Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln by Michael Seewald, and: Reform: Dieselbe Kirche anders denken by Michael Seewald

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln by Michael Seewald, and: Reform: Dieselbe Kirche anders denken by Michael Seewald Matthew Briel Dogma im Wandel: Wie Glaubenslehren sich entwickeln by Michael Seewald (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2018), 334 pp. Reform: Dieselbe Kirche anders denken by Michael Seewald (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2019), 174 pp. Two recent books from Michael Seewald, professor of dogmatics at the University of Münster, are influenced by Walter Kasper and attempt to show that "there is more room for change [in the Church] than many people think" (Dogma im Wandel, 20). By analyzing the development of the magisterium (Lehramt) over the past 150 years, and especially under John Paul II, Seewald argues that some of the teachings we take to be definitive are, in truth, questionable. The Church is thus ripe for reform. Dogma is prefaced by a German translation of Evelyn Waugh's foreword to his 1964 Sword of Honour (a trilogy comprising his novels Men at Arms [1952], Officers and Gentlemen [1955], and Unconditional Surrender [1961]): On reading the book I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries. All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete. When I wrote Brideshead Revisited I was consciously writing an obituary of the doomed English upper class. It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour, that the Church was susceptible to change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent.1 This becomes programmatic for Seewald's two books, addressed to a [End Page 1385] semi-popular audience. One of Seewald's concerns seems to be to demonstrate that those who are alienated by Pope Francis's changes in doctrine and complain of the Holy Father's innovations are themselves inheritors of a revolution in Church doctrine concerning the magisterium that occurred under the cloak of conservativism.2 Those who oppose Francis's changes, it is implied, are like Waugh, who did not see that there is no historical end to the development of doctrine (Dogma, 294). After an introductory chapter, an important second chapter of Dogma, "Definition of Terms: Dogma and Development" (22–73), provides a foreshadowing of the conclusion of the book. The first half of the chapter presents a history of the idea of dogma as both the whole of Catholic teaching and (later) individual doctrines. As is true of his analysis in both books, it is Seewald's presentation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas ("modernity") that are central to his argument. In the first half of chapter 2, Seewald argues that Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" was itself an innovation with an anti-innovation intention (36–42) and that the reception of the Second Vatican Council in the pontificate of John Paul II betrayed the desire of the Council to reposition the teaching authority of the Church in the entire college of bishops. Seewald also introduces here an inquiry into the change in the conception of dogma introduced by John Paul II that will be essential to his analysis of the present state of the Church in both books. John Paul II's 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, says Seewald, contains a revolution in §88 when it says that dogmas are those truths that are either contained in revelation or those truths that have a necessary connection to the truths contained in revelation (Dogma, 45). There are two ways in which a secondary truth can be necessarily tied to revelation in such a way as to qualify as dogma: it can be bound to revelation either logically or historically (47). This is highly innovative and a significant departure or advance from the first Vatican Council, according to Seewald. However, he argues, secondary truths that were once thought to be dogmas can be overturned (51). Thus monogenism, declared a dogma in Pius XII's Humani Generis, is no longer held by the 1992 Catechism. I would here make two suggestions. First, with Karl Rahner, I would argue that the teaching on monogenism had...