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Overview
Avery Dulles's theological career has spanned one of the most creative and confusing periods in the history of the church. With the goal of integrating new information from philosophy and the sciences into a deeper understanding of the world and society, the many theological schools pursued independent agendas, with the net effect of a loss of coherence. It is Fr. Dulles's contention that theological schools have drifted so far apart that what seems false and dangerous to one school seems almost self-evident to another. Theologians lack a common language, common goals, and common norms.
Exploring the possibilities for greater consensus, The Craft of Theology illustrates how a "post-critical" theology can draw on the riches of Scripture and tradition as it reflects on the faith of the church in new contexts. Fr. Dulles discusses the freedom of theology within the university and sets forth principles for a fresh dialogue with philosophy, the sciences, and other Christian churches.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780824550202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublishDrive |
| Publication date: | 03/01/1995 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Toward a Postcritical Theology
Many recent books on theology contain proposals for a restructuring of theology on the basis of principles proper to our own age. Various attempts have been made to show that we live in a new era in which the prevalent methods of the "modern" period are outdated. Many such works contain in their titles the term "postmodern" or some near equivalent.
Labels such as "postmodern," "postliberal," and "postcritical" are likely to be rather manipulative. They seem to put unfair demands on people to conform to what the speaker proclaims as the spirit of the age, with the implication that previous approaches are obsolete. But at the same time the prevalence of such terminology indicates a widespread perception that we are moving, or have already moved, into a period radically unlike the past few centuries, necessitating an abrupt shift of theological style comparable in magnitude to the shift that occurred with the dissemination of printed literature in the sixteenth century. Without wishing to exaggerate the discontinuity, I share this perception to some degree. The history of theology over the centuries, I submit, can be clarified by the successive attitudes toward criticism; for example, the precritical, the critical, and the postcritical.
From Precritical to Postcritical
Was there ever a precritical era in theology? In a sense, no. Theology is by its very nature a disciplined reflection on faith, one that attempts to distinguish methodically between truth and illusion and to ground its affirmations on principles rather than on blind impulses. In that sense it involves the use of criticism. In the patristic and medieval periods Greek philosophy, including Aristotelian logic, was used to refute heresy, reconcile the authorities, and establish particular doctrines as consonant with revelation. Everything was measured against divine revelation as enshrined in the canonical Scriptures and in the definitions of popes and councils. But criticism was not leveled at the canonical sources themselves. A privileged position was given to authoritative statements of the word of God. In this qualified sense the theology of the early centuries may be called precritical.
The critical era was ushered in when observation and mathematics were used to overthrow the authority of Aristotle in the realm of science. Francis Bacon and Galileo heralded the arrival of the new science. Shortly afterward philosophers, under the guidance of Descartes and Spinoza, attempted to erect comprehensive systems by adopting a quasi-mathematical method. Beginning with universal methodic doubt, they rejected whatever could not be verified by reduction to self-evident facts and principles. The critical program, after being launched in continental Europe, took an empiricist turn in England with Locke and Hume, both of whom applied their methodology to theological questions. Theologians, in their estimation, would be unwarranted in requiring the faithful to believe anything as true before it had been submitted to the acids of doubt and criticism. A few Protestant liberals and at least one Catholic theologian (Georg Hermes [1775–1831]) accepted the critical program, but the vast majority reacted defensively against it.
One reaction that became popular toward the end of the eighteenth century may be called the paracritical. Critical doubt and rational testing, it was held, were proper and necessary in the sphere of science and speculative knowledge. Faith and religion, however, were assigned to a separate sphere in which sentiment and volition were sovereign. Theology was seen as an attempt to describe and analyze the dictates of religious feeling. This dichotomy between scientific and religious discourse, having received its philosophical charter from Immanuel Kant, prevailed in Lutheran pietism, in nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, and in Protestant and Catholic Modernism. Indeed, it still flourishes in certain circles influenced by neopositivism and linguistic analysis.
A second reaction to the critical movement was what may be called the countercritical. It strove to fight against criticism with its own weapons. Many theologians contended that the truth of Christianity could be vindicated by a rigorously critical approach to the sources and exact syllogistic logic. This approach, which insisted strongly on miracles as evidential signs, reached its culmination in early twentieth-century apologetics, both Protestant and Catholic. Hilarin Felder, O.M. Cap., in his two-volume work Christ and the Critics, which appeared in German in 1911, undertook to "summon the opponents of the Christian revelation before the bar of fair, unclouded history" and to prove by strict historical method that the Gospels are "in their full extent and in the strictest sense of the word, historical authorities and scientific evidence." The neo-scholastic theology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while rigorously orthodox, was heavily infected by Cartesian rationalism and mathematicism.
The Critique of Criticism
In the second half of the twentieth century the approach that I call postcritical has been emerging not only among theologians but among philosophers of stature, such as Michael Polanyi, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. Analogous themes may be found in the sociological writings of Peter Berger and Robert Bellah. Among theologians, authors such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and George Lindbeck are at least in some respects postcritical. Postcritical, indeed, may be used as an umbrella term to include a variety of positions, some more traditionalist and others more innovative. In the following presentation I shall give my own methodological proposals, without attempting to speak for any other theologian. Students of Michael Polanyi will find it easy to detect his influence upon this chapter.
Postcritical thinking does not reject criticism but carries it to new lengths, scrutinizing the presuppositions and methods of the critical program itself. It has drawn attention to the following five flaws.
First, the critical program was animated by a bias toward doubt, with the implied assumption that the royal road to truth consists in uprooting all voluntary commitments. In the estimation of critical thinkers, probity requires one to abandon any convictions that can be doubted rather than to maintain such convictions in the face of possible doubt. This bias was understandable enough in the time of the religious wars, when fanatical overcommitment was a major threat to civic peace, but is a distinct liability in a time when moral and religious convictions have been thoroughly eroded by skepticism. Our contemporaries, well aware that religious tenets are capable of being questioned, need to be shown how firm religious commitments may nevertheless be responsible.
In the second place, the critical program failed to recognize that doubt itself, and consequently criticism, rests on a fiduciary basis. If I doubt something I am implicitly affirming that it does not measure up to my standards of evidence. Such a doubt presupposes a network of beliefs concerning the possibilities of proof — beliefs that could in their turn be doubted. The postulates of Euclidean geometry and the testimony of the senses, taken as indubitable by some positivists, can be shown to be fiduciary in character.
Thirdly, it is impossible to apply the critical program consistently. We do not have stringent evidence for even the most obvious facts, such as the existence of the external world or the reliability of the physical and behavioral laws upon which all our ideas of worldly realities, past, present, and future, inevitably rest. Universal doubt is so repugnant to human nature that it is in fact unrealizable. If carried out, it would dissolve the very principles required for reconstructing the edifice of knowledge, as Descartes found when he tried to build a bridge between the mind and the external world.
Proponents of the critical program have rarely attempted to carry it through without restriction. Most have applied the program selectively with a view to destroying certain beliefs, such as those of revealed religion. In their hands the critical program has served to promote, in a covert way, liberal and naturalistic belief-systems such as positivism and scientific humanism.
In the fourth place, the critical program neglects the social dimension of knowledge. Implicitly it assumes that each individual is in a position to command all the evidence relevant for solving the question at hand. Although critical philosophers have in fact depended upon predecessors and colleagues, they tend to speak as though they were individually self-sufficient.
Fifthly and most fundamentally, the critical program overlooked the tacit dimension of knowledge. It gave no cognitive value to what Pascal meant by the "reasons of the heart" and what Newman meant by "presumptions," "antecedent dispositions," and the "instincts of an educated conscience." Yet these precritical orientations are essential. Even on the most primitive level of visual perception I have to depend on clues that I cannot specify, still less defend, by formal argument. Uninterpreted visual signals, if they may be said to exist at all, are situated at a level below that of explicit awareness. Still more palpably, tacit presuppositions are operative in all human knowledge concerning the facts of history, the findings of science, and the data of religious faith.
The critical program has been under attack for at least a generation, not only in theology but also in philosophy, science, history, and literary criticism. The collapse of that program carries with it certain dangers, especially for theology. The critical program undergirded the not inconsiderable theological achievements both of liberal Protestantism and of various reactions against liberal theology such as neo-scholasticism. The widespread rejection of both the critical and the countercritical alternatives in our own day produces a vacuum and casts doubt upon the viability of the theological enterprise itself. Anticritical and paracritical theories that depict faith as a matter of arbitrary prejudice or blind emotion deprive theology of its cognitive import. We are faced today by an urgent need to overcome the present sense of drift and confusion and to establish an intellectually respectable method. My intention in the present chapter is to take a step in this direction.
The Sources as Clues
Postcritical theology, as I use the term, begins with a presupposition or prejudice in favor of faith. Its fundamental attitude is a hermeneutics of trust, not of suspicion. Its purpose is constructive, not destructive. This is not to deny that people are entitled to doubt what they have reason to regard as false or unfounded. The doubter can be a serious thinker, candidly examining the claims made for religion. But theology, as commonly understood, is the kind of inquiry that takes place from within a religious commitment. Drawing on the convictions instilled by faith, the theologian uses them as resources for the proper task of theology, which is the understanding of faith.
For the postcritical theologian the affirmations of faith cannot be rightly probed except from within the horizon of faith. A computer may be able to derive conclusions from creedal statements or dogmas considered as bare propositions. To the believer, however, the formulations of faith are binding and meaningful insofar as they express aspects of a total vision or idea that can never be fully objectified. The contents of faith are known not by merely detached observation but by indwelling or participation, somewhat as we know our own body with its powers and weaknesses.
Theology is, moreover, an ecclesial discipline. It is done in the Church because the Church is the primary bearer of faith. Christ delivered his revelation to a community of disciples; the Holy Spirit descended upon a gathered community. Any individual can lose or betray the faith, but the Church as a whole has the promise of indefectibility because Christ has promised to be with it through his Spirit to the end of the age. A theologian who departs from the Church and seeks to work without the support of fellow believers has forfeited a necessary resource for the theological enterprise.
Theology, then, is a methodical effort to articulate the truth implied in Christian faith, the faith of the Church. The method cannot be pursued by the techniques of mathematics or syllogistic logic, but it depends on a kind of connoisseurship derived from personal appropriation of the living faith of the Church. The correct articulation of the meaning of the Christian symbols is not a science learned out of books alone but rather an art acquired through familiarity by being at home in the community in which the symbols function. To apprehend the meaning of the symbols, it is not enough to gaze at them in a detached manner as objects and dissect them under a logical microscope. The joint meaning of the symbols cannot be discerned unless one relies confidently on the symbols as clues, and attends to the realities to which they point. From within this stance of faith the theologian seeks to formulate in explicit terms what the Christian symbols have to say to the questions that call for solution.
Liturgy has regularly been recognized as a prime theological source and it is securely established in this role by postcritical theology. The rule of prayer, as the axiom has it, establishes the rule of belief. The Church was assured of the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit because, or at least partly because, divine functions were attributed to them in prayer and sacramental worship. The Church was able to define that Mary was Mother of God because it had long invoked her as theotokos. It was certain that Christ was truly present in the consecrated elements because it worshiped him there. It knew that even infants needed to be redeemed by Christ because it had from the beginning practiced infant baptism.
If theology is not to regress, it must retain its close bonds with prayer and worship. In contemporary speculations about God theologians will do well to take account not only of abstract philosophical reasoning but also of the requirements of worship. If God were not personal and distinct from the world, how would our life of prayer be affected? Would we still be able to adore God, to call him Father, to thank him for all the blessings of life? If God were not sovereign over history, could we still have the kind of theological trust and hope that have been characteristic of believers? Theology should not allow truth to be subordinated to practical concerns, but it should turn to the praxis of the Church as a locus for the discernment of theological truth.
Postcritical theology gives new vitality to classical theological loci such as the "sense of the faithful." Johann Adam Möhler maintained that the Holy Spirit had imprinted on the Church "a peculiarly Christian tact, a deep sure-guiding feeling" that leads it into all truth. Newman, in his famous essay On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, described it as "a sort of instinct, or phronema, deep in the bosom of the mystical body of Christ," enabling the faithful as a collectivity to distinguish between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The theologian, quite evidently, must possess this subjective sense of the faith. Through indwelling in the community of faith one acquires a kind of connaturality or connoisseurship that enables one to judge what is or is not consonant with revelation. In applying this sense of the faith one apprehends the clues in a subsidiary or tacit manner and concentrates on their joint meaning.
The liturgy and the sense of the faithful are particular forms of tradition, which is likewise reckoned among the sources of theology. As Maurice Blondel pointed out in his History and Dogma, tradition is not a mere surrogate for written records. It preserves the past not as a dead memory but as a living reality, and points toward the future, which it conquers and illumines. Tradition, says Blondel, "is the guardian of the initial gift insofar as it has not yet been formulated nor even expressly understood." Consisting predominantly of tacit knowledge, tradition perpetuates itself not primarily by explicit statement but rather by gesture, deed, and example, including ritual actions. The theologian who wishes to draw on the full riches of tradition seeks to dwell within it so as to assimilate the unspecifiable lore that it transmits.
In addition to these nonwritten sources the theologian has the Holy Scriptures. In the words of Albert Outler, "the aim of postliberal hermeneutics is to reposition Holy Scripture as a unique linguistic medium of God's self-communication to the human family" and "as the human medium of a divine revelation that has endured and will endure in and through the cultural metamorphoses that succeed each other as history unfolds." The Bible for the theologian is not simply a mine of historical information or a collection of divine oracles, each having independent weight, regardless of literary genre and context. Postcritical theology treats the Bible in its totality as a set of clues that serve to focus the Christian vision of reality from manifold perspectives. Within the Bible the figure of Jesus Christ stands out as God's supreme self-disclosure. Any viable theological proposal must be seen as consistent with the biblical clues and as carrying forward the intentions imbedded in them.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 1992 Avery Dulles, S.J..
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Table of Contents
Introduction to the Expanded Edition,
Introduction,
Abbreviations,
1. Toward a Postcritical Theology,
2. Theology and Symbolic Communication,
3. The Problem of Method: From Scholasticism to Models,
4. Fundamental Theology and the Dynamics of Conversion,
5. The Uses of Scripture in Theology,
6. Tradition as a Theological Source,
7. The Magisterium and Theological Dissent,
8. Theology and Philosophy,
9. Theology and the Physical Sciences,
10. University Theology in Service to the Church,
11. The Teaching Mission of the Church and Academic Freedom,
12. Method in Ecumenical Theology,
13. Theology and Worship,
14. Historical Method and the Reality of Christ,
Notes,
Sources,