This page will feature entries from other folks. I’ve invited a few to think up some things to say about topics that will probably be of interest to those who read our site.
Our first entry is from Rodney Howsare, Associate Professor of Theology at De Sales University. Howsare & I go way back; years ago I worked as a guard in Rolling Rock State Penitentiary near Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he was doing time for check forgery. He’s nicely turned his life around & married the FBI agent who busted him, so the goofy smile is warranted. (My wife thinks I should put something like, “Just kidding,” but I think anyone who found this page on this site, or anyone with a modicum of sense, won’t need to be told that.)
Check out the Books page for information on Howsare’s contribution to Balthasar studies. His entry in the Guides For the Perplexed series by T & T Clark is recognized as one of the very best things to have been written on Balthasar, no small feat for a book designed to introduce readers to the work of the Swiss theologian. I remember reading parts of the book as Howsare was writing it; what a strange thing to hold the finished product in your hands, read through it & the comments made about it, & remember that the author is a guy you drink mojitos & martinis with & whose wife cusses you out every time you call. Perhaps of special interest to readers of this site is that Howsare teaches a class at De Sales on theology & film, & has long had a taste for good films. He’s also a big Iris Murdoch & Flannery O’Connor fan, & routinely offers me suggestions on interesting fiction. I look forward to his offering us a piece on O’Connor in the future. Enjoy this one.
The following links are to the pertinent materials Howsare discusses; the first is for Tilley’s address, the second for Weinandy’s response.
http://www.ctsa-online.org/presidential_addresss_2009.pdf
http://www.catholicscholars.org/publications/quarterly/v32n3fal2009.pdf
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ANOTHER MAGISTERIUM: SOME DISJOINTED COMMENTS ABOUT THE TILLEY-WEINANDY DEBATE (with a few important asides)
“Here is the failure of Agnosticism. That our every-day view of the things we do (in the common sense) know, actually depends upon our view of the things we do not (in the common sense) know…. This is the real fact. You cannot live without dogmas about these things. You cannot act for twenty-four hours without deciding either to hold people responsible or not to hold them responsible” (GK Chesterton, The Blatchford Controversies).
Several months ago something of a debate ensued as a result of Terrence Tilley’s address to the Catholic Theological Society of America at their annual meeting. It really wasn’t much of a debate: Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap., responded to Tilley’s address in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars’ Newsletter; Tilley responded to Weinandy, with requisite offended-ness; and then Weinandy replied by not replying, but inviting the reader to re-read Tilley, re-read his response and then judge for him or herself if what he said was offensive or unfair. I would like to chime in on the discussion (which has received a fair amount of attention both on the internet and in various Catholic news sources) because I think something important is being missed in the whole exchange. While I agree with many of Weinandy’s criticisms of Tilley’s address, I fear that it misses the key issue in the whole affair. I also think the exchange is worth commenting on because it gets at the heart of where we have been (and where we might be going) theologically in the Catholic Church since the Council.
Before reading on, I would highly recommend that you give both Tilley’s address and the response by Weinandy a careful read (see the links above). I will summarize some of the key elements in each, but only as much as is necessary to make the point that I think Weinandy misses. For those of you who don’t know Tilley or his work, he is a classic representative of what a friend of mine (and Tilley’s, if I’m not mistaken) calls ART (the American Rahner Trajectory). Weinandy, on the other hand, is a classic Thomist who has written some interesting things on Christology and on the immutability of God.
As stated earlier, the debate ensued after Tilley gave a presidential address to the CTSA in which he diagnoses three impasses in the current theological scene on the issue of Christology. Before listing and then offering an account of them, Tilley makes a distinction between an impasse and a stalemate. The latter occurs when discussion has broken down and one side is either forced out of the discussion or chooses to leave and start a different game. The Reformation of the 16th century is an example that he gives. An impasse, however, refers to a question that is still open and hasn’t yet reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Terrence Tilley
Tilley’s three Christological impasses are as follows: 1) methodological—do we begin with scripture and tradition or do we begin with the current situation (this simplistic opposition is not mine; it’s Tilley’s); 2) soteriological—do, or, how do those outside of Christianity attain salvation; here a special nod is given to question of the Church and Israel; 3) Christological—how can one person have both a divine and a human nature? With regard to the first, Tilley argues that while people like Roger Haight and Jon Sobrino have been corrected by the hierarchy for attempting to inculturate the Gospel into contemporary culture, this is exactly what the early Councils did with the Greek/Roman culture of their day. With regard to the second, Tilley points out that there has been and is no easy solution to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, insofar as Christianity will always be either supersessionist or not, and that either or these positions is fraught with insurmountable difficulties. And, third, Chalcedon was not an end to the problem of the two natures of Christ, but just a beginning. Indeed, far from resolving anything, the Council “owed as much to political intrigue as to theological argument. There were rigged Councils, banished bishops, imprisonments, ecclesiastical witch-hunts…” etc. etc.
What does Tilley conclude from all of this? If you’ve been theologically awake for the past 50 years, you can probably guess. Since these theological impasses are irresolvable apart from the kind of top-down, authoritarian approach that will merely turn them into stalemates, they must be kept open and allowed further discussion. Again, since the Church allowed the early Fathers to use the language and philosophy of its day to articulate its Christology, the Church ought to be willing to do the same today. And, more importantly, Christianity has never been primarily about “theory,” but about practice. Tilley uses the example of the desert Fathers of the fifth century finding unity in their ascetical practices even when they couldn’t in they doctrinal positions. In short, Tilley’s solution is more theological dialogue coupled with a common practical and social agenda. The absolute worst thing would be for the Church to silence certain theological positions and endorse those of, say, Chalcedon, especially given the fact that the solutions of the Councils did not provide permanent norms, but only tentative solutions appropriate (maybe, here Tilley is inconsistent) to that time and place.
(A long, but important aside: If I’m not mistaken, there would be no way, in Tilley’s view, to give more weight to, say, the Council of Nicea than to the theology of Roger Haight. At least I can’t find any basis in his address for saying that an Ecumenical Council would de facto carry more theological clout than the opinion of any contemporary theologian. I know this will be the precise point at which Tilley would balk, but everything I’ve read of his serves to cast serious doubt on every source and safeguard of revelation, in order to make more room for “dialogue with the world.” In dealing with the NT, it is his constant refrain to highlight the competing christologies and soteriologies; with regard to the Councils, it is to consistently highlight the messiness of history and the political nature of the decisions; when dealing with the Magisterium, well, its members are, of course, fascists. So the question is what in fact happens to the teaching authority of the Church? Imagine, for instance, if Tilley’s theological method were applied to the first major theological crisis facing the NT church: the issue of circumcision. Paul and Barnabas show up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars. It is clear that a fairly large constituency thinks that righteousness is unavailable apart from obedience to the whole law, including the so-called ceremonial law. Paul makes a case that certain aspects of the law are no longer binding on account of the sacrifice of Christ, who is now the sole source of justification. After, I imagine, a great deal of discussion, James and Peter stand up and declare Paul correct and present a prescription for the Church to follow. Were some of the people upset? You bet they were. Did they continue to resist Paul’s position on this matter? You bet they did. But if the Tilley approach were in place, there would have been no settling this matter, because the way it was settled led to what Tilley calls a “stalemate” between Paul and the circumcision party. In Tilley’s view, the dialogue should have gone on either until all parties were happy, or churches should have been allowed to practice circumcision or not as they saw fit. So, why were Paul and the pillars so adamant to settle this thing? I suggest it is because the other position compromises the radicality of the Gospel. The prevalent Jewish culture at that time simply could not envisage sitting across the table with an uncircumcised Gentile (even Peter had been guilty of eating only with his fellow Jews).
“Inculturation” as Tilley defines it would have meant trying to compromise somehow with this cultural prejudice. And yet the radicality of the Gospel called for a definitive “no!” This required knowing, in some real sense, that requiring circumcision was contrary to the Christian faith. And such knowing could be captured at least sufficiently enough in propositions to rule out certain errors. This decision doesn’t, then, have to be revisited every so often in the light of new situations. The “no” to requiring circumcision sticks. And this does not mean that Paul and the “pillars” resolved the mystery of salvation. Of course not! It means that they knew enough to know of what it did not consist. The early church’s councils worked the same way. They never resolved the mystery of or the person of Christ: “if you have understood it, it is not God,” Augustine reminds us. But they were able to rule out positions that compromised the radicality of God’s activity in Christ in favor of certain cultural prejudices. Again, it was the heretics who were overly beholden to the Greek ways of thought, not the Councils!)
Fr. Weinandy
Weinandy’s response to this is also what anybody who has been involved in the theological debates of the past 50 years might expect. I don’t mean that as an insult. I don’t think Fr. Weinandy was trying to be innovative. I think he intended to call a spade a spade. He points out that Tilley’s address is short on theological argument and that it de facto subscribes to theological relativism. For instance, in response to Tilley’s assertion that the New Testament itself contains a plurality of christologies—some “from above,” some adoptionist—, Weinandy points out that such a plurality does not entail contradictions (although he admits that there are some New Testament scholars who would suggest so). He makes his best point, however, with regard to the Council of Chalcedon. After correcting a rather basic mistake that Tilley makes with regard to the Council’s Christology, Weinandy states:
“Secondly, in criticizing Chalcedon for merely restating the impasse of how Jesus can be both God and man rather then finding a satisfactory resolution to the issues, Tilley manifests that he does not understand the true nature of the theological enterprise. The task of theology and the defining of doctrine are not to solve theological problems but to clarify exactly what the mysteries of the faith are. Heresy always solves what is considered to be a theological problem and in so doing renders the mystery of faith completely comprehensible and so depriving it of its very mystery.”
Two final, important points are made in Weinandy’s critique: 1) Tilley provides absolutely no criteria by which to judge theological positions, beyond whether or not they speak to the times (which is the same as none); 2) making common cause in more practical areas will prove to be impossible without some measure of doctrinal agreement.
As I stated at the outset, I concur with Weinandy’s criticisms as far as they go. Indeed, I would add to them by pointing out that Tilley’s notion that the early Councils reflect nothing more than an attempt to put the language of revelation into the language of the time is simply, patently false. It was precisely folk like Arius and the Eusebians who were trying to tailor Christian teaching to Greek metaphysics. The notion that the One, who is even above Being for Plotinus, could take on flesh and become united to a finite, human nature, is something that Arius’s Hellenistic mind simply could not accept. It was precisely those who were willing to judge Greek metaphysics in the light of revelation who prevailed at Nicea and then Constantinople. Of course they used Greek terminology and drew on classical philosophy, but it would be closer to the truth to say that the basic teachings of those Councils turned Greek thought on its head! One need only read the educated Roman despisers of Christianity, such as Galen, Celsus or the Emperor Julian, to see just how far the teachings of the Church Fathers were from the standard philosophical opinions of the day.
(Aside #2: One thing in particular that really annoyed Roman sensibilities was ancient Christianity’s insistence that Christ was unique. The Romans, in good pluralistic fashion, were perfectly happy to have the Christians treat Jesus as another way among many. What the Hellenized mind could not abide is the notion that the universal (God) had revealed himself in some unique way in this particular man. To say that Patristic theology was a matter of “inculturation,” as if that means “adaptation of Christian ideas to the ideas of the time” is just about the opposite of what was in fact the case.)
And yet there is something about Weinandy’s response to Tilley that I find incomplete or, perhaps, slightly off the mark. It appears that in some sense Weinandy has responded just the way Tilley wanted him (or those like him) to respond. If Tilley is for more dialogue and less doctrinal dogmatism, then Weinandy must remind us of the need for and the goodness of doctrinal perimeters and the authority of the tradition. Of course these are not bad things. It’s more that Weinandy seems willing to let Tilley set the rules of the game and then respond to them. It’s as if Tilley is on offense and Weinandy is saying, “Hey, not so fast. We don’t want theological relativism.” But this is the very game that has been playing out for the past fifty years and, to put it mildly, the Weinandy crowd isn’t winning. (CTSA has sessions that are bigger than the entire meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the latter too often seems content to sit around wringing their hands over the “liberal establishment”). Nor am I saying that this is about winning or numbers. My point is, rather, that it might be time to get off of defense and start playing offense. Paul’s opposition to the circumcision party was not a defensive strategy; he was setting a theological agenda based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ which was too radical for his conservative (the followers of James) opponents to accept. Let’s face it, Paul’s notion that Gentiles need not be circumcised was radical in the same way that the notion that the infinite could be united with the finite was radical. In both cases, it was status quo types who couldn’t accept the radicality of orthodoxy. As Connor Cunningham once told me about Radical Orthodoxy: Radical Orthodoxy is simply the belief that orthodoxy is radical. Chesterton said something similar a hundred years ago.
The problem with Terrence Tilley isn’t that he is too innovative or too radical or even that he’s too critical. The problem with Terrence Tilley is that he is either embarrassingly obtuse or willfully malevolent. Tilley is not interested in softening up the Church’s authority and doctrinal stances in order to make more room at the table for more people; rather, he wants to replace one set of truly exciting, world changing, timeless teachings with another set of weary, worn out Oprah-esque ones. Furthermore, there is something positively quaint about what he is espousing. For more than a hundred years now the most interesting thinkers—beginning with Kierkegaard and running up through Nietzsche and Heidegger and taken up in our day by the likes of Gadamer, Voegelin, Polanyi, MacIntyre, Balthasar and others—have been pointing out that Liberalism, which is naïve enough to think that it is simply describing the way things are, is just another metanarrative (to use MacIntyre’s name for it), or a “competing orthodoxy” (to use Balthasar’s). And yet it’s the one competing orthodoxy which, to borrow again from MacIntyre, has convinced the world that it isn’t a position at all. Tilley is either naïve or deceitful enough (and I hope it’s the former) to think that what he is suggesting in his address is not beholden to a set of fairly far-reaching truth claims concerning all sorts of ultimate questions about which he must be quite dogmatic.
Put another way, Tilley’s entire argument is based on the notion that we can’t really settle our theological disputes—a decidedly un-Catholic position, I might add—so we might as well focus our discussion on procedure (“method”: as Alexander Schmemann once said, “Theology used to be the study of God, now it’s the study of theology.”) and practice. What Tilley either doesn’t realize or is unwilling to admit is that his procedure and his practice are both premised upon settling the very questions which he is suggesting remain endlessly open. A parallel from the American abortion debate might help to illustrate my point. The difficulty of arguing the pro-life position in a Liberal regime arises from the fact that the deck has already been stacked in favor of the pro-choice position, insofar as the pro-life position is made to look like the only position which is making a moral truth claim (made to look, that is, “dogmatic and intolerant”). Once I’ve established in advance that open-mindedness, agnosticism, freedom of thought and tolerance are absolute values, then any position which, well, takes a position is already doomed. All the pro-choice position has to do to win the day—and in a Liberal regime it is inevitable that the position in favor of greater choices for more individuals will always win the day—is to say, “We don’t know whether or not a fetus is a human being, so we’re going to let the individual decide.” In his interview with Rick Warren during his election campaign Obama responded to the question of when life begins brilliantly: “That’s above my pay scale.” Americans are conditioned to love it when a government official pleads ignorance and suggests allowing people to decide for themselves. That is the essence of the negative notion of freedom prominent in Liberal societies. Nobody seems to notice, however, that allowing people to decide to kill their unborn children is saying something very definite about unborn children. And the practical results are just as definite: we’ve killed over 40 million of them. But this is not, of course, how the pro-choice position talks. They speak under the Liberal pretense of agnosticism, “We just don’t know.” “Who’s to say?” “You decide.” “Passing a law against it would just close the debate.” Etc.
And this is exactly the tactic that Tilley has taken in his speech. (I have no idea, by the way, what Tilley’s position on abortion is, and I am not implying that he is pro-choice. I am merely drawing a parallel in principle between these different arguments.) Who knows whether Christology should begin with revelation or with the current cultural setting? It’s too complicated to say. So, let’s just keep the question open and get on with the business of making the world a better place. But this is classic Liberal orthodoxy. Kant made a similar move in his first two critiques when in the first one he denies that we can know anything about the “thing in itself,” only to turn around a build the entire edifice of the second critique (doesn’t his, “So let’s move on to the practical” sound familiar?) on the very things (God, freedom and immortality) that he just told us we can’t know. All of the agnosticism which Kant claims in the first critique comes crumbling down when in his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone he bemoans those who think that we need special revelation to know God. Apparently Kant could know enough about God to make the world a better place without the need for revelation. How that corresponds to his previous agnosticism, I’m still not sure. The point is this: it’s not enough to respond to the Tilleys of the world by playing our dogmatism against their relativism. We must also point out their dogmatisms. The choice is not between orthodoxy on the one hand and open-mindedness on the other. The choice is quite clearly between two orthodoxies (just as the abortion debate is between two competing anthropologies). I could sum up my entire argument rather simply with the following: Tilley doesn’t want less hegemony, less authority, less dogma, less magisterium, etc.; he wants different hegemony, different authority, different dogma, and a different magisterium. The only difference is this: at the bottom of the Liberal position is the naked power of the secular state; at the bottom of the Catholic position is a God whose truth is coextensive with love.
A brilliant dissection of Tilley’s position. I would only add one thing. The agnosticism inherent in the Liberal project, and which spills over into “liberal” Catholic theology as an objection to any attempt at theological closure by the teaching Magisterium on central issues, also implies a radical dualism between God and the world that is, ironically, more Hellenistic in tone than Catholic. What I mean is this: inherent in liberal theological positions is the notion, very similar to Lessing’s famous “ditch” between the contingent truths of history and the universal truths of “reason”, that the messiness of history and the limitations of our finitude preclude any definitive revelation from God that transcends the particularities of time and place. Apparently, God’s essence is so foreign to worldliness that it just cannot make itself known in an Absolute way in time and in the structures of human history. Thus, for Tilley, any christology or ecclesiology that would emphasize the Absolute normativity of God’s Revelation in Christ and the articulation of this truth in the Church’s dogmatic tradition, is guilty of intolerance and “hegemony”; no single human being, it is asserted, can possibly be the bearer of an Absolute presence of the divine, nor can any single “religion” presume to speak authoritatively about the same. But this is an apodictic and dogmatic claim of its own that rests on a very particular metaphysical position that pits God’s eternity against the world’s temporality.
Thus, the “pluralism of religions” approach to Christology and ecclesiology, while speaking in the language of inclusivity and tolerance, actually masks a deep anti-world and quasi-Gnostic cynicism that refuses to allow God any definitive entry into the world. And notice how this is deeply disrespectful to ALL religions, for there is no major religion in the world that does not in some way make definitive truth claims that are exclusionary of all other rival truth claims. Real interreligious dialogue, therefore, must proceed from more positive premises, e.g. that we respect the fact that other religions are making truth claims with which we need to dialogue precisely as truth claims. Tilley’s approach is to take the dogmas of Western secular Liberalism and to use these to “see through” the relativity of all particular religious truth claims, and to thus come to the realization that the only person who is truly “right” is the person who thinks like Tilley. In short, “tolerance” and “inclusivity” are easy things to achieve when you begin by denying that there is any truth other than Tilley’s. If all religious people would just agree with Tilley, then all would be well!
What this indicates, as Howsare has said, is that Tilley is either unbelievably behind the times when it comes to scholarly analysis of the latent truth claims within the Liberal project, or he is simply being insouciant with regard to theological truth claims in order to advance his deeper Liberal agenda that the only thing that really matters are “good works”. But where is the joy in such a “religion”? In my experience, all Pelagians tend to be self-important killjoys and pharisaical finger-waggers, who equate the Kingdom of God with the righteousness of their own political positions. And as anyone who has worked in the theological guild for the past decades will tell you, God help you if you run afoul of the Pelagian Magisterium of politically correct finger-waggers. The usual career-ruining repercussions are often so extreme that they would make Torquemada blush.
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