Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T13:43:11.111Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gregory Baum on the Revelatory Work of the Holy Spirit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Don Schweitzer
Don Schweitzer*
Affiliation:
Wesley United Church, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores Gregory Baum's notion of how the Holy Spirit leads the church to a new understanding of Jesus as the Christ. It begins by examining Baum's interpretation of the doctrinal development at Vatican II, then analyzes the innovative understanding Baum has developed based on how the Spirit works to reformulate the church's message through a process of cultural conversion. It relates Baum's theory to preceding reflection on the development of dogma, then takes up Rosemary Ruether's criticism that Baum's position deprives Scripture of its transcendence. It concludes by developing a way of relating Word and Spirit that combines Baum's openness to the spirit with Ruether's concern for the transcendence of Scripture.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 73 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Davis, Charles, A Question of Conscience (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967), 28, 64.Google Scholar

2 Baum, Gregory, The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 26.Google Scholar

3 Baum, Gregory, “The Self-Understanding of the Roman Catholic Church at Vatican II” in Johnston, George, ed., The Church in the Modern World Church (Toronto: Ryerson, 1967), 91.Google Scholar Baum argues that while this new position was not affirmed uniformly throughout the documents of Vatican II, it is present in the teaching on religious liberty, the nature of other denominations, the salvation of non-Catholics, and the relation of the church to the Jews to a degree that represents a startling doctrinal development. See Baum, , Credibility, 22–27.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 23-24.

5 Ibid., 24.

6 Ibid., 94.

7 Dulles, Avery, The Survival of Dogma (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 145.Google Scholar

8 Baum, , “The Self-Understanding,” 101.Google Scholar

9 Baum, Gregory, “Vatican II's Constitution on Revelation: History and Interpretation,” Theological Studies 28 (1967): 51–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Baum, , Credibility, 152.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 169.

12 Baum, Gregory, Man Becoming: God in Secular Experience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), ix–x.Google Scholar

13 Baum, Gregory, “The Magisterium in a Changing Church” in Schilleheeckx, E. and Willems, B., eds., Man as Man and Believer, Concilium 21 (New York: Paulist, 1966), 79.Google Scholar

14 Baum notes that Vatican II cautiously admitted, in the Decree on Ecumenism, that “at certain times doctrinal statements must be corrected,” as happened here. See Baum, Gregory, “Vatican II and the Reinterpretation of Doctrine,” The Ecumenist 9/1 (November–December 1970): 2.Google Scholar

15 Baum, , Credibility, 32.Google Scholar

16 Baum, Gregory, Faith and Doctrine: A Contemporary View (New York: Paulist, 1969), 104.Google Scholar

17 “The quest for self-realization includes the way of the cross. To grow, to become more human, to realize oneself more fully is a process which is, properly speaking, redemptive and which incarnates the paschal mystery revealed by Christ” (Baum, , Man Becoming, 155;Google Scholar see 154-61).

18 Ibid., ix.

19 For what follows see Baum, , Credibility, 157–73.Google Scholar

20 Ricoeur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. Thompson, J. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 139–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Baum, Gregory, Compassion and Solidarity: The Church for Others (New York: Paulist, 1990), 86.Google Scholar

22 For a survey of this tradition from Newman on, see Nichols, Aiden O.P., From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990).Google Scholar

23 Baum, , Credibility, 151.Google Scholar

24 Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations, vol. 14 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976), 5.Google Scholar See Hines, Mary, The Transformation of Dogma: An Introduction to Karl Rahner on Doctrine (New York: Paulist, 1989), 70.Google Scholar

25 Küng, Hans, Theology for the Third Millennium (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988), 187.Google Scholar

26 Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations, vol. 4 (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 16.Google Scholar

27 This position is defended in Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 290.Google Scholar

28 Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1972), 29.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 325.

30 Ibid., 353.

31 Ibid., 319.

32 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 148.Google Scholar

33 Ibid.

34 Moltmann, Jürgen, Theology Today (London: SCM Press, 1988), 84–85Google Scholar, and Cobb, Kelton, “Reconsidering the Status of Popular Culture in Tillich's Theology of Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63/1 (Spring 1995): 59–64.Google Scholar Traces of something like Baum's notion of how the Spirit works to lead the church to a new understanding of Jesus as the Christ can be found in José Comblin's attempt to relate the Holy Spirit to the rise of liberation theology. See Comblin, José, The Holy Spirit and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989).Google Scholar

35 Baum, Gregory, Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology (New York: Paulist, 1975), 189.Google Scholar

36 For a discussion of this theme, unique to the Johannine tradition, see Burge, Gary, The Annointed Community: The Holy Spirit in the Johannine Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1987), 211ff.Google Scholar

37 Baum, , Credibility, 173.Google Scholar

38 Baum, Gregory, “The Bible as Norm,” The Ecumenist 9/5 (July–August 1971): 95.Google Scholar

39 Baum, Gregory, “Rethinking the Church's Mission after Auschwitz” in Fleischner, Eva, ed., Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1977), 125.Google Scholar

40 Ruether, Rosemary, “Letter to The Ecumenist,” The Ecumenist 9/6 (September–October 1971): 93.Google Scholar Donald Evans also questioned this lack of criteria (Evans, Donald, “Gregory Baum's Theology of Liberation,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 1 [1971]:59–60).Google Scholar

41 Maurice Wiles and Nicholas Lash argue that there is always some underlying continuity even in the most radical doctrinal development, i.e., in the basic questions doctrines are meant to answer or in the object they interpret. See Wiles, Maurice, The Making of Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lash, Nicholas, Change in Focus: A Study of Doctrinal Change and Continuity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), 153, 176.Google Scholar

42 Baum, , Credibility, 164.Google Scholar For Baum this process of discernment involves the entire Christian community. While the magisterium has the final verdict on the authenticity of a new teaching, that can only be reached through a conversation involving the whole church and is authenticity only when it represents a kind of communal consensus. See the article by Baum in Kirvan, John J., ed., The Infallibility Debate (New York: Paulist, 1971), 1–33, 29.Google Scholar

43 Rahner, , Theological Investigations, vol. 4, 16–17.Google Scholar

44 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza demonstrates the presence of a similar distortion and untruth in Scripture in relation to women (Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins [New York: Crossroad, 1994]).Google Scholar

45 Baum, Gregory, “Introduction” in Ruether, Rosemary, Faith and Fratricide (New York: Seabury, 1979), 7–8.Google Scholar

46 Baum, , Compassion and Solidarity, 80.Google Scholar

47 Taylor, Charles, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 34–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Ibid., 39.

49 Baum, , Religion and Alienation, 196.Google Scholar

50 This is in keeping with the teaching of Vatican II on the transcendence of the Word of God over “every expression of it in the Church” (Baum, , Credibility, 150Google Scholar).

51 For a discussion of this, see Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations, vol. 9 (New York: Seabury, 1974), 71–72.Google Scholar For Rahner, the discrepancy is limited to between the expression of doctrine and experience. For Baum, it can be between doctrine, on the one hand, and the biblical witness and present experience, on the other.

52 Hanson, Paul, The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986).Google Scholar

53 Baum, , “Rethinking the Church's Mission,” 125.Google Scholar

54 Anne Carr argues that the feminist drive for emancipation forms a Spirit-created Word which demands a reform in Christian praxis precisely on the basis of the horizon of expectation established by “the enduring mystery of Christ” (Carr, Anne, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women's Experience San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988], 25, 38Google Scholar). The revelation of God in Jesus forms a “transcendent horizon” which enables the church to overcome its teachings when they are challenged by this Spirit created Word in history (Ibid., 178). Elizabeth Johnson sees feminist concerns interacting with “the liberating impulse of the gospel” to demand the revision of anthropocentric understandings of the Gospel (Johnson, Elizabeth, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse [New York: Crossroad, 1993], 154, 78–79Google Scholar).

55 Fiorenza, , Foundational Theology, 305.Google Scholar

56 According to Jürgen Moltmann, the identity of Christian faith lies in “that moment of hope inherent in it,” which “enters, actualizing itself, into every new situation and, at the same time, still reaches out beyond every situation” (Moltmann, Jürgen, Hope and Planning[London: SCM Press, 1971], 87Google Scholar). Baum's analysis traces how the Spirit enables this to happen.