Arabic and Islam, on the grounds that, of all great religions, Islam was so little known to Christian intellect...
...By the broadmindedness of my Georgetown colleagues, it did anyway...
...In this context I met many heroic priests as well as a scattering of Protestant ministers and lay men and women both Catholic and Protestant worthy of the deepest admiration for their courage and steady clarity of purpose in situations of terrorism, active persecution, interrogations under torture, and the pervasive threat of violent death...
...Why aren't we discussing Timothy Leary and psychedelics...
...Since 1964, death has been my companion and I am sometimes surprised that I have had time for this work and that, while new days keep being given...
...Though usually occupied in economic development projects, the staff members, some of whom were devout Catholics, had found funding for a more broadly conceived series of workshops for Latin American clergy...
...Social sin seems to me to be a different kind of negativity experience from experiences of tragedy or finitude, which belong to the nature of mortal existence...
...what new questions arise today and what inspiration can be drawn from contemporary authors for their solution...
...Reflection upon the impact of my own experiences on my theology, has made me appreciate the importance of "experience" as a major influence in everyone's theological enterprise...
...however, I recognize that undisciplined it can be tyrannous and impoverishing beyond any propositional truth theology...
...As far as I can tell, these two concerns are not going to go away...
...After a moment the inspector shrugs, puts the letters back in the large brown envelope, and returns the large brown envelope to the suitcase...
...In virtue of departmental chairmanship I was the bishops' host...
...faith was a patented part of the church's rescue apparatus...
...Due to the nature of my work, I must be regularly involved in the academic, pastoral, and administrative life of the church...
...More decisively, the tone of contemporary philosophies and culture will keep theology very close to experience...
...Something in me died with him, a certain unreality of sorts...
...Should the same theological questions be asked in these different contexts, (and understood in the same way) the different answers will bear the mark of the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional resources, as well as the personal experiences and allegiances of those involved...
...These, in turn, have sprung from the needs of believers and the experience of theologians...
...I am convinced that in spite of the real differences between the presuppositions and theological methodologies in the worlds of the chdrch, the university, and ordinary life, these different,worlds of religious meaning are the settings for an essentially positive activity...
...I suppose I just assumed from my American background that slavery would be abhorrent to everyone...
...Comparing the actual American people to the vision of America cherished in the literary culture I then took part in, I was subverted...
...The classroom has pushed me into the question of how theological thinking serves human well-being...
...Technical language and normative discourse are important for the life of the faith community...
...This Jesuit who was being hunted down, directing retreats for peasants in hiding places, without benefits of current books and periodicals and exchange with colleagues, explained how he presented the Christian vision and commitment...
...But tonight there is one more checkpoint than usual...
...This extension has been recognized, albeit hesitantly, in the Vatican document of 1973 Mysterium Ecclesiae, and Catholic theology now must deal with historical-critical interpretation of "tradition" as well as Scripture...
...As regards theories of how God reveals himself I welcomed the turn away from revelation as the disclosure of statements of truth (Christ is one person in two natures, human and divine...
...And he shares the task of building a Catholic theology for our time, an urgent task now that a particular scholastic theology has been relegated to history...
...It was early in the autumn of 1968, and we had about four dozen bishops gathered quietly at Notre Dame for their annual theology seminar...
...It is not necessarily a comfortable freedom, for it must reckon with the consequences of a loss of the familiar absolutes in theological reflection...
...Theologians recognized that a Catholic can dissent from an authoritative, noninfallible hierarchical teaching when one discerns there are sufficient reasons for overturning the presumption in favor of the official teaching...
...I am persuaded that my stand against the rising orthodoxies is correct each time I hear of another of their self-righteous transgressions against individual conscience or I am reminded of the heavy intellectual burden they place upon their adherents to integrate fully what they know with what they are taught to believe...
...It incites but does not accomplish what we long for: union with the Father...
...Meanwhile, back at the chancery, the tribunal staffs (pastorally compassionate' but unable to reconcile their practice with the past) are issuing divorces to their parents...
...And we come to know it the same way our forebears did and recovering alcoholics do: by seeing people weaken and die from it...
...Archbishop Quinn's intervention at the Synod on Humanae Vitae, the discussion of a change in U.S...
...Faith of itself does not make us safe...
...It would be nice to have a secure place...
...whether personal or public-has most affected your theological work in the years since Vatican II...
...What is there to feel beyond terror...
...They are the ongoing drudgeries, the day-in day-out settings...
...not only what you have actually "done," but even more what you have accepted from it...
...This commitment carries with it the expectation of making many errors of practical judgment, many misreadings of reality, many unavoidable changes of mind...
...Quietly, because no one had a plausible public explanation of what those men, allegedly graced with a plenitude of faith-understanding, stood to learn from theologians over Whom they were placed as teachers...
...The experience of nothingness, often revived, is better...
...Because of having stood at Birkenau, it is now impossible for me to affirm God in the ways I did before...
...Thanks, Harry...
...In theological thinking this posturing can find its finest moment...
...At times, with proper consultation and deliberation, the hierarchical magisterium must speak out on theological questions involving faith and morals...
...We make it through customs, breathing unaccustomed sighs of relief...
...The hoped-for result of such efforts is that no one of us will take a part of Christian wisdom for the whole...
...What it was slow to realize, however, is that the acceptance of such a conclusion in biblical interpretation inevitably would involve the extension of it to all dogmatic formulations as well...
...The parish priest or bishop who only pages through The Priest or' 'Homily Hints'' each week will give one homily while the one who carefully reads the writings of the spiritual masters will give another...
...Does it promote their common well-being or subvert it...
...how was a systematic explanation derived from these stories, images, and symbols...
...In any case, I accepted and became involved in the planning, conduct, and subsequent analysis of a series of such workshops...
...Why do I deny a cardinal element of Judaism's classic teaching, that conscience is fulfilled in the Torah and has no independent weight against its mandates as interpreted by the Sages of our day...
...TIDAL MOVE TO THE RIGHT Eugene B. Borowitz Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at the New York School of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Eugene B. Borowitz is Editor of Sh'ma, a Jewish ethical journal...
...I was profoundly affected by them...
...Jesus Christ...
...Theological constructions quickly turn to self-justifying statements or the bolstering for pet programs...
...But even with its emphasis on experience I found its style too conceptual and abstract for pastoral work (I teach seminarians) and it is generally uninterested in orthodoxy, which is not "true doctrine" but "right praise," namely, prayer and worship...
...If the letters are opened, my friends are dead and I have betrayed them...
...This awareness results in a sort of awesome freedom for the theologian, not freedom from any restraint on the part of tradition or the magisterium, but freedom to follow the search for meaning unhindered by literalism or historicism...
...These experiences might be described as "negativity experiences," not primarily of a personal, but of a social nature...
...What began as tolerance led on to pluralism and soon became a relativism which now threatens us as nihilism...
...Having a real God as part of an age-old, worldwide ethnic community, I have a sense of genuine Divine and corporate, yet personalized, discipline...
...Why don't we just rap a bit...
...I began the 1970s thinking that socialism is probably the most beautiful ideal available to thinking persons...
...What I have lost in the last decade is a secure place on the left...
...This Christology I can preach...
...In very general terms, the model I attempt is the following...
...The relationship between experiences related in story forms and critical and speculative reflection must be explicitly spelled out...
...The large brown envelope is opened...
...I would expect to continue to work on explicating different pieces of that for the foreseeable future...
...Discovery that the social system of which you are a part is engaged in chronic duplicity and contradiction, then, comes as a shock and an awakening...
...I asked myself why...
...The layperson who only reads The Wanderer or the National Catholic Reporter will draw certain conclusions concerning the difficulties between the Vatican, Father Kung, and Father Schillebeeckx, while those who are able to read the full documentation (not to mention the authors' books themselves...
...Negatively, it may be put this way: if I scorn the old servile liberal dependency on "the best of Western culture ," if I acknowledge the lasting truth of Judaism understood in rich particularity, why am I not observant of the historic Torah...
...developments in the arts, e.g...
...holydays of obligation...
...For me, a recognition of the abhorrent behavior of the Roman Catholic church preceded an awareness of the contradictions of American society...
...the resurgence of racism and sexism...
...The economic and political self-interest and manipulation by the powerful which sent the powerless to the war in Vietnam to kill and be killed was seen as the manifestation of a very sick society...
...His books include A New Jewish Theology in the Making X Westminster), The Masks Jews Wear (Simon & Schuster), and, most recently, Contemporary Christologies, a Jewish Response (Paulist Press...
...Many of the traditionalist battles my colleagues and I fought among liberals resulted in victories now rather taken for granted by serious-minded Jews (who remain, alas, a minority among us...
...Armed soldiers on city buses, bombings in the Jewish market, the brisk efficiency of the Israeli, the combination of graciousness and casual hostility of passing Arabs, the Mount of Olives, the Holy Sepulcher, the sacred bloody history of the temple site, the monument recalling the horrors of Dachau and Auschwitz, all told me that experience and place massively determine theology...
...Basically, we cleave to God by cleaving to one another, by doing something secular, the works of duty that transform us: diapering babies and stopping wars and keeping our heavy thumb off the shop scales...
...I find the prospect exciting and hope that it will be the nucleus of my own theological work in the future...
...I came to think there was more health in the people than in their literary elites, including me...
...The "biblical theologian" has the possibility of being not just an antiquarian but a theologian tout court...
...Our silence is deafening...
...My second setting is the local church...
...Looking forward, I realize that many of these same agenda items still remain...
...In the matter of salvation, we had heard from our forefathers closest to Jesus that he had rescued them, that faith had brought them out of estrangement into peace...
...I will not name him because I do not know what he is doing now and whether anonymity is important...
...One lesson he taught me (best of all in The Idiot) is that the people, while not always wise, are wiser than the intellectuals...
...because our situation is too affluent and therefore our experience is deficient...
...However, our moral traditions of individual"sins'' do not give us a good handle for analyzing the nature of culpability for social sin...
...It is historically inherited...
...Most Catholics have long made their peace with Humanae Vitae one way or another...
...a seeming Stalemate in ecumenism...
...There is immense tyranny on the left, a tyranny of moral style, a tyranny of keeping one's credentials, a tyranny of cleaving to acceptable moral lines...
...By reporting episodes illustrative of each of these, I can also insinuate a third factor in my own theological shaping - (c) narrative or story as a mode of theological communication...
...Rather it is a question of the theological enterprise itself...
...Standard operating procedure...
...But when a return to Jewish faith is a response to our civilizational crisis, the failures of Jewish liberalism raise the challenge that Jewish authenticity can only mean Jewish Orthodoxy...
...Footnote: There is not a single indication, for all my Jerusalem experience, that my theology was in the least affected by the Holocaust...
...At this moment, the effort is more to stay afloat than to navigate a course...
...First, my own reason for changing my thinking on this question came about because of contact and dialogue with many Catholic married couples during the 1960s...
...Here too I insist on the fact that there exists pluralism of methodologies compatible with Catholic faith understanding...
...My political awakening was somewhat later...
...In fact, it had condoned it and was itself among the last to give up the ownership of serfs...
...At the close of Harry's talk I Violated hospitality by saying in front of all the bishops that it sounded like a lot of malarkey...
...Schillebeeckx has also promised one...
...The Faculty Board of Inquiry concluded that our declarations and actions had been responsible...
...single indication, for all my Jerusalem experience, that my theology was in the least affected by the Holocaust...
...I reported these two episodes in a recent book (Creative Dislocation-The Movement of Grace, Abingdon) and repeat them here since they can hardly be condensed further...
...There were, of course, many aspects to this-the need for the clergy to understand something of the dynamics of economic and social change, the importance of knowing the history and being able to analyze the present situation with its local and larger patterns of interdependence, and training in perceptive-ness to appropriate and use well the culturally conditioned social and psychological leadership potential of the priesthood in the Latin American societies...
...The range of "theological" and "religious" comments about such diverse events as the travels and writings of Pope John Paul II...
...Social sin, on the other hand, is fundamentally culpable...
...The challenge facing the church is to reconcile the unity of the church with this pluralism...
...It was the old stuff about crypto-Christians, anonymous believers, people-who-would-belong-if-only-they-got-the-call-ungarbled...
...First-order expression is the immediate casting of experience...
...I asked myself where they did draw their inspiration, and why it worked out so well with the Cuban Jesuit and so disastrously ill with some of the others...
...Around our country Pre-Cana staffs are rousing young fiances to surrender their lives in Christian jeopardy, for better or for worse, until death...
...I'm not sure yet whether it was a prayer or a curse...
...It will try to gauge the impact of theological ideas on personal and social life...
...Significantly Schillebeeckx, who speaks about "the authority of experience," ends his second volume in prayer...
...But for some time now - though here we tend to overlook its many successes - events continually make its bankruptcy more plain...
...In this context I had been newly hired in the Theology Department at Georgetown University and was asked what I would like to teach in an elective slot that was open...
...He told, very simply, the radicalizing events that had precipitated the crucial conversion in his life, and the path he then followed in attempting to rouse an active and responsible Christian consciousness among the peasants and the really poor by means of men's weekend retreats...
...In the short run the personal world has a primacy of impact...
...They took me through a series of intellectual and personal conversions and introduced me to liberation theology in the making...
...This is the distinction, almost universally admitted in theology, between first-order expression and second-order reflection...
...In biblical interpretation the historical-critical method leads most immediately to the conclusion that the affirmations of the Bible are in varying ways conditioned by the limitations of time, culture, human understanding, literary expression, and all the factors that make up what is called the historical relativity of the various biblical books...
...And such works lie at hand to those without faith, who often take them up with more relish and pluck than we whose faith has told us of their secret worth...
...In other words, a full religious picture includes encounter, expression, reflection, and action...
...In these different settings the same "public" events trigger very different implicit or explicit theological responses...
...the experience of hostility from the left as I began to criticize the left as I had earlier criticized the right...
...It was based on the discovery of the depth and apparent boundlessness of human self-determination and human loneliness, on the vertiginous sense of human existence in a vast, uncharted void...
...and the deaths of Dorothy Day, the missionaries in El Salvador, and John Lennon demonstrate what I mean...
...To over-generalize, the religious sensitivity of parish people emphasizes human feeling and communicates faith in story forms...
...I fear that efforts by Rome to control theology will have the unhappy effect of driving Catholic theology out of Catholic institutions precisely because of the danger of unwarranted hierarchical intervention...
...Theologically, I have sought to demonstrate the liberal validity of a personalist Judaism...
...The priest-theologian who lectures on Godamer during the week but celebrates the Eucharist and preaches in a parish on weekends will theologize differently from the theologian who spends the weekend in the library...
...But if the church context of theology (along with the public and university contexts) is to be heeded, a complementary strategy must be engaged in...
...It is now fundamental for my theological stance...
...In process theology inspired by Whitehead and Hartshorne I met a paradigm for reality which was the self's full experience of self, a richer turn to the subject and experience, I was faced with the fundamental elements of reality seen as "occasions of experience'' or "drops of experience...
...nor do I want them on my person in case there is a physical check...
...How can you give me that sort of grade when this is how I sincerely feel about it...
...Now anything according to Karl Rahner is pretty murky, but as Harry was striving to make light shine in that particular darkness it came clear that unbelievers were to be saved by some sort of unwitting tie-up with the church...
...Second-order reflection is the cooler activity of critiquing, exploring, and expanding these primordial faith statements...
...I have tried in the last decade or so to develop new methodological approaches which will avoid some of the problems associated with the natural law approach of the manuals of theology...
...The contraception question was the foremost problem in Catholic moral theology (and probably in Catholic life) in the decade of the sixties...
...This controversy 'brought to the fore the question of the teaching function of the church and especially the role of the papal and episcopal teaching offices in the church...
...Jesus could be got at only through faith...
...Their experience was a true theological source for me...
...Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" or Pomerance's play The Elephant Man...
...One has to reevaluate not only the social system, but one's own life in it...
...My mobility and personal involvement in different theological contexts has assumed specifically theological significance because it has convinced me that even though members of the various groups, do not always agree with or appreciate one another, they each are mediating elements of religious meaning that are valuable for the life of the church...
...IT WOULD be difficult to isolate a particular event in the last fifteen years which has shaped my theological work...
...I was startled by the combination of creativity and loyalty to the tradition...
...One might have thought that Divino Afflante Spiritii (1943) had long since resolved the issue, but it was clear in the years immediately preceding the Council that it hadn't...
...The discussion over Humanae Vitae helped to clarify the role of theology in the life of the church...
...I breathe to her as I sit down...
...And then it comes - first from the lips of one man, Elie Wiesel (standing in the camp vyheire thirty-five years earlier his life and family and faith were destroyed), and then in a mounting chorus from others, mostly Jews, the great affirmation: Shema Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai echod, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One...
...Little in life is less trustworthy than what leaders in the world of ideas at any one time find enlightened, sophisticated, and virtuous...
...I was leery of what David Tracy calls "a warm deism...
...THEOLOGICALLY, the most significant event of my life, in retrospect, may have been the murder of my younger brother Dick, a priest of twenty-seven, in Dacca, then East Pakistan, in 1964...
...BRIDGE BUILDING Edward K. Braxton Assistant Chancellor for Theological Affairs for the Diocese of Cleveland, Father Edward K. Braxton has just been appointed Special Assistant to Archbishop James A. Hickey in Washington, D.C...
...Liberation seemed to be synonymous with anarchy in the minds of many students in those days...
...It was brief, almost casual, more or less by chance...
...Humanae Vitae and the questions surrounding it have greatly influenced my own work as a theologian especially in terms of setting my theological agenda...
...What is essentially different now in the age-old enterprise of creating theology anew is that theologians are conscious of the newness of their methods and of the relativity of the older formulations...
...If venerable spokesmen have said that "artificial" contraception is evil, then we in our time ought be able to join them in this conviction by looking mighty hard at people who do it, and by seeing that in doing it they wither, they lose love, they fade, they die...
...Personally I am intrigued by experience as a theological theme because I know it can be liberating and transforming...
...What the vision sees is that vision alone does not save...
...Unfortunately, recent Roman regulations and the proposed new Code of Canon Law are designed to put theology under the jurisdiction of the hierarchy...
...While it may be unreasonable to expect those in one of these worlds to be fully at ease and in agreement with those in another, my personal experience of positive collaboration with many different worlds has reinforced my suspicion that it will be good for the church if some theologians maintain genuine conversations with these diverse "hermeneutic circles" without prematurely "taking sides...
...Thus, one proposition of "liberation theology" that I do admire (mostly I find it a justification for socialist tyranny) is the principle that theological reflection should begin in engagement with the common sense of the people...
...I also sensed immediately that, if the opposite was the case, then this was a massive fact that would fundamentally reshape my whole conception of the authority of the church...
...what is the question that arises out of that experience...
...In reacting to the Humanae Vitae discussion, I have tried to avoid the danger of focusing only on this issue to the exclusion of more important aspects of the moral life and of the discipline of moral theology...
...The social sciences have pointed to the ideological mechanisms present in all thinking...
...But these questions expand rather than fundamentally change the problem...
...Faith sends us to do the works of love and to be refashioned by the doing of them...
...However, many of the conflicts between so-called liberal and conservative factions among bishops, pastoral ministers, scholars, and the people in the pews is the result of artificially separating orthodoxy, orthopraxis, and conceptual clarity from fundamental religious experience at the level of personal conversion, inferiority, and the ascetical life...
...Theologically, I have always written from engagement in action...
...DURING VATICAN II I was engaged in doctoral research at the University of Cambridge in the field of New Testament and the history of religion in the Greco-Roman world...
...The function of theology is not merely to apply the statements.of the hierarchical magisterium but to interpret the Word of God as faithfully handed down in the church in the light of the changing realities of time and place...
...When people who write point to this distinction, they quickly follow it with a ringing defense of second-order reflection...
...But now the mode was different and I had to wrestle and make judgments, not all of them favorable...
...One cannot reflect correctly on our historical reality without keeping clear that knowledge of the system from the side of the oppressed...
...The study of the Spirit, I venture, will follow the study of Christ from below, namely, beginning with how the Spirit was actually experienced in New Testament times and not with abstract speculation about his nature...
...The absurdity, the unfairness, the harshness of reality ceased being theoretical...
...The church, they concluded, must more trenchantly persuade them that is wrong, for high clergy have so often said it was...
...Obviously, this recognition also occasioned the further discussion about infallibility...
...Whatever its faults such a study from below demonstrated that without renewed experience of Jesus a gulf develops between the primordial New Testament experience and the on-going tradition...
...At the recent Synod some bishops were cast down because so many good Catholic folk were contracepting...
...The letters themselves are extracted...
...One of the scarier moments of teaching is watching a freshly fashioned thought become a weapon in the mind of a student...
...Yes, there are difficulties in weighing and discerning the experience of Christian people (no theologian maintains it is merely a question of nose-counting or poll-taking), but the importance and role of this experience in the life of the church and of theology cannot be denied...
...I need to refer to two events rather than one, since neither one by itself gives sufficient indication of the tensions within which I am working...
...I am obviously prejudiced, but such procedures have worked in the Humanae Vitae situation and can and should be allowed to be operative in all possible future situations...
...I am not suggesting that I or anyone else attempt to do everything...
...What I was asked to do was to think out and present to the organizers and to successive groups of workshop participants a coherent theological account of the "what," "why," and "how" of priestly concern in economic development and social change...
...The gist of it, though tortuously extended by Rahner (you tended to forget his beginning by the time you arrived, spent, at his conclusion), was familiar...
...I believe that there is a need for theologians to give more attention to the way in which people "theologize" from context to context...
...CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM Charles E. Curran Professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Father Charles E. Curran is the author of numerous books including Issues in Sexual and Medical Ethics arid Ongoing Revisions in Moral Theology (Fides/Claretian...
...There are so many ways the synapse fails to close...
...As a result of this ongoing, historic association, the human partners create Torah, the Jewish teaching and way...
...We are standing on ruins the Germans tried (unsuccessfully) to obliterate, to hide evidence that six million Jews had been shot and gassed and burned in such places, solely because they were Jews...
...My Jewish liberalism grew organically, nurtured beneficiently by its appealing openness to the world, its tolerance of difference and its flexibility of belief and practice...
...Social sin continues across generations...
...To me that issue is as much engendered by the Ayatollah Khomeini as by the American Jewish youths who can only "come back" to Judaism significantly by denying the legitimacy of any of the liberal Judaisms, Reform, Conservative, or Reconstructionist...
...For twenty-four seconds of one early morning, we experience the reality with which our sisters and brothers in Latin America live during the twenty-four hours of every single day and every single night...
...I have tried to maintain over the years that theology can serve the church best if it has the protections afforded by American university procedures...
...Individuals are socialized into roles of domination and oppression and taught that these are normal and right...
...It was perceived by the student generation of the time in terms of oppressive social structures...
...This sociospeak can put a lot of hop in an audience with talk of structural oppression and union lettuce and self-actualization, but you never learn from it why Jesus had to die...
...Many of the problems faced by moral theology are really ecclesiological issues about the teaching functions in the church...
...The parish has forced me to connect religious feeling with theological thought...
...Sound theology must close the synapse between what ancients said to us and what we have seen for ourselves...
...Christianity is a religious faith before it is a theological idea or an ethical strategy...
...We hold ourselves answerable to the more durable insights our ancestors in faith left us from their graced experience...
...PASTORAL EFFECTIVENESS Monika K. Hellwig A professor of theology at Georgetown University, Monika K. Hellwig is the author of What Are the Theologians Saying?, The Christian Creeds, The Meaning of the Sacraments, Tradition: The Catholic Story Today (all published by Pflaum), as well as The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World, Death and Christian Hope and the forthcoming Understanding Catholicism (all published by Paulist Press...
...I take a doctrine and try to uncover what is the human experience of which it speaks...
...I grew up in a relatively privileged, patriotic, and pious family...
...Life is too short for such captivity...
...It is hard to say exactly when I became aware of these kinds of chronic experiences of contradiction, and, even less, why I responded to them, rather than screening them out as unconnected with myself...
...a calling it back to faithfulness to its own professed ideals...
...Heady stuff and much of it useful, expecially its emphasis on the interrelatedness of all reality and its critique of traditional theism...
...GRACE & DISLOCATION Robert McAfee Brown Professor of theology and ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in California, Robert McAfee Brown is the author of Theology in a New Key and Creative Dislocation (Abingdon), among others...
...and hence those unfaithed who were fortunate enough to make it had to be beholden somehow, through some mystical association, to Jesus and to us, his card-carrying believers...
...Above all, moral theology must deal with what discipleship requires of us in our world...
...Thanks to a university-wide strike, I was given a promotion and a new contract...
...But I take some small comfort in what Virgil Michel, a monk of my own monastery and an acknowledged founder of the liturgical movement in the U.S., was saying in the 1920s: a cultic Christianity, huddled around the altar, which internalizes morality while leaving social reality and experience untouched and unchanged, is an illusion...
...How does knowledge serve love...
...These were to explore the possible leadership roles of the clergy in economic development and social change...
...As a welcome interruption to these preoccupations, there came to my office one day in 1969 two staff members of a small research and development corporation with an urgent and enthusiastic request...
...Much theological writing tends to emphasize coherent thinking and communicates faith in concepts...
...What future does experience have as a major theological category...
...I was even more startled when he said to me later, "You teach theology...
...If there is a single feeling, it is being at the mercy of many significant events and being enticed by an entire chorus line of ideas...
...I have become convinced that the church needs an independent theological voice which faithfully recognizes the role of the hierarchical teaching function...
...It reveals to us the things which do...
...the phenomenon of civil religion...
...In each there is something of substantial value for the church...
...How come you lecture...
...Freed from that tyranny, I have begun looking at the world-it now seems-far more directly...
...Salvation came only through Jesus...
...This seems to me to have ruled out the sectarian response of the search for the "pure" community apart from this "world...
...It is a degenerative disease...
...Liberalism once commended itself as a messianic program, one which would inevitably increase its sway in human affairs...
...ONE ENCOUNTER with one person has probably shaped my perception of the theologian's task more than any other since Vatican II...
...Fear turns to terror...
...During the congressional elections of 1970,1 seized the opportunity to travel to some thirty-nine states and into many neighborhoods and communities...
...This may mean writing a review of Kung's Does God Exist: An Answer for Today, delivering a homily on one hundred years of black Catholics in Chicago, raising the theological implications of diocesan administrative policies, provoking a group of seminarians to a "radical" level of theological reflection and explaining on a TV talk show that the "object" of Christian faith is the saving deeds of God in Jesus the Christ and could never hinge upon studies of the Shroud of Turin...
...Attacks on historical-critical interpretation, often from high places, were reflected in the initial draft of the Constitution and were overcome only by the slow educative process that took place in and around the Council itself...
...If there has ever been a century more savage than ours, its dates elude me...
...And if, try as we do, we cannot see or say that folk who space their children contraceptively are of withered spirit-then we must hush about its being sin, and do more learning...
...the publication of Volume II of Schillebeeckx's Christology...
...Still it may be useful for some theologians to "pass over" into the different but related worlds of church and university theologians, the magisterial concerns of bishops, the pastoral theological realities of the parish, the devotional lives and spiritual struggle of ordinary Catholic families, and the street religion of the "faithful" who are never in the churches...
...How do you see this influence shaping your future work...
...When the theological house is built, the question will be, "Who can live in it...
...This important development has numerous consequences for the whole enterprise of theology which affect my work and will continue to do so...
...the earthquake in Naples, the threat of international war...
...The danger of isolated second-order reflection is ideas without roots, coherent thinking without any adequate grounding...
...Then there is liberation theology with its turn not to the subject but to the situation...
...I OWE a most persisting theological insight to Harry McSorley, though he will not be thanking me for the telling of it...
...I never could begin to understand what they were talking about or why...
...Rahner and Lonergan both represented a continuing move away from a theology preoccupied with an abstract analysis of objects (God, Christ, church...
...A church which continually, for most of its history, accepted and justified slavery was not "infallible in morals," either in teaching or practice...
...Aristotelian theory of knowledge (all knowing comes through the senses) and even my monastic-patristic tradition were heavy with experience...
...Other than my immediate family, most of my relatives on both sides are politically conservative and "genteelly" chauvinist and racist...
...On a more theoretical level, the exact relationship between the hierarchical magisterium and the role of theologians causes many tensions in the contemporary church...
...However, final and juridically binding decisions in the academy must be made only by academic peers giving due weight to what is Catholic faith...
...I thought it would attract an enrollment that would justify its place as an elective if we called it' "Theology of Freedom.'' It did...
...The suitcase is opened, the large brown envelope extracted...
...Moral theology today bears the weight of many of the unsolved problems in ecclesiology...
...That's an indictment and I have no explanation...
...the experience of seeing life again through the eyes of three growing children-cumulatively, all these have forced me to rethink my earlier education...
...That glimpse in 1968 of theology ever ancient and ever new has meant much to me...
...These negativity experiences reveal the massive and chronic contradictions between the professed ideals and commitments of institutions, such as the American government and the Roman Catholic church, and their actual, operating procedures...
...It also proved to be curiously difficult to teach, given those troubled times, as witnessed by such petulant questions as, "Why a final exam if this is supposed to be Theology of Freedom...
...In subsequent experiences, both in the American ghettos of race and poverty and in Latin America, I have deepened that experience...
...Basically, a person cleaves to God by doing something religious...
...In a recent luncheon conversation a sociologist, armed with facts, volunteered, ' 'Nobody is listening to theologians.'' One of the theologians present sighed, "You should add, 'Alas!' " There is either a gap or a chasm, depending on what day you look, between the theological writing done in the academy and the pastoral reality of the grass-roots church...
...Bernard Lonergan was correct when he said it is no longer possible for any individual theologian to be equally competent in all the areas of specialization...
...But that, perhaps, does not unite past preaching with present learning...
...When the religious dream is articulated, the question will be, "Who wins?'' Theology is one thing people do to each other...
...What I am suggesting is that in the various "hermeneutic circles" in the church there exists more good will and more cogency than outsiders might suspect or admit...
...SOCIAL SIN Rosemary Radford Ruether A member of the faculty at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois, Rosemary Radford Ruether is the author of several books including Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (Seabury), The Radical Kingdom (Paulist-Newman) and, co-editor, with Rosemary Keller, of Women and Religion in America: the Nineteenth Century (Harper & Row...
...Sacramental character, grace of state, original sin, papal magisterium-all that theospeak that puts the glaze on eyes in the pews-teachers tell us of their nature and worth, but one has the notion they couldn't point one out in a crowd...
...With this I resonated positively...
...The Catholic church must surely have opposed it...
...There was one encounter which was decisive for me, with a Cuban Jesuit...
...Sin is no technical foul...
...MY response to your query arises from the context of my religious stance over the years...
...So many cried out to God at this spot and were not heard...
Vol. 108 • January 1981 • No. 2
