bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Human Beings as the Story of God: Schillebeeckx's Third Christology
Authors: Kennedy Philip 
Published: July 2007

During the month of his seventy-fifth birthday, November, 1989, Edward Schillebeeckx published the final part of what now stands as a three- volumed Christology. His new book, Mensen als verhaal van God (‘Human Beings as the Story of God’), has taken twelve years to appear. It completes a trilogy begun in 1974 with Jezus, het verhaal van een levende (‘Jesus: The Story of a Living One’), and continued in 1977 with Gerechtigheiden liefde: Genade en bevrijding (‘Justice and Love: Grace and Liberation’). These three ‘opera magna’ combine approximately eighteen hundred pages of reflection on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the specificity of Christian faith. What follows is a description of the third part of Schillebeeckx’s Jesus-Quest with an overview of its structure and contents in the light of its two companion volumes, and comments on its governing preoccupation. The description is intended more as an interpretative commentary than a critique.Professor Schillebeeckx began the exegetical research for the first instalment only a few years after the closure of the Second Vatican Council. His intention in the initial volume was not to provide an apologetical support for official church teaching, but rather to discover what was distinctive about Jesus, not as his individuality is codified dogmatically but as it is found in his practice and preaching, as these are reflected in the early credal formulas of the New Testament. Schillebeeckx sought to examine critically the intelligibility of Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth for people today (1,33—34). Whereas the first volume addressed the issue of the ultimate identity of Jesus, the second gave more attention to various theologies of grace, especially the New Testament. The most fundamental presuppositions on which the first two books were constructed related to conditions for professing a Christian faith in the modern world. Schillebeeckx maintains that people today will no longer embrace Christianity simply on the basis of authority: conditions for believing must in some way be anchored in contemporary experiences.
The Great Sabbath
Authors: Bruteau Beatrice 
Published: July 2007

‘... for that was a Great Sabbath. ‘ —John 19:31The Sabbath that immediately precedes Pesah (Passover) is called Shabbat ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. It is this day that is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a day whose mystical significance has not, perhaps, been sufficiently drawn to our attention.Holy Saturday is in every way a Nothing Day. There is no liturgical celebration. The churches are empty. The altars are stripped. The tabernacles have been vacated and their doors stand ajar. Nothing whatever is happening. What does this mean?It is the Great Sabbath—the Great Silence, the Great Nothing that precedes the Feast of Redemption, of liberation from slavery, of entry into the New Life of freedom.To begin to appreciate it, to experience and savour it, we need to study the significance of the Sabbath in general. It is, no doubt, an endless study, for not only have scholars thought about it for thousands of years, but worshippers commit themselves to live it and experience it deeper and deeper throughout their lives.‘Sabbath’ comes from the Hebrew shavat = ‘to rest’. It recalls the Creation and God’s rest when it was completed. It is characterised by cessation of creative physical activity.Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And the seventh day God finished his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. —Gen. 2: 2—3.
Is Sacra Doctrina Theology?
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with the question de sacra doctrina, qualis sit et ad quae se extendat. Readers of this question often assume that he is here asking about the nature of Christian theology. This assumption is open to question and in what follows I shall briefly explain why that is so and what Aquinas actually does mean by sacra doctrina.IThe most obvious reason for refusing to equate sacra doctrina in Aquinas with ‘theology’, as that word is commonly used, is that much that would now pass for theology would not be recognised by Aquinas as sacra doctrina. In most modern discsssions, ‘theology’ does not mean ‘teaching we agree with’. It means what people who earn their living as theologians say or write. On that basis, editors and librarians, whether Christian or not, will class as theology the views of people as different as Augustine and Troeltsch, Luther and Cajetan, Schillebeeckx and Ratzinger. These pairs of authors, and others one could mention, have wildly divergent things to say, but all of it counts as theology. For Aquinas, however, not all of it would constitute sacra doctrina. That, for him, is nothing but true teaching. For him, sacra doctrina is indeed ‘teaching we agree with’. Or, more precisely, it is teaching we ought to agree with. As we read in la, 1,1, it is something revealed by God.In the second place, ‘theology’ does not translate sacra doctrina. The proper translation is ‘holy teaching’ or ‘sacred doctrine’.
Eckhart's Orthodoxy Reconsidered
Authors: Colledge Edmund 
Published: July 2007

There probably has never been a generation since the year 1329, when the Holy See in Avignon condemned fifteen propositions extracted from Eckhart’s writings as heretical, when the justice of the condemnation has not been questioned. The object of this paper is to take account of some recent publications which seem to support the decision of the Dominican General Chapter at Walberberg in 1980 to initiate proceedings for a reexamination of Eckhart’s case.One is by Richard Woods OP, and it may be commended for its concise and factual account of the troubled times in which Eckhart lived and suffered. Sagely he observes that some of the Church’s grievous problems, which she may be thought to have visited upon the German friar, are still afflicting her, so that the Order of Preachers, in seeking to restore to him his good name, is not merely indulging in Dantesque brooding over the parish pump.The second is by a Dutch Jesuit, Paul Verdeyen, who has with Romana Guarnieri’s permission reprinted, in 1986, as volume 69 of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis her text of the French Mirror of Simple Souls, parallel to his own critical edition of the manuscripts of the Mirror’s Latin translation. Though Verdeyen’s work is flawed (particularly by one strange misapprehension—that the translation was produced by the Inquisition in Paris before the author of the Mirror, Margaret Porette, was tried, condemned and put to death for heresy), nonetheless Verdeyen has made valuable contributions to our further knowledge of Margaret’s perplexing and engrossing case. Very soon I shall attempt to support my belief that it is relevant to that of Eckhart.
Galileo and the Inquisition
Authors: Carroll William E. 
Published: July 2007

On the occasion of the publication, in March 1987, of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and foetal experimentation, there appeared a cartoon in a Roman newspaper, in which two bishops are standing next to a telescope. In the distant night sky, in addition to Saturn and the Moon, there are dozens of test-tubes. One bishop turns to the other, who is in front of the telescope, and asks: ‘This time what should we do? Should we look or not?’ Many see the Galileo affair as a prime example of the fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, between reason and faith. Stephen Hawking, in his recent best-seller, A Brief History of Time, writes a two-page biographical appendix on Galileo which offers ample evidence for the persistence of the view that the accomplishments of Galileo must be understood in the face of the opposition of Aristotelian science and Catholic theology. Galileo, Hawking claims, ‘was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.’ Hawking, in commenting on his participation at a conference on cosmology sponsored by the Vatican at which he challenged traditional interpretations of Big Bang cosmology, evoked the image of himself as a potential Galileo:
The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down a law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to advise it on cosmology.
Magna est Veritas et praevalebit
Authors: White Allan 
Published: July 2007

‘Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela’ (‘Poland is not Dead!’). It was with these words that V&clav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new President, closed his address to the Polish Sejm and Senate on 21 January, 1990. He was quoting from the Polish National Anthem, the Mazurek of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, who in 1797 assembled a Polish legion to fight with the French revolutionary armies. The quotation would have been familiar to every Pole:
And from the trumpets to the heavens sped That march of triumph: ‘Poland is not yet dead!’The verse itself is incorporated in a large epic poem, Pan Tadeusz written by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 as he languished in exile after the failure of the Polish revolution against the Russians four years earlier.Adam Mickiewicz (1798—1855) belonged to a group of poets which included Julius Słbvacki (1809—49) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812—59) collectively known as the Polish Messianists. A theme common to all of them was an emphasis on the manifest and representative destiny of the Polish people. In their struggle for independence and national integrity the Poles were not only fighting for the fulfilment of a purely political design but for the realisation of a humanitarian and cosmopolitan dream with a strong vein of spirituality. Many of the images they used were drawn from the Christian symbolic repertoire with, not unnaturally, a particular emphasis on the significance of the resurrection of Christ. This messianic theme was quietly alluded to by Havel in his January address in Warsaw.
God, Time and Helm
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.
Preaching on Purgatory
Authors: Mills John Orme 
Published: July 2007

‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.’According to St Luke, the Lord dies fully conscious, quoting this line from the 31st psalm: ‘Into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ And, later on, in St Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, we hear St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying as he is dying: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And in the 1st epistle of Peter Christians suffering severe hardship are told to ‘entrust their souls to a faithful Creator’.Trusting ourselves to God, letting go, putting ourselves in the hands of God. Down through the ages numerous holy men and women have urged us to do this, but it is not quite as easy as it sounds. There are all sorts of obstacles—our sins, hang-ups deep down inside us—that stop nearly all of us, right until the end, right until death, from letting go completely.
The Church, Homosexuality and AIDS
Authors: Moore Gareth 
Published: July 2007

There are a number of ways in which HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is transmitted, but still by far the most important worldwide and in particular in the West is sexual transmission. In America and Europe a major and growing route of infection is needle-sharing among drug abusers, but in the past, and still now, it has spread mainly, though far from exclusively, through homosexual contact between men. It is this sexual aspect of AIDS, and its connection with homosexuality, that has made it so controversial, and which has made it so problematic for the Church to find a proper response to it. So it is on AIDS, sex and the Church that I shall focus.What is the proper attitude of the Church to AIDS? One thing to be said first of all is that the Church’s ministry is one of word and deed. As a body we seek both to proclaim the Gospel and to bring ordinary human comfort to those in need, whoever they may be. We not only preach, teach and defend a message; we also tend the sick, feed the hungry, visit those in prison, and so on. We lay before people the possibility of a fuller life and help them to share in the life that we ourselves have received. The two belong together; ours is a practical Gospel. We cannot, as Church, preach the commandments of Christ without being committed to obey them; we cannot preach his love for us and for all without letting that love reach others through us.
AIDS and Truth
Authors: Malherbe Jean‐François , Zorrilla Sergio 
Published: July 2007

We see the AIDS epidemic first and foremost as exposing a crisis which goes beyond it and which emphasises how urgent and exacting is the challenge facing us all: the challenge to become, both personally and collectively, the subject—or subjects—of our own history.In approaching this subject, clarification of the obscure relations between AIDS and the question of truth plays an indispensable part. That is why we desire to return to it by tackling it from the angle of the patient/practitioner relationship. This offers us the advantage of a concrete approach to the question of truth and AIDS without exempting us from facing the question at the deeper level of an analysis of our desire to control everything. Also it enables us to stress the close bonds which link this question of truth with that of deficiency.The patient-practitioner relationship is a particular instance of human relationship in general. It also can be subjected to the same fundamental ethical analysis. As we have shown elsewhere, no true human relationship is possible if those involved do not fulfil the following three conditions: to be present to one another, to accept their differences in fact, and, above all, to cultivate their moral equivalence. But their moral equivalence would be denied by one lying about the other. Why, in fact, pretend to recognise another person as morally your equal if, by hiding the truth from that person, you seal him or her up in a lie?
Guardian Angels and Carrotburgers: Two Views of the Role of the Magisterium
Authors: Parvis Paul 
Published: July 2007

John Henry Cardinal Newman died on 11 August, 1890. In the summer of the centenary of his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. It is a topic by which Newman was much exercised. In this article I would like to look at the Instruction in the light of two ideas adumbrated by Newman, each of which involves a distinction between positive and negative models of the role of the Magisterium.The Vatican Council of 1870 was a major landslip in the history of Catholic theology, and for much of the following decade Newman was riding the after-shocks generated by its definition of papal infallibility. His central concern was to assimilate what he understood to be the true teaching of the decree Pastor Aeternus into a structure which would still allow scope for theological responsibility. In November 1874 an intemperate pamphlet by William Gladstone gave Newman an opening for a formal and public statement of his reaction to the definition. A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation was dated 27 December 1874 and was published in January 1875. In the Letter Newman was of course particularly concerned with infallibility, ecclesial and papal, rather than with magisterial teaching in general, but his reflections are of wider application.Newman observes that authoritative statements may be either positive or negative:
The infallibility, whether of the Church or of the Pope, acts principally or solely in two channels, in direct statements of truth, and in the condemnation of error.
Subsistit in
Authors: McAndrew Fred 
Published: July 2007

Last January the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie was giving one of the addresses in the service being held at Westminster Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Referring to the ecumenical implications of the use of the words subsistit in, he said: ‘After Vatican II the Church “subsisted” in the Roman Catholic Church, a small linguistic change, but a world apart in self-understanding.’ He was echoing the thoughts of Fr Grillmeier, the distinguished Jesuit theologian: these two words ‘constituted a development of unforseeable dimensions’.Sadly, it appears that there are those in Rome engaged in preparing the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church who would wish to change the words of the Council fathers. To understand properly what is going on we must go back over some familiar old ground.Lumen Gentium, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, states that the visible Church, structured hierarchically, and the invisible Church, the Body of Christ, are not to be thought of as two realities, but as one complex reality having a human and a divine element:
Haec Ecclesia, in hoc mundo ut societas constituta et ordinata, subsistit in Ecclesia catholica, a successore Petri et Episcopis in eius communione gubernata, licet extra eius compaginem elementa plura sanctificationis et veritatis inveniantur, quae ut dona Ecclesiae Christi propria, ad unitatem catholicam impellunt.
Of two kinds of deep belief
Authors: Kameda Masanori 
Published: July 2007

Mahayana Buddhism is called the religion of grace. In other words, the very core of its teaching is dependent on the compassionate work of Amida Buddha, the Saviour of all sentient beings. In this article I, who am today a Christian, would like to show how, through the Jodo Shin- shu teaching which was established by Shinran (1173—1262), and which very fully embodies the essence of Mahayana Buddhism’s teachings, I came to understand the doctrine of ‘Nishu Jinshin’ (‘Two kinds of deep belief’), and why this doctrine has been so important in my religious development.To do this I must first write about the beginnings of my knowledge of Christianity. When, for the first time, I heard the name of Jesus Christ, from my elementary school teacher, Miss Yamano, I was just six years old. One day, in her class, we were talking about the greatest people in the world, and she told us the stories of Buddha, Hideyo Noguchi and Jesus Christ, among others. I still clearly remember what she told us about Jesus Christ: ‘Jesus Christ is the man crucified on the cross for all people’s sake.’ I remember it because I was deeply impressed by this, and wished to meet this man. However, since I was a small boy, I did not know anything at all about an institutionalised Christianity. Nevertheless, from that time onwards, Jesus Christ became a great man for whom I longed. He was also the first person to teach me the value of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, something the consciousness of which grew steadily stronger in me under the influence not only of people whom I met but also people whom I knew through their writings.
Why were Eckhart's propositions condemned?
Authors: Davies Oliver 
Published: July 2007

The promulgation of the Bull In agro dominico in March 1329, which condemned twenty-eight propositions taken from the work of Meister Eckhart, is an event which has attracted the attention of many scholars in recent years. This interest is the result not only of the ‘rehabilitation’ of Eckhart by the theological fraternity (the greater part of which is now convinced of his fundamental orthodoxy) but also of the extraordinary character of the condemnation itself. In the present article I do not intend to repeat the work of Bernard McGinn, Edmund Colledge and others, who have shown the extent to which Eckhart was misunderstood by the commission which examined his work, but rather to enquire why it was that such misgivings were ultimately translated into a formal condemnation of Eckhart’s work by the Holy See itself.In agro dominico stands out from other such condemnatory Bulls in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first and only occasion when the full machinery of the Inquisition was used against a member of the Dominican Order, and it was similarly the first and only time in which a theologian of the first rank was charged with the inquisitio haereticae pravitatis: the most serious accusation which the Inquisition had at its disposal and the one which carried the heaviest penalties. Despite its extraordinary character, however, Eckhart’s trial remained fundamentally within the bounds of legality, as Winfried Trusen’s recent study has shown. Trusen also reveals, however, the malevolence of his detractors and their determination to inflict maximum damage upon Eckhart within the strict letter of the law.
Brothers in the Church Today: Probing the Silence
Authors: Lescher Bruce H. 
Published: July 2007

The years since Vatican II have hit religious brothers hard. Brothers have been leaving religious life in greater percentages than priests or women religious. The brothers’ present search for identity in this vocational crisis may take years to work itself out. Meanwhile, brothers need to reflect on a phenomenon not affecting women religious or priests: general silence in the Church about their vocation. The question is: what do we make of the silence?Before exploring the silence, I want to first situate the brother’s vocation in a historical perspective. Brothers are presently caught between two contradictory historical forces. On the one hand, the lay religious life has an ancient, valid, and venerable tradition in the Church; on the other hand, male religious life has become clericalized since the middle ages.In western monasticism, by the ninth century the vocation of the lay monk suffered gradual diminishment as more and more monks were ordained. The identity of the brother suffered further obfuscation during the Gregorian Reform. A monastic reform accompanied Gregory VII’s battle against the abuses of lay investiture. New communities such as the Camaldolese and Cistercians arose; other monks (e.g. William of Hirsau) attempted to reform Benedictine monasticism without breaking away. During this monastic reform, some orders created a new class of religious: the laybrother (at that time called conversi Laybrothers were not considered monks. Some orders, particularly the Cistercians, established structures of class distinction. Cistercian laybrothers, for example, had no vote in chapter, wore a habit different from that of the monks, were not allowed into the cloister, and could not be taught reading and writing.