Catholic identity after Vatican II

...Such participation and discipleship do not constitute for the Christian a hindrance to openness and dialogue, but provide its positive basis...

...Hence I am always alert for theological writings that articulate and promote a catholicity of both scope and attitude, intellectual expansiveness wed to generosity of spirit...

...Van Beeckunderstands fundamental theology to be the perennial moment of the theological com• mitment to faith seeking understanding that, inspired by the essential openness and universalist perspective of the great tradition, ponders the sensitivities, insights, and values of a given culture and engages in respectful and discerning dialogue...

...Finally, it shows that the deepest desires of the human heart are freed, not stymied, by ecstatic surrender to the God who is greater than our hearts...

...Finally, the massive undertaking will be completed by a volume 3, "A World in Transformation," devoted to the return of all creation to its fount and origin, through worship, sacrament, church community, and mission...

...The merit of van Beeck's comprehensive synthesis in the making is that it is magnificently "mystagogic": it leads us ever beyond formulations and causes toward mystery and urges us to the mystical abandon that alone surrenders fully to mystery...

...Indeed, they remain rootless, not Christian stories at all, unless implanted in the soil of chapter 1 (the mystery of the church...

...Certainly one of the main attractions of van Beeck's synthesis is the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ in his theology and the clearly Christie form of his spirituality...

...That depth, of course, is Christ...

...For "the Risen Christ is the mystical source of identity and mission" and, therefore, "the ground that sustains the Christian mystic in everything is union with Christ...

...One might pose the same question regarding the Second Vatican Council...

...though in the Roman Catholicism of the early 1950s the second term of the disjunction was scarcely selfevident...

...Like the erstwhile political designations "conservative" and "liberal," the labels seem to camouflage as much as they clarify...

...And, wondrous to behold, "the mystery is this: Christ in you, the hope of glory...

...In many ways he is the Rubens of contemporary theology: working on a vast canvas, his work exhibits superb organization, but often arrests with vivid detail...

...but its mere mention affords some perspective upon the council's poignantly troubled aftermath, both pastoral and theological...

...That the aggiornamento itself was, arguably, more than sixty years overdue is not a subject to be pursued here...

...But clearly Jerusalem holds the primacy and provides the orientation: the revelation of the Glory, the very Word of God, became flesh there, recapitulating and transfiguring all the aspirations and intimations embodied in human nature and culture...

...Its focus is away from self, on God...

...they find their identity neither in the limits nor in the openness of the church, but most importantly, in its depth...

...The antagonists have contended under the not always helpful banners of "traditionalists" and "progressives" or (more polemically) "restorationists" and "innovators...

...He is in fact accomplishing what so many have called for: anew integration of theology and spirituality that does not sacrifice either the exigencies of the mind or the realizations of the heart...

...Setforth thus schematically the project may seem dry and even daunting...

...If all Christian theology of necessity mediates between faith and culture, fundamental theology undertakes the mediation most self-consciously and thematically...

...It brought an end to one period of Roman Catholic self-understanding and ushered in a new age...

...For this tradition is a living reality, avid to appropriate more fully its foundational vision and to integrate, with discriminating openness, the values of the new cultures it encounters...

...Professing Jesus' divine Sonship involves us...

...an Beeck holds that the theologian's primary and defining commitment and loyalty is to the church's tradition...

...clearly, for Roman Catholics and others as well, the defining ecclesial event of our century...

...The church is the sacrament of the wondrous exchange, the admirabile commercium...

...His answer was, of course, both...

...16...

...That mystery achieves transparency in Christ who alone is the light of the nations, the unique Lumen gentium...

...The Christological center of Christian faith is manifest in the church's worship "through Jesus Christ our Lord," but it also permeates and "informs" all Christian reflection and action...

...As van Beeck forthrightly avers: "the Catholic church and her members can make no real sense, either of their identity or of their mission, unless they go back to their abiding foundation: the risen Lord...

...It is the mystic who is rooted in the mystery of Christ and thus becomes attuned to the very heart of the church...

...Characteristic 14 of van Beeck' s synthesis is this affirmation of distinctions, coupled with the resolute refusal to allow them to harden into dichotomies...

...and nature is inherently open to graced transformation...

...His quasi-technical designation for these "types of faith experience and identity" are the "pistic," the "charismatic," and the "mystic...

...He or she (both Jan van Ruysbroeck and Teresa of Avila serve in the first part of volume 2 as crucial and exemplary witnesses) realizes the worshipful encounter, the wondrous exchange with the living God not only through and with the Risen Christ, but in him...

...and that its zeal for unity too often satisfied itself with a rather rote uniformity...

...In the context of Christian worship this new life of grace is further specified as personal communion with God through the risen Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit...

...This "pneumatological" sensitivity is another hopeful and attractive note of van Beeck's synthesis and marks a further recovery of the great tradition of the undivided church of East and West...

...Volume 1 of God Encountered, "Understanding the Christian Faith," appeared in 1989...

...The church can do no other and no more than to reflect Christ's light...

...And the response would undoubtedly be the same: both an end and a new beginning...

...However, by the early 1960s both the ecclesial and cultural situations had made a fresh examination of Catholic identity ROBERTP...

...The only adequate and lasting reason for worship is: that God is God...

...but the case can be argued that the pre-Vatican II Catholic self-understanding was unduly restrictive and reactionary...

...serves as epigraph for each of the volumes of God Encountered, thereby sounding the leitmotif of the entire synthesis and rooting it securely in the great tradition's liturgical and doxological depth...

...for only "in Christ" can it claim to be, in the words of the council, "the sacrament of unity of humankind with God...

...The focus falls upon the objective realities of faith, and in particular the God whose initiative and agency originates, sustains, and transforms created reality...

...Generalizations are, of course, hazardous...

...Part 2, "One God, Creator of All That Is," is at the printers' and should appear later this year...

...But, even when acknowledged, what is often lacking is a sufficiently comprehensive framework to integrate the both/and of the Catholic vision and prevent its collapse into a polarized and less productive either/or...

...Van Beeck, a Dutch Jesuit, has been teaching in the United States since 1968, for many years at Boston College, and currently as the Cody Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Chicago...

...In representative fashion he writes: "The risen Jesus, present in the Spirit, therefore, evokes, not detached affirmation of, but participation in, his divine identity...

...But they do point to tendencies and concerns that crystallize around themes like tradition and experience, universal church and local church, sacramental structure and justice advocacy, identity and openness, and even, ultimately, the transcendence and immanence of God...

...but it embraces also creedal confessions and conciliar teaching, as well as the Spiritinspired witness of martyrs and mystics, prophets and poets, activists and contemplatives through the ages...

...As he confesses, in words that challenge so much of the current dismal dwelling upon the therapeutic: "Worship is abandon, not cultivation of self...

...Jesus Christ, through whom God is encountered, is, however, not a figure of the past whose words and deeds are subjected to an allegedly unbiased academic scrutiny, but the living and present Lord whose Spirit empowers discipleship and participation in the life of God...

...In doing so it affirms the dignity of human reason and its attainments, even as it suggests that reason surpasses itself and finds its fullness in faith...

...Part 3, "Finitude and Fall," is almost completed and scheduled for publication in the fall of 1995, and will be followed, Deo volente, by part 4, "The Glory of God in the Face of Christ...

...The lovely Latin antiphon from Evening Prayer for the Feast of Mary the Mother of God—"O admirabile commercium...

...Thus volume 2, part 1 engages issues of "fundamental theology...

...Within the concrete commitment of Christian faith, then, fundamental theology cherishes humanity's native yearning for communication and communion...

...On the 12 Catholic identity after Vatican II ROBERT P. IMBELLI contrary, I have found reading the available volumes a singularly bracing experience...

...Here is celebrated that "wondrous exchange," wherein God and humanity are inextricably joined in the mystery of Incarnation, thus making possible humanity's intimate and awesome sharing in the very life of God...

...involvement with God's Son makes us children of God....The New Testament conveys this by having the risen Christ communicate the Holy Spirit...

...Hence ongoing discernment and interpretation are ingredient to the church's life and to theology's craft...

...Col...

...In fashioning his "spiritual-pastoraltheological synthesis," van Beeck has clearly consulted the saints and the mystics and has entered into attentive conversation with them...

...In what follows I shall highlight some distinctive features of van Beeck's synthesis...

...It offers abundant challenge, but also ample delight...

...Here grace is by no means alien to nature...

...THE THEOLOGY OF FRANS JOZEF VAN BEECK In a path-breaking article, written to commemorate the fifteen hundreth anniversary of the Council of Chalcedon, Karl Rahner posed his famous question: "Chalcedon—End or Beginning...

...And the mystic is one who passes beyond (without bypassing) mere profession or even imitation of Christ to attain union...

...and the universal Christian hope anticipates the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come...

...Elicited by God's presence, to God's presence it responds, with fruits beyond intending and thus beyond all telling...

...For several years now, in speaking and writing about post-Vatican II polarization, I have suggested, in shorthand fashion, that it has tended to pit adherents of chapter 3 of the council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (on the church's hierarchical structure) against advocates of chapter 2 (on the church as peopleof God...

...After all, the council was convened by John XXIII to undertake an aggiornamento: a bringing up to date of the Catholic vision and mission, of the changeless and changing Catholic enterprise...

...His inaugural lectures there, published in 1985 under the title, Catholic Identity after Vatican II, serve as an invaluable orientation to his thinking and to the exciting project in systematic theology that is unfolding in his multivolumed, God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology...

...For the years subsequent to the council have witnessed an inordinately large measure of polarization within Catholicism, to the point where sometimes even civility, much less charity, has seemed a casualty...

...But he clearly privileges the depth and comprehensiveness realized by the mystic abandonment of self to God and neighbor, receiving through this paschal process the graced gift of a new relational self...

...Van Beeck's writing combines intellectual rigor and aesthetic elegance...

...And I have expressed my conviction that the identity experiences embodied in these sometimes contrasting narratives and commitments are valid, but that, in isolation, they represent only half-stories...

...In the heat of debate the unimpeachable legitimacy of many of the concerns that animate both parties can receive scant attention...

...that it lacked a discriminating historical sense...

...The creed itself, the symbol of the community's encounter with God, professes belief in the one God, who is creator of all that is seen and unseen...

...Such emphasis upon the centrality of Christ for Christian vision and mission might appear tautological were it not that the Christological center (which Vatican II took as a given) needs today to be recovered in a way that is creative and compelling, in the face of and (one dares hope) as a reconciliation of the polarizations that have plagued the post-Vatican II period...

...that it often viewed the surrounding culture in suspicious if not hostile fashion...

...The worshiper is summoned, therefore, less to self-fulfillment than to self-transcendence, to ecstatic abandon in joyful praise and service...

...Thus dispossessed, divested, and disarmed, their souls more and more live beyond the ecclesiastical dilemmas and the judgments necessarily implied in them...

...Like the second-century theologian Irenaeus, the author of the great tradition's first "spiritual-pastoraltheological synthesis" (and one from whose work he appreciatively draws), van Beeck robustly holds Christ and Spirit in tensive unity: the "two hands" with which God accomplishes all God's works...

...1:27...

...In Christ we see the original fullness of what is offered to the church by way of grace and participation...

...The very title of van Beeck's opus, God 13 Encountered, deserves comment...

...It is stimulating to follow his weaving of this richly diversified theme through the published volumes and to appreciate how it helps clar15 ify and further the post-Vatican II search for an integral and open Catholic identityLike Friedrich von Hiigel (whose threefold differentiation of the institutional, the critical, and the mystical elements of religion his own usage resembles), van Beeck insists upon the validity and necessity for all three dimensions of faith experience...

...Christ is its reality...

...There is a depth here that must not be traded away for anything...

...In this "great tradition" Scripture has pride of place...

...Vatican II launched a truly courageous discernment of spirits on the part of the church and its millions of faithful...

...It must remain at the heart of all Christian faith-experience...

...Between creation and new creation, the Catholic vision celebrates and proclaims "the depth of God-given nature being encountered by the height of God-given grace...

...Part 1" was published in 1993 as "Introduction and Fundamental Theology...

...Such fundamental theology may eventuate either in cultural critique or in the purification and advancement of the tradition or both...

...His goal, as he states it in Catholic Theology after Vatican II, is to sketch "a new spiritual-pastoral-theological synthesis" as a theological response to the task set by Vatican II, which inaugurated "a significant rearrangement of the themes and emphases of the Catholic faith-experience...

...Thus it attests that "[i]n the actual life of growth-by-desire, the essential features of native aspiration are laid bare: humanity is revealed as immanently, indelibly attuned to God, and that atonement turns out to be dynamic—a natural desire for God...

...y incorporating fundamental theology as a moment in the enterprise of systematic theology, van Beeck clearly opts for both "Jerusalem" and for "Athens:" for both the positive faith tradition symbolized by the city of David the King and of Jesus the Christ and for the native human integrity symbolized by the city of the philosophers...

...One salient instance is his recovery of the spiritual tradition's reflection upon the three stages of growth in the Spirit (variously articulated, but generally construed as "beginners," "those making progress," and "the mature") and his correlation of these stages with the objective structures of faith: teaching, life, and worship...

...For van Beeck the church's worship is the privileged place where the living heart of the tradition comes to fullest expression...

...imperative...

...Volume 2, titled "The Revelation of the Glory," will, when completed, comprise four parts...

...Thus, though he by no means repudiates modernity's "turn to the subject," so cogently claimed for Catholic theology by Karl Rahner, van Beeck characteristically stresses the Trinitarian essence of faith that evokes and structures Christian worship and praise, not the self-experience and expression of the worshiping subject or community...

...None of the above assessment gainsays the very real pastoral and missionary achievements of pre-Vatican II Catholicism nor disputes its ability to promote a magnificent witness of both homely and heroic holiness...

...In this regard the achievement of Frans Jozef van Beeck is simply outstanding...

...JMBELH a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches systematic theology at Boston College...