Henri de Lubac is one of a handful of twentieth-century theologians who made a lasting impact on me. According to de Lubac, the Catholic Church was at least partly responsible for its own increasing marginalization and for the ascendance of atheist humanism... According to de Lubac, “the error,” for the theologian, “consists in conceiving of dogma as a kind of ‘thing in itself,’ as a block of revealed truth with no relationship whatsoever to natural man.” ...The prevailing neo-scholastic approach, he goes on to explain, “confines dogma to the extremities of knowledge and, hence, isolates it.” In a later article, written during the Second World War, de Lubac compared neo-scholastic theology to museum work... According to de Lubac, Christian apologists had adopted the rationalism and positivism of the age and embraced “the common prejudice that recognized no certitude or even intelligibility that was not scientific.” All the while, apologists had lost sight of the most important “reasons for believing” as they worked tirelessly to prove the factuality of revealed dogma. In de Lubac’s view, an extrinsic theology coupled with a scientific apologetics falls very far short of the Church’s great tradition... At the heart of the issue is the question of whether or not Christian theology has something meaningful to say to the human condition. De Lubac believed that neo-scholastic theologians had turned “dogma into a kind of ‘superstructure,’ believing that, if dogma is to remain ‘supernatural,’ it must be all the more divine.” This kind of theology, he explains, acts “as though the same God were not the author of both nature and grace.” De Lubac believed that theology is superficial if it fails to show how Christian dogma is a “source of universal light,” that makes the world both more comprehensible and more beautiful. Thus theologians cannot allow secular philosophies to have the last, or only word on any matter that pertains to the human condition, matters involving economics, politics, marriage, the family, etc. According to de Lubac, the theologian must work to illuminate everything that pertains to human nature in the light of grace. In order to do so, however, the theologian must become an apologist, since the “most formidable adversaries of the Faith, who are also the most interesting, have a conception of the world and a doctrine of life that they deem to be superior to ours.” bryanhollon.wordpress/2014/05/23/henri-de-lubac-the-bitter-fruit-of-old-atheism-and-christian-humanism/
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 01:10:16 +0000