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I want to present a difficulty, and to commend a solution to that difficulty. The difficulty is one which frequently troubles Catholics and (to a lesser extent) other Christians; the solution to it is neither original nor new, but I think deserves wider publicity than it has had up to the present time.
The difficulty is as follows. Catholic Christians, and also many Christians of Protestant or Eastern communions, hold that the assent of believers is demanded to some doctrines, like those of the Trinity and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which have been solemnly defined by the Church in the past. Now the definitions are couched in terms derived from earlier philosophical world-views. So, if we assent to the doctrines, it seems that we are thereby committed to the world-views which provided the terms in which they were defined.
It seems that the believer is faced with the following dilemma: to reject the world-views as outmoded and therefore to reject the doctrines; or to accept the doctrines and with them the worldviews. No Catholic can really accept either alternative; to accept the second is to be stuck for ever in the conceptual scheme of the ancient world, while to accept the first is, logically, to cease to be a Catholic. ‘Conservatives’ in the Catholic Church tend to emphasize the importance of maintaining the doctrines, and divert attention from the apparent consequence that the outdated world-views must also be retained. ‘Progressives’ tend to emphasize the imam portance of dispensing with the world-views, and to gloss over the problem of in what sense, if any, one can consistently at once maintain the doctrine and abandon the world-view. To raise this question at all is to invite the stigma of conservatism at the hands of progressives, of progressivism at the hands of conservatives.
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- Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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page 461 note 1 I am grateful to Fr Fergus Kerr, O.P., for his comments on an early draft of this article.
page 461 note 2 As Whitehead put it, ‘you cannot claim absolute finality for a dogma without claiming a commensurate finality for the sphere of thought within which it arose. If the dogmas of the Christian Church from the second to the sixth centuries express finally and sufficiently [my italics] the truths concerning the topics about which they deal, then the Greek philosophy of that period had developed a system of ideas of equal finality’ (Religion in the Making, C.U.P., 1926, p. 130). More recently, Leslie Dewart has stated roundly that ‘no Christian today (unless he can abstract himself from contemporary experience)…can intelligently beieve that in the one hypostasis of Jesus two real natures are united’ The Future of Belief, London, 1966, p. 150).
page 462 note 1 That it has been so adversely affected, even in the classical doctrinal formulations, has been alleged by such profound theologians as Paul Tillich and William Temple. cant, and very surprising, dissenting voice is that of Karl Barth, whose attitude on this matter I shall mention briefly below.
page 462 note 2 Cf. especially The Dehellenization of Dogma, Theological Studies, June 1967; to which subsequent references will be unless otherwise assigned. Fr Lonergan's theory of the nature of dogmatic statements is exhaustively set out in his treatises De Deo Trino and De Verbo Incarnate.
page 462 note 3 Cf. E. R. Hardie, Introduction to Christology of the Luter Fathers (Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 111), p. 21.
page 462 note 4 God in Patristic Thought, p. 209.
page 463 note 1 344.
page 463 note 2 342.
page 463 note 3 343.
page 463 note 4 Cf. E. R. Hardie, op. cit., p. 17: ‘The history of theology can be written in large part by the explanation of a series of technical terms, the understanding, misunderstanding, and final definition of which make up the development of doctrine.’ This attitude to the history of doctrine is identical with Fr Lonergan’s.
page 464 note 1 344-5. The dogma ressed by the formula is thus implicit in the New Testament so far as ‘God’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘the Spirit’, or other terms with the same references, are used in a more or less interchangeable way. To exaggerate the ‘more’ is to confound the persons; to exaggerate the ‘less’ to divide the substance.
page 464 note 2 346.
page 465 note 1 346.
page 465 note 2 346-7.
page 466 note 1 Cf. M. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 31st Edition, $217-221.
page 466 note 2 The Future of Belief, p. 150.
page 466 note 3 347.
page 467 note 1 This paragraph is substantially identical with one in an article ‘The Uses of Philosophy for Theology’, which I wrote for The Catholic Gazette (March 1969); it is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor of that journal. The naughty thought OCCUD to me that, judging by some of their pronouncements, a number of authors would hold that I cannot say that the one paragraph is ‘substantially identical’ with the other, without committing myself to an outmoded metaphysical world-view of substances.
page 468 note 1 Cf. Church Dogmatics I, 1, 354; I, 2,779f.
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