EVANGEL. Autumn 1984
THEOLOGY
5
EdwardSchillebeeckx: God is "always absolutely new." The Revd DrJ. B. Webster StJohn's College, Durham Edward Schillebeeckx was born in Antwerp in 1914 and studied in Louvain and Parts. A Dominican priest he taught dogmatic theology at Louvain and then at Nijmegen until his retirement in 1982, and was a notable figure at Vatican II. His earlier work was mostly concerned with ecclesiology and sacramental theology, but more recently he has devoted increasing energy to exegesis and philosophy as well as to more central dogmatic concerns. He is a prolific writer, and is currently completing the third volume of his Chrtstology, after which he hopes to tum his attention to hermeneutics and to eschatology. Of late, Schillebeeckx has lived under a cloud of official disapproval after his investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1979. This article attempts to identify some of his major preoccupations from the vantage-point of his understanding of the relationship between the Christian gospel and the contemporary world in which salvation is experienced. One of the results of the profound mutations in Christian religion and theology since the eighteenth century has been the rise of historical consciousness. No serious contemporary Christian theologian can fail to grapple with the fact that Christianity is a phenomenon which, far from remaining historically stable, undergoes change. Because of this, we might say that mainstream Christian theology today understands Christianity as within history rather than history as within Christianity. The Christian faith is subject to the same sorts of historical developments as any other human phenomenon, and so its beliefs, its patterns of behaviour and its institutional expressions are not static but moments within an historical process. This problem of historical change is perhaps the most fundamental theme of Christian theology since the Enlightenment.
Because of this, we might say that mainstream Christian theology today understands Christianity as within history rather than history as within Christianity. Whilst some theologians welcome the awareness of historical development as unproblematic, most understand that it faces the Christian theologian with the question of the identity of Christianity. If Christianity is historically mobile, then can it be said to have a stable core - a "centre" or "essence" (the terms cu:e familiar throughout the theological literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries)? How can the Christian faith be said to have a continuous identity, an identity with duration through historical change? Within the evangelical tradition it is the primacy of Scripture which furnishes the element of stab ill ty; within other traditions it may be, for example, the persistence of certain patterns of ministry (such as episcopacy). For the Catholic tradition. the issues are clearly of very great significance indeed, since until relatively recently the Catholic understanding of tradition emphasised the unbroken continuityofthe teaching office
DrJohn Webster, whose stimulating series surveying contemporary continental theolgians has been appreciated by many, continues with a look at the controversial Catholic thinker, Edward Schillebeeckx. of the church and the a-historical nature of Catholic teaching. The decrees and decisions of the church, deriving ultimately from the commission of Christ to the apostles, are eternally valid and thus outside the historical process. A great deal of Schillebeeckx's work is taken up either explicitly or implicitly with this set of issues. This is as much the case in his earlier treatises on marriage or the eucharist as it is in his most recent writings on the political dimensions of the Christian experience of salvation. For he has always sought to refuse any suggestions that the theologian is forced to choose between fidelity to the Christian inheritance and commitment to the contemporary world. The "identity" of Christianity, its "essence," is not discovered by abstraction from the processes of historical development but within those processes. And so commitment to the reinterpretation of the Christian tradition need not be either dimunition of its substance or courting the favour of the contemporary world. It may be the way to discover both the content and the meaning of the gospel. Schillebeeckx's positive attitude to historical change derives partly from his understanding of revelation as that which is experienced within history rather than as that which lies outside history, and partly from the pervasive "incamational" tone of much of his writing. But it is also the fruit of the spirituality which has nourished him throughout his theological work: that of the Dominicans or Order of Preachers. Schillebeeckx's Dominicanism is not simply accidental, but of great significance for understanding his style of theology; and so it is to a few remarks on the Dominicans that we tum.
Dominican spirituality Two features of the Dominican tradition are of especial significance here. The first is its commitment to the intellectual service of the Word of God. From its inception the Dominican order has been less concerned with personal formation and ascetical theology than with study. and study as a means to an end: the proclamation of the Word of God, in the sense of the articulation of the Christian gospel in an intelligible and contemporary way. An English