Fernández / Ross Doing Theology as If People Mattered

Encounters in Contextual Theology
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8245-9997-3
Verlag: PublishDrive
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 314 Seiten

This book narrates a reflexive account of the 'doing' of contextual theology at the Jesuit School of Theology (JST) of Santa Clara University. The collection explores practicing contextual theology in the classroom and beyond, in service, international immersions, interreligious dialogue, and mission. This collection narrates the story of contextual theology at JST: how the School came to select this theological method and how it guides the vision and mission of the School; how contextual theology shapes pedagogy and work in the classroom; how contextual theology and education  flourish in ministerial praxis in the local intercultural San Francisco Bay Area; and more.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fernández, Eduardo

Ross, Deborah

Leseproben

Chapter One RECONCILED DIVERSITY THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE ECUMENICAL JOURNEY Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM Introduction1 I am very grateful for the invitation to deliver the 2017 Founders’ Day Lecture of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in this year, which is very special from several points of view. This is, I believe, the first major public event of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary since its move, just twenty days ago, from its erstwhile hilltop location to its new home in downtown Berkeley—a “new beginning” within a venerable tradition. I’m sure this move is symbolic in many ways, but one, pertinent to our discussion today, is of the transition in the whole Church in our time from the emphasis on the traditional and very legitimate seclusion of the theological academy as a privileged locus and haven of reflection to the necessary emphasis today on the engagement of theology with the world that God so loved. And it is perhaps also symbolic that this event is taking place in one of the member schools of the Graduate Theological Union, the Jesuit School of Theology, to which I am happy to welcome all our Lutheran and other GTU friends and colleagues, for what we hope will be the first of many shared experiences now that we are geographically so much closer to each other. But most of all, I am personally deeply honored and humbled to be addressing you, carriers of Martin Luther’s important legacy, in this extraordinary year when we commemorate, on October 31, the 500th anniversary of one of the most momentous events in the history of Christianity, the posting of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses on the portal of the Church of Wittenberg (or so the myth has it!), the symbolic beginning of the Reformation in which we must all—in our distinctive ways—remain forever engaged. I cannot resist recounting to you an event I’ve shared with some of you in the past. Shortly after my arrival on the faculty here at the Jesuit School, after some event in which, I suppose, we had been discussing the nature and interpretation of scripture, one of my Catholic colleagues said to me, I suspected only partly in jest, “Sandra, I think you are a closet Lutheran.” I replied, also not entirely in jest, “I deeply resent that. There is nothing closet about it.” In fact, I was, at that point, very recently returned from doctoral studies in New Testament in Rome, where my work on the biblical spirituality of John’s Gospel had been deeply enriched by study not only of the new generation of Roman Catholic biblical scholars, like Raymond Brown, and others who had come into prominence in the wake of the just-concluded Second Vatican Council, but also by my wide reading of the giants of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant scholarship, such as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, and the great Lutheran ecumenist, Oscar Cullmann, from whom Pope Francis has borrowed a term that is at the heart of our reflections this morning, namely, “reconciled diversity,” which is the true aim of any ecumenism worthy of the name. Reconciled diversity is not uniformity, however achieved, but something that, I will try to show, probably could not have been envisioned, at least by Catholics, prior to Vatican II. In any case, with the exception of Raymond Brown, perhaps the premier Catholic biblical scholar of the postconciliar period, the most influential biblical scholars in my early academic life were mainly Protestants, who, of course, certainly outnumbered Catholic biblical scholars until well into the late twentieth century and who were, without doubt, the real mentors and teachers of the first generation of postconciliar Roman Catholic biblical scholars. And as my biblical interests became increasingly hermeneutical it was the Protestant giants of the twentieth-century conversation, the new hermeneuts like Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs, Heinrich Ott, and their philosophical contemporaries like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricœur, who were my primary mentors and dialogue partners. Over the years I have continued to appreciate and appropriate the rich heritage of biblical scholarship that comes to all of us Christians from the Reformation which has been integral to my own work in biblical spirituality. I also had the privilege of directing the doctoral dissertation in Christian Spirituality of one of your increasingly influential newer colleagues, Dr. Lisa Dahill, in the process of which I learned a great deal about Lutheran spirituality. And given all the topics in regard to Lutheran-Catholic relations that we might discuss, none is more important than scripture, and no perspective on scripture more important than spirituality. Although the Wittenberg theses were specifically concerned with the controversy over indulgences and its implications in regard to authority in the Church, the fundamental issues of church, ministry, and Eucharist which we are still discussing, were, in depth, more about the nature and interpretation of scripture and its role in the Church and in the spirituality of believers than about practices or discipline. We certainly do not have time, nor do I have the competence, to retrace in detail the important progress that has been made in the fifty years since the close of the Second Vatican Council in Lutheran-Catholic relations. But just to recall the major milestones of this extraordinary journey, the process began even in the last year of the council, 1964, before the first official dialogue in 1967 that led to the 1983 landmark Joint Statement entitled Justification by Faith and then to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of October 31, 1999, and then to the 2010 common statement The Hope of Eternal Life, and finally, in 2015—explicitly in preparation for the observance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation this year—to the Declaration on the Way,2 which undertakes the movement beyond doctrinal agreement toward greater visible unity between our two communions. The Declaration on the Way, which was the impetus for my reflections in this lecture, specifically articulates thirty-two consensus statements on the topics of justification, church, Eucharist, and ministry, the topics which have long divided Lutherans and Catholics. The document also identifies a few areas, fewer than half as many as the thirty-two statements on which there is working consensus, which still require further discussion. Given the preceding five hundred years of virtual mutual excommunication, we are living in an exciting time when this half-millennial-old rift in the Body of Christ might finally be healed. Even now both communions are seeking increasingly visible signs of reunification, especially in expanded opportunities for eucharistic sharing and mutual recognition of ministries. And what better year in which to anticipate and pray for full reunification with the realistic hope that we will live to see this happen? Where Are We, and What Is Going On? There would be many ways to examine the progress that has been made in Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue, the most obvious of which would be to examine the theological content of the discussions in which, little by little, both sides have reached the conclusion on one issue after another—thirty-two of them—that the differences between us on that issue are “not Church dividing.” I was profoundly struck, and fascinated, by this formulation and it became the center of my reflections as I began to prepare this lecture. How were we able to get to this remarkable point, this striking formulation, that on these long-polarizing topics, our diverse positions were “not Church dividing”? Stated positively, this was a claim that the two sides to the conversation, Lutheran and Catholic, were not claiming some kind of uniformity, not saying there were no differences between us on these issues, nor that the differences were not substantive or important, nor that they were inconsequential historical oddities that had lost their relevance and were no longer worth discussing much less fighting about, nor that one side or the other would abandon its characteristic approach on the subject and simply accept that of the other for the sake of verbal harmony—but that the differences, though real, substantive, and significant and probably permanent, were “not Church dividing.” In other words, there is room in the Church’s identity, faith, and life for real, substantive, and significant differences on important issues. To me, this is a far more significant position than the positions taken on the subject matter itself of the thirty-two issues, individually or taken together. It marks a new, shared approach to truth that was not really imaginable prior to Vatican II. It is an approach rejected by Luther in his posting of the ninety-five theses and by the Roman Church in its condemnation of Luther’s positions at the Council of Trent. For Luther, truth and integrity demanded his “Here I stand; I can do no other” and for Trent that same truth and integrity grounded the only possible response, “Let him be anathema.” The important change to which the Declaration on the Way witnesses—that is, the move from intransigent mutual condemnation based on a certain understanding of the truth rooted in the principle of non-contradiction, to the possibility of holding simultaneously and without compromise more than one valid and life-giving position on a single subject, that is, to “reconciled diversity” on matters of faith and morals, is what I would like to...