EDITORIAL Keep the faith, but keep it in
perspective
Pope John Paul IIs apostolic letter, Ad Tuendam
Fidem,(http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/documents/tuendam.htm)
closes the circle on an interesting century that began with the papal campaign
against Modernism, crested with the Second Vatican Councils cry for
freedom and reform, and now crawls to a whimpering conclusion with the
popes command to a billion faithful to think only as he thinks.
It may be a good time for theologians and others, instead of
committing theological hara-kiri, to step back a few paces and look at the
bigger picture.
Theology is where we try to figure God out. Long before there were
catechisms with definitive answers, people sat by primitive fires or looked at
their reflection in a lake and wondered where they came from and who was
responsible and how it all might end. They located God high on mountains or
deep in forests, above or within, vengeful or benign. God was elusive from the
beginning, hard to pin down -- immense and cosmic or intimate and personal. The
God we found usually said more about us than about God.
Eventually the search for transcendence, now called religion, got
organized. Rules had to be made. Officials had to be found to define and defend
the official God. Never mind that there were many official gods, jealously
espoused by the worlds great religions. And even the official gods were
elusive, never quite showing their faces. This left room -- and created the
necessity -- for speculation or inspiration.
The trouble is, human speculation and divine inspiration are
equally quixotic. Imagination can raise its head and play havoc with old
orthodoxies. Out of this human development two kinds of theologians arose in
most religions, including Catholicism: the theologian who represented the
partys traditional line; and the one who couldnt keep her or his
imagination from wondering and suggesting and writing troublesome books with
new angles on God. In a perfect world these two theologians would overlap, but
in ours this rarely happens. The result is the tumultuous history of Catholic
theology.
Ours is not an age of imagination. The other end of that pole is
fundamentalism. While imagination is potentially reckless, fundamentalism is
invariably fearful. It clings desperately to whatever status quo has been good
to us in the past.
Once fear kicks in, however, its hard to exorcise it. One
must batten down one hatch after another to keep ones truth in and
everyone elses fallacies out. So, when the pope writes that henceforth
Catholic truths will be exactly as he tells us and engraves this in the Code of
Canon Law, the gesture looks risky: What if everyone doesnt get it? So
the faithful Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger comes to the rescue with his own
document (http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/documents/ratz.htm), even
longer than the popes, battening down every doctrinal hatch.
No gradation of belief is left unchecked. No infringement on any
teaching is left unpunished. Every conceivable jot and tittle is paraded. The
gibe about medieval angels on the head of a pin would seem an understatement
here.
And yet. When we or the pope or the cardinal confront our God, the
formulas fall away, and we are on our own with the image we got from pictures
or parents, from visions or intuitions or whatever. Seldom is it the image or
essence of papal document or theological text; its something much more
personal. And no two of our gods are exactly the same, not even
Ratzingers and John Pauls. Theyre all seen through our
personal glasses darkly.
Theologians and we and the pope and the cardinal know all this.
The topic here is whos in charge of the church. Who gets to say what God
means? If we could all say it, the church would be less necessary. Its a
huge dilemma for the Vatican. Even as the pope wowed the world on his trips,
more and more people came to regard the church as less essential for their
ultimate happiness. Many think this is because todays God isnt
joyful and generous but uptight and begrudging.
This pontificate has chosen to solve the dilemma by retrenching.
Let cafeteria Catholics who dont buy the whole package stay away. Let
theologians who dare to question stay quiet. The only good Catholics are those
in sufficient sync with the pope. Woe to those who are not.
This means, if taken seriously, the end of theology for now. By
definition theology goes beyond todays boundaries to new insights.
Anything else is rewriting the catechism.
The pendulum swings. Outlawed theologians of the past have time
and again been rehabilitated, even canonized. Were at an in-between time.
While theres a pendulum, theres hope.
National Catholic Reporter, July 17,
1998
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