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The Cambridge historian Richard Rex has noted that the first great crisis in Christianity was over the nature of the Trinity, especially over the nature of Christ, hence the early Christological heresies. The second great crisis, associated with the Reformation, was over the nature of the Church. This entailed the Protestant attack on sacramentality and the sacred hierarchy. The third great crisis, Rex observes, the one we are enduring today, is over the nature of the human person. Here the concrete issues revolve around the fact of sexual difference. Does the difference between masculinity and femininity have any theological significance?
This overview of the history of ecclesial crises is very perceptive but one might add that within the Catholic Church today the crisis is not confined to matters of anthropology. Rather a perfect storm has been building across the various branches of theology. In some cases, the crisis has been created because elements of the Catholic intellectual tradition that should exist in a symbiotic relationship have been de-coupled from one another and left in a kind of free-floating state. For example, moral theology has been de-coupled from dogmatic theology. Quite simply, the field of fundamental theology that undergirds all other branches of Catholic theology has been an intellectual battle zone for the past half century. There is no common agreement within the Catholic theological academies over such “building blocks” as the relationship between nature and grace, faith and reason, history and ontology, scripture and tradition, and the principles that ought to govern scriptural exegesis. Not only are the relationships a subject of academic debate, but the individual concepts themselves are not understood in the same way across the world of Catholic scholarship. There is, for example, no common agreement about key concepts like “grace,” “sacrament,” “tradition,” and even “priesthood.” Notions like the understanding of a priest as “alter Christus” (another Christ) are accepted by some but rejected by others. Some scholars believe that priesthood entails an ontological change in the recipient of the sacrament while others believe this idea is medieval nonsense. Some scholars read the Scriptures through the lens of contemporary social theories such as Critical Theory or a wide variety of Feminist theories, while others accept the teaching in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993), a publication of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, that is expressly critical of the employment of Marxist and Feminist social theories.
Continued below.
whatweneednow.substack.com
This overview of the history of ecclesial crises is very perceptive but one might add that within the Catholic Church today the crisis is not confined to matters of anthropology. Rather a perfect storm has been building across the various branches of theology. In some cases, the crisis has been created because elements of the Catholic intellectual tradition that should exist in a symbiotic relationship have been de-coupled from one another and left in a kind of free-floating state. For example, moral theology has been de-coupled from dogmatic theology. Quite simply, the field of fundamental theology that undergirds all other branches of Catholic theology has been an intellectual battle zone for the past half century. There is no common agreement within the Catholic theological academies over such “building blocks” as the relationship between nature and grace, faith and reason, history and ontology, scripture and tradition, and the principles that ought to govern scriptural exegesis. Not only are the relationships a subject of academic debate, but the individual concepts themselves are not understood in the same way across the world of Catholic scholarship. There is, for example, no common agreement about key concepts like “grace,” “sacrament,” “tradition,” and even “priesthood.” Notions like the understanding of a priest as “alter Christus” (another Christ) are accepted by some but rejected by others. Some scholars believe that priesthood entails an ontological change in the recipient of the sacrament while others believe this idea is medieval nonsense. Some scholars read the Scriptures through the lens of contemporary social theories such as Critical Theory or a wide variety of Feminist theories, while others accept the teaching in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993), a publication of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, that is expressly critical of the employment of Marxist and Feminist social theories.
Continued below.
Ecclesiology Today
Tracey Rowland examines the state of theology in much of the Church today
whatweneednow.substack.com
