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The Difficulty of Making Sense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Lash
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To believe in the ‘infallibility’ of the Church is not to suppose that we are reliable, but that God is. It is to believe in the effectiveness of God’s act, God’s coming as Word and Spirit to the world he makes and, making it, makes his own, his dwelling-place, his temple. It is to believe that this effectiveness is un-failingly exhibited in the truthfulness of witness borne, in word and action, to this fact, this truth, this Word of life. But this is not easy to believe because the evidence surrounds us on every side that we have been given licence to corrupt, to falsify and to destroy—through egotism, carelessness, incompetence and greed—ourselves, each other, and the world.

We know what needs to be said: there is (for example) nothing obscure or unfamiliar about the Apostles’ Creed. But how to say what must be said in such a manner as to enable our contemporaries (and ourselves!) to hear, in our utterance of it, that one word for all seasons, one same surprising Gospel for every creature—and not some alien, strange, purely particular and puzzling tale, some kind of ancient folklore or science fiction—this is no easy matter. The difficulty of making sense, of making Christian sense, is the difficulty of so expressing the content of the Creed, in word and action, as effectively and properly to clarify, to throw some light upon, our various circumstances, responsibilities and predicament: our politics and science, our poetry and plans and hopes and fears, our private pains and public enterprises, our disease, and happiness, and tedium, and death.

This task, of saying simply what needs simply to be said, this teaching task, this ‘magisterium’ that is the Church’s mission, can only properly be executed in the measure that, always and everywhere, we are attentive, listening before we speak, inquiring before we answer, watchful. This is not a recommendation to regress to pre-critical patterns of interpretative practice. There is no going back upon the lessons learnt in the experiment of modernity, the freedoms (in principle) secured. It is, rather, an invitation to move towards post-critical maturity and, in so doing, to find fresh sense in ancient truth.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 70 , Issue 824 , February 1989 , pp. 74 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Pedersen, Olaf, ‘Christian Belief and the Fascination of Science’, Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, ed Russell, Robert J., Stoeger, William R., Coyne, George V. (Vatican Observatory, 1988), pp. 125–140Google Scholar.

2 Rahner, Karl, Karl Rahner in Dialogue. Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982, ed. Imhof, Paul and Biallowans, Hubert, translation edited by Egan, Harvey (New York, Crossroad, 1986), p. 86Google Scholar; see Rahner, , ‘The Question of the Future’, Theological Investigations, XII, tr. Bourke, David (London, Darton Longman and Todd, 1974), p. 181Google Scholar.

3 Burrell, David B., Aquinas: God and Action (London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 67Google Scholar; on this, see Lash, Nicholas, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London, SCM Press, 1986), p. 114Google Scholar.

4 On this, as on many other matters, von Hugel talked much sense: see my discussion in Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (London, SCM Press, 1988)Google Scholar, where many of the points made in this paper are made more carefully and at greater length.

5 Williams, Rowan, ‘Trinity and Revelation’, Modem Theology, 2:3 (1986), pp. 200, 198.Google Scholar

6 Dummett, Michael, ‘Unsafe Premises’, New Blackfriars, December 1987, p. 566Google Scholar.

7 Dummett, ‘What Chance for Ecumenism?’New Blackfriars, December 1988, p. 531. There seem to be two reasons why Professor Dummett holds this curious opinion as to my views. In the first place, he wonders why ‘so many people’ (including me) were ‘so very cross’ with him, and decides that it must be because we were ‘infuriated’ by his proposal that things ‘having long been taught by the Church’ was a reason for believeing them. No such proposal would infuriate me because I think it sensible and proper. I was very cross because, on the basis of one article by a philosopher who thinks that the entire history of Christianity has been a deception, Dummett felt entitled to charge what, in his second article, he called ‘a large and important sector within the Church … including significantly many seminary teachers’, with apostasy, fraudulence and deceit (‘Unsafe Premises’, p. 560; see ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, pp. 430–431). This seemed to me, and still seems, a thoroughly irresponsible manner in which to incite others to share his grave suspicions. In the second place, he mistakes my mention of ‘experts’. My suggestion was that he would have done better directly to ascertain the views of Catholic New Testament scholars, since these were the people whose orthodoxy and integrity were being so colourfully impugned. I had no other group of experts in mind than those I took to be the target of his diatribe. I saw them not as judges in the case but as the prisoners at the bar.

8 See Easter in Ordinary, pp. 254–285.

9 Rahner, , ‘The Hiddenness of God’, Theological Investigations, XVI, trans. Morland, David (London, Darton Longman and Todd, 1979), pp. 238–239Google Scholar, his stress.

10 Rahner, , Christian at the Crossroads, trans. Green, V. (London, Burns Oates 1975), p. 23Google Scholar.

11 Rahner, ‘The Foundation of Belief Today’, Investigations, XVI, p. 9. A similar note was sounded in Gaudium et Spes, 33, in which the Council spoke of the Church's desire to ‘illuminate’ humanity's path ‘without always having to hand the solution to particular problems’.

12 The Tablet, 26 November 1988, p. 1362.

13 ‘Opportunities for Peace’, Catholic Media Office, 24 November 1988, no. 15.

14 ‘Opportunities’, nos. 26 (my stress), 36.

15 See The Tablet, 26 November 1988, p. 1378.

16 The matter is amply documented in Kaiser, Robert Blair, The Encyclical that Never Was: The Story of the Commission on Population, Family and Birth, 1964–1966 (London, Sheed and Ward, 1987)Google Scholar and, without the journalistic brio, in Mahoney, John, The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 259–301Google Scholar. It is not possible to take into account the ‘Cologne Declaration’ and Bernard Haring's appeal in //Regno, both of which appeared after this paper was written (see The Tablet, 4 February 1989, pp. 140–142.

17 See Mahoney, Making of Moral Theology, pp. 116–120, drawing largely on Congar.

18 Toulmin, Stephen, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, 1958), p. 7Google Scholar.

19 Dummett ‘What Chance for Ecumenism?’New Blackfriars, December 1988, p. 543.

20 Ibid., p. 532.

21 Lash, ‘A Leaky Sort of Thing? The Divisiveness of Michael Dummett’, New Blackfriars, December 1987, p. 555.

22 Making of Moral Theology, pp. 340–341.

23 And if the papal contribution to the Church's teaching were similarly made and, moreover, made within the structures of a Synod no longer confined to courtly or ‘consultative’ status (with the task of such central offices as were required restricted to administration), then the pathologies of the past hundred and fifty years might, at last, be on the way to being healed.