Models of the Church (Image Classics, Band 13) - Softcover

Dulles, Avery

 
9780385133685: Models of the Church (Image Classics, Band 13)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385133685 ISBN 13: 9780385133685
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 1991

Inhaltsangabe

There is today a dramatic reexamination of structure, authority, dogma -- indeed, every aspect of the life of the Church is held up to scrutiny. Welcoming this as a sign of vitality, Avery Dulles has carefully studied the writings of contemporary Protestant and Catholic ecclesiologists and sifted out six major approaches, or "models," through which the Church's character can be understood: as Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, Servant, and, in a recent addition to the book, as Community of Disciples. A balanced theology, he concludes, must incorporate the major affirmations of each. "The method of models or types," observes Cardinal Dulles, "can have great value in helping people to get beyond the limitations of their own particular outlook and to enter into fruitful conversation with others... Such conversation is obviously essential if ecumenism is to get beyond its present impasses."

This new edition includes a new Appendix and Preface by the author.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., the first U.S. theologian named to the College of Cardinals, is known both nationally and internationally as a preeminent Catholic scholar, teacher, and theologian. He lives in New York City and holds the McGinley Professorship of Religion and Society at Fordham University. His writings over the past half-century have helped to shape the face of theological reflection in the post-Vatican II Church.

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One of America's leading theologians defines the basic functions of the Church, assesses its mission on Earth, and explores its many different roles in the lives of believers.

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ca's leading theologians defines the basic functions of the Church, assesses its mission on Earth, and explores its many different roles in the lives of believers.

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I

The Use of Models in Ecclesiology

In may 1972 the New York Times carried a typical exchange of views about what is happening in the Catholic Church in the United States. It reported the assessment of an Italian theologian, Battista Mondin, to the effect that the Church in America is falling apart. Two days later the Times published a letter to the editor in which the writer conceded, "[Mondin] is right that the traditional Church is near collapse," but then added: "The disasters he mentions are only such to those churchmen who are so stuck in conservatism and authority that they cannot see the Gospel of Christ for the Code of Canon Law . . . My feeling, as a member of an adapting religious community, is that these are the best days of the church."

Disputes of this type are going on everywhere these days. Christians cannot agree about the measure of progress or decline because they have radically different visions of the Church. They are not agreed about what the Church really is.

When we ask what something is we are normally seeking a definition. The classical way to define a thing is to put it into a category of familiar objects and then to list the distinguishing characteristics that differentiate it from other members of the same category. Thus we say that a snail is a slow-moving gastropod mollusk, or that a chair is a piece of furniture designed for people to sit on. In definitions such as these we are dealing with external realities that we can see and touch, and we are able to pin them down fairly well in terms of familiar categories.

It used to be thought, at least by many, that the Church and other realities of faith could be defined by a similar process. Thus the Church, according to Robert Bellarmine, is a specific type of human community (coetus hominum). "The one and true Church," he wrote in a celebrated passage, "is the community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and conjoined in the communion of the same sacraments, under the government of the legitimate pastors and especially the one vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman pontiff." This definition, as contemporary commentators have noted, comprises three elements: profession of the true faith, communion in the sacraments, and submission to the legitimate pastors. By applying these criteria, Bellarmine is able to exclude all persons who in his opinion do not belong to the true Church. The first criterion rules out pagans, Moslems, Jews, heretics, and apostates; the second rules out catechumens and excommunicated persons; the third rules out schismatics. Thus only Roman Catholics remain.

It is significant that Bellarmine's definition is entirely in terms of visible elements. He even goes so far as to maintain that, whereas profession of the true faith is essential, actual belief, being an internal and unverifiable factor, is not. A man who professes to believe but does not believe in his heart would be on this definition a member of the Church, whereas a man who believed without professing to believe would not be. Bellarmine's concern against the Reformers (especially Calvin) is to show that the true Church is a fully visible society--as visible, he says, as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice. No doubt this concern reflects something of the spirit of the seventeenth century. The baroque mentality wanted the supernatural to be as manifest as possible, and the theology of the period tried to reduce everything to clear and distinct ideas.

This clarity, however, was bought at a price. It tended to lower the Church to the same plane as other human communities (since it was put in the same general category as they) and to neglect the most important thing about the Church: the presence in it of the God who calls the members to himself, sustains them by his grace, and works through them as they carry out the mission of the Church. There is something of a consensus today that the innermost reality of the Church--the most important constituent of its being--is the divine self-gift. The Church is a union or communion of men with one another through the grace of Christ. Although this communion manifests itself in sacramental and juridical structures, at the heart of the Church one finds mystery.

The term "mystery" has been used in many ways in the biblical and nonbiblical religions. For present purposes, the usage of the Pauline epistles (1 Cor., Eph., and Col.) would be of central importance. The mystery par excellence is not so much God in his essential nature, or the counsels of the divine mind, but rather God's plan of salvation as it comes to concrete realization in the person of Christ Jesus. In Christ are "unsearchable riches" (Eph. 3:8); in him dwells the whole fullness of God (Col. 3:9); and this fullness is disclosed to those whose hearts are open to the Spirit which is from God (1 Cor. 2:12).

Vatican Council II, after rejecting an initial schema on the Church in which the first chapter was entitled "The Nature of the Church Militant," adopted as the title of its first chapter, "The Mystery of the Church," and this change of titles is symptomatic of the whole ecclesiology of the Council.

The term mystery, applied to the Church, signifies many things. It implies that the Church is not fully intelligible to the finite mind of man, and that the reason for this lack of intelligibility is not the poverty but the richness of the Church itself. Like other supernatural mysteries, the Church is known by a kind of connaturality (as Thomas Aquinas and the classical theologians called it). We cannot fully objectify the Church because we are involved in it; we know it through a kind of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, the Church pertains to the mystery of Christ; Christ is carrying out in the Church his plan of redemption. He is dynamically at work in the Church through his Spirit.

When the New Testament tells us that marriage is "a great mystery in reference to Christ in the Church" (Eph. 5:32), it is implied that the union of the human with the divine, begun in Christ, goes on in the Church; otherwise marriage would not be a figure of the Church. In a word, the mystery is "Christ in you, your hope of glory" (Col. 1:2).

This general conception of mystery as applied to the Church was set forth by Paul VI in his opening address at the second session of the Council. He declared: "The Church is a mystery. It is a reality imbued with the hidden presence of God. It lies, therefore, within the very nature of the Church to be always open to new and ever greater exploration."

The mysterious character of the Church has important implications for methodology. It rules out the possibility of proceeding from clear and univocal concepts, or from definitions in the usual sense of the word. The concepts abstracted from the realities we observe in the objective world about us are not applicable, at least directly, to the mystery of man's communion with God. Some would therefore conclude that ecclesiology must be apophatic; that we can have only a theologia negativa of the Church, affirming not what it is but only what it is not. In a certain sense this may be conceded. In some respects we shall in the end have to accept a reverent silence about the Church, or for that matter about any theological reality. But we should not fall into the negative phase prematurely, until we have exhausted the possibilities of the positive.

Among the positive tools that have been used to illuminate the mysteries of faith we must consider, in the first place, images. This consideration will lead us into some discussion of cognate realities, such as symbols, models, and paradigms--tools that have a long theological history, and are returning to their former prominence in the theology of our day.

Referring to the debate on the schema De Ecclesia at the first session of Vatican II,...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
1991
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385133685
ISBN 13 
9780385133685
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
LiveRowing
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D�lkener Str.20
Viersen
nrw
41747
Deutschland

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