Rethinking God VII

Massacio's Crucifixion, typical

of late medieval art emphasizing

the humanity of Christ

Well, let’s get back to our postings on revisioning God (see entries for November 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17).  I had mentioned how our concepts of God have evolved over the centuries since that point at which what are known as the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—made their first contact with Y-WH Sabaoth some four thousand years ago when He first picked up with this wild and unshaven band of nomadic outlaws from Ur of the Chaldees.  I mentioned in previous postings that it took the Hebrew people some thousand years or more to come to monotheism and to realize that this God of theirs was not one of several gods but is God Alone.  In the process too they seem to have consolidated Him with another deity they knew and worshiped—Elohim.  And then it took some time more to realize that while this Deity was far from vegetarian, human sacrifice was not on His menu.  Along the way various new stories emerged about Him and how the world and all its inhabitants came to be and sometimes those stories conflicted with one another.  That was not a problem—the People of God could live with some ambiguity.
Christianity provoked new developments in our understanding of God as the believers in Jesus as mashiah gradually came to appreciate that Jesus somehow shared in the Divine Nature of the Deity he referred to as his (and our) Abba.  From this awareness developed the notion of the Trinity—that God is One in Divinity but three in distinct Persons: The Father (Y-WH, The Son (who is become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth) and the Holy Spirit.  This did not happen at once—nor was the awareness complete in biblical times but only in the second and third centuries with substantial disagreements lasting into the fourth and fifth and—at least in regards to what the Divinity of Jesus means—even later. 
With Christianity and the emergence of a Trinitarian awareness, the Second Person of the Trinity—incarnate in Jesus—eclipsed the primacy of the First Person (Y-WH, the Father) not in theory but certainly in the devotional life of the faithful.  Jesus, as the Mediator with the Father, became the Presence of God most familiar and most adored.  Jesus was seen primarily as the Great Heavenly High Priest who stands at the heavenly Throne of Grace interceding for us.  He also was seen as the King who will come at the end of time as Judge and Ruler.  But this perception too would change in time.  In the late eleventh century Anselm of Canterbury wrote Cur Deus Homo, a theological treatise explaining why (cur)  God (Deus) had become human (homo)  in the Incarnation of the Divine Son as Jesus of Nazareth.  We won’t go into his answer here, but we need to note that historically this would also cause a great theological shift as Christians from the twelfth century through the fourteenth centuries would greatly emphasize the human nature of Christ whereas for centuries from the sixth through the eleventh they had emphasized his Divinity.  Now we see less and less of the King seated on the throne of Judgment and more and more of the tender babe in his mother’s arms or the naked and dying savior hanging on the cross.       
Now why I have been writing about this is so that we can see that the faithful—the People of Israel in their Covenant and the Christians in ours have not been passive recipients of doctrine but have played the active role of shaping the faith.  It is not the role of a Magisterium to define the Truth and for God’s people to passively accept their word as dogma.  The faith as it bubbled up through the sacred writers of the Scriptures and in the decrees of the Councils and later in the teachings of the Church bubbled up from the hearts of God’s people as they reflected on their experience of God.  Again—I am not writing theologically here and have no interest in this blog of doing a “theology of revelation.”  I am writing from a historical viewpoint.  It was not Abraham nor even Moses who came to “define” God in a monotheistic understanding.  They were long in their graves before the People of Israel were weaned away from polytheism.  It was not Paul, much less Peter, who defined the hypostatic union of the Divine and Human Natures in the One Person Jesus Christ or taught that God is one in Divine Nature but Three in distinct Persons.  If this had been taught definitively by the apostles there would have been no arguments over it in the third and fourth centuries.  These understandings arose over time within the hearts of the Christian people.  It was not the bishops who insisted that Jesus was one in Divine Nature with the Father.  Newman reminds us that the majority of the bishops had bought into the Arian heresy hook, line, and sinker.  The issue wasn’t even settled with the Council of Nicea—Arianism flourished for a further two centuries after Nicea.  It was the faith of the faithful that clarified the doctrine.
And so too today—the problem is not that the faithful are not listening to the bishops; the problem is that the bishops are not listening to the faithful.  Our faith in not static.  There are serious issues facing the Church today, issues that require some key teachings of faith and especially of morals to be critically reexamined.  Pontifications will not resolve these issues but rather the Church—the entire Church—magisterium, theologians, and faithful need to build consensus.  All three voices must realize this is not a time we can afford disunity but rather where we must bravely enter into deep and prayerful reflection and dialogue to come to understand the faith the Church—the whole Church—holds.   

The Year of Faith--and a disheartening history

John XXIII, Benedict's

Forgotten Pope?

When Pope Benedict announced a “Year of Faith” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, he never mentioned in his apostolic letter, Porta Fidei, the pope that called the Council, John XXIII.  Benedict cited his predecessor John Paul II several times and he even referred to Paul VI but he never once acknowledged “Good Pope John.”  That is no mere oversight.  Papal statements don’t make oversights.  It can be seen as nothing other than a clear and deliberate snub of Pope John. 

The late Father Alcuin Coyle, a Franciscan Friar who worked at the Franciscan curia in Rome for many years and had a wonderful nose for Roman Gossip once told me that the Vatican was resisting the beatification of John XXIII despite having over 20 miracles to the credit of his prayers.  Of course, eventually the powers that held sway at the time had to give in and permit the beatification as the clamor of the faithful was too great.  To balance out the ticket the symbol of ultramontane pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Pius IX (pope from 1846 to 1878) was beatified in the same ceremony.  There seems to be little enthusiasm in the Vatican for the movement to push John XXIII on to sainthood.  John remains a very popular figure among rank and file Catholics but is seen by many in the Vatican as a traitor to all they have worked for and believe in because of the way his Council almost overturned their stranglehold on their bureaucratic power.

The Roman bureaucracy had long been building up a monopoly on Church authority.  I am not speaking of the Pope here and of whatever authority is proper to the Petrine Office, but rather of the immense officialdom that oversees the day to day administration of the Church.  Throughout the nineteenth century the Roman Curia expanded its power as modern communications—originally the telegraph, later the telephone, the radio, and television, and in recent decades the internet has facilitated direct and immediate communication between Rome and dioceses scattered around the world.  In the Napoleonic era and then at the Council of Vienna, concordats with the European powers took away the rights of the clergy in most dioceses to elect their bishops and replaced canonical election with papal appointments.  Missionary countries—and at the time that included the United States—were never granted the rights of episcopal election. After Vatican I and the Decree on Infallibility in 1870 the papacy was supreme in its authority over the western Church and the Curia ever increasingly tightened its stranglehold over all decision making.  The papacy of St Pius X was a time of particular centralization with the Machiavellian Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val as Pius’s chief minister.  The final years of Pius XII, particularly the years after his 1954 illness, were another period in which the Curial officials were able to strengthen their own power at the expense of the pope on one hand and local bishops on the other. 

The stranglehold that this bureaucracy held on Church decision making was one of the things that John XXIII was determined to break and his calling the Council brought the bishops of the world together to provide a challenge to the Curia as a Council not only provided the bishops with a voice of their own but had the authority to change structures of Church administration.  This they did—or attempted to do—with the Conciliar Decrees.  Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church), and Christus Dominus (The Decree on Bishops) effectively redefined the role of the Curia and its relationship to the bishops.  The trouble was, however, that the bishops went home at the end of the Council and the Curia stayed. The bishops had left a wounded animal.  The election of John Paul II marked a policy of return to the status quo before the Council.  The Curia had already begun its program of reconsolidating its power in the final years of Paul VI when the Pope, all but paralyzed by a combination of age and depression resulting from the hostility with which his encyclical Humanae Vitae was received, more and more withdrew from everyday governance of the Church.  Who knows what John Paul I would have done had he lived, but John Paul II aggressively supported a return to centralized power.  Some say that John Paul never understood the idea of collegiality and the role of his brother bishops, but I think he understood it well and rejected it. Shared authority didn’t fit into his somewhat narrow experience of having lived under totalitarian regimes for most of his life and the experience of the Polish Church that required lockstep obedience to the Primate if the Church were to resist the Communist rulers of Poland after World War II.  John Paul may have thought that restoring the Curia to power strengthened the papacy but in fact he could never get the control over the Curia himself.  It had become an agency “under” the pope only in name as various desk-jockeys from mighty Cardinals to lowly monsignori  began issuing decrees and decisions independent of the Pope and of one another—creating a morass of contradictory policies coming from Rome.             

Benedict may have thought that he could alter that—take control of the wild animal and tame it under his leadership but he has been mistaken.  In fact, the whole problem of the papal butler, Paolo Gabriele, stealing papal papers and turning them over to journalists was meant, at least in the butler’s mind, of exposing that the Holy Father is no more than a captive of a cabal of Curialists that are steering the Church in the direction they think it should go.  Well, God bless Pope Benedict but perhaps more than a “year of faith” commemorating the Second Vatican Council we need a John XXIII and a new Council to pick up the pieces and put us back on track. 
Incidentally, today is the 54th anniversary Pope John XXIII's coronation