Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe’s offering of Catholic theology in The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology studiously resists the lure of critical Catholic theologies that engage questions of difference and power (such as decolonial theology and theologies exploring the existential and historical realities and challenges of colonialism, postcolonialism, racism, and sexuality). In so doing, the volume reflects a tension between constructive Catholic theological methods that explore histories of domination and imbalances of power for theological re-visioning, and traditional historical theological methods aiming for unity of goals for theology. As an example of a Catholic traditionalist approach, the essays assert that Catholic theology and Christianity have creative and generative perspectives to offer to our contemporary world, showing variously that while the tradition is messily complex and plural, rooting in Scripture and tradition can be unifying. The question, of course, is whether such a traditionalist method truly unifies.
The volume’s own self-avowed contextual and cultural milieu is that of “Latin theology” proclaiming itself in fidelity with magisterial teaching and the Second Vatican Council. Several essays emphasize the significance of Thomas Aquinas as a uniting figure for present-day theological reflection and a “return to sources of faith” as a uniting method. The essays in the volume also acknowledge that contemporary knowledge in fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology has the potential to deepen Catholic and Christian reflection on faithful speech about God, but they simultaneously assert that such potentiality is realized only by using traditional Christian language and symbols. Evidently, such a move forecloses the postmodern challenges of grand narratives and constructive theologies wrestling with existential questions of being and knowing in contexts of domination and subjugation.
Yet, as is also widely acknowledged in the academy, the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology investigate how human beings organize themselves, their worlds, their views of others, and their understanding of the divine. These fields have demonstrated, often as criticism of an unexamined Christian theologizing, and in convincing ways, that the metaphysics of self, other, world, and God frequently reflect rather human and mundane visions of power and domination. The attempt to unify using culturally singular grammars of immanence and transcendence stumbles in the face of the “Catholic instinct” (mentioned by Michael Barnes in the volume’s last essay on “Catholic Theology and Other Religions”), to consider thinking theologically with the whole rather than only with the same.
Nevertheless, many of the essays in the anthology by deeply respected scholars and colleagues are stellar examples of Western historical theology and are uniformly excellent. They would be very useful in introductory courses in Catholic theology when balanced with constructive theological proposals that engage contemporary reflections of historical realities of Christian expansion through conquest, settlement, and control. The balance is necessary; forming even Latin Catholics in Euro-American contexts by obscuring the historical, social, and political truth of institutionalized structures and their co-inherence with colonial and racial systems of power is a form of epistemological and theological violence.
Global, non-Western, and Southern Catholics, who live with the continuing and real effects of colonial, racial, cultural, gender, or religious subjugation continue to struggle to find purchase in theologies that continue to reinscribe European culture, language, and methods at the center of revelation and theology. For we too pray, hope, and believe in the salvation offered in and through Jesus Christ by a generous God to the whole world, we too are disciples of the living Christ and want to be of service in like manner to the whole world. For some of us, Christianity also historically predates European Christianity and European colonialism by hundreds of centuries. Our realities are part of the whole— the universal church. The “Catholic instinct” goes both ways: certainly, in the missionary church’s outreach to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also, and very importantly, in the open and enspirited reception to the Word by those non-European cultures in which it continues to root and grow.
