Henri de lubac biography of rory
http://www.tonyflannery.com/how-much-of-church-doctrine-do-we-really-believe/
It is stating the obvious to say that the Catholic Church has lost a great deal of its credibility, particularly here in this country. There are some very obvious reasons for that, the clerical sex abuse revelations, clerical control and the side-lining of women in decision making and ministry, various teachings on sexuality and relationships, a serious failure of leadership, and many others.
But I believe there is a deeper, and more fundamental, problem than any of the above. Some of the very basic doctrines of the Church no longer make sense to the modern mind, and are being quietly rejected even by people who still attend church. Some of these doctrines are not Scripture based, but came out of the early centuries of the Church, a time when there was a very different understanding of the world and of humanity, and, probably most significant of all, a very different language which is still used to proclaim these doctrines. (And here I am not only referring to ‘consubstantial’!) Our understanding of the universe and of the human person, through science, has greatly influenced the way we look at ourselves and the universe, and Church doctrine has not adapted to this. So it become increasingly meaningless to the modern mind. I will give some examples of doctrines that are no longer credible.
The traditional understanding of God in Catholic teaching is of a male individual, resident in the heavenly realm in the skies, a dwelling we are told we will attain to if we live well and keep the commandments. There is a whole range of problems with this understanding of God and his relationship with us, not least being the notion of God as male. Modern science, and maybe especially quantum physics, has opened up for us the wonder and mystery of the universe, and how creation was not just an event of ancient history, but is an ongoing reality. In this context it makes more sen
Sexuality After Industrialism
The gender wars within evangelicalism seem intractable, and often stale. Complementarians who strongly defend the fundamental differences between the sexes and the respective roles that correspond to them informed by Scripture and nature are opposed by egalitarians who argue that the former’s supposedly “biblical” vision is in fact idiosyncratic within the Christian tradition and contingent on certain historical circumstances, and therefore irrelevant to a different context. There is a largely untapped resource which could bring some fresh life to these debates. It is found in the provocative book Genderby the category-defying figure Ivan Illich.
An eccentric thinker, Illich’s family (including his Jewish mother) fled the Nazis in Austria, he later earned a doctorate in medieval studies and then studied philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, served as a parish priest and community organizer, and was eventually defrocked after coming under the ire of the Vatican for his attacks on the Catholic Church for its complicity in Western colonialism under the guise of third-world “development.” A penetrating social critic, Illich was championed by leftist intellectuals in the 1970s for his political views, which included attacks on mass institutionalization in Deschooling Society(1971)and Tools for Conviviality (1973).
These works are united by a common critique of modern technologies and social arrangements as displacing vernacular skills, services, and mores, and thereby undermining freedom, self-reliance, and dignity. Illich extended this line of thinking to the topic of gender in his book of that title in 1982, and lost favor with many of his admirers as a result. Even today, his Wikipedia page includes no discussion of this important work. Its argument deserves a wider hearing among evangelicals.
Illich forces us to reconsider the very foundation of our gender debates. T Back to 6.2.2 Unit 6 Contents ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Before we turn to the second half of Hochschild’s chapter, in which he discusses what the natural law means for families, let’s address the question I raised earlier about ‘human flourishing’. I said on 6.2.1 that I was using the term ‘human wellbeing’ rather than ‘human flourishing’. However Hochschild presents his understanding in terms of ‘human flourishing’; he uses this expression four times on p. 118. This is very standard in explanations of natural law. You might be thinking, “What’s the issue here? Surely those two terms mean exactly the same thing.” There is actually a very interesting issue here, and one that’s much more significant than is obvious at first. Indeed, by looking at this, we shall be able to see a way in which CST requires a critique of some natural law thinking. – >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> What difference of meaning, or at least of connotation, do you think there could be between the following two, if any? >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> – How, then, does the concept of ‘flourishing’ fit with CST’s vision of ‘integral human development’? Does it just give another way of saying the same thing, or is there a difference? It turns out that addressing this takes us into what can be seen as the most significant and controversial issue in Roman Catholic theology in the past 100 years! Let’s unpack the idea of flourishing. This word is a metaphor from botany. It comes from the Latin and French for ‘to come into bloom’ or ‘to flower’. Therefore, as it is a One Hundred Years of Modernism: A Genealogy of the Principles of the Second Vatican Council
Where the book is at its best is on the nineteenth century background to Modernism. It explains the problems inherent in Kantian subjectivity and the impact it had on theology through the evolutionism of Hegel and the fideism of Schleiermacher. It also portrays well the developments in (German) biblical criticism which impacted upon Liberal Protestantism, as a forerunner of the ideas which were to manifest within Catholic Modernism.
But when it gets to Modernism itself, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, the author’s own idiosyncratic perspective becomes an important factor which the reader needs to bear in mind. The author is a member of a splinter group which accuses mainstream Catholicism of falling into the error of Modernism. He describes Pope John Paul II, for example, as a ‘dyed in the wool modernist’ (Chp. 24). So, he is not an objective analyst of Modernism. He has a very specific interest in defending his minority perspective on Modernism.
One of the problems with this kind of approach is that it is so focused upon the error of Modernism, that it doesn’t recognise the very real philosophical and theological problems that the modernists were trying to deal with. Condemning their excesses is all well and good, but it does not solve the actual underlying problems that they were struggling with. This is essentially why the Catholic Church struggled to get on top of Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century and it is arguably why the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis had the very limited impact which the author notes.
The author thinks that Kantian scepticism should have simply been rejected as incoherent and inconsistent, and as ‘…fall(ing) into the most lamentable contradictions…’ (Chp.1). Instead, Modernists took it seriously and (allegedly) were happy to Reflection