I trust that those of you who have been following the conversation in First Things have been, well..following it. But just in case, here’s the latest from Fr. Oakes on heresy:
What I’m searching for is a term for two different kinds of heresies: one in which no agreement is possible between the orthodox position and a heretical position (docetism, for example), and one in which agreement can, at least in principle, be reached (like justification by faith). Again, extreme cases are best for illuminating what I mean, which I hope will explain to Dr. Pitstick and others what I mean by Catholic theologians who are “selling the company store.” The following sentences represent a catena of quotations from the chapter on the Resurrection from Roger Haight’s Jesus, Symbol of God:
My understanding of the resurrection does not support the necessity of an empty tomb in principle. Resurrection faith today is not belief in an external miracle, an empirical historical event testified to by disciples, which we take as a fact on the basis of their word. Although that may describe in fact the belief of many Christians, it is no ideal. A reflective faith-hope today will affirm Jesus risen on the basis of a conviction that Jesus’ message is true; because God is the way Jesus revealed God to be, Jesus is alive. . . . Because it was Jesus whom people experienced as risen, and not someone else, one must assume that Jesus had a forceful religious impact on people. . . . In the view proposed here, the external event that helped mediate a consciousness of Jesus risen was Jesus himself during his ministry. Or, to be more exact, after his death, the disciples’ memory of Jesus filled this role. (All emphases added.)
I certainly hope I don’t have to argue the point here that an orthodox understanding of Christology and the Resurrection can reach no common understanding whatever with these sentences, either now or at any time in the future. Here surely Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ famous law can be invoked: “When orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.” Tragically, Haight’s views are part of a long trend in Catholic theology that began right after the Second Vatican Council, a point that Joseph Ratzinger was one of the first to notice. In his epochal Introduction to Christianity
(1968), he describes the Neuhaus law–with remarkable prescience, I might add–using one of the fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm:
Anyone who has watched the theological movement of the last decade and who is not one of those thoughtless people who always uncritically accept what is new as necessarily better might well feel [feel!] reminded of the old story of “Clever Hans.” The lump of gold that was too heavy and troublesome for him he exchanged successively, so as to be more comfortable, for a horse, a cow, a pig, a goose, and a whetstone, which he finally threw in the water, still without losing much; on the contrary, what he now gained in exchange, so he thought was the precious gift of complete freedom. . . .
The worried Christian of today is often bothered by questions like these: Has our theology in the last few years not taken in many ways a similar path? Has it not gradually watered down the demands of faith, which had been found all too demanding, always only so little that nothing important seemed to be lost, yet always so much that it was soon possible to venture on to the next step? And will poor Hans, the Christian who trustingly let himself be led from exchange and exchange, from interpretation to interpretation, not really soon hold in his hand, instead of the gold with which he began, only a whetstone that he can safely be advised to throw away?
Note that Haight is shilling his views as a Catholic theologian (indeed, he was once elected president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, which just goes to show how pervasive his views are, at least among the professor-set). It is precisely against trends represented here so garishly by Haight that Cardinal Ratzinger struggled during his tenure as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which explains the relevance of Ad Tuendam Fidem, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and (above all) Dominus Iesus.
In fact, the controversy aroused by that last document highlights my point. Because they lacked a proper terminology for different modes of heresy, the bien-pensants of the world press largely took Dominus Jesus to be an unwarranted insult to Protestant churches and to other religions. In point of fact, however, it was a warning against pluralistic trends in Catholic theology. But because it was promulgated in a pluralistic world, it was taken as a declaration abjuring all dialogue of whatever stripe. That this was far from Cardinal Ratzinger’s mind can be seen in his book Truth and Tolerance
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