Doctrines are not floated down to the Church

Oct 07, 2015

If this October is anything like last year’s, the press covering the Synod of Bishops will focus almost exclusively on homosexuality and the possibility of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receiving Holy Communion. That emphasis is understandable, since there is certainly division among Catholics on both issues.

Not surprisingly, the press frames the synod as merely a political contest boiling down to which “side” has the numbers to win. This approach ignores the fact that the synod’s pastoral conversation about homosexuality, divorce and the sacraments will be framed by the Church’s faith, including the articulation of that faith in doctrine.

For many members of the Christian community, however, the invocation of “doctrine” might suggest the death of all hope. A popular perception of doctrine is that it is a set of rigid, uncompromising propositions that are handed down from on high: one obeys doctrine; one does not tend to look to it for help during life’s difficulties.

For the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–84), on the other hand, doctrine enables the Church to speak to the real problems of real people. Fr Rahner calls doctrine that which, when put into words, proclaims the faith of the church in ordinary language, thereby leading people more deeply into relationship with God. Put differently, doctrine invites people into friendship with God by proclaiming what the Church knows about God.

Doctrine extends to members of the church a helping hand rather than a wagging finger. This makes sense, given that doctrine exists to facilitate a relationship with God, not to provide instructions for avoiding divine wrath. Consequently, doctrine, like anything that reaches across cultures and epochs to address itself to human needs and desires, can fully make sense only in the context of those needs and desires. It can never be an abstract or technical truth, particular to one time and one place.

Calling on doctrine to fortify our relationships with God is not the same as saying that the Church needs to produce ever better, ever clearer explanations that cover all eventualities and all particularities. Indeed, attempting such a task would be futile.

One partner in the relationship —God — remains, as Fr Rahner would put it, the “incomprehensible mystery” who exceeds our grasp, while the other partner — humanity — is constantly changing. Our concerns, ideas, languages and capacities are not identical to those of the generation before us, to say nothing of how different they are from those of our ancestors from centuries ago.

So doctrine must be dynamic enough to accompany the Church in every generation, yet also reliable enough to teach us something about the unchanging God and to guide us in our life as a pilgrim Church. This tension between reliability and connection to pastoral reality is not new; it has been present throughout the history of the Church.

Where to begin? It might seem obvious to begin with some doctrine of the church as a point of departure. Fr Rahner would counsel otherwise. Precisely because doctrine flows from the church’s experience of the living God, the starting point must be predoctrinal, which, in this instance, means prepropositional as well.

To help explain what prepropositional knowledge means, Father Rahner introduces the example of a young man falling in love. The young man’s clumsy attempts to articulate his feelings to himself and to others are not, in themselves, the start of his love. He has an ineffable feeling, something precognitive that must be recognized as something.

But for the young man’s love to grow, this feeling must be expressed in some way. Fr Rahner writes, “Reflection upon oneself...in propositions...is thus a part of the progressive realization of love itself; it is not just a parallel phenomenon, without importance for the thing itself.” An experience of love is neither the feeling alone, nor the recognition of the feeling alone, but precisely the experience of recognizing and naming what one is feeling. That is when we encounter the reality of love.

Fr Rahner claims, “We discover the possible from the real.” And so the answer to the question of where to begin is simple: not with our propositions about what is real but with the real itself. This, after all, is how Jesus’ first friends encountered him. He was not consubstantial with anyone, as far as they were concerned, nor were they worried about how many natures or wills he possessed; he said and did things that first made them reorient their whole lives; only later did they rethink them.

The Church of today is not so different. When we address challenging pastoral situations, we should not immediately look for a doctrinal explanation or solution but should first make sure that we understand what is going on in the experience of the people affected.

Authentic use of Scripture
Since Scripture is the Church’s norma normans non normata, all authentic doctrine must conform to it. Any reading or application of doctrine that contradicts Scripture must be regarded as a false appropriation of the Church’s teaching.

It is important, however, to avoid the ways that Scripture has been erroneously used in the production of the Church’s doctrine. Father Rahner recognizes two of these patterns that seem to tempt the church in every age.

First, a “one-sided view of Scripture” treats the biblical text as if “each of its assertions [were] dogma and not merely theology.” Scripture, then, does not amount to a handbook of doctrinal statements waiting to be cut-and-pasted into catechisms. Scripture contains both the original kerygma and the Apostolic Church’s reflection upon it. Consequently, approaches to contentious issues in the life of the Church will avoid abusing the biblical text and drawing false conclusions from it only when their reading of the text is subjected to the most outstanding exegesis. Rigorous exegesis, as the Second Vatican Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” teaches, will produce “a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture,” thus allowing “the judgment of the Church [to] mature.”

Second, the four canonical Gospels, even the words attributed to Jesus himself, are not immune to misuse. Fr Rahner writes, “[The modern theologian] can precisely, not simply, present every saying placed upon the lips of Jesus by the evangelists as his ipsissima verba.” In its substance, this second way of misusing of Scripture does not differ from the first, but it bears mentioning in the Church today, especially given the frequency with which certain words are attributed to Jesus — the Matthean (19:7-9) and Marcan (10:11-13) sayings on divorce come to mind — have been recently invoked as demanding careful attention, most especially when real exegetical questions are dismissed on the grounds that the “plain sense” of Jesus’ words is obvious. -- America

--Continued next week