Brian Kelly

Towards a Theology of Redemption

tore, was usually a slim and compact volume. The main points treated were the necessity of Christ’s passion and death, their effects for humankind and the way in which they caused them (satisfaction, atonement, merit) and, possibly, something on Christ’s enthronement at the right hand of the Father. Questions relating to the Incarnation were discussed in a different treatise. A glance at the 3a Pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae will show that much was omitted which might well have been included. For example, he devotes whole quaestiones to the principal mysteries of Jesus’s life as well as to his burial and descent into hell. But there were more serious omissions also, as well as not a few misleading presuppositions and positions. It is these which provide the launchingpad for the pages which follow. What was the role of the Trinity in our redemption? The manualists showed little awareness of the question. For Paul, however, &dquo;God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). Did Jesus’ witness to the truth contribute in any way to redeeming us? It is implicit throughout the Dei Verbum of Vatican II, and occasionally quite explicit, that revelation was salvific or redemptive. The idea seems to have escaped the manualists even though it made up the bulk of Aquinas’ prologue to his 3a Pars. Finally, there is the question of our free acceptance of redemption. From one point of view the answer to it belongs to wherever the interplay between grace and free will is discussed. But from another, and possibly more fundamental point of view, it belongs to the theology of redemption since, if it is to be accepted freely, redemption must have been tailored to the measure of our freedom.

Book Review: bChristian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition. By Jordan Aumann, O.P. London: Sheed and Ward, 1985. Pp. x+326. £8.50 stg:

This is a companion volume to Aumann’s earlier Christian Spirituality. It is intended to show how theory and principles, treated of in the first book, have been and should be translated into life and witness. In effect it is a short history of spirituality with a strong biographical component. It is, perhaps, too condensed for beginners. But others will find it a useful compendium of names, schools and dates. Beginning with the spirituality of the Bible and the Early Church it works its way down to recent times (around 1950) finding space en route for a little over a page on Irish monasticism. Apart from that page Ireland finds no mention. Dom Marmion appears only as the Benedictine Abbot of Maredsous.

Book Review: What Is God? By John F. Haught. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986. Pp. 141. Price £7.95

or too expensive. Having said this I must confess that a certain residual Barthianism seems to stand in the way of our author’s appreciation of the reciprocity and co-independence of creature and Creator in that strictly mystical experience which is the glowing centre of John’s whole testament of beauty. For John, the soul of man not only reflects God’s beauty in this experience but gives to God, in return, a new beauty all its own. So we are told in The Living Flame, stanza 3 that the soul gives heat and light to God, the Beloved. (Calor y luz dan junto

Book Review: Telling About God. Vol. 1, Promise and Fulfilment. By William A. Van Roo, S.J. Rome: Analecta Gregoriana, 1986. Pp. xii + 374. Lire 50,000 (

Divine) as being to provide a simple mystagogy or introduction to mystery (p. 116). Living in a world where life comes progressively under the control of technology, today’s man strives &dquo;to suppress the unmanageable horizon of mystery and vanquish the need for any surrender of self to it&dquo; (p. 117). To counter this trend Haught pinpoints certain areas of experience which, if examined closely, are understandable only in relation to a horizon usually termed God within which they become intelligible: &dquo;God may be understood as the ultimate horizon which makes all of our experience possible in the first place&dquo; (p. 20). The areas selected are those of depth, future, freedom, beauty and truth. Each is allocated a chapter, and each chapter concludes with subsections on the absence of God and religion. The book ends with a summarising discussion of mystery. Despite his avowed intention to write critically or scientifically, Haught is more than a little influenced by his desire to approach his topic from angles with which his readers will be familiar. This results in occasional strange twists of perspective. Thus, he takes freedom to mean primarily that our universe is one in which we are challenged by a daunting array of possibilities. He writes of beauty without mentioning St Augustine, and finds it chiefly in the &dquo;story wherein the contradictions and conflicts in one’s life-experience are patterned into a larger harmony&dquo; (p. 74). A final example though he professes to employ the term truth &dquo;primarily in the metaphysical sense&dquo; (p. 94) in actual fact he writes of it most of all from the side of the knowing subject. This occasional uncertainty and ambiguity notwithstanding, Haught has written a book of real value both to the professional theologian and to those who meet atheism in the course of pastoral work. It is a measure of its worth that it provokes critical reflection and frees the reader from the strait-jacket of untouchable traditional proofs. To the extent to which he is a pioneer, Haught has still further to go. A few suggestions may help him on his way. Does he rely excessively on the horizon metaphor (11 references in a spare Index)? He realises that it is a metaphor (p. 130). But, when he applies it to God

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ION FROM TECHNICAL TERMS On the one hand the Church is the divinely appointed depository and teacher of saving truth and on the other, her competence does not extend in any direct way to mental, moral or physical science under their strictly scientific aspects.6 From this it follows that if in formulating dogmatic statements she makes use for reasons to be discussed shortly of technical terms drawn from any of these sciences, or if those who draw up her formulas seem to belong to one or other scientific school or culture, the theologian exegete must abstract completely from the technical in his attempt to determine what precisely was taught. He can legitimately do this since he knows that when she speaks in her official capacity it is always the Church’s (at least) implicit intention to teach revealed saving truth and never to enter into debate with human philosophy or science at the merely human level. This does not, it must be stressed, excuse him the toil of historical research. It will always remain his duty to try to find out why a council or a pope made use of a particular technical term even when he is convinced that the best his research can do is to make a little clearer that it is to be understood non-technically. Thus he must examine all available historical records when studying Trent’s use of transubstalltiatio and all available contemporary literature when he comes to the Trinitarian and Christological vocabulary. I do not propose to attempt any such full-scale investigations here and aim at nothing more ambitious than a few suggestions which others, more competent, may think it worth while to follow up. Bypassing history for the most part I shall take a selection of formulas in which technical terms occur and endeavour to show in the light of mainly general principles how they are to be understood. I shall begin with an example taken from near our own times and which, for that reason, lends itself more readily to reconstructing the attitude of mind of the person who formulated it. It is also an example which may remind us with something of a jolt that technical terms are more widely present in dogmatic formulas than is commonly appreciated. The example is the formula in which Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception and in 6. A technical term as such is one which admits of precise definition. Since God cannot be defined by man it follows that the technical terms of the human sciences (mental, moral and physical) cannot be predicated of Him. This ties in with the Thomistic idea that we know of God rather what He is not than what He is. On the technical terms of christian theology something has been said above. We may add now that these also, to the extent to which they are the technical terms of a human science, cannot be predicated with strict univocity of a mystery.

Dogmatic Formulas : Their Exegesis and Interpretation

Despite the considerable literature which has grown up on grace both at the scientific and the popular levels one may fairly say that much still remains to be done. There are individual points, such as that of the relationship which grace sets up between man and the Three Divine Persons taken in their personal distinctness, in regard to which we have done little more than to grasp the outline of the problem. And dominating all there is the question of synthesis. For a glance at any comprehensive modern treatment of grace as an example we may take the one which appeared in 1966 in the Dictionrraire de Spiritualité is sufficient to indicate that even our most recent syntheses have done little more than to bring all the known questions within the unity of a single volume. A complete and unified theology of grace has yet to be elaborated and its elaboration will be the work of more than one theological generation. In the meantime all that an individual can do is to attempt to find a continuous thread of

Towards a Theology of Grace

1. An English translation was published by Geoffrey Chapman in 1959 under the title I Believe, The Personal Structure of Faith. 2. Beauchesne (Paris 1966). It is almost twenty years since Canon Jean Mouroux noted in the preface to his Je crois en Dieu; Structure personelle de la Foii that theologians writing on faith, whether on its origin or on its structure, usually limit their treatment to a discussion of its subjective factors (intellect, will and grace) and the objective data (credibility, the material object and formal motive). Due in no small measure to a renewal of biblical and patristic studies, there has been a recent tendency to treat of it in a more concrete manner, to see it as a many-sided spiritual experience of rich content. Canon Mouroux’s own work which he warned us was limited to a single aspect revealed faith as an organized whole of personal relations, principally with God in three divine Persons. In an appendix he referred to other complementary aspects which need to be developed if a proper balance is to be kept. Chief among them is faith’s ecclesial character. In a few condensed pages he provided a sketch of what this ecclesial character means: that faith is founded on the word of God transmitted to the Church; that it is realized by entry into the Church; that it grows by life within the Church; that community-conscious faith builds up the Church. More recently Fr Andr6 de Bovis, s.J. has returned to the idea of faith’s ecclesial dimension in his Vivre de la Foi.2 Though he devotes considerably more space to the question than did Canon Mouroux, the two treatments differ little in substance. Fr de Bovis’s additional detail does not amount to a fresh approach. Both authors insist on the importance of faith’s ecclesial dimension. But in actual fact they reduce it to a bundle of