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The Shape of Catholic Theology by Aidan Nichols, O.P.
Part Two: THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEOLOGY
Chapter 6: The Possibility and Historicity of Revelation Here we are concerned with the role of philosophy in establishing two more portions of theology's earthworks. First, is revelation possible? And second, if it is, by what criteria can we assess the claims of the alleged revelation possessed by the Church to be historically founded? It should perhaps be mentioned at the outset that for one school of thought, the first question is scarcely worth dealing with in its own right. If we can answer satisfactorily the second question, Has a divine revelation in point of historical fact taken place? then the first question at once becomes otiose. Suppose that we were to discuss the possibility of travel between planets in different solar systems. If during our discussion an actual space traveller from the planet of another star walked into the room, there would be precious little point in going on with the conversation. Analogously, it is said, if we have reason to believe that there has been an actual revelation, we can dispense with the question of its possibility. But if we take this line, which is that of much Catholic apologetic around the turn of the century, [1] we will probably end up with a rather extrinsic and shallow view of revelation. In fact, one writer has denounced such an approach - using a metaphor from science fiction - as "robotic apologetics." [2] Since the beginning of this century, and in particular with the work of Maurice Blondel (1861-1949), apologetics (or fundamental theology) has been much more concerned with the possibility of revelation and especially its intrinsic fittingness to the human condition, although this is not to say that concern with the historicity of the actual revelation, established through the applying of external criteria to the sources, is unimportant. [3] There are three questions involved here. The first is, Is there reason to think that the God whom, with philosophy?s help, we have found to exist could make a further revelation of himself? The second is, Are there reasons for thinking that man is incapable of receiving such a revelation were he offered it? And the third is, If none of the objections to the second question are valid, can we say why we positively think man could receive such a revelation? (Clearly, the last two questions are simply the two sides of the same coin.) First, then, we can look at the possibility of supernatural revelation from the side of God. The self-revelation of God is unthinkable unless a theology can show, in whatever conceptual terms it prefers, that God himself is transcendent, personal, and free. God must be transcendent or he could not reveal himself. Without his transcendence of the world, God has no genuine partner to whom he can show himself. And so theories about God which consider the world to be in some sense part of God, or included within God's being, cannot concede the possibility of supernatural revelation. You cannot have a conversation unless you have someone else to speak with. But as we have seen, a number of arguments for God's existence point toward a properly theistic (as distinct from pantheistic or panentheistic) concept of God. It may be that pan-theists appeal less to philosophy and more to religious feeling, reminding us that we often feel nature and nature's God to be a unity. The English Romantic poets, for instance, are full of such feelings. But once we let reason come into play to test the functioning of imagination, we find that such feelings should be analyzed within a theistic, not a pantheistic, description of the world. In the second place, a God who reveals himself must be a personal God. The basic picture behind the idea of special or supernatural revelation is that there is a someone revealed in a something. We are all familiar with persons disclosing themselves in their actions: a smile, a handshake, a characteristic gesture, a letter, a poem, a painting. All of these are ways in which personal somebodies reveal themselves in impersonal somethings. If God were not personal it would be impossible to suppose that he could step out of his silence or hiddenness and show himself to us. For that to happen God must be in some way like the person who has decided to make himself known and can do or say something that communicates his inward being to others. And once again, some of the arguments for God's existence point in the direction of the personality of God. More generally, we can say that if God is the source of all created things, then these things must in some sense have preexisted in that source. But the highest things we know in the universe are interpersonal knowledge and love, being subjects capable of knowing and loving other subjects. So this too, and especially this, must preexist in its divine source. And this brings us to the third factor in the possibility of revelation from the side of God. A God who reveals himself must be not only transcendent and personal but free. If the world emanates automatically from God, as one takes pantheists to be saying, or if, at the opposite philosophical pole, the world is a closed system over against God, as deists say, then God is unfree vis-à-vis the world and cannot show his hand. In pantheism God cannot help but reveal himself; in deism he cannot reveal himself further even should he want to. In both cases he is unfree. If supernatural revelation is to be possible, we must grant God the freedom to go beyond the order of creation if he so wills. But now let us look at the same issue, the possibility of revelation, from the side of man: our second and third questions in this realm. Revelation is only possible from the side of man if he is open to transcendence. Various objections are brought from time to time against this basic openness of the human being to God. These objections may be said to resolve themselves into two: one is lodged in terms of humankind's autonomy and the other, which is quite incompatible with the first, in terms of their determinedness by factors beyond their control. In the first case, it is said that human autonomy, man's taking responsibility for his own life, should rule out an appeal to revelation as a shortcut to the answers of life's problems. It is unworthy of human dignity not to decide for oneself on all fundamental questions of existence. The brief reply to this is that being autonomous does not mean being liberated from all ties and obligations but rather being free to posit such ties and obligations as one's own internal norm. But among these ties and obligations, and not the least important of them, is the duty to follow the truth wherever it leads. Thus if we have reason to think that a truth from beyond this world is being shown to us, then it is no lapse into heteronomy freely to accept and interiorize supramundane truth. In the case of the second objection to revelation's possibility from the side of humankind, namely our determinedness, we find that we are dealing here with several widespread reductionist theories, each of which claims that human ideas are so determined by causes internal to human beings themselves that they could not respond to a truth coming wholly from outside themselves even if they wished to. Most commonly, such theories are socioeconomic (as with Marxism-Leninism) or psychological (as with orthodox Freudianism) in character. Although there is space here neither to refute fully, nor even to state fairly, such theories, it may be said, in short compass, that in each case humankind's intellectual and volitional life is seen as fully preprogrammed by one or more of its basic drives or needs. In Marxism, the need to express oneself in work is at the start of a complex theory of man which ends by regarding all doctrines save Marxism itself as examples of "false consciousness," or systematic misapprehension. Thus the concept of God can be reinterpreted as the projection on to the starry heavens of the best part of ourselves, motivated by our despair of ever realizing ourselves in society as we know it. In orthodox Freudianism, the sexual drive is seen as explaining all human activities and beliefs in some way or another by regarding the entire fabric of human culture (including religion) as an endless series of adjustments between reality and the thrust toward pleasure. All such reductionisms stem, it may be suggested, from a form of intellectual self-indulgence, that is, from the desire to be in possession of a single key that will open up all reality. Through this desire, theses about limited aspects of human behavior become total explanations of an imperialistic kind. To reduce the reductionisms to size is not only necessary in order to maintain man's openness to revelation. It is also a mercy to the elements of truth in the reductionisms themselves. [4] Finally, can we show positively why we think man can receive a revelation? At the turn of this century there arose a school of Catholic thought dubbed the "new apologetics." The principal concern of this school, of which Blondel was the ornament, was to show how it is intrinsically fitting for men and women to be in receipt of divine revelation. Considered historically, this "new" apologetics was a revival of the defense of Christianity found in Pascal. Its approach was by way of the "method of immanence," "immanence" here referring to human interiority, to needs and tendencies in the human person that point to a divine revelation as what is required to make a human life complete. [5] Blondel's position, as offered in his chef d'oeuvre, called L'action, sets out from the observation that the will is greater than any of its possible earthly objects. By metaphysical instinct, it presses beyond them in the search for a good that is commensurate with its own infinitude. The implication is that in a created universe where nothing is as it is except for a good reason, this cannot be by chance. At some point in the past, present, or future, the supreme Object of action has offered, is offering, or at any rate will offer himself to all people as the only reality that can fully satisfy them. [6] The stress here falls not on the divine truth making itself accessible to the human mind but on the divine goodness drawing to itself the human will. But a sound account of the act of faith should really include both of these components, mind and will. We recognize the truth of revelation intellectually insofar as we are capable of grasping God's self-revelation. We also respond volitionally or affectively, by the will or heart, to the goodness of God, who is drawing us through this revelation to himself. Blondel and the new apologists concentrated somewhat unilaterally on the will, chiefly in order to correct a picture of human beings as thinking machines rather than as loving and desiring subjects which - they believed - a degenerate Scholasticism and the older apologetics had alike fostered. Others since have underlined the role of the mind, and perhaps most emphatically the late Karl Rahner in his Spirit in the World and its sequel, Hearers of the Word. [7] A balanced account would integrate both. What we have seen so far belongs to the ambit of a subjective apologia for revelation: a defense of revelation's possibility in terms of criteria touching the divine subject and human subjects. We must now investigate the objective apologia which forms the other wing of the diptych. What are the objective criteria for determining the historical reality of an alleged revelation, in this case, that of the Judeo-Christian religion? This enquiry falls into two parts, which are, first, the historical credibility of the biblical narrative that presents us with claims to revelation, and second, the credibility of the Bible's own theological interpretation of this narrative. First, then, the historical credibility of the biblical narrative, which is the vehicle of putative revelation. It seems pretty clear that the Christian religion, like its Jewish parent religion, [8] is a thoroughly historical affair. [9] Admittedly, not all of the books of the Bible are historical books in the sense of being written by people who were what the ancient world could regard as historians. In that sense, the Book of Exodus is a historical book, but the Book of Wisdom is not; the Gospel of Mark is a historical book, but the Letter of James is not. Nevertheless, all the books of Scripture are historical in the sense that they presuppose and depend on a religion which regards certain historical events as central to its own claims to be true. The authors of Wisdom and the Letter of James were not writing as historians, even by Jewish or Hellenistic standards of historiography, but they were writing as men who believed as they did because they accepted an interpretation of certain historical events, which the Jewish religion had made and the Christian religion partly inherited and partly made in turn. Both Judaism and Christianity hold that the one true God, source and ground of the world, has disclosed himself through these events of religious history - from Abraham to the close of the Old Testament period in Judaism, from Abraham to the apostles of Jesus in Christianity. The Creator Lord had entered a covenant relationship, a relationship of friendship and trust with a people: Israel, the Church. And this relationship was believed to exist because of events which had really transpired within history. Thus, the ideas about God entertained by, first, Jews and, then, by the earliest Christian generation did not take root because people who thought them out liked them so much they decided to keep them. Instead, people found themselves involved in a relationship with God because of the great historical experiences through which they had passed. The ideas element in their faith was not the basis of their belief but its further distillation. Two questions arise here of a philosophical or at least semi-philosophical kind. The first question is about the possibility of our knowing the past at all. All historical knowledge is built up on evidence consisting of written or nonwritten remains. Sceptics may allege that the attempt to construct a picture of the past on the basis of these remains is foredoomed to failure. We are obliged to use our imagination to fill in the gaps; our imagination is conditioned by the fact that we belong to the twentieth century after Christ and not to the first century after Christ or the twentieth century before him. What counts, therefore, as history tells us more about our own age, the age of the historian, than it does about the age such books purport to describe. But if this be true, then it will not be possible to establish the credibility of the truth-claims of the Judeo-Christian religion, for the obvious reason that if we can know nothing for certain about the events out of which Judaism and Christianity were built, we cannot a fortiori know whether the Jewish and Christian interpretation of these events is credible. The second question concerns not the status of history in general but that of the biblical history in particular. Even supposing that we are successful in rebutting the sceptical account of historical studies outlined above, we still need to show that the particular segments of alleged historical material enshrined in the Bible are trustworthy. It may be the case that while many historical remains enable us to write reliable history, those included in Scripture are not among them. Here we must temporarily show the philosopher to the door and wait for the ancient historian to call instead. However, from the viewpoint of the preamble of faith, it is not equally urgent that the ancient historian should be willing to credit any and every factual claim in the biblical narrative. What we need to know theologically is whether the general outline of the biblical history can be trusted, that is, whether the events regarded as crucial and determinative by the biblical writers themselves really happened. I am thinking here of such things as the call of Abraham; the Exodus from Egypt; the Sinai experience of Moses; the establishment of the Davidic dynasty with its messianic promises; the Exile and restoration of Israel from Babylon; the conception, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; his founding of the Church; the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. If it could be shown that these events, or sequences (and clusters) of events, never happened, or that they happened in such a form that the Jewish and Christian interpretations of them are effectively excluded, then manifestly the claims of the Judeo-Christian religion would fall to the ground. Of less importance are such matters as whether in the book of his name Joshua made the sun stand still, or whether in the Acts of the Apostles Herod Agrippa I was smitten in Caesarea by an angel of the Lord and was eaten by worms. In the preamble of faith there is no need to concern ourselves with the question as to whether every detail of the biblical history has a factual basis. To establish the credibility of the biblical revelation, it is not necessary to establish the facticity of such matters unless there is reason to think that the biblical revelation itself proposes them as necessary to its own cohesion. In principle, it is possible that a genuine revelation could have been recorded in writings which only in part reflect that revelation and in part reflect the imperfect geography, historiography, and natural science of their day. The notions of revelation and of inerrancy are not coterminous. What we need to know is whether or not it is credible to say that the central events of the sacred history happened through the power and guidance of the God whose character and purpose is disclosed through them. To assure ourselves of this we need to know that these central events really happened, and that the biblical interpretation of them is, at worst, believable, and at best the only satisfactory explanation possible. First of all, then, let us look at the question of the possibility of historical knowledge as such. In English-speaking countries, the philosophy of history largely consists in an attempt to show that historical knowledge is a legitimate form of human understanding, that statements about events in the past and the possible relations of cause and effect that hold between them can be justified before the bar of philosophical reason. In other words, philosophers working in this area are looking for ways of explaining how the practice of history is possible - because of course history books are in fact being written all the time, and historians do not dream of suspending their labors until philosophers have agreed on how to justify them. The philosophy of history in the Anglo-Saxon tradition is, then, a modest discipline which does not set itself very high targets. It is in striking contrast to its sister in continental Europe where, perhaps particularly in Germany, the philosophy of history consists in speculation on the universal meaning of a history composed of particular processes, an enquiry into how any given historical movement might be said to contribute to the totality of the experience of the race seen as a meaningful unity [10] shall not be concerning myself with the subject in this latter sense, which is perhaps just as well since it is an area where talking nonsense is more than usually easy. Rather, I am concerned in what follows with the epistemology of historical statements, since this is necessary to render secure the claimed access of Christian minds to those past events on which their faith depends. The making and comprehending of a history book may be compared to the making and comprehending of any story. [11] The understanding of stories, narratives, is a form of human understanding which unfortunately has been somewhat played down since ancient times. Even though the Hellenes were rather good storytellers and historians, their philosophers concentrated almost exclusively on the search for universal truths, truths that held irrespective of the particularities of those people in that time and space. [12] Yet surely there is a genuine, distinctive, and important kind of understanding involved in following a story with attention and insight, even though the story deals almost invariably with particularities and hardly ever with universal truths. The difference between a purely literary story and a historical narrative can be specified in terms of certain conditions which we expect a historical story to meet. [13] First and most obviously, a historical story must be set in real time and space. A story about life on the planet Nusquam in the year 3000 could scarcely claim our interest as history. Second, a historical story must be consistent with all the known evidence relevant to the events it contains. Third, it must arise out of public materials and possess a public aim, that of giving an account of some slice of the public past. The story of an individual's love affairs would not in itself be history even if it took place in the eighteenth century, though doubtless by certain deft touches it could be rendered historically significant. If a narrative meets these three conditions - set in real space and time, consistent with all the evidence, part of the public and not just private past, then it is history. There is no harm in admitting that imagination plays a considerable part in constructing such a story. By imagination writers of both fiction and history relate one event to another in ways that strike us as plausible because they have a feel cognate with that which we ourselves know from daily life. The ability to enter into the minds of other human agents and to see separate events as part of a coherent narrative is among the most vital forms of imaginative understanding we have, even though by "understanding" here something very different is meant from our use of the same word in the context of, say, the scientist at work in his laboratory. Understanding we can say - is polyvalent: the way we understand a poem is not the way we understand a philosophical argument, and neither is the way we understand our grandmother. Thus historical explanation is not a fading echo of the explanation found in the natural sciences but is sui generis, standing on its own two feet. In offering a historical explanation for some event or movement or personality, historians invites us to look with them at their chosen grouping of the known facts and the questions they raise. They present us with a pattern which, they believe, they have found in the evidence and invite our judgment as to whether this pattern is really there. We judge by deciding whether a historian's highlighting enables us to follow a story more easily and renders it coherent in and of itself. Yes, it all seems to fit is the response that a successfully stated historical hypothesis should elicit. Given, then, that the construction of historical narratives is a perfectly proper human enterprise, is there reason to think that the biblical history underlying our faith exemplifies such storytelling? Remaining on the central line of the biblical story and refusing to be sidetracked onto comparative details, we must still distinguish between historical event and theological interpretation. When, for instance, we speak of the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, we are conflating a claimed historical event and a claimed accurate theological interpretation of that event. The alleged historical event is that something very remarkable happened to the apostolic group in the upper room in Jerusalem on the Jewish feast of Weeks in the year of Jesus' death. The allegedly accurate theological interpretation is that the something in question was the definitive gift of the Spirit of Jesus Christ and his Father. Parallel distinctions can be made right down the story line. What we have in the Bible is event plus theological interpretation. The result of this distinction is that we have two questions to cope with. First, were there in fact historical events of the kind presupposed by the complex description of event-plus-theological-interpretation given in Scripture? Second, is the theological account of the significance of these events compatible with what is believed about them by historians? Only exact study by historians of the biblical period can found critically any assurance on these questions, but an attempt will be made here to sketch out the rough lines of a response. For most of the episodes in the biblical history, the Bible itself is the only direct source of evidence. However, within the Bible there are often several distinct sources relevant to the same event. Within any one of these sources scholars may sometimes discern more than one authorial hand. This opens the possibility of multiple and convergent attestation of a kind that warrants confidence. Thus, for instance, the gospel stories about the resurrection appearances of Jesus occur in multiple and perhaps composite sources whose authors can be shown to have very different aims. For St. Mark, whose resurrection-appearance story is clearly indicated but missing in the "lost ending," the resurrection is principally a consolation for Christians under persecution; for St. John, very differently, it is the foundation for the sacramental life of the Church. That writers so utterly at variance in their projects should agree on the fact of the resurrection appearances is reassuring. So because the Bible is a library of books and not a single book conceived and executed in terms of a unitary authorial scheme, it can and does contain a number of convergent witnesses to certain vital events along its central line. However, this is not always so, and even when it is so it may sometimes be shown that one account has drawn so heavily on another as hardly to constitute an independent testimony at all. The sagas of the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis are examples of stories where we have no corroborating testimony from elsewhere in the Bible, for the references to, say, the life of Abraham in the Psalter, seem simply drawn from Genesis itself. Here historians are more likely to consider the extrabiblical evidence in a somewhat impressionistic sense of that word. if what is said of the patriarchs coheres with what is known from the social history of the nations around Israel in the patriarchal period, then a chastened confidence in the historicity of the biblical narrative is once more justified. In assessing the historical character of the biblical story, it is often found that historians working within their own frames of reference are more optimistic about biblical historicity (abstracting for the moment from the dimension of the miraculous) than are theologians. This is at first sight a paradox, but it admits of two explanations. First, theologians are naturally more interested than are historians in the theological significance of the events, and for this reason they sometimes tend to count as theological interpretation what should more properly count as event. To illustrate this syndrome, we can take the episode of the meeting of Mary Magdalene with the risen Jesus by the garden tomb in the Gospel of John. According to the evangelist, Mary mistakes Christ for the gardener. Now the theologian, struck by this vignette, may want to suggest that in the mind of the author there is a deliberate double meaning. As the New Adam leading his disciples into the new paradise Christ, is indeed a gardener; he is preparing the new earth, which another writer of the Johannine school sees descending from above in his Apocalypse. Mary spoke more truly than she knew - an example of the celebrated Johannine irony. To the theologian, the theological affirmation that Christ is the New Adam seems a good deal more important than the simple historical fact involved in whether or not a Palestinian woman mistook Jesus for a gardener, a bricklayer, or a steeplejack. The historical episode thus falls into the background. Moreover, there is a sense in which the theological affirmation stands out more clearly from the pages of the Gospel if St. John simply created the story of the meeting in order to convey his own teaching. For, after all, if Mary really did mistake Jesus for the gardener, then perhaps there is nothing more to the story than the record of that mistake, and the theologian himself is reading into the text of St. John something which never crossed the author's mind. Difficulties of this sort explain the not-infrequent situation in which theologians intent on theological meaning give the appearance of a historical iconoclasm, which, to the ordinary believer, cuts off the branch on which one is sitting. A theological interpretation without an undergirding event is like the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat; yet if the theological interpretation were to be entirely swallowed by the event, all we should be left with is sheer facticity without clear indications of wider significance. The second cause of the paradox in question is intelligible rather than excusable. Theologians in the Lutheran tradition are customarily unhappy at the idea that objective, neutral investigation of the biblical record could play a role in establishing faith. If the pure gratuity of faith is stressed sufficiently over against all forms of "fallen" reason, including historical reason, then it become possible actually to rejoice when the Bible is thought to be historically defective. Thus writers influenced by Lutheranism will often prefer the Bible to be less a straightforward historical narrative and more a witness of faith to a new life given by God. This dichotomy is summed up in the distinction between the German words Historie and Geschichte popularized by the theologian-exegete Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1977). The general idea is that Historie is merely factual history while Geschichte is history laden with significance for human existence. Applied to the Bible, this becomes a distinction between scientific history or objective narrative on the one hand and, on the other, the believer?s story of new life made possible through faith in Christ.[14] But the distinction between Historic and Geschichte rests on a questionable division of reality into facts and values. Bultmann's dichotomy, with its foundation in a Lutheran anthropology that we have already had cause to reject, should be of interest to Catholic theology only in encouraging us to find a better account of the relation between history and faith than his. The question of the reasonableness of the theological interpretation put upon the central story line of Scripture by Jews and Christians cannot really be answered without at least glancing at the thorny problem of the miraculous. It is plain that the biblical record cannot stand if miracles are to be outlawed. At the level of the alleged historical events themselves, even the basic datum must sometimes be classified as strictly miraculous, no matter what wider theological interpretation we may wish to adopt. Thus, irrespective of our theology of the resurrection, we are faced with a claim (textually suppressed only by wonders of exegetical contortionism) that the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth did not rot in the grave but was resuscitated and perceived by others to have returned to life. Theologically considered, the resurrection means a great deal more than this; indeed, any account of the resurrection which spoke only of the resuscitation of a corpse could scarcely be called Christian at all. Nevertheless, it is clear that at the least resurrection does mean resuscitation and that in principle the evidence for this resuscitation is something that historians (and not simply believers) can be invited to consider as part of their account of Christian origins. When we move on to the theological interpretation of the historical events, the Bible presents us with more numerous if less inescapable instances of the allegedly miraculous. Thus the crossing of the Sea of Reeds by the fleeing Israelites might have been interpreted as a providential coincidence based on the fluctuation of tides, but the Book of Exodus does not appear to present the episode in that light. Rather, it is claimed that only the hand of God can account for what happened, not simply in the sense that the Israelites took advantage of the pattern of nature established by the Creator but in the sense that the Creator himself intervened in his creation at this point in time and space for the sake of the people he had chosen. At least since the eighteenth century, philosophers in the Christian West have felt sceptical about all such claims. The Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711-76) provided the classic formulation of the case against. Hume's objection to miracles is not that they are theoretically impossible: for someone who believes in a divine Creator there can be no a priori exclusion, he thought, of the possibility of particular interventions of God in his own world. Hume's objection is that all of our rational activity as human beings is predicated on the assumption that the world is predictable. I do not refuse to make plans to go swimming tomorrow on the grounds that quite possibly the sun will not rise for the first time in history. I am not afraid to cut into an orange with a fruit knife on the grounds that it (the orange or the fruit knife) may inexplicably turn into a top hat. Hume's point is that our assumption of order is so pervasive that it would take a quite extraordinary amount of evidence to convince us that in some particular case this assumption does not hold. Hume then goes on to say that in practice we never find this weight of evidence for any alleged miracle. We find evidence, certainly, but according to Hume, it is always more rational to suppose that something has gone wrong with the collection or transmission of the evidence than to suspend the assumption of cosmic order. The reply to this is that while indeed part of rationality consists in acting on the assumption of the orderliness of reality, this idea does not in itself tell us which concept of order we should have. The Christian theist believes that the order exhibited by the universe is ultimately an order founded on God's love, a love lying behind the world's making and ahead at the world's end. But if this is the basic order displayed in the creation, then the special acts of God's providence we call miracles can themselves be seen as orderly, and not as ruptures of order. Take, for instance, such a miracle as the feeding of the five thousand. Here we have a miraculous provision of food, which fits in with two things. First, it fits in with God the Creator's provision of means for our survival and nourishment, something which goes on continually through the forces of nature. And second, it fits in with the promise of God the Redeemer that one day our spiritual hunger will be satisfied in the banquet of heaven - and while the non-Christian does not by definition credit such a promise, he or she can be brought to see imaginatively the understanding of future order it represents. On such a view of the world, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes cannot be called disorderly, since it coheres perfectly with the order of the purposes of a loving God. For the classical theist, the divine goodness is the most fundamental principle of predictability that there is. So far we have been thinking about physical miracles. But the approach I have outlined would apply equally to that other main category of the miraculous in Judeo-Christianity, namely prophecy, or what is sometimes referred to as "intellectual miracle." The biblical concept of prophecy is a good deal richer than simply that of accurately foretelling particular contingent events, yet such foretelling, even when shorn of simplistic interpretation, remains obstinately part of the biblical narrative. Once again, such foretelling should not be thought of as a bizarre and monstrous disruption or order. The basic order of the world is not simply the order of nature, or of the inherent possibilities of finite spirit, but the order of a God who wills to guide mankind into the knowledge of his truth. In the central figure of the biblical narrative as a whole, Jesus Christ, we find an amazing
concentration of miracle. We find physical miracles: miracles in which Jesus repairs the order of creation, as
with his many acts of healing the sick and crippled. We, find, too, miracles in which he transforms the order of
creation and so points forward to the new life of the world to come, as with his transformation of water into wine
at Cana in Galilee. We find intellectual miracles: prophecies in which Jesus foretells the future history of the
Jewish people in Roman Palestine and prophecies in which he foretells the future fate of his Church. Then in his
own person Jesus is the subject of miracle: as when in his own life story he fulfills the predictions of the Old
Testament prophets and when at Easter he is raised from the dead. Insofar as miracle is evidence of the presence
of God inside history, this extraordinary concentration of miracle is evidence of a special intensity to God's
presence in the story of Jesus Christ. And this naturally raises the question of the unique status or authority
of Jesus. Alternatively, the unique status or authority of Jesus can be brought out by speaking of the aesthetic rather than moral authority of his life. This way of speaking is not a matter of ignoring the ethical aspect of Jesus' transcendence but of suggesting how to conceive that aspect in the wider context of humanity?s search for meaning and truth. A comparison is being instituted between the authority of Jesus and the authority of a great work of art. The latter is something before which we are brought up short, and to which we submit ourselves, because we find in it a meaning that goes beyond the realm of the everyday. The splendor of a great work of art communicates the radiance which belongs to the truth of things, what the Scholastic philosophers call pulchrum, beauty as a determination of being as such. In a similar way, it is proposed, the glory of God shines forth in the life and person of Jesus Christ. His words and works of love express the selfcommunicating goodness of being, a goodness derived from being?s transcendent ground or source [16] Once again, it becomes rationally credible to speak of him as a divine legate. In such ways we can flesh out in reasonable terms the claim that Jesus Christ represents a unique openness of human history to God. The miracles which surround him, brought to a climax in the resurrection, are the detritus left by a unique intersection of eternity with time. As presented in the biblical story, this intersection is more than an interruption of a gracious kind. It is not merely the mending of an old order but the elevation of history into a new order, even though this new order does not negate the old but preserves it in carrying it beyond itself. Thus, what I have called the remarkable concentration of miracle in the life of Jesus signals something greater than any miracle, namely a new mode of divine presence and activity in history. As Dei verbum, the constitution of the Second Vatican Council on divine revelation, put it, the sign par excellence of that revelation in history is Jesus Christ himself, the "whole of his presence and self-manifestation," [17] something the text goes on to analyze in terms of his words and deeds, his signs and miracles, and, especially, his death and resurrection, along with the sending of the Spirit of truth. That Christ is thus the central sign may be confirmed by noting that the Bible as we have it, that is, as laid out in the Church's canon, or approved sequence of authorized books, is itself centered on Jesus Christ. In Scripture, everything looks forward to Jesus Christ, as in the Old Testament, or flows from him, as in the life of the New Testament community he founded. [18] Jesus' claims as a divine legate, and those of the Church he founded, may be defended as not unreasonable. More than this philosophy cannot do for theology without destroying the freedom of the act of faith itself, since faith is not simply coerced by evidence. [19] However, we have not entirely finished with the services of the philosopher. For we still need to know how philosophy can help us organize the materials of theology, the content of the act of faith, and not simply justify rationally the possibility of theology, the making of the act of faith in the first place - even if an account of the latter already tells us something about the former. FOOTNOTES 1. However, concern with "motives of credibility" has a distinguished ancestry: see, for instance, Thomas' Summa theologiae ha. IIae., q. 1, a. 4, ad ii; and, in general, A. Lang, Die Entfaltung des apologetischen Problems in der Scholastik des Mittelalters (Freiburg:1962). 2. G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: 1980) 17. 3. The best neo-Thomists were careful to integrate both approaches: e.g. J Falcon, La Crédibilité du dogme catholique (Lyons-Paris: 1933) 4. For a fuller description and criticism of these theories, in the spirit of the approach suggested here, see A. Leonard, Pensées des hommes et foi en Jesus Christ. Pour un discernement intellectuel chrétien (Paris: 1980) 64-73, 84-97. 5. G. Daly, "Apologetics in the Modernist Period," Chesterton Review 15, 1-2 (February-May 1989) 79-94. 6. M. Blondel, L'Action (Paris: 1893). See H. Bouillard, Blondel et le christianisme (Paris: 1961); J. M. Somerville, "Maurice Blondel 1861-1949," Thought 36 (1961) 371-410. 7. K. Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York and London: 1968); Rahner, Hearers of the Word (New York and London: 1969); the aim of these two sequentially related works is briefly described in J. A. DiNoia, "Karl Rahner," in The Modern Theologians, 1, ed. D. Ford (Oxford: 1989) 190-92. 8. On Judaism here, see C. R. North, The Old Testament Interpretation of History (London: 1946). 9. Thus history is for Christianity "a process determined by the creative act of God vertically from above," C. H. Dodd, History and the Gospel (London: 1938) 81. Or again, for Christian faith: "the temporal is inwardly sustained, saturated, pervaded by the Untemporal," J. Pieper, The End of Time (London: 1954) 67. For the distinctiveness of this viewpoint vis-à-vis other religious cultures, see C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London: 1972) 2-3. 10. CF W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (London 1951-1958) 119-20 11. R. Cohlingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: 1946) 20-21. 12. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: 1964) 22-71. 13. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 246ff. 14. L. Majevez, The Christian Message and Myth: The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (English trans., London: 1958) 188; C. Greshake, Historie wird Geschichte. Bedeutung und Sinn der Unterscheidung von Historie und Geschichte in der Theologie Rudolf Bultmanns (Essen: 1963). 15. S. W. Sykes, "The Theology of the Humanity of Christ," in Christ, Faith and History. Cambridge Studies in Christology, ed. S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (Cambridge: 1972) 53-71. 16. R. Fisichella, La rivelazione: evento e credibilità (Bologna: 1985), presents a global view of the credibility of revelation as the self-manifestation of the Trinitarian love showing itself in its signs, first and foremost in Christ, but then, in dependence upon him, in the Church. His approach is based on his earlier investigation of Balthasar's contribution here: R. Fisichella, Hans Urs von Baithasar. Amore e credibilitd cristiana (Rome: 1981). 17.Dei verbum, 4. 18.A notion well expressed in T. S. Eliot's The Rock: "Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and out of time, /A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,/A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. . . ."(1934) 50. 19.Although for the First Vatican Council's constitution on faith, the miracles are said to be "quite certain signs accommodated to all minds," this does not mean that grace is not required to turn natural vision into eyes of faith: see P. Rousselot, "Les yeux de la foi," Recherches de science religieuse (1910) 241-59, 444-75. Section Contents Copyright ©; Mark Alder and Order of St Benedict, Inc., 1991, 2001. This Version: 6th February 2008
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