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‘The Truth Looks Different From Here’ or On seeking the unity of truth from a diversity of perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Janet Martin Soskice
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Gustavo Gutierrez, in a recent visit to Cambridge, told this story about the Medellin conference of 1968. (This is my recollection of his story and not an exact quotation.) Following that important gathering, the South American bishops received a letter from Rome. ‘We can see’, it read, ‘that your circumstances are very different from those we experience here in Europe. To enable us to help you, please send experts on South American economics, politics, sociology and anthropology to Rome. . . But don’t send any theologians because we have our own theologians here.’

Despite the fashionable sound to the phrase, theology has always been done ‘in context’. Augustine was no less contextual a theologian than Bonhoeffer, with each page attesting to the writer’s particular education, formation as a Christian, pastoral concerns and so on. Does this alarm us? Should this alarm us? If we admit to, and even delight in, the diverse contexts for the doing of theology are we ‘going soft’ on any claim to a universally valid Christian message? How do we speak of the truth and yet speak from our particularity? These are the questions I wish to consider here, questions whose significance for contemporary theology, now a global and ecumenical enterprise, need not be underlined.

I would like to begin, however, at a place seemingly remote from our own—Europe in the sixteenth century. I should like to look at one of those Reformation debates which, while distant in time and sensibility from those of our century, have repercussions which all Christians to a greater or lesser degree must still feel. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I should like to begin this discussion of ‘truth’ with a look at an exchange of letters in 1539 between Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 73 , Issue 865 , November 1992 , pp. 528 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 All references to Sadoleto are from Sadoleto, James, ‘Letter to the Senate and People of Geneva, (18 March, 1539)’, in Tracts and Treatises of the Reformation Church, Oliver and Boyd, 1958Google Scholar. All Calvin citations are from Calvin, John, ‘Reply to Sadoleto (September 1, 1539)’ in Calvin: Theological Treatises, Library of Christian Classics, XXII, SCM, 1954.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Bouwsma, William, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Eire, Carlos, War Against the Idols, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Buckley, Michael J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p 37Google Scholar.

4 Kant, Preface to The Metaphysical Principles of Right (in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trs. James Ellington, 1964, p.5), cit. Lovibond below. That it was still very much ‘men’ of right reason whose agreement was solicited by the philosophers seems clear. See, for instance, ‘Kant’ by Susan Mendus, in ed. Ellen Kennedy and Mendus, Susan, Women in Western Political Philosophy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 I have explored this far more thoroughly in Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, especially chapters 6–8.

6 ‘An interview with Professor Hilary Putnam’, in Cogito, Summer, 1989, p. 89, p.90.

7 Summa Theologiae, Ia,1,5. Blackfriars edn, Vol. 1, trans. Gilby, Thomas O.P. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), p. 19Google Scholar.

8 Nolan, Albert, God in South Africa (London: CIIR, 1988)Google Scholar. Nolan is critical of what he calls the ‘universalising tendency’ of Western theology, ‘the assumption that nothing is true or valuable unless it applies to all people, at all times and in all circumstances’ (p. 15), but nonetheless his own distinction between ‘content’ and ‘shape’ of the gospel, the first changing and the second remaining the same across time and place, is an attempt to say how Christian continuity is maintained while hearing the new voice.

9 See Toril Moi on the French feminist, Helene Cixous in eds. Jefferson, Ann and Roby, David, Modern Literary Theory (London: B.T. Batsford, 1986), p. 211Google Scholar. An account of the post‐modernist critique of Enlightenment ideals is given by Lovibond below.

10 Cit. Jonathan Culler in Barthes (London: Fontana, 1983)Google Scholar.

11 For an anthropological account of the ‘muting’ of women see the Introduction to ed. Ardener, Shirley, Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 20ffGoogle Scholar. For a more philosophical account, Cameron, Deborah, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (London: The Macmillan Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Macdonell, Diane, Theories of Discourse (Oxford: Basil Black well, 1987)Google Scholar.

12 Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 178Google Scholar.

13 Lovibond, Sabina, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review, #178, 1989, p.12Google Scholar

14 A more difficult question, but fortunately not ours to answer, is how the the secularist and secular feminist will escape from the amoral vision of the future post‐modernism holds out before them? It is interesting to find Lovibond speaking of ‘the epistemic equivalent of an article of faith, a commitment to persist in the search for common ground with others: in fact, something which could not be relinquished on pain of sinking into ‘hatred of reason and of humanity’ (Plato, Phaedo)’ (p. 14). The French writer, Julia Kristeva, speaks directly of the crisis of meaning in language in a world without God. After speaking of the quest for ‘an impossible truth, concerning the meaning of speech, concerning our condition as speaking beings’ (ix), she speaks of psychoanalytic discourse as perhaps the only one ‘capable of addressing this untenable place where our speaking species resides, threatened by the madness beneath the emptiness of heaven’ (xi). In her Preface to Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Roudiez, Leon S. (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

15 In order to underline this moral quandary of post‐modernist thought I have run the danger of appearing dismissive of some of the astute criticisms of power and language to emerge from this quarter. Theology has much to learn from these, as Rebecca Chopp demonstrates in The Power to Speak: Feminism. Language. God (New York: Crossroad, 1989)Google Scholar.

16 For a critical discussion of the exegesis of apartheid see Loubser, J.A., The Apartheid Bible: A Critical Review of Racial Theology in South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1987)Google Scholar.

17 Williams, Rowan, ‘Trinity and Revelation’, Modern Theology 2:3, 1986, p. 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For the limitations of theology ‘done by angels’ see Kerr, Fergus, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar.

19 The approach to theology here developed is thus entirely different from that which T.F. Torrance credits to Karl Barth. According to Torrance, Barth 'set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual context of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption.'(my emphasis) cited by Richard Roberts in Sykes, Stephen, ed., Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 147Google Scholar. For a very different view of what Barth's intentions were see Ingolf Dalferth, ‘Karl Barth's eschatological realism’ in the same volume.

20 I take evil to be a prime correlate of suffering. Cf. Paul Riceour,‘…to do evil in this sense is always, either directly or indirectly, to make another person suffer. In its relational or dialogical structure, in other words, evil committed by someone finds its other half in the evil suffered by someone else.’ In eds Deuser, H., Martin, G.M., Stock, K. and Welker, M., Gottes Zukunft Der Welt: Festschrift für Jürgen Moltmann (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986), p. 346Google Scholar.

21 At the Concilium conference, Louvain, Summer, 1990.

22 I am grateful to Ann Conway for drawing my attention to this text.