The end of Catholicism, Part III: To trust or to suspect
Tracy, David
slippery rhetoric, his glib, shallow agnostic arguments, and his contemptuous, "with it" innuendoes. Like Oakland, there is ultimately no there there. He does not understand the liberal consensus...
...A contributor to many journals, he is the author of Blessed Rage for Order...
...Nor am I the first theologian to try to reflect on that charge...
...He does not understand the social science of knowing, he does not understand the philosophers of science such as Polanyi and Ricoeur, he does not understand how those who work on the leading edge of both disciplines now realize that all forms of knowing, science and religion equally included, struggle to understandreality through a model fitting process which requires both faith and skepticism...
...Later, the house he shares with his father in a predominantly Protestant development is firebombed by Ulster arsonists...
...Elements of this scene are repeated in part or in full as Cal draws near the widow...
...Does Thomas Sheehan believe that trust in any tradition precludes critical and even suspicious attitudes towards that same tradition...
...Who is he reading...
...Like his country, he's tied in knots...
...Feminist Christian theologies, as one major example, have recently demonstrated by argued and persuasive suspicion an endemic, unconscious sexism in traditional Christian self-understanding...
...What his original article claimed, and what I responded to, is this: there is a liberal consensus in modern Catholic exegesis and theology, and that consensus has brought Catholic theology to the "limits" of its own language...
...If Sheehan believes that such religious experience is impossible, or that any process of religious discernment is implausible, then let us discuss that...
...I respect that option...
...In fact, Thomas Sheehan seems I I I FATHER DAVID TRACY is a member of the Committee on Ideas and Methods and a professor of theology at the University of Chicago...
...Criticism is geared to pursuing the truth by examining rival claims and eliminating all possible conscious errors...
...So the first question for both of us to consider is: how can we converse critically about these differences across such a fundamental chasm separating our attitudes...
...On the basis of his arguments against that hope, Thomas Sheehan seems to be a reform-minded modem thinker with a strong religious sense...
...Modern Catholic theologians, we both agree, employ a hermeneutic of retrieval informed principally by an attitude of fundamental trust in the tradition...
...Lena, as quoted in William Faulkner's Light in August O NE WAY to respond to criticism is to change the subject...
...Sheehan seems to agree with this distinction between critical and constitutive functions, only to quietly shift the meaning of "constitutive" to his description of the "content" of revelation as seance-like discoveries of spooky supernatural information...
...If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he was an Elmer Gantry-like fraud, this would radically affect Christian self-understanding...
...iceberg...
...But the "postliberal" devil he proposes seems, perhaps unconsciously, to propose an all-too-familiar modern liberal scenario: religion would be acceptable if only it did not make claims other than those we already know...
...He has not...
...But such suspicion, he insists, theologians do not, and, perhaps temperamentally, cannot allow...
...Here we ain't been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee...
...The Ulster policeman whose wife Cal befriends answers his bell during Christmastime revels: happy and flushed from wine and song, he opens his door, is shot, then dies crying out his wife Marcella's ,name...
...To trust in a global sugpicion is no more and no less vulnerable to the need for critical assessment than to trust in a fundamental trust...
...His interest lies elsewhere...
...If he believes that any talk of the resurrection of Jesus is either false consciousness, contrary to what we all know is possible, or that present theological interpretations of the Resurrection are a falsification of the New Testament statements, then let us discuss that...
...He first meets her accidentally when he hears her consoled by name in a library...
...The film, adapted to the screen by the writer of the original novel, Bernard MacLaverty, seems to condone this sad view and provide no easy answers...
...It can even be glimpsed in the sometimes gray-on-gray arguments of liberal theologians who attempt to give reasons for the hope and trust they experience--no more, no less...
...or you believe that Cecil B. de Mille's rendition of the resurrection of Jesus is the best interpretation we have...
...As he states them so far, they are not...
...They believe that God did vindicate the startling message and the shocking, radical mode of life proclaimed and lived by Jesus of Nazareth...
...That's why "liberals" can only be "brilliant conservatives...
...The questions he now raises are more important and more interesting than the ones posed in his original article...
...Any fundamental attitude (whether trust or suspicion) is always vulnerable to criticism and suspicion from any source...
...I do not claim that the present conversation is resolved...
...That interest, as his recent reply makes clear, is in the question of whether theology itself -- all theology (especially the "modem," "liberal" kind) -- is not unconsciously selfdeluding...
...That vindication means that Jesus is the Christ, is with God, and is with the Christian community i w l :i:?' " 5 October 1984:533 now...
...Politics might determine one's reaction to Cal...
...But it is worth noting that they are different...
...They believe in the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of some personal religious experience of Jesus Christ as the crucified and risen one...
...Jesus is not dead as a doornail...
...The real task, he now urges us, is to reflect on whether his radical suspicions of any liberal theological enterprise are persuasive...
...It can be glimpsed in people' s attempt at Christian prayer, reflection, and action, like the prayer, reflection, and action of those "basic communities" of Christians in Latin America...
...This is an entirely legitimate question to theology...
...They may "tinker," but they are not truly suspicious...
...The contemporary theologians Sheehan cites (Kiing, Schillebeeckx, Rahner, myself--and by implication the political and liberation theologians) have tried to reflect publicly on the critical results of historical methods for traditional beliefs...
...If Sheehan thinks...
...They experience this reality in prayer, in worship, in word and sacrament, in reflecting on the New Testament narrations of that life, death and resurrection, and in every genuine attempt to live the kind of challenge disclosed in the New Testament documents of this Jesus of Nazareth...
...Consider this exchange itself: our fundamental trust of one another's intellectual integrity and personal honesty has not been broken by our strong criticisms of one another's arguments, or even by whatever mutual suspicions of one another's intellectual position we may express...
...The local IRA leader evokes a sympathetic response when recalling the Londonderry "riot" of 1972, when British soldiers killed thirteen Catholics at what, until then, had been a predominantly peaceful demonstration...
...It is important to be clear about this: if Thomas Sheehan was really, all along, articulating a radical suspicion of any theological argument, why did he not say so in his original article...
...That's why, despite all their use of critical methods, theologians can only be reformers, "tinkerers" polishing the brass on the Titanic as it heads for Commonweal: 532 the inevitable crash against a presently submerged (unconscious...
...We are informed that the problem with theologians, docile creatures that they are, is that they may not be able to imagine anything really different from what the tradition tells them...
...That is precisely what every conversation, every argument with someone you fundamentally trust demands...
...So does Thomas Sheehan...
...He is not interested, it seems, in arguments that there are "levels" of discourse which function in the "liberal consensus" he chose to interpret...
...Theology is not so much wrong or erroneous as self-deluding, illusory, systemically and unconsciously distorted...
...What is he experiencing-in any personal situation of trust he has ever been a party to...
...But even these questions suggested by Sheehan are caught in the paradoxes of his language...
...Christian theology is accountable to any legitimate suspicions, however radical...
...How different can be glimpsed by anyone's reflection on the demands for what a truly human life might be in light of the ministry, message, actions, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
...Both these claims have been expressed by historians, and both have been found implausible on strictly historico-critical grounds...
...He is, moreover, Stalinist in his tactics, employing sadistic killers who pressure Cal into operations despite his desire to bid farewell to arms...
...But perhaps the questions have become a little clearer...
...Theologians have also argued why this central belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is, by the very nature of the subject matter, a belief necessarily grounded in a contemporary religious discernment of discipleship and prayer...
...With considerable Irish charm, Thomas Sheehan does exactly that in his response to my criticisms of his article in The New York Review of Books...
...What counts is a critical attitude, from whatever approach which is willing to put itself at risk in every conversation and every argument...
...I erred in my interpretations of his position, or in my arguments with his position, he should have argued back and shown where my errors lie...
...They do not believe that this reality is reducibleto the historical claim that something happened to Jesus' reputation after he was crucified...
...Cal's problem is simple but symbolic: he's in love with the widow of an Ulster policeman whose assassination he abetted by driving a getaway car for an IRA gunman...
...There is, I agree, a difference between a hermeneutic informed by basic trust in a tradition, and one informed by basic suspicion...
...And that explaining cannot be met through rhetorical flourishes about "quasi-parliamentary" procedures, "what if " scenarios about Jesus' return, Sheehan's memories of Catholic grammar school, or suggestions that theologians must know, like the "rest of us," that Jesus is "dead as a doornail...
...Sheehan assures us that something happened to Jesus' "reputation" after his death, but that the rest is "faith,"--Sheehan's shorthand for "Simon's hoping Jesus out of the grave...
...I stated in my response, and restate here, that "Historical Jesus" research and research into the "original apostolic message" have a critical function for Christian self-understanding, even though they cannot, in the nature of the case, have a constitutive function...
...Thomas Sheehan's arguments too often take the form of offering inadequate alternatives: either you believe that Jesus is dead, and that's that...
...I may be allowed some suspicion myself, because Thomas Sheehan may trust too much in familiar modern methods of suspicion himself...
...But if, as is more likely, all these are not the real questions he wishes to pose at all, then what are...
...What they need instead, Sheehan claims, is a hermeneutic of radical suspicion upon that tradition...
...They have also tried to reflect critically on the radical suspicions of any theological consciousness developed by such masters of suspicion as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche...
...He could then have spared himself, and the rest of us, further excursions into all those other issues he raised...
...Why then does Sheehan not present these theologians' arguments, along with the arguments of radical suspicion, and show us why their theological responses do not or even cannot work...
...We live here, and they're trespassers," he comments succinctly, with much heat and some accuracy...
...I disputed that claim...
...Critical reflection, if critical, does not hand blank cheques over to anyone--neither to Sheehan's mythical "Simon," nor to Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger...
...He has elected, instead, to unmask what he feels is a radical ideology unconsciously pervading all modern theology...
...The worst violence in Cal occurs at the beginning, even before the initial credits, providing both powerful forward momentum and profound unity to the film...
...For both of us, I hope, the conversation has just begun...
...If we agree on that, then Thomas Sheehan has as much explaining to do as the theologians he suspects...
...I I I I III THE END OF CATHOLICISM, PART Iii DAVID TRACY To trust or suspect I I "My, my...
...On the other hand, we are instructed that they are stubborn creatures who will not agree with what everyone already knows: "once you're dead you're dead...
...New Pluralism in Theology and The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (both Crossroad Books...
...The theologians Sheehan cites (Kiing, Schillebeeckx, Rahner, and myself) do believe in the resurrection of Jesus...
...On the basis of his response to me, Thomas Sheehan's question seems to be this: is it really possible for any twentieth-century intelligent person to believe such central claims of Christianity as Jesus' resurrection...
...The woman doesn't know: drawn to her by an uncertain mixture of love and guilt, Cal is trying to forget and forge some kind of healing reconciliation...
...In his response, Sheehan is now strangely silent on the "liberal consensus" he earlier forged...
...It s only a snippet, but characteristic of the sad wit and economy that underlines the movie, the most touching film version of the troubles in Northern Ireland to date...
...And yet Christianity, as a religion grounded in historical events, is vulnerable to historical criticism...
...The oppression of Catholics is to be sure, vividly depicted...
...Those issues, it turns out, were never the point...
...Screen NOT-SO- FINAL BATTLES 'CAL' & 'THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY' B~ ~ HEY'RE PLAYING our song," the title character of Cal says mournfully over the sound of a siren to the a l l woman he loves...
...A body does get around...
...I challenge those who wish to embrace Professor Sheehan's position -- on the grounds perhaps that it is "purer" as one "correspondent suggests -- to explore the fields I have cited and decide for themselves whether his statement of alternatives is accurate or adequate...
...I I uninterested now in discussing what theologians actually do when they do theology...
...I trust critical conversation and argument...
...he then tries to draw close, and eventually lands a job at the farm of her Commonweal: 534...
...He suspects that any attempt to interpret such beliefs as true is finally an unconscious expression of "false consciousness," including the subtle interpretations of liberal theological "tinkerers...
...Hence their unconscious self-delusion...
...And they also believe in tffis Jesus Christ with "the Apostles/' as Paul believed: Jesus' life and message have been vindicated by God...
...It is also what every conversation with any tradition you fundamentally trust demands...
...Personally embodying the contradictions of terrorist civil war in this acute form, Cal is both reluctant accomplice to murder and would-be redeemer...
...They believe in this Jesus Christ, crucified and risen...
...A Protestant sympathetically tells Cal after his house is burned, "There are bad bastards on both sides...
...Start with The Varieties...
...An enthusiastic supporter of the IRA provisionals, or at least British withdrawal, would be sure to find much to criticize in its resolutely even-handed approach...
...Cal himself is beaten for no apparent reason by Protestant thugs, unaware of his IRA connections...
...He does not understand the liberal consensus in theology...
...Christianity is not, I repeat, religiously grounded in historico-critical reconstructions...
...Finally -- one must say it candidly -- for all the stir the article in the New York Review of Books created and for all Professor Sheehan's unquestioned forensic skills, his ignorance of th~ disciplines around which he flits, strongly suggests that he does not know what he is talking about...
...But that is a position which no one--I repeat no one--of the theologians he cited holds...
...But he leaves out the Ulstermen, as the IRA has always done...
...Sheehan is not the first to suggest that any theology as theology is ideological...
...To be a Christian (or better, with Kierkegaard, to attempt to become a Christian) is to risk a life on something radically different...
...Catholic theology is now at the point' 'where one can ask what its teachings have to offer that cannot be found outside the scope of its own experience and discourse...
...Is such trust a kind of pure, Billy Budd attitude that can never be critical, and is incapable of suspicion on itself...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
