I wish I knew better what goes on when one writes an intellectual autobiography. In his “Apology,” Socrates says that a life without self-examination is not worth living. But objective problems have occupied considerably more of my energy. In any case, when one makes oneself the subject matter of memory and reflection, one makes oneself an object. Remembering and writing convert self-consciousness into a kind of objective story. Although the storyline is not fictive, yet, as something from the past remembered in the present, it undergoes a good deal of revisionist interpretation.
The story here concerns teaching and learning, or learning and teaching, because these reciprocal activities interact to become the engine of the life of a teaching theologian. All new teachers share the surprise of how much they learn through teaching. The “banking” teacher learns in order to teach; the maieutic teacher learns through discussion with students; the two complementary processes reinforce each other. Thus much of my intellectual activity has revolved around the courses I’ve taught and my writing reflects this. Thus telling the story of the genesis of several books suggests itself as an “objective” way of presenting something as intimate as an intellectual itinerary. I begin with an account of how I got into a position where I could write a book.
During the first half of my life thus far, I was getting started. It was somewhat embarrassing being still in school at the age of thirty-seven and being asked what grade I was in. I can explain what took me so long by the four major decisions that shaped my early life.
The first one was to apply for membership in the Jesuits after high school. This decision had to be accepted by the Jesuits and, when it was, it meant that every other decision I would make would not be simply my own, but would emerge from the context of the Jesuit mission and responsibility to the group. The second was to go to the Philippines at the age of twenty-two with the expectation that this would be the permanent scene of my work. During my first six years there, it became my home.
During my first ten years as a Jesuit I studied no theology, so stratified was the course of studies. Only on coming back to the United States and beginning the study of theology did I make the third decision that I wished this to be my trade within the Jesuits. This required a post-M.Div.-level graduate degree. Thus the fourth major decision that finally got me started was to enter the doctoral program in Christian Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. It is impossible to capture the fullness of the intellectual life of Chicago in a word, but some key phrases can suggest it: outstanding faculty, diverse programs and students, insistence upon depth and breadth of basic learning before specialization, self-conscious insistence on critical method. The whole school was alive, constantly moving, continually readjusting, and always in conversation.
I wrote a thesis under David Tracy on the themes of faith and doctrine in French modernism. These figures were the first, after the Tübingen School at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to make a concerted effort to confront the premodern theology in place by accepting the turn to history and to the subject in philosophy and to integrate these strategic moves into a fundamentally reconceptualized Christian apologetic. The developments in Catholic theology after Vatican II mirrored this effort. Also, the distinctions and categories that the modernists developed and that were initially condemned were proving to be sound. Their appeal to experience provided grounds for attending to the experience of other cultures and thus encouraged a process of theological inculturation in the Philippines and other parts of the developing world outside the West. When I graduated from Chicago in 1973, I was ready to get started.
Gathering reflections around subjects I’ve taught that became subjects of books provides a larger framework for recalling this history than a list of influential authors. It is difficult to sort out the relative impact of so many different and at times antithetical conceptions. In any case, I’ve always taught in a professional school of training for ministry. But all of these schools have had a relatively academic bent. My first course dealt with the Roman Catholic treatise on grace. In place of the objective, neo-scholastic, a-temporal analysis of various senses of this term and aspects of its ontology, I offered a historical course that spent time situating and explaining the experience and language of grace developed by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Trent, and Karl Rahner. These historical studies were set within the context provided by a study of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. This set the premises of the historicity and pluralism of religious experiences.
The subject matter of the theology of grace as it was worked out in the Roman Catholic tradition is so subtle that students could finish a course and not know exactly what they had studied. One way of explaining this intrinsic subtlety lies in the object studied, which is no less than the living, dynamic relationship between God and human beings. The interaction between the two poles of God’s initiative and human response shows up consistently in attention to the value of the one or the other or their mutual interdependence: Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and Aquinas. A constructive theology of grace will try to view each of these poles positively to see how they work together in a pattern broader than either/or. Such an approach led me to something like a dynamic formula of release and empowerment. These authors’ descriptions of the dynamics of grace convinced me that human freedom was at stake in the very center of a Christian vision of how God entered into relationship with human beings as mediated by Jesus Christ. Human freedom had potential to be free beyond mere choices; human freedom on its own cannot realize its own potential; God releases human freedom from the internal bonds that constrain it and opens it to things beyond self-interest.
The theology of grace is a reflective reprise of the inner logic of Christian experience itself. Little can be more fundamental to and controlling of the Christian imagination than one’s conviction about the structure of the relationship between God and human freedom. But this issue is so deep and mysterious that both Pelagius and Augustine can be right, and both Aquinas and Luther. An appreciation of this requires a dialectical or paradoxical imagination. This is allowed when we appreciate their assertions and make our own with a humility that respects God’s mystery and transcendence and does not seek false comfort in exclusive assertions.
At the same time I began teaching the theology of grace, I also began teaching liberation theology in the context of Filipino society and culture. As a result, this book has two layers of meaning that are completely congruent. Liberation theology mirrors the theology of grace on the social level. It begins with the scandal of dehumanization, criticizes theological conceptions that support it, raises up alternative experiences, appeals to Jesus and scripture for constructive themes that negate the human negation, and measures the adequacy of theology’s truth by its ability to reflect and empower liberating praxis. The distinctive insights of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Rahner into the empowerment of God’s grace in human existence can be translated into social expression and effectiveness. The blending of these two theological discussions provided me with a platform for the rudiments of a Christian theology of history. Whether worked out in eschatological or teleological language, history’s goal in God’s design and the power of God’s Spirit is symbolized in what Jesus called the kingdom of God. On the ground, this vision provides Christians with a set of ideals to measure the values to which they may with confidence dedicate their freedom.
I wrote the first draft of The Experience and Language of Grace in Manila; I rounded it off in Chicago while teaching at Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. I moved to Regis College in the Toronto School of Theology in 1981 and in the course of nine years there published two books. The first was an extended interpretation of the liberation theology of Latin America titled An Alternative Vision.
This particular liberation theology developed in the conjunction of Vatican II and the social and cultural situation of Central and South America. As articulated by Gustavo Gutiérrez, its center of gravity lay in God’s response to the suffering of the poor and the resultant imperative for a human response. Because this theology responds to God’s call to react to a desperate human situation, this theology privileges graced human praxis as the source and goal of its interpretation. The practical character of this theology received far more attention than its theoretical underpinnings. Because of its direct relevance to situations of poverty and systemic injustice, it spread rapidly to all continents. But the persistent reading of it in North America construed it as a regional, or ethnic, or class, or partisan theology bound to a group and thereby failed to grasp its universal relevance. The developed nations’ ability to hide the poor or marginalize them still further on the basis of middle-class or entrepreneurial values obscured or simply dismissed the significance of this theological movement in a technologically developed society and culture. I tried to internalize the fundamental intuitions of liberation theology and express them in the cultural categories of North American theology.
Liberation theology designates a genus with several species: black liberation theology, Latin American liberation theology, feminist liberation theology, and others. Not all liberation theologians are saying the same thing. For the project of reinterpreting South American thought in a North American dialect, I found the work of Juan Luis Segundo most congenial, for several reasons. He wrote from a Uruguayan situation that is largely urban and secularized; it has a large middle class. Some of his leading ideas and intellectual strategies fit a developed society and culture. “Freedom” in the sense of active creativity in society and history occupies the center of his thinking. He directly appealed to the middle class as the dynamic sector of society. He had a strong activist theology of grace that played itself out in society. Christian spirituality involved taking up God’s project of the kingdom of God in history and the conviction that the kingdom that God would bring about eschatologically would also depend on graced human freedom. Here were the grounds for a liberation theology that while recognizing classes and social conflict did not privilege any with its call for participation in a joint effort to fashion more just social structures. This view of liberation theology, which bears some analogies to themes in Isaac Hecker’s “Americanism” and the social gospel movement, I thought, could gain some purchase among Catholic students and in U.S. Catholic parishes. In any case, An Alternative Vision attempts to recast the principal doctrines and loci of theology in a liberationist idiom that supported a socially engaged spirituality. One of the problems of this book is that it does not explicitly focus and dwell on the evils of racism and the way it functions as one of the causes of poverty in the U.S.
This little book had an interesting provenance and marks a couple of subtle transitions. In a tradition with deep roots in medieval theological training, the course of studies leading to ordination culminated in an oral examination that considered all the central doctrines or loci of theology. This subject matter was frequently represented as a body of knowledge expressed in propositional or thematic forms. The student was expected to be able to defend by knowing and explaining or interpreting the standard classical doctrines of the Catholic Church. Every year, I and many of my colleagues would emerge from those examinations in a mild state of depression. Too many students after three years of studying theology and four months of cramming for this two-hour exam could do no better than recite the words of the doctrine; frequently the sessions never transcended the catechetical. Three years of theology had generated or confirmed rote dependence on authority. We as a faculty in many cases had simply failed to enable students to develop a rudimentary historical, critical consciousness or a creativity enabling interpretation of the meaning of a given doctrine for a particular group of people today. I decided that I would at least address the issue.
My first step was to develop a more advanced course that really covered much of the material usually associated with an introduction to the discipline. In it, I tried to communicate in a vital and relevant way for people about to take the exam I just described some essential distinctions that are presupposed by all critical theologians. I have to name these to indicate the rudimentary level I’m referring to: the absolutely transcendent character of the Holy Mystery we call God; the difference between an act or attitude of faith and belief expressed in a propositional formula; the recognition that revelation cannot be conceived of as God communicating verbal information about God’s self; the historical and human dimension of biblical texts as distinct from their revelatory character; the symbolic character of all historical and linguistic mediation of God; the historical nature and hermeneutical character of all human understanding; the inescapable hold of the present on all understanding that paradoxically coexists in the human capacity of self-transcendence; the elementary co-relation with context of all understanding; and the constructive character of all interpretation. It is true that some students simply cannot take these ideas in or can only do so at rudimentary levels, but a school of theology has to help stimulate a learned and self-critical ministry.
Dynamics of Theology develops the movement of that course. The title draws on Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith; it is meant to suggest that faith’s response to reality creatively transforms the empirical world by discovering transcendent meaning in it, below it, all around it, and beyond it as a goal. Dialogue with transcendence constitutes human existence and consistently draws it forward in the exercise of personal and corporate freedom. The reduction of Christian faith to a set of propositions preserved in a hermetically sealed glass case and committed to memory really corrupts the whole divine project. Grace releases the human will and spirit from internal bonds; theology should help release the human mind creatively to interpret the meaning of Christian classics and appropriate tradition in relation to the concrete situations in which we exist.
This work was written while I was teaching in the extraordinarily cosmopolitan city of Toronto. This energetically pluralistic and yet civil city is reflected in the Toronto School of Theology where cross-registration works. This active ecumenical environment simply rules out sectarian perspectives and language and generates a healthy and satisfying experience of how pluralism works positively toward greater understanding of particularity and universal relevance. Dynamics of Theology is not a Roman Catholic work in a sectarian sense. It was written by a Roman Catholic, and Protestant and Orthodox readers would not have the slightest doubt about that. But it reaches out for an audience that far transcends the Roman Church. I take it that the Catholic Church’s joining the ecumenical movement at Vatican II was a deliberate action; that council promised the world that its theologians would think ecumenically. The council also mandated Catholic theologians to enter into dialogue with the world in its socioeconomic problems, its cultures, and its religions. Dynamics offers a method and a style of theology that is aimed in that direction.
In 1990, I joined the faculty of Weston School of Theology. In the course of my first few years there I met Robert Ellsberg, who as an editor at Orbis Books asked me whether I would be interested in writing a book on Christology. I had to think about that. As far as I could see, there were two major systematic Christologies available in the early 1990s, those of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Karl Rahner. One could write a book about an aspect of Christology or collect essays on Christology, but a systematic Christology required multidisciplinary work. One had to know something about scripture and its subdisciplines of New Testament Christology and the history and literature of the “quest for the historical Jesus.” Retrieval of the historical Jesus had to have an impact on Christology. The project also required immersion in patristic authors because the classical Christological formulas still command the imaginations of the majority of Christians. Switching to systematics, despite the two minor classics I mentioned, few fields in Christian theology were more active and more pluralistic than interpretations of Jesus Christ. Also, a new extensive body of literature had arisen that dealt with Christ and the other religions. We were fast approaching a situation in which one person could no longer write a systematic Christology that was adequate to the demands of the resources. While I hesitated, I also explored ways in which I might at least attend to these several areas of research. In the end, I contracted to write a systematic Christology before I wrote it and Jesus Symbol of God is the result.
I have gone back and explained the method of this work and responded to objections several times, most recently in The Future of Christology (Continuum, 2005). But some simple observations can illumine the project as a whole. I conceived the overall logic of the work, including its suppositions and method, in terms consistent with the conception of systematic and constructive theology laid out in Dynamics. It addresses an audience that transcends the church in an effort at giving a rationale for Christian faith in Jesus Christ. As an apologetic work, it had to be a Christology from below, which in this case means beginning with Jesus whose human life and ministry are available and potentially comprehensible to all. Then in a sustained argument it traces the ascent of faith’s interpretation of Jesus, in and through whom the disciples found God’s salvation, beginning with their experience of his resurrection. Theologians frequently use the term “sacrament” to characterize the implicit logic of encountering God in historical events, or God’s accommodation to the human person. But the audience, the apologetic intent, and the logical status of theological assertion recommended the broader idiom of symbol. Because the category of symbol is so fundamental to so many disciplines, few educated people are unfamiliar with the power of symbol to expand the range of human appreciation beyond empirical perception and literal predication. Rahner, Tillich, Eliade, Ricoeur, and Pseudo-Dionysius helped me here. Symbol works to open up the human imagination to new possibilities and ultimately to transcendence. If Jesus were less than symbol of God, he would not be the Christ.
Most of the criticism of Jesus Symbol of God has engaged the work on a serious theological level, but a good deal of it has been polemical and defensive of a position that admits no others. I have already explained that I did not and do not write to defend Roman Catholic positions against others; I believe that polemics do not serve the transcendent object of theology. Pluralism, meaning unity within diversity, defines the “natural” or intrinsic character of religious experience. I did not advance a theological position to the exclusion of others that are coherently expounded. I do not propose a single reading of Jesus, or a single New Testament Christology, or an exclusive theory of salvation, or a Spirit Christology to the exclusion of a Word Christology. I do not see how those who characterize Jesus Symbol of God as a “radical” Christology could know the field. It clearly and methodically argues to a formulation of faith that affirms the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and such a position is ordinarily taken to be a high Christology.
Over the past seven years I have been working in a focused way in the area of ecclesiology. I hope to bring to a conclusion the trilogy, which covers fundamental theology, Jesus Christ, and the church. The church project, titled Christian Community in History, has two parts: the first is historical ecclesiology, and the second is a systematic ecclesiology. I tried to write the historical ecclesiology in a single volume, but it proved to be impossible and so the history of ecclesiology was divided again into “historical” and “comparative” ecclesiologies. The whole work is aimed at a systematic understanding of the church, but it is not possible to write a systematic ecclesiology of a two-thousand-year-old institution without consideration of its journey and the intellectual history of its self-understanding. I will describe some of the theological ideas that governed or arose out of the historical work and then discuss the systematic project in the next section.
Once again, a set of premises and presuppositions consistent with Dynamics of Theology govern the fundamental logic of this project. Thus I call it “ecclesiology from below” by appropriating the rationale that the phrase has in Christology: it means beginning with Jesus and maintaining the conjunction between theological assertion and the historical church on the ground. Also, in keeping with Vatican II’s instruction that Catholic theologians think and proceed ecumenically and in dialogue with the societies and cultures of the world, I take the whole Christian movement as the primary referent governing the meaning of “church.” Since the church is or includes organizational structure, I apply a formal and open sociological model for understanding organizations to the historical existence of the church. This move does not become disruptive but in fact spontaneously correlates with the major “topics” of traditional ecclesiology that consider the church’s nature and mission, organizational structure, members, activities, and relationship to its world.
In some respects, these premises do not transcend the canons of the discipline of history. But two factors generate a certain complexity and ambiguity. On the one hand, this history traces the normative theological self-understanding of the Christian community. For the longest time, until the eve of the sixteenth century, ecclesiology was not a distinct comprehensive theological topic, partly because everyone more or less knew what it was to be church. On the other hand, history, the great relativizer, sets in plain view the changing character of the church across the eras and in its various social and cultural incarnations. There is little about the church that is ubique, semper, et ab omnibus. And yet the same church with a continuous life in history always identified with and recognized itself in the New Testament. This tension between diversity and unity, between change and sameness, can of course be asserted on a theological level: the church constantly changes with history and culture and yet remains the body of Christ animated by God’s Spirit. The shift to a historical ecclesiology tries to find the traces of sameness or unchanging identity within the actual adjustments of history. To do this I consistently isolated within the historical development certain “constants” in the form of content or beliefs and principles that the whole church in any period could appeal to as its own.
With the sixteenth century and the Reformation, ecclesiology came of age. The pluralism within western Europe called forth critical and comprehensive ecclesiologies the way the division between East and West did not, probably because of territorial and cultural separation. Ecclesiologies like those of Calvin and Hooker are truly impressive, and although Trent did not formulate a comparable ecclesiology, the broad lines of Roman Catholic ecclesiology were implicit in the church’s performance and more or less solidified in the canonical tradition. With the Reformation, the history of ecclesiology gained a comparative edge, one that was often explicit and openly polemical. In keeping with the initial premises of my work, which understands the church to include the whole Christian movement, and in the spirit of twentieth-century ecumenism I tried to remove the polemics from the ecclesiologies of the sixteenth century forward. But I also highlighted the “comparative” dimension. This was facilitated by the standard organizational grid used to represent ecclesiological topics in each instance. The essence of what is going on in a comparative ecclesiology of this sort is represented succinctly in the comparison between Free Church and Roman ecclesiologies. By the three criteria of faithfulness to scripture, coherence, and an ability to sustain and empower Christian life, these two very different ecclesiologies both appear to be valid. The whole church, then, is a community of communities. Each church contains the whole church theologically, but historically it constitutes a part of the church. This dialectic of whole and part, and the continual conversation between the parts that each contribute to the whole, describes the state of the church in history.
When I began the project of a historical-comparative ecclesiology, I intended to conclude it with a historically conscious Roman Catholic ecclesiology. But this would not be a fitting conclusion given the historical/theological method I had adopted. That approach required a “transdenominational” ecclesiology. The subtle if not ambiguous object of such a work needs some commentary.
I take the work of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches as the model for what I mean by a transdenominational ecclesiology. More specifically I have in mind the Commission’s two documents, “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” (1982) and “The Nature and Mission of the Church” (2005). The first was a highly successful attempt to formulate in a consensus statement a theological construal of baptism, eucharist, and church ministry. That success can be measured by the six volumes of official responses to the document by different churches from around the world. It is obvious from these responses that the churches took seriously the effort of BEM to reach the largest possible constituency that could recognize the apostolicity of its theological statements. In fact, most churches affirmed the overall validity of these statements of Faith and Order in the sense of their reaching toward a current interpretation of apostolicity as distinct from complete agreement with or acceptance of the details. The overwhelming majority of the responses had questions about or reflected some particular difference with the BEM statement while at the same time recognizing that, on the whole, it reflected an apostolic faith that the churches shared in common. It will be interesting to see whether over a certain period of time the second document of the Faith and Order Commission can achieve the same success.
BEM illustrates the logic of what I’ve been forced unwillingly to call “transdenominational” ecclesiology for sheer lack of another term. BEM also helps define the subtle nature of its content or object. This ecclesiology does not describe or attach to a particular church in its particularity, but seeks to describe what churches share in common. In that sense, it aims at giving the fullest possible elaboration of the apostolic character of the church, that which either comes from or is compatible with the defining origins of the church. When one church recognizes the apostolicity of another church, even though the second church differs significantly from the first, this means that the first church implicitly recognizes at least a partial communion between it and the other church. The amount of this kind of consensus that is implicitly affirmed around the BEM document is quite remarkable. It means that historical consciousness, which generates the cliché that there can only be unity that at the same time accepts diversity, is actually beginning to take hold in the churches. Transdenominational ecclesiology, therefore, does not intend to construct the ecclesiology of any particular church. Yet its object exists even though this ecclesiology is by definition an abstraction. The existence of this ecclesiology lies within the churches that conceive themselves to be apostolic. The language and analysis that constitute this ecclesiology seek to formulate discursively what apostolic churches recognize as partial but substantial descriptions of themselves. I have titled this third volume of Christian Community in History Ecclesial Existence to indicate its simultaneously abstract and existential character: it resists complete circumscription by any particular church institution while at the same time defining in organizational terms an actual Christian spirituality or way of life.
Finally, I do not understand this communal ecclesiology as a competitor of denominational ecclesiologies; these will always be needed to define the particularities of a church tradition. But I do want to stimulate this kind of ecclesiology as a discipline running in parallel, one that keeps the lines open to other churches by comparison, contrast, and assertion of a common faith.
Such has been my itinerary thus far, and it has generated some reaction from the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. It is difficult to respond publicly to an official disclaimer of certain aspects of one’s theology without appearing self-serving and disloyal. Indeed, theological debate with legitimate institutional religious authority contains intrinsically antithetical elements that ultimately confuse the discourse. Theology and proclamation are not the same thing. In any case, my theology is not and has never been stated over against Roman Catholic teaching but addresses a broader context, envisages a larger audience, and invites extended conversation. More and more polemics and even debate seem to me to miss the inner intentionality of religious symbols generally and the positive appeal of the gospel in particular. My hope for the future is that being drawn into the incomprehensible mystery before which we all stand will elicit less contestation, more sharing, and more spontaneous reaction against the obvious sources of dehumanization that characterize our existence.