Introduction
This paper argues that the Catholic theological community is fundamentally divided on the question of what can be expected of ‘the world’ in terms of openness and receptivity to God's Word, and that recognition of this helps us to understand some of the theological tensions currently operative within Catholic theology. It argues further for a via media between the two general tendencies as represented in the work of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Catholic theologians would all agree that God's Word somehow precedes our proclamation of that Word. But precisely how God's Word precedes our proclamation, and how salvifically efficacious is what we might call this implicit or inner Word; precisely how it is related to the explicit Word spoken in the Christ event; on this we are not in agreement. This, I suggest, is essentially the ‘fault line’ in contemporary Catholic theology, or, as some would like to see it, the ‘creative tension’.Footnote 1
While accepting that in some shape or form this division and debate is coterminous with the history of Christianity itself, the paper will take up the discussion in the context of the pre-conciliar debate on the relationship between nature and grace. The second part of the paper will highlight the current practical implications of the debate in terms of the hardening of certain ecclesiastico-political positions. The third part will attempt to suggest a possible via media in a postmodern cultural context.
Two streams converge, then part again
Neo-scholasticism was of the view that the most God's revelation in nature could do was to ensure that no contradiction existed between nature and grace. From this perspective, nature and grace co-existed in two layers, in a duplex ordo with grace as a kind of superstructure. The relationship between nature and grace was at best understood to be a freedom from contradiction, a kind of non-repugnance.Footnote 2 While the intention here was to protect the transcendence of God, the effect was to create a chasm between the life of the Church and people's ordinary everyday lives, which seemed more or less irrelevant to their journey towards salvation. It also made it difficult to account for the salvation of non-Christians. Grace seemed to be extrinsic to, and at best superimposed upon, nature. If we pause to reflect for a moment on the Christian societies which we now experience as being ‘detraditionalised’, I think we will accept that it was one in which this duplex ordo perdured.
In 1946, de Lubac entered the fray with the publication of Surnaturel. If human beings had a natural desire for God, this desire could not be doomed to frustration. De Lubac argued that God could not create human beings without in some way at the same time calling them to union with himself (the beatific vision). Thus, he argued, human beings must have by nature a spiritual orientation to the one God revealed in Jesus Christ. As he saw it, the neo-scholastic ‘potential obediency’ was far more potent than any mere ‘non-repugnance’. De Lubac's position was implicitly condemned in Humani generis(1950) which saw it as destructive of the true ‘gratuity’ of grace.
While completely sympathetic to de Lubac's intention, Rahner felt that Humani generis might have a point. And so he sought a way to defend de Lubac's understanding of human beings’ spiritual orientation to the one true God revealed in Jesus Christ, while at the same time, to protect the gratuitousness of grace.
The only way Rahner saw of protecting the gratuitousness of grace while at the same time avoiding, on the one hand, the extrinsicism of neo-scholasticism, and, on the other, the danger of intrinsicism(the effective collapse of grace into nature which is what Humani generis feared about de Lubac's position), was to propose what came to be called the ‘supernatural existential’.Footnote 3 By this, Rahner meant that the spiritual orientation to God experienced by all human beings was not something owing to them by nature, but by the concrete order of the existence in which all human beings find themselves; an existence which at all times has to do with God, and is addressed by God. Not by virtue of their nature or essence, but by virtue of their existence, prior to any exercise of their freedom, human beings are graciously and freely addressed by God and invited into fellowship, and this in such a way that an acceptance of or refusal of such fellowship takes place in the circumstances of their everyday lives.Footnote 4 The beatific vision is offered to everyone not by virtue of their nature, but by virtue of the concrete order of reality graciously instituted by a loving God.
The terminology of ‘existential’ here owes much to Heidegger, and this compounded the difficulties Rahner would in any case have faced in attempting to put forward such a radical understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. However, I think it can be shown that Rahner's philosophy always proceeded from his theology, and not vice versa, a point, I believe, grasped by RatzingerFootnote 5 but probably never quite by von Balthasar.
While Rahner's terminology is philosophical, his insight is not. The insight follows from the starting point of Rahner's theology and is grounded in his conviction regarding God's salvific universal salvific intention, a conviction that manifested itself from the very first year of his teaching.
Rahner's distinctive contribution, which Roman Siebenrock has described as a radical change (Umbruch) in terms of the theology of grace,Footnote 6 lay both in prioritising God's salvific will, and in unpacking what it must logically mean. God's saving will is understood by Rahner to be ‘absolute’(lat. absoluta). By this he does not mean that it is absolutely effective in all cases; its effectiveness depends upon human free will. Humans are not bound to co-operate with God's salvific will. They are bound, however, absolutely and unconditionally, to seek salvation. This must be the case if God's salvific intention is to be both sincere (lat. sincera) and effective (lat. operosa), in other words, not just a vague aspiration on God's part.
Two points follow from this. The first is that God's universal salvific will could not be taken as sincere and effective if the most human nature could show was that it was not adverse to God's grace. The second point relates to the fact that if God's universal salvific will is to be understood as sincere and operative, it must enjoy concrete historical expression. Rahner locates the historical realisation of God's universal salvific will in Christ and the Church: Haec dei voluntas salvifica nos attingit in Christo Jesu et Ecclesia.Footnote 7 Batlogg, Rulands et al see this as another novum in terms of the theology of grace at that time. Rahner is quite specific: he is not thinking of some cosmic Christ. Rahner means Jesus Christ made flesh and crucified. All grace, according to Rahner, bears the form of Christ. This is what it means to say that Christ is the one, sole mediator of salvation for all of humankind. It follows that all experiences of grace, even those of non-Christians, are proffered in and through Christ, and all positive responses to God's grace are implicit acts of Christian discipleship.
For Rahner, it is not just that God's plan of salvation touches all people in and through Christ and the Church. All people, in so far as they respond to God's grace, are also doing so through Christ and the Church. Christ, and the Church as Christ's abiding presence, taken together are a ‘great sacrament of grace’(lat. magnum sacramentum gratiae).Footnote 8
Even before reaching disagreement with the content of what Rahner proposed, Balthasar's disdain for any attempt at a renovation of neo-scholasticism would have distanced him from Rahner's attempts to explain the relationship between nature and grace in these terms. Balthasar viewed such attempts both as unnecessary and unlikely to succeed, unnecessary, in that Christ's true glory had already been captured and expressed by the Fathers, unlikely to succeed in that neo-scholasticism was in itself evidence of the inadequacy of human rational theories to express the Christ event.Footnote 9
He agreed with de Lubac that what was needed was a re-interpretation, a revisiting of the essential Christian sources (a ressourcement) rather than any further ‘messing around’ with neo-scholasticism.
However, Balthasar's disagreement with Rahner was not just with his method, but also with his result. On several occasions, as we know, he took Rahner to task for the way in which his accounting for the relationship between nature and grace effectively, as he saw it, relativised the explicit revelation in Jesus Christ. Just three references here will suffice:
My main argument … is this: It might be true that from the very beginning man was created to be disposed towards God's revelation, so that with God's grace even the sinner can accept all revelation. Gratia supponit naturam. But when God sends his own living Word to his creatures, he does so, not to instruct them about the mysteries of the world, nor primarily to fulfil their deepest needs and yearnings. Rather he communicates and actively demonstrates such unheard-of things that man feels not satisfied but awestruck by a love which he never could have hoped to experience. For who would dare to have described God as love, without having first received the revelation of the Trinity in the acceptance of the cross by the Son.Footnote 10
And again, specifically tackling Rahner's concept of the supernatural existential, he stated,
… it is questionable whether this (supernatural) transcendence, even if it is a real experience of grace, can be termed an experience of being addressed by the personal God.Footnote 11
Further on, in Theodramatik Footnote 12 Balthasar takes Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith more or less ‘head on’, arguing that it reduces vertical revelation to the horizontal plane. According to him, if you follow Rahner, you cannot avoid concluding that the explicit Christ event is merely the extrapolation of implicit grace that people had already encountered and responded to before ever hearing the Good News. This would mean that the cross merely exemplifies rather than effects God's salvific will.
Naming the operative tensions and tendencies
All of us who teach Catholic theology today are affected by this debate, and for the most part we have developed an operative style in how we teach theology and reflect upon Christian faith. This can be characterized as follows. Depending on which side of the divide we are on, we tend to stress the continuity between creation and redemption, or the discontinuity. We consider the Christ event primarily as the fullest explication of God's eternal love, or primarily as God's radical response to the reality of human sinfulness. We advocate either a Christology ‘from above’, or one ‘from below’. We lay emphasis on the incarnation, or on the cross.
We hold to the costliness of grace, stressing that ‘Christ's mercy is not grace at a discount,’Footnote 13 or we tend to emphasise that grace is not like a commodity that becomes cheapened by virtue of being freely available. We therefore wish the Church to approach the world either as a ‘detective of grace’Footnote 14 already considered present and active, or as grace's privileged purveyor.
We view the history of the world in which the Church must speak the Word as essentially co-extensive with salvation history, and therefore, oriented to hearing the Word because it already has the self-communicating God as its innermost heart,Footnote 15 or we consider history, while irreversibly marked and punctuated by the Christ-event, nonetheless also as so deformed by human sinfulness that it remains a precarious and somewhat ambivalent seedbed for the Word.
If we are on the Balthasar side of the debate, we are more likely to stress humans as surprised receivers of an unanticipated Word rather than, with Rahner, as attuned and expectant hearers of a Word yearned for, and we will be suspicious of any undue stress on the value and importance of human efforts to grasp God as feeding modernity's myth that we are self-made men and women.
We will also be suspicious of attempts to demonstrate the rationality of faith, favouring instead insistence upon faith's internal logic and intelligibility, which we will understand as primarily self-authenticating (‘God as his own exegete’– Balthasar).Footnote 16 Similarly, we will be suspicious of philosophies and non-Christian or even extra-Christian thought systems in general as more likely to mislead than to illumine, and we will be inclined towards too little rather than too much contextualization of the Gospel, in order to avoid the Gospel being diluted and misunderstood. We will also be suspicious of attempts at ‘relevance’ as inevitably likely to compromise the truth.Footnote 17
These tensions also play themselves out in terms of theologies of priesthood, with some favouring an understanding of priesthood primarily as representatio Christi and others as primarily representatio ecclesiae.Footnote 18 Similarly, people tend to stress an understanding of Eucharist either as altar-sacrifice or as table-fellowship.
Similar tensions can be perceived with regard to ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue: we want to emphasise what is held in common, or else where the differences and divisions lie. We tend to view dialogue as an essential vehicle for proclaiming the Word of God through promoting mutual understanding, or as an inevitable path towards relativism and syncretism.
Speaking the Word in a postmodern cultural context
With the election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, the primary ministry of unity in the Church has fallen upon the shoulders of someone clearly identified with one side of the ‘fault line’ outlined above. His election marks the enthronement, in terms of the post-conciliar magisterium, of the movement for Church reform that takes its immediate inspiration from de Lubac and Balthasar. The imagery used in Pope Benedict's homilies and speeches reinforces the dialectic between Church and world. The world is a desert, the Church, God's fertile garden; the world is a sea of suffering, death and darkness without light, the Gospel the net that brings us into the splendour of God's light and true life.Footnote 19 Yet a certain reserve has also been noted, most clearly so far in Benedict's addresses at World Youth Day in Cologne. There are signs, such as the recent private meeting with Hans Küng, that Benedict is very much aware of his responsibility to build a bridge across the ‘fault line’ here described.
When one looks more closely, divisions that have formed may not have as profound a theological basis as is often thought. To take the example only of Karl Rahner and von Balthasar:
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• Rahner, perhaps most transparently, but not only, in his prayers/spirituality, clearly acknowledges discontinuity in terms of human experience of God and the need to acknowledge the inadequacy of our attempts to reach God: ‘I have not grasped you, you have embraced me’.Footnote 20 And, as I have already pointed out, Rahner's starting point is clearly a faith perspective on the human condition, not a philosophical one.
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• Balthasar's aesthetics, on the other hand clearly requires some ‘pre-grasp’ of the concept of beauty with which the ‘glory of the Lord’ can be correlated; similarly, Balthasar comes closer to proposing an apocatastasis than Rahner could ever have done because of his uncompromising understanding of the inviolability and responsibility of human freedom.Footnote 21
At times, one wonders if the divisions are more at the level of strategy than of theological truth. I recall reading a letter by von Balthasar to Rahner, when the former was attempting to get a collection of essays together to refute Küng on the issue of infallibility. They had both ‘fallen out’ so to speak after the publication of Cordula oder der Ernstfall. In the course of the letter, he said that his problem was not per se with Rahner's theory of the ‘anonymous Christian’– just how it was likely to be misunderstood by ordinary people.
But has not the kind of aggiornamento theology which seeks to correlate tradition and context, as, for example, Rahner does, run its course? In addition to losing credibility within the Church, has it not also lost its currency in ‘the ‘changing world?’ I now want to consider very briefly a conversation that has been on-going on both sides of the Atlantic in recent times.
What ‘works’ in postmodern culture?
From a purely pragmatic perspective, the approach of Rahner, and others who seek to ‘honour’ the implicit Word being spoken by God, who seek to correlate tradition and context, is considered to be increasingly problematic. I will here develop the three observations made recently by Anthony Godzieba.Footnote 22 The first is that its method is viewed, by people like George Lindbeck, as a form of capitulation. Putting this crudely, it is the accusation that somehow this theological method has led to the Christian narrative ‘going native’. Balthasar, in fact, on one occasion, made this accusation of the Council as a whole, comparing it to a watering can with a hole in it that had nothing of substance left to give to the world by the time that it reached it.Footnote 23
The second problem is that while, paradoxically, at least at one level, the theology of Balthasar and others could be viewed as somewhat exclusive and elitist, ironically, it finds more easy expression in prayer and liturgical practice than that of Rahner, whose work, despite, or perhaps because of its emphasis on God being met and encountered in the ordinariness of everyday experience, seems to evacuate the mystery and otherness of God. Evangelically and charismatically minded believers, for example, would take little sustenance from Rahner speaking of a ‘sober intoxication of the spirit’. In contrast, ressourcement theology, drawing almost entirely upon the work of de Lubac, Balthasar and Ratzinger, has inspired a whole host of new religious movements. Its principal journal, Communio, was intended from its very inception as an intellectual and spiritual foundation for such small groups.Footnote 24 I do not think that the same could be said of Concilium, which had a more strictly academic focus.
The third problem faced by correlation theology is that it is perceived methodologically as having so accommodated itself to modernity's ‘turn to the subject’, that now, in a postmodern context in which all appeals to human experience are suspect, it is left ‘high and dry.’ Putting this another way: proponents of correlation theology were so anxious to learn a common language, to develop a kind of epistemological ‘esperanto,’ that now, where no one speaks or even respects this or any other common language, it has sadly no inherent or distinctive language of its own to which it can revert. While accepting this to be the case, it must nonetheless be noted that with the possible exception of Hearer of the Word ? Rahner was always working within a theological rather than a philosophical framework.
According to Lieven Boeve, correlation theology runs aground when the overlap between culture and faith becomes too slight, i.e. when on a cultural level human experiences can no longer be interpreted within Christian paradigmatic frameworks.Footnote 25 What is then required is a serious assessment of how the cultural landscape has been transformed. Otherwise, theological approaches critical and disdainful of contextualisation tend to come to the centre of the theological stage,Footnote 26 as I would suggest has happened today in many seminary contexts.
Boeve seeks a middle way between, on the one hand, a theology of correlation that naïvely repeats its theological presuppositions and, on the other, a theology of ‘rupture’ represented by the more extreme forms of ressourcement theology as well as the Radical Orthodoxy school, that tends to wash its hands of any attempt at contextualization. An important research project currently underway at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, under Boeve and others, sees its key challenge as supporting Christian identity in postmodern culture.
Boeve has proposed conceiving of religious experience as ‘interruption’(a term also used by David Tracy), and this as a via media allowing both for continuity and discontinuity between tradition and context. As I understand it, Boeve believes that the present cultural context, which he describes as pluralized, individualized and detraditionalised, demands of Christians to be clear about what is distinctive of and particular regarding the Christian faith experience. Christians live in a cultural context that cherishes plurality, and therefore, particularity and difference. This gives them new scope to express what is unique about the Christian understanding and experience of God, to re-contextualise it in all its radicality and particularity. At the same time, in a detraditionalised context, faith is a matter of individual choice, and the presence of a variety of possibilities in terms of personal identity and life options means that Christians must be clear about and grounded in their own identity.
The suggestion here, as I understand it, is to show how the Christian experience, which is always, Abraham-like, a calling forth, and therefore an interruption, can speak to contemporary postmodern human beings in their own encounter with vulnerability, homelessness, confusion, and contingency. In so doing, the challenge is to avoid, on the one hand a ‘totalising’ of human experience, which would now be anachronistic, and on the other, articulating Christian identity in such a way that it is closed and defensive, requiring people or leading people to separate from their culture and seek some kind of sectarian asylum.
In my view, the evidence of the value and the validity of this approach is how it immediately calls forth biblical images of the reign of God, which is at the same time among us, in us, in-breaking, and yet always at the same time beyond us and beckoning us.
Conclusion: how to ‘speak a constant Word’
What is needed today is a via media between the theological tensions and tendencies which have been outlined here. Such an approach would arguably be more faithful to the theological giants on either side of the line from whom many of the new generation of theologians take their inspiration.
First and foremost, an obedient listening to the Word must precede any attempt to proclaim it. Careful discernment is needed of what the Spirit is saying to the Churches (Rev 2:7). We need to attend to how the Word is being spoken to us both in the prayer life of the Christian community, an emphasis that would come to us from the Balthasar approach and in the complexity of our own lived experience, an emphasis that would very much be represented by Rahner.
From the Rahner approach we would also find reassurance in the face of the apparent fruitlessness of our efforts to evangelise. Rahner would urge us to take as seriously as God does, the absolute nature of God's salvific will, and therefore to trust that God has created the genuine possibility for all people to hear ‘a constant Word in a changing culture’. Thus there is no need for a pastoral panic. We do not need to become cultural refugees who might seek to re-create hermetic refuges from ‘the changing world’. Instead, we can enter confidently into the doubt, disillusionment, ambiguity and confusion that mark our culture, trusting that, as all is assumed, all can be redeemed.
At the same time, there is much to be learned from the other side of the ‘fault line’ that would emphasise the radical otherness of Christian revelation and how the Christian narrative interrupts and disrupts any cosy accommodation to contemporary culture. There is a need, for example, to confront the contemporary privileging of individual autonomy with the radically liberating understanding of human freedom. There is also a need to disrupt the false optimisms of Western culture and its many dehabilitating pessimisms with the genuineness of Christian hope.
The Word of God is best served by its ministers, pastors and theologians, exploring a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’ approach in proclaiming that Word. This is the most authentic approach in a Church that has yet to attain ‘full perfection’ and which inevitably ‘takes on the appearance of this passing world’,Footnote 27 and so must live with both continuity and discontinuity, constancy and change, as it journeys through history.
