The so-called undogmatic Christianity

‘An undogmatic Christianity, one without the mediation of the church, would be a chimera’-International Theological Commission

While possible that the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel could have made a bilious character say such an expression in his film Nazarin, it seems obvious that many have experience of a kind of Catholicism hewn deep in culture which, in secular reflex, has made faith rarified. Rahner has acknowledged this and therefore harkened the magisterium to attend ‘the actual faith of the people’ thereby discovering ways in which official teaching is ‘already influenced from below’ (Rahner 1991, 172). In our view, what the ITC denounces as monstrous can be more properly understood as a confusion. At least four interpretations follow that indicate possible confusions one could have regarding church doctrine. Two deal with confusion about authority and two with confusion how doctrine mediates Jesus Christ. First, the proponent of an ‘undogmatic Christianity’ is likely to hold that doctrine interferes with the individual. For instance, conflict might mistakenly be assumed between the authority of conscience and authority of the magisterium. An offshoot of this is the concern of Latino theologian Orlando Espin that popular religion is dismissed as suspicion, ‘undogmatic’ when in fact it exists in reflection of “the culturally mediated character of all religious reception” (Gaillardetz 2002, 107). Second, one with this view can suggest antipathy toward ‘the teaching of the church’ and overlook the varying levels of authority held by different doctrine (Lennan 2004, 161). The flattening of such authority could be more properly understood as a way to name the center-periphery strategy often used blatantly unidirectionally (Gaillardetz 2002, 106). Third, apart from confusion with authority, is doctrine discontinuous with the historical Jesus or somehow divorced from the Gospels? The question could arise from a perceived dissonance from the Jesus Christ a believer knows and the one mediated in the church (Lennan 2004, 160). Fourth, more basically, an undogmatic Christianity would seem the project of someone convinced that doctrine itself fails to do its job. When it should aid the believer to know Jesus Christ and apprehend God’s will, it does just the opposite; for instance, through fault of language. Instead of elucidating the Truth of faith, the language obscures it with arcana and bigotry (Lennan 2004, 160). Taken together the preoccupations express a deeply held desire that faith be reasonable. Lacking in love, then indeed we might fear; still, we see Karl Rahner is right that the Spirit blesses the Church with unrest, fomenting opposition toward the forces of fossilization (Lennan 2004, 171). This desire is far from monstrous; though wild, it might even be tamed and led to see that a dogmatic Christianity is reasonable to support. Richard Gaillardetz has proposed a place for internal critique in the church, providing a model that giving a ‘fresh remembrance’ to the place of consensus fidelium (Gaillardetz 2002, 110). Participants can come into the church with dignity when shown that their end of consensus is vital (Gaillardetz 2002, 106).

             Pope Benedict XVI warns in the Regensburg address what we might call the thrust behind ‘undogmatic Christianity’ is a collapsed notion of reason which has intended to deHellenize Christianity for the sake of the so-called simple message of the New Testament. “[I]s the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always an intrinsically true?” (Benedict XVI, Regensburg address, 3). With this inquiry, he confronts those who trumpet the primacy of conscience in a Kantian fashion where it is made into the internal magistrate of the good. This is the fallacy indicated by Timothy Radcliff, speaking of the “intolerance of those who believe that their words say it all” (Radcliffe 1996, 47). Purchased by the claim of a so-called “autonomous reason” the subject is decidedly cut off from the community. Imaginatively, what might this mean? Robert L. Wilken has depicted as “a map” what such reason rejects: “The Church’s way of speaking is a map of the experience of those who have known God” (Wilken 2006, 95). Johann Baptist Metz identified the perilous direction of a society wandering off alone, into an oblivion of self-understanding that will not cope another generation, i.e. in a future devoid of history and memory. To the credit of those who would ‘dehistoricize’ salvation history, society suffers one-dimensionality, a washed out ruling consciousness blank from the hopes as well as the terrors experienced in the past (Metz 2007, 182-83). We might therefore face a future where the atomic individualism of today has become a place of zero self-sacrifice, thus lacking Matthew 25, lacking what Rahner describes as the everyday interpersonal life established between love of God and love of neighbor (Rahner 1978, 456). In sum, without an interpersonal reason that sees ‘God as the horizon’, for whom is one self-realized?

To ameliorate such peril, Benedict XVI promotes “courage to engage the whole breadth of reason” (4-5). Such is the advantage of the Pope, presumed by Catholics to speak with authority on matters of faith and morals by means of inheriting the chair of St. Peter, and acting as the vicar of Christ, thus granted a supreme horizon on the ‘whole breadth of reason’. Ormond Rush adds a cautionary tale to the responsibilities of those who bear the teaching office. For instance, though not exhaustively limited to this one responsibility, the Pope is constrained in the exercise of reason “to safeguard and preserve the deposit of faith by making official judgments regarding its interpretations”(Rush 2009, 194).Not only for our good, but for future generations this task concerns the preservation of the faith, linked universally with what Rahner describes in ‘A Theology of Hope’:  “the will to guard and preserve is the basic virtue of life” (10, 258-59) It follows, since the teaching office is not limited exclusively to the Pope, theologians are  exhorted to interpret the deposit of faith, for example to interpret dogma in the light of ongoing tradition (Sullivan 1996, 115-16).