Christology and the Catholic Encounter with World Religions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article presents an intriguing approach to the question of a kind of inter/intrareligious Christology. The thesis posits that without dialogue within, there is no possibility of an appropriate dialogue without. Such a dialogue is to be welcomed.

The article presents significant milestones in the evolution of Catholic Church doctrine and the progress of theological investigations throughout the 20th century. It would have been beneficial to include references to some liberation theologians, such as Sobrino.

The article presents a compelling argument for the renewal of charismatic spirituality, the revitalization of the Catholic Church, and its capacity to engage in constructive dialogue with Islam and Hinduism. The article provides a prudent and well-balanced overview of the relevant fields and authors associated with the aforementioned issues. It is not intended to be a scientific paper in the traditional sense. It offers a noteworthy observation regarding the contrast between the strategies and circumstances of theological inquiry before and after the Second Vatican Council. The conclusion emphasizes Lonergan's approach and references Pope Benedict XVI.

Author Response

1. I appreciate the succinct summary of the essay. The suggestion that I look at Sobrino’s Christology is well-received.In fact, I did read this book and did not find anything in it compelling with regard to what I’d like to say in this essay.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This contribution is a plea for Catholic Christians to discover the unknown Christ, the voice of the Good Shepherd, in non-Christian religions. In doing so, it draws on experiences in dialogue with Eastern religions, is critical of liberation theology, advocates renewed attention to the theology just prior to Vatican II, and highlights results of research on patristic Christology and on different Christological approaches in the Bible.

 

From a methodological point of view, I note some striking elements in this contribution.

1) The author defines Christian spirituality as a search for the fullness of Christ's humanity in order to embody the Risen Lord in all circumstances. He seeks the goal of interreligious dialogue by extension: to search for the full humanity of Christ also in other religions. This is interesting and surprising, because one might rather expect to look for elements of holiness and divinity in other religions. Therefore, this methodical approach calls for a clarification of what exactly is meant by full humanity; or to put it another way: do we seek God or do we seek man, or does that contradiction not exist according to the author? A fascinating question in this regard is the one formulated on p. 5, r. 230-233: “do we truly know the Christ in whom we believe if we do not know the human phenomena present in at least some of the great religious cultures that have arisen among human communities over the millenia?”

2) The contribution lacks an explicit research question and thus a clear direction by which a rationale and conclusion could be formulated. The lack of an explicit division into paragraphs or steps taken also contributes to a certain methodological lack of clarity.

3) In some cases, the appeal made to theological authors seems motivated by dropping authoritative names (i.e. name-dropping) rather than deriving an accurate argument. This applies, for example, to Thomas Aquinas (whose small work “De Rationibus Fidei” is only presented in translation in the bibliography).

4) The author uses different styles in this contribution: personal, abstract theological, historical, pastoral. This creates variety but also confusion. It is also unfortunate that the author does not give articulated examples of where he thinks he meets the unknown Christ in other religions.

5) The author refers to Rudolf Otto’s famous definition of the holy (p. 8). It serves to understand why some Christians feel uneasiness when similarities between their way of being religious and that of others are brought to the fore: not only fascinating but also fearful. The way the author employs this argument, however, makes one wonder: if the definition of Otto is correct, then fear and tremble cannot be avoided but is part and parcel of religious practice; one cannot have one (fascinosum) without the other (tremendum), yet the author seems to suggest that it is possible indeed. To me this position seems contradictory.

6) Fascinating indeed is what the author remarks on p. 10, when speaking about the risk for the Church to become the locked tabernacle of an ‘unknown Christ’, when she is not in dialogue with her context. This very much teams up, without mentioning, with the approaches chosen by pope Francis.

7) The verbatim quotation of Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, interesting as it indeed is, is not very verbatim. I don’t know where this version comes from, but it is not correct. Lonergan writes about a ‘minor’ and a ‘major’ exception, for instance (not ‘secondary’ and ‘most important’), and there are many other differences between this text and either the 1971 or the 1990 edition of Method in Theology, that I checked. In the book from 1971 it can be found on pages 122 and 123, in the critical edition from 1990 it is on page 118.

8) On p. 4 a reference to the commentary of Fitzmyer is lacking.

Author Response

1. Do we seek God or humanity in our encounter with other religions?From the perspective of Catholic spirituality, we are always seeking God in all that we do.  This insight is grounded in the Johannine citation:  I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.  In order to understand this verse correctly, it is important to reflect on the implications of the entire Christ-event, the theology of the Incarnation both in Jesus of Nazareth and in the Christ of New Testament and historical faith.  To encounter Jesus Christ as the true way to the Father requires a heightened appreciation of not only Jesus’ humanity (which is no longer accessible to us except through the scriptures), but of the sum total of humanity in which the Word of God is present and expresses the intentions of God toward all that is, all that was created in the Word.  The Logos and the Spirit are God’s gifts to the church, by which the entire human phenomenon can be “read” and discerned.  Making use of the criteria of cultural anthropology in the study of world religions, we can expand our understanding of humanity first of all.  Then, working theologically, this data (in constant expansion thanks to research) can be applied to an expanded Christology.  This means that other cultures and religions can give us access to an ample degree, within the created order, to whom and what Christ is for us.  We know this to be true because the entire experience of the Church since its origins in Judaism and Hellenism has been a “reading” of successive cultures, allowing the process of inculturation to take place over the centuries, all over the world.  In the anthropology of cultures, it has become possible to provide in-depth information about human societies, in particular their approaches to the divine mystery.  Much of this information, particularly with regard to living religious cultures, allows Christians a glimpse of the immense richness of the human phenomenon.  From this glimpse arises a wholesome wonderment within which a previously “unknown Christ” comes to be recognized. In this way, Christians come to know and love Christ in greater depth, following the Way that He is without ratifying the acts of violence against persons, ideas, and cultural artifacts that have disfigured the Church’s mission in the past (for which Pope Francis offered a penitential prayer at the recent opening of the Synod) .  As an approach of non-violence, this Christological encounter is in harmony with the core proclamation of the Gospel itself (e.g. The Sermon on the Mount; Jesus’ mission of healing even among non-Jews, and so forth).

 

With regard to the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum: the two aspects of the encounter with the divine cannot be separated in experience, although they can be distinguished in description.  It is true that, as the illusion of separateness diminishes, the sense of reverent fear also intensifies.  In mystical terms, this gives rise to the experience of selflessness, annihilation, and “not I, but Christ in me.”  Unfortunately, the sense of fear and trembling at the threshold of an encounter with the Holy may provoke, in certain personalities, a tendency to block out information about “others” in such a way as to reinforce attitudinal rigidity and a refusal to grow.

The long Lonergan quote is translated by the author from the Italian version as cited by Cardinal Martini in La Civilta’ Cattolica. On page 122 of the 1990 edition of Method in Theology, the same quote can be found in the original English.  The key point here, however, is that Longergan is willing to make use of studies of religious consciousness (Alan Richardson, 1966; and Olivier Rabut, 1969) to formulate a theological approach to the experience of God’s love even beyond the boundaries of Christian faith.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article, as it clearly shows the abstract, follows a very significant topic of ecumenical or interreligious dialogue with an original approach, which is not based on the theoretical beliefs of Catholic or other religions, but on the religious experience of an individual. In the words of the author, "to listen to hear the "voice" of the Good Shepherd wherever it resounds". It is based on the experience that the theological text itself is understood by an individual only because of his own religious experience. Growth in spirituality makes it possible to penetrate deeper into doctrinal texts.

Another logical step that the author develops is that religious experience is not limited to one denomination, it is the experience of personal encountering the same God. If the dialogue is conducted only between individual theological theories, it quickly slips into rationalism, psychologism, subjectivism, sociology, as the author rightly points out: "The Church is no longer defined as an effective means of spiritual transformation under grace, but instead becomes an instrument to promote social chanage".

 However, it must be said that in his argumentation the author slipped into generalizing the issue and presents his study (he himself calls it an essay several times) in the form of a religious debate, as if he were freely surfing the current issues of church life within the Catholic Church (especially in the United States), as well as among other churches or religious experiences. One can fully agree with the expressed opinions. However, they do not follow either the defined issue or the professional or scientific procedure to confirm their theses. The author is often personal, the argumentation rather vague ("I hope that my readers will also be aware of the fact what I am saying here..." . 557). The citation of the authors is also considerably vague, as is their selection, much of it being from the years immediately following Vatican II. To call Bernard Lonergan "one of the greathest philosopher of the twenteith century" (581) seems bold. And to evaluate it only on the basis of one's own experience "Hre I finally found a theologian who gave primacy to the experience of God" (589).

From the text and the context, it is evident that the author has a rich pastoral experience, is fully involved in the mission of a pastor and is sincerely concerned with the great problems and challenges of the present. The arguments he presents are certainly profound and true, but they are too general and poorly documented. In the background, one can observe the search for a way out of the contradictions between progressive and conservative currents. A logical division of the text with appropriate headings would also serve a scientific and clear purpose.

Conclusion: In its current form, the article would be more suitable for a popularization journal, or it would require a significant reworking according to the methodology of scientific work and thus presented in Religions.

Author Response

1. The search for a “scientific and clear purpose”.My “scientific and clear purpose” in this essay has been to apply the data of cultural anthropology and biology to the task of offering conditions for the possibility of an orthodox, if extended, Christology in harmony with the valid insights of our times, and our personal research in the field of religious studies.  Thus, we are seeking to describe the human phenomenon in such a way as to fill out the implications of the “True God-True Man” paradigm of Chalcedonian orthodoxy.  This is based on the conviction that humanity’s collective ratification of a primordial fall/sin required a redemptive intervention o the divine side of the paradigm.  That intervention in Jesus Christ is also a disclosure in Christ’s own person of what it is to be human and how God operates to “so love the world” as to wish freely to redeem it.  Thus, the task of a missionary Church has been from the very beginning of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God to encounter human beings in particular cultural settings in order to invite them not so much to mimic a new or alien culture, but to purify and sanctify the sum total of what they already are, in spite of the obscuring consequences of original sin.  In other words, sin did not corrupt everything (otherwise there would be nothing at all to redeem- everything would have to be utterly annihilated and creation would have had to have been re-instituted, which is certainly not the teaching of the New Testament), and the proclamation of the Kingdom invites a renewed consecration of the human appropriation of the task that God assigned to humanity from the beginning, before the fall.  This is evident in those parables that suggest that human goodness can reach out for truth in spite of sin.  For example, the Prodigal Son, the parable of the talents, the mustard seed, the growth of grain below ground in ways unknown to the farmer, the lilies of the field, the repentant publican, and so forth.  The proclamation is always addressed in a polyvalent symbolic way to the better side of humankind in the hope of raising this to its fulfilment in realizing what was intended from the beginning.  Whether it is healing, or food, or exorcism, or deeper insight, or compassion, the image is re-established and the likeness is made luminous in Christ’s mission to humanity, so that even sinners may become proclaimers (e.g., the Samaritan woman at the well).

This basic structure of the proclamation needs to be applied as a corrective to the already deeply problematic notion that Christianity, integrating illogically with the anti-Christian ideology of the European “enlightenment”, is somehow the gold standard of civilization to be imposed ruthlessly in tandem with the process of evangelization in other cultures.  A renewed vision of the Church’s mission, including the discernment of ways of inculturation, allows nothing to be lost that was good and true and already part of the way of life of non-European cultures.  Moreover, through interreligious dialogue, previously unknown (to Europeans) dimensions of the human person are disclosed, allowing Christians to come to the full maturity of faith in Christ which cannot be restricted to the cultural platforms of Mediterranean antiquity alone.

It is very important to understand that my essay is most certainly not about the religious experience of an individual, nor is it about reading texts.  It is about communities with their particular “emic” ways of life, including the Catholic communities around the world (with particular attention to the US Catholic Church, in which the author was raised, and which I served in a number of settings and capacities from 1998-2009).  It is true that certain persons of faith have a particular vocation to engage in one or another form of interreligious dialogue.  Their observations and experiences should be brought to the attention of the entire faith community which, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, may wish to discern those aspects of other “emic” communities of faith that should be known among Catholic Christians.  Typically, this will take the form of good works and contemplative practices that have been perfected by other traditions in the service of other cultural communities.  This helps to guide what we call “inculturation”: adaptations of the practices of the Church to the positive values of the cultures in which local churches are embedded.  There is also considerable evidence that Catholic Christianity has suffered from misguided and psychologically debilitating beliefs, which the Church may wish to dismantle under the guidance of the Spirit.  Some of this guidance can be discerned thanks to our encounter with the healthier teachings of other religions.

 

My notion of “religion” and “religious consciousness” owes much to my studies of anthropology and sociology.  My teacher at Columbia University was Theodore Riccardi, an expert in the anthropology of the cultures of Nepal.  Other influences include: Peter Berger (sociology); Robert N. Bellah (sociology); Robert Desjarlais (anthropology); Edward Evans-Pritchard (anthropology); Christoph von Furer Haimendorf (Himalayan anthropology); Hubert Decleer (Himalayan anthropology).  Certainly this field of study is sufficiently purposeful and scientific.