A Symbolic Theology

Extract

Professor Michael Dummett, in the article in New Blackfriars which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’ (October 1987, pp. 424—431), seems to have taken as a criterion of Catholic faith what Avery Dulles, calls in his book Models of Revelation a propositional model of revelation. Professor Dummett is a distinguished logician. No doubt, then, he is accustomed to think of abstract logical thought as a norm of human discourse. But, if it is religious discourse we are considering, this is an assumption which can be extremely misleading. As Avery Dulles says, it tends to ‘reduce meaning and intelligibility to the narrow confines of conceptual logic’. In place of this Dulles suggests a symbolic model of revelation, which seems to me to give much more meaning to faith and to present a much more convincing model of the Church.

The proposition which Professor Dummett proposes as fundamental to a Catholic understanding of the Church, that ‘it is enjoined on us, whatever the provocation, never to take any step to disrupt the unity of the Church’ (p. 424), seems particularly unsatisfactory. In the first place, as Dummett acknowledges in regard to the schism between the Eastern and the Western Church, there is the problem of who was responsible for the split. And there is the further problem, that Dummett thinks that the Protestant Reformers ‘did not even pretend to form a rival Catholic Church’ (p. 425).

This, however, is a minor point. It is the whole idea of a propositional model of revelation which needs to be questioned—even at the risk of repeating here much that is familiar.