The “Sense of the Faith” in History: Its Sources, Reception, and Theology by John J. Burkhard

Abstract

Reviewed by: The “Sense of the Faith” in History: Its Sources, Reception, and Theology by John J. Burkhard Jared Wicks S.J. The “Sense of the Faith” in History: Its Sources, Reception, and Theology. By John J. Burkhard, OFM Conv. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic. 2022. Pp. xiv, 442. $59.95. ISBN: 9780814666890). John Burkhard taught ecclesiology at the Washington Theological Union from the 1990s until the Union’s closure in 2015, with service as its President in 2006 and 2008–09. Theologians will know Burkhard’s ample bibliographies of post-Vatican Council II studies of the sensus fidei published in Heythrop Journal in 1993, 2005, and 2006. The volume reviewed here is also extensive bibliographically, offering a chronological list of nearly 400 studies of the sensus from 1940 to 2000. The importance of Burkhard’s work rests on the centrality of the sensus fidei in Vatican II’s teaching, as brought out recently in several passages of Ormond Rush’s theological summa of the Council, The Vision of Vatican II (Liturgical Press, 2019). For the sensus fidei is a key dimension of a basic theological principle of the Council, namely, faith’s graced adherence to God’s saving revelation. The sensus is the capacity, sometimes called an “instinct,” given by the Holy Spirit’s “anointing” (1 John 2: 20.27), to enable the believer and the believing community to lay hold of God’s word in its true meaning while dismissing inauthentic versions. It is at the heart of living faith in personal adherence, penetration of revealed meaning, and the application of God’s word to life in the Lord (so, Lumen gentium 12, also 35, with Dei verbum 8, and Gaudium et spes 44 and 62). In ten substantial chapters, Burkhard presents the history of treatments of the sensus fidei in Catholic teaching, both by theologians and the magisterium, beginning with scattered references to doctrines held by an unexplained “sense of the church” both before Trent and in that council’s decrees. Learned accounts treated the sensus in nineteenth-century works by Johann Adam Möhler, Giovanni Perrone, and John Henry Newman, with its importance being sealed by Pope Pius IX’s consultation of the Catholic people’s consensus in adhering in faith to Mary’s Immaculate Conception, as a step toward the dogmatic definition of 1854. In the twentieth century, two Dominicans treated the sensus, first as a major factor in doctrinal development (Francisco Marin-Sola) and then as the instinctive wisdom of the believer’s graced sensibility (Mannes D. Koster). After the dogmatic definition of Mary’s Assumption in 1950, the Alsatian Redemptorist Clément Dillenschneider promoted attention to the sensus fidei while relating it to the Church’s lex orandi, while Yves Congar’s Lay People in the Church (originally 1953) situated the [End Page 168] sensus in God’s spiritual endowment of the whole Church to enable it to carry out its share in Christ’s prophetic office. Burkhard relates the iter of the sensus fidei through the labors of Vatican Council II, beginning textually with a later chapter of the 1962 schema De ecclesia, which contrasted public opinion in the Church with the grace-effect that enables the believing people to respond obediently to proposed teaching and understand its meaning. In early 1963 a transformed ecclesiology schema located the sensus in a new second chapter on the whole people of God, who are indefectible in believing, taught and anointed as they are by God (Jn. 6:45; 1 Jn. 2:20.27), for carrying out in the world Christ’s offices of priest, prophet, and royal servant. The aula discussion of 1963 led to several refinements now in Lumen gentium 12, which distinguishes sharply the one sensus of all believers from the great variety of charisms for special callings, with the former leading believers to adhere to what is truly the word of God (1 Thes. 2:13), both grasping its depths and applying it more completely in life. Burkhard treats the reception of Vatican II’s doctrine of the sensus fidei in several venues, as in ecumenical dialogue documents, in the new codes of Catholic canon law, in papal teaching, especially by...