Abstract
In their different ways, both these books explore how Catholic theologians have wrestled with the ongoing challenge of holding together two commitments that often seem in tension: on the one hand, the desire to be faithful to the tradition in such a way that continuity with the original foundations of Christianity is maintained, and, on the other hand, the concern to ensure that the faith is communicated in their own context and culture in such a way as to render that faith accessible, dynamic and vibrant. If the link with the past is severed, is what is being communicated authentically Christian? If the link to the past is so strong that it stifles development and creative expressions, has the vitality and current relevance of the tradition been undermined? Some fear attempts to create openings to, borrowing from, and dialogue with contemporary culture in case this leads to Christians becoming too accommodating to the spirit of the age. Others fear that a refusal to engage in such openings, borrowing, and dialogue will deny the Church the opportunity and the means to reach out with clarity and credibility to the people of our time. Catholic theologians must always be conscious of the legitimate call of both these commitments and these two books demonstrate how they have sought to do so over the centuries (Seewald) and especially during the 20th century (Petráčk).
Seewald holds the chair at the University of Münster once occupied by Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner. He examines various attempts to do justice to the revelation given in Jesus Christ, to convey faithfully a Gospel and tradition that are believed to be supernaturally illuminated, guided and animated, yet also subject to historical contingency and consciousness. Christian faith cannot dispense with history, nor can it assume that that history has come to an end; God still speaks to us in the present; for Christians to discern how God still speaks they need to use the language and thought-forms of the present. At issue for the many protagonists whose work is examined here—whose efforts to do justice to the givenness, objectivity, and enduring nature of truth, and also to take into account the historical conditioning and contextual factors that influenced how this truth is to be described and communicated, is the question of authority. Who decides–and by what criteria—which expressions of faith are authentic, permissible or required? Neither past nor present expressions of faith, however helpful, can escape their finiteness and limitations; nor can they express the gospel exhaustively, so that nothing new needs to be said. As Ratzinger observed: ‘revelation precedes and transcends its affirmative testimonies. . . . Every dogmatic formula contains a dogmatic insufficiency: on the one hand, its distance from the reality, which it tries to express; on the other, its participation in the historically determined and historically relative world of the people who have expressed their knowledge of faith in this formula. This diminishes the total finality of the formula, and thus also the lasting claim of the formula, without cancelling the finality of the thing meant in the formula, and thus also the lasting claim of the formula’ (quoted pp. 159–60).
Between the brief Introduction and Epilogue, there are seven chapters. The first defines dogma and development. The second treats the Bible as both product and yardstick of doctrinal development. In chapter three Seewald analyses how the early Church reflected on doctrinal continuity and change. Then, in chapter four, he moves on to the Middle Ages, tracing arguments developed in that period about how there might be changes in an unchanging faith. In chapter five he interrogates theories of doctrinal development in the 19th and early 20th century. Chapter six covers the 20th century, from anti-modernism to the Second Vatican Council. Chapter Seven provides an overview of the theories of dogma and development with some intricate classifications of these. There is a substantial bibliography, drawing on principally German, but also French and English scholarly works.
The writing is succinct, tightly argued and pitched at more advanced scholars in theology. The tone is clinical and the author maintains a balanced approach, one which recognizes the legitimacy of the call to both fidelity and to creativity in changing circumstances. ‘A healthy conservatism allows the Church to remain itself through the millennia. A healthy evolutionism allows it to remain forever young’ (p. 187). Seewald acknowledges that without a proper relationship with its origins ‘the Church would no longer have roots’ and without a proper response to the new ‘the Church can have no future’ (p. 170). The author’s analysis rests on his claim that ‘the issue of doctrinal development denotes the unstable simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. Pure discontinuity would be the beginning of something completely new, which has no relation to the old and therefore cannot be seen as a development from it. Pure continuity, on the other hand, would be standstill, since every change always carries within it the element of discontinuity’ (p. 181).
Petráček is professor of modern social and church history at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. His weighty tome is elegantly written and, despite its specialized nature, is clear and accessible, even for readers who come to it unfamiliar with many of the writers whose work he examines. And there are a host of names unfamiliar to this reviewer, a range of Czech theologians—for example, Vincent Zapletal, Alois Musil, Jan Nepomuk Hejčl, and Vojtěch Adalbert Šanda—whose work is brought to the fore as significant contributors to the major shift in Catholic official teaching described by the author: from the deep suspicion, indeed virulent hostility, to critical biblical scholarship that marked the opening years of the 20th century, to the later acceptance and embracing of critical-historical methods as a legitimate approach which could be adopted by Catholic biblical scholars.
Petráček provides a clear map of this major transition in the stance of church authorities in the period from 1893 to 1993. During this time historical-critical biblical scholarship went from rejection, prohibition and persecution to eventual acceptance and official approval. The author traces the state of Catholic biblical scholarship at the beginning of the 20th century and the beginnings of the historical-critical method (Chapter Two) and how the magisterium related to the task of biblical interpretation (Chapter Three). Then he examines the arguments put forward by the opponents of progressive exegesis (Chapter Four) before exploring their motives for opposing historical-criticism (Chapter Five). Chapter Six describes the consequences of the impaired exegesis that followed from the onslaught against such critical approaches. Then, in Chapter Seven, he delineates the slow process of adopting the aforementioned approaches and rehabilitating the scholars who had advocated them, before offering some final reflections on the period of transition (Chapter Eight). A huge range of scholarship, multilingual in nature has been drawn upon, as is evident in the 48 pages of notes and the 25 page bibliography. Although the author’s sympathies clearly lie with the progressive scholars whose work was marginalized and subject to many penalties imposed by church authorities, nevertheless he treats seriously and carefully the various arguments put forward by their opponents. For instance, he shows that both modernists and anti-modernists had a deep faith and displayed a lively intelligence in how they presented their case.
Ultra-conservative websites today constantly attack the papacy of Francis and echo the militant and aggressive tone adopted by those who opposed the use of modern scholarly methods when studying the Bible in the early 20th century, though now without the power of their predecessors to bring their pernicious distortions and poisonous allegations to fruition in the form of excommunication, dismissal from academic or pastoral posts, censorship, and so forth. The desire for certainty, the demand for conformity, the siege mentality, the readiness to use force and intimidation to prevent unsettling ideas, the notion of the church as being a fortress rather than a fountain—all these worked for decades against a balanced assessment of the potential value of engaging with modern biblical scholarly approaches.
Petráček offers readers an illuminating guide through complex and subtle scholarly debates, detailing the arguments used by proponents and opponents of historical-critical methods when applied to the Bible, introducing us to many of the leading figures on both sides, such as, among others, Lagrange, Loisy and Archbishop Mignot, Louis Duchesne, Eugène Tisserant and Augustin Bea. He also examines the role of major institutions, such as the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the Jerusalem Bible School (Dominican) and the Jesuit Biblical Institute. Major milestones along the journey, such as Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divino afflante spiritu, the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum and the 1993 document on The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, are all treated clearly.
The relationship between the magisterium of the Pope and the bishops, on the one hand, and that of theologians, on the other, remains contested and open to question. Petráček casts light on one extended episode in which this relationship has been played out. At the end of his book, he notes that: ‘Today, and to come, a church will only survive, and a church will only be credible, if it is critical of itself, if it admits of its own mistakes, past and present, and if it remains unafraid to see its views and actions exposed to constant public critique’ (p. 312). Yet he also shows that, although one cannot approve of some of the methods used by the guardians of orthodoxy (both official and self-appointed), ‘conservative protest is nevertheless valuable’ and has a corrective part to play in the unending dialogue between church leaders and theologians. Between them, Seewald and Petráček provide, respectively, a wide-angle and a more narrowly focused interrogation of the ongoing and always necessary dialogue in the church about the relation between continuity and creativity in how claims to truth (whether about doctrine or the Bible) are put forward.