'Dual loyalties in Catholic theology': An exchange of views
'DUAL LOYALTIES IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY' AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS Heart of the matter William Shea's essay, "Dual Loyalties in Catholic Theology" [January 3 1] evoked in this reader somewhat...
...For myself, I do not have a guarantee that all will turn out as Bob Imbelli and I wish...
...Well, is he correct...
...They, and not Christological heresy, will create a new age for the church, if there is one coming...
...Both too would have stressed that the act of faith, which seeks understanding, passes beyond the mediating texts (however amply construed) to the reality of the One whom faith desires and loves...
...I have heard from others making the same point: Catholicism has been an appropriating religion, proving that nothing human is alien...
...indeed, a theology that is solely ecclesiastical can be no more than a "separated theology...
...Neither does Imbelli tell me whether, in his view, I may believe these things as a revelation of God's meaning for human beings and at the same time regard myself as a Catholic theologian...
...For over all the many discussions and debates and questions currently agitating the Catholic theological community, there looms the haunting avowal of H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic, The Kingdom of God in America...
...Had I answers, I would have given them...
...This is what Pius X saw when he looked at poor Loisy and Tyrrell and then pushed them over the edge...
...We might ask just what are the alternatives to the slippery slope under current conditions...
...He cites excellent examples...
...There, I believe, lies a cautionary tale for Catholics, especially those of us of liberal parentage and persuasion...
...I cannot afford to be...
...Bob Imbelli does not speak to the question of whether these beliefs are in fact drawn from an alien text, or, rather, from the Great Tradition...
...have ecclesial sanction...
...Toward the end of the book, in a section significantly entitled "Liberalism and the Kingdom of God," he pens this famous observation: "In the course of succeeding generations the heritage of faith with which liberalism had started was used up...
...He thinks that the liberals are on a slippery slope to Christological disaster on the model of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism...
...To illustrate my issue I offered the five little beliefs that I regard as drawn from an "alien text" (the "American experience," theoretically explicated in American philosophers...
...Many, however, are very likely liberals and so on the slippery slope...
...It is, I think, entirely another matter to suggest that in this expanded theological universe concern for the substance and content of the gospel (which the questions, posed and then dismissed, suggest to me) is somehow transcended...
...What will not help is Christological high dudgeon...
...I too shed no tears for the "separated theology" (de Lubac) of the preVatican II era...
...REV...
...ROBERT P. IMBELLI The writer is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...
...By his measure (Christological orthodoxy and piety), we Catholic liberals are going doctrinally bankrupt...
...They are, coincidentally but providentially, pointedly raised, however, in the same issue of Commonweal, in Luke Johnson's review of one depressing expression of the current Christological confusions: John Bowden's Jesus: The Unanswered Questions...
...I hope these reactions and too abbreviated thoughts may serve to further the conversation William Shea boldly stimulated...
...Of all the theologians who may be with me on the slippery slope, in my opinion and hope there are few who will end up over the edge...
...Here Thomas and Bonaventure are at one, whatever the methodological differences between them...
...There is the hermetically sealed ecclesiastical theology (the "separated theology" mentioned by de Lubac...
...Mistletoe and fir trees are one thing...
...I think that is possible to be a Catholic theologian and yet to hold certain convictions "with religious intensity" that do not rise from Catholic sources and do not (yet...
...As I have indicated, the three questions Shea forthrightly poses, then too hastily withdraws, remain without answer in his article...
...For the "breakdown of ecclesial life" which Shea laments is, I think, symptomatic of a deeper crisis at whose root lies Christological doubt and denial...
...The situation is new, the requirements and range of theology are new...
...Hence the many "spirits," enumerated by Shea, that are most certainly abroad, need to be seriously and unremittingly tested, though always honoring von Hügel 's injunction of "ample patience and delicate discrimination...
...And I have a guiding question: What does it mean theologically and religiously when theologians start to take the stranger seriously as a stranger, stop trying to convert her or appropriate her meaning, and start to learn from her...
...WILLIAM M. SHEA The writer is chairman of the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University...
...that theology properly culminates in prayer and worship...
...On the first point, the bits of sociological data that I read indicate that Catholic theologians, while slightly more liberal (this might better read "linguistically sophisticated") than the Catholic laity, are not one whit more Christologically heterodox than the laity...
...To the second, I rejoin that theology is no longer a solely ecclesial discipline...
...Bob Imbelli moves from my worry to his warning and even accusations about the orthodoxy of some of our colleagues...
...We are falling into distortions fueled on animosities and fears...
...If there is a difference here, between liberal theologians and profoundly ecclesial theologians, it may be a matter of grace, of call, if we need to speak of it in religious terms...
...quite literally in ortho-doxy...
...While I regard myself as Christologically orthodox as the next Catholic, I also regard myself as one who believes and therefore does not know, and whose belief is always poised on the edge of unbelief...
...While raising his own issue, which is Christological orthodoxy, Bob Imbelli ignores my issue, which is church practice...
...I didn't duck them...
...It may be that one should check one's kerygma at the door and replace it with sophia...
...They stem from an appreciation of Shea's concerns as well as a real apprehension concerning the drift of his reflections...
...We theologians quite rightly expect our episcopal leaders to listen to one another and to us and to converse civilly about our differences...
...The fissure extends from the papal throne to the parish pew...
...Is there something going on at Boston College...
...The author replies: In my essay I tried to communicate two concerns...
...I cannot refrain from asking: What theological meetings do you attend...
...for it seems to suggest that there is no precedent in the tradition for the present situation, that we are embarked upon an entirely new enterprise whose issue may finally be not the enlargement of the tradition but its supersession in a sort of Joachamite "third age...
...and that the locus of this worshipful encounter is in medio ecclesiae, in the midst of the church...
...Quite simply: before the decisive Christological question, "who do you say I am...
...I wanted to call this to the attention of theologians, and am glad that Bob Imbelli joins his concern to mine...
...Are they of God or not...
...We quite rightly criticize them when they do not...
...1 John 4:1-2...
...test the spirits to see whether they are of God...
...they have been steadily repudiated by our infallible magisterium for two centuries...
...I hope that this is not the fleshpots again...
...We are in big political trouble as a result...
...Appropriation is one thing, and recognition and acceptance are another...
...But I also detect intimations of a subtext in Shea's article that I find problematic...
...To liberals, the profoundly ecclesial and Christologically 22: 24 April 1992 Commonweal normed theologians are the running dogs of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith...
...Well, yes and no...
...Now it is one thing to suggest that one's theological method has become more catholic by including texts from the "civil" as well as the "ecclesial" tradition...
...This assertion strikes me as both vague and troubling...
...Hence, though one might legitimately chide certain theologians for being too narrowly "ecclesiastical," can one be a Catholic theologian without being profoundly "ecclesial...
...I am not being flippant...
...There the questions appear unanswerable in principle and the Geist animating the book under discussion seems to have moved, unambiguously if regretfully, beyond the Christian tradition to a postChrist and post-Christian reconstruction...
...Far more theologians, far more Catholics, believe them and in them than harbor Christological heterodoxy...
...But precisely there lies the heart of the matter...
...It may be that even profoundly ecclesial theologians should devise similar questions for themselves, out of their own perspectives...
...My second concern is to raise the question of how the alien texts which become important to theologians are to be taken in this intrachurch conversation...
...I share Johnson's puzzlement about "the odd way in which not the tradition but the assumptions of modernity are assumed to be valid and set the agenda for the discussion...
...There is the Christologically normed ecclesial theology supported by Bob Imbelli, and, I am sure, many others...
...There may be another meaning than the slippery slope, perhaps some healthy transformation of the tradition...
...Neither its leaders nor its theologians are doing anything about it...
...It is written with Shea's usual autobiographical verve and obvious, even somewhat anguished, concern...
...To my count there are few Catholic feminists, deconstructionists, ecumenists (his terms, not mine) who are at work "de-centering" our Christological faith...
...If he accepts that as a possibility, he will have agreed with me on the dual texts, the dual sources of Catholic theology...
...I do not expect to have answers to them until I die, and then my life, not my theory, is the answer to the questions...
...On the one hand, there is much to appreciate in the piece...
...In this I stand with all cardcarrying Commonweal Catholics...
...That, at least, is my intention...
...We know, of course, that the new includes the old, but it is not the old and never will be...
...to most of which I subscribe...
...His Eminence has warned us quite directly about these things and exiled a perfectly decent and responsible theologian over one of them...
...To those who take the first and second options, the ecclesiastical and the profoundly ecclesial, liberalism is an early stage of unbelief...
...Observe the problem of the four options, and of the perceptions (or caricatures) that rise from them...
...How do we discern whether the tunes we are humming to our high-pitched guitars are the Lord's songs in an alien land or alien songs in the house of the Lord...
...But what sort of example do we set them...
...Never either/or, always both/and...
...I certainly lament with him the factionalism that has polarized the community of Catholic theologians...
...To the liberals, on the other hand, the ecclesial is just a gussied-up and selfdeceived case of the first...
...And then there is the liberalism of those on the slippery slope who have not yet slipped into the pit, and here I wish to place myself...
...Bob Imbelli must be exaggerating unknowingly when he talks of a massive assault on the gospel resting on "Christological doubt and denial...
...Alien texts may be and have been baptized...
...I think this is true of Bob Imbelli and the pope as well, but I am not in a position to argue that except in such general terms as will not convince either of them...
...Such discernment should not simply be remanded to the magisterium, but should profoundly engage the entire Catholic theological community...
...I can only say that in my fifty-six years I have found no norm in a doctrine, no seizure of final certainty that allowed me to judge that what I believe and what the church believes is beyond doubt true—yet I believe...
...both would have found the notion of a "nonecclesial theologian" passing strange, if not utter nonsense...
...they are now suffered by our leaders to exist in nonecclesiastical reality and are denied again whenever they appear inside the gate...
...An assault on orthodoxy, by Catholic theologians...
...They are real questions, and I treated them seriously...
...If you are on the slope you might as well be in the pit...
...Perhaps the "Commonweal Catholics" you mention also struggle to maintain their balance here, bereft of a profoundly ecclesial theology...
...I, for one, believe that the ultimate test must be a Christological one...
...If such be the trajectory intimated, the present scission in the theological community could well become a schism...
...Joining the witches' coven is also another thing, and so are: practicing Hindu rites, placing one's spiritual life in the hands of a Zen master, weekending with an EST group, sitting on the hilltop with the shaman, deciding that Jews don't have to be Catholics, that it is perhaps not even desirable that they become such, and that there may be something to the observance of the dual Torah after all...
...They are the sort of questions which strike a chord, which may help one better attend to what one does, but which receive a finally personal rather than theological answer...
...Let me distinguish...
...But then begins the subtext which finally wonders whether the "Geist" animating the loyalty to other texts might not, after all, be genuinely alien "to the Catholic tradition as a whole," and he goes on to dismiss as "disingenuous [the] claims of some liberals that they are recouping earlier Catholic sources of liberalism...
...They are drawn from alien texts...
...There is the pit of doctrinal relativism to which the slippery slope leads...
...it reflects a spiritual and psychological immaturity in the Catholic soul, and it more directly regards ecclesiology...
...I then raised three questions which suggest that anyone so engaged may be self-deceived, or worse...
...DUAL LOYALTIES IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY' AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS Heart of the matter William Shea's essay, "Dual Loyalties in Catholic Theology" [January 3 1] evoked in this reader somewhat ambivalent feelings...
...Thus Shea rightly observes that "we are witnessing a breakdown of ecclesial life" and he is clearly dismayed by the prospect...
...I think we have uncovered a hot wire...
...What when, rather than looting the Egyptians for the sake of the house of Israel, we begin to see God's grace for us in Egypt...
...Commonweal 24 April 1992: 23...
...For among the loyalties of the Christian is there not a paramount, indeed identitydefining loyalty: to Christ and his gospel, as proclaimed by and in the church...
...Are there some I don't know about...
...The first is this: The Left and Right in the Roman Catholic church aren't communicating with each other...
...Because they are new...
...I must add that the faculty of Saint Louis University is part of no massive assault on Christological orthodoxy...
...So it has been from the beginning: "Beloved, not every spirit is to be trusted...
...These beliefs (regarding the ecclesial relevance of democratic experience, freedom of inquiry and communication, loyalty to the entire human community, the value of pluralism, and the nature of reflection) are not Roman Catholic, though some Roman Catholics subscribe to them...
...But the outcome of this massive assault is to evacuate the gospel of its distinctive content: the proclamation and celebration that Jesus Christ is Lord...
...Moreover, to find such questions and the concerns they articulate genuine and germane should not subject one to being cast out into the seeming dark company of "ecclesial theologians whose sole task is the interpretation of Catholic texts...
...The outcome...
...Second, he thinks we are courting disaster by supposing that theology is a nonecclesial discipline...
...Bob Imbelli finds "the heart of the matter" in Christological orthodoxy...
...Because he believes they are not of God, they are not a proper part of a profoundly ecclesial theology and experience...
...This is a big problem for the church...
...The Right talks to the Right about the Left and the Left to the Left about the Right...
...The liberal children of liberal fathers needed to operate with ever diminishing capital...
...like him, I endorse the urgent need for renewed conversation at all levels of the church...
...Where then...
...freedom of inquiry and communication and the AAUP statement on academic freedom are another...
...This is why my top concern is top...
...To the first I say that we liberals are forever on the slippery slope to "unbelief," though I hope not to "unfaith...
...Time, as Bob Imbelli suggests, will tell, but time spent in the strong currents between traditions...
...Each side wishes the other would go away so that it would have the church to itself...
...Within that consideration I expressed a worry over my own liberal bent in theology, and I posed three questions from the Right...
...This split to my way of thinking is not brought on by a difference in Christological orthodoxy...
...But Imbelli wants my answers...
...some stand mute, while others confess other ultimate loyalties, thereby eroding the one foundation upon which all baptized Christians, whether professional theologians or not, can stand securely...
...Indeed, it has already elicited from your readers rather varied reactions [Correspondence, February 28...
...Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God...
...In many and varied guises a Christological "de-cenCommonweal 24 April 1992: 21 tering" is abroad in the guild of academic theologians: whether in the name of ecumenical openness, feminist suspicion, or deconstructive ambiguity and pluralism...
...Adding to my uneasiness as to what Shea ultimately intends is the quick rhetorical move whereby the questions he had forthrightly formulated regarding the tenability of his own position—questions about a secularist reduction of the tradition, about an excessive and possibly unfaithful accommodation to contemporary culture, about the risk of losing touch with the realities of the gospel—are now declared inapplicable since "the very charges themselves reveal to me that I no longer share the view of theology that undergirds them...
...And, though his conclusion is incisive and stark, it is definitely worth pondering: the "allegiance to Christianity" appears "largely sentimental, and unfortunately provides further solid evidence why liberalism is not trusted by those who could benefit from it...
...Donald Kraus [Commonweal, February 28] raised an important point...
...And since the subtext I perceive is more and more becoming the text of much of theology done in the college or university setting, my own concerns lead me to seek further clarity regarding issues and options...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 8
