Catholic Theology E-Book

Frederick C. Bauerschmidt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1051

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Introduction to Catholic Theology is an accessible but in-depth examination of the ways in which Catholic theology is rooted in and informs Catholic practice.

• Weaves together discussion of the Bible, historical texts, reflections by important theologians, and contemporary debates for a nuanced look at belief and practice within the Catholic faith
• Provides an overview of all major theological areas, including scriptural, historical, philosophical, systematic, liturgical, and moral theology
• Appropriate for students at all levels, assuming no prior knowledge yet providing enough insight and substance to interest those more familiar with the topic
• Written in a dynamic, engaging style by two professors with more than 50 years of classroom experience between them

Leseprobe

Catholic Theology

An Introduction

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and James J. Buckley

This edition first published 2017 © 2017 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and James J. Buckley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian, author. Title: Catholic theology : an introduction / Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt & James J. Buckley. Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016004469 | ISBN 9780631212966 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church--Doctrines. Classification: LCC BX1751.3 .B395 2016 | DDC 230/.2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004469

Paperback 9780631212973

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Cover image: Alvesgaspar, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madonna_col_bambino_(Lorenzo_Lotto)_September_2015-1a.jpg.

To those who continue to teach us theology:

our families and our parishes,

our colleagues and friends,

past and present and future—

all awaiting the day

when we will be at the end rather than in the middle,

and will not need anyone but the LORD to teach us.

(Isaiah 54:13; Jeremiah 31:34; 1 Thessalonians 4:9)

CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Texts

Abbreviations

Official Church Teaching Documents

Ancient and Medieval Works

Introduction: From the Middle of Our Life’s Journey

Reference

1 The Nature and Sources of Catholic Theology

1.1 Catholics

1.2 Theology:

Fides et Ratio

1.3 The Sources of Catholic Theology

Notes

References

2 God

2.1 The God of Scripture

2.2 Father, Son, and Spirit

2.3 The Grammar of Divinity

Notes

References

3 Creation and Fall

3.1 The God Who Creates

3.2 The Created Order

3.3 The Human Creature

3.4 Sin

Notes

References

4 Jesus Christ

4.1 The Story of Jesus of Nazareth

4.2 The Person of Jesus Christ

4.3 The Work of Christ for Us and for Our Salvation

Notes

References

5 The Spirit of Holiness

5.1 The Spirit of God

5.2 The Holy Spirit and Human Life: Disputed Questions over Grace

5.3 Mary

Notes

References

6 The Church

6.1 People of God and Body of Christ

6.2 The Pilgrimage of the People of God

6.3 One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic

6.4 The Church's Missionary Solidarity with Today's World

Note

References

7 Praying Always

7.1 Hoop-jumpers and Do-gooders

7.2 Praying Always in an Ordinary Life

7.3 Praying Always in the Sacramental Economy

Notes

References

8 The Seven Sacraments

8.1 Sacraments of Initiation

8.2 Sacraments of Healing

8.3 Sacraments at the Service of Communion

Notes

References

9 The Good Life

9.1 The Tradition of Living Well

9.2 Love as Virtue

9.3 Love as the Law of Christ

9.4 Perplexities of Action

References

10 The End

10.1 God's Word of Promise

10.2 Traditions of Catholic Hope

10.3 Thinking the End

10.4 The Substance of Things Hoped For

Notes

References

Appendix: Conciliar Formulae

Index of Scriptural Citations

Name and Subject Index

EULA

Guide

Cover

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Abbreviations and Texts

Abbreviations

CCC

Catechism of the Catholic Church

CIC

Codex Iuris Canonici (Code of Canon Law)

D

Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals

ST

Summa Theologiae

Official Church Teaching Documents

The official documents of the twenty-one Ecumenical Councils recognized by the Catholic Church can be found in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Norman Tanner, ed. and trans. (Georgetown University Press, 1990). Unless otherwise noted, the texts of all modern Church documents (including the two Vatican Councils) and papal statements, as well as the Catechism, the Compendium, and the Code of Canon Law, are available on the Vatican website (vatican.va). We have also supplied the so-called “Denzinger numbers” for those documents included in Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd edn, Peter Hünnermann rev., Robert Fastiggi et al., trans. (Ignatius Press, 2012).

Ancient and Medieval Works

Because pre-modern works are often available in a variety of editions and translations, we have cited them, where possible, by book, part, chapter and/or paragraph numbers rather than page numbers, which vary from edition to edition. At the end of each chapter we list the works we have cited along with an English translation where these are available. We have not always used the translation we have cited, sometimes preferring to make our own translation; the translation is provided for the reader who wishes to pursue further a particular work or thinker.

Introduction: From the Middle of Our Life’s Journey

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) begins The Divine Comedy, his great work of poetic theology, “midway along the journey of our life,” awakening in a dark wood and realizing that he has lost his way. In writing this introduction to Catholic theology we have found ourselves returning again and again to the idea that we are always beginning our theological endeavors in the middle. Theology, taken in its broadest sense of talking about and reflecting on God and all things in relation to God, is something that we find ourselves doing long before most of us are ever aware that there is an academic discipline called Theology. Our talking and our reflecting occur spontaneously from the middle of our life's journey, and that middle is as particular as each life story. The Second Vatican Council speaks of the Church sharing in “the joys and hopes and the sorrows and anxieties of people today” (Gaudium et Spes n. 1), and we presume this means that the Church's theology can begin from any of the joys and hopes, sorrows and anxieties that people experience. We feel ourselves lost, or found, and find ourselves praying in moments of crisis or of great joy; we wonder why it is that a loved one suffers or why we should be so lucky; we tell and are told stories about Noah and Moses and Mary and Jesus; we are taught and teach others to ask St Anthony for help when we've lost something and to talk to St Jude when things seems really hopeless; we hear politicians say, “God bless the United States of America” or “God save the Queen”; priests say, “The Lord be with you” and the rest of us respond, “And with your spirit”; we find a sudden peace, a sudden clarity, descend upon us without any preceding cause, while engaged in activities as diverse as washing the dishes or embracing our child and we wonder what its source is. In these and countless other ways, people are always already engaged in God-talk and God-thought, so we do not presume that there is an obvious place to start in theology.

We also begin in the middle because that is where God is at work, and God is at work not only in our talking and reflecting, but also in our actions. We have sought to be attentive to the ways in which Catholic theology is rooted in Catholic practices in all their diversity. Our thinking about Jesus, for example, is related to the practice of offering a prayer in his name, but it is also, he tells us, related to what we are doing when we offer a drink to the thirsty or food to the hungry, when we care for the sick or visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46). Claims about what Catholics believe about the Eucharist are inseparable from practices such as Eucharistic adoration, the care shown for the sacramental elements after communion, discernment concerning who can and cannot receive communion, the offering of “stipends” to have Masses said on behalf of the dead or for other intentions, and so forth. The meaning of our talk and reflection is only made clear in relation to the practices that accompany them, and vice versa. It is not simply that the practices display the beliefs that underlie them, but the beliefs are shaped by the practices. Christians were praying to Jesus and in the name of Jesus for centuries before the Council of Chalcedon defined what it means for him to be both divine and human; Catholics were concerned with reverently disposing of the Eucharistic bread and wine centuries before they formulated the doctrine of transubstantiation. Catholic theology grows from the desire not only to have our practices conform to our beliefs, but also to have our beliefs conform to our practices.

This book reflects the various practices in which its authors have engaged over the years: participating in the Eucharist, being parents, preaching homilies and hearing homilies, baptizing and being baptized, feeding the hungry, and so forth. One practice that we have both engaged in for many years (over 50 years between the two of us) with great frequency has been teaching an introductory course in theology at Loyola University Maryland. It is really only in retrospect that we have realized how much this introduction to Catholic theology has been shaped by our experience of teaching this course, which is required of all students at Loyola. It has shaped this introduction in a number of different ways.

First, because this course is required, we teach students from a wide variety of backgrounds and levels of interest. Some have twelve years of Catholic education and some have no religious education whatsoever. Some are practitioners of Catholicism or some other tradition of Christianity, a smaller number are practitioners of a non-Christian religious tradition, and a growing number identify with no religious tradition at all (although they too are diverse and do not fit under a single label such as “secular” or “atheist”). Some, regardless of their own beliefs or practices, are extremely interested in thinking about religious questions, and others have to be coaxed into seeing how these might be interesting.

We hope that this book will be useful to a similarly wide range of readers. We believe that it can properly be called an “introduction” because we have tried to presume as little knowledge of theology or Catholicism as possible. We attempt to explain terms and identify people and events as we introduce them, and to avoid some of the more abstruse theological argot. At the same time, this book undoubtedly contains more information than could be covered in a typical introductory course and at times goes into significantly more depth than a beginner might need. Still, by seeking to keep our discussions only as technical as they need to be, we have sought to make it something that is accessible to any reader with a solid general education.

Second, our Introduction to Theology courses, while taught differently by different members of our department, are all guided by certain agreements we have with each other as to the types of material we will use. Specifically, we all agree to make use of the Bible—drawing from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, and the Letters—along with some texts from the theological tradition, and some texts that raise contemporary questions. Teaching this sort of course, which everyone in our department does, regardless of theological sub-specialty, engenders many theological conversations, because no one is expert in all of these areas and so we must depend on each other to teach our courses well.

Likewise in this book we have tried to write a book that ranges across the standard sub-specialties of theology, drawing in Scripture, historical theology, philosophical theology, systematic theology, liturgical theology, and moral theology. In doing so, we have sought to be in conversation with thinkers whose expertise in these areas is greater than our own. We hope that the result is not dilettantish. We have tried to take Scripture seriously on every topic, without pretending to offer an introduction to everything Scripture says about any topic. We have tried to take seriously Catholic life and thought as an historical movement with abiding as well as transient traditions, but we have not provided a comprehensive overview of the tradition. We have also tried to take account of our contemporaries—whether they are Catholic or not—and their questions, though we obviously have been unable to address, much less answer, all those questions.

Third, because the audience for our classes is so varied, and because the material we attempt to teach is no less varied, there is no obvious starting point at which to begin. As we have already said and will have occasion to mention repeatedly, this book is an exercise in beginning in the middle. We might begin our classes with what seems to us an interesting contemporary question, or with the book of Genesis, or with the question of the existence and attributes of God, or perhaps with Job's protest against God. Over the years, we have begun our classes in all these ways. We do it differently at different times because our interests and circumstances, and our perception of our students' interests and circumstances, shift over time. At any given point and on any given topic, we find ourselves needing to say everything, while recognizing that this is impossible. So we resign ourselves to having to begin somewhere.

This book follows a fairly classical order that reflects both the order of the creeds and the order of the Biblical narrative. After a brief preliminary chapter on the nature of Catholic theology (Chapter 1), which might be seen as corresponding to the “I believe” with which the creeds begin, we then move on to the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit (Chapter 2) and who is “the creator of heaven and earth”: a world that reflects the goodness of its creator, yet is fallen away from the fullness of divine goodness (Chapter 3). We then turn to Jesus, who is the saving presence of God in the midst of God's creation, one who is both truly “God from God and light from light,” and at the same time truly a human creature (Chapter 4). God is present not only visibly in the person of Jesus, but also invisibly in the person of the Holy Spirit, who is “lord and giver of life,” so we then turn to the Spirit who dwells in us by grace and is manifested in the lives of those holy ones we call saints (Chapter 5). This Spirit gives life to the Church that is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” (Chapter 6), and, as St Paul says, prays within it “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26), making us live lives that are characterized by praying always (Chapter 7). These lives are marked both by the sacramental rituals of the Church (Chapter 8) and the virtues that enable us to act in ways that will lead to ultimate blessedness (Chapter 9). We conclude with an all too brief exploration of that blessed life as it will be lived in eternity, looking at the consummation of all things in God (Chapter 10).

There is nothing particularly startling in this ordering of chapters, which is somewhat by design, since we believe that the Good News—that the creator of the universe has come to dwell among us in the human life of Jesus and the abiding, transforming presence of the Spirit—is itself so deeply startling that any effort on our part to proceed in a manner that is clever or original would end up looking superficial by comparison. At the same time, our conviction that we always begin in the middle, because the whole of theology is contained in each of its parts, manifests itself in frequent cross-referencing between sections and chapters. So, for example, someone who wishes to understand how Catholics think about the Holy Spirit might quite reasonably turn to the fifth chapter, but would also find himself or herself directed to earlier discussions of the Trinity in the second chapter and of the Church in the sixth chapter, as well as a discussion of the sacrament of Confirmation in the eighth chapter. In this way, we seek to honor one classical pattern of expositing the Christian faith, while maintaining our conviction that theology is always undertaken from the midst of our life's journey.

This book has taken us an embarrassingly long time to write, due in part to administrative duties that we both undertook during the time of its writing. It was begun during the papacy of St John Paul II, continued its slow progress during the reign of Benedict XVI, and now comes to completion under the remarkable ministry of Pope Francis. Any book of such long gestation incurs an immense number of debts. We owe to our colleagues in the Theology Department at Loyola University Maryland a general debt of thanks for many years of theological companionship and conversation; we have learned much from them. More specifically we are grateful to our colleagues Trent Pomplun and Rebekah Eklund, and to our former colleague David Decosimo, for charitable but acute critiques of specific chapters. We also owe thanks to our families who have gently inquired over the years about our progress on this book. Further, we thank the current and past professionals at Wiley Blackwell who have been indispensable (and ever-so-patient) guides at every stage, especially Rebecca Harkin, Georgina Coleby, Isobel Bainton, Ben Thatcher, Lisa Sharp, and Joanna Pyke. Finally, we owe thanks to the people of the Church, clergy and consecrated religious, theologians, and lay people, but particularly the parish communities who have formed us over the years through their worship, preaching, and common life. It is they who give theology its purpose and this book would truly not have been possible without them.

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

James J. Buckley

January 28, 2016

Feast of St Thomas Aquinas

Reference

Dante.

The Divine Comedy

[in

The Portable Dante

, Mark Musa, trans. (Penguin, 2003)].

1The Nature and Sources of Catholic Theology

1.1 Catholics

1.1.1 Being and Becoming Catholic

1.1.2 Personal and Communal

1.1.3 Catholics and Other People

1.2 Theology:

Fides et Ratio

1.2.1

Fides

1.2.2

Ratio

1.3 The Sources of Catholic Theology

1.3.1 Scripture

1.3.2 Tradition

1.3.3 Magisterium

Notes

References

As we said in the introduction to this book, we propose to begin our inquiry into Catholic theology in the middle. We propose this not because we think there is some ideal point, a Golden Mean, between the Alpha and the Omega at which we can “safely” begin. Speaking about God, which is what theology is, is always a dangerous business. Dangerous, but necessary. As Augustine of Hippo (354–430) prayed, “What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to them that keep silence, for even those who say the most are like the mute” (Confessions bk 1 ch. 4). We propose beginning in the middle because, no matter what starting point one chooses, it always ends up being in the middle of something. We never approach any topic as a totally blank slate. Even if it is a topic about which we as yet possess no “data,” we always have ideas, dispositions, habits, biases, and so forth that affect how we receive the data that is eventually presented to us. Specifically in the case of an introduction to Catholic theology, we presume that practically all readers will have at least a vague impression of what Catholic theology is about. Minimally, they will have some familiarity with the word “God,” even if it is a word they have little occasion to use themselves, which will shape how they hear and respond to what we say about the Catholic understanding of God. Perhaps they will have a lifetime of Catholic practice—praying privately, celebrating liturgies, reading the Bible, hearing homilies, working for justice and peace—which will shape how they hear and respond to what we say about the Trinity, the sacraments, or social justice.

In this chapter, we begin to introduce the reader to the nature and sources of Catholic theology. In doing this, we do not assume this is an ideal starting point. Even in talking about “sources,” which sounds like beginning in the beginning, we are still beginning in the middle, since almost all readers will have some views already on the sources we discuss. Another way to learn the nature of Catholic theology would be to actually read or read about a variety of Catholic theologians and then ask the question about the nature and sources of Catholic theology. Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, one could leave reading this chapter for last, to see if our description of the nature and sources of Catholic theology fits with how we actually do theology in the subsequent chapters. But we hope that for most readers what we say here will provide an initial survey of the landscape that will allow them to orient themselves and get an idea of what exactly it is that they have found themselves in the middle of. We will do this by (1) talking about the nature of “Catholicism” as a personal and communal reality, (2) talking about the nature of “theology” as an exercise of both faith and reason, and (3) talking about the sources of the faith about which we reason, specifically Scripture, tradition, and the teaching office of the Church (often referred to by the Latin term magisterium).

1.1 Catholics

If an introduction to Catholic theology is about anything, it seems to be about Catholics and the sort of theology that Catholics do. In saying this, we do not mean first and foremost the sort of theology engaged in by professional theologians who are Catholic. Rather, we mean the theology that shapes and informs the life of —the holy common People of God. Therefore before we can understand what those Catholics do who are professional theologians, we need to give some idea of the theological life of what might be called “plain, ordinary Catholics.”