Winds of Change … Puffs of Freedom?

The winds of freedom are beginning to stir within the Roman Catholic Church. Those who were present at the opening session of the Second Vatican Council were startled by the tension-filled debate that accompanied the reading of the report on Scripture and tradition. For in that debate—in St. Peter’s in the city of Rome, in the presence of the highest church officials—some Roman Catholic theologians defended the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptara, maintaining that it was and had always been the teaching of the church, despite the apparently contrary statements of the Council of Trent. No less surprising was the interest accorded the views of Protestant observers.

In many sectors of Catholic life one hears Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation honored, if not entirely exonerated. And the rebirth of interest in biblical studies that accompanied and fed the Lutheran Reformation is today strikingly paralleled—at least in some measure—within the church of Rome.

In its early days, to combat modernism the Pontifical Biblical Commission suppressed many attempts to employ the historical method in Old and New Testament studies; but today this is no longer true. Although the Biblical Commission is hardly progressive, it is not reactionary. It permits great freedom for many biblical and historical scholars and has contributed to a bold reassessment of biblical data, as in the long schema on the Church approved at the third session of Vatican II. Progressives like Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and Edward Schillebeeckx speak openly, and church authorities not only let them speak but even seem willing at times to listen to what they have to say. Some Catholic scholars state openly that they prefer Karl Barth to Thomas Aquinas. And many are well acquainted with Bultmann (and, we may add, seem overly in debt to his views).

Nevertheless, many feel that the winds of freedom are merely gentle puffs. Not even the visionary Pope John XXIII was prepared to allow progressives to discount the church’s claim to absolute and infallible authority in matters of faith and doctrine. Nor did either John XXIII or Paul VI hesitate to intervene decisively in Vatican Council proceedings when intervention seemed expedient. Apparently, neither pope has intended to grant unbridled liberty or to countenance modernism while extending a limited freedom to progressive theologians.

Why this caution? Part of the answer lies in the conservatism of the Roman Catholic Church, symbolized by the ultra-conservative Curia. But there is more to it than that. Years have passed since the great anti-modernist crisis, launched by Pope Pius X’s Pascendi dominici gregis encyclical of 1907 and highlighted again at mid-century by Pius XII’s Humani generis. But the specter of modernism still haunts the church. Although few exponents of the “new theology” would care for such a label, who can be certain of their leanings? Academic freedom has often been curtailed by the church, and disciplinary reprisals have sometimes followed upon unguarded expressions of heretical views; therefore who can be sure that the articulation of a slightly avant-garde theology does not actually conceal a radicalism that if unleashed would, from the Catholic point of view, be destructive both of the church and of Christian doctrine? That those within the Roman church, especially the popes, proceed with caution is thus fully understandable. And Protestants, who view the developments almost entirely from outside, should be especially careful to judge the spirits and to refrain from endorsing every wind of change as an expression, however belated, of the spiritual insights of the Protestant Reformation.

In attempting to assess the new climate within the church of Rome, Protestants should be aware of certain clear distinctions. At the very least, they should be aware of the distinction between progressives and modernists, even if in a given situation it is hard to describe a man as one or the other. A progressive within the Roman church is one who seeks constructive change, not to overthrow the dogmas of the church and the teachings of Scripture, but to enable them to become more clearly understood and more effectively proclaimed. Sometimes this legitimate aim results in a guarded reinterpretation of dogma. A modernist in the proper sense is one who, while pretending to maintain the dogma of the church, actually destroys it. Thus when Alfred Loisy, the French biblical scholar, accepted not only the historical method of Harnack but also Harnack’s view of the person of Jesus, he became a modernist and rightly suffered the disapprobation of his church. Lagrange, on the other hand, who was suspected of modernism because he also applied historical methods to the Bible, refrained conscientiously from attacking any dogma of the church and is now regarded as the great saint of biblical scholarship.

At the same time, Protestants should be aware that not all progressives are “reformers,” as Protestants generally understand that term. The progressives at Vatican Council II were united, not primarily in their doctrinal positions or on methodological grounds, but in an overriding concern for aggiornamento, a concern for renewal leading to a reconciliation between Rome and the modern historically minded and scientific world. Some of these men were quite orthodox from the Roman point of view. Others were modernists to the extent that they would openly attack some dogma, such as the Catholic view of transubstantiation. Some would be regarded as heretics, even in conservative Protestant circles. With some, such as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, there is great difficulty in determining whether a new discovery of certain points of doctrine is, as they claim, only a recovery of what the church has always taught in all ages or is actually a defense of views that Rome even now would judge heretical. Only the future will tell the degree to which the “new” theology will encourage spiritual and theological reform.

Besides those who work within the church, there are others who despair of the possibility of reconciling Roman Catholicism with the modern world and who therefore leave the church for a secular life and ministry. Some leave it for very personal reasons. Often several motives are working together. The departure from the Roman church of British theologian Charles Davis, for instance, seems to have been based more on a rejection of the church’s authoritarian structure than on a rejection of its doctrine. And the distinctive tenets of the Lutheran Reformation seem negligible aspects of his thought. Thus Protestants should be as cautious about dubbing all those who have left the Catholic Church reformers as about casting all progressives in that role.

Protestant observers should also be careful about ascribing a rediscovery of Protestant doctrines—sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia—to the Roman church at large. True, some Catholic theologians, especially in Germany and France, implicitly and sometimes explicitly endorse some of these assertions. But their views are hardly universal in the church. And the future of their views, in light of the slightly hardening line of the Second Vatican Council on papal infallibility and other dogmas, is not completely encouraging.

An illustration may be found in the great doctrinal issue between the Jansenists, who were hounded out of France in the eighteenth century, and the Jesuits, whose theology has always dominated the Roman Catholic Church. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jansenists demanded many reforms within the church, and many of these reforms have come about in recent decades. But the Jansenists stood for more than ecclesiastical and liturgical reforms. Jansenism was the last great attempt in the Roman church to overcome the Pelagianism of the Jesuits and return to the biblical theology forcefully expounded by Saint Augustine. The Jansenists insisted upon the total sovereignty of God in man’s salvation and deplored the idea that man could in any sense earn grace.

Even though many of the ecclesiastical reforms desired by the Jansenists were effected by Vatican II, the doctrinal emphasis of the Jansenists was strikingly lacking in conciliar debate. The concept of sin found in the council documents is superficial by Augustinian standards. Many of the speeches presupposed the ability of the natural man to know God and to cooperate with the divine grace. And many speakers revealed a tendency toward universalism. Thus Origen rather than Augustine seems to be the pater theologica of modern Catholicism. The task still falls upon evangelicals in all churches to renew Augustine’s profound doctrines of sin and grace as vital options in the contemporary theological debate.

This does not mean that Protestants should reject all that is happening within the church of Rome. On the contrary, they should applaud its new freedom and rejoice in its strong new attention to biblical scholarship. They should do this all the more in a day in which the Protestant churches appear to be disintegrating under the effects of a vagabond biblical and systematic theology.

But at the same time they must be aware that not all rebels, either Protestant or Catholic, are moved by the Spirit of God. They must look, not for freedom itself or for theological movement itself, but for signs of new awareness of the depths of man’s sin and of the total sovereignty of God in man’s salvation, wherever these signs may be found.—ED.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.