TABLE OF CONTENTS

COURSE INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 2
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY..................................................................2
THE APPROACH TO THE HISTORY OF JESUS.......................................................................................6
AN OVERVIEW OF CHRISTOLOGY.......................................................................................................... 9
THE PASCHAL TESTIMONY................................................................................................................ 12
THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH (OBOEDITIO FIDEI)...............................................................................15
THE ACT OF FAITH: ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS.............................................................................20
THE ANALYSIS OF FAITH AND THE ACT OF FAITH.............................................................................22
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF A THEORY OF RENUNCIATION...............................................................23
KNOWLEDGE THROUGH CONNATURALITY (COGNITIO PER CONNATURALITATEM)....................24
REVELATION: THE UNIVERSAL AND DEFINITIVE WORD OF GOD.................................................25
THE CONCRETUM UNIVERSALE: FUNDAMENTAL CATEGORY OF REVELATION........................26
FIDES EX AUDITU................................................................................................................................ 31
HOMO CAPAX DEI (MANS CAPACITY FOR GOD)................................................................................35
WHAT FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY?..........................................................36
FUNDAMENTAL ECCLESIOLOGY TODAY............................................................................................. 40
FUNDAMENTAL ECCLESIOLOGY, PART II............................................................................................ 43
PARADOX, MYSTERY, AND WITNESS................................................................................................47
FUTURE PERSPECTIVES AND A BRIEF REPRISE...............................................................................50
ABOUT THE EXAM.................................................................................................................................. 52
 1

Course Introduction
I. Fr Patsch began by quoting Schellings first lecture in Berlin, which indicates the importance of
the reciprocity between the professor and students:
A. I greet you affectionately... The teacher knows many things, but without students he cannot
do anything. I am nothing without you, without your benevolent support... (Quote from
Schelling Erse Vorlesung in Berlin. 15 November 1841, in Schelling's Sammtliche Werke.
Hrg. K.F.A.)
B. He also noted that, as a Hungarian, his theological point of view is European, but he hopes
that we will be able to achieve a genuine fusion of horizons (Gadamer) in the exceptional
classroom situation in which we find ourselves. In particular, he is interested in a dialogical
approach: ask questions, participate in the online forum.
II. The exam is available in English, Italian, French, German, and Hungarian.
III. The basic text for the course is the manual of Salvador Pie'-Ninot, the former teacher of this
class: La Teologia Fondamentale, Queriniana, Brescia 2010. (Queriniana, 2010, #121 in the
series). It contains 10 theses, which you will find, almost without modification, on the website
for this course.
IV. He will inform us as we go along as to reading assignments. He intends to use the first 5-10
minutes of the second hour to respond to questions and the last 5-10 minutes to consider items
from the online forum. Currently, there are no recommended English sources.
V. (Review of the course objectives stated on the syllabus)

Historical Evolution of Fundamental Theology

I. 1 Peter 3:15 provides the Magna Carta of fundamental theology, as well as its task: Be ready
at all times to give a reason for the hope that is in you to whoever asks. This has been the
task of all Christians from Justin Martyr to St Augustine to St Anselm to Blessed John Henry
Newman, and to us in our own day, even to the point of martyrdom if necessary. There is a
weight, therefore, to fundamental theology.
II. Historical Overview
A. New Testament: The Biblical books are writings of a pastoral character, written to
communities of believers. They are not properly apologetic.
1. The writings of the New Testament are principally pastoral in character, addressed to a
community of faith rather than attempting apologetics (for the most part). At the same
time, we see some of the foundations of this discipline already present: in dialogue with
Jews and pagans, Christians needed to defend their own beliefs. The earliest
approaches appealed to fulfilled prophecies and miracles, and we see this reflected, e.g.
in Luke (explains his goal in writing an account) and Acts (Stephen and Paul in
preaching). This approach provided reassurance to Christians that their faith was well
founded.
2. Patristic Age: The apologetic writings became the principle form of Christian literature:
Justin, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Augustine. Each of these wrote in defense of the
faith. With Clement and Origen, apologetic writing reached new heights of refinement
and development.
B. Patristic Age:
1. The apologetic writings became the principle form of Christian literature: Justin,
Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Augustine. Each of these wrote in defense of the faith. With
Clement and Origen, apologetic writing reached new heights of refinement and
development.
C. The Middle Ages
1. At this time, there was a change of paradigm: the culture itself had become Christian. As
Tarnas describes it in The Passion of the Western Mind.
 2

a. Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in
the Middle Ageswith virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of
human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman
pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of
the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals,
the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests,
monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and the poor, the sacramental
rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious
art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin
language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian
religiosity in every sphere of human activityall this can hardly fail to elicit a certain
admiration for the magnitude of the Churchs success in establishing a universal
Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission. And whatever Christianitys
actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself
owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church
throughout medieval Europe.
b. But perhaps above all, we must be wary of projecting modern secular standards of
judgment back onto the world view of an earlier era. The historical record suggests
that for medieval Christians, the basic tenets of their faith were not abstract beliefs
compelled by ecclesiastical authority but rather the very substance of their
experience. The workings of God or the devil or the Virgin Mary, the states of sin and
salvation, the expectation of the Kingdom of Heaventhese were living principles
that effectively underlay and motivated the Christians world. We must assume that
the medieval experience of a specifically Christian reality was as tangible and self-
evident as, say, the archaic Greek experience of a mythological reality with its gods
and goddesses, or the modern experience of an impersonal and material objective
reality fully distinct from a private subjective psyche... (Richard Tarnas, The Passion
of the Western Mind, pp. 169-170)
2. With regards to fundamental theology, there was an additional task, exhibited
particularly by St John Damascene, Nicholas Cusano, and St Thomas Summa contra
gentiles: to respond to Islam, especially in Spain.
D. The Modern Period
1. The next phase, symbolized by the brooding statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo de
Fiori, comes from yet another cultural shift to the modern period, characterized by a
spirit of radical criticism. Savonarola is an emblematic figure of a cultural-theological-
philosophical clash. He was condemned for a theological heresy, but to describe this
period further, we'll read further, in Tarnas words:
a. And so between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the West saw the
emergence of a newly self-conscious and autonomous human beingcurious about
the world, confident in his own judgments, skeptical of orthodoxies, rebellious
against authority, responsible for his own beliefs and actions, enamored of the
classical past but even more committed to a greater future, proud of his humanity,
conscious of his distinctness from nature, aware of his artistic powers as an
individual creator, assured of his intellectual capacity to comprehend and control
nature, and altogether less dependent on an omnipotent God. This emergence of the
modern mind, rooted in the rebellion against the medieval Church and the ancient
authorities, and yet dependent upon and developing from both of these matrices,
took the three distinct and dialectically related forms of the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. These collectively ended the cultural
hegemony of the Catholic Church in Europe and established the more individualistic,
skeptical, and secular spirit of the modern age. Out of that profound cultural
 3

transformation, science emerged as the Wests new faith (Richard Tarnas, The
Passion of the Western Mind, pg. 282).
b. As summarized by Fr. Patsch: a new man arose, who looked at the world with
curiosity, suspect of orthodoxy, admired classical cultures, but above all aimed at the
future... aware of the creative force of the artist as an individual. Man began to feel
more and more like an omnipotent deity. Modern culture was born in a severe
criticism of the Church. Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the
Enlightenment were definitive for the relationship of the Church with European
culture, and they defined the individualism of European culture.(Richard Tarnas,
The Passion of the Western Mind)
2. The Enlightenment
a. This period was ushered in by figures such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot,
d'Holbach- Fichte, Schelling, Kant. Key words include progress, liberty,
atheism/agnosticism, deism, rationalism.
b. The Enlightenment has as its project the liberation of mankind from ignorance and
inherited prejudice. Kant says,
i. Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage s man's
inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-
incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of
resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude!
Have courage to use your own reason!- that is the motto of enlightenment.
c. We often assume that we know this history, but do we really know it? Against whom,
for example, was the Enlightenment? The project of the Enlightenment was about
liberating mankind from ignorance and inherited prejudice. To liberate man from
prejudice and ignorance, it was understood as necessary to free man from tradition,
which is essentially the Church herself.
3. The Response to the Modern Period
a. In response, Christian thinkers began to found a new discipline of modern
apologetics, with two distinct schools emerging led by two figures:
i. The first was associated with the German city of Tbingen
1. J.S. Drey (1777-1853) German
2. Apologetic works aimed at providing a scientific demonstration of the divinity
of Christianity.
ii. The other school, commonly called the Roman school and associated with the
Gregorian
1. Was inspired by the work of Perrone (1794-1876) in his Praelectiones
Theologicae. He taught at the Roman College in collaboration with the
Gregorian.
4. In general, the Enlightenment caused a complete divorce of faith and science (scientiam
inter ac fidem complevit divortium), but as is often the case, a strong reaction against
something is often characterized by the same problem (such as feminism vs. anti-
feminism)antinomies are often based on the same basic epistemological problem.
Thus, these responses to rationalism themselves tended to have a rationalistic
character.
5. Fr. Pratsch made an additional two points not specifically related:
a. Modernity has limits and disadvantages.
b. We live at the end of this age, if not already in the post-modern age.
E. Vatican I
1. In one sense, the council fathers remained prisoners of the same rationalism of the
Enlightenment epoch in which they lived. This is important.
2. At the First Vatican Council, Dei Filius affirmed the possibility of knowing Gods
existence with certainty using purely natural reason.
 4

3. The apologetic approach resulting from this involved a three-fold customary apologetic
(classical or traditional apologetics) to demonstrate:
a. The existence of God (against atheists) (demonstratio religiosa)
b. The existence of the true religion (against other religions) (demonstratio Christiana)
c. The existence of the true Church (against Protestants) (demonstratio Catholica).
4. Clear in principle, this method in practice had an extrinsic character, tending to produce
a two-tier pattern of thought which saw revelation purely as something added almost
optionally on top of natural reason, with the result that one might say I just dont need
that last addition in rejecting revelation. In locating its authentic identity in opposition to
rationalism, this approach became in a sense a prisoner of rationalism.
F. Vatican II
1. At Vatican II, Dei Verbum, the dogmatic constitution on Divine Revelation, again treated
the relationship of faith and reason.
2. We should first note its fidelity to Vatican I: it affirms reasons ability to know God, and it
speaks of an obedience of faith (indeed, an obedience which is faith) that implicates
both a capacity and an obligation. In contrast to Vatican I, however, Dei Verbum re-
orders things: revelation has primacy, with the knowledge of God through revelation
being placed in first place. Thus, to summarize, the Council returns to the Biblical
expression of the obedience of faith.
3. At the same time, the council changes the order: it places in the first place revelation,
which is the true & proper place. Because to separate the two, beginning as we used to
with natural theology, makes it seem like revelation is something merely added on as
extra. This was the danger of the two-level theology, as it allowed modern man to think,
I myself don't have need of anything extra, of any supernatural revelation.
G. Post-conciliar Era
1. Following the council, in the years 1965-79, we can observe the long transition from the
language of Dei Verbum to that of the encyclical Sapientia Christiana, the first
magisterial use of the term fundamental theology. Therefore, it is very interesting to
note that the council never used the words Fundamental theology. In the development
of the discipline in this period, we can observe five trends:
a. The continuance of classical apologetics, a more defensive approach which provides
a strong sense of identity and is now particularly associated with Spanish
theologians
b. The development of dogmatic theological approaches to revelation, which took
inspiration from Karl Barth and whose exponents in Catholic circles were Latourelle
and Fisichella (both associated with the Gregorian)
c. The immanent approach to apologetics, seen earlier in the thought of Maurice
Blondel and which had questioned the utility of the classical approach
d. An approach which sought to provide a Christian anthropology of man as a large
ear open to hearing the Word of God and thereby analyzing the conditions of the
possibility of this listening. We are fundamentally ordered toward a revelation from
the Infinite; we are hearers of the Word.
e. The beginnings of practical fundamental theology
2. The years 1980-98 saw the development of two major schools of fundamental theology:
one associated with the Gregorian (again, Latourelle, Fisichella), and another German
school connected especially with Freiburg and Tbingen (whose most famous exponent
is Max Seckler). The fundamental theology of these schools involved two general points
of reference:
a. Attention to the credibility of Christianity
b. A monstratio religiosa/Christiana/Catholica.
i. Note the use of mostratio rather than demonstration: the objective is not to prove
everything about the faith at every cost but rather to show forth the intelligibility
 5

and beauty of what we believe. We thus see a different comportment that seeks
genuine dialogue with other points of view rather than simply speaking into an
empty void. This is an important methodological change given the current
environment of strong and unavoidable religious pluralism.
ii. Why the change? Because in this time of pluralism, we can't speak as we once
did. There has always been theological pluralism, but this is a new phase. We are
recognizing now the possibility and seeking the way of living together, in dialogue
with those of other religions and even with those of no religion.
3. The International Congress of Fundamental Theology was held at the Gregorian in
1995.
4. Another recent turning point in fundamental theology was in 1998 with the encyclical
Fides et Ratio, which in #67 gives a full description of the subject. It points out three
specific tasks:
a. To give reasons for faith (rendere ragione)
b. To justify and explicate the relation between faith and philosophical reflection
(giustificare)
c. To study revelation and its credibility. (Fr Patsch sees this last point as the specialty
of fundamental theology at the Gregorian.)
III. Class Summary
A. To summarize our discussion, Fr Patsch proposes a synthetic description of fundamental
theology: grounding and justifying Christian revelation as reasonably proposed with
theological, historical, and anthropological credibility in order to be able to give a reason for
the hope within us. [Fondare e giustificare la rivelazione Cristiana come proposta sensate
di credibilit teologica, storica, e anthropologica per poter cos rendere ragione all fede .] As
John 20:31 puts it, these things have been written that you may believe and believing have
life in his name. He also cites the famous Epistle to Diognetus, which is perhaps the first
Christian apologetic work:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language,
nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor
employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any
singularity. . . . But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of
each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to
clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful
and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as
sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as
if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their
birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they
do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They
are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but
they are citizens of heaven...

B. This quotation shows the challenge of talking about our faith in a situation marked by
pluralism. Indeed, the pluralism of our contemporary world is characterized by a global
society which is qualitatively new that requires us to rethink deeply how we discuss our
faith.
C. This pluralism is qualitatively different than in past times, because we are living in a world
context in our epoch. It may not be wrong to say that there are 3 periods of Church history:
1. The primitive Church, 2. The middle ages (Constantine forward), and 3. The
Enlightenment and afterward. Today, we are in a much different global context, and we
can't speak as did the first Jesuits, for example, who went to China and spoke and
converted the peoples. This not because we are incapable: it is a much more profound
 6

change. We must seek not to abandon this missionary impulse, but it must be conserved in
a very relaxed way, which is much more comfortable living with others.
D. Watch the video of the debate between Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Pell on whether
religion has been a net positive force in history, and comment on the forum as to what you
would have said differently.

26 Feb 2014

The Approach to the History of Jesus

[Note: many points in todays lecture correspond to #6 on the course program.]
I. The Memoria Iesu
A. The memoria Iesu can be seen as a basic aspect of fundamental theologyfundamental
Christology.
B. Henri de Lubac: the word par excellence is Christ, the substantial Word who is at the same
time the Messenger and the content of the message. Similarly, we should show the content
of our faith by incarnating it in our own lives.
C. I Peter 3:15: always be ready to give a reason for the hope within you. We might note that
hope here includes both faith (its contents) and love (the corresponding way of life). This
necessarily involves an understanding of the context of the modern day.
1. We have seen the evolution of an antinomy or divorce between faith and reason, rooted
in the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
2. When there are two concepts considered mutually opposed, we run the risk of
remaining trapped in the same conceptual scheme. Overcoming this risk requires one to
rise to a higher level, as did Vatican I.
3. The philosophical concept at play in considering our context is historicity (cf. Dei
Verbum 19 and Sancta Mater Ecclesia of 1964).
a. Texts as such, even the Gospel texts, can be very dangerous in themselves. One
apparently innocent word can provoke an immense change in the reader, e.g. St.
Anthony (hearing sell everything at Mass and doing so quite literally, or more
negatively, the massacres of Jews, the burning of putative witches, etc. Context is
important.
b. Helpful to distinguish what we mean by history. Turning to the German, we find:
i. Historie, which focuses on concrete calendar events
ii. Geschichte, the flow of history in which we ourselves are immersed, and in
which we interpret the past.
II. Hermeneutic Presuppositions of an Event
A. The word originates from the Greek hermeneuein (express, explain, translate) and is well-
illustrated by the image of the Greek deity Hermes, the mediator (interpreter!) of Zeus
towards humans.
B. Traditional hermeneutics is simply the art and theory of interpretation, but the word takes
on a special sense when understood philosophically: a dialogical approach to philosophy,
the art of posing questions.
1. Note carefully that ones questions have a major influence on answers, in that a
question as posed structures in a certain way the response.
2. Philosophical hermeneutics is a self-reflective application of our own being-conditioned,
which takes seriously the fact that we are beings historically conditioned by our cultural
and linguistic contexts and works from a methodology which is historically conscious
(geschichtliches Bewutsein).
3. This approach takes into account the historicity of the historian: in years past, the
dominant criterion for the quality of a historian was his intelligence, but we would now
also want to consider the quality of his perspective on history in evaluating him.
C. The hermeneutical circle:
 7

1. On Heideggers analysis (cf Being and Time, section 32), the back-and-forth between
our pre-understanding [i.e. questions] and understanding [i.e. answers]Being-in-the-
world always considers the world with certain pre-structures, and the consideration re-
structures it. We have to look at reality from within historical reality, we cannot escape
from it, but this circle doesn't have to be a vicious one. To take an example from Hans-
Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, 317), the Enlightenment based itself on rejecting all
prejudice as unfounded and illegitimatebut this itself was a prejudice!
III. The Historical-Hermeneutic Research into Jesus of Nazareth
A. In order to account for historicity in this research, we will need a hermeneutical approach.
We might summarize the relevant history thus: it begins with the mystery of the Trinity,
which is the source of the event of Christ, who is then spoken of in the kerygma of the
Church, which then passes on the apostolic teaching via Scripture and Tradition. The
modern investigation into the historical Jesus comprises three basic stages:
B. The 1st Quest (1778-1906) begun by Lessing and Reimarus, which often argued for an
Enlightenment-type natural religion as opposed to the faith of the Church. The Christ of
faith was separated strongly from the Jesus of history. This period of research was
terminated by Albert Schweitzer with his History of the Research on Jesus Life, which
showed that much of this research was a projection of the researchers own perspectives
onto history.
C. The Not a Quest period of 1921-53, in which Rudolph Bultmann and his disciples
(especially Ksemann) tended to read everything in the Scriptures which was not credible
from our perspective as a myth, which for him was synonymous with credulity.
D. The New Quest (1953-85), represented especially by Ksemann, who took inspiration
from the Historie/Geschichte distinction. Reading the Gospels as merely transmitting brute
facts was seen as shallowthe new question was how the Geschichte set in the Historie
of Jesus can became anew Geschichte for us.
E. The Third Quest (1985-c. 2000), with historical-sociological interests. This project
considers Jesus in the context of Judaism and his creation of a reform movement within
Judaism. Important exponents include Wright and Sanders. The Jesus Seminars occur in
this context.
F. We briefly considered several cinematic depictions of Jesus (notably the Jesus of
Montreal, which Fr Patsch quite enjoyed), but this was concluded with a caution that these
depictions are not generally based on deep scholarship but more artistic concerns.
IV. Towards a Contemporary Proposal of Criteria of Authenticity of the Gospel Accounts
A. First general criterion of authenticity: historical plausibility and the coherence of the figure of
Jesus. This criterion applies to all historical studies.
B. Derived criteria of authenticity
1. Dissimilarity with the cultural context (i.e. what is clearly a move away from the position
of contemporary Judaism)
2. Multiple attestation (e.g. Jesus pity and kindness, accounts of him as a miracle worker,
the accounts of him calling the disciples).
3. Ecclesial embarrassment: if the records preserve something which would have been
embarrassing to the early Church (e.g. Jesus being baptized by John, the words of My
God, why have you forsaken me?), it is more likely authenticwhy would the Church
have made it up? (Less important)
V. From the Criteria of Authenticity to Jesus of Nazareth, the Source of Christology
A. This project aims at developing a historical image of Jesus.
1. The day of Jesus birth.
a. Dionysius the Lesser in 525 attempted to calculate the date of Jesus birth and
placed it at 754 from the founding of Rome, which became 1 AD, but this was an
error.
 8

b. The Gospel accounts provide some difficultiesfor example, Luke cites the census
under Quirinius, the governor of Syria, but this was in 6 AD.
c. The general consensus puts Jesus birth somewhere from 7 to 4 BC.
2. There is also a dating issue regarding the timing of the Last Supper and Crucifixion
a. Synoptics place Last Supper on the Passover
b. John puts the Last Supper on the day of preparation for the Passover
c. Synoptics have Crucifixion on Friday, 15 Nisan
d. John has Crucifixion on Friday, 14 Nisan
e. Gospels are in many respects works of art rather than works of Enlightenment
history, and should be appreciated as such.
3. Non-Christian historical sources
a. Pliny the Younger (112 AD): in a letter to the Emperor, he makes a reference to the
Christians and asks how to act toward Christians who refuse to venerate the
emperor as a god. He describes Christian practices and their high standard of moral
conduct (cf. Slides), which apparently was well-known by their contemporaries.
b. Tacitus (around 115 AD): In his Annals, this Roman orator and historian writes 2
paragraphs mentioning Christ and the Christians. In the last, he affirms the presence
of Christians in Rome under the emperor Nero.
c. Suetonius (around 120 AD): Describes the expulsion of Jews from Rome as a result
of the infighting between the Jews and the first Christians. Recounts some of the first
conflicts between Christians and their social environment.
d. Flavius Josephus (Jewish writer): 93, Jewish Histories. Contains some data that may
have been added later by Christian editors. He at least describes the virtue and
perfection of Christ, though, and does ask whether he might have been the Messiah.
He describes the Christian communities, existing to this day, who claim that he
rose from the dead.
B. Given the evidence of non-Christian sources, there are some almost undeniable data
points, even apart from a perspective of faith
1. A certain Jesus, originally from Galilee and having a reputation as a miracle-worker,
was tried by the Procurator Pontius Pilate during the principate of Tiberius.
2. By the year 50, the Jews of Rome were arguing about the title of Christ
3. In 64 Nero persecuted and tried the followers of this Christ.
4. Around 93-94 there were several communities of Christians that referred to Christ as
God
5. By 114 there was an investigation into the activity of these Christians who met each
week on Sunday to praise Christ and eat a shared meal.
C. Fr Patsch spoke of his experience of growing up under a Communist regime that
propagandized against Christianitythese affirmations help us defend against such anti-
Christian intellectualism, showing that our faith is not something unbelievable, even if we do
not consider the Gospel accounts.
D. List of historical points established from the Gospels taken together with these other
sources. Jesus:
1. Was a Nazarean
2. Was baptized by John
3. Proclaimed the Kingdom of God
4. Called disciples
5. Was known as a wonder-worker
6. Had a special closeness with God, whom he called Abba
7. Had a critical relationship with the Temple
8. Had a farewell supper with his disciples
9. Was crucified under the title of King of the Jews
10. Was proclaimed as risen, victorious over death and now alive
 9

11. Was followed by Nazarenes, who were later called Christians and formed the Church
E. We concluded with an unfinished discussion of how we might reply to accusations that
religion (in particular Christianity) has not been a net positive force in the world. The idea
discussed was that of Francis Fukuyama, who saw personal loyalty as having expanded
throughout history from family to tribe to nation to civilization, and we can see Christianity
as having expanded this circle of consideration to include all of humanity.

5 March 2014

An Overview of Christology
I. Introduction
A. In this lecture and the last, we have been considering the mysterium Christi, which
distinguishes Christianity from all other religions. As Henri de Lubac put it, Christianity is the
only religion whose revelation was incarnated in a person. Thus, it is somewhat inaccurate
to refer to our faith as a religion of the book (as do Muslims), even though the Scriptures
have an important role to play.
B. Scheme of the lecture:
1. Titles of Jesus: A crucified Messiah?
2. The teaching of the Church: magisterial documents
3. Anthropological research: Philosophic Christology?
II. A brief re-consideration of our approach
A. This repetition is important since, as Heidegger noted, to say the same thing it is often
necessary to use different words, for we mean the explication of its original, still-hidden
possibilities. To begin, we are taking an approach to the credibility of Christianity (the
specialty of the Gregorian school of Fundamental Theology) which considers its historicity.
The professor feels himself to be in the theological school of the Gregorian, one of the two
schools in FT, the other being the German school.
B. The above approach is necessary since there are no such things as brute factsthey
must always be interpreted. This statement should not be radicalized but rather taken in a
more moderate sense, as do the 1964 document On the Historical Truth of the Gospels
and Dei Verbum 19. To do so, we will make use of philosophical hermeneutics, which is a
way of thinking that gives attention to its own historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions.
C. In particular, we must pay attention to our own prejudices, or pre-judgments.
1. To take an example: for us, the Coliseum is a symbol of ancient Roman culture, but
what did it symbolize for the ancient Romans 2000 years ago? Or for ancient
Christians? Similarly, Saint Peters Basilica has meanings that are different for us than
for, e.g., Protestants in the Reformation period.
2. As Gadamer notes in Verita e metodo 325:We pertain to history, not the other way
around... The prejudices of the individual are constitutive of his historic reality. We
pertain to a story, a history, in which we are immersed. This is not an obstacle or a sin! It
is, in fact, the condition of possibility for understanding any event. Taken personally,
very few of us likely are Catholic after a systematic investigation of every religionour
possibility of understanding comes from our belonging to a particular tradition. So long
as we keep this in mind, it is not a negative thing.
III. Titles of Jesus Christ in the New Testament
A. As the source of our most substantial historical information regarding Jesus, the New
Testament (and particularly the Gospels) give us the basic elements of an implicit or seed-
form Christology.
B. Messiah/Christ - We should first note the historical reality of this title, made famous by
Peters confession and present throughout the biblical accounts as applying to Jesus.
Interestingly, however, Jesus himself distanced himself from the title (tell no one), likely
because of its ambivalence in the Jewish culture of his time, which had strong notions of a
 10

political Messiah. The term is used more explicitly after his death and resurrection
although the idea of a crucified Messiah seems like an oxymoron, Jesus life made it clear
that his suffering and resurrection come together, an idea illustrated by the artistic
representations of the Risen Christ on the Cross.
C. Son of man - This term, frequently applied by Jesus to himself, derives from Daniels
dream vision in Daniel 7. Its meaning appears to develop through the life of Jesus and the
apostles, moving from a generic significance of an eschatological figure to a confession of
his messianicity.
D. Son - The Qumran documents attest to a variation of this (Son of the Most High) as a
current phrase around the time of Jesus. The sense of him having a special relationship
and even an unbelievable closeness with God, Abba, is undeniable (Mark 14:36 is one of
countless Gospel texts along these lines; one might consider also Matthew 12:1-12, with
the parable of the murderous vine-dressers).
E. Lord - Kyriethis title also underwent an evolution in the lives of Jesus and his followers,
from a simple courtesy (given to a respected teacher) to a title of his supreme majesty. This
evolution occurred through an experience of his words, acts, and deeds, resulting in the
very special sense that we give it.
F. In conclusion, we might consider the titulus of the Cross as giving us an interpretive key to
these titles: This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. In ancient times, these signs, the Causa
Poenae, were used to show the reason for a criminals punishment, but Jesus resurrection
ironically confirms the title and leads to a serious reinterpretation of it. Jesus crucifixion is a
scandal for the Jews and folly for the Gentiles, and it contrasts radically with the founding
stories of other religionsfor example, the life of Islams prophet is one of vindication and
success.
IV. The Churchs Teaching
A. There are two basic approaches to doing theology: ascending and descending. Both are
legitimate, and indeed, they find their unity in Jesus.
B. The Council Fathers at Vatican II rejected the original schema prepared for the document
on revelation, De Fontibus Revelationis, and accepted instead De Revelatione Dei et
Hominis in Iesu Christo Facta, the alternative schema prepared by Frs. Ratzinger and
Rahner which eventually became Dei Verbum.
C. Looking at Gaudium et Spes 22 (a supercharged chapter), we find an important synthesis
of the conciliar Christology which combines elements of both. This provides us with the
fundamental aspects we should keep in mind and will help the Church, the sacramentum
universale salutis, to remain in dialogue with the world. Fr Patsch recommends several
commentaries on this document, particularly those of Moeller, Sander, and Ratzinger. Basic
points:
D. The Christology of the Second Vatican Council:
1. In general, Christ is the full revelation of what it is to be human
a. Fides et Ratio 8: In reality, only in the mystery of the Word incarnate does the
mystery of man truly take on light.
b. The recapitulation of the mystery of man in the mystery of Christ: GS 22.
2. The mystery of the incarnation: The council affirms that Christ is united in a certain way
to every human. The language in this case does not directly follow scholastic theology,
but the affirmation can be seen in the light of Hebrews 4:15 (like us in every way but
sin).
a. He Who is "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15), is Himself the perfect man.
To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from
the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that
very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His
incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He
worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice
 11

and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one
of us, like us in all things except sin.
b. Irenaeus distinguishes between Imago, which is exterior, and similitudinem, which is
interior. The council, however, doesn't use this way of thinking. With that last
sentence, this paragraph makes a strong, ontological affirmation. In the background
is Hebrews 4:15, which describes our High Priest like us in all things but sin.
3. The centrality of the Paschal mystery as both means of our salvation and an archetype
for us to follow
a. As an innocent lamb He merited for us life by the free shedding of His own blood. In
Him God reconciled us to Himself and among ourselves; from bondage to the devil
and sin He delivered us, so that each one of us can say with the Apostle: The Son of
God "loved me and gave Himself up for me" (Gal. 2:20). By suffering for us He not
only provided us with an example for our imitation, He blazed a trail, and if we follow
it, life and death are made holy and take on a new meaning.
b. The professor tends not to accent this notion of sacrifice to much in preaching &
teaching, because it seems like it is a concept distant from the man of today.
4. The importance of the Holy Spirit (and more generally, a Trinitarian perspective) in
Christology. The Spirit is He Who helps discover in the concrete situations of life how to
act: The Christian man, conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of
many brothers, received "the first-fruits of the Spirit" (Rom. 8:23) by which he becomes
capable of discharging the new law of love.
5. God's universal salvific will: LG 16. But often men, deceived by the Evil One, have
become vain in their reasoning and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving
the creature rather than the Creator. Or there are some who, living and dying in this
world without God, are exposed to final despair. Wherefore, to promote the glory of God
and procure the salvation of all of these, and mindful of the command of the Lord, to
"preach the Gospel to every creature", the Church fosters the missions with care and
attention. This is a passage not often quoted. For this reason, we are called to preach
the Gospel to every creature.
6. The Trinitarian Synthesis: GS 22. Such is the mystery of man, and it is a great one, as
seen by believers in the light of Christian revelation. Through Christ and in Christ, the
riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful. Apart from His Gospel, they overwhelm
us. Christ has risen, destroying death by His death; He has lavished life upon us so that,
as sons in the Son, we can cry out in the Spirit; Abba, Father
E. Further reading:
1. Sacramentum Salutis Universale GS 45, at the end of the document. Also, there are
some sections pertaining to this material in Lumen Gentium.
2. Recommended reading: Moeller, Sander, Ratzinger, Alesiani (all in the sala di lettura).
V. A Philosophical Christology?
A. In our course, we will have not only the ancient Greek philosophers but also a synthesis of
an anthropological research.
B. In theology, it is fitting/necessary to philosophize (oportet philosophari). So, what are the
models of the relationship between philosophy and theology? In considering this material
from the perspective of credibility, the possibility of a sort of philosophical Christology
presents itself, which will depend on the perspective one takes on the relationship between
faith and reason:
1. Neo-positivism: the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In our times, one
often runs into the position that theological propositions have no real meaning (and thus
are rationally inscrutable). Against this, we might give an example of experiencing a
great work of art, which has the effect of changing ones perspective: this change is not
scientifically measurable but it would seem strange to say that it is meaningless. We
could make a similar argument for religion.
 12

2. Contradiction: faith and reason conflict irreconcilably. Exponents of this position have
included Tertullian and Luther on one side, and Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche on the
other.
3. Inseparable unity: from this perspective, one side completely subsumes the other. For
example, we might speak of a Christian philosophy (with Augustine and Anselm) that is
the one true philosophy, and thus Christianity absorbs philosophy entirely. Alternatively,
Kant or Hegel would see religion as entirely within the ambit of philosophy.
4. Two distinct intellectual levels: can refer to each other but do not conflict. This approach
is the view commended by the Church and expressed by the dictum gratia supponit
naturam. Important exponents include Aquinas and Rahner.
C. What does a philosophical Christology look like? From one perspective, we might see what
different philosophers have seen in Christ:
1. For Spinoza, Christ is: the great Enlightener.
2. Rousseau: rational Jesus
3. Lessing: pedagogical Jesus
4. Kant: the good principle ideal personified
5. Schleiermacher: the virtuous Christ of religion
6. Hegel: The Verbum Crucis
7. Schelling: light of the pagans
8. Nietzsche: against the Crucified
9. Heidegger: the absence of Christ
10. Enst Bloch: the rebel for love.
D. In other words, this is Christology via anthropology. This sees in Christ the fulfillment of
certain human experiences and expectations.
1. The first way to see this illustrated is how Christ is seen as the absolute fulfillment of the
love which we all seek in our relationships. He reveals the complete parallelism between
love of God and love of neighbor. If I love/hate my neighbor, I love/hate God. (cf
Matthew 25:31-46).
a. Occasionally in the Sacrament of Confession, one hears Help me father, it's been 5
years and I don't recall many things. One way is, Ok, let's review the 10
Commandments. But Fr. Patsch prefers rather, How are your personal
relationships? We tend to fool ourselves thinking we're good at keeping the
commandments, but few would say that all of their personal relationships are in
order.
2. The second way considers our experience of death: our love of self and other recoils at
death, which seems to indicate a natural desire to live forever.
3. The third way is the hope for the future absolute: a type of natural eschatological
expectation we find within ourselves.
E. Jesus is the response to the questions posed by human nature and life itself: the revelation
of absolute love, God (and not death) as the human absolute, and in his resurrection, the
promise of life to come.
F. There is legitimate room for doubt, for if there were not the possibility of doubt, there would
not be the possibility of faith, either. Faith that does not allow itself to question or doubt is
not worthy of being faith. - Heidegger
G. Conclusion: the historical, theological, and anthropological credibility of Jesus is a
reasonable response to the question which is man himself. This is our proposition. The core
of this affirmation lies in the Resurrection, which is at the same time the object and motive
of the credibility of faith in Christ, the event which changed not only the attitudes of the
disciples but enabled them to found the early Christian community.
1. Appendix: Bibliography for the course (or at least for this part): [The majority of these
are available in the library sala di lettura.]
a. Latourelle, Collins.
 13

b. Fisichella, La Rivelazione: evento e credibilita'

c. Pie-Ninot (former teacher of this course)
d. Massimo Epis
e. Latourelle & Fisichella, Dictionary of Fundamental Theology

12 March 2014

The Paschal Testimony

I. Who can change the world?

A. Famous scientists, politicians, philosophers, religious leaders.
B. The life of Jesus (from a backwater province; no higher-level education; never traveled
more than a few hundred miles away from where he was born; abandoned by even his
closest friends; executed as a criminal) seems insignificant when measured against the
sorts of people we typically think of in this category, though our assessments are always
biased. Yet he is the central figure of a religion that shortly after his death began to exert a
world-wide influence. No army has ever changed the world like he did.
C. The key to this paradox is the Paschal Mystery.
II. Hermeneutic Presuppositions
A. Examining Acts 2:32-36, one of the most ancient creeds of Christianity, we note an
unexpected aspect of the Resurrectionthis Jesus, whom you crucified, has been raised.
The phrase Christ is risen is found in many NT passages (1 Titus 4:15; 1 Cor 15; etc.) and
indicates a conviction that Jesus has re-awoken from the dead, body and all.
B. In Rev 1:17 and following (I am the first and the last), we see that the Resurrection
highlights specifically the definitiveness of the redemption of human existence that God has
accomplished in Jesus, a point which is definitive and even constitutive of Christian belief.
C. Dei Verbum 4: Christ brings revelation to perfect fulfillment especially with his death and
resurrection. But what does especially indicate? Von Balthasar says Christs death is
fullness, others his Resurrection. This is an important question.
1. The Resurrection has a peculiar epistemological status (cf. 1 Cor 15:14: If Christ has
not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain) as both ground
and content of faith. This might seem strange from a logical standpoint: how can a belief
be self-attesting? How is it not question-begging?
2. Jesus is both object and motive of faith: a hermeneutical circle. Our entry point into this
circle is through the faith of the first disciples themselves, the only ones who were there.
Our intellectual horizon must fuse with theirs in order for us to interpret the event
correctly, and so their original experience and interpretation cannot be eliminated from
our consideration. Indeed, at least three intellectual horizons are involved in this
interpretation: that of Jesus, that of his followers, and our own. The point is not to
escape the circle, but to learn to dwell in it as best as we can.
D. We are not seeking here to demonstrate a necessity of having faith in Christ, but rather we
are considering how that faith is motivated. Thomas Berger & Thomas Luchman (sp?)
speak of structures of plausibility. The social structure of today is today's structure of its
plausibility. Society conditions those who live in it.
1. For Hindus, the concept of the incarnation of the divine is an easy one, but it is folly to
Greeks. How often do we consider how hard might be to accept our beliefs from
another perspective? We must be aware of the background structures and motives of
our Christian life and belief.
E. There was a turning-point that animated the Easter faith. Something had to have happened
that not only totally changed the disciples' behavior, but also made them capable of a
renewed activity and of founding a community. This is the nucleus of their faith. (Dibelius,
 14

Jesus, Berlin 1939). With regards to the Resurrection, we must now consider: what
interpretation of the event is plausible?
III. Research on the Resurrection of Jesus
A. Paralleling the history of biblical research, we find several distinct stages of research on
Jesus Resurrection which line up with the intellectual presuppositions of the researchers.
1. The First/Old Paschal Quest (1778-1906)
a. Was characterized by the historical-critical and rationalistic interpretations of
Reimarus and his successors, who did not want to admit of a miraculous raising of
Jesus from the dead. Thus, several putative explanations became popular:
i. The disciples stole and hid Jesus body, then lied about the resurrection. This has
roots in Mt 18:11-15, in which the Pharisees are reported as having spread such
a story. The difficulty with this is explaining the change in the disciples afterwards.
ii. Jesus only apparently diedhe perhaps fainted and then later recovered in the
tomb. This explanation was favored by Paulus and Schleiermacher, based upon
the unusual rapidity of Jesus death. The report of Jesus side having been
pierced by a spear presents a difficulty for this explanation.
iii. The language of resurrection should be interpreted as meaning only subjective
visions of the disciples after Jesus death rather than an objective resurrection
event.
2. The Not a Quest (really a non-stage)
a. Bultmann and his followers were characterized by an epistemological skepticism
aimed at the historical reliability of the Gospels.
i. The origins of the Paschal faith in the disciples are shrouded in mystery by the
later legends but the historical roots are not important.
ii. This does not get us any closer to an interpretation of the Resurrection.
3. The New Paschal Quest
a. The second actual stage of this research was the New Paschal Quest of the 1970s
and 80s, which began from new hermeneutical directions. [Fr Patsch named Haes,
Martini, and Durwell, but gave no other details.]
4. The Third Paschal Quest,
a. This is the third and current stage, and it is the most diverse
i. Jesus pro-existence [yep, thats the word] is a sufficient reason [explanation]
of the Resurrection. (Verweyen)
ii. Rationalist, psychogenic explanation: Disciples response and accounts a
psychological response to a traumatic event.
iii. The Jesus Seminar and its adherents see talk about the Resurrection as purely
symbolic, without any connection with objective reality.
iv. Others have affirmed the reality of the Resurrection (Leon-Durfour, Berten,
Gonzalez-Gil, etc.)
B. In summary, the debate on the Resurrection has been very lively, and appropriately so,
since this is the essential point of our faith. We can observe the difficulties of a directly
historical approach to the Resurrection, which has not produced a unanimous opinion, and
that the presuppositions of the researchers on the subject, brought on by their various sitz
im leben, or positions of life, have played a significant role in their perspective on it.
C. The solution which the professor has found in pastoral situations with people in crises of
faith is to take the person seriously. Love is never a theoretic or spiritual thing; it is practical.
If you are in crisis, the solution is to begin to love in a strong sense in one's practical life.
IV. Looking with the Eyes of Faith
A. Based on this, we can see the importance of looking at the facts with the eyes of faith in
order to arrive at the proper interpretation. This idea has roots in the patristic period,
particularly in St. Augustines striking phrase that habet namquam fides oculos suos (faith
has its own eyes).
 15

B. In the 20th century, the concept was developed by Pierre Rousselot in his book The Eyes of
Faith.
1. The starting point for this concept is that God has revealed himself not through purely
internal experiences but rather through history, in which he has given us many
reasonable signs of himself: the empty tomb, the apparitions of angels, Jesus post-
Resurrection appearances. Faith provides the background structure of plausibility to
understand and believe these signs.
2. A non-believer might ask: when I look out the window, what do I see that has changed
with the Resurrection? For the believer, the answer is everything, but the non-believer
still sees from the same perspective and so cannot perceive the difference. The
response to the question is be converted and believe, a response which combines
both subjective and objective elements.
C. Garigou-Lagrange and others of the pre-conciliar period attacked Rousselot's conception of
the act of faith very strongly. Rousselot's conception influenced DeLubac strongly.
D. As an example of this we can take Lk 24:13-35, the story of the disciples on the road to
Emmaus. Note the chiastic structure of the passage:
A. Introduction: disciples going from Jerusalem (13)
B. Jesus draws close and speaks with them (15)
C. But their eyes are unable to recognize Him (16)
D. They relate the relevant facts to Jesus (17-19)
E. He was condemned and crucified (20)
F. Some women say that they found the
tomb empty... and say that He is 'the living' (Zen)
(22)
F'. Parallel begins: Some from us went to the tomb
and verified it, but Him they did not see (24)
E'. Jesus rebukes them for being slow of heart to believe
(25)
D'. By the scriptures, He explains to them that the Messiah must
suffer (26-27)
C'. Their eyes are opened and they recognize Him (31a)
B'. Jesus vanishes from their sight (31b)
A'. They return to Jerusalem and tell the others. (32-35)
1. A key question which this text addresses is how can he be living if you cant see him?
which arose in the early Church and the explanation of which is that only with the eyes
of faith can he be seen, particularly in the breaking of bread.
2. The text itself has multiple interpretations:
a. liberation theology (we thought he would free Israel)
b. feminist (suspicion of the women)
c. historical-critical
d. depth psychology (interior consolation/illumination in distress)
e. interreligious (use of the prophets to explain Christ)
f. spiritual-contemplative
g. liturgical (breaking of the bread)
V. A change of subject [potentially related]: The charismatic & Pentecostal movement
A. [Theory of relevance: Those who experience the Risen One often are a part of this
movement.]
B. [Theory of meta-relevance: dialogue regarding an important but sometimes divisive subject
in order to get a sense of how deep the influence of our own context and presuppositions
can run in assessing a matter of faith.]
C. Criticisms (from students): the faith they express is sometimes vague and general. It's too
emotional: what happens after the emotions?
 16

D. Defense (from students): it's about personal conversion to Jesus, which is the first
requirement of those Jesus calls in the gospels.
E. Statistics: see The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diveristy, other literature.
F. Demographic data: 32% of the world is Christian. The Catholic Church is global. In 1910,
66.2% if Christians lived in Europe (406 million), but today only 25.9% of Christians do. The
movement involves over 100 million people, many of them Catholics, 9 million in North
America. It is the most dynamic part of the Church, the future of the Church.
G. The message: try not to get in the way of the movement.

19 March 2014

The Obedience of Faith (Oboeditio Fidei)

[NB: Fr. Patsch noted at the outset of the lecture that he is not going linearly through the theses
we are treating in the course. We have done 6 through 8, and we are now moving back to cover 3.
For todays lecture, we began with some closing remarks on the Resurrection, then considered
faith: biblical definition of faith, magisterial affirmations to arrive at a synthesis, and a glance at
contemporary challenges.]

I. Closing Remarks on the Resurrection

A. As discussed last time, the Resurrection has a unique status for Christians as both the
object and the motive of our belief. The objective facts and the Christian interpretation of
them point to a historical event that asks for faith in the form of an active involvement in the
implications of the event. In closing, we can summarize much of this treatment with 10
theses [cf. Pi-Ninot, La Teologia Fondamentalepp. 438 and following]:
1. The Easter testimony of Peter (Acts 2:32) articulates a witness realized in faith of a
reality which has taken place in history: Jesus has definitively triumphed over death and
shown himself to be Messiah and Lord.
2. The Easter witness is revealed by God, as shown by the angels in the tomb and Jesus
own appearances to the disciples.
3. Since the Resurrection took place in history, its facts are open to historical-critical
investigation, particularly the radical transformation of the disciples, a je ne sais quoi
that motivated their faith in Jesus Resurrection.
4. The Easter witness is rooted in the eyes of faith (oculata fidefaithful gaze)faith
makes us able to see the various historical events as signs of Jesus Resurrection.
5. The je ne sais quoi (of #3) is the historical core of the Easter faith is described in the
New Testament as Jesus real and personal presence among us, and in the NT it is
interpreted through the Jewish categories and language of the time.
6. Rise, re-awaken, and being raised are used also to describe the eschatological
hope for the resurrection of the body. In Jesus, this hope became reality.
7. Affirming the reality of Jesus resurrection presupposes: the possibility of God acting in
history and leaving traces and signs that are historically reliable; and that this possibility
became real in Jesus of Nazareth as the first-born of all creation.
8. The apostolic witness is a necessary mediation for us to receive and accept the Easter
testimony. The commitment of the apostles makes the Easter faith trustworthy, and it
was deeply rooted in the nascent Church.
9. The signs accessible to historical-critical study present a historically plausible overall
picture which in turn points to the veracity of the Easter testimony.
10. In reflecting on the way in which Jesus resurrection makes the Christian faith credible
and provides the greatest motive for faith, fundamental theology attempts to show the
connection of the Easter testimony with a series of verifiable signs in history that make
our belief historically and anthropologically credible and thus worthy of faith.
 17

B. Fr Patsch summarizes all of this by noting that the Christian faith is fundamentally a drama,
not a tragedyJesus resurrection provides us with a reasonable hope for a happy ending.
II. What is Faith?
A. In everyday language, faith has four basic meanings:
1. A belief in something uncertain, a deficient form of knowledge. Plato expressed this
idea with a distinction between pistis and episteme, with the latter being scientifically
certain knowledge and the former being dubious at best.
2. An orientation in values or models. For example, one could have faith in traditional
marriage as a social institution while acknowledging other perspectives as having
validity.
3. An act of trust in another. Faith in a person.
4. A relationship of trust which leads to knowledge. For example, most Americans take it
on faith that Australia exists.
B. Ratzinger notes that faith in these senses is a basic part of the framework of human society
we all find ourselves placed into a world which requires us to trust others, whether we like
it or not.
C. Moving towards a more religious sense of faith, we note that modern religions have two
basic components: creed and cult. The latter was predominant in ancient religions, which
had as their basic religious attitude a desire for connection with the cosmos and expressed
this desire through specified rituals without a specific requirement for a belief system.
Socrates expresses this sense in his reply to his conviction: I have always honored the
rites of the city. This situation changed radically with Judaism and (later) Christianity.
D. As Ratzinger notes in Introduction to Christianity, the core of Christian existence can be
expressed with the word Credo. This points to a religious sense of faith as a type of belief.
In our liturgy, we can observe the response to the question, What do you ask of the
Church? Reply: Faith. Theology, the scientia fidei, is necessarily based on the existential
act of faithwithout the elements of belief included in it, there would be nothing for theology
to reflect upon. This explains why Barth refers to theology as a function of the Church: it is
necessary for us to reflect upon our act of faith, but this reflection only makes sense if the
faith is there in the first place.
III. Biblical Understanding of Faith
A. The Old Testament:
1. There are numerous texts related to faith, most of which emphasize the existential
aspect of trust: II Chron 20:20, Ps 18, II Sam 22:2ff.
2. All four meanings of faith are present, but fiduciary faith, complete adherence to God,
is emphasized.
3. The great model of faith is Abraham: on Gods word, he left his home and even offered
the promised child to God. In Kierkegaards beautiful reflection, Abraham is the knight
of faith, who clings to God in trust even when nothing makes sense.
B. At this point, we consider 5 key biblical texts on faith in their Wirkungsgeschichte [here
meaning the history of their historical significance]:
1. If you do not believe, you will not understand (Is 7:9).
a. The word here for believe comes from the same root as Amen and indicates a
ratification, an acceptance, an oath of allegiancein other words, an existential
affirmation.
b. We see this echoed in St Augustines 43 rd sermon, which sees faith and
understanding as two undivided realities: intellege ut credas, crede ut intellegas.
c. St Anselms classic definition of theology also comes to mind, fides quaerens
intellectum, and is in line with a tradition going back to St Cyril, who indicated a
priority of faith: fidem sequitur cognitio, non antecedit [i.e. understanding follows after
faith instead of coming before it.]
 18

d. There is also an echo of this in Aquinas Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Q.

8, Art. 5, ad 3: intellectual perception of many truths of faith is above the human
intellect and requires grace, which puts faith as the first priority for us.
e. From this tradition, Vatican I described how reason illuminated by faith can arrive at
an understanding of revealed mystery, ratio fide illustrate (DH 3019) Philosophy can
prepare the way for faith, though we should note the impossibility of completely
prescinding from our faith even when doing philosophyif faith is a true existential
attitude, it cannot simply be set aside, even for intellectual purposes.
2. Faith is the substance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, the proof (elenchos,
argumentum) of things not seen (Heb 11:1).
a. The Catholic tradition has traditionally seen hypostasis here as signifying an
objective foundation or guarantee (Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas), whereas
later figures (Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, and many others) read it more as a
subjective steadfast trust.
b. The term elenchos has been interpreted as a means of knowing (not so much
proof in a discursive sense), though it has also been interpreted as a subjective
absence of doubt. Brush states: In the NT, there's a new development in which
the group of terms pistos, pisteuein stands, in a manner not yet seen, unknown at
the center (see slides).
3. Rational submission (This phrase applied to faith comes from the Latin version of Rm
12:1).
a. In spite of the fact that this does not have a solid basis in the original Greek (which
has logikan latreian, which has more the sense of reasonable spiritual worship), this
idea has been developed in the tradition through the concept of rationabile
obsequium. We can see in this an example of the way in which ones language
structures one world and a concrete case of the importance of dialogue with other
perspectives.
b. An important text is Pius IXs encyclical Qui pluribus (1846), which was written
against rationalism and which made use of this phrase to describe the reasonability
of faith. It refers to rationabile obsequium in the following way: it's necessary that
human reason attentively studies divine revelation, to be secure that God has
spoken and to render it, as with great wisdom the apostle says, 'ossequio secondo
ragione.' There is a great difference between the Latin and the Greek senses of
rationabile obsequium. Pius IX here is speaking in the neoscholastic line, against the
Enlightenment. He unwittingly assumes some of the same presuppositions of the
Enlightenment in his efforts against it. This is not to say that we are more intelligent
than the fathers of the First Vatican Councils. We may ask ourselves why the
theologians of a different error did not see the big-picture problem in their efforts. But
the same might be said of us in 200 years. Solon could not have argued successfully
against slavery in Athens, because slavery was an ubiquitous reality.
c. The phrase reoccurs in Pius Xs Communium rerum, which indicated that the primary
task of philosophy is to show the reasonableness of the act of faith. This is not to say
that philosophy has no autonomy at allit certainly has its own particular intellectual
tasksbut for Catholics much of its importance comes from Vatican Is insistence
that the homage of faith is not a blind movement of the intellect. Piux X:
Communium Rerum (1909). The principle office of philosophy is to highlight rational
submission (rationabile obsequium) of our faith (Rom 12:1). See how the line is
blurred between philosophy and theology. This sounds to us rather authoritarian of
the pope, to dictate the principle office of philosophy. We're used to a more genteel
approach that leaves a greater legitimate autonomy to the world, as Lumen Gentium
proposes. Reason certainly has the duty of helping our comprehension of the faith.
4. Faith/faithfulness/trustworthiness of Christ (Gal 2:16 and Phil 3:9).
 19

a. There is a significant on-going exegetical discussion over these words over whether
they attribute an act of faith to Jesus.
b. On one side, there is a contemporary movement to see Christ as a paradigm of
singularity by affirming Christs faith (von Balthasar, among others). On the other, we
find an anthropological paradigm which highlights the differences between the
believer and Jesus (Rahner, Cardenal, OCollins, among others). Do we speak of a
faith as a journey towards Christ or a journey which begins in Christ?
5. Always be ready to give a defense [apologion] to anyone who asks for a reason [logos]
for the hope within you (I Pt 3:15).
a. Although we might take these words as a given, we should keep in mind that when
they were written, there was a genuine risk of some who gave a defense of their faith
ending up in prison.
b. We can take logos here as a giving an account of, a well-considered motive for
belief. This is reflected in the commentary on the passage in the Summa Theologica,
Supp, Q. 36, Art. 2, ad 2: the reasons for our hope do not prove matters of faith and
hope as such but rather show the probability of these things. In other words, we
should not take a reason for our hope (logos) in an Enlightenment or rationalistic
sense of proof. See Lumen Gentium 10 and Fides et Ratio 67 for more recent
commentary on this point.
IV. Magisterial Affirmations and a Theological Synthesis
A. The first magisterial text to touch on this subject was from Trent, which was concerned
primarily with the relationship of faith and justification: fides humanae salutis initium (faith is
the beginning of human salvation).
B. Vatican I, which was very concerned with the relationship between faith and reason, saw
faith as the full obedience of the intellect and the will to the God who reveals ( plenum
revelanti Deo intellectus et voluntatis obsequium).
1. Thus, faith here is seen as a way of obeying God with ones intellect and will.
2. The council also noted the external signs of revelation, which show its credibility and
are adapted to human reason (and therefore every human). This is a basic
anthropological foundation of the Christian faith: we are created to desire and to receive
Gods revelation. Even so, we nonetheless have the responsibility to reflect upon and
present the revelation so as to show forth its credibilitysince we believe that right
reason can demonstrate the foundations of the faith, we have an obligation to use
reason rightly.
C. Dei Verbum 5 adds to Vatican Is definition the phrase obedience which is faith to bring out
the complete personal obligation in which faith consists. DV 3 and 6 draw out the primacy of
our knowledge of God through revelation over natural knowledge of Him.
D. To begin sketching a synthesis of this material, we can consider Lombards distinction in De
Symbolis I, 181, which is later echoed by St Thomas (ST II-II, Q. 2, Art. 2). We follow here
Pi-Ninots interpretation of these terms:
1. Credere Deumthis draws out the specific cognitive content of faith.
2. Credere Deothis points to the formal motive by which one believes: a conviction of
Gods trustworthiness.
3. Credere in Deumthis makes explicit the aspect of eschatological communion with God
in faith, the journey of faith towards God.
E. Another classic point of reference is St. Augustines distinction between:
1. Fides quae crediturthe objective content of faith
2. Fides qua crediturfaith as an formal act of the will toward God
V. Theological Debates and an Open Perspective
A. There are a variety of contemporary challenges to faith.
1. From the inside we might note Christian divisions as a problem: there is a distinction
between the institutional Church and the corpus mysticum Christi (in St Augustines
 20

words, many who are within are actually without, and many without are within), though
Fr Patsch finds Rahners notion of anonymous Christians as less than helpful here.
2. We might also note contemporary brain research, which some would say indicates that
religious experience is a pure fantasy, a mere brain function.
B. Fr Patsch sees 2 principal contemporary challenges: positivism and the experience of
suffering. There is a sense in some circles that religion has become unnecessary, and the
general cultural environment of today sees only scientific truth as reliablehence Humes
advice (Dialogues concerning natural religion) to cast all books on religion and philosophy
into the flames. Bertrand Russel can help us understand the cultural atmosphere of today
(Science and Religion, 1935): The scientific mindset is prudent, experimental, and empiric.
It does not pretend to know the whole truth.
C. Fr. Patsch ended with an interrupted consideration of Einsteins religious views, the
quintessential man of science and the modern world. He gives several quotes referring to
the cosmic religion and religious sentiment, understood as admiration for the structure of
the world.
26 Mar 2014
D. Theology and Natural Science: an opposition?
1. An old Buddhist story for illustration: a young monk asked an older one what the
foundation of the world might be and was told that the world sits on the back of an
elephant. Upon inquiring what this elephant stood on, the younger monk was told that it
stands on the shell of a giant turtle. And what is the turtle standing on? Ahhh . . . we
do not ask that question. (Fantasy author Terry Pratchett would later conclude that the
answer is turtles all the way down.)
2. There is a human impulse to investigate the order of the cosmos in which we live, but
faith often seems to be in tension with it, as indicated by the figure of Galileo and the
numerous contemporary debates between prominent exponents of religion and science.
3. In recent centuries, empiricism (Hume) and positivism (Bertrand Russell) have defended
the superiority of science over religion and advocated a complete freedom of research.
As Hume said if a book contains neither numerical abstract reasoning nor experimental
research, it's worthless.
4. Speaking of a god is a philosophical presupposition, and all scientists who take
positions here do so as philosophers.
5. Albert Einsteins religious views hint at a situation more complex than it seems at first
glance: he wrote of a cosmic religion which doesn't necessarily refer to a personal
creator in the Christian sense, but could refer to a Spinozian deity, an intelligence that is
behind the intelligibility and beauty of creation and mathematics. On his view, science
without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.
6. On the other hand, Georges Lematre, the originator of the Big Bang theory, was a
Catholic priest and represents a position which sees science as having philosophical
and theological presuppositions.
7. More recently, the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., a paleontologist, advocated a point
of view which saw theology and evolution as being in harmony. His merit was to help the
Church slowly accept evolution, which John Paul II called more than a mere theory. He
wrote a Hymn to Material in the style of St. Francis' famed Canticle of the Sun which
praises the matter which gives us an intimation of the grandeur and dimensions of God
and should be taken poetically rather than in a literal-theological sense.
8. Karl Rahner, in a notable essay on science and religion, argued that the two cannot
even in principle come into conflict. Natural science must be methodologically atheistic,
as its point of departure and object are completely distinct from those of theology. God is
not a part of the world, but its foundation, a condition of its existence. Thus, we can
argue that any tension between science and faith has been resolved at a high level.
 21

9. The on-going apparent tensions seem to be the result of certain philosophical

assumptions common in our time: in particular, the assumption that the only things that
really exist are concrete things, which can be seen, handled, etc. This assumption is a
species of philosophical nominalism which in its unrestricted form is a distinctly modern
idea, with roots in the thought of William of Ockham. Ironically, Ockham actually
proposed the idea in order to protect Gods freedom with respect to creation, but as the
idea has played out, it has created a cultural atmosphere which is difficult for religion.
10. The alternative is a position of philosophical realism (Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic,
etc.) and an affirmation of an analogia entis. Being, essere, really exists. We, and all
things that exists, are manifestations of this essere, which, however, is more than all of
these.
11. For more reading on this subject, Fr Patsch recommends Rahners essay, the writings of
Polkinghorne, and some of Hans Kngs thoughts on the subject.

The Act of Faith: Analysis and Synthesis

I. An Introduction
A. The investigation of the act of faith itself is the question par excellence of Fundamental
Theology.
B. One can't believe if he doesn't understand, nor can he speak. Note that this order (Act
before Analysis) is the reverse of what we have already seen.
C. The overall Catholic position is that faith is not a sacrificium intellectusrather, we believe
that it can be rendered intelligible.
D. However, we do have to make a distinction between faith and reason in order to see how
they can work together.
E. Lumen Fidei: In the modern age, it has often been thought that the light [of faith] could be
enough for ancient society but is not useful in our time for man, who has come of age and is
proud of his reason (LF 2).
F. It is often assumed that faith and reason are opposed to each other. The encyclical cites
Nietzsche, who invites his sister to run new ways and not to fear the uncertainty. For
him, Believe seems opposed to search: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then
believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek. Is it true that reason is a light,
and faith a darkness?
II. From the Analysis of Faith to the Synthesis of Faith
A. Analysis fidei
1. This is a classic theological term for describing the study of the act of faith: its freedom,
its reasonability, and its gratuitousness.
2. The classic position is that revelation is believed through faith. However, this
expresses a sort of auto-foundation of faith. This is dangerous, because the act of faith
is at once a human act and a divine gift. It cannot be the necessary result of an
undeniable chain of reasoning. It is not the result of a decisive conclusion but rather a
free act formally motivated by Gods trustworthiness.
B. Synthesis fidei
1. This a term emphasizing the holistic nature of the act of faith, which involves the entire
person, his entire life, and implicates both objective and subjective dimensions.
2. Building from St Augustines comment that habet oculos fides, Rousselots idea of the
eyes of faith brings this to the front: faith has a synthetic power which allows us to see
and understand with new eyes.
3. We might note also St Thomas notion of oculata fides (seeing faith), in contrast to
Ockham who based on a nominalistic perspective saw faith as something more extrinsic
to the human person.
C. Rousselot in Les yeux de la foi, (The Eyes of Faith) questions the models of his day, asking
whether faith is really as scientific as they made it out to be: The difference between the
 22

one who sees and the other does not need to be searched for in some difference in the
elements of representation, but in the greater or lesser power of the intellectual activity...
The perception of credibility and the act of belief are the same act.
D. A caution from Vatican I: Si quis dixerit, assensus fidei christianae non esse liberum sed
argumentis humanae rationis necessario produci... Anathema sit. (If anyone says that the
assent to Christian faith is not free, but is necessarily produced by arguments of human
reason; or that the grace of God is necessary only for living faith which works by charity: let
him be anathema.)
E. Thus, Rousselot wants to create a much more organic union between the intellectual
aspect and the emotional/existential aspect of faith, which had been obscured in neo-
scholastic theology: Some say Believe blindly, and then you'll see. Others say, First see
clearly, and then you'll believe. The solution is Vision through love: if the solution
proposed here has any merit, it is that of giving to love an essential role in the act of faith,
without detriment to the most rigorous intellectuality.
F. In general, we should see faith as having both rational and supernatural components.
III. The Process of Believing: Revelation Known through Signs Accessible to Reason
A. Before affirming the credibility of faith, theology has traditionally considered the role of
reason in establishing a number of presuppositions of the faith, or praeambula fidei: the
existence of God; the conditions of the possibility of revelation; and so on.
B. This is not the same as the ratio fidei, which considers the believability of revelation as
such. This justification is seen not so much by a conclusive demonstration (human reason
is too weak to convince of all the matters of faith on its own) but rather by a perspective
informed by the eyes of faith. Fr Patsch gave two analogies:
1. A friend of his who during a visit to a church far from home, saw a bishops chair which
reminded him of that back in his home diocese. Seeing with the eyes of nostalgia did
not change any facts of the matter but rather gave him access to a dimension of the
chair which had previously not been perceived.
2. The difference in seeing someone with or without the eyes of love.
C. Thus, the synthesis achieved in seeing with the eyes of faith to arrive at the ratio fidei is not
a purely subjective change but a genuine perception of reality.
D. Another important concept here is cognition per connaturalitatem, which points to the fact
that there is a spiritual affinity we have with the truths of faith or a quasi-intuitive experiential
knowledge of them, a notion pointed out by St Thomas in the ST. [Note: the ref is ST II-II,
Q. 45, Art. 2.]
IV. Towards a Synthesis
A. The starting point of this synthesis is a hermeneutic circularity between faith and reason.
B. Fides et Ratio notes, Theology's source and starting-point must always be the word of God
revealed in history, while its final goal will be an understanding of that word which increases
with each passing generation. Yet, since God's word is Truth (cf. Jn 17:17), the human
search for truthphilosophy, pursued in keeping with its own rulescan only help to
understand God's word better (73).
C. In fundamental theology, recognizing the truth of revelation presupposes a reasonability to
faith, while faith is strengthened and aided by reason. This is not a vicious cycle: there
exists a mutual conditioning between the two. The only way to recognize the signs of
credibility is to affirm the reality. As Rousselot wrote, the recognition of credibility and the
assent of faith are the same act.
D. This is like (meta)physics: we have abstract concepts like preambula fidei, ratio fidei,
synthesis fidei, etc, as if we were speaking of things entirely extraneous to our lives. This is
somewhat inevitable when doing theology. But we must not forget the unnaturality of this
situation. We must refer to that base of the Church's life. The Church could exist without
theology done at universities. But if the Church in antiquity had not been linked with Greek
philosophy, then today only the simpletons would believe. If the Church in antiquity had not
 23

been linked with Roman jurisprudence, then today the Church wouldn't exist. But we must
not forget simplicity: simple village women and peasants in remote regions can believe, as
can academics of the highest levels.
V. An Evolutionary Approach to Faith
A. Fr Patsch proposes a developmental view of faith which we might apply at both the
individual and the societal levels.
1. The faith of a child takes place in a mythical world in which reality and myth are not
distinguishable.
2. Adolescence (perhaps analogous with the medieval world) continues on these
foundations but begins to distinguish myth and reality.
3. Early adulthood (the Renaissance, perhaps) involves a movement toward having to
make a conscious choice to live ones faith in an active way, a decision which
sometimes results in a rebellion against the beliefs and values of youth.
4. At full maturity, these beliefs are present but one becomes again sensitive to the
spiritual dimension of the world around us.
B. Somewhat reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardain, but it yet may provoke some thought.
C. A pastoral question: how should a priest respond to an older woman of simple faith who
reports being bothered by the devil? Per Fr Patsch, the appropriate response is one of
listening to the particulars of her situation, responding as appropriate with the traditional
spiritual means given to us by the Church (pray, bless the house, contact the experts if it
looks real), but most of all working to cultivate an attitude of turning toward God as
triumphant over the powers of hell and not to worry too muchwe should not focus our
spirituality on base things. The demons believe and tremble. - Aquinas
VI. Belief as a Reasonable Proposition
A. When we say that faith is credible, we are saying that it is trustworthy, a point expressed by
I Cor 1:9 (God is trustworthy/faithful).
B. In recent magisterial teaching, Fides et Ratio treats the term in the context of fundamental
theology:
1. In studying Revelation and its credibility, as well as the corresponding act of faith,
fundamental theology should show how, in the light of the knowledge conferred by faith,
there emerge certain truths which reason, from its own independent enquiry, already
perceives. Revelation endows these truths with their fullest meaning, directing them
towards the richness of the revealed mystery in which they find their ultimate purpose
(FR, 67).
C. New elements for understanding the credibility of faith as a reasonable proposition today:
1. Pie-Ninot says theres been a recovery of a sense of the importance of rhetoric, or
persuasive argumentation in a listener/place/time-appropriate manner (rather than the
dismissive use of the term rhetoric as mere propaganda). An important author here is
J.L. Vives.
2. A renewed attention to the ability of reason to appeal universally, against various
relativisms. The weak reason is spoken of often, but the weakness of reason does not
mean that one cannot speak of universal truths.
3. Communicative/hermeneutic intentionality
4. Emphasis on the appropriate relevance
5. Verifiability
6. Orientation toward practice: a certain pragmatism. When we dialogue with the
followers of other religions, finding a common ground of belief is hard. But finding a
common ethical ground is much easier. Christians, Muslims and Jews, for example,
might not find much in common in belief, but much at the ethical level.
7. We can also speak of a triple articulation of credibility in theological, historical, and
anthropological senses. Per FR 14, Revelation [theological sense] therefore introduces
into our history [philosophical-historical sense] a universal and ultimate truth which stirs
 24

the human mind to ceaseless effort [philosophical-anthropological sense]. To speak of

credibility in a theological context presupposes the faith, in a way, because if you are
doing theology, you are already in a context of faith.
VII. Epilogue: The video testimony of Sister Maria, who says that every choice implies
renouncing something.
A. For further reading, Fr Patsch suggests:
1. Pierre Rousselot, Les yeux de la foi [The eyes of faith]
2. Luis Ladaria, Antropologia teologica
3. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik, I-5
4. Christoph Bttigheimer, Comprendere la fede. Una teologia dellatto di fede (Queriniana
167)

April 2, 2014

The Analysis of Faith and the Act of Faith

I. Wittgenstein wrote in 1930: I should like to say that this book were written in honor of God, if
today these words did not sound foolish; if, that is, this would not be wrongly understood. They
intend to express that the book has been written in good will, and in the measure in which it
has not been written with good will...
II. We want to try to do theology in the same way. In order to deepen our discussion of the
analysis of faith and the act of faith, we will investigate two themes: a phenomenology of
renunciation, and the notion of connaturality with the truth.

A Phenomenology of a Theory of Renunciation

I. When considering theology, we should note that there is a difference of quality between it and
other disciplines, not simply with regard to its object and method, but also with regard to the
element of faith, giving it a supernatural level. The traditional oppositions faith/reason,
natural/supernatural, and nature/grace bring this difference to the front, indicating that
something intrinsically different is going on in theology. Per Fr Patsch, the core of the difference
lies in an emptying or renunciation of self which is at the heart of theology, a turning toward
God and a detachment from the world. He calls this the Way of Renunciation. There is a
certain renunciation necessary.
II. One of the biggest challenges in preaching is explaining this leap: that to turn towards God is
impossible without an emptying of myself, without a renunciation. This is something people
don't want to hear. And so, one is accused of rigidity, of excessive moralism, etc. There is a
special difficulty with this theme.
III. While avoiding a notion which overly externalizes revelation or radically opposes it the
world, theology nonetheless requires this self-emptying.
A. Biblical data can help us understand this leap better, because it is certainly present in the
Bible.
1. The prodigal son must realize the emptiness of his vain lifestyle and see himself as
standing before nothingness before turning to his father with all his heart.
2. The Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) asks for the water of life precisely because
she realizes her own misery and sin.
3. Zaccheus with his conversion finds an interior need to empty himself and hurry down.
4. The good thief crucified next to Jesus admits his total failure in life, then is moved to
ask our Lord to remember him.
5. In one fascinating scene, the Rich Young Man, on the other hand, was unwilling to face
this renunciation (Mt 10:17-23) who has kept all of the commandments asks what he
must do to obtain eternal life. Jesus reply implies a double standard: the
commandments themselves are insufficient for this man, who must also sell all he has
 25

(empty himself!) and come follow Jesus. The 10 commandments are basically deducible
from reason and thus can also be found in the cultural environment surrounding Israel,
in the great Mesopotamian cultures. They are the golden rule for social life. But Jesus
insists on a leap to a level beyond this. Only through self-emptying do we find fullness,
and only through poverty do we attain true wealth.
B. Anthropological (pastoral) parallels: this emptiness is also present in everyone's life. One
must choose, which entails renouncing (vocation, spouse, becoming a parent, raising
children, retirement, the death of a life partner). Definitio est negatio definition is negation.
If I choose something, I must necessarily renounce something else. The difficult part of
making a choice is not saying yes to something positive, but rather accepting the
renunciation that this entails. In the process of a spouse's death and one's own, one sees
the Creator's pedagogy. This is the ultimate renunciation. The pattern re-occurs so much
throughout human life that it seems to be intentional on the part of the Creator.
IV. Theological reflection: towards a theology of renunciation
A. In religions outside of Christianity, we can see many parallels to this point: all the ancient
religions involve moral standards, ascetical practices, and have mystical traditions that
emphasize self-emptying to one degree or another. Thus, this theology is non-negotiable in
this sense, because God is Transcendental and is not in our pocket. Revealing Himself,
He draws backwards. There is this dynamic of offering Himself and hiding Himself. The
protestant dialectic theologians, above all Barth, were right in this sense. There is an
eschatalogical moment here as well. Charity became stronger, more explicit after Christ's
coming, because the world was opened more fully to God in a new way. Recall the kenosis
of the Christological hymn in Philippians 2:6-11: He humbled Himself... He emptied
Himself. This forms a basic pattern which reoccurs in many places.
B. Ok, now what theological error is there in the above explication?
1. It's this: The aspect of Israel. To say that the 10 commandments are so general that they
can be found in other religions and cultures is a mistake. Think especially of the
Sabbath. This is a very strong law. It is at the heart of the Decalogue, thus at the heart
of Israel's spirituality. The decalogue expresses an anti-idolatry aspect of our theology.
For this reason, there are 4 Gospels, not just one: to avoid idolizing the text itself. It is
not a text that we adore, it is not a text that is at the center of our faith, but a Person.
The seventh day... you shall make no one work, neither yourself, nor your son, nor your
daughter, nor your slave, nor your maid, nor your beast, nor the foreigner that dwells
with you (Es 20:10, Dt 5:14). Some theologians see in this a weekly liberation of
slaves, something unheard of in the surrounding cultures. Also the attention to and
concern for the foreigner is unparalleled.

Knowledge through Connaturality (cognitio per connaturalitatem)

I. A General Overview from Aquinas and Augustine
A. Building on some of St Thomas remarks, this type of knowledge involves a judgment based
upon either experience or an affective relationship with the object of rational judgment. A
common point in mystical theology is that if you love, you know in another waythis
knowing is true knowledge, but it does not come through rational discourse as such but
from an innate sensitivity to the truth. Thomas wants to give a theological foundation to
mystical experience: mysticism is a form of knowledge. How to understand the mystical
experience? Thomas seeks to understand it on the basis of connatural knowledge. In the
Summa Theol. II-II, Q. 45, Art. 2, Thomas writes about right judgment coming either through
a perfect use of reason or through some sort of connaturality. In theology, this involves a
wisdom by which we taste and see divine things through experience. This type of
knowledge surpasses the level of pure reason acting alone.
B. Thomas use of it shows his continuity in this respect with the Augustinian theological
tradition. Augustine speaks to this as such: When I experience good things of creation,
 26

even the good things of sense perception, I experience God in some sense. There are
presuppositions to being able to know God: both ontological presuppositions (creation) and
moral presuppositions (by virtue and grace). That is to say, to know God, I must both be
created with the correct ontological structure, and live the requisite sort of moral &
supernatural life through virtue and God's grace. In particular, we note that the intellect is
connatural with (ordered toward) the truthultimately, we are created to desire the fullness
of truth in the beatific vision. Consequently, this explains the fittingness (convenienza) of
mystical experience. Connaturality adds the aspect of relation and of the proper movement
of the appetite, of its historic modification of its development. In faith, we notice both a
habitus of a rational character and one which modifies this purely natural tendency.
C. At this point, Fr Patsch posed a sort of meta-question regarding the on-going relevance of
scholastic reasoning. Although he did not provide an answer to the question, he did note
the changing vision of the human person which has influenced any possible answer to it.
Citing Heideggers history of being (Seinsgeschichte), he articulated the evolution of the
human ideal from the hero (in antiquity) to the saint (in the Middle Ages) to the insecure
consumer (today). You've got to be careful with Heidegger, because, radicalizing his
thought, you can lose the sense of the continuity of human maturation. But still, one must
acknowledge that there have been great changes and revolutions in human thought and
existence... The positivity of love is the final motivation of choosing Christianity, but there
is also a negative aspect. In todays context, Fr Patsch notes the following basic
tendencies:
1. What was the problem with the old Roman/Gregorian school of Fundamental
Theology?
a. Never underestimate your predecessors this is a very important, because in that
context, there was a need to do theology in a certain way, laid out in Vatican I, in
response to the Liberal threat. The hermeneutic challenge is to elaborate today the
context in which you must do theology. The context today is new, whether your
talking about the theological, spiritual, global, or economic context.
2. The question is, what is the key to reading and interpreting documents, what is the
context of today?
a. liberal democracy: we're not in a monarchy anymore. In ecclesiology, we'll study how
much democracy is not applicable in ecclesiology. But to meet this context is
inevitable.
b. postmodern pluralism: this is not a negative thing, though relativism and
individualism are negative. But many developments are positive, like the conquest of
the notion of the separated, isolated ego by the idea of community, as well as the
end of great narratives which led to extreme nationalism.
c. scientific neoplatonism
d. empiric sociology/psychology
e. biblical criticism
f. comparative religions, etc.
II. Summary balance on connaturality.
A. Applied to God, in the inter-Trinitarian relations, it indicates the identity of nature. We are
involved in the interior life of the Trinity in virtue of our baptism.
B. Extended to creatures, it expresses a relation of fittingness between a being and its end.

Revelation: the universal and definitive word of God

I. Meaning of Revelation
A. In common language, revelation means to communicate what is unknown, to disclose
something hidden, something known only to me. Or rather, it can mean that I open to
another what is intimately mine, and thus bring the other into my world or into a knowledge
that has a profound meaning for me.
 27

B. Etymology: apokaluptein to reveal. Re-velare: The Latin translation is telling, it refers to

the removal of the veil, and yet it also has a sense of veil again. Here again we see the
dialectic of reveal draw back referred to above.
II. The modern history of the concept of Revelation:
A. This is firstly about the Enlightenment understanding. From the Enlightenment came a
harsh epistemological and ideological criticism of revelation. On the one hand, it insisted on
reducing religion to the level of ethics, to the worldly level. On the other, epistemological
side, it insisted on a de-masking of revelation. This aspect was present in all the moments
of an intellectual construction, because, if we take a position, then we find ourselves
immediately in class warfare, or at least at the level of conflict of interpretation. One of the
big contributions of Habermas was to always keep in mind the relevance to the world of
politics and society.
1. Vatican I: Dei Filius (JS Drey, G Perrone) rationalism. These founded the Roman school
of Fundamental theology; their motives were to confront the unbelieving and the
heterodox. Thus they constructed a demonstration of the Christian and Catholic religion.
2. Nouvelle Theologie, renewal in the field of biblical studies, patristics, liturgy, etc. This
has an influence at Vatican II.
3. Vatican II: a journey from revelation as doctrine to the Person of Christ as Revealer of
the Father.
III. A theological survey of the 20th century:
A. Gibellini suggests in his book a fourfold division of contemporary typology.
1. The first tendency was the theology of identity. Two exemplars would be Barth and Von
Balthasar, who represented post-secular theology.
2. The second was theology of correlation, which insisted on the reception of revelation
on the part of diverse cultural contexts: Bultmann, Tillich; Rahner, Kng.
3. The third was political theology, of which the most important figures was Metz, but also
Bonhoeffer and Bloch (sp).
4. The fourth movement was the theology in the era of globalization. Among the figures
would be the Peruvian priest Guitierrez, a certain Tanzanian priest, and the feminist
theologian Elizabeth Johnson. Such generalizations are always dangerous, though.
B. Avery Dulles (1918-2008): Among his works were Revelation Theology: A History, A History
of Apologetics, and Models of Revelation, of which the last is probably the most important
but least-discussed. In it, he presents five models of revelation, as representations of the
ways of doing theology. The word model allows us to see the legitimacy of plurality in
theology. A model is something constructed simply in order to help us understanding
something complex. It's like a mannequin in a store window: clothes fit perfectly on the
mannequins, but they don't fit the clients so perfectly. They have to be adjusted to the client.
So too, models don't fit theologians exactly. But the models, the norms, are valid:
1. Revelation as doctrine: revelation can be individuated into various positive affirmations
of God the teacher. For Protestants, this takes the form of scripture, for Catholics,
magisterial pronouncements. Biblical litteralists and neo-scholastics seem to take this
model.
2. Revelation as history: the opposite of the previous. God reveals himself it His great
works, especially those revealed in the Bible. The Bible is the magisterium, the teacher
of History, insofar as it teaches what God has done. Wolfhart Pannenberg.
3. Internal Experience: if the first two were objective, this model is subjective. It
emphasizes the importance of an interior communication with God. Tracey, a
fundamental theologian in Chicago.
4. Dialectic presence: some theologians in Europe after WWI rejected both the objectivity
of the first two models and the subjectivity of the third, and instead suggested a dialectic
between them.
5. New Consciousness/Awareness
 28

C. Dulles also seeks to elaborate his own suggestion or position, an analogical theology in
order to understand the Catholic concept of Revelation. For describing the Catholic
understanding of what revelation is, three analogous concepts are useful:
1. Revelation as Word:
a. Revelation is always a communication.
b. This is no great revelation. The documents of the Church speaking about the Bible
speak about logos and rhema very often. But to dramatize a bit the important of this
theme, think of Spinoza, who began Biblical criticism. He was excommunicated by
the Jewish community in June 1673. In that ceremony, they read the Anathema: We
anathematize, excommunicate, and curse Baruch Spinoza...we announce against
him the curse that Eleazar pronounced against his sons... Then follow the curses,
which are drawn from the Torah. With the word, therefore, you can give life and take
it. You can kill someone with the word. We Christians are called to bless, say the
scriptures, and to be ourselves a blessing in our very existence. The Name of God's
Son is Word of God, say the scriptures.
2. Revelation as encounter:
a. When one encounters a you, he listens to him.
b. We find ourselves in a neighborly situation, a relationship in which both sides
change. Gadamer says that every dialogue requires, or constitutes, a common
language. There is something in the middle in which both partners participate...the
being comprehended in dialogue is not just an attempt at triumphing one's own point
of view, but a transformation of self into that what is held in common (cf. slides). A
real dialogue changes both sides. In the encounter with God through Revelation, the
same revelation becomes itself transformed through our eyes, our person, our
involvement.
3. Revelation as Presence:
a. A very valid method that is perhaps under-emphasized in our theology.
b. It refers to the meaning of Isaiah's word, Emmanuel, and to the last words of Christ
on Earth: I will be with you to the end of the age. DV 4 refers to Jesus' revelation,
above all His death and resurrection, as the confirmation that God is with us.
IV. Revelation, then, can be seen as the universal and definitive word of God to us.
A. How is it universal?
1. For one, his salvific will is universalhe has a zeal to see all humans saved.
9 Apr 2014

The Concretum Universale: Fundamental Category of Revelation

I. Introduction
A. This material corresponds to Thesis 5 and pp. 258-282 in La Teologia Fondamentale.
B. Saint Irenaeus wrote, Our Lord, recapitulating all in Himself, came to us not in the way that
he could, but in the way in which we could see Him. God adopted Himself to our capacity
to receive Him, so that we could have an experience of Him. This theme is central in today's
manuals of Fundamental Theology.
II. A Problem: How Can Something Be Both Universal and Concrete?
A. Lessing, the Enlightenment-era thinker, expressed this particular objection clearly: truths of
history cannot be necessary truths of reason. In other words, it would seem that universal
truths of reason and concrete facts of history are mutually exclusive. On the other hand,
medieval theologians generally saw the two as compatible. For example, Bonaventure
noted that Pater Verbo quod ab ipso procedit dicit se et omnia [By the Word which
proceeds from him, the Father expresses both himself and all things]. Consider the mystery
of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple: how can a tiny child in this particular place and
time have a universal significance?
 29

B. To frame the question, we might consider the perspective of modern science, which has
come to see man as a very small part of a very large universe.
1. To show the existential implications of this problem, listen to the cynical expression of
Nietzsche: In some remote corner of the universe, there was once a celestial body from
which a few intelligent animals discovered consciousness... this was for less than a
minute.... and soon, these animals died off. This fable aims to show that the human
intellect is an ephemeral, short-lived thing in the grand scheme of the universe. There is
no ulterior mission which brings the human intellect outside of the life of man, since the
human is its own possessor and guide. The human being does not mean much,
apparently, for the universe.
2. This cynical, sarcastic opinion of Nietzsche seems justified by what modern science and
cosmology tell us about the origins, size, and duration of the universe. If we make a
proportional analogy: take the universe's duration to be one year long. Christ's birth
would then be 4.5 seconds ago. Thus, our confidence in our singularity in the history of
the universe might be shaken by these considerations. On the other hand, as Pascal
points out in his Penses, Man is only a reed, but a reed that thinks. He knows the
superiority of the universe above him, while the universe itself knows nothing of him.
Thus, we still have a certain advantage before all other creatures, in that we are aware
of our weakness, our concreteness, small as it is
III. Philosophical Origins of the Expression Concretum Universale
A. The expression originates in Idealist philosophy with thinkers like Hegel, Fichte, and
Schelling, but the earliest roots of this expression lie in the medieval debates on universals.
To take two examples, what is it to be a flower or be a horse, on the basis of what reality
can we say that different flowers or horses are examples of the same thing? The problem is
both ontological and epistemological: what constitutes the connection, and how do we
come to know it? Historical, there have been three broad categories of solutions:
1. Radical (exaggerated) realism
a. There exists an Idea prior to any instance of it in the world.
b. Plato is behind this theory, to which Boethius also seemed to adhere.
c. Universale ante rem
2. Nominalism
a. [the exact opposite of radical realism]
b. There are no Ideas, nor is there any connection between individual existents
c. Even concepts are simply a flautus vocis (mere talk)
d. Universale post rem
3. Moderate realism
a. There are no Ideas in the strong sense, but there are genuine concepts, derived by
abstracting from the essential communis
b. In a sense, the idea is in the thing
c. Universale in re
B. The expression universale concretum emerges in Hegel, who argued that the universal is
united dialectically to the particular, and the two must be held together. Philosophy's job is
to show that there does not exist the abstract, that the abstract leads us to the concrete.
Thus, he claimed that philosphy is the mortal enemy of the abstract. This served as the
basis for his understanding of Christianity as having an absolute character while still being
historical, making it a sort of universale concretum.
C. In 20th century theology, Bultmann debated this idea in the context of kerygmatic theology
to emphasize the universal anthropological importance of faith above and beyond the
historical facts. Karl Barth, on the other hand, with his dialectical theology argued that
Christianity is not the culmination of natural religions but rather a judgment upon them,
since the truths of faith have a universal importance beyond the historical events.
 30

D. Newman develops the notion of the Illative Sense, a sort of common sense, comparable
to phronesis of Aristotle or to conscience. It is an intuitive sense in man that leads him to
the good, true, and beautiful in concrete circumstances. It is the foundation of our intuitive
certainties. The Illative sense also guides us to the unknown known, to the God unknown
by reason, whom we know nevertheless exists An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.
E. For Rahner, this move toward a universal judgment occurs in the reciprocal relationship
between transcendental and categorical revelation (i.e. the universal fundamental
questions/responses and the historical facts/words of revelation).
F. Finally, von Balthasars Theology of History identifies Christ as the concrete Idea and the
Holy Spirit as guiding the abstractive action which allows us to recognize him.
G. Ss. Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor can be seen as having hinted at this
notion, which they considered in connection with Christology: Jesus has a universal
application, but He is also a concrete, singular, historical individual.
H. Nicholas Cusano (15th century) used a method of coincidentia oppositorum in which he
explicitly connected the idea with Christ as an attempt to overcome the problem. In general,
we can observe a lived tension between opposed things at both natural and divine levels:
love and justice; Gods immanence and transcendence; the Word of God and the word of
man; freedom and obligation in marriage. Most of all, we see this in the Incarnation, with
Jesus Christ being true God and true man. Such dialectical tensions must be held together
without reducing to exclusively one side or the other.
IV. Theological Reflection - The category of universale concretum can be observed in three
theological questions: why the economy of revelation? Why did God become man? And how
can the Church be the universal sacrament of salvation?
A. Cur oeconomia revelationis?
1. The questions here are: Why an economy of revelation? Why should revelation have
happened in this historic way?
2. The economy of revelation is fundamentally historical. As a starting point, consider
Ephesians 1:10: God has made known the mystery of his will through his plan
[] in the fullness [] of time, his design to recapitulate
[] all things in Christ. Through this recapitulation (),
Christ assumes the totality of history, making him the hinge of all space and time.
Reflecting on this, Fides et Ratio 12 says, In the Incarnation of the Son of God we see
forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not
even have imagined: the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part.
3. Why did God wait so long until entering into history in this way? Eusebius of Caesarea
provides the famous theologumenon that God used history as a praeparatio evangelica,
a preparation for the Gospel.
4. To respond, again, to the question of the economy of revelation, of the historicity of our
faith: think of the history of philosophy in broad strokes: the greatest thinkers of history
have made the biggest mistakes: Aristotles rationalization of slavery; Plato hadn't seen
anything to reject in homosexual practice of the time, Augustine had accepted the
slavery of the time and placed women inferior to men, Hegels bizarre discussions of
being as becoming; Heideggers shameful association with the Nazis. They articulated
many world-changing ideas, but even in the intellectual sphere, we have a radical need
for assistance in a concrete manner that can speak to the universal.
B. Cur Deus homo? Why a God made man?
1. This question, famously raised by St Anselm, arises from consideration of Jesus life as
a man for others. Per Jn 3:16 and Rom 8:31, he was given to us by the Father, and on
the other hand, he gave himself up for us (Gal 2:20). Two traditional responses have
been given to it:
 31

a. Saint Augustine: if man had not fallen, the Son of man would not have come
(Sermon 174). In other words, the Incarnation occurred specifically as a response to
human sin.
b. Duns Scotus: God became Incarnate because He wanted to share His love with us.
In other words, the Incarnation occurred primarily because of the super-abundance
of Gods love towards us.
2. In this context, it is fruitful to consider a personal interest of Fr Patschs: how do other
religions relate to the absolute claims of Christ?
a. The question is quite contemporary; as the theologian Schlette noted in 1963, it was
new dogmatic territory.
b. In Kngs well-known phrase, there will be no peace among the nations until there is
peace among the different religions; there will be no peace among the religions
without dialogue between them; and there will be no dialogue between them without
research on the foundations of the religions. Thus, theology of religions should be
taken in a subjective genitive sense as a way of doing theology in an interreligious
context. Some basic questions that should be asked include:
i. Does religion arise solely from a natural predisposition?
ii. Is there something which the various religions have in common?
iii. Why should we dialogue with each other?
iv. Can people professing different absolute truth claims tolerate each other in the
same society?
v. Who will be saved?
vi. Is there a morality without religion?
3. With regard to the question of tolerance, we should note with Kaspar that we do not
have to absolutize the concrete universal: truth insofar as it is believed in love can be
tolerant, while ideological pluralism can be extremely intolerant. The Universale
Concretum doesn't mean the absoluteness of Christianity or the Catholic Church. The
Church too is subject to eschatological judgment. An integralism that tries to avoid this
tension is false. With regards to the thorny issue of salvation, there are three basic
positions among Christians:
a. Exclusivismno salvation in other religions
i. Representatives: Kraemer, Barth
ii. Formal adherence to Christianity is required for salvation, for there is only one
true religion. The eschatological judgment will unfold in this sense. This is usually
connected with the three sola on which we are supposedly to be judged: sola
fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia. Kraemer, Barth.
iii. Ecclesiocentrism
iv. Barth wrote, Religion is incredulity, religion is par excellence the fact of man
without God, that is to say, the enacted attempt of man to justify himself without
God. For him, Christianity was not a religion, but something altogether different,
coming from God Himself.
v. Today: post-liberal theology tends toward this direction (concretum)
b. Inclusivismsalvation of those in other religions
i. Adherents of other religions can be saved because Christ in some way brings
fulfillment to what other religions lack (i.e. not as members of those religions but
through an implicit connection with Christ)
ii. Christocentrism
iii. Representatives: Danilou, Rahner, Schlette
iv. Nostra Aetate, 2: other religions found everywhere try to counter the
restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways,"
comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects
nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere
 32

reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which,
though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth,
nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.
v. The above quote reflects two positions that were at the time radically novel:
1. A positive evaluation of the worth of other religions
2. The possibility of salvation of those belong to other religions (cf. Gaudium et
Spes, 16 & 22)
vi. Today: Relational Christianity (unviversale concretum et personale), which
recognizes the personality of the other. Christianity, remaining identical with itself,
has a different identity in the context of interreligious dialogue.
c. Pluralismsalvation by other religions (universale)
i. Adherents of other religions can be saved by those religions as such
ii. Theocentrism or soteriocentrism
iii. Principal exponent: John Hick in God Has Many Names. The Copernican
revolution in religion, said Hick, is to move from an idea centered on Jesus to one
centered on God, on the divine reality. Knitter and Panikkar also represent this
current. Vive la difference!
iv. Radicalized hermeneutic for reading other religions
v. Today: theological pluralism
d. Within these positions, Fr Patsch finds the pluralist position tempting but places
himself in the inclusivist category because he believes that is what authentic
Christian belief entails. [Fr Begasse also self-identified with this position.]
4. Additional Notes on the Relationship of Christianity to Other Religions: arguments for
and against each [RN: taken from April 30th lecture]
a. Regarding biblical foundations, exclusivism has many obvious scriptural defenses:
for example, Christs declaration in John 14:6 that he is the way, the truth, and the
life; no man comes to the Father but by me. However, the inclusivist position also
finds a ground in the New Testament, particularly in places where Jesus and the
apostles recognize positive aspects of non-Jewish religions, such as Jesus
statements about the faith of many Gentiles and St Pauls appropriation of Greek
thought in his speech at the Areopagus. Exclusivists find plenty of scriptural support:
Acts 4:12, 1 Cor 3:11, 1 Tim 2:5, Jn 14:6, etc., but Inclusivists also find evidence:
Rom 5:20, Mt 15:28, Lk 17:18, Mt 8:10-12, Acts 17:21-23.
b. Pluralism, on the other hand, is difficult to defend from Scripture, and exponents of
this view have generally not felt a need to do so. Rather, they appeal to a number of
positive points of their position, such as recognizing how each religion gives its
followers a framework of meaning for their life and how every major religion makes
often similar moral demands (e.g. the frequent occurrence of different versions of the
Golden Rule).
c. There are some major problems with pluralism, however: what to make of the Hindu
caste system, Buddhist indifference to social justice, Islams sanction of holy war,
and the ambiguous legacy of Christianity in the areas of just war, relations with
Judaism, and freedom?
d. The strongest argument against pluralists: ... and Jesus? There are non-
negotiables in the examining of each religion:
i. In Jesus God has given us something very special, something not done in any
other place which will not be done again elsewhere.
ii. Because of this something, Jesus, while having things in common with other
figures, will always remain different, irreducibly different. The difference of Jesus
must be preserved.
iii. This difference and importance of Jesus matters, not just for Christians, but for all
people.
 33

e. [Regarding other religions, the professor seeks an authentic approach that takes the
truth of the other seriously, while at the same time maintaining one's own identity. He
suggests as reading Ratzinger's book Truth and Tolerance.]
f. Regarding exclusivism, we might consider the interesting 20 th-century case of Fr
Feeney, an American Jesuit who obstinately defended a very strict interpretation of
extra ecclesiam nulla salusso strict that he maintained that no non-Catholics would
be saved. For his intransigence on this issue, he was excommunicated in 1953,
though happily he was reconciled to the Church before his death. This line of thought
also goes against the fairly clear language of Lumen Gentium 16: Those also can
attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ
or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to
do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.(19*) Nor does
Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without
blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His
grace strive to live a good life. Per the International Theological Commission, the
question which is currently in play has to do with the precise role of other religions in
the economy of salvation, not if those in other religions can be saved (which has
been settled).
g. Nosce Te ipsum Is this an anthropocentric starting point?
C. Cur Ecclesia Sacramentum Universale Salutis? Why the Church as universal
sacrament of salvation? [cf. Pie-Ninot 258-282]
1. Point of departure: Lumen Gentium gives a very strong emphasis to the sociological
aspect of our religion, not however overlooking the mystical aspect.
a. LG 8: But the society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of
Christ, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the
spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly
things; rather they form one complex reality which coalesces from a divine and a
human element. For this reason, by no weak analogy, it is compared to the mystery
of the incarnate Word.
b. We are back to the famous contradictions: human divine, hierarchic society
mystical body. The institution and grace have to be maintained together. We might
not feel the weight of this thought, of the novelty, the new-ness of this thought,
because the phrase institutional grace is a new word. There was a tendency to
oppose grace and institution after the council, but the task is to maintain them
together.
2. Redemptionis Missio 10: Grace always has a mysterious link with the Church!
Magisterial language speaks often of the orientation or ordering of all persons to the
Church, on the basis of anthropology or ontology: all men are ordered towards the
beatific vision, above all, and in this sense, towards the Church as the promoter of our
transcendental ordering. All men are ordered toward the Church, and implicitly the
Church is present in the moment of a graced act in history. The Church exists from
Babel, says Lumen Gentium as a motive for its existence in space and time.
3. Saint Irenaeus wrote already in the 2nd century, ubi est ecclesia, ibi est Deus (Where the
Church is, there God is). The activity of the Spirit is the proof of the Church's presence.
God's salvific will in Jesus Christ is that all be saved: totum non totaliter Tutto ma non
totalmente: in Christ, everything is somehow present, but not totally. Here we have
space for theological reflection.

30 April, 2014
 34

Fides ex Auditu
I. Know Yourself: the inscription of Delphi
A. Evangelii Gaudium 133: It is not enough that evangelizers be concerned to reach each
person, or that the Gospel be proclaimed to the cultures as a whole. A theology and not
simply a pastoral theology which is in dialogue with other sciences and human
experiences is most important for our discernment on how best to bring the Gospel
message to different cultural contexts and groups. The Church, in her commitment to
evangelization, appreciates and encourages the charism of theologians and their scholarly
efforts to advance dialogue with the world of cultures and sciences.
B. The professor speaks from a European point of view, but is aware of the conditioned nature
of his thought. Being able to see and know one's own limits is a big modern aid to theology.
We are becoming more and more aware of our limits, and knowing yourself is essential for
thinking and theologizing well.
C. A concrete event, that of Jesus Christ, that must be interpreted. We're doing this, arriving at
concrete theologies, so that we can make a connection, making our discourses, our
narrative in theology. At the end it will be much clearer.
II. Know Thyself
A. Nosce Te ipsum Is this an anthropocentric starting point?
B. In order to understand the credibility of revelation, we need to understand the believer in
revelation. This means that our starting point is anthropological, but per Fr Patsch, it is not
anthropocentric. The focus on the human subject is a basic characteristic of modernity,
particularly as articulated philosophically by its greatest exponents (Descartes, Kant,
Heidegger, etc.). We are not simply giving in to their positions, but rather as Christians we
are conducting our philosophical reflection in dialogue with modernity, seeking with Maurice
Blondel a philosophy which is useful for articulating our belief in our current context. Major
exponents of this approach include Marchal, Rousselot, and (in particular) Rahner. Further
illustrating how the approach is anthropological but not anthropocentric, Rahner notes in his
essay The Fundamental Question of Theology About God:
1. Most of our contemporaries seem to think that above all we must ask ourselves if, why,
and in what respect God is important for man. I consider this anthropocentric
problematic erroneous and am of the opinion that such a strange way of forgetting God
is perhaps the most fundamental problem today. I dont mean that people talk too much
about God nor even that too few books about philosophy and theology are published.
For me, there are too few people who think that God does not exist for them but rather
that they exist for God. Yes, in our theological discussions I am categorized as one of
the anthropocentrics, but that is a shallow characterization. (Dimensioni Politiche del
Cristanesimo, pp. 20-21)
C. To explore in more detail what an anthropological starting point means, let us consider
Heideggers approach to fundamental ontology: the existential analytic of Dasein. As he
describes in Being and Time, the question of our starting point is not an indifferent one
when we consider the question of what being investigates the meaning of Being. Dasein is
not merely one being among others but rather has an existential relationship with its own
being, a special connection with the problem of Being itself. For us, then, an anthropological
starting point is not an impious negation of God but rather an undeniable part of the
structure of how we come to understand. In the language of Fides et Ratio 1:
D. Know Yourself in Fides et Ratio:
1. FR 1: Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts
of the world, with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental
questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I come from and where
am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? These are the questions
which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we
find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara
 35

and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and
Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are
questions which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always
compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to these questions decides the
direction which people seek to give to their lives.
2. FR 26: The truth comes initially to the human being as a question: Does life have a
meaning? Where is it going? At first sight, personal existence may seem completely
meaningless. It is not necessary to turn to the philosophers of the absurd or to the
provocative questioning found in the Book of Job in order to have doubts about life's
meaning. The daily experience of sufferingin one's own life and in the lives of others
and the array of facts which seem inexplicable to reason are enough to ensure that a
question as dramatic as the question of meaning cannot be evaded. Moreover, the first
absolutely certain truth of our life, beyond the fact that we exist, is the inevitability of our
death. Given this unsettling fact, the search for a full answer is inescapable. Each of us
has both the desire and the duty to know the truth of our own destiny. We want to know
if death will be the definitive end of our life or if there is something beyondif it is
possible to hope for an after-life or not. It is not insignificant that the death of Socrates
gave philosophy one of its decisive orientations, no less decisive now than it was more
than two thousand years ago. It is not by chance, then, that faced with the fact of death
philosophers have again and again posed this question, together with the question of
the meaning of life and immortality.
3. FR 102: There is today no more urgent preparation for the performance of these tasks
than this: to lead people to discover both their capacity to know the truth and their
yearning for the ultimate and definitive meaning of life.
4. A desire for meaning, for an ultimate and definitive sense is not a Catholic or
Christian, it is a human thing, for which all people feel the need.
5. The later section of the encyclical reiterates the centrality of the human quest for
meaning. The true novelty of this encyclical, says Pie-Ninot, is that it cites Israel, the
Veda, Confuscius, Lao-Tze, Buddha, Homer, Eurpides, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle.
The Christian cannot follow the example of the Muslim general who burned the
Alexandrian library and said that everything in its writings was either in the Koran (in
which case it was superfluous) or not in the Koran (in which case it was unnecessary or
false). It is necessary to dialogue with the world. The Bible is not sufficient for knowing
the Bible, if you will. To know ourselves, we need others. To know our faith, we need to
be in contact with other religious traditions. This is significant in Western thought:
a. Pindar, Herodotus, Antiphanes: being mortal, you must think as a mortal
b. Xenophon: know yourselfSocrates: the unexamined life is not worth living
c. Plato (quoting the inscription over the shrine at Delphi): know thyself
d. Cicero: know yourself not out of arrogance but rather to know the reality
e. Diogenes: it is difficult to know yourself; it is easy to admonish others
f. Juvenal: know yourself as having come down from heaven
g. Erasmus: in quo modestiae commendatio est (i.e. the praiseworthy fruit of self-
knowledge is modesty
E. Historically, the knowledge of oneself has been closely linked with the encounter with God.
The core of the hermeneutic methods we have been considering is precisely the recognition
of the Other and ones own identity at the same time. To consider a few paradigmatic
figures:
1. Abraham: our father in faith, who underwent his journeys and became aware of Gods
promises for him precisely in the personal encounter of prayer.
2. Moses: who grew up in the city of Pharaoh, a very religious environment full of temples
and Egyptian priests, but God did not speak to Moses in this environment. He spoke to
him, rather, in the desert of Sinai. There he knew emptiness. In the desert, only the
 36

essential remains. And exactly there, Moses had personal contact with God, in which He
revealed Himself as He is: I am for you; I love you. At the same time, Moses knew his
own identity and received his mandate to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.
3. John the Baptist: Certainly, he lived in desert, and the people of Jerusalem flocked to
him, because they realized that his way of speaking was different than that of the priests
and doctors of the law, since he spoke from the force of personal contact with God. He
knew God immediately, personally, and he spoke from this experience.
4. Jesus Christ: he is obviously in a different category than all of the above, but even so,
he provides the supreme model for us in his humanity. In particular, we can note the
power of his inner experience of the Father and read his own temptations as indicating
an interior journey.
5. Paul: after his conversion on the Damascus road, he did not go up immediately to
Jerusalem but rather went into the desert for a period of some years, during which his
own identity was re-formed in the light of his direct experience of Jesus.
6. Augustine: although he had heard the preaching of Ambrose, he still had to undergo a
personal conversion, after which he spent some years in a monastic, contemplative
lifestyle. Some of his most characteristic sayings indicate this dynamic very well:
a. Noverim me, noverim te (I will myself, and I will know You)
b. Noli foras irein interiore hominis habitat veritas (Dont go outsidetruth dwells
within man)
c. Deus interior intimo meo (God, who is deeper with than my most inner self)
7. Bernard: his analysis of humility as the virtue by which we know ourselves truly.
Mysticism in the Christian tradition always has a connection with ascetic practice.
8. Anselm: redi in te ipsum (go back and search within yourself)
9. Thomas Aquinas: his investigation of how the intellectual soul knows itself and all that is
within it (ST I, q. 87) involves an implicit reference to the dicta of Socrates and Plato
above.
10. Meister Eckhar: the knowledge of oneself is the perfection of the human condition
11. Ignatius of Loyola: After his conversion, before his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he lived
an entire year in a grotto near Montserrat. He was learning to note his interior
experience, learning to make examinations of consciousness. His Spiritual Exercises
are, he writes, Rules to recognize the spirits: they are not just about knowing one's
self, but also the spirits that are affecting one, in order to know the will of God. That's the
aim: knowledge of God's will. His phenomenological investigation of his interior
movements as being connected to God himselfhow God acted inside him, patterns in
the movement of the spirits. He did not do this introspection for its own sake but rather
for the purpose of following Gods will.
F. Gaudium et Spes, 10: the basic question of what is man? continually arises, particularly in
our own time.
1. Vatican II: citing this long tradition, the Council says in GS 10:
a. Nevertheless, in the face of the modern development of the world, the number
constantly swells of the people who raise the most basic questions or recognize
them with a new sharpness: what is man? What is this sense of sorrow, of evil, of
death, which continues to exist despite so much progress? What purpose have these
victories purchased at so high a cost? What can man offer to society, what can he
expect from it? What follows this earthly life?
b. The Church firmly believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all,(2) can
through His Spirit offer man the light and the strength to measure up to his supreme
destiny. Nor has any other name under the heaven been given to man by which it is
fitting for him to be saved.(3) She likewise holds that in her most benign Lord and
Master can be found the key, the focal point and the goal of man, as well as of all
human history.
 37

2. The Council again cites the question, what is the meaning of evil that continues despite
such great progress? This leads into the second part of the lecture:
III. Knowing Ourselves and the Experience of Evil
A. Through discussion, we noted a number of different categories of evil: physical evil (malum
physicum et psychicum), moral evil, and metaphysical evil.
B. What is the source of suffering in this world? What gives suffering?
1. Disorder: lack of respect for the order given, the order of nature, the order of ourselves.
Sickness, hunger, death, injustice, loneliness, violence, war, despair, sin...
2. There are various categories:
a. Natural evil (i.e. natural catastrophes)
b. Physical evil, malum physicum/ malum psychologicum (i.e. pain/suffering built into
nature)
c. Metaphysical evil, malum metaphysicum (existential evil)
d. Moral/personal evil, malum morale/ malum personale
e. Structural evil, malum structurale
i. A new and important analogical concept. It was first used in liberation theology.
Originally it was held suspect by the magisterium, but today the concept is used
in the Catechism.
3. How are these things interpreted? What are the arguments to justify evil, to justify God's
existence in the presence of these evils?
C. Fr Patsch also noted the category of structural evil as one of particular relevance in our
time. How do we address this issue? Several different approaches have been tried:
1. The optimistic solution of Leibniz, which sees evil as necessary for the existence of the
good.
2. The tragic solution of the existentialists (Sartre and Camus on one hand, Dostoevsky on
the other). This has perhaps its most depressing formulation in Sartres statement that
hell is other people (in No Exit).
3. The intellectual proposal of many traditional approaches, notably those of Augustine and
Aquinas (the latter noted for the statement that quia malum, Deus estbecause there is
evil, God must exist). Remember, evil is a Privatio Bonum, the Thomistic idea that evil
is the absence of a proper good. Or, evil is the price of free will.
4. The apophatic proposal expressed by Rahner.
a. Against the traditional apologetics, Rahner argues that four basic approaches to
explaining why God permits evil have been tried and found wanting: evil as a natural
concomitant of good (e.g. Leibniz); evil as a result of freedom; evil as an opportunity
for growth and maturation; and evil as a phenomenon which re-orients us toward the
next life.
b. Per Rahner, the presence of evil is a mystery in the strict sense: given Gods
incomprehensibility, we should not expect to be able to explain away His purposes
in creation. Practically, he recommended not attempting direct discourse on the
subjectthis mystery is not a question to which we can make a response. Rather,
we should take the example of Job and his friends, who remained together in silence
for 7 days before attempting to speak of it. This shows the appropriate attitude
before the mystery.
5. A pastoral perspective: what does one say to a person in a concrete situation of
suffering?
a. Per Fr Patsch, the first thing to emphasize is that the suffering is not some kind of
vengeance from a wrathful Godit is generally unfruitful to look for a particular sin
as the cause.
b. Similarly, the question of why? is generally not fruitful, as theres not really a good
response. They should be encouraged to give thanks to God in spite of the suffering,
 38

but we should be wary of trying to use the blessings received in suffering as an

explanation for it.
c. Finally, we should always keep in mind that evil will inevitably remain something of a
mystery. Bringing up the Churchs teachings here would likely not be fruitful as the
person is not likely in a position to receive them.
d. Can we say that the evils we endure are fruit of our own sins and not the work of
God? The professor thinks yes, in our situation after the Fall. It's impossible to live
without being under the influence of this situation of sin.
e. Thus, on a pastoral note, Fr. Patsch said not to ever preach in a direct way to men
who are suffering. Instead, first of all listen. The same mystery is manifested. A
mystery is not a question to respond to, but something to open to, allowing the same
mystery to reveal itself.

7 May 2014 [Note: part of this lecture included a summary of the problem of evil, which was
included in the ntoes above.]

Homo capax Dei (mans capacity for God)

I. Man as capax beatitudinis and potentia obedientialis
A. Man is the image of God insofar as he is capable of God and can participate in His nature
(Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, 8, 11).
1. This statement implies that man by nature can participate in Gods nature, not in the
gnostic sense of a divine spark inside of us, but in the sense that ontologically, we are
able to participate in God.
2. Bonaventure identifies the soul itself as the image of God in man and the locus of this
capacity for God.
3. St Thomas uses similar language in speaking of man as capax Trinitatis (ST, I, 93, 7)
and capax beatitudinis (II-II, 25, 12, ad 2).
4. In his treatise on happiness, Aquinas also develops a proof for Gods existence based
on the fact that humans are not content for long with any finite or created good, which if
we assume that human nature is not intrinsically absurd implies that we are open in
some way to an infinite happiness.
B. Another important idea from St Thomas: man as a potentia obedientialis. This obediential
potency is a certain passive receptivity to God, a radical openness of man to God as the
infinite horizon of our being and thought.
1. As St Anselm notes, the grandness of being is such that every time one conceives
something (except for God), one can immediately conceive something yet greaterthe
instant I create an image, I have immediately gone beyond that image, which implies an
infinite cognitive horizon against which all reflection takes place.
2. Obediential potency, then, is the foundational capacity of man to receive Gods self-
revelation:
a. obediential in that it is a free response to something offered
b. potency in that it can (but is not necessarily) obediently responsive to God.
3. St Thomas connects this idea with the capacity for seeing God (visio Dei), as in ST III,
11, 1. Our desire is infinite, but natural goods are limited, so the possibility of this
complete fulfillment in the infinite good of the beatific vision must exist.
II. Man as desiderium natural videndi Deum
A. From this, we can develop another anthropological point: man as desiderium naturale
videndi Deum (natural desire to see God). Three general tendencies have emerged in the
reflection on this point:
1. Extrinsecist tendency
 39

a. Emphasizes a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural orders out of a
desire to highlight the absolute gratuitousness of grace.
b. Results in a refusal to allow for an ontological tendency in man towards the absolute
happiness of God (because this would seem to imply that God is in some sense
obliged to give humanity supernatural grace).
c. Best-known exponents: R. Garrigou-Lagrange and H. Lennerz (best read with an
eye toward their historical context of concerns about problematic Protestant and
rationalistic approaches to nature and grace)
d. Popular before Vatican II, especially in the Roman school
2. Intrinsecist tendency
a. Interested in overcoming an exaggerated dualism that resulted from the struggle with
Protestant and rationalistic thought mentioned above.
b. Emphasized the innateness of the desire to see God and the profound unity of the
orders of grace and nature.
c. Not necessarily anti-Thomist
d. A particularly important exponent was Henri de Lubac.
3. A program of synthesis and enrichment (elucidated by Pie-Ninot)
a. Sought to capture the important insights of both of the above ways of thinking (i.e.
reconciling the transcendence of Gods grace with the real affinity of the human spirit
to it).
b. Important exponents include many major names of 20 th century theology, with a slant
towards Transcendental Thomism: Marchal, Rousselot, de Lubac, Lonergan,
Rahner, Alfaro, Belloso, Ladaria, and many others.
c. This line of thought is also an emphasis in the Gregorians school of thought. [Note:
Fr Patsch did not develop this point in detail, but there is a nice overview on pp. 101-
4 of La Teologia Fondamentale.]
4. Recommended reading: Salvifica Doloris by Pope St. John Paul II.

What Fundamental Theology for the 21st century?

I. An approach the diversity of various theologies
A. [Note: this portion involved a musical demonstration with a popularity poll.]
B. Is our musical preference just a matter of personal taste? Does this notion of personal taste
have to do with our theological preferences? What about our preference for liturgical
music?
C. As in music, there is a certain amount of legitimate pluralism within theology. To push the art
analogy, consider Gadamers statements in Truth and Method:
1. Is there really no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to
truth which is certainly different from that of science but just as certainly is not inferior to
it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that experience of art is
a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge
which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of
nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all
conceptual knowledgebut still knowledge, i.e. conveying truth?
2. Furthermore: Art is knowledge, and experiencing a work of art means to share in that
knowledge.
D. There are matters of taste, but the truth is objective; it has a dignity not to be undervalued.
E. However, inside the human sciences, including theology, the truth is not objective in the
same sense as in the natural sciences. This points to a needed change in our notion of
objectivity: it is necessarily mediated by subjectivity. Fr Patsch suggests that because of
this, a point which indicates the possibility and even need for a degree of pluralism in
theological approaches. This is not to say that there are not criteria. The taste of Ratzinger,
insofar as he prefers Mozart as a composer, is an absolute in the Platonic sense. But that
 40

doesn't mean that other preferences are necessarily mistaken. The absoluteness of the
truth and the variety of expressions is something to be maintained.
II. Theological Pluralism, continued [Note: this section (up until historical overview) is from
the May 14th lecture but was included here due to similarity in content.]
A. A characteristic of theology these days is a diversity of approaches, which raises the
question of the legitimacy of this diversity. Returning to our discussion of music from the last
lecture, Fr Patsch clarifies his point that a range of theological approaches are permissible
by analogy with the acknowledged importance of enculturated music within the liturgy.
Citing again Gadamer in Truth and Method, we note that although the knowledge within
art is not that same as scientific or mathematical knowledge, it nonetheless speaks to the
truth. Art is not simply an aesthetic nicety added on top of something already complete, but
rather beauty has something to do with truth itself. Von Balthasars project of connecting
beauty with truth in theology was an application of a similar insight.
B. The question arises, though, regarding the objectivity of the truth. To answer it, we should
again distinguish between the clear and distinct truths of the hard sciences and the truth
achieved in the humane sciencesthere is a real difference of approach, and so we should
not expect to either use the methods of (e.g) physics nor obtain a similar type of surety. As
an example, consider historiography when it looks at a battle in South Tyrol (now a region
of Italy but which formerly was part of the Austrian Empire). Two history texts, one Italian
and the other Austrian, will likely report the same facts, but the interpretations will vary. Who
is right in a historical sense? There are ways to arrive at the truth here, but they involve
interpretation and a consideration of the context. Note that this contextualization of truth is
not the same as relativism: not all perspectives and interpretations are equally valid. Going
back to the question of music, we can note a sort of hierarchy of musical forms based on
depth and the broadness of the interpretation in the greatest music.
C. So what fundamental theology should we seek in the 21 st century? The answer to this, of
course, will depend upon the context. A major weakness of mainstream Catholic theology of
50 years ago was precisely its monolithic status: it presented a single theology that was
perhaps appropriate for Enlightenment-era Europe but ignored the concerns and questions
of the rest of the world. Asking what the best theology might be is like asking what the best
homily might beit depends on the context.
III. Historical Overview
A. [Note: Fr Patsch indicated that if/when this point comes up on the exam, he only expects us
to talk about our choice of 1 of the following philosophers/theologians. Pages 104 and
following in the Pie-Ninot textbook parallel this treatment exactly but in much more detail, so
it is advisable for everyone to read through the section in the book which corresponds to
their chosen author, particularly if they decide to do one of the ones that Fr Patsch breezed
through rapidly.]
B. Blaise Pascal (17th century)Reasons of the heart
1. French polymath
2. Following a mystical experience, devoted himself to writing about philosophy and
theology; was opposed to the rationalist currents of his time.
3. He was a prisoner of the Nationalism of his era and of his metaphysical presuppositions,
but this doesn't diminish his genius. He was also a Jansenist.
4. Important work: Penses
5. Big idea: Pascals wager
a. If God exists and I believe in him, I gain everything (salvation)
b. If God exists and I dont believe in him, I lose everything
c. If God does not exist and I believe in him, I lose in the end but have had a more
pleasant existence, since I did not have to believe I would crumble into dust
d. If God does not exist and I do not believe in him, I lose everything
e. So . . . you have nothing to lose by believing, and possibly everything to gain
 41

C. Maurice Blondel (19th/20th century)method of immanence

1. French academic who argued for belief in God against the secular positivism dominant
in his time
2. Emphasized the importance of interior experience of faith, spiritual knowledge.
3. Important work: Action
4. Big idea: If it's true that the demands of revelation are foundational, then you cant say
that we are entirely at home even when at home
a. In other words, even in pure philosophy, there will necessarily be hints and traces
of the theological and the supernatural in its insufficiency.
D. Paul Tillich (20th century)method of correlation
1. German Protestant theologian, moved to America to escape Nazi persecution.
2. Important work: Systematic Theology
3. Big ideas:
a. Theological topics are only those that can become an object of ultimate concern
i. Revelation necessarily connects with precisely these existential questions
ii. Ultimate concern is that which determines our being or non-being
b. Method of correlation: Apologetic attempt to explain the contents of Christian faith as
responding to questions of ultimate concern
c. When I ask something, I determine the answer I receive, in some way, and the
answer has to be prepared by a good, well-put question.
E. Xavier Zubiri (20th century)understanding of the binding of man
1. Spanish philosopher
2. Important work: [not in notes]
3. Big idea: Atheism, Theism, and Gnosticism are historic modes of experience of the
foundation of the real. They are not mere conceptual attitudes.
F. Juan Alfarofrom the problem of man to the problem of God
1. Sought to create a phenomenological anthropology
2. Important work: From the Problem of Man to the Problem of God (1988)
3. Big idea: leave behind grand theories and try to return to the things themselves; this is
the basic idea of phenomenology.
a. In the same existential experience there emerge signs of transcendence.
b. Phenomenological-transcendental reflection
G. Johann Baptist Metzpractical and critical articulation
1. German theologian
2. Important work: La Fede, nella storia e nella societ.
3. Says that transcendental theology doesn't help theology.
4. Concerned about a divorce between theology and practical reality, he explored how
faith is in history and in society, articulating a political theology that emphasizes
historical-social dimensions
5. Three stages:
a. Remembering (the history of mankind itself, including that of the Cross and of all the
oppressed)
b. Narration
c. Solidarity
i. Special task of theology
ii. Represented particularly the conquered and the marginalized
iii. Solidarity not only with those living, but also those of the past and future who
have no other present voice
H. Hans Jrgen Verweyenthe search for the ultimate foundation of meaning
1. Did doctorate with Ratzinger.
2. Major work: Gods Final Word: Compendium of Fundamental Theology
3. Big idea:
 42

a. Basic ground of meaning is the capacity of man for revelation

b. To be able to affirm something like there is no human liberty, you've got to be able
to make a choice between true and false.
c. Human libertys decision is always absolute.
d. Double structure of discourse
i. Performative (1st level)speech acts
ii. Propositional (2nd level)communication of information
e. In the Anglo-Saxon world, this is foundationalism and anti-foundationalism.
I. Hans Urs von Balthasarphenomenology of love
1. Emphasis: mysterium salutis (from above; mystical/spiritual)
2. Many important works:
a. The Glory of the Lord
b. Theo-Logic
c. Theo-Drama
d. Love Alone is Credible
i. Those that love know God better than anyone else
3. A set of big ideas: history of Christian reasoning as consisting of three approaches
a. First approach: a cosmological reduction (Greek philosophy and past theology
derived therefrom)
i. Tendency to frame theology within natural religion
ii. Christianity appears as a logical fulfillment of natural reason
iii. But where is Christianitys distinctiveness?
b. Second approach: an anthropological reduction (follows Blondel)
i. Arising from existential and anthropocentric philosophy
ii. Runs the risk of falling into a pure immanentism (i.e. religion loses its
supernatural character)
c. Third approach: the method of love
i. Beholding the glory of God in revelation, love for him arises within us
ii. Perceiving His beauty communicates the possibility of us responding to Him in
love.
4. The Big idea: phenomenology of love
a. The perception of divine love is itself the basis of Christianitys credibility. From Love
Alone is Credible:
i. Apart from this revelation of love, all negative theology remains so empty that it
is in immediate danger of drifting either into atheism (or agnosticism) or a
philosophy (or mysticism) of identiy. By contrast, once we see that the figure of
revelation remains unintelligible unless it is interpreted in light of Gods love, then
the Wholly-Other and Ever-Greater appears tangibly and surprises us in the
ultimate and unsurpassable incomprehensibility of divine love.
b. This takes seriously our status as the intended recipients of revelation.
c. Does it indicate a weakness of reason? Not really, as the history of philosophy
provides even stronger grounds to believe in a basic limitation of our fallen reason:
the greatest philosophers have often made the greatest errors.
1. Aristotlewomen and slaves lack full human dignity
2. Hegelreduction of the infinite to the finite
3. Heideggerpolitical association with the Nazis
J. Karl Rahnertranscendental anthropology
1. Emphasis: sacramentum mundi (from below; earthly)
2. Although respectful of St Thomas, he struggled against certain closed-minded Thomists
who could not imagine progress in theology apart from Thomism.
3. Sought to promote a qualitative leap from neo-scholasticism to the modern era.
4. Important works: Schriften zur Theologie, Lexicon for Theology and the Church
 43

5. Big idea: How is God experienced by us? The Answer: transcendental experience,
according to which we can all experience God.
a. His thought covered many different subjects, but to begin consider primarily a
conference he gave in Frankfurt in February 1984, just a few months before he died:
i. One day all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves had arrogantly
decorated the sky of our existence, will cease to shine and will go out; one day
death will bring in an extraordinarily silent void, and we will receive this void with
faith, hope, and in silence as our true essence; one day all of our preceding life,
however long, will appear to us like a single, brief explosion of our freedom,
which seemed to us drawn out only because we saw it in slow motion, an
explosion in which the question is transformed into reply, possibility into reality,
time into eternity, given freedom into freedom handed over in act; one day, terribly
afraid and ineffably jubilant, we shall discover that this enormous and silent void
that we experience as death is in reality filled with that originary mystery that we
call God, who by his pure light and love takes away and gives us everything; one
day the face of Jesus, the Blessed One, shall emerge from this unfathomable
mystery.
b. A question at play in all of this is: how does one experience God?
i. This question is an existential one for Rahner, and his approach provides a way
of talking to even the most refined of us moderns. Indeed, theology has the task
of speaking not just to theologians but also to laypeople. He says,
1. The task of explaining the experience of God to a layman is entrusted to the
priests, but others have certainly experienced God as well... A mystical
experience belongs to the evident Christian realities: these are always
present, regardless of our opinions (Cf. Slides).
ii. The basic approach:
1. Everyone has already experience Gods grace in some way, as His grace is
always present and active.
2. This experience needs to be brought out, reflected upon, and made self-
reflective.
3. In particular, transcendental experience is a type of experiential grace,
though reflection upon it occurs a posteriori
4. Various dimensions can be involved:
Philosophical
Existential - E.g. even a rural person with little education who truly loves
another has a profound transcendental experience: If a peasant loves his
girlfriend, I can give him a discourse on love and he wouldn't understand.
Nevertheless, he has had an experience of the love I'm talking about, in
fact, he has lived an experience of love in a much more profound, radical,
and honest way (Rahner). You see things like this often in pastoral
experience.
Mystical - Democratic conception of mysticism, in that it is accessible to
everyone and not merely to a few

14 May 2014

I. Two parenthetical notes:

A. [Note: Fr Patsch mentioned that he will give concrete indications regarding the exam at next
weeks lecture. In the meantime, he once again recommends reading the course texts
provided on the theses or the complementary bibliography. He also suggests that
understanding the material from the slides on the course site is a good way to prepare.]
 44

B. [Note 2: a fair amount of the review material from this lecture was grouped with the previous
lecture, including Theological Pluralism and much dealing with von Balthasar and Rahner.]

Fundamental Ecclesiology Today

I. The Interpretative Context
A. As Fr Patsch notes, many of us could describe the idea of a single, transcendent God even
to a non-believing friend in perhaps an hour. Describing who Jesus is would perhaps take a
day to get even the basics across, but describing the Church . . . it might take a week! To
find a starting point, we should consider our current and changed Western context. Two
basic trends are particularly important:
1. Globalization
a. A general phenomenon of de-territorializationthanks to electronic commerce and
travel, ones exact location has become less important both for business and
pleasure.
b. Interconnectivityfrontiers are now very flexible, to the point that many speak of the
end of the nation-state
c. Global infrastructuredependence on resources and activities world-wide leads to a
corresponding enlargement of our thought
d. Acceleration of social trendsmany long-term processes are happening at an ever
more rapid pace, leading to cultural confusion
2. Postmodernism
a. Here, we mean the term in its less radical sensea new way of thinking, not an
extreme type of deconstruction or relativism
b. Rationality is no longer all-powerful in cultureother considerations are generally
prior to it. In today's intellectual climate, we don't consider Reason to be all-powerful
as we used to at the beginning of this century.
c. Break-down of the subject-object schema: the myth of the autonomous and free
human subject has also been shattered in the last decades.
d. A nave belief in progress is no longer dominantmost people dont believe that
things can or will always get better
e. The idea of neutral, value-free knowledge has been seriously called into question
f. End of the belief that every problem has a technical solution
g. As Jean-Franois Lyotard defined it, postmodernism is the skepticism of
metanarratives (overarching social or cultural frameworks that legitimize actions and
provide shared meaning).
i. Example: the death of the metanarrative of social progress by planning occurred
on 15 June 1972, with the detonation of a failed urban renewal project in St
Louis.
h. It's a world that's post-industrialist, post-colonialist, post-Europocentrist, post-
patriarchal, and inter-religious. You can't live in this world and do theology without
taking this postmodern globalization seriously.
i. This postmodernism is marked also by a context of interreligious dialogue
II. The Church: The Sacrament of Christ in the World
A. This Church is a sacrament of Christ. When you have the opportunity to give a public
lecture, it's always worth it to set up a structure before speaking. This is true also when
taking an exam: Always an introduction, the points, and a conclusion. If you're speaking on
the Church, you could use this provocative introduction: the Church as a sinner.
B. Is the Church a sinner? You can't speak about the Church today without addressing this.
This would be appreciated by most audiences today. Rahner, in an essay on the Church
and sinners, writes: the fact that the Church is a Church of sinners is not very much in the
foreground of theological interest; that may be due to the fact that this is a daily given of
experience that is too little noted.
 45

C. Having overcome this challenge, and that of an overly Romanocentric conception, one can
go forward. Both Rahner and Von Balthasar address this. Rahner: Church of Sinners; Von
Balthasar: Casa Meretrix. How can the Church be a pure prostitute?
1. This is first of all a dogmatic question: what do revelation and tradition say regarding the
un-holiness of the Church? (pp. 419-434)
2. Given this context, a basic issue that must be thematized at the outset of a
contemporary fundamental ecclesiology is the sin of the Churchs members and the
structural sins connected with the institutional Church itself. Fr Patsch thus recommends
Church as sinner as a fruitful starting point in this consideration, given that the present
of so many sinners and so much sin in the Church is a datum of our daily experience.
Indeed, for many seminarians and religious, this realization leads to the first crisis of
vocationthe Church is on one hand a very human institution. In von Balthasars
phrase, She is a Casta Meretrix (prostitute who is pure).
3. Rahners reflections on this subject are worthy of consideration. For him, it is an
important dogmatic question to consider the meaning of revelation and tradition in light
of the non-sanctity of the church on earth, which is a net containing good and bad fish
that will not be separated until the end of time. As Christ says in Revelation, I know
your works, that you seem to be alive but are actually dead.
4. Historically, some of the Churchs hardest challenges have been from movements that
begin in scandal from the sinfulness with the Church: Docetism, Montanism, Catharism,
Protestantism, Jansenism. Consider the sad case of Tertullian, who saw the Church as
only a house of prostitutes and ended in Montanism. As Rahner notes, any spirituality
that cannot bear the servile and sinful figure of the Church will become a type of
religious fanaticism. The key: although sinners can rightfully belong to the Church, their
sin always remains in a stark contradiction of the Churchs proper essence. The Church,
then, has a sacramental status, in that She is a sign of something beyond Her that
effectively produces grace indeed, the Church is the ur-sacrament (the primordial
sacrament) of God. We must distinguish between the visible corporeality and the full
reality filled with grace. Just as with sacraments, we should also distinguish between a
valid belonging/reception and a fruitful one.
D. As Jesus cautions, we must avoid the attitude of O God, I thank you that I am not like that
sinner. In many ways, the case of the woman caught in the act of adultery is much like that
of the Church: though having sinned, her Lord forgives her sin.
E. Three methods of ecclesiology:
1. Turning to the subject of ecclesiology, it is interesting to note that as a full-blown
dogmatic treatise it was practically inexistent at the academic level prior to the Council.
In fundamental theology, it was treated apologetically as a demonstratio Catholicai.e.
why the Catholic Church is the superior church. The method was a via historica that
involved consulting ancient documents to prove that the Roman Church has always
been essentially the way it is.
2. There was also a via notarum, which looked for the four notes of the Church that must
always be present: one, holy, Catholic, apostolic. The Council took up this language
(from the Creed) but intentionally did not identify the Roman Catholic Church with the
one, holy, Catholic, apostolic Churchrather, Lumen Gentium 8 says that this Church
subsists in the Catholic Church rather than is simply the Catholic Church, a subtle but
important distinction that recognizes the many good and true things that exist in other
ecclesial bodies.
3. Finally, there was a via empirica which regarded the concrete existence of the Church
as a sort of moral miracle that functioned as a divine sign.
III. Vatican IIs Contribution to Ecclesiology
A. The Council documents entailed a fundamental re-thinking of the above methodology. Most
of the major documents took up the theme of the Church as sacramental, involving external
 46

and internal signs along with a connection to them. Thus, the Church is seen to have two
sides: a spiritual/eschatological essence and a historical/institutional existence.
B. This avoids reducing the Church to a juridically material object and recognizes the genuine
mediating reality present in it. Per Lumen Gentium 1, the Church is the community of faith,
hope, and love which has an intimate union with God and a unique role in the unity of the
entire human race.
C. Once again, the Church is the primordial sacrament. The origin of this thought takes us
back to Rahner's book on faith. Why must we speak of the Church as fundamental
sacrament? Because if we analyze her with the historical-criticism that's been applied the
Bible, even the validity of the sacraments is problematic. Not even baptism is safe: early on
the verbal form varied. All the sacraments present this problem when it comes to the
institution by Jesus. Their institution must be understood in an analogous manner to the
foundation of the Church by Jesus. If Jesus founded the Church, then by this foundation,
the Church, at bottom, has the duty and right to specify and institutionalize the sacraments.
All the sacraments, those of institution, of service to communion, and of healing, are all
based on this foundation, that is, the institutionalization of Our Lord. This is freeing for
theologians: you don't have to prove that the sacraments come verbally from Jesus, but you
can presuppose it in this broad sense. The Church is more credible if it gives testimony
with its own life (Synod of Bishops, 1985). This is a beautiful justification, as the synod
fathers say. We must remember that testimony, in Greek, is martyrdom.
D. Thomas, following Augustine, speaks of this distinction: some things are only sacrament,
some things are only reality, and some things are both sacrament and reality. This is very
Catholic: Both and, not either or. Sacramentum tantum, et res et sacramentum.
IV. Overview of Post-Conciliar Fundamental Ecclesiology
A. Many major post-conciliar theologians took up some version of the via notarum (Rahner,
Congar, Kehl, Sullivan, Kng) under various approaches: the methods of relationship,
finality, paradox, and future unity. Regarding relationship, Congar notes the Catholic values
and valid elements present in other Christian communions, and so Catholic critiques of
them must not marginalize the great truths in them. Universality, then, means that in many
respects the Church can be found outside the visible bounds of the Catholic Church, where
fullness of truth is uniquely located. Thus, for Congar, the true apologetic for the Catholic
Church is ecumenicism.
B. The method of finality emphasizes seeing the Churchs reality by considering her final
goal and destination. Historical approaches have focused on an exploration of the Churchs
founding, the early Church, and the history of the Roman primacy.

21 May 2014

Fundamental Ecclesiology, Part II

I. Changes in the Contemporary Context (holdover from previous lecture)
A. Postmodernism is an ambiguous concept of uncertain value.
B. Lyotard defined postmodernism as the suspicion of metanarratives (incredulity in the
encounter with metanarratives).
C. Though this has often been taken in a relativistic sense, the suspicion of all metanarratives
is itself a metanarrative.
D. In this sense, it is not so easy to escape from metaphysics.
 47

E. This suspicion is a basic feature of contemporary culture, generating two erroneous

reactions:
1. Relativism, which results in an attitude of laissez-faire that betrays the past.
2. Fundamentalism, or imperialism, which obsesses over the past, constituting a sort of
theological necrophilia which refuses to engage the changed situation.
F. It will be our task to formulate an ecclesiology. To some degree, this will depend on ones
own particular context. Globalization and localization go together.
G. Some basic positive themes of contemporary culture to emphasize: sustainability; ecology;
ethical obligation; inclusion; solidarity; empathy (a favorite word of Fr Patschs); relationality;
and global responsibility.
H. Three classical approaches to ecclesiology (again):
1. The via notarum (considering the basic marks of the Church as present)
2. The via historica
3. The via empirica (considering the Church from the perspective of sociology, institutional
dynamics, etc.).
I. The basic characteristic of fundamental ecclesiology since the Council has been to see
these three united in a via testimoniithe witness that the Church and Her members give to
Her authenticity in many different ways.
II. The Church as Rooted in Jesus Christ
A. Many different images have been used to illustrate the Church, among which is the very
famous city on a hill which is built on a rock.
B. In Ad Gentes 36, the council Fathers saw the Churchs first and principle responsibility as
being a sign held up before the nations: Let everyone know that their first and most
important obligation for the spread of the Faith is this: to lead a profoundly Christian life. For
their fervor in the service of God and their charity toward others will cause a new spiritual
wind to blow for the whole Church, which will then appear as a sign lifted up among the
nations (cf. Is. 11:12), "the light of the world" (Matt. 5:14) and "the salt of the earth" (Matt.
5:13).
C. The modernist crisis of the early 20 th century is a good place to begin sketching the history
of this line of thought.
1. It involved the critical questioning of the singular foundation of the Church by Christ,
which Pope St. Pius X condemned in Lamentabili (1907) and Pascendi (1907).
2. Part of the response was the imposition of an anti-modernist oath, which among other
things emphasized the Church as having been instituted immediately and directly by
Christ himself while he was on earth (cf. DH 3540). This expresses a noble inheritance
of the Church regarding Her foundations (see also Vatican I, DH 3452, sanctam
aedificare ecclesiam decrevit)
3. The oath as such was necessary because theologians were not ready to respond to the
challenge to the Churchs status posed by modernist thought, and perhaps more
problematic, the anti-modernist program impeded the development of such responses.
4. The Catholic modernist controversy developed from several lines of research stemming
from liberal Protestant theology.
a. The early Enlightenment rationalist theologian Reimarus argued that Jesus did not
intend to found a church, but that the church resulted from a failed attempt to
reestablish the Davidic kingdom.
b. Loisy, a controversialist of the modernist school, summarized this with the famous
statement: Jesus announced the Kingdom, but its the Church that came (Jsus
annonait le Royaume, mais cest le lglise qui est venue)
i. Note that Loisy did not mean this in a pejorative sense, though it is frequently
taken that way.
ii. It actually underlines the fact that the existence of the Church was a necessary
condition for the continuation of the proclamation of the Kingdom.
 48

5. In the mid-20th century, the Lutheran theologian Ksemann (associated with both
Marburg and Tbingen) created an influential synthesis.
a. He analyzed the origins of the Church through a dialectic of the early Pauline
ecclesiology represented by the first epistles (i.e. the earliest writings in the New
Testament) vs the later ecclesiology of the deutero-Pauline corpus.
b. He describes the Pauline epistles as showing a charismatic and somewhat fluid
sense of ecclesiology.
c. He describes the deutero-Pauline corpus as representing a Frhkatholismus, an
incipient Catholic ecclesiology.
d. Thus, Ksemanns view describes a developing ecclesiology at the time of the New
Testament, a theological journey within the canon itself.
6. For Ksemann, this is a negative process, but we might take his approach and use it to
motivate the legitimacy of the Churchthe witnesses to Jesus Resurrection and their
immediate successors moved rapidly and directly to an ecclesiology recognizable to us.
7. We might also take it as a motive for the legitimacy of theological development, which in
ecclesiology is represented by the Roman primacy.
8. In these two lectures, the professor wants to convince us of the legitimacy of this. He will
defend the primacy of Peter, attempting to convince anyone who's doubtful.
9. The findings of new research: The Church arrives only after the glorification and
Pentecost!
10. More recent theologians, from Schnackenberg and Vgtle on the right and Kng and
Boff on the left share a basic structure to their research. In brief, the Church becomes
itself as such following Christs Ascension and the event of Pentecost, without properly
ecclesial acts from Jesus.
III. The Origins of the Church
A. The thought of Lohfink provides our basic approach to understanding the Churchs origins:
1. Jesus Himself was engaged in restoring the one people of God, a re-gathering of Israel.
2. Thus, there is an organic connection between the pre-Paschal Jesus and the post-
Pentecost Church.
3. Following the Resurrection, there is a structural continuity of this community but also a
transformation.
B. Theissen notes in his book The Historical Jesus: After the death of Jesus, his Jewish
renewal movement became in a first moment a Jewish sect... around 70 AD, this sect
entered a definitive schism because of the destruction of the temple. Shortly thereafter,
with the expulsion of Christians from the synagogues, the Church moves decisively from
being a Jewish sect to being an independent entity.
C. The new synthesis proposed by the International Theological Commission (ITC) in the
1985 document The Consciousness of Christ concerning Himself and His Mission
emphasizes that the early ecclesiology of the Church was implicit, developing over the
years in continuity with the basic principles that it had received from Jesus.
D. Lumen Gentium 2-5 is an important magisterial point of reference on this issue.
1. LG 2 speaks of the Father Himself has convoked the Church, which was prefigured from
the beginning, prepared for in the history of Israel, and finally instituted and manifested
in Christ.
2. LG 3 describes the mission and work of the Son, who inaugurated the Church while
present on earth and is even now at work through Her.
3. LG 4 describes how the Spirit lives in and sanctifies the Church.
4. LG 5: The mystery of the holy Church is manifest in its very foundation.
E. So, considering again Loisys question, what is the relationship between the Church and the
Kingdom of God? Although we should hesitate to identify the two strictly, nonetheless we
must maintain that the Churchs founding acts lie in Jesus activity on earth, particularly in
his preaching of the Gospel and his miracles that confirm the arrival of the Kingdom.
 49

F. The 1984 ITC document Selected Themes of Ecclesiology summarizes the founding acts
of Jesus, giving a suitable, updated Catholic synthesis of the founding of the Church:
1. The saving force of Jesus actions presumes the promises made in the Old Testament
2. The ample invitation extended to all men by Jesus to convert and believe in Him.
3. The call and institution of the 12, by which there is a reestablishment of all Israel.
4. The imposing of a new name on Simon Peter.
5. The refusal of Jesus by Israel and the rupture between the Jewish people and the
disciples of Jesus.
6. The historical fact that Jesus persisted in preaching the Kingdom. In all moments of His
life, He spoke of this Kingdom, almost as an institution.
7. The reconstitution of the community thanks to the Resurrection.
8. The sending of the Holy Spirit that makes the Church truly a creation of God.
9. The Mission to the pagans and the constitution of the Church of the pagans.
10. The definitive rupture between the true Israel and Judaisim.
G. This is not exhaustive. It's not wrong to speak of an implicit ecclesiology as the document
does. Even if its not historically easy to specify, there is still a valid, even if perhaps implicit,
founding of the Church by Jesus. There is a historically-demonstrable will to found the
Church that one can see in all of these different acts of Jesus.
IV. An Existential Excursus
A. In theological reflection, we should consider not only the positive data but also the personal
dimensions. Fr Patsch proposes the following questions to do so for this subject:
B. For you personally, is it easier to relate to Jesus Christ as man or God?
1. Obviously we know that according to Chalcedon He is true God and true man. But for
me personally, what is the aspect that is most important? Which aspect needs to be
worked on mentally?
2. If Jesus is only God, He would know the whole story of the Church up to us in His
foreknowledge.
3. If He's only man, the Church is simply a human institution, because He does not
influence the workings of providence and grace.
4. The challenge is to hold both together and to discover the origin of the Church. The
question becomes, what is our relationship with history? What is our relationship with
tradition?
C. What is my relationship with history and the Other? (a short lesson on hermeneutic
philosophy)
1. This question is basically philosophical, but since Christianity is a historically- and
personally-mediated religion, it has theological implications.
2. Note that ones mode of connection with history is closely connected to ones
relationship with the Other.
3. There are three basic approaches:
a. Indifferentism
i. The Other/history are treated as mere objects
ii. We attempt to act as neutral observers
iii. Similar to a doctor who is interested in solely diagnostic knowledge of a patient
iv. Attitude of distance, even coldness
v. The problem is that such objectivity does not exist in human affairs
1. We can pretend to do so, but the subjective perspective is always present
b. Self-centered paternalism
i. This is an attempt to relate to the other, but an immature and permanently self-
referential one
ii. Dialectic of submission-dominance, in which one side imposes its perspective on
the other
iii. The result of this approach is a type of intellectual tyranny
 50

c. Openness toward the Other

i. A mutual, reciprocal relationship
ii. I allow myself to be influenced and changed by my experience of history and the
Other
iii. I do not close myself in with my identity or the Other in his.
iv. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method
1. Every authentic dialogue presupposes and itself constitutes a language of
discussion
2. True encounter with the other results in a transformation in which I do not
remain the same as I was before
v. This approach is very productive in the encounter with other people and cultures,
as well as ones own tradition
V. Two Classic Dichotomies
A. Scripture vs the Church
1. In the Reformation period, the basic choice seemed to be between sola scriptura (on the
Protestant side) and a two-source theory of revelation (on the Catholic side).
2. Concerning Scripture, the Catholic view saw tradition as having an interpretive force
(though Scripture remained materially sufficient with respect to doctrine, a traditio
interpretiva was necessary).
3. With respect to morals and the Christian life, the Catholic view saw Scripture as
materially insufficient, and so a traditio constitutiva was necessary to supplement it.
4. Vatican II was an important effort to overcome this old dualism. The central document is
Dei Verbum (and within it, sections 6, 7, and 8), which saw both Scripture and Tradition
as arising from the same source.
B. Ius divinum vs ius ecclesiasticum
1. In the Reformation period, Luther worked from the principle of sola scriptura to argue
against any ius ecclesiasticumfor him, the Church had no binding authority, and so the
Christian was subject directly to Gods authority alone (ius divinum).
2. Trent, on the other hand, affirmed that the Church had jurisdictional authority iure divino
[i.e. God Himself has authorized the ius ecclesiasticum] in primacy and sacraments.
3. Vatican II, again attempting to overcome this dichotomy, recognizes the Churchs activity
itself as resulting from divine providence [i.e. the Churchs exercise of authority is not
arbitrary or autonomous from God].
4. The 1972 statement from the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue treated this issue similarly: the
ius divinum is itself carried within the signs of history, and so the Church is not a purely
sociological process. Rather, the action of the Spirit must be seen as present within the
Church.
5. Modern theologians recognize that there can be an implicit institution of the sacraments.
A recognition of their historical emergence by providence.
VI. Conclusions
A. To summarize this discussion of fundamental ecclesiology, we can note several themes:
1. The Churchs institution by Christ
a. We must maintain a sense of Jesus as the Churchs founder
b. We can interpret what appear to be later develops as the progressive working-out of
an ecclesiology which was fundamentally present though still implicit from the
beginning
2. The external sign of the Church is Jesus Christ Himself
3. The internal sign is the effect of grace in the saving mysteries
B. Some topics of note:
1. The Spirit as creating a new humanity (Rom 5:12-25)
2. Recapitulation of all things in Christ, including history itself (Eph 1:10)
C. In general: the Church is a universal foundation and norm
 51

1. The salvific mysteries of Christ (incarnation, paschal mystery, sending of the Holy Spirit).
2. So, is there a true founding of the Church by Christ? There are still topics to deepen.
3. The Letter to the Romans speaks of a new humanity, and Ephesians refers to the
recapitulation of all history in Christ.
4. The theological conclusion is that the primitive Church is normative for us for all times.
VII. Historical Periods of the Primitive Church
A. Apostolic period: 30-60 AD
1. Characterized by fellowship (koinonia), sharing of goods, missionary zeal
2. Several idealized descriptions are found in Acts
B. Sub-apostolic period: 60-110 AD
1. Christian testimony becomes less missionary and mobile as institutional structures form
2. The Church begins to take on a pastoral and stable character
C. New Religion: 110-? AD
1. Follows the expulsion of Christians form the synagogues
VIII. Preeminent Role of Peter
A. It is extremely likely that Jesus gave this name to Peter, given the variety of different
sources and traditions that support this fact.
B. The name indicates a couple special characteristics of Peter. He is the Twelves spokesman
and becomes the first public witness of the Risen Christ, himself becoming a good
shepherd who gives his life for the sheep and dying a martyrs death. He also commences
the Churchs practice of missions and has a major role at the Council of Jerusalem.
C. This all gives Peter a special relevance.
D. The continuing Petrine ministry of primacy in the Church has been described many times:
the Councils of Lyons, Florence, Vatican I (which provided the magna carta of the Petrine
ministry), and Vatican II; and famously explicated by Cardinals Osio and Bellarmine.
IX. Structures of Plausibility
A. Is this information completely convincing regarding the Church? Not entirely, but the
postmodern take on rationality suggests a solution.
B. In the rationalistic sense, the logos is not strong enough to convince someone only,
exclusively with rationalistic arguments. A post-modern, more humble reasoning is
necessary, one that doesn't think of itself as omnipotent.
C. The logos is not totally weak. There is a conditionality of the truth. If I come from a particular
context, there is a connection of sense. The truth is partially conditioned, and we are
predisposed to accept a truth by having an experience of human love and solidarity.
D. This predisposition, this structure of plausibility doesn't exclude the action of the Holy
Spirit; rather, the Spirit acts, sometimes despite these structures, but often most often
through these. Our predispositions and our openness to transcendence go very well
together, and we have to safeguard them.
E. For example consider these two (not mutually coherent) types of post-Enlightenment
thought:
1. 18th centuryemphasis on:
a. Reason
b. Autonomy
c. Universalism
d. Progress
e. Secularism
2. 21st centuryemphasis on:
a. A recognition of reasons limits
b. A more self-reflective autonomy
c. Empathy
d. Ethical sense of humanism
e. Spirituality
 52

F. The Church is only credible when she acts with these means in her story, and when she
does, she is credible. As Rahner said: Only when the Church shall be transformed
courageously at a world level, and ceases to be a European Church with exports in the
world, shall she be truly the soul, explicit or anonymous, of the world. In Rome, a tendency
continues to prevail that is a little too euro-centric.
G. Thus, the credibility of the Church depends on the credibility of Her activity and witness in
reaching out to all people.

28 May 2014

Paradox, Mystery, and Witness

I. Paradox, Mystery, and Witness [Thesis 10]
A. The title words of this section indicate the question of how is it possible for God to speak to
humans. The category of witness is useful in explaining this possibility. We will consider it
from three basic perspectives: its treatment in the Bible; a philosophical view; and the
Magisteriums treatment.
B. Indications of testimony in the Bible.
1. The mystery that God can speak to man, and that man can respond, is an undeniable
paradox. We want to be able to bear witness to this.
2. Within the Bible, the central figures of witness are the apostles, who testified not only to
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but also to the salvific significance of these
events. Two words figure in: eyewitnesses () and witness (). The latter
term, by far the predominant one in the New Testament, indicates something more than
simply having perceived an event: one has encountered the event and also taken a
position towards it, a commitment to its existential truth.
3. This is a big theme in Johns Gospel. As our Lord himself said to Pilate, For this I was
born, and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth (Jn 18:37).
C. Toward a philosophy of testimony
1. Several different philosophical traditions could be brought to bear on this termnotably
phenomenology, hermeneutics, and analytic philosophybut for this course we will
consider primarily phenomenology. Remember, these are the important philosophers:
a. Phenomenological - Ricoeur, Levinas, Tilliette
b. Hermeneutic - Gadamer, Vattimo
c. Analytic - Austin, Searle
d. Theological perspectives - Rahner, Geffre.
2. According to the hermeneutic school, which the professor follows most, testimony is not
a thing in itself. Similar to above, we notice from this perspective that one who gives
witness does not simply narrate a set of facts but also an interpretation of them. A
witness in the full sense of the term is never a purely neutral observer, because he or
she has been involved in and changed by the events. However, ones perspective is not
simply an arbitrary decision, as there are better and worse perspective among which we
must choose. In the Gospels, we can note that revelation does not occur as a sort of
meteor from the sky but is primarily the living reality of a person, Jesus Christ. The art
of interpretation requires that a particular position be taken. For example, look at the
various films on Jesus. They each have a specific take on Him, and this is not
necessarily bad. It doesn't mean that it's all arbitrary. There are certainly wrong
interpretations. There can be errors. But the truth sought here is not the same sort of
truth sought in the modern natural sciences.
3. Thus, the written gospels which testify to him are not merely an abstracted set of facts in
the text but rather are tendentious, that is, they indicate how those facts have changed
 53

the authors and possess for them an existential importance. As a result, we arrive at the
truth of Christ via witnesses, people who have themselves been changed by the events,
which we can only understand properly if we let ourselves as well be changed by them
(Wirkungsgeschichte).
D. Testimony and the Magisterium - In Magisterial teaching, we can note that the documents of
Vatican II use variations on the term witness over 130 times. Ad Gentes 11 proposes a
sort of Decalogue on the Churchs witness. Her members must:
1. Be joined to others by esteem and love
a. E.g. Charles de Foucald in largely Muslim Algeria
2. Acknowledge themselves as also being members of the human groups in which they
live.
a. Important particularly in our individualistic Western context, which often disdains
such connections
3. Share in the cultural and social life
a. Christianity shapes cultures!
4. Be familiar with their national and religious traditions
a. Knowing another culture and traditions well is already a testimony to the Gospel.
5. Let them gladly and reverently lay bare the seeds of the Word which lie hidden among
their fellows.
a. This is an ancient idea, which is found in the fathers. These seeds of the Word can
be found in national and religious traditions, according to AG.
6. Let them look to the profound changes which are taking place among nations.
a. This speaks of a moral evolution. In 20th century Europe, there were some of the
biggest violations of human values ever, but there was an unwillingness by the Nazis
to admit this.
7. Let them exert themselves to keep modern man, intent as he is on the science and
technology of today's world from becoming a stranger to things divine; rather, Let them
awaken in him a yearning for that truth and charity which God has revealed.
8. His disciples, profoundly penetrated by the Spirit of Christ, should know the people
among whom they live.
a. Knowing other cultures is already a testimony to the Gospel in some way, and an
expression of love for ones neighbor
9. Dialogue with others with sincerity and patience, seeking to learn the treasures that God
has given to others
10. Let them try to furbish these treasures, set them free, and bring them under the
dominion of God their Savior with the light of the Gospel
a. All of these things are not unconditionally good, and the council doesn't pretend that
they are without need of the Gospel's purifying truth.
II. Christian Testimony: Ecclesial sign of credibility
A. A Jesuit in the Holy Land describes the encounter with an old woman that had led to his
conversion. Her family had died in Communist Russia. She was bedridden, yet she was the
most joyous person he had ever met. He was baffled. She continued to respect his
Judaism, but began to speak of Jesus. He couldn't deny her joy, and in her he encountered
Jesus. Through her, he began to be a believing Christian.
B. This joy is an ecclesial sign of credibility. These three categories of testimony can be
memorized if you want:
1. Apostolic witness
a. The initial revelation was to the apostles
b. The presence of the Risen Lord who will return was undeniable among them. This is
the form, the pattern, of testimony for the Church of all times. This witness remains
central for us today, as it was incorporated into Scripture and is lived in the Churchs
liturgical celebration
 54

2. Witness of the Churchs Life

a. As Lumen Gentium 8 notes, the Church is the pilgrim community of faith, hope, and
love. The Pilgrim Church in history is made up of saints and sinners (Unitatis
Redintegratio 6).
3. Witness of the Spirit in the Church
a. In a very real way, the Spirit animates the Church
b. The surprising phrase ecclesialization of the Spirit means not that the Spirit is
somehow reducible to institutions, but rather that in some manner, in the Church
herself, the Spirit has become institution. This is the mystery.
c. There was a phase in theology that sought to divide grace and institution. Today,
though, we do not say so. We should emphasize, however, that as Catholics we find
no tension between the Spirit and the institution.
i. From the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, we could say that the
Church is a graced institution and an institutional grace
ii. Grace is received through the visible institutional structure, and grace guides and
strengthens that institution
iii. The message of Jesus Christ has never been such a huge success without the
institution itself of the Church.
C. Taken together, these three ways constitute a new via empirica (way of recognizing the
Church as divinely-instituted through empirical observations). Indeed, this is a way of
approaching credibility through the Church herself, which is a social institution which is at
the service of the Spirit.
D. The Church as an Institution
1. This approach in fundamental theology sees credibility as being found in the reality of
testimony. Thus, we can overcome the classic antinomy between faith/grace and the
institution. The Church herself is an experiential foundation for dialogue, a point of
reference and norm in our faith.
2. The Method of Paradox
a. The method of paradox is particularly clear here, in parallel with the paradox of the
Cross, which is foolishness for the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews but
the power of God to those who are being saved (cf. I Cor 1:17-31). In some ways,
we in the West are overly accustomed to the Cross. Although he disagrees with the
decision, Fr Patsch understands very well the motivation of a recently opened Jesuit
school in Japan which decided not to put crucifixes in the lecture halls: because the
symbol of a man being tortured to death is not omnipresent in Japanese culture, it
still creates a shock and a scandal there, a horror to which we are perhaps overly
accustomed. The paradox of the Cross and the Church surpasses but does not
contradict human logic: it is foolishness for this age, but it is true wisdom. A number
of authors have made this operation: Tertullian credo quia absurdum (I believe
because it's absurd), which really is not ideal, Origen, Paschal, Kierkegaard, Tillich
(method of paradox), and von Balthasar (the Church as a Casta Meretrix), as well
as de Lubac. Paradox, then, is a synthesis of elements that surpasses human logic,
forcing us to a reductio in mysterium:
3. The Reductio in Mysterium
a. At the end, it's a mystery. The greatest presentation of the Christian life, and perhaps
the most beautiful testimony, is in Acts 2:44-47: See how they love one another.
Even if Christianity is attacked from all sides, it seems that this reductio in
mysterium, that is, in amorem, is undeniable.

Future Perspectives and a Brief Reprise

I. What Perspective for the Future?
A. What new thematic keys?
 55

B. Since Vatican II is now almost 50 years past, life develops. We've seen conciliar
documents, and those of the 1985 synod, on testimony. The latter reminded us of
martyrdom as the highest form of witness.
C. What theme would be best to develop today, perhaps in a council or synod? The professor
would suggest prayer. Prayer was hardly treated by Vatican II. We preach about what
concerns us most, and in preaching, personal prayer is not treated nearly enough. There
are priests that always add some certain issue at the end: abortion, politics, etc. that aren't
connected with that day's gospel passage.
D. It is worthwhile to consider what the key themes for the Churchs witness might be today. Fr
Patsch suggests as points for reflection:
1. Authentic Christian life
2. Faithfulness to the Gospel
3. Example of life
4. Sign
5. Announcement/Proclamation/kerygma
6. Preaching/catechesis
E. Theology is interesting: what would help in teaching cannot be taught, and what can be
taught is not worth it.
II. Reprise of the Course
A. To synthesize our perspective on the identity of fundamental theology: to ground and justify
revelation as a sensible proposition of theological, historical, and anthropological
(philosophical) credibility in order to give a reason for the hope within us (I Pt 3:15). The
faith must be shown to correspond to anthropology.
B. Life as such demands a foundation: it is necessary to find meaning in it, particularly when
the end is nigh. Thus, Christian revelation has been given to us These things have been
written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that, believing, you might
have life in His Name. (cf. Jn 20:31).
C. So where does its credibility come from? As the Vatican I document Dei Filius (1870) notes,
it is the Churchs task as guardian and teacher of the Word to make apparent the faiths
credibility to every culture and time: God, through his only begotten Son, founded the
Church, and he endowed his institution with clear notes to the end that she might be
recognized by all as the guardian and teacher of the revealed word. To the Catholic Church
alone belong all those things, so many and so marvelous, which have been divinely
ordained to make for the manifest credibility of the Christian faith.
D. What are the particular characteristics of our own time? There have, after all, been many
changes since Vatican Iindeed, we can no longer speak of being in the same historical
period of modernity. The changes to our mentality from the new perspectives of Galileo and
Darwin (not to mention Einstein) have gone very deep into our culture: globalism,
positivism, and post-modernity. The Church herself parallels the Incarnation of the Word in
that she has a double structure of corporeal institution and the Spirit who gives her life: By
no weak analogy, it [the Church] is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word. As the
assumed nature inseparably united to Him, serves the divine Word as a living organ of
salvation, so, in a similar way, does the visible social structure of the Church serve the Spirit
of Christ, who vivifies it, in the building up of the body (LG 8).
E. The Church is the sacramentum universale salutis (LG 48), the sign lifted up among the
nations to testify to Jesus Christ. This expression is closer to us. The Church is a
sacrament. God is in the midst of His people, an idea already present in the OT. Her
mission is to gather the various peoples so as to become the People of God.
F. The relative accessibility of these Vatican II texts relative to Vatican I speaks to our
condition of historicity, being by nature part of a historical process.
III. Personal Approach to Credibility
 56

A. What are particular aspects of our own approach to credibility? Fr Patsch gives two, which
are somewhat in tension with each other:
1. Metaphysics-practically and etymologically, is an attempt to overcome the limits of
temporality and historicity by finding enduring truth;
2. Hermeneutics- which takes into account our own historical, cultural, and linguistic
conditions. It does not say all the other positions are conditioned while it pretends to be
objective; no, it acknowledges even its own conditioned state.
B. The two can be hard to hold together, but if we are to show the credibility of the faith in our
own time and places, we must accomplish this paradoxical task: the (eternal) Word Himself
became (temporal) flesh. How to maintain these two antagonists is a paradoxical task, as
both parts have to remain present. For we want, on the one hand to speak of something
concrete, to touch the eternal Truth of the gospel. Yet on the other hand, this Truth has
become part of our human history. Thus, this is not to solve but to hold together
paradoxically. Both must be evaluated positively.
C. The key word of this project is dialogue. Per Paul VIs Ecclesiam suam (1964, #100), he
spoke for the first time on the importance of dialogue, describing it as a series of concentric
circles around the central point at which God has placed us. This involves dialogue with
the people in four concentric circles:
1. (Outermost) All people of good will
2. Monotheists, particularly of the great Eastern and Western religions, especially Judaism,
but also the great African and Asian religions.
3. Separated brethren (other Christians)
4. (Innermost) Those within the Church herself
D. There are various consequences of this hermeneutic approach: There's a sense that we do
not have a direct approach; we need others.
E. The dialectic question-response is very fecund for theology. In putting a question, I already
condition the answer itself. The response is never independent of my question. We need to
seek broad, high questions, relevant questions, not narrow questions like What is the circle
of effect of the consecratory prayer?
F. Within the Church, there have been three general periods of history: the primitive Church
(up to 325 with the legalization of Christian in the Roman Empire); the state Church (up to
the 17th century); and the recent phase beginning with the reception of the Enlightenment in
the surrounding culture, which has again separated the Church from the official state
structure, which is more similar to the Church of the Fathers. There is a much greater
pluralism in which the Church must arrange herself. Consider the image of the man with the
Cross by a wall: it is hard to tell if he is putting it on the wall or taking it down. This parallels
our own situation today, in which it is hard to tell which direction the Church is going in.
There is hope, however, particularly on the margins of our cultures and countries where one
would think there is no hope, but we must listen to others and speak with them, but we don't
know exactly in what direction the Church will go. The professor's companions were
working in the peripheries of Madrid, and in two years they had revitalized a parish that had
seemed totally hopeless. They did it by means of the youth, and eventually the parents
started to come too. The point is that the people have a hunger for the gospel, for the truth.
It's not hopeless, there is reason to hope.
G. How do we approach the challenges of a secular age? Fr Patsch suggests two basic points
to keep in mind.
1. First, opennesssince every human person is open to and created for God, every
person will have a transcendental experience of God which is the key to dialogue with
them, and so openness is a key theme on both sides. Not physical, but real.
2. Additionally, we must be confident in our own identity. You can say, I don't know a more
direct road to God than Christian revelation. Putting this into words is testimony. The
attentive, hermeneutic formulation of this phrase is important. We don't want to say in an
 57

absolute sense what is the best road, because from infancy I am made by my personal
experiences, ideals, parents, Christian professors. Thus I can't pretend to have an
objective perspective on this question. But, with all respect and self-confidence, I can
say that I have never known a road that leads more directly to God.
H. We must also seek a unity of mysticism/spirituality and theology. The most inspiring aspect
of medieval theology was its ability to rally all aspects of Christian life to a common reality,
making a unified building of Christianity. A problem in the modern period has been the
divide between scientific theology, biblical studies, and mystical spirituality, a difference
symbolized by the distinct buildings in which the Gregorian Department of Theology, the
Pontifical Biblical Institute, and the Institute of Spirituality are located. This is not a positive
development, and our generation is called to rediscover this unity of heart and head, word
and spirit.
I. Concrete suggestions from Fr. Patsch:
1. Always keep a fat book on your work, maybe one of Fundamental Theology, and read it
regularly
2. Get out of your own country/ region at least once per year for perspective on other
customs and situations. This helps us get out of entrenched way of thinking. But
traveling in itself doesn't help it takes listening to people, to what's important for them.
3. Pray an hour each day outside the liturgya deep, contemplative spiritual life is
essential for theologians, priests, and religious