09.30.07
Posted in Great Catholic Writers at 10:47 am by Brian Schuettler
Why don’t we ask an expert. In fact, a renowned theologian by the name of Aidan Nichols wrote an article by that title a few years ago. Born in 1948, entered the Dominican Order in 1970, ordained priest in 1976, Aidan Nichols has the honorary status of Affiliated Lecturer in the University of Cambridge. He has also taught at the Pontifical University of St Thomas, Rome; St Mary’s College, Oscott; and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. He has published some thirty books, and over seventy articles.
At Fr. Nichols Homepage:
From the standpoint of its form, his theological work aims so to explore the riches of Tradition as to present the faith as an organic whole characterised by divine-human truth, beauty and goodness. To this end, he uses, philosophically, elements of both metaphysical and phenomenological approaches. To the same end, he makes use theologically of both rational-scholastic and imagistic-poetic modes of discourse. The aim is to show how divine revelation emerges in human experience and thought as coherently epiphanic in character: that is, as manifesting a superabundant fulness of truth, beauty, goodness which exceeds those available by other routes. In this way, the incarnate revelation of the Trinity, from which issues the doxological life of the Church, provides the ultimate overall context in which all other reality is to be viewed.
From the standpoint of its content, his theology begins (in 1980) from enquiry into Jesus Christ as the supreme divine artwork which irradiates, so Christian theology and iconography attest, not only the biblical history, but human existence and cosmic nature too. From there his theology moves out to consider (‘FOUNDATIONS OF THE FAITH’) the rational-experiential basis of belief in God, and the content of Christian faith, both in its catechetical building-blocks and in its ecclesial-dogmatic structure, as well as the theological method best suited to its exploration. His project requires for its realisation study of the range and depth of theological tradition (‘THEOLOGICAL RESSOURCEMENT’) not only as found in pre-modern writers but in those moderns who saw themselves as engaged in recycling, albeit with new insights, that tradition’s stored up wealth. His writing takes the Liturgy as a key locus for theology and Church, and treats culture as the field of the world which a Gospel expressed doxologically must transform (‘CULT and CULTURE’). Finally, for the re-integration of a catholicity impaired by Christian disunity he is concerned to repatriate elements of Eastern Orthodox and Anglican theology (‘ECUMENICAL EVALUATION’). This is in a perspective that, without infidelity to the doctrine of the Roman magisterium, encourages reunion with Constantinople and, in a more limited sense, Christians formed by the patrimony of Anglicanism.
What Theology Is > Trying to describe to newcomers what theology is can be an instructive exercise. This article sums up what was said in a series of introductory talks on Catholic theology given to first-year students at the Angelicum University, Rome.
I will begin by mentioning three possible definitions of the theological task that I cannot accept, on the principle that many good definitions are arrived at by ruling out what things are not. Each of these ‘negative definitions’ will be to some extent a caricature, yet all caricatures have some relation to reality. Moreover, each of the rejected definitions will prove to have incorporated in it an element of value. This element is capable of being disengaged and used afresh in a positive definition of the theological task to be offered in the second part of the article. Read the article at Christendom-Awake http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/anichols/theology.htm
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09.28.07
Posted in Catholic Heroes, Just War Doctrine Discussion at 2:22 pm by Brian Schuettler
No account of the Nazi martyrs can leave out the remarkable story of the Austrian Franz Jägerstätter. Jägerstätter’s story is both simple and complex. He was born in 1907 in a village with spiritual and agricultural roots going back perhaps as far as Roman times, where everyone was a farmer. In some accounts of Jägerstätter’s life, he is described as a simple farmer who stubbornly refused to co-operate with the Nazis after the 1938 German Anschluss overran Austria. This is a true, but incomplete way of characterizing a man whose soul was of a quite rare kind, akin, in fact, to the great contemplatives and saints. When the Nazis arrived, not only did he refuse collaboration with their evil intentions, he even rejected benefits from the regime in areas that had nothing to do with its racial hatreds or pagan warmongering. It must have hurt for a poor father of three to turn down the money to which he was entitled through a Nazi family assistance program. But that is what he did. And the farmer paid the price of discipleship when — after a storm destroyed crops — he would not take the emergency aid offered by the government.
As the Nazis organized Austria, Jägerstätter had to decide whether to allow himself to be drafted by the German army and thus collaborate with Nazism. Two seemingly good reasons were given to him, sometimes by spiritual advisers, why he should not resist. First, he was told, he had to consider his family. The other argument was that he had a responsibility to obey legitimate authorities. The political authorities were the ones liable to judgment for their decisions, not ordinary citizens. Jägerstätter rejected both arguments. In normal times, of course, obedience to authority may be required even when we disagree on certain policies. But the 1940s in Austria were not normal times: to obey for obedience’s sake would have been to do what Adolf Eichmann would later plead in his trial in Jerusalem — he was just following orders. The consequences of Jägerstätter’s position were obvious: “Everyone tells me, of course, that I should not do what I am doing because of the danger of death. I believe it is better to sacrifice one’s life right away than to place oneself in the grave danger of committing sin and then dying.” But he serenely decided that he could not allow himself to contribute to a regime that was immoral and anti-Catholic. Jägerstätter was sent to the prison in Linz-an-der-Donau, where Hitler and Eichmann had lived as children. According to the prison chaplain, 38 men were executed there, some for desertion, others for resistance similar to Jägerstätter’s (no others have been positively identified). His Way of the Cross would not be long. In May, he was transferred to a prison in Berlin. His parish priest, his wife and his lawyer all tried to change his mind. But it was useless. On Aug. 9, 1943, he accepted execution, even though he knew it would make no earthly difference to the Nazi death machine.
A Father Jochmann was the prison chaplain in Berlin and spent some time with Jägerstätter that day. He reports that the prisoner was calm and uncomplaining. He refused any religious material, even a New Testament, because, he said, “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord, and any reading would only interrupt my communication with my God.” Very few men could have made such a statement without seeming to be in denial or utterly mad. Father Jochmann later said of him: “I can say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint I have ever met in my lifetime.”
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Like Germans of the Weimar Republic after the mass inflation wiped out their life savings in the 1920s, many Americans have become in the wake of 9/11 a frightened and vindictive people. When we say we are Christian, we mostly mean that we are frightened, of homosexuals, pornographers, drug users, “terrists,” you name it. We look for leaders who best act out our vindictiveness, the Nixons, the Giulianis. Already in 1920 the late Henry Mencken was predicting a Giuliani presidency with his remarks about the road to power in America beginning in the office of the ambitious, unscrupulous prosecutor. “Conservative” Christians may talk about the right to life, but will embrace the most anti-life strongman as long as he seems vindictive enough. The evangelicals caved on life back in the Nixon days. In 1971 and 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention came out strongly in favor of legal abortion, at first in limited circumstances, then more generally. As “patriotic Americans” they had already consented to industrialized murder, to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and (many of them) My Lai. A fetus wasn’t a human being, any more than a Jap or a Gook. The Baptists, to their eternal honor, have lately begun to repent, and now form a powerful part of the pro-life movement. But the Evangelical movement as a whole, as represented by the likes of Cal Thomas, congratulates itself on its maturity—that is, on its new refusal to emphasize any belief that might embarrass churchgoers in the company of liberals, as Paul Gottfried so tellingly points out. The essence of Evangelicalism, at least in the public sphere, is reduced to hysterical jihad against the Muslim menace.
Baylor University recently demonstrated the kind of maturity the pundits are praising. The University denied tenure to the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis J. Beckwith. A philosopher of international repute, Beckwith was a fierce a critic of abortion–and one of those thinkers who, without denying Darwinism, thought it should not be imposed as dogma by the state. Baylor backed down, but not without a great deal of soul-searching on all sides: Professor Beckwith’s led him back to the Catholic Church of his childhood. Just last year, Evangelical theologian Kirby Godsey, president of Mercer University, published a remarkable book entitled When We Talk about God… Let’s Be Honest. In it, he insists that the Christian who is really honest with himself has no higher opinion of Jesus Christ than a Muslim or a Reform Jew would have, and a lower one than any Hindu. All who uphold the Creed can be safely dismissed as dishonest. If this be maturity, let us become again as little children! The Christian who stands against the worship of the state, the holocaust of the unborn, the systematic torture and degradation of our rulers’ enemies, will find as little support among these so-called Evangelicals as Jägerstätter found among the so-called Catholics of his time.
The grass isn’t much greener on the Catholic side of the street. The already partly homosexualized American Church stood almost alone against abortion, its moral standing compromised by its own blessing of total war for unconditional surrender and by its insistence that lay people follow their own inclinations in matters of war and contraception. What support could Paul VI expect for Humanae Vitae when the most articulate Catholic in North America had already defied the Blessed John XXIII with the slogan Mater si, magistra no? In the four and a half decades since the conservative Catholic intelligentsia set its face against Rome, the New Left has become the Neocon Center. The Lutheran firebrand who said Che Guevara deserved his defeat because he lacked the revolutionary will to terror now advises the President in the collar of a Catholic priest, and the author of A Theology for Radical Politics lectures Popes on the moral necessity of preemptive war.
Even Hitler didn’t start with Jews, that is, with neighbors other Germans saw every day, and when he got around to them, a great many Germans didn’t have the heart to give them up. He started with lives that were more obviously “unlebenswürdig,” lives not worth living, not worth keeping alive, not worth allowing to live. The Pope well remembers a cousin being taken off, and later learning that his life had been judged unworthy and terminated. Then it was the handicapped. Now it is any child whose mother doesn’t want him, or can be persuaded — by boyfriend, parent, teacher, guidance councilor — to have him terminated. Some people who still believe that abortion is a sin for themselves think it a great virtue to abort others. A nation that will crush the skull of a half born baby as an act of liberation will not object greatly when the police ram the broken stick of a toilet plunger up a Haitian cab driver’s rectum. When this happened here in New York, one heard a certain amount of muttering that it was about time “those people” were taught a lesson, muttering we would not have heard twenty years ago. We have been on the road to Abu Gharaib — and Guantanamo — for a long time.
Where is light to be found today? In the Catholic Church, to be sure, in so far as it is faithful to the See of Rome, and in the Peace Churches in so far as they are faithful to their Gospel roots. The main stream of Protestantism and its Catholic hangers on, as far as we can tell, is theologically confused, spiritually sterile, and morally bankrupt. As with the German churches of the Hitler years, it is dominated by modernism, the social gospel in one form or other, and neoconservatism. In other words there is little belief in the literal truth of Christianity, much faith in the ability of government to create and sustain a moral social order, and a despairing conviction that we must use whatever means seem necessary, because only the naïve trust God’s providence in history. Some oppose the Bush regime, but most of those would have supported, and indeed did and do support, tyranny, torture, and terrorism when practiced by regimes of the Left. They are neocons too, the tired spawn of Reinhold Niebuhr.
A recent PBS biography of Bonhoeffer sniffed that Neibuhr at Union Seminary left the German theologian cold, with the clear implication that the realities of life in Nazi Germany would teach him better. I think not; Bonhoeffer did well to look rather to the black churches of Harlem. But Reinhold had a brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, not so well known today because he did not serve our secular masters so well. Richard broke with Reinhold over Asia, thinking the Christian had enough to do to keep the Gospel alive in his own milieu without demanding the government send troops to police the rest of the world. Richard’s model of Christian action and resistance was St. Benedict, and of course it is with the Benedictines that Bonhoeffer found refuge and inspiration. We could do worse in our own bad times than read or, better, reread Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and Hildebrand’s Transformation in Christ, and make an occasional toast of Kloster Ettal (I prefer the bitter variety), if you can get it, to the memory of the martyrs of Germany and Austria, known and unknown. http://www.takimag.com/site/article/a_martyr_for_peace/
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09.27.07
Posted in Authentic Christian Dialogue at 12:32 pm by Brian Schuettler
…so says the internetmonk http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/a-better-writer-gets-a-turn after an unfortunate exchange (unfortunate for Michael, that is) with Carl Olson at the Ignatius Insight http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/. I have read all the posts and all the comments on both sides of the issue of the reasons Michael Spencer chooses not to be a Catholic. The confusion seems to be centered upon the audience that Michael was addressing. A comment at Ignatius by someone calling themselves voiceovers wrote:
It’s just that I’m a bit stumped. I don’t believe Michael Spencer posted his issues with Catholic theology on his blog to be corrected by anyone, whether it be by you or by some of your more vitriolic respondents. I believe he posted those issues as musings to help Protestants more willingly embrace Roman Catholics as bretheren and, perhaps more importantly, to provoke Protestants to think outside their box.
The fact that you felt the need correct his theology, simply suggests to me that you’d rather be right than relational.
So, the point I think you’re missing is, I believe, a relatively simple one. If I held up the contents of this page as a way of attempting to reflect the nature of Christ as found in the Gospels, how much do you think I’d find? As John Wesley once wrote to a Roman Catholic brother, “… if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss.”
St Paul was letter perfect in his understanding of the Law as a Pharisee, yet did not love the ones whom Christ loved. It’s interesting to me that he needed to be blinded in order to see.
Forgive my arrogance in desiring to find some common ground in the love of Christ, but I think I’d rather be relational than just plain right Carl.
What about you?
Carl’s response gets, I believe, to the crux of the matter:
Is it better to be right with men, or to be right with God? And, at risk of repetition, can we be truly relational–that is, sharing the truth–if we are not right in how we relate? I can appreciate that Michael was trying to help other Protestants understand Catholicism better, but at the same time I can also point out that his understanding of Catholicism was not entirely right, thus hindering relationships. I would go so far as to argue that true theology seeks to be both right with God and relational with God, because it seeks right relationship. And that can only come through God’s grace and a willingness on our part to change our hearts and minds about whatever is lacking, incorrect, or incomplete in our acting, thinking, and living.
How is it that Michael’s comments will necessarily “provoke Protestants to think outside their box,” but that my comments, which sought to convey truth about essential Catholic beliefs, cannot? Some of the comments on this post show that my remarks did help some Protestants better appreciate Catholic teaching. If that was the goal, how is that a bad thing?
Finally, Michael made mention of his attraction to “constant reformation, listening, digging, discussing and savoring the Bible” and that he has an aversion to Catholic circles where, he stated, “debates and arguments are almost unheard of.” Yet, ironically, when I listened to what he had said, dug into it a bit, and discussed it–as well as debated and argued with it–he and many others took it badly. He is incorrect in his assessment of the amount of debate and argument that takes place among Catholics; we argue about nearly everything! And one reason we can do so, I believe, is because we tend to take seriously both relationships and being right, knowing that each needs the other.
It is very important to remember that a blog is intentionally accessible to the general public, be they Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems, pagans etc. If Michael’s intentional audience was exclusively his fellow Evangelicals than it would, in retrospect, have been better for him to address this issue in a different forum. Carl, or any Catholic for that matter, has the right to correct Michael’s errors about Catholicism just as Michael saw it as being his right to critique Catholicism. As someone who has been in the position of regretting comments that were later misunderstood and then being visiously attacked for making them I can certainly sympathize with Michael Spencer. However, that is not what Carl Olson did. Carl reasoned with Michael in a logical, informed, respectful and dispassionate way. What I believe dismayed Michael Spencer is that Carl was confidently convincing in his defense of Catholic teaching and that it certainly took the wind out of Michael’s sails and, in a sense, seems to have crushed him…
I’ve lost something today, and I don’t know if it’s coming back. Right now, I don’t want it back. If the answer to my blogging is Olson’s “Why I’m Not A Protestant,” I think my answer to Olson is…….completely irrelevant. If I call him my brother, I’m a damnable heretic with the truly reformed, and if I call myself a “Not a Catholic”, then the best I can be is just one more deficient, defective Protestant, outside of the true church with no authority to say anything anyway and never getting the real Jesus because I refuse to recognize transubstantiation. (Plus, I’m unwilling to read a Scott Hahn book to get all my questions answered.)
I hope that Michael continues to blog for the Lord and comes to a sense of peace regarding this experience through the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.
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