Column Mandatum threatens covenant of respect
By ROSEMARY RADFORD
RUETHER
Liberalism has been taking a beating
in recent decades in American culture, ever since the Republicans succeeded in
making it the L word identified with big government.
More recently a new wave of neoconservative theology, calling itself
Radical Orthodoxy, has been seeking to discredit the entire
movement of liberalism and modernity as the cause of the disintegration of
faith in the truth of Christian revelation and church tradition. Thinkers who
belong to this movement, spearheaded by English theologian John Milbank, assume
that questioning scripture and church tradition through confidence in human
reason led to the twin evils of interminable violence and
pluralism.
I find these assumptions questionable. Interminable violence and
pluralism existed prior to liberalism and modernity. Indeed, in my view,
interminable violence has been partly due, and continues to be due, to efforts
to repress pluralism, rather than to seek a way for pluralism (in religious,
ethnic and cultural identities) to coexist.
I also question that there was or is a secure, certain, unchanging
understanding of scripture and church tradition to which one can
return to solve these problems. Church tradition has been a hot
debate between different views from the time of the earliest Christians.
Orthodoxy has been established by deciding for one view and disallowing all
others. But this repression of other views has not caused these other views to
be silenced. Rather, the continual effort to repress them has been the basis of
inquisitions, book burnings and the torture and execution of
heretics. This is not a state of violence to which I would wish to
return.
I think that liberalism was too narrow (in fact, insufficiently
pluralist) and needs to be reformed and expanded by movements that bring in the
voices and affirm the social rights of persons ignored by the liberal
definitions of the person. Yet I believe that liberalism is
nevertheless basic for the assumptions on which both U.S. society and its
institutions of higher education have been constituted.
I wish to highlight two aspects of liberalism that I see as basic
to intellectual community:
Liberalism, on a cultural and intellectual level, means freedom of
thought, freedom of conscience, freedom to discuss and publish differing
viewpoints on truth. This assumption is foundational both to the Declaration of
Independence (a classical liberal document) and to the affirmation of academic
freedom in university life that has been largely accepted by liberal
theological schools. This concept of freedom of conscience, thought and speech
is not a rejection of the existence of truth, but it assumes that truth cannot
be finally and fully known. It can only be approximated. The way to best
approximate truth is to allow all voices to be heard. The dogmatic assumption
that one group has a privileged knowledge of truth that can be used to suppress
all other voices keeps corrective insights from being heard that can bring us
closer to truth. It is also the source of socially sanctioned violence.
The view that we get closer to truth through free debate is
somewhat overly optimistic, since it ignores the ways in which debate is
covertly limited by the propaganda of the powerful. But this means that one
needs continually to correct power imbalances in order to make genuine freedom
of debate possible. But this liberal ideal of free debate has not been without
limits. The limits are based on a certain humility about ones
own claims to truth, an acceptance by all parties of the partiality of their
own views of truth and a willingness to listen to others in order to arrive at
a fuller consensus or at the least to allow some mutual acceptance and
coexistence.
The liberal covenant, on which academic freedom is based, is that
one accepts partiality of ones own views and coexistence with other
views. This is foundational to academic civility. Evidently those
who wish to assert that there is one normative orthodoxy reject this liberal
humility. They claim to be silenced by liberalism. This
is partly true and partly misleading, since if they would win they
would in fact silence all other voices. What is allowed in the liberal covenant
is a vigorous affirmation of differences of perspectives, including views that
the scripture and church tradition have vital resources for our understanding
of truth. What is not allowed is the assertion of one perspective in a way that
disallows others as possibly also offering some truthful insights.
The second essential aspect of liberalism for our life together is
political liberalism. I leave aside here economic liberalism, or free market
liberalism, which I see as a different problem. Its views were formulated in
the 18th century as a way of undermining state monopolies and championing free
trade among a plurality of small entrepreneurs. The problem with this tradition
is that its rhetoric is used today to champion new global monopolies of the
multinational corporations that effectively destroy the conditions for free
trade for small businesses and local economies that it originally
supported.
Political liberalism is based on the proposition that all
men are created equal and therefore should have equal political rights
and equal civil status before the law. Classical liberalism failed to vindicate
the universalism of this promise by assuming that the subject of
this equality was white propertied males. Originally women, slaves, Indians and
those without property were excluded. But the liberal principle itself was open
to a continual expansion of interpretation, and eventually included women,
freed slaves and opened itself to religious and ethnic diversity.
Classical orthodox Christianity affirmed a basic
principle that all humans are created in the image of God. But it failed to
vindicate this on a legal, social and political level, accepting the
hierarchies of male over female, masters over slaves (or servants) and rulers
over subjects as the order of creation. These hierarchies were seen
as mandated by God and a foundation of social order and thus must be accepted
by all. To rebel against ones place in this social hierarchy
was to rebel against God. Liberalism rejected the identification of social
hierarchy with orders of creation while drawing on the idea of the universality
of all persons in the image of God as the basis of creating a new social order
of equality in legal and political rights.
What can rejection of liberalism as a political covenant mean? It
can only mean, in my view, a retreat to a claim that race, gender and economic
hierarchies are divinely ordained and unchangeable. One can go beyond
liberalism to a fuller justice. One cannot turn back from it, in my view,
without negating the basic covenant that allows women and people of diverse
races to coexist with an assumption of equality of rights. There are certain
liberal principles that are the basis of the way in which universities and
seminaries have constituted themselves as communities of diverse perspectives
that can coexist in a covenant of civility and mutual respect.
The effort of Catholic bishops to impose a mandatum based
on a supposed standard of orthodoxy from the premodern world threatens this
covenant of mutual respect. Moreover it will not take us to a secure peace and
certainty through univocal truths given by scripture and church tradition, as
is promised, but only to an effort to establish one view of scripture and
church tradition that must eliminate all others. The victory of these efforts,
either from the Radical Orthodoxy group or from Catholic bishops, will, I am
afraid, destroy the hard-won efforts of Catholic theological schools and
departments of religion in Catholic colleges to establish their academic
respectability.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a professor of theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill. Her e-mail address
is Rosemary.Ruether@nwu.edu
National Catholic Reporter, April 27,
2001
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