Theological Vocation Research Articles

Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation

Theological Indebtedness to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain:A Testimony to Their Contribution to My Theological Vocation Matthew L. Lamb Robert Cardinal Sarah's important The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise shows the fundamental significance of monastic contemplation and silence for a God-centered renewal of society and culture. Before I would teach at Catholic theological faculties, I realized that I should draw upon an intellectual and contemplative formation I had received previous to any teaching.1 Just before my fifteenth birthday, in May of 1952, I was graced with a vocation to enter the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. This gave me the advantage of being in a contemplative monastery where an intellectual asceticism was linked with quests for wisdom and worship. Steeped in the Biblical Word of God and the Divine Office, the intellectual, moral, and religious formation invited the monk to an in depth study of the philosophical and theological writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, as well as the Medieval monastic and scholastic saints and scholars. I drew upon those fifteen years of study because they were foundational for a much needed renewal of Catholic theology in our times. A serious shortcoming in Catholic circles after Vatican II was a severing of a genuine ressourcement from aggiornomento. This rupture relegated the great intellectual achievements of the biblical, conciliar, patristic, medieval, and [End Page 617] Renaissance periods to historical museums. They were fine for visits, but had little or no relevance to modern issues and questions. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI warned, a hermeneutics of rupture made a hermeneutics of reform and renewal dead, leaving Catholics with nothing more than the swirling, ever-changing cultural fashions of the day. The writings of Jacques Maritain were studied and read in the Trappist monastery I had entered. The essay he wrote with Raïssa on "Liturgy and Contemplation" was published in the Carmelite journal Spiritual Life and was important in its relation of the Divine Office to the contemplative life. A most important aspect of Maritain's many writings is how, during the 1920s through the 1960s, he forged in philosophy the importance of recovering the great intellectual achievements of the past in order to provide adequate answers to contemporary questions. He saw clearly that major problems in modernity are due to the failure to keep alive the intellectual, moral, and religious traditions of Catholic Europe. He saw clearly the universal validity of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as inviting the reader to discover the natural reason of humanity.2 It was common in the monastery to read Maritain's writings on an array of issues: natural law, the state and democracy, Christian existentialism, art and scholasticism, and the art of Rouault, as well as his contributions to the United Nations charter. His wonderful Reflections on America were read aloud during meals in the monastic refectory. Indeed, it was Jacques Maritain who illustrated in his philosophy how only by recovering human reason (ressourcement) through a thorough study of the ancients could one bring renewal and reform to modern times (aggiornomento). Thus the philosophical recovery of Aquinas by Maritain prepared the intellectual groundwork for a proper understanding of the biblical and patristic renewals, even though this had been unfortunately overlooked by some proponents of la nouvelle théologie.3 Decades before the 1960s, Maritain was recovering important theoretical writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and his commentators, especially John of St. Thomas. [End Page 618] Maritain realized the importance of this recovery not only to counteract the baneful consequences of nominalism and voluntarism on modern thought and life, but also to provide more adequate perspectives on major issues facing modernity. His philosophical ressourcement was decisive for his philosophical aggiornomento. When he saw the failures of many Catholic intellectuals after Vatican II to live up to the demands of the theoretical recoveries of the Fathers and Aquinas, he wrote the blunt positive and negative assessments of post-conciliar life and thought in The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time. Nevertheless...

Reformation: a Two-edged Sword in the Cause of the Ministry of Women

When Martin Luther mounted an attack on the industry of Indulgences, he affirmed key Reformation principles: human beings are saved by God’s grace alone and the priesthood of all the baptised gives all followers of Christ equal status. This was in conformity with an earlier generation of reformers who saw the Bible as ultimate authority and witnessed to biblical truth against corruption. The logical consequence of this should have been the enabling of women who were so disposed to exercise a theological vocation. In practice, the resulting rupture in religious and social life often affected women for the worse. Educational formation and leadership opportunities were restricted by the closure of convents. While the trade guilds, with their tightly regulated social systems, did not allow scope for women who transgressed normative expectations, their suppression was not necessarily liberating for women. The new social model of the home replaced that of convent and guild and marriage was exalted in place of celibacy. Changes in devotional practice involved loss and gain. Women who did not conform to the domestic norm were treated at best with misogyny and female prophets of the radical Reformation paid for their convictions with their lives. In education, leadership, piety and radical social challenge, women’s options were restricted. However, the key Reformation principles ultimately enabled the development of women’s ministry which was marked by the ordination of Constance Todd 400 years later.

Maximus the Confessor’s Letters to Thomas. A Review of the Most Recent Critical Text and English Translation

For bringing to us the metaphysical vision of Maximus the Confessor about the Incarnation of Christ in a scholarly, rigorous and yet accessible form, Janssens and Lollar are owed our hearty thanks. Lollar in particular has much more to offer Maximus scholars as he presses on to translate the lengthy Ambigua to John. Although critical work on the Greek text of these Difficulties still awaits definitive accomplishment, he will gain much needed help from existing translations in other languages by Staniloae (Romanian), Moreschini (Italian), and Ponsoye (French). Translation deserves to be honoured as an intellectual and theological vocation in its own right, with its own dignity and value. Yet as Maximus continues to attract an exploding academic following, such translations not only offer a first level of theological interpretation, but also provide us all with a vital touch-stone by which to judge the worth of the ever widening pool of secondary publications

Performing Christ: The Theological Vocation of Lay People

The development of secular institutions has led to the widespread assumption, even among Christians, that the Church is itself one more institution. There is to this a corresponding privatisation of piety and a depoliticization of the church and of the theologian. The church, however, is not primarily an institution. It is first of all the primordial fellowship of the body of Christ. Seen this way, a renewed emphasis is placed on the full distribution of ministries, in which every lay member bears a part. The church is ‘made to appear’ through the exercise of these roles within the body of Christ. This ‘labour’ is nothing less than the performance of Christ within the other social bodies to which Christians belong. This performance makes every Christian a theologian. The lay Christian is particularly well placed to exemplify a theology that is worked out in action and behaviour as well as words.

The Crucible of Faith: Justice and Liberation in the Work of Engelbert Mveng

This paper examines the thought of Engelbert Mveng, a Cameroonian artist, philosopher, historian, theologian, poet, an ordained Catholic priest, and the founder of the Movement of African Catholic Intellectuals (M.I.C.A.). He led a vigorous fight for the liberation of every day people, was labeled as an irredentist by many powerful forces in the country and was brutally murdered in his own home after celebrating mass in 1995. According to Prof. Akintunde E. Akinade, his theological vocation provides a useful lens for understanding the relevance of the Christian faith within the African continent.

Poetry and apocalypse: theological disclosures of poetic language

Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Preface iii @toc1:Part 1 @toc2:I. Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue: A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language 00 @toc1:Part 2 @toc2:II. Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation in Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce 000 III. Typological Re-Origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry: How to Read Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic 000 IV. On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today: From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology 000 @toc4:Post-apocalypse 000 Notes 000 Index 000

¿Por qué pensar la fe?

The author of this article articulates an answer to the question posed'by taking as its point of departure the theological vocation that is proper to the Chu...

The Weakness of Power and the Power of Weakness: The Ethics of War in a Time of Terror

In 2002 a significant number of American theologians declared that the ‘war on terror’ was a just war. But the indiscriminate strategies and munitions technologies deployed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq fall short of the just war principles of non-combatant immunity, and proportionate response. The just war tradition is one of Christendom's most enduring legacies to the law of nations. Its practice implies a standard of virtue in war that is undermined by the indiscriminate effects of many modern weapons and by the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. The violent power represented by the technology of what the Vatican calls ‘total war’has occasioned a significant shift in Catholic social teaching on just war since the Second World War. Total war generates an asymmetry of weakness in those subjected to these techniques of terror, and this has only strengthened the violence of the Islamist struggle against the West. But those who draw inspiration and legitimacy from this weakness in their struggle with the West also reject virtue in war. In a time of terror the theological vocation is to speak peace and to recall the terms in which the peace of God was achieved by way of the cross.

Primordial Sacrifice, Typology and the Theological Vocation of Literature: Extending Gian Balsamo's Interpretation of Joyce and Christian Epic

Extending the new contribution to the Joyce scholarship offered by Gian Balsamo, this essay develops a typological perspective upon literature as a ritualistic repetition of primordial sacrifice. It traces this function of literature from Dante through the Christian epic to Joyce. Poetry, viewed in this perspective, envisions and expresses what makes a culture possible as a whole and from its deepest roots. Such theologically laden types as sacrifice and eucharistie celebration reveal western culture in its development from both Greek and Hebrew antiquity to its ultramodem apotheosis in Joyce as one ongoing negotiation with itself. Culture is a continual reworking and revisioning of traditionary types that ran from the beginning to the end of the history—and back again—becoming the overarching metaphors that connect everything in the universe of human experience together. The figurative powers that pre-dispose poetic language to perform the work of revelation in a sense akin to and even indiscernible from religious revelation are evinced with particular force in the operation of literary and theological types and in the compositional and exegetical methods of typology. Under various names, the type is one of the most classical topics in figurative rhetoric. The recognisability of characters and events as typical—as based on and repeating, as well as estabhshing precedents—is fundamental to literary and symbolic significance, in general. More specifically, typology has been indispensable to biblical interpretation since ancient times and has parallels Literature & Theology © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org The Author 2006. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.73 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:46:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 252 THE THEOLOGICAL VOCATION OF LITERATURE in the methods used for interpreting Homer and other poets in pagan antiquity. Even more primordially, typology is inextricably bound up with the repetitions of religious rite and specifically sacrifice. For the type is inherently a form of repetition, and sacrifice is an archetypal origin that is typically repeated. Typology has taken on a new life in contemporary literary criticism and particularly in a very recent criticism ofjames Joyce. Gian Balsamo is currently applying an innovatively typological method, inspired by biblical typology, in a penetrating reading of Joyce and Christian epic.1 Balsamo shows how primordial sacrifice is repeated by literary representations or types that re-invent and fulfil the primitive motifs that they subsume. This enables us to see literature as fulfilling a unitary purpose from ancient Greek tragedy through the Christian epic to Joyce and the novel: literature, in all these guises, has been discovered as being deeply liturgical in nature and as responding to a theological vocation. Viewed typologically, literature gives an original access to direct, especially sensuous experience of the divine; it even reveals this experience as the origin of human society and consciousness. These are, in fact, perennial ideas concerning the mission and function of poetry that can be traced all the way back to Orphic sources, in which Orpheus is designated as the instituter of the sacrificial rites of Bacchus,2 but they are now being worked out with critical acumen in a perspective that can help us discern a new horizon for the experience of literature and religion. I will elicit from this work on typology aspects that bear particularly on linguistic repetition as a means of theological revelation. Balsamo's work on scriptural poetics and James Joyce, conducts poetry back to its originally theological inspiration by showing how the experience of literature today, that is, in the day of James Joyce, is really not to be understood fully except in terms of the experience of liturgy, and that means an experience of primordial sacrifice. This clears a vista for overviewing the purport of poetry quite generally that extends beyond our customary field of vision, opening a wider panorama in which poetic literature can be seen as responsive to a theological vocation. In former ages, poets made claims to theological inspiration with great frequency, but such claims seem to many to have become virtually unintelligible today. It is striking, then, that out of the midst of the modemist writing of Joyce, Balsamo evokes primordial types or archetypes for envisioning literature—the very existence and inexhaustible concreteness of literature—as theological in its deepest motivations. In Joyce's works, it becomes fully clear that the literary, at the level of seriousness represented by Christian epics, operates fundamentally as a religious rite. This emerges clearly, moreover, as having been at stake in the Christian epic all along. Joyce and the Christian epic tradition taken together show how literature can be understood as the actualisation of religious ritual This content downloaded from 207.46.13.73 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:46:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Vocation of the Theologian

[Today theologians are as often lay as cleric. Vatican II reshaped the nature of this vocation as a charism located with the prophetic office of the people of God. Originally theologians were bishops, then monks, then Scholastic thinkers. Prior to Vatican II, changes in theology affected the theological vocation: a shift in the understanding of the magisterium, changes in methodology, and renewed attention to Pneumatology enabled the birth of the new cadre. However, the relation between the institutional Church and its lay theologians remains a work in progress.]

The Practice of Theology as Passion for Truth: Testimony from the Journals of Yves Congar, O.P.

ABSTRACTYves Congar, O.P. (1904–1995) is widely considered the most important Roman Catholic ecclesiologist of the twentieth century and one of the most influential theologians at the Second Vatican Council. His personal diaries Journal d'un théologien 1946–1956 and Mon journal du Concile, recently published posthumously in France, enhance our appreciation for the character and spirituality of this extraordinary theologian. These journals testify to the passion for truth that inspired and sustained Congar's theological vocation through both his difficult years of censure and the exhilarating conciliar period. The witness and example Congar offers can be instructive to our own continuing practice of the theological discipline.

Karl Barth and Oscar Cullmann on Their Theological Vocation: I On Systematic Theology

Attempting to account to mýself how I actually came into the field of systematic theology requires reaching back to my sixteenth year, to the confirmation instruction I experienced at that time. It was extraordinary in its own way. I learned then, for example, that very dubious undertakings are involved in the five medieval proofs for the existence of God and in the later orthodox theory of the literal inspiration of the Bible. Much more important, however, I learned that it would be a fine and excellent thing not only to identify and to affirm the great articles of the Christian confession of faith but also to understand them from inside out. On the eve of my confirmaton day I boldly resolved to become a theologian, perhaps not so much with the thought of preaching, cure of souls and the like, but rather in the hope of realising in the course of this study some substantial understanding of a confession of faith of which I had only a vague apprehension. As yet I knew nothing of Anselm and his programme of fides quaerens intellectum and therefore also nothing of what I was undertaking as ‘theology’ in general or even of what ‘systematic’ theology was in particular. Upon entering the University, the theoretical and practical philosophy of Kant together with Schleiermacher's analysis of religion and faith became my guiding stars. To the prevailing tendency of about 1910 among the younger followers of Albrecht Ritschl I attached myself with passable conviction.