All dressed in scarlet: Avery Dulles: Model theologian
Komonchak, Joseph A.
Joseph A. Komonchak ALL DRESSED IN SCARLET Avery Dulles goes to college bout a decade ago colleagues and former students of Avery Dulles published a volume in tribute to him on the occasion...
...And he has been a good listener, first, in the sense that he has attended to the voices of the past in large works on the history of theology, to separated Christians in several ecumenical dialogues, and to fellow Catholics in analyses of postconciliar church life and theology...
...Lying behind more particular differences of opinion in the church often are differences at these prior levels...
...The analogy was with the community of disciples stumbling after Jesus during his ministry, and the focus fell on the distinctiveness of the faith required and the countercultural challenge it represented...
...His own sympathies at the time seemed to be with the sacrament model...
...and an exploration of the more Cardinal Avery Dulles basic differences can encourage modesty and promote mutual understanding and communication, at least if proponents of any one model recognize that no single approach can exhaust the mysteries of the faith...
...No red hat Luke Timothy Johnson's incisive critique of John Paul II's pronouncements on love, sex, and pleasure should be studied and openly discussed in every Catholi college and Newman Club in the nation—together with Paul Baumann's humorous reflections on George Weigel's biography of our pope ("Crossing the Threshold," December 3, 1999...
...Then none of the models is dismissed out of hand, each having its strengths...
...but anyone acquainted with his thought over the years has to admit that respect for the tradition and for the church's doctrinal integrity is nothing new in him...
...Sympathetic listening was also one of the rules which Dulles learned from Saint Ignatius Loyola at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises: "Let it be presupposed that every good Christian is more ready to save his neighbor's proposition than to condemn it...
...Maybe that's why there is such massive apostacy among young people of marrying age, as well as so many who are married...
...The pope's action crowns Dulles's long life as a theologian in the service of the church...
...One wonders in what spatial reality their authors live...
...REV...
...Each time we gather at the Lord's table, I see in his eyes, lo these many years later, the struggling wisdom that is so evident in Johnson's words...
...Both of these Commonweal articles are priceless and full of wisdom from men who have actually "been there and done that...
...Dulles has excelled at this type of analysis, and he has refrained from constructing any grand theological synthesis of his own, maybe out of modesty, maybe especially out of his great respect for the divine transcendence...
...On different planets Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's reflections on sexuality was the most theologically cogent and pastorally persuasive commentary I've read in years about Catholic sexual teaching...
...The most famous of his books is Models of the Church (1974), in which he described five theoretical approaches to the church: as institution, communion, sacrament, herald, and servant...
...His work has been marked largely by a commitment to conversation, which, of course, involves listening as much as it does speaking...
...Is anybody listening to them...
...Dulles says he borrowed the new image from Pope John Paul H's first encyclical, and for the last twenty years he has been a firm and articulate defender of the present pope's teachings and pastoral undertakings...
...9 (Continued from page 4) Lived wisdom Luke Timothy Johnson's persuasive article on John Paul II's theology of the body is perhaps the finest article of its kind I have read in forty years...
...24...
...Oh well...
...Vail, Colo...
...His own example may lead us to question the adequacies of these categories altogether, since they are often used as an excuse not to follow Saint Ignatius's rule, which, it turns out, is not as easy to follow as it may seem...
...Joseph A. Komonchak ALL DRESSED IN SCARLET Avery Dulles goes to college bout a decade ago colleagues and former students of Avery Dulles published a volume in tribute to him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday...
...But, alas, people like him who try to introduce fresh ways of looking at such questions, while preserving the deep values of our faith, often find the welcome mat snatched out from under 23 them...
...Of course, both will be decried by those who believe Catholics should all walk in lock step with any current papal teaching, especially in matters of sexual ethics...
...And now we have papal confirmation of our high regard for him...
...E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...Pope John Paul II has followed the example of Pope Paul VI and honored the work of a few theologians by naming them to the College of Cardinals...
...It's exciting to read something like Johnson's refreshing insights...
...Dulles even made the Ignatian rule the basis of a method he made popular in Catholic theology: an analysis of diversity through "models," conceptual frameworks, often imagebased, which orient and articulate a certain understanding of a reality or doctrine of the faith...
...Whereas he once was criticized as a relativist by the Right, now some people speak of a conservative shift in his theology...
...To the names of Congar, Danielou, de Lubac, Grillmeier, Pavan, and von Balthasar can now be added that of Avery Dulles, S.J., the first U.S...
...How long can we afford to lose this critically important segment of the Catholic church in favor of a moral theology of sexuality that appears so rigid and static...
...and none becomes all-determining, each having its weaknesses...
...To be sure, Luke Timothy Johnson will not be joining Avery Dulles at the next consistory...
...If today he seems often to find it more urgent to be conservative, that is probably in part because he thinks it is a certain liberal paradigm that most needs to be challenged, at least in theological circles...
...In my congregation there is a man who left his position as an active priest in the wake of Paul VI's Humanae vitae...
...Most of them have long ago put aside church teaching on birth control...
...Rather, it is about the church learning from the lived wisdom of her members and having the courage to (here is that word...
...The writer is Metropolitan Archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America...
...MOST REV...
...incorporate it...
...Friends, colleagues, and admirers are delighted, and among their not entirely negligible joys they await the day when they can see him in procession among his fellow cardinals, most of whom are plumper, dressed in "cardinalatial" finery, settling the question of what Abraham Lincoln would have looked like in scarlet...
...The documents issuing from Rome and diocesan offices come across as totally abstract and divorced from real life...
...The book's title, Faithful Witness, both defined what the chief task of theology is and expressed our gratitude for Father Dulles's example in fulfilling it...
...Have they ever had any firsthand, practical experience with marriage...
...The entire issue of human sexuality and the gospel tradition is, it seems to me, not so much a matter of church versus individual conscience...
...But in the early 1980s he offered a sixth model, the church as a community of disciples, which he thought retained the strengths of the other models and was especially appropriate in the circumstances of the church's life as a cognitive minority in the contemporary world...
...It was sometimes said of him, decades ago, that he tended to be conservative when among liberals and liberal when among conservatives...
...GEORGE R. FITZGERALD, C.S.P...
...This was always, I think, more than simple impish desire to prevent anyone from becoming too comfortable in his stance...
...theologian to be so honored...
...ANDREW GALLIGAN Tracy, Calif...
...This assumption is the opposite of the odium theologicum that too often poisons the atmosphere of the church...
...I must admit, sadly, that in my thirty-six years as a priest, most married persons—and those to be married—with whom I have spoken feel that the church doesn't really address the complex problems couples face today...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 4
