Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria Michael McClymond Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), xxi + 199 pp. Catholic fundamental theologians ought to attend to Eduardo Echeverria's wide-ranging new book, appearing when foundational theological issues stand in the foreground, as witnessed by debates over Amoris Laetitia, critiques from the Dubia Cardinals, controversies over the death penalty, and the 2019 Amazon Synod. The scope of argumentation in Echeverria's work is ambitious, encompassing essentialist-versus-historicist disputes over Vatican II (1–45), the nature of revelation, Scripture, and Tradition (47–92), questions of epistemic and theological foundationalism (93–152), and definitions of a Lérinian hermeneutics of tradition (153–74), as well as the development of dogma (175–95). While each theme might have filled out an entire volume, Echeverria in surveying each theme provides a compact yet comprehensive vision. The book is a contemporary manifesto for Catholic fundamental theology. Catholic readers will be struck by the many Protestant (and especially Protestant Evangelical) authors cited here, including such luminaries as G. C. Berkouwer, G. E. Ladd, Colin Gunton, Paul Helm, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Oliver Crisp. This engagement with non-Catholic authors reflects Echeverria's earlier, PhD-level training in Protestant dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam. Nonetheless, this work is not a mediation between Catholic and Evangelical reasoning, but rather a constitutively Catholic argument that selectively deploys ideas from Protestant as well as Catholic sources. Protestant insights here serve Catholic purposes. It is [End Page 1414] not just that non-Catholics have good things to say, but that Evangelical thinkers in their two-century-long battle against modernist Protestantism have accumulated their own rich repertoire of arguments that prove useful. For Echeverria, ecumenism involves co-belligerency: the enemy of my enemy may prove to be my friend. Among the Catholic thinkers whom Echeverria cites appreciatively are Thomas Aquinas, Yves Congar, Pope John XXIII, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Avery Dulles, Pope Benedict XVI, Aidan Nichols, Germain Grisez, Thomas Guarino, and (more surprisingly) Karl Rahner and David Tracy. Edward Schillebeeckx receives a mixed review in the book in light of his mid-career shift from realism to non-realism (24), as does Gavin D'Costa, since D'Costa rejects relativism but offers a position that Echeverria says is in need of a more robust metaphysical underpinning (27–29). Catholic historians and theologians who serve as a foil, against whom Echeverria reasons, include Giuseppe Alberigo, John O'Malley, Massimo Faggioli, Richard Gaillardetz, Lieven Boeve, and Christoph Theobold. Echeverria opens his book by stating that "I am centrally concerned with the matter of diversity and discontinuity in theological expressions and formulations within a fundamental unity of truth" (1). As collectively "the specter of relativism, antirealism, or fideism" (97), he opposes a cluster of interrelated ideas: that theological assertions make no objective claims regarding the world (non-realism), involve no intellectual or propositional content (non-cognitivism, non-propositionalism), and are always subject to revision or replacement by some new assertion (fallibilism). He writes that "the rejection of a realist notion of truth and language is behind why many find implausible the normative truth of dogmas, creeds, and confessions" (129). The author displays constructive as well as polemical intent in his book, seeking not only to refute false ideas but also to propose better, alternative formulations. Continuity and change in Catholic teaching, argues Echeverria, can be properly understood only if one distinguishes the universal and unchanging truths of the faith from their particular and time-bound forms of expression. What remain changeless are not specific words, nor even doctrinal concepts per se, but the underlying theological judgments and patterns of judgment (xvi). This core claim sets Echeverria at odds with John O'Malley, who uses the words "substantialism" or "essentialism" to typify those who in this way distinguish unchanging truths from their changing expressions (11). Echeverria argues that the truth–expression distinction is not only legitimate but necessary, and that it serves a central purpose in what he calls "the Lérianian legacy of Vatican II" (11). In defense of the truth–expression distinction, Echeverria...