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By RICHARD P. McBRIEN, S.T.D.
,Crowley-O’Brien-Walter |
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By RICHARD P. McBRIEN, S.T.D. ,Crowley-O’Brien-Walter
Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
January 18, 1967
[Available on this website with Fr. McBrien’s permission]
I have suggested in two previous columns that the U.S. Catholic bishops issue a pastoral letter on Catholic fundamentalism.
As one prominent Catholic biblical scholar recently observed, the number of Catholics who have been lost to the Catholic Church because of the writings of Father Hans Kueng could hold a convention in a telephone booth. But the number who have been lost because of fundamentalism is in the thousands.
Fundamentalism is of two kinds: biblical and doctrinal. A pastoral letter would have to address both.
he Bible and the doctrines of the Church must be read and interpreted in light of their original historical context, and of the Church’s own understanding of them from the beginning.
Documents
Guidelines for interpreting the Bible are available in such documents as Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), and the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels” (1964).
The most significant recent pronouncement on the interpretation of official Church teachings is Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973), which applies essentially the same rules for interpreting doctrines and dogmas as the other two documents applied to the interpretation of the Bible.
Because of biblical fundamentalism, the Catholic Church has lost thousands of its members to such groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Assembly of God, and other pentecostal communities. The problem has been particularly severe among Hispanic Catholics.
Division
Because of doctrinal fundamentalism, the Catholic Church has suffered needless internal conflict and division. Doctrinal fundamentalists do not leave the Church. They spend much of their time trying to get fellow Catholics to leave it, or trying to get Church authorities to expel those who refuse to leave.
If the Catholic Church could overcome its own problem of biblical fundamentalism, it would help thousands upon thousands of its members to appreciate the true richness and spiritual power of the biblical Word of God.
And if the Church could overcome its internal problem of doctrinal fundamentalism, it would help an equally large number of Catholics to appreciate dogmas and doctrines for what they are: pathways to God and vehicles of church unity, not the stuff of loyalty oaths.
But fundamentalism is as much a psychological problem as it is a theological problem. People do not reason their way into fundamentalism, nor do they pray their way into it.
Certitude
Fundamentalism stems from what one theologian once called a “lust for certitude.”
The Catholic who is satisfied with nothing less than absolute certitude about all matters of faith corrupts genuine faith just as surely as the lustful person corrupts love.
When we open ourselves to love, we overcome lust. When we open ourselves to faith, we overcome the obsession with certitude.
Faith is more than intellectual assent to propositions. It is a personal acceptance of God. Therefore, faith involves more than knowledge. It involves trust, risk, and commitment.
Just as one doesn’t argue his or her way into a marriage, one doesn’t argue his or her way into the Church.
Objective Facts
One cannot ignore certain objective facts, of course: compatibility, financial resources, shared values, etc. But the decision to marry will not, in the end, he based on those facts alone.
This is also true of our relationship with God in faith. Not even St. Thomas Aquinas pretended to prove the existence of God by his famous five ways. He showed rather the congruence between our belief in God, on the one hand, and our human knowledge and experience, on the other.
Indeed, St. Thomas’ masterwork, the Summa Theologica, seeks to understand the faith through the posing of questions, without, however, trying to measure the certitude of all his answers.
Faith does give us certitude, but the certitude is at a personal, not intellectual, level.
Misplaced
Just as the marriage partner can be wrong about the spouse, so can the “faith” of the religious person be misplaced or distorted. But the husband or wife remains convinced, even certain, of the lovableness of the other.
As soon as the husband or the wife looks upon the other as an object, or a possession, then love is gone - replaced by lust, the will to power, or whatever.
Pope John Paul II has reminded us that there can be physical lust even in marriage. So, too, there can be a lust for certitude even in a religious community.
Just as physical lust, which seeks total possession of the other, destroys the bond of love, so the lust for certitude, which seeks absolute security from the other, destroys the bond of faith.
Faith is as much trust as knowledge, and as much commitment as assent.